Hagazussa: A Series Of Unfortunate Events

Period pieces are tough to pull off in horror - you’re already asking your audience to suspend one level of disbelief, and then on top of that, setting that particular suspension of disbelief in a setting which requires its own suspension of disbelief, well, all it takes is for one thing to ring false for the whole thing to kind of come crashing down.

From an authenticity standpoint, Hagazussa (subtitled “A Heathen’s Curse”) comes off quite well, but maybe too well. Its commitment to a particular time and place isn’t just in its setting, art direction and dialogue, but in pace as well, and that along with some specific narrative choices ends up robbing it of some of its impact.

It begins with a woman and her young daughter, trudging through the snow, clad in furs and rags. The woman is Martha and her daughter is Albrun, and they’re urged by a passerby to get home before dark, as it’s Twelfth Night. These are people who believe in spirits. But as it transpires, it isn’t spirits they need to worry about - it’s the three men with torches outside their modest cabin, threatening to burn it down - they aren’t spirits, they’re the Christians of 15th century Germany, determined to eradicate heathens such as Martha and Albrun, people who live out in the woods and still use folk medicine and practice the old ways.

It’s already a hard, unforgiving life before you factor in the townsfolk trying to get rid of them, and over the course of a long, dark winter, Martha dies of bubonic plague, her only companion Albrun after the church declares her a lost cause. And then it cuts from Albrun as a little girl in the dead of winter to Albrun as a grown woman in the sunlight of spring. She makes her living tending goats in the wilderness, trying to sell their milk at market, and still being harassed as a witch. It’s a tough, solitary life.

And then she starts hearing voices coming from the woods.

With its antiquated settings and language and focus on life in a harsh and mysterious wilderness, this film easily draws comparisons to The VVitch, but it’s definitely its own beast - it’s much, much less talky, for a start. There’s very little dialogue, much of it brief and halting. A big part of The VVitch was the dynamics of a particular family that had struck out to go it alone, and how those dynamics disintegrated in the wake of a tragedy, leaving the family open to evil’s influence. By contrast, Albrun is all on her own and extremely vulnerable, no family to speak of except her own daughter (named Martha after her mother). With the exception of a young villager named Swinda, nobody will give her the time of day. She’s still seen as a heathen and is persecuted accordingly, so this is more about how loneliness and isolation can have a similar effect to family dysfunction. It’s much more elliptical as well - it’s never clear exactly what’s out in the forest or how much of it is in Albrun’s imagination (unlike The VVitch, which pretty much shows us all its cards pretty early on), and where you could argue for the ending of The VVitch as either tragic or triumphant, this is unremittingly tragic. It’s just as convincing a period piece, though, just one which chooses to leave a lot of what actually happened up to us.

Normally, I like a film that underplays things, but I think in this case, it could stand to turn up the volume a little at points. It’s glacially paced, filled with long stretches of stillness and silence, broken only by spare, minimal exchanges between people and the various things that happen to Albrun (mostly very bad). This can be very effective when done strategically, as making no real distinction between the everyday and atrocity lends the atrocity a certain power that overplaying it would dilute, but that’s when it’s done strategically. As it is, the lack of rising action does lend itself at points to monotony. This is a film that feels very much every second of its 1 hour and 49 minute run time. There’s very little music, just the occasional ambient drone, overlaid over huge panoramic shots of mountains and forests, gray winters, gorgeous springs, and dark, dark nights lit only by fire. It’s monolithic in its minimalism and commitment to a feeling of a steady trudge, but the end result feels a little like just one horrible thing happening to Albrun after another, with the only real rise in pitch being how horrible the next thing is.

And this is what sort of makes this frustrating for me, because I admire films that refuse to just be one jump scare after another - some horror films just sort of feel like someone yelling in your face for an hour and a half - but I think the pacing and refusal to really go there/put the mask on and go “BOO”/go to the fireworks factory ends up hurting this film in the end. Terrible things happen (pretty much entirely to Albrun) over the course of the film, and its relentlessly dispassionate tone do give the isolated moments of atrocity its own power - nothing is telegraphed here, and at points toward the end it goes downright hallucinatory - but across nearly two hours, I think the final result is sort of enervating, and in its denouement reminds me of nothing so much as Dancer In The Dark - terrible things happen to this young woman, witchcraft might be involved, the end, no moral. There are moments that impact you, but they’re sort of muted or muffled by long stretches of silence, endless mountain and forest vistas, and an almost perverse absence of tension in places (to be fair, this is balanced by a fair amount of tension in other places). I felt enough for Albrun that I wanted to see shit really pop off, and being denied that catharsis is certainly a commitment to historical authenticity and a particular aesthetic, but it makes for sort of an unsatisfying film.

IMDB entry
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Stoker: Inheritance

It’s been awhile since I watched something that was just downright gothic - not gothic in the pop-cultural sense, but in the literary sense. It’s not something horror traffics in so much anymore. I mean, I guess the remake of Suspiria has its gothic elements, but only in passing. If you want that real, uncut gothic style - big old mansions, ingenues, enigmatic strangers and terrible family secrets - there’s not a lot of that going around.

Well, except for Stoker, which is very much a modern update of a prototypical gothic story. It’s stylish, well-assembled, and makes up in cleverness what it lacks in emotional intensity.

We open with a monologue by a young woman that largely consists of the kind of stuff you expect to find in undergraduate literary magazines (example: “These senses are the fruits of a lifetime of longing, longing to be rescued, to be completed”). This young woman is India Stoker, and she’s standing in a field, the sun is shining, and she’s looking at something off-camera. We’ll come back to this moment, at the end of the film. Before this point, however, India has lost her father in a terrible car accident, and she is getting ready for the funeral. India lives in a huge, stately home, with servants and her mother Evelyn, who is about as far from maternal as you can get without leaving the planet. After the funeral, as Evelyn receives mourners, India is introduced to her uncle Charlie - Richard’s brother, the world traveler, home for the first time in years.

Charlie, the brother that Richard never, ever mentioned.

And thus, we have the framework of a gothic tale. The big house, the servants, mysterious disappearances, an ingenue, and family secrets. That’s not to say it’s strictly reverent - India is less the fainting innocent than a serious, skeptical loner in the mode of Wednesday Addams or Lydia from Beetlejuice, and it’s definitely set in the modern day, and there are some other twists I’m not about to spoil, though the observant might cotton to what’s going on before the final act. But it’s very stylized, very cold - hardly anyone in this film is warm or sympathetic, and their dialogue and behavior are thoroughly mannered (example: “Once your father and I were not so distant.” I mean, who talks like that?) and it’s very much about secrets unspoken, exchanges and glances full of portent. Charlie is charming and worldly, and everyone who was around for his childhood seems seriously uneasy at his sudden arrival at the family home. Evelyn is quite taken with him, shedding her widow’s garments (and wedding band) without much of a second thought as he ingratiates himself into the household. But Charlie’s most eager to spend time with India, and nothing about it isn’t creepy.

And really, that’s probably the term that best captures the mood and atmosphere of this film - call it an even split between creepy and sinister. It’s not an especially intense or graphic film, and there isn’t a lot of emotional heat, but it gets a lot of mileage out of repeated motifs and flashbacks (whose meanings slowly become clearer and clearer), the removed, almost alien manner in which everyone behaves, and very judiciously deployed revelations. The kindly housekeeper is seriously freaked out to see Charlie, India’s aunt can’t get away from the house fast enough once she realizes Charlie is home, and Charlie is, throughout, unfailingly polite and pleasant, and by turns seductive. It’s not shocking or horrifying, but it is sure as shit unnerving. The film takes place in the same modern-but-timeless space that films like I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House do, which adds to the sense of strangeness and dislocation, and it takes its own sweet time in dropping the other shoe, so you spend the majority of the front half trying to decipher the importance of mysterious gifts, flashbacks to hunting trips, and trying to figure out exactly what Charlie’s fucking deal is, but what’s great is that even after that shoe does drop (and this is a film that is concerned with shoes), it’s really just the beginning in some ways. 

It’s elegantly designed - in its story, in its art direction, and in the use of some nifty transitions between scenes that rely on some unusual visual juxtapositions - and just detached enough from the world we’re familiar with to deny us any sense of comfort. It’s a film about inheritance - who deserves what, and who has inherited what from whom. There’s no neon sign hung on the idea, it’s subtle, but it’s definitely there, and the way that confidence in its own construction permeates the film makes it eminently satisfying to watch. The film ends like it begins, and now we know what India meant all along.

IMDB entry

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Old Gods Of Appalachia: The Hills Are Alive

Something a little bit different today, because my remote work schedule is playing havoc with my movie-watching schedule, and it occurs to me that I’ve also talked about books here, so hey, why not go for a media trifecta and talk about a podcast as well?

I’ve mentioned Old Gods Of Appalachia here before, in passing, but now’s as good a time as any to talk in more detail about exactly why I like it, because it’s really fucking good. It’s a horror anthology podcast set in an alternate-universe Appalachia, where malevolent beings have been imprisoned, deep beneath the mountains, for millennia. But time erodes everything, and their prison is not as secure as perhaps it once was.

It’s not an especially complex premise, but it doesn’t need to be, because what makes this podcast so good isn’t the complexity of its premise, it’s the execution. Horror is often - maybe not always, but often - highly reliant on mood and atmosphere, and it’s easy to forget sometimes just how well sound and sound alone - in terms of music, ambient sound, and a practiced storyteller - can evoke mood and atmosphere. It’s sort of funny - when it comes down to it, podcasts like this aren’t really that different from old-time radio plays, which can still be surprisingly effective. Sound leaves a lot to the imagination, and what we conjure in our imagination can so often be so much scarier and so much worse than any literal depiction, because we’re drawing on the things that scare US personally the most.

And this podcast definitely knows how to set a mood. The majority of it consists of a single story, told over multiple episodes, by one storyteller (there are occasionally other voice actors, but this is mostly one person doing most of the narration) who sounds like, in the words of a friend of mine, your grizzled uncle who lives back in the hills and has seen some shit.  The language is restrained but evocative, tastefully supplemented by vocal effects, the narrator employs other voices to good effect but not gratuitously so, and other voice actors chime in as well. At every moment, though, the focus is on the story, on establishing a setting and illustrating vividly what is happening there. They give you just enough for your imagination to work with, and it does the rest. 

And it’s in service of a really good story. Cosmic horror is one of my favorite types of horror, but as I’ve talked about in the past, it’s been sort of tainted, both by nerd-culture appropriation that reduces it basically to “tentacles and madness,” and by the really appalling beliefs of one of its most notable authors, H.P. Lovecraft. There are still good examples of it out there in film and literature (again, got to give a shout-out to The Croning by Laird Barron), but even when it avoids the racism, sexism, classism, religious intolerance, and just all-around xenophobia of Lovecraft’s cringiest moments, it’s still easy to get it wrong, to assume that all you need is some kind of cyclopean horror from beyond space and some weirdo cultists to get over, and that ain’t it. One of the things that makes this such a good, solid example of cosmic horror is that it isn't a bunch of clichés slapped down into some kind of two-dimensional hillbilly caricature. 

This may be an alternate-universe Appalachia, but only in the sense that ancient monstrosities are confirmed - horribly confirmed - to exist in this world, and the locations aren’t actual places. The first series is about the mining town of Barlo, Kentucky, and what happens when the coal miners dig too deep, what comes out of the earth, and how it leads to Barlo’s ruin. Now, there is no such town as Barlo, Kentucky in our world, but there are plenty of towns just like Barlo - Appalachian coal towns where everyone gets paid in company scrip, nobody’s ever going to be able to pay back what they owe the company store, and the best you can hope for is to live long enough to retire instead of dying in a cave-in or a fire, and having some relatively good years before the black lung takes you. 

That’s real, and so these are stories rooted in a real time and a real place. The people who make this podcast are from Appalachia, live and work in Appalachia, and are tied closely to the land they call home, and so not only is it treated with the respect it is due (Lovecraft’s ideas about the inhabitants of Appalachia were just as awful as his ideas about everyone else), but the horrors that emerge do so organically from this place and time. These aren’t cultists who are evil for reasons, these are coal miners, desperate for any solution to a life of grinding hardship. When evils beyond comprehension walk among these people, they do so as company men, come to tempt them with respite, or as figures of nature - stags with bloody hooves and burning amber antlers. 

You get the sense that the people of these hills and hollers have settled somewhere already occupied by warring factions of beings much, much older, who see human beings as pawns or cattle. And likewise, this world is filled with witches who don’t cackle or stir cauldrons, but instead keep gardens of herbs, collect roots, and treat the people of the town and the valley when no doctor can come. Granny women are real, practitioners of country medicine, of old ways that have kept people alive in this part of the world for centuries. There are no erudite scholars here poring over ancient tomes, just people trying to stay alive and push back against things that are ancient and primal. There is a sense of an entire world, an entire secret history gradually unfolding. Not a tentacle or raving lunatic in sight. Put on some headphones, lie back, close your eyes, and listen.

Old Gods Of Appalachia Home Page

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Cattle To The Slaughter

Every now and then, I like to go back and revisit the classics, and let me tell you, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is definitely one of the classics. Made in 1974, it falls right between its contemporaries Last House On The Left and Halloween, all films that redefined what was possible in horror. The people who made these films were wrestling with the national trauma of the Vietnam War and the massive social upheaval attending it, and they weren’t especially interested in polite convention or following rules. These were raw, intense films that broke new ground. And I think The Texas Chain Saw Massacre also makes a nice middle ground between the other two films stylistically as well - not quite as unrelentingly vicious and nihilistic as Last House On The Left, but also not as coolly atmospheric as Halloween. It’s a wild-eyed, gonzo film, but one that does its strongest work with mood and pacing, rather than graphic violence.

The film opens with a text crawl and a narrator telling us that what we’re about to see is an account of “one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history.” This is old hat today, thanks to found-footage films telling us that what we’re about to see is, in essence, based in truth. But back then, it was easier to buy into the idea that this was based on a true story (was it? Eh, it was loosely, loosely based on the crimes of Ed Gein, but not in any substantive way). Then the screen goes black, then it flares white, as if a flash bulb is going off. There’s an industrial whine, and the flash illuminates a decomposing hand. Darkness, flash, barely-glimpsed rotting flesh, over and over. Slowly the sound of a news report fades up, a story of grave-robbing and corpse desecration in rural Texas. We’re faced with an arrangement of body parts tied up into a sort of sculpture. This is one of those openings to a horror film that tells us, in essence, that all bets are off.

We cut to a van driving down a rural highway. In the van are Sally, her brother Franklin, Sally’s boyfriend Jerry, and their friends Kirk and Pam. They’re on their way to visit the grave of Sally and Franklin’s grandfather. They want to make sure that his grave wasn’t one of the ones disturbed. Satisfied that his grave is intact, they decide to make a side trip to their grandfather’s old house. There’s a swimming hole nearby, and a swim would be really nice on this sweltering Texas day. On the way, they pick up a hitchhiker. An extremely creepy, off-putting hitchhiker.

From here, things start getting weird. Well, weirder. From the moment the film proper starts, there’s a palpable feel of menace to it, helped along by the very striking opening scenes. Even the scene at the graveyard is filled with men more than happy to help Sally find the grave, their smiles just short of predatory. A drunk leans up against a car, muttering vaguely sinister things about what he’s seen out in the country. Sally and company seem mostly oblivious to it, but the audience is not. Following the run-in with the hitchhiker, they have some trouble finding a place to sell them gas, but they don’t seem overly concerned. But now they’re out in the country. And a lot of things can happen out in the country.

For a film called The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, there is surprisingly little gore or graphic violence on display. It does a lot of its heavy lifting by creating an atmosphere and not backing away from it. The dialogue is naturalistic to the point of being almost mundane, the acting just amateurish enough to make it feel like it might very well not be acting at all. Franklin, who is wheelchair-bound and thus dependent on Sally and the others to help him get around, is childish and petulant. Kirk and Jerry don’t hesitate to make fun of him, there’s a little bit of contempt there. Franklin is quite literally the fifth wheel here, and you get the sense he’s being kind of a drag on everyone else’s fun. When the others leave him behind to explore the grandfather’s old house, he throws a fit that seems both deeply immature and slightly unhinged. It’s not behavior you’d expect from an adult, and it contributes to an overall feeling of strangeness that only escalates.

It was shot on location in rural Texas during record temperatures, and it shows in every shot - the heat and sweat and grime practically radiates off the screen, and the action primarily takes place in dilapidated houses and gas stations that are obviously not sets.  This is the sort of film that really does look like it could be someone’s nightmarish home movies. The soundtrack is largely devoid of music, jettisoning it in favor of ambient hums and clangs and crashes and piercing whines. Even in the quiet moments, everything feels uneasy.

And when it’s not quiet, it’s sharp and excruciating. This is a very well-paced film that knows when to ease off the gas and let things get quiet, so that when it gets loud again it hits even harder. It isn’t predictable - danger can and does appear in the blink of an eye, terrible things happen, and then at least initially it’s over before you can completely register what horrible thing you just saw. But you definitely saw something horrible.

As the film goes on, the breaks between awful things get shorter and shorter, until the last ten or fifteen minutes are just unrelenting, an extended piercing scream. When it does employ violence, it focuses less on the violence itself than the effect that the violence has on its victim. People do not die neatly in this film. They struggle, convulse, moan, beg and cry. I think this is what makes some films more uncomfortable than others - violence without suffering allows for the audience to keep their distance, but suffering doesn’t allow that. Accepting that there’s a real human cost to violence takes it out of the realm of fun and games, and this film knows it. There’s a manic edge to it that relies a lot on constant uncomfortably close close-ups intercut with reactions, back and forth, until you feel cornered. There’s a catharsis to the end that doesn’t feel like the Final Girl triumphant so much as some kind of feral howl in defiance of death. There’s a lot of talk about slaughterhouses, about how cattle were and are killed, lots of shots of cattle and roadkill and bones, as if the protagonists are just another kind of meat. And under a punishing, unblinking sun, a full moon large enough to swallow us whole, and the headlights of a truck that promises nothing good, the film makes its case that that’s exactly what they are.

You can see the effect this film has had on horror in the masked killers of any number of slasher films (given that this predates Halloween), in Rob Zombie’s gritty grindhouse aesthetic, in the constant jump-cuts and industrial soundtracks of the Saw films. Forget the sequels, prequels, and reboots. This is the one that matters.

IMDB entry
Available from Amazon