Right now, as of May 28th, 2020, there are some damn good lesser-known horror movies on Amazon Prime Video, free to people with Prime membership. :These all range from "hey, better than I thought it'd be" to "this is one of my favorite horror films ever" and everything in between. So if that's a service you use, go watchlist the following...
Absentia
Afflicted
Open Grave
Possum
The Loved Ones
Triangle
Wake In Fright
Yellowbrickroad
GO GET THAT SHIT.
Thursday, May 28, 2020
The Things We Tell The Ones We Love: If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Another
When it comes to scary movies, I am firmly of the opinion that the best films don’t try to do too much. They find a mood or aesthetic or narrative through-line (or some combination of these) and stick with it. Try to do too much - throw too many premises or ideas at the audience at once - and what you risk is something that does a lot, but does no one thing well.
A recent example of this for me was It Follows, which had a great central premise, but was set in a somewhat off-kilter world that (I think) was supposed to make the whole thing feel somewhat dreamlike, but instead just felt distracting. Maybe it’s reductive, but I think you can either tell a weird story in a normal world or a normal story in a weird world, and either can work. Absentia is an excellent example of the former, and Daybreakers is a pretty good example of the latter. But trying to tell a weird story in a weird world, I think, denies the audience any opportunity for connection, and without connection it’s hard to really engage with a film.
This is especially evident to me in The Things We Tell The Ones We Love, which tells a nominally weird story in a weird world while messing with the medium of film itself, and the result feels really confusing.
It’s the story of Billy and his baby daughter Shelly. Billy lives with his mother and sister in Davenport, Iowa. Both Davenport and Billy have seen better times. Billy’s estranged from his wife Sabrina, trying to support himself and his daughter while chasing his dream of being a successful MMA fighter. Davenport’s run down, what we see of it looks a lot like Rust Belt towns a little further east, towns where the factories closed down and all the jobs went away. Not long into the film, Billy’s sister sees from social media that Sabrina is on a tear again, talking about how she’s going to come over, kick Billy’s ass and take their daughter back. Which isn’t itself unusual - relationships go bad, and sometimes people get violent and irrational. Sometimes people say things they don’t mean in the heat of the moment.
So why is Billy’s mother loading a shotgun Why are they setting traps? Why are they boarding over the windows and hiding Billy and Shelly in the basement?
Now, if this film were telling a weird story in a normal world, this would be a good setup. Seems like a family drama, until we discover there’s something very…wrong…with Sabrina. But it doesn’t make that a reveal - instead, the film opens up with all the explanation we need. This film is set in a near-future America where some regions have been declared Freedom Zones. Nobody pays taxes, everything is deregulated, and all services are privatized, supplied on a pay-as-you-go basis. And into this world, someone has released a “designer virus” - a variant on the herpes virus that attacks the prefrontal cortex of the brain, a region implicated in higher-order cognition and impulse control. The virus flares up and goes into remission, but when it flares up, the host acts in violent, irrational ways. Sabrina has had it for awhile.
So we have a virus that makes people a danger to themselves or others, in a world where basic services are priced out of the reach of most people, and one man trying to make his way through the world with his little girl. That’s…a lot. We have a personal antagonist in Sabrina, and a situational antagonist in this dystopian version of the U.S.. A weird story in a weird world. But that’s not all - the film itself is an interactive story, meaning that it’s divided up into chapters, with the viewer making key decisions for one character or another at specific points. A link appears on the screen, and you click the one corresponding to the choice you want to make, and what happens next is the product of that choice.
So it’s a weird story in a weird world in a weird format. And it’s difficult to really engage with the film as a result. Billy is more or less relatable, but the interactive nature of the storytelling harms that to a degree, because you’re aware that what you see him do is something that emerges not from the character, but from your decision. For me, it lays bare a key difference between the medium of film and the medium of games - in an interactive narrative game like Detroit, you have a similar situation, but the characters are entirely under your control, all the way down to movement. In film, we’re used to watching events unfold in front of us without the ability to intervene, and in horror especially that can be really effective. I mean, why else do people yell at the screen? We are helpless to intervene, and when intervention becomes possible in a medium where it usually isn’t, I think it breaks the spell a little in a way that it doesn’t in games, because in games, that particular spell isn’t really there to start with. And the setting is alienating as well. It’s not totally unrecognizable - the locations all read as real and gritty, to their benefit - but it’s different enough that the bizarre behavior of people infected with the virus doesn’t really feel strange or disruptive. The whole world is weird, so what’s one more weird thing? The sense of dislocation that makes a lot of horror movies work needs some kind of connection to reality to highlight the ways in which reality has been violated. If everything’s strange, in some ways nothing is.
This isn’t strictly true - I’ve seen some films that were weird stem to stern, films that make Possession almost look like a quiet chamber drama, but it’s tough to pull off. You have to go so unapologetically maximalist and go all-in on the weird for it to work, and it’s as likely as not to fail. And this film doesn’t go big enough in that regard - the effects of the virus as we see them aren’t much different from an especially bad meth bender, and living someplace where everything is totally privatized only really comes into play at one point, mostly to delay police response to a break-in, and there’s all kinds of other ways that can be handled as well. That the virus was designed in a lab and released into the environment doesn’t seem to play a role at all in the story (I say “seem” because I’m basing this on a single viewing with one specific set of choices, and I don’t know how different the other versions are). It tells us there’s this weird virus, and it tells us there’s this weird world, but once it’s told us both of these things they end up being largely inessential to the story.
Which is another issue with the film: Maybe it’s that it doesn’t have a very big budget (which is not a problem - plenty of stinkers out there that did, and good ones that didn’t), but this is a film that does a lot of telling instead of showing. Most of the dialogue is exposition, most character is revealed through dialogue instead of behavior. How do we know that Billy still loves Sabrina? Is it in how he talks to her, or his hesitancy to do the hard but necessary thing? No, it’s because one character tells another that he still loves her while he himself is offscreen. How do we know this country has totally privatized regions? Is it in signage or incidental behavior? No, it’s part of a title card that tells us how the world is, and a sequence where Shelly plays with the television remote and we can hear different programs explaining the whole system offscreen. I liked the changing-channel bit as a narrative device, but why would television news still be explaining the existence of this system to people after it had presumably been in place for years? It’s not an organic part of the world, it’s there for our benefit. Sabrina did some pretty horrible shit to get herself estranged from Billy, but we don’t get to see it - instead, Billy brings it up while talking to Sabrina. Telling, instead of showing. And from a horror standpoint, beginning with a title card telling us everything about the world and virus before the film even starts just sucks all the mystery and surprise out. Horror often lies in realization or discovery or recognition, and if you know what’s going on from the start, then there’s nothing to realize or discover, unless you go with an unreliable narrator.
This introduction of elements that end up not really contributing much to the story even extends, to a degree, to technical aspects of the film. The interactive choice mechanism only came up three times over the course of the film, and the resolution I got to the last one was really hamfisted - one of the characters even asks flat-out why the other character would do what they did, that it was a very bad choice. Which, when you give the audience the option of making the choice, feels a little unfair. Don’t punish your audience for making a choice you allowed them to make. The need to make a choice before the film continued made it feel disjointed - the cuts from choice to outcome felt a little clumsy - and robbed it of momentum. And for reasons that don’t seem to have a narrative rationale, the whole thing is shot in black and white with elements of spot color. At times, it’s effective -the startling blue of Sabrina’s eyes when in the grip of the virus was striking - but it doesn’t seem to be systematic or intended to communicate anything specific. It’s just sort of there, like the artificiality of the virus or the dystopian setting.
I’d never ding anyone for ambition or trying something that hasn’t been done before, but when you do all of them at once, I think the end product suffers. If this were a story about a guy with big dreams in a broken-down town whose estranged wife had turned into Something Else, that’d be a solid story. If this were a story about a guy trying to get custody of his daughter in a world where every aspect of life had a marked-up price tag attached, that’d be a solid story too. But doing both at once diluted it. And I’m not sure horror is a genre to make interactive, since so much of horror is the audience watching what’s happening and being powerless to stop it. Giving the audience power makes it less scary, and maybe underscores the artificiality of the exercise - if I go back and try a different path, consequences feel less meaningful, and I see what events would play out no matter what I did. It’s not the experience I come to movies for (and probably why I’ve never bothered to watch Bandersnatch), and throwing it into the mix on top of everything else when you’re working with just enough resources to tell a small-scale, straightforward story is a hard thing to make work. I think it’s cool to have all these ideas, but putting them all into a single movie doesn’t work so well.
IMDB entry
Movie homepage (access available for a donation)
A recent example of this for me was It Follows, which had a great central premise, but was set in a somewhat off-kilter world that (I think) was supposed to make the whole thing feel somewhat dreamlike, but instead just felt distracting. Maybe it’s reductive, but I think you can either tell a weird story in a normal world or a normal story in a weird world, and either can work. Absentia is an excellent example of the former, and Daybreakers is a pretty good example of the latter. But trying to tell a weird story in a weird world, I think, denies the audience any opportunity for connection, and without connection it’s hard to really engage with a film.
This is especially evident to me in The Things We Tell The Ones We Love, which tells a nominally weird story in a weird world while messing with the medium of film itself, and the result feels really confusing.
It’s the story of Billy and his baby daughter Shelly. Billy lives with his mother and sister in Davenport, Iowa. Both Davenport and Billy have seen better times. Billy’s estranged from his wife Sabrina, trying to support himself and his daughter while chasing his dream of being a successful MMA fighter. Davenport’s run down, what we see of it looks a lot like Rust Belt towns a little further east, towns where the factories closed down and all the jobs went away. Not long into the film, Billy’s sister sees from social media that Sabrina is on a tear again, talking about how she’s going to come over, kick Billy’s ass and take their daughter back. Which isn’t itself unusual - relationships go bad, and sometimes people get violent and irrational. Sometimes people say things they don’t mean in the heat of the moment.
So why is Billy’s mother loading a shotgun Why are they setting traps? Why are they boarding over the windows and hiding Billy and Shelly in the basement?
So we have a virus that makes people a danger to themselves or others, in a world where basic services are priced out of the reach of most people, and one man trying to make his way through the world with his little girl. That’s…a lot. We have a personal antagonist in Sabrina, and a situational antagonist in this dystopian version of the U.S.. A weird story in a weird world. But that’s not all - the film itself is an interactive story, meaning that it’s divided up into chapters, with the viewer making key decisions for one character or another at specific points. A link appears on the screen, and you click the one corresponding to the choice you want to make, and what happens next is the product of that choice.
So it’s a weird story in a weird world in a weird format. And it’s difficult to really engage with the film as a result. Billy is more or less relatable, but the interactive nature of the storytelling harms that to a degree, because you’re aware that what you see him do is something that emerges not from the character, but from your decision. For me, it lays bare a key difference between the medium of film and the medium of games - in an interactive narrative game like Detroit, you have a similar situation, but the characters are entirely under your control, all the way down to movement. In film, we’re used to watching events unfold in front of us without the ability to intervene, and in horror especially that can be really effective. I mean, why else do people yell at the screen? We are helpless to intervene, and when intervention becomes possible in a medium where it usually isn’t, I think it breaks the spell a little in a way that it doesn’t in games, because in games, that particular spell isn’t really there to start with. And the setting is alienating as well. It’s not totally unrecognizable - the locations all read as real and gritty, to their benefit - but it’s different enough that the bizarre behavior of people infected with the virus doesn’t really feel strange or disruptive. The whole world is weird, so what’s one more weird thing? The sense of dislocation that makes a lot of horror movies work needs some kind of connection to reality to highlight the ways in which reality has been violated. If everything’s strange, in some ways nothing is.
This isn’t strictly true - I’ve seen some films that were weird stem to stern, films that make Possession almost look like a quiet chamber drama, but it’s tough to pull off. You have to go so unapologetically maximalist and go all-in on the weird for it to work, and it’s as likely as not to fail. And this film doesn’t go big enough in that regard - the effects of the virus as we see them aren’t much different from an especially bad meth bender, and living someplace where everything is totally privatized only really comes into play at one point, mostly to delay police response to a break-in, and there’s all kinds of other ways that can be handled as well. That the virus was designed in a lab and released into the environment doesn’t seem to play a role at all in the story (I say “seem” because I’m basing this on a single viewing with one specific set of choices, and I don’t know how different the other versions are). It tells us there’s this weird virus, and it tells us there’s this weird world, but once it’s told us both of these things they end up being largely inessential to the story.
Which is another issue with the film: Maybe it’s that it doesn’t have a very big budget (which is not a problem - plenty of stinkers out there that did, and good ones that didn’t), but this is a film that does a lot of telling instead of showing. Most of the dialogue is exposition, most character is revealed through dialogue instead of behavior. How do we know that Billy still loves Sabrina? Is it in how he talks to her, or his hesitancy to do the hard but necessary thing? No, it’s because one character tells another that he still loves her while he himself is offscreen. How do we know this country has totally privatized regions? Is it in signage or incidental behavior? No, it’s part of a title card that tells us how the world is, and a sequence where Shelly plays with the television remote and we can hear different programs explaining the whole system offscreen. I liked the changing-channel bit as a narrative device, but why would television news still be explaining the existence of this system to people after it had presumably been in place for years? It’s not an organic part of the world, it’s there for our benefit. Sabrina did some pretty horrible shit to get herself estranged from Billy, but we don’t get to see it - instead, Billy brings it up while talking to Sabrina. Telling, instead of showing. And from a horror standpoint, beginning with a title card telling us everything about the world and virus before the film even starts just sucks all the mystery and surprise out. Horror often lies in realization or discovery or recognition, and if you know what’s going on from the start, then there’s nothing to realize or discover, unless you go with an unreliable narrator.
This introduction of elements that end up not really contributing much to the story even extends, to a degree, to technical aspects of the film. The interactive choice mechanism only came up three times over the course of the film, and the resolution I got to the last one was really hamfisted - one of the characters even asks flat-out why the other character would do what they did, that it was a very bad choice. Which, when you give the audience the option of making the choice, feels a little unfair. Don’t punish your audience for making a choice you allowed them to make. The need to make a choice before the film continued made it feel disjointed - the cuts from choice to outcome felt a little clumsy - and robbed it of momentum. And for reasons that don’t seem to have a narrative rationale, the whole thing is shot in black and white with elements of spot color. At times, it’s effective -the startling blue of Sabrina’s eyes when in the grip of the virus was striking - but it doesn’t seem to be systematic or intended to communicate anything specific. It’s just sort of there, like the artificiality of the virus or the dystopian setting.
I’d never ding anyone for ambition or trying something that hasn’t been done before, but when you do all of them at once, I think the end product suffers. If this were a story about a guy with big dreams in a broken-down town whose estranged wife had turned into Something Else, that’d be a solid story. If this were a story about a guy trying to get custody of his daughter in a world where every aspect of life had a marked-up price tag attached, that’d be a solid story too. But doing both at once diluted it. And I’m not sure horror is a genre to make interactive, since so much of horror is the audience watching what’s happening and being powerless to stop it. Giving the audience power makes it less scary, and maybe underscores the artificiality of the exercise - if I go back and try a different path, consequences feel less meaningful, and I see what events would play out no matter what I did. It’s not the experience I come to movies for (and probably why I’ve never bothered to watch Bandersnatch), and throwing it into the mix on top of everything else when you’re working with just enough resources to tell a small-scale, straightforward story is a hard thing to make work. I think it’s cool to have all these ideas, but putting them all into a single movie doesn’t work so well.
IMDB entry
Movie homepage (access available for a donation)
Friday, May 22, 2020
Possession: That Escalated Quickly
I’ve watched a lot of scary movies. A lot. And one of the things I’ve noticed is that over time, I’ve noticed myself getting more…not jaded, exactly, but harder to surprise. Watch enough average horror films, you start to notice formulas. The more obvious the formulas are, the harder it is to engage with the film or really be affected by it. Luckily, they aren’t all average, but after awhile the ones that really make an impression get farther and farther apart.
Possession was very much a surprise, start to finish. It’s singular in its vision, and one of those rare horror films that actually captures the feeling of a nightmare.
It’s the story of Mark and Anna, a married couple living in 1980s West Berlin with their son Bob. Mark is away from home a lot for work, and when the film opens, Mark has come home after an extended stretch elsewhere, and things are…strained.
So the film starts off like a sort of European take on relationship dramas like Kramer Vs. Kramer, where most of the action revolves around a couple’s dissection of their own relationship as it falls apart, and the emotional aftermath of that. Mark spends a lot of time away from home for work, and Anna’s dissatisfied with the marriage. Maybe it’s that he’s never around, maybe it’s that she finds that she doesn’t mind him not being around, maybe she’s realizing how little identity of her own she has. Mark doesn’t take it well, Anna’s sort of all over the place emotionally. None of this is new, in that respect. But almost immediately, bits of strangeness start creeping in around the edges.
The weirdness begins in the film’s tone. It’s melodramatic almost to the point of comedy, especially in the first act. The dialogue is loaded with quasi-philosophical musings about identity and being, emotions are played one way - loud - and the characters regularly faint or collapse, sometimes for apparent reasons, sometimes not. It starts off playing almost like a parody of European art films, or at least what a mass audience might imagine those films to be like. We go from “polite conversation about ending the marriage” to “screaming match and throwing furniture in a café” to “four days into a bender, curled up filthy and sobbing on the floor of a trashed hotel room” in the span of the first five minutes or so. And this movie is a little over two hours long. It’s like “well, that escalated quickly.”
And so at first it plays as funny, but soon enough, the skin of an end-of-the-marriage story splits to reveal the much, much stranger bones underneath. Anna isn’t just unhappy with the marriage, she doesn’t just have a lover (Heinrich, who’s exactly as creepy and loathsome as he needs to be, and as much of a cartoon as everyone else in the film), she’s also vanishing for days at a time with no notice. Mark doesn’t know where she’s going. Heinrich doesn’t know either. And every time she comes back, she comes back more unbalanced. She comes back stranger. And Mark isn’t doing any better either. The abrupt cuts from one scene to the next that originally felt funny start to feel jagged and dislocating, like we’re witnessing the moments of lucidity between blackouts or fugue states. And then when we find out where Anna’s been going, at the end of the first act, shit starts getting really weird in a direction I don’t think you could predict from what came before. And it’s just the beginning.
As things begin to get stranger and stranger, it all starts to feel like we’re the audience to a nightmare. The literal and metaphoric are all mashed up, like internal emotional states are being played out externally, but it’s all played up front - nothing is presented as dreams or hallucinations. The result is something that almost feels a little like opera in how over-the-top and stylized it is, and the full-throttle approach gives it a lunatic verve. This is not a movie that moves from scene to scene as much as it careens from scene to scene, and if you think you know what’s coming next, you really don’t. Shifts in time, space, perspective, all played to the rafters, but even if the details are sometimes a little murky, the feeling is clear through out - profound alienation, estrangement, and derangement from the self as well as others.
As events progress, the film pulls equally from psychological and body horror as we watch Mark and Anna’s deepest fears, insecurities and obsessions play out in a world that feels shifted just to the left of one we might recognize. Why is Bob’s teacher a dead ringer for Anna? What exactly does Mark do for a living? What happened to Anna in the subway that night? The film is filled with little odd details - the view of the Berlin Wall from their apartment provides a menacing backdrop to everything that occurs. Conversations about custody and visitation are accompanied by the chopping of raw meat. Mark, in the throes of a loud public argument is tackled by chefs in toques and full whites. On the surface there’s nothing that unusual about any of it, but in juxtaposition it all feels off - slightly to start, and then more and more over time.
It shouldn’t work, this fever-pitched fever dream, but it largely does (things do start to get a little muddled in the third act), and it’s because everyone completely commits and just fucking goes for it, without a single wink or bit of ironic distancing. I can’t really directly compare this to anything else I’ve seen, but it does fall along a thematic line that also contains The Brood before it, and Hellraiser and Antichrist after it, in that it’s a film about desire stretched into bizarre forms and making internal emotional violence and personal disintegration horrifyingly external. If it seems like I’ve thrown it in with other films that bear no resemblance to each other, well, trust me - you’ve probably never seen anything like this before, and if you’re up for the cask-strength weird shit, it’s one to seek out.
IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Possession was very much a surprise, start to finish. It’s singular in its vision, and one of those rare horror films that actually captures the feeling of a nightmare.
It’s the story of Mark and Anna, a married couple living in 1980s West Berlin with their son Bob. Mark is away from home a lot for work, and when the film opens, Mark has come home after an extended stretch elsewhere, and things are…strained.
So the film starts off like a sort of European take on relationship dramas like Kramer Vs. Kramer, where most of the action revolves around a couple’s dissection of their own relationship as it falls apart, and the emotional aftermath of that. Mark spends a lot of time away from home for work, and Anna’s dissatisfied with the marriage. Maybe it’s that he’s never around, maybe it’s that she finds that she doesn’t mind him not being around, maybe she’s realizing how little identity of her own she has. Mark doesn’t take it well, Anna’s sort of all over the place emotionally. None of this is new, in that respect. But almost immediately, bits of strangeness start creeping in around the edges.
And so at first it plays as funny, but soon enough, the skin of an end-of-the-marriage story splits to reveal the much, much stranger bones underneath. Anna isn’t just unhappy with the marriage, she doesn’t just have a lover (Heinrich, who’s exactly as creepy and loathsome as he needs to be, and as much of a cartoon as everyone else in the film), she’s also vanishing for days at a time with no notice. Mark doesn’t know where she’s going. Heinrich doesn’t know either. And every time she comes back, she comes back more unbalanced. She comes back stranger. And Mark isn’t doing any better either. The abrupt cuts from one scene to the next that originally felt funny start to feel jagged and dislocating, like we’re witnessing the moments of lucidity between blackouts or fugue states. And then when we find out where Anna’s been going, at the end of the first act, shit starts getting really weird in a direction I don’t think you could predict from what came before. And it’s just the beginning.
As things begin to get stranger and stranger, it all starts to feel like we’re the audience to a nightmare. The literal and metaphoric are all mashed up, like internal emotional states are being played out externally, but it’s all played up front - nothing is presented as dreams or hallucinations. The result is something that almost feels a little like opera in how over-the-top and stylized it is, and the full-throttle approach gives it a lunatic verve. This is not a movie that moves from scene to scene as much as it careens from scene to scene, and if you think you know what’s coming next, you really don’t. Shifts in time, space, perspective, all played to the rafters, but even if the details are sometimes a little murky, the feeling is clear through out - profound alienation, estrangement, and derangement from the self as well as others.
As events progress, the film pulls equally from psychological and body horror as we watch Mark and Anna’s deepest fears, insecurities and obsessions play out in a world that feels shifted just to the left of one we might recognize. Why is Bob’s teacher a dead ringer for Anna? What exactly does Mark do for a living? What happened to Anna in the subway that night? The film is filled with little odd details - the view of the Berlin Wall from their apartment provides a menacing backdrop to everything that occurs. Conversations about custody and visitation are accompanied by the chopping of raw meat. Mark, in the throes of a loud public argument is tackled by chefs in toques and full whites. On the surface there’s nothing that unusual about any of it, but in juxtaposition it all feels off - slightly to start, and then more and more over time.
It shouldn’t work, this fever-pitched fever dream, but it largely does (things do start to get a little muddled in the third act), and it’s because everyone completely commits and just fucking goes for it, without a single wink or bit of ironic distancing. I can’t really directly compare this to anything else I’ve seen, but it does fall along a thematic line that also contains The Brood before it, and Hellraiser and Antichrist after it, in that it’s a film about desire stretched into bizarre forms and making internal emotional violence and personal disintegration horrifyingly external. If it seems like I’ve thrown it in with other films that bear no resemblance to each other, well, trust me - you’ve probably never seen anything like this before, and if you’re up for the cask-strength weird shit, it’s one to seek out.
IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
XX: This One’s For The Ladies
Hot take incoming: Horror film is capable of communicating genuinely unsettling and uncomfortable experiences and points of view. On the other hand, the horror film industry is - like so many profit-driven industries - deeply conservative, if not downright reactionary. Horror fandom isn’t much better, for that matter. Scratch the surface even a little and you get some pretty shitty ideas about women and other marginalized groups. It’s part of a larger insistence on a status quo. Scare me, but don’t make me genuinely uncomfortable. Give me thrill rides filled with blood and tits, but don’t make me examine myself.
I think this is part of why I’m coming into this post about the anthology XX with kind of a bad taste in my mouth. The whole marketing angle, down to the title, is that these are four films made from a female point of view - all four directed by women, three written by women. That it’s a marketing angle at all says a lot to me - this anthology is different! It’s special! Why? Because women made these films! Isn’t that wacky?
The rest of it? Well, that’s all on me. As the film began, my first thought was that these films should be especially subversive, they should Say Something about gender and being a woman in a patriarchal society. And you know what? No they shouldn’t. That isn’t any fairer than treating horror films made by women like a sideshow curiosity. That’s tokenism, plain and simple. They don’t need to make some big statement - the existence of the work is statement enough, and everything else follows from that. Any film is at least in part a product of the director and writers’ worldview, so if a woman wrote it and directed it, then by its very nature, it is saying something.
So with that out of the way, I’m going to talk about each entry as, well, horror films.
The film is bookended by stop-motion animation that reminds me of the Brothers Quay, and additional segments in the same style serve as interstitials between the films. It’s reasonably creepy and impressionistic, evoking a mood rather than serving as a conventional framing narrative. Which is fine with me, since framing stories in anthology films suck as often as not.
The Box
We open on Susan, traveling with her son Danny and daughter Jenny on the subway. It’s Christmastime, and there’s a voiceover from a woman (presumably Susan) about how she doesn’t remember whether they’d gotten presents or not at that point. So she’s recalling this from sometime in the future. Danny asks the man sitting next to him what’s in the box he’s carrying. It’s a red gift-wrapped box with a bow on top. The man says it’s a present, and Danny asks if he can look. The man obliges, and Danny looks puzzled as he stares into the box, his smile fading. Come dinnertime at home, he says he isn’t hungry. He doesn’t eat his dinner that night.
Or the next night, or the next night, or the next night.
It’s a terse, economically told story about a little boy who just won’t eat, and won’t say why. The acting is a little stiff in places, but it’s nicely restrained and makes good use of a repeated motif of the family sitting at the dinner table, with overhead shots of the food. It creates a rhythm which it then begins to disrupt as things get worse and worse. Susan doesn’t know why this is happening, she and her husband start to fight about it, and then things get much, much worse. At every turn, it doesn’t overexplain, letting the little details do the work along with the judicious use of some shocking imagery. It does a good job of being really unsettling without falling back into melodrama.
The Birthday Party
Mary is a well-to-do housewife in a fancy suburb full of other well-to-do housewives. She’s wound up tight about her daughter’s birthday party going exactly right, as one tends to be when one has the time and privilege to become obsessed with one’s social standing. In Mary’s case, however, this is complicated by the fact of her husband sitting in his study, very dead, with the party starting very, very soon.
It’s an odd, off-kilter domestic drama that takes upper-middle-class keeping-up-with-the-Joneses anxiety and turns it up to absurd levels, treating a dead husband like a profound inconvenience rather than a source of grief, playing the whole thing for slapstick and scoring it with the sort of minor key synths and sharp music stabs you’d associate with a horror film. The end result feels like we’re watching Mary’s worst nightmare play out, but it’s a worst nightmare that is, in the vast scheme of things, pretty low-stakes. But that seems like it’s kind of the point. It’s well-shot and composed, with a vividly colorful palette, but it’s not really that scary, and the ending title card reveals it for the black comedy it is.
Don’t Fall
Four friends - Jay, Paul, Gretchen, and Jess - are out for a hike in the desert, and as it transpires, they’re probably in a nature preserve area that’s off-limits to the public. The other three get some mileage out of messing with Gretchen, who is afraid of heights and scorpions. Soon enough, they find some mysterious paintings on a rock face, and Gretchen gets bitten by something which causes her to...change.
This is probably the only real dud of the bunch. The Birthday Party wasn’t horror, but it was cohesive and evoked a mood (and the ending made me laugh loudly). This is…just sort of an inconsequential monster story that doesn’t really take time to set things up or really establish a mood. At first it feels like it’s going to be an exercise in tension where a bunch of potential threats get set up, only for us to be blindsided by something that comes out of nowhere (which isn’t a bad thing) or maybe a survival story about a bunch of young adults out of their element, but it isn’t. The four friends hang out for a bit, one of them turns into a monster and kills the others. That’s it. It all just sort of happens, without a lot of tension, and the practical effects let the whole thing down a little bit more. The best thing I can really say about it is that it’s short.
Her Only Living Son
This one opens cryptically, with a fraught conversation between a woman and a doctor, shot in close-ups, with talk of how people have agendas and how she’ll run away, someplace far away where nobody will find her or “little Andy and Jenny.” The doctor gives her some money, says “Godspeed, Mrs. -“and the woman interrupts him to say “no, she’s gone.” Then there is the buzzing of an alarm clock, the woman (now called Cora) waking up, and the caption “18 Years Later.”
“Little Andy” appears to be Cora’s son, it’s coming up on his 18th birthday, and there’s something not quite right about him. It’s in how he treats the dog, the way he tastes the blood from an egg yolk.
The squirrel nailed to the tree.
This one shares a lot of the strengths of The Box, in its restraint and willingness to let suggestion do a lot of the heavy lifting. At its heart, it’s the story of a mother who doesn’t really recognize her son anymore as he’s passing through adolescence, but this is shot through with echoes of We Need To Talk About Kevin, in Cora’s struggling with the knowledge that she has a son who has done something awful, as well as Rosemary’s Baby - it’s not just that Cora can see there’s something terribly wrong, it’s also that nobody around her seems to acknowledge it. In fact, some of them seem to be enabling it. According to them, her son is very, very special.
The end result is a little richer in texture than The Box, and just as uneasy, forsaking easy shocks for a constant simmering dread as Cora’s situation becomes clearer to us. It does get a little ham-handed and obvious in a couple of spots, but it ends well, tying the universal horror of not knowing your own child anymore to the more specific horror of who Andy’s father really was, bringing them together in a reckoning that ends up being both unsettling and touching at the same time. It’s a powerful piece of work and ends the anthology on a strong note.
So, what do horror films made by women look like? Mostly they look like horror films made by men, for good and ill alike. At their best, there’s some good subtext and imagery in here around motherhood and family, the sacrifices women make, and the pressures they live under without really being didactic about it. I’d love to see more from most of the directors, not just because I like the idea of more different voice in horror (though that’s true), but also because The Box and Her Only Living Son are examples of the kind of horror I like - reliant more on detail, mood, and suggestion than full-on gore, tying together the fears we face every day and fears borne of far stranger things. Life is already full of nightmares, and pairing them with fictional nightmares makes for good horror in my book.
IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon
I think this is part of why I’m coming into this post about the anthology XX with kind of a bad taste in my mouth. The whole marketing angle, down to the title, is that these are four films made from a female point of view - all four directed by women, three written by women. That it’s a marketing angle at all says a lot to me - this anthology is different! It’s special! Why? Because women made these films! Isn’t that wacky?
The rest of it? Well, that’s all on me. As the film began, my first thought was that these films should be especially subversive, they should Say Something about gender and being a woman in a patriarchal society. And you know what? No they shouldn’t. That isn’t any fairer than treating horror films made by women like a sideshow curiosity. That’s tokenism, plain and simple. They don’t need to make some big statement - the existence of the work is statement enough, and everything else follows from that. Any film is at least in part a product of the director and writers’ worldview, so if a woman wrote it and directed it, then by its very nature, it is saying something.
So with that out of the way, I’m going to talk about each entry as, well, horror films.
The film is bookended by stop-motion animation that reminds me of the Brothers Quay, and additional segments in the same style serve as interstitials between the films. It’s reasonably creepy and impressionistic, evoking a mood rather than serving as a conventional framing narrative. Which is fine with me, since framing stories in anthology films suck as often as not.
The Box
Or the next night, or the next night, or the next night.
It’s a terse, economically told story about a little boy who just won’t eat, and won’t say why. The acting is a little stiff in places, but it’s nicely restrained and makes good use of a repeated motif of the family sitting at the dinner table, with overhead shots of the food. It creates a rhythm which it then begins to disrupt as things get worse and worse. Susan doesn’t know why this is happening, she and her husband start to fight about it, and then things get much, much worse. At every turn, it doesn’t overexplain, letting the little details do the work along with the judicious use of some shocking imagery. It does a good job of being really unsettling without falling back into melodrama.
The Birthday Party
It’s an odd, off-kilter domestic drama that takes upper-middle-class keeping-up-with-the-Joneses anxiety and turns it up to absurd levels, treating a dead husband like a profound inconvenience rather than a source of grief, playing the whole thing for slapstick and scoring it with the sort of minor key synths and sharp music stabs you’d associate with a horror film. The end result feels like we’re watching Mary’s worst nightmare play out, but it’s a worst nightmare that is, in the vast scheme of things, pretty low-stakes. But that seems like it’s kind of the point. It’s well-shot and composed, with a vividly colorful palette, but it’s not really that scary, and the ending title card reveals it for the black comedy it is.
Don’t Fall
This is probably the only real dud of the bunch. The Birthday Party wasn’t horror, but it was cohesive and evoked a mood (and the ending made me laugh loudly). This is…just sort of an inconsequential monster story that doesn’t really take time to set things up or really establish a mood. At first it feels like it’s going to be an exercise in tension where a bunch of potential threats get set up, only for us to be blindsided by something that comes out of nowhere (which isn’t a bad thing) or maybe a survival story about a bunch of young adults out of their element, but it isn’t. The four friends hang out for a bit, one of them turns into a monster and kills the others. That’s it. It all just sort of happens, without a lot of tension, and the practical effects let the whole thing down a little bit more. The best thing I can really say about it is that it’s short.
Her Only Living Son
“Little Andy” appears to be Cora’s son, it’s coming up on his 18th birthday, and there’s something not quite right about him. It’s in how he treats the dog, the way he tastes the blood from an egg yolk.
The squirrel nailed to the tree.
This one shares a lot of the strengths of The Box, in its restraint and willingness to let suggestion do a lot of the heavy lifting. At its heart, it’s the story of a mother who doesn’t really recognize her son anymore as he’s passing through adolescence, but this is shot through with echoes of We Need To Talk About Kevin, in Cora’s struggling with the knowledge that she has a son who has done something awful, as well as Rosemary’s Baby - it’s not just that Cora can see there’s something terribly wrong, it’s also that nobody around her seems to acknowledge it. In fact, some of them seem to be enabling it. According to them, her son is very, very special.
The end result is a little richer in texture than The Box, and just as uneasy, forsaking easy shocks for a constant simmering dread as Cora’s situation becomes clearer to us. It does get a little ham-handed and obvious in a couple of spots, but it ends well, tying the universal horror of not knowing your own child anymore to the more specific horror of who Andy’s father really was, bringing them together in a reckoning that ends up being both unsettling and touching at the same time. It’s a powerful piece of work and ends the anthology on a strong note.
So, what do horror films made by women look like? Mostly they look like horror films made by men, for good and ill alike. At their best, there’s some good subtext and imagery in here around motherhood and family, the sacrifices women make, and the pressures they live under without really being didactic about it. I’d love to see more from most of the directors, not just because I like the idea of more different voice in horror (though that’s true), but also because The Box and Her Only Living Son are examples of the kind of horror I like - reliant more on detail, mood, and suggestion than full-on gore, tying together the fears we face every day and fears borne of far stranger things. Life is already full of nightmares, and pairing them with fictional nightmares makes for good horror in my book.
IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon
Wednesday, May 6, 2020
Alien: (Not) Not The Texas Chain Saw Massacre In Space
I’ve been thinking about Alien ever since I wrote about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre a few weeks back, since it’s been described - by its director, even - as an attempt to make The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in space. When I originally considered this, I didn’t think that it was a comparison that really tracked, but having watched Alien again (for the umpteenth time), it really does have a lot of that film’s strengths, along with drawing from some other horror traditions.
(As a side note, a lot of what got this film made was the success of the first Star Wars film, which suggested that science fiction could be successful with a mass audience. Which is kind of nuts, to imagine someone taking their kid to see this thinking “oh, I bet it will be like Star Wars,” because it’s still a motherfucker of a movie - tense and economical, not like anything before or since.)
(As a side note, a lot of what got this film made was the success of the first Star Wars film, which suggested that science fiction could be successful with a mass audience. Which is kind of nuts, to imagine someone taking their kid to see this thinking “oh, I bet it will be like Star Wars,” because it’s still a motherfucker of a movie - tense and economical, not like anything before or since.)
It opens on the cold quiet of space, and a terse summary of our location - the commercial refinery vessel Nostromo, crew of 7, hauling thousands of tons of mineral ore. The camera glides through the ship’s interior in a way that recalls haunted house movies - empty corridors, empty rooms, lots of silence. We wait for the silence to be broken, and it’s held just long enough before consoles come to life, filling screens with data and the bridge of the ship with electronic chatter, light spilling onto emergency helmets as if they’re conducting the conversation. And then the slow zoom down a long corridor, to a room where the crew wake slowly and silently from a long, cold sleep.
It’s apparent right away that the crew of the Nostromo - Dallas, Ash, Parker, Brett, Kane, Ripley and Lambert - are sick of each other’s company and ready to be home. Parker immediately starts complaining about how he doesn’t get a full share (even though that’s what he contracted for) and you get the sense it’s a conversation that this crew has had (or has heard Parker monologue about) a lot. They are not friends, and nobody needs to say that. It’s apparent in the tones of their voices, the looks on their faces. Nothing here is telegraphed, it’s communicated naturally. Their moods don’t improve when they find out they’ve been brought out of cold sleep early, very far away from home. The ship’s computer has picked up a repeating signal, and they’re contractually obligated to investigate it. It might be an SOS.
Or it might be a warning.
I mean, it’s right there in the title. Even if it weren’t for the (ugh) franchising of this film and the insistence on spinning it into a whole “universe” with its own canon and mythology and all of the sort of over-explaining nonsense (that might be fine for films like the sequel, Aliens, which is a good action film in its own right, it’s just not a horror film) that has led to dramatically diminishing returns, even if it weren’t for all the kind of pop-culture nonsense that tends to ruin horror in my opinion, even if it weren’t for all that and you’d never heard of this film before now, you still have an idea of what’s going to happen. Yes, there’s something on the inhospitable planet from which the signal originates, and it gets aboard. You could have a film called Alien without any aliens, but it’d probably be ill-advised.
So the real key here, I think, is not what happens, but how. And as far as that goes, Alien is very well-executed and has a lot of the virtues I associate with good horror in general, even today. The people feel like actual people, with distinct personalities and relationships, and their interactions don’t feel stagey at all - it really does feel like we’ve sort of been dropped into this group of people in medias res, and although we don’t learn a lot about them and there’s hardly any exposition around them as people, you don’t need it because it’s all in how they act toward each other and how they talk - the way Brett gives Parker a time estimate for some repairs and Parker inflates it when he communicates it to Ripley, the tightness in Lambert’s voice when someone points out that her calculations don’t put them anywhere near Earth, the way Dallas sounds resigned and helpless instead of authoritative when he says “I just run the ship.” They’re actual people, not archetypes or caricatures. A lot of this is apparently down to much of the dialogue being improvised, and it helps a lot. It’s also helped by this - like Star Wars - being set in a world where technology isn’t sleek and glossy, it’s beaten up and grungy and lived-in. grounding it even though we’re in the far future. Video communications are noisy and distorted and low-resolution, equipment is clumsy and cobbled-together. There’s no utopian vision here, just a bunch of tired working stiffs who want to go home already.
This rawness is part of the DNA it shares with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but so is its pacing. This is a film that isn’t afraid to have long stretches where nothing happens in terms of action, and like that film, the long stretches of silence and nothing (or, rather, atmosphere-building, since even in the absence of action, there’s a definite mood being established) are punctuated with sharp, intense bursts of action that are over almost before we’ve had time to process what we’ve just seen beyond that it was very bad and unsettling. And like that film, this movie doesn’t really rely on gore (with one notable exception) - it’s another case where you think it’s gorier than it really is because the worst is left to your imagination. Quick cuts between different close-up perspectives do a lot of the work in this area.
And it draws on other traditions as well - it makes good use of haunted-house techniques like having something terrible unfold in the background behind unsuspecting protagonists, monster-movie techniques like having an animal pop out where you think the monster will be, only to have the animal’s reaction signal the monster’s appearance, and the slow, methodical stalking techniques associated with slasher films, which were also beginning to develop as a genre around the same time. For that matter, a setting where a bunch of people who do not like or trust each other, stuck in a dangerous environment with a deadly creature set a great precedent for the remake of The Thing, another excellent horror film about an alien. It’s also not one-note - like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, there are twists where expectations are upended and safety snatched away. As the tagline for that film had it, “who will survive, and what will be left of them?”
It’s been often imitated, but never duplicated, because the key to Alien isn’t the alien, and the science fiction setting isn’t incidental by any means, but it’s also not the most important part. It’s the believability of the people and the inexplicability of their peril, and their antagonists’ utter indifference, told in lulls and bursts of tension which eventually blur into a single panicky fugue where horrors are glimpsed only briefly against a bigger crisis, that this film retains its power. Some of the effects have definitely not aged well (and are, frankly, downright silly to modern eyes), but in its pace, characterization, and art direction, and what it chooses not to tell us as well as what it does, it’s still one of the best for a reason.