Anytime I write about something, I try to make a point of focusing on the film and not really talking too much about who wrote it, who starred in it, or who directed it. This is partially because I want to focus on the film as the final product, and partially because I think that sometimes the horror genre (at least in the U.S.) tends a little bit too much toward personalities. Sometimes otherwise-respected writers or directors turn out real stinkers, and reverence for the personality eclipses the quality of the work. Or franchises (ugh) get a pass for being more of the same based on the strength of the personalities (directors or actors especially) involved. Plus, films aren’t made by one person, they’re a collective effort. Basically, my thing is: Regardless of who made it, how did it turn out?
But this time, I kind of have to, because when I looked up Books Of Blood in anticipation that I would write it up, I was struck immediately by two things: First, that it was, as the title indicated, putatively based on the anthology of the same name by author Clive Barker, and that made me say “yay!” to myself. Second, that it was directed by Brannon Braga, whose most recent work has been on shows and films in the Star Trek franchise and more recently, science fiction comedy The Orville. And that made me say “uh-oh” to myself. There is little in his work as a writer or director to indicate much experience with horror, or at least the kind of horror found in Barker’s work at its best.
See, here’s the thing - the great thing about Barker’s writing, whether it’s more straight-up horror (e.g., The Midnight Meat Train, The Hellbound Heart) or dark fantasy (The Great And Secret Show, Imajica), is that it imagines that just below the mundane skin of everyday existence lies a hidden, secret world of great mystery, and some folks are unfortunate enough to discover this in the least likely of places. And in the instances where it makes itself known, the effect is more often one of terror than wonder. His stories also often treat the human body with the kind of detached objectification that you usually go to early David Cronenberg for, and at its best, it’s really unsettling, intense stuff. It’s hard for me to trust that someone who’s spent most of their career on franchise television is really going to go off and turn in something that does justice to the source material. That it’s a Hulu Original, well, Monsterland aside, that’s not encouraging either.
But that’s not to say that people can’t surprise us. Every now and then someone known for a particular style of television or film will surprise with something out of left field, and Monsterland (at least the first episode) suggests that everything Hulu commissions doesn’t have to be disappointingly mediocre. So I wanted to give this a fair shot.
I gave it a fair shot, and sure enough, very little of what makes the source material so special makes it into this movie. In fact, it’s even worse than I anticipated. It’s a little too corny to be taken seriously, but too gory to really be camp. Even worse, it’s a mess. Apparently this was supposed to be an anthology series, but the decision was made just to throw three stories together and package it as an anthology film instead, and the result reads like one of those term papers that was written in an hour or two the night before.
The film begins with someone closing up a used bookstore for the night. He seems nervous, vigilant. Being alone in a somewhat-spooky old bookstore makes that a reasonable response, but it’s not ghosts he’s worried about, as we discover when he’s confronted by a thug come to collect on a payment. The guy doesn’t have it, but tells the thug where he can find a one-of-a-kind book worth millions. A book called…you guessed it…the Book of Blood. (DUN-dun-DUUUNNNNNN!) He gives the thug an address, and the thug kills him for his trouble. Which seems like bad business to me, since the dead can’t pay, ever, but away the nameless thug and his accomplice go, to a neighborhood they describe as “cursed.” The accomplice is nervous, but away they drive. And then we come to the first entry…
Jenna
Jenna is a young woman who lives with her wealthy mother and…father? Stepfather? Dude seems kind of young to be her dad…in a sleek, modern house on a beach in the middle of nowhere. Jenna’s a morbid young woman, constantly drawing ghoulish, monstrous faces in her sketchbook, and she isn’t happy about anything. She looks out at the waves crashing against the beach, and sees drowning and freezing to death in “that hellish water.” Her mother’s mad, and at first it isn’t clear why, but as it transpires, she moved everyone out to this remote house for Jenna’s benefit. Jenna suffers from misophonia, which is typically characterized by aversion to specific sounds, but for the purposes of this film seems to include sounds of almost any sort, short of conversation. Jenna dropped out of college because of some unspecified “incident,” and then she went to live on “the farm,” which seems to have been some kind of treatment facility. Jenna sketches and wears noise-cancelling headphones a lot.
And then, after dinner, Jenna overhears her parents talking (because apparently misophonia also gives you super-hearing in this film) and realizes her mother is pissed off that she’s blown off college and just sits around and mopes. Like any good parent, she decides she’s just going to ship her back to “the farm.” So Jenna grabs a bunch of cash out of a stash in her parent’s closet and hightails it for L.A.. Except that someone seems to be following her, so she jumps off the bus early and lands at a charming little B&B in a small town. Is that a lot? It’s kind of a lot, and that’s just the first 15 minutes or so of a segment that takes up most of the movie. The B&B is run by a charming older couple, who say that they like to think of everyone who stays there as family.
No, that’s not ominous at all.
By this point, the problems are already starting to show. Most notable is the clumsy, artificial dialogue. It’s true not just in this segment, but throughout the film - everything is an expository speech, nobody talks like actual human beings. We’re talking, like Criminal Minds or Law & Order: SVU levels of “nobody talks that way.” It’s most effective at killing any attempt at atmosphere that might develop. It does have help in that department, though - the pacing is completely squirrelly as well. This segment feints at being a couple of different stories before it settles on a through-line, and takes way too long to get there. What’s the deal with all the weird shit she sketches? What was “the incident?” When did her misophonia develop? All of these are sort of teased as meaning something - and they do, we just don’t get resolution on them in the actual segment about her, and they aren’t what’s driving her story. Then there’s mysterious figure following her, and then she gets to the B&B and there’s lots of weird stuff around the edges, some odd nightmare imagery, and so then it seems like maybe it’s about paranoia and an impending psychological breakdown.
But…nope. To its credit, the real story is an interesting idea, and definitely feels like the kind of thing Barker would come up with (no, this isn’t actually one of the stories from the source text, it was written specifically for this), but it’s lost in all of the haphazard plot points before and after. And then, just when it feels like it should be coming to a close, it just keeps going and going, ending on a non-sequitur that robs it of any power whatsoever. Jenna’s misophonia never comes off more as than unnecessary contrivance, there’s no real mood to speak of (because everything feels so artificial), and so the stranger turns it takes feel more confusing than anything else. The whole thing sort of feels like a bunch of stuff being thrown at the wall to see what sticks, and none of it does.
Miles
We open with a video recording of a man, standing nude in the middle of a white room. The lights shut off, and the darkness is immediately filled with a cacophony of shrieks, growls, and wails. When the lights come up, the man is curled up on the floor, the walls around hum now filled with writing - chaotic, overlapping scrawls in what appears to be blood. This is the kind of moment I expect from a Clive Barker story, and for the record, this is the only material taken directly from the source text…and it’s the narrative bookend of the anthology, so there’s not a whole story to work with. But it’s a striking image with which to open the segment. The man is Simon, and he is a speaker for the dead. This is how the dead speak through him. Mary is a professor in…well, her field is never specified, but she’s apparently made a career as someone who debunks psychic phenomena using science. A tried-and-true skeptic, who lost her son Miles to leukemia and has grieved ever since. Simon, of course, offers to perform a “convocation” on her terms to prove that his abilities are real, and that he can put her in touch with Miles.
And so this is the story of how Mary comes to know Simon and learn about his abilities, and how their relationship changes over time. It’s a much more cohesive story than the first segment, and has some genuinely creepy and unsettling moments, but ends up being let down again by the dialogue (again, all tell, no show - Simon introduces himself by breaking into Mary’s office and going through a whole monologue about who she is and who he is and it’s like…
fuck, we
know) and by a disappointingly conventional turn and resolution that makes the whole thing feel like an episode of
Tales From The Crypt, and like I said up front, this isn’t campy, at least not intentionally, so the end of what is an noticeably shorter segment compared to
Jenna just has all of the air let out of it. Like the first story, there’s a germ of a good idea and some good imagery, but even though it’s much tighter and more economical about how it gets to the point, the narrative itself ends up being so pedestrian that it brings the whole thing down.
Bennett
So this isn’t so much a third story as it is the leftovers from the introduction and the other two stories. The titular Bennett turns out to be the thug from the opening, and he and his accomplice Steve are on their way to collect the book, from the address provided to them by the bookseller before he died. Without spoiling anything, I can say that it’s a neighborhood and a house we’ve seen before already, so we sort of know what Bennett is going to find. There’s really not much story here at all - Bennett and Steve arrive someplace that feels like equal parts urban blight and haunted forest (which to be fair is a very Barker kind of vibe), there are some jump scares and a messy death for reasons never made clear, and then Bennett’s journey very conveniently takes him through places we’ve seen before. It ends up feeling very, very much like they tried to pass off what was supposed to be the bookend to the opening as its own story, since there’s no real plot or development of who Bennett is and why he does what he does. He’s an unsympathetic character meant to meet a nasty end in the service of some moral, but just when it feels like his story should be wrapped up and thus the film ended, the perspective shifts from Bennett back to Jenna, and we learn what the incident at school was, and Jenna comes to some kind of reckoning. It does end up someplace I wasn’t expecting and there is some power to it, but it’s not nearly as effective as it could have been. Again, this is because the segment, like much of the film, is a disjointed mess, very obviously cobbled together from parts. It’s the second false ending of the film, the shift back to Jenna doesn’t really make sense because the film didn’t begin with her, and it reveals her to be a far less sympathetic character than she already was. I think the end would have packed more of a punch if we’d cared about her, but as it stands it sort of comes off like “you know what? Good.” There’s not a lot of horror there, and the film doesn’t so much end as lurch to a halt.
I don’t like to judge films by anything other than the end product if I can help it. But everything about this feels exactly like someone with little to no experience directing horror attempting to take what could be salvaged out of a failed anthology and present it as a marketable product, and if nothing about that sentence sounds great, well, there you go.
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