Black Christmas: The Nightmare Before Christmas

As was the case with Halloween, I find myself sitting down to watch the movie I’m going to write about for the coming week on the day after a holiday - this year that happened to be the day after Christmas so, well, ‘tis the season and all that. And like Halloween, Black Christmas is an early example of the slasher film, a type of horror film of which I’m generally not very fond - I don’t find the prospect of a bunch of unwitting teenagers getting mowed down by a silent, hulking presence with some kind of gimmick all that compelling. 

But I do feel I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least look at seminal examples of the type. That’s usually where you’re going to find the most interesting films, before they’ve been codified into some kind of genre with rules and clichés and expectations to be met. And, though I don’t know that Black Christmas works as well overall as Halloween does, there are some really interesting choices here alongside early examples of the sort of things that would become slasher film cliché.

The film begins sort of in medias res, as the young women of Pi Kappa Sigma sorority are throwing a holiday party before Christmas break. There’s drinking, conversation, the mood’s mostly festive and relaxed, though one sorority sister named Barb is having a tense phone call with her mother, and another sister, Jess, seems to be considering breaking up with her boyfriend Peter for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. Meanwhile, outside the sorority house, we cut to a first-person perspective of someone walking around the house, looking in the windows, trying the doors. 

Inside, the party is winding down as most of the sisters begin packing up to leave for the holidays, and then there’s a phone call. An obscene phone call, by the sounds of it. The caller breathes and grunts and moans, as the young women gathered around the phone listen with something between bemusement and numb resignation. The grunting and moaning escalates to surprisingly graphic ranting obscenity, and just before the caller hangs up, one last thing, almost whispered…

“I’m going to kill you.”

In some ways, Black Christmas really does create a lot of the template for future slasher films - even apart from setting the film during a holiday, which would go on to become a staple of the genre, we have a group of young people -in this case, young women - in a fixed location being stalked and murdered by an impersonal killer. The use of first-person perspective, which figured heavily into Halloween and shows up as a device in many other slasher films as well, is a big part of this film. Law enforcement is largely ineffectual and doesn’t really take the protagonists’ concerns seriously, and people get picked off one by one leading up to the climactic confrontation between the last protagonist and the killer. 

But there are some important departures as well, things that future copycats wouldn’t include in the formula. Like Halloween, it is a much more deliberately-paced film than its successors would be, with a fairly large stretch of the film given over to the reactions of other characters to the disappearance of the first victim and efforts to locate her. It isn’t immediately clear what’s going on, and because they aren’t in an isolated location, there’s a sense that life continues to go on around this young woman going missing. There are subplots as well, which you generally don’t get in slasher films, about the first victims’ father, who came to campus to pick her up and then stayed to assist with the search effort, and Jess’ relationship with her boyfriend. They’re somewhat tangential to the main story, but end up becoming part of it as well, sometimes in surprisingly effective ways. For long stretches, it feels more like a mystery and how this group of people reacts to it than it does a horror film, except we know right off the bat what’s happened and are sort of waiting for it to happen again.

It’s also a lot less graphically violent than the films that would follow it - a number of people do die, but the murders are rarely lingered upon and in at least two cases occur entirely off-camera. Almost all of the action takes place in the sorority house, an actual house rented and remodeled for the film, which gives it a tremendous sense of geography. It gives the film a real feeling of…not claustrophobia, exactly, but confinement. There’s someone in the house with these young women, and all it would take would be opening a certain door or climbing up into the attic of this sprawling, labyrinthine house to reveal everything, but because there’s no real reason to, people don’t. A lot turns on small details - open doors, the sound of heavy breathing - to cue what’s about to happen, and much more than the films it inspires, this film really leans into the power of suggestion and imagination. There’s something nightmarish about it, this idea that there’s a maniac up in the attic, creeping down when people aren’t looking and lurking in the shadows, just watching. And what a maniac he is. One thing that Halloween does seem to be responsible for is the killer as a silent, implacable hulking figure. That is definitely not the case in this film. We almost never see the killer at all from anyone else’s perspective - just a hand or eyes peering out from the shadows. But we do see a lot from the killer’s perspective, and he rants, babbles, makes strange, inarticulate animal noises, speaking in multiple voices like a man possessed. There’s a horrific energy to this that exists in counterpoint to the fairly restrained depictions of murder. The obscene phone call that begins the film is surprisingly nasty for the time in which the film was made, and it continues in a way that best describes the killer as unhinged. The violence is in the killer’s portrayal, not in his actions, and because the killer is never really revealed in a meaningful way or explained at all, it’s really unsettling. 

It’s also interesting to observe how the subject matter of this film interacts with the time in which it was made. It came out in 1974, and mid-70s ideas about gender are very much on display here in a way that communicates with the film. There’s the weary resignation the sorority sisters exhibit at yet another obscene phone call, the way that most of the men are occupied with dictating the lives of the women in the film, from the father’s prudish disapproval of his daughter’s fellow sorority sisters to Peter’s callous narcissism, the way the police dismiss the protagonist’s complaints about obscene phone calls and even the first sister going missing, or even just total strangers acting creepy. These women exist in an environment where they’re constantly under siege as it is from the men in their lives, never mind an unseen killer. And the men in this film mostly exist on a continuum of arrested development, from the police sergeant flustered by the word “fellatio” to the fraternity brother who can’t help but play Santa Claus while spouting obscenities, to Peter’s utter failure to consider anyone’s needs but his own, to the way the killer keeps regressing to a child as he rants and raves. Almost any of the men in this film could be a monster, it’s just a matter of degree.

So even though there is an interesting, almost theatrical feeling to this film (I really could see this being adapted for the stage if it hasn’t been already), it also makes a number of mistakes. The use of first-person perspective is pretty clumsy, and especially overdone at the start, where we basically know about the killer’s existence before we’re even properly situated with the characters and the setting. It burns off some of the suspense, and continually reverting to it throughout the film threatens to take us out of the story since it feels so artificial. Characterization in this film isn’t especially deep across the board, sometimes bordering on caricature, but there are occasionally some exchanges that feel pretty real, especially in the back half of the film when it becomes clear that there’s something going on. But the housemother is almost played for comic relief, and the protagonists aren’t really so much fleshed-out people as they are either a single personality trait or their relationship with another character.

This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem in a film that moved along at a faster clip, but because the whole second act consists mostly of people talking to each other, things start to drag quite a bit. The tension does start to ramp up in the last act, accompanied by good use of long shots of empty hallways from different perspectives, which accentuates how big the house is and how many hidden nooks and crannies it has. I think more of that and less of the first-person stuff would have made it even better, and to its credit it ends strong on a creepily inconclusive note, something a lot of horror films fail to manage. 

On its own, this is an idiosyncratic film that does slightly more right than it does wrong, but for as much as it’s contributed to a thoroughly overdone style of horror film, it’s also very much its own thing, and something about it has stuck with me ever since I watched it. That doesn’t happen all that often. 

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Available on Tubi

Creep 2: Collaboration

(Note: This is going to be mildly spoilery for the 2014 film Creep, and if you haven’t seen it - well, you should, it’s really good and it’ll inform how you see this film. So maybe go check that out and then read this.)

If you’ve spent any amount of time reading this thing of mine, you’ll know I don’t like sequels to horror movies. If you haven’t spent much time reading this thing of mine, well…I don’t like sequels to horror movies. I think horror works best when there’s mystery and finality to it, and sequels (and prequels, for that matter) undo both of those, diminishing what made the original so powerful. Plus, there’s a tendency to reprise the original - another group of campers come to the cursed summer camp, another group of people with dodgy pasts get snared by the evil mastermind, another family moves into the haunted house. It tends to be more of the same, and again, no finality or mystery. We’ve seen this already. There are the occasional exceptions, as there always are, but as a rule, I don’t do sequels.

Creep was one of those films that made me consider an exception, mostly because it falls so far outside of conventional horror filmmaking in so many ways that I was genuinely curious what another story by these people in this world would look like. And in a lot of ways, Creep 2 doesn’t disappoint, primarily because it elaborates on the first film, rather than reprise it. It’s like variations on a theme, or someone improvising on an existing riff, and it goes some places the original film didn’t. It does have the problem inherent in any sequel in that some of the surprise is lost, but what replaces it works more often than not. 

We open on a young man named Dave, who’s just received a package in the mail - we can’t see what it is, because our perspective is being shot from inside the box. He pulls out a DVD, and though we can’t see what’s on it, it has Dave pretty rattled. So he calls his friend Aaron to come over. We’ve seen Aaron before - the last time we saw him, he was calling himself “Josef.” There’s a conversation, there are revelations, there’s a knife, and soon enough, Dave is dead.

Cut to Sara. Sara is a video artist, sort of a documentarian. She’s making a web series called Encounters wherein she answers Craigslist ads put up by lonely men and documents herself spending the day with these men, finding out how they got to this point in their life. It’s very raw, very honest, and pretty much nobody is watching it. She’s losing faith in her ability to do this, in her ability as an artist. She needs something to really push the boundaries, something really compelling.

And then she answers a Craigslist ad from someone named “Aaron.”

Initially, then, we’re sort of working from the bones of the original. An unsuspecting videographer is invited out to a house deep in the woods on the pretext of spending the day filming the person who hired them. That’s not entirely where the similarities end, but it’s where most of them end. One of the things that I thought made Creep work so well was how it gave the audience a first-person perspective on someone gradually realizing that this person they initially thought was just sort of needy and awkward is actually something much worse, and how grounded that was in actual human behavior. It was very much about someone coming to realize too late that they were in over their head, and that’s not exactly what’s going on here - well, it’s not not what’s going on here, but it’s a very different dynamic.

The dynamic in this film feels much more actively collaborative, insofar as both Aaron and Sara are trying to get something out of each other. Aaron’s trying to meet his needs, as in the first film, though here he’s depicted as someone headed into middle age, realizing that he doesn’t have the same joy in his work as he used to, and he’s wondering what’s happening to him. He wants Sara to tell his story. But Sara’s also trying to meet her needs as well, and it’s something more complicated than just a day’s filming for hire - she wants her show to work, she wants something really challenging and maybe even dangerous to make for a compelling episode. She’s already in a place where she’s accustomed to walking alone into potentially dangerous situations, so she’s not naïve, but you get the sense that maybe she has a little more confidence than she really should, based on all of the previous times she was able to handle herself. From what we see of Encounters, she’s mostly been dealing with sheep, and we know (from the first film and from the prologue) that now she’s dealing with an actual wolf, and so the simmering discomfort at all of the boundary violations from the first film are replaced with a simmering discomfort at us knowing exactly how much trouble she’s really in and wondering how it’s all going to play out. On that level, we’re watching a predator toy with its prey for a little over an hour. It’s more nuanced than that, though, as Sara both acknowledges how dangerous it is for her as a woman to walk into a strange man’s house in the middle of nowhere, but also at the same time recognize how well this could pay off for her, paired with an immediate dismissal of the idea that this guy could actually be dangerous. It’s like a much more grounded version of the feeling you get in more conventional horror films right before one of the protagonists opens a door that you absolutely know they should not open. It’s not so much blithe ignorance as you being able to see Sara talking herself out of her better instincts in real time. 

But on top of that, there’s the way that Aaron continues to weaponize the idea of intimacy as one of his ways of manipulating his victims. Just as in the first film, he’s extremely confessional and open, affectionately demonstrative and given to SoCal touchy-feely psychobabble as gestures toward vulnerability. And as in the first film, he pushes Sara to be just as revealing, a way of brute-forcing the trust he’s going to exploit eventually. But because Sara essentially has an agenda of her own, she gives as good as she gets, and her fearlessness serves her well. She’s more assertive and directive, she challenges Aaron, she doesn’t back down. She’s someone who’s also used to using intimacy as a tool, used to using trust and vulnerability to her own ends. So there’s much more of a back-and-forth there than in the first film. 

Another advantage to this film is the way it makes our antagonist more of a mystery, rather than less. One of the problems I have with sequels to horror films in general is that they tend to reveal more and more about the antagonist until there’s no horror left because it’s all choked out by the backstory. Here, though, we can never, ever trust anything Aaron says or does as being true. As in the first film, he uses intimacy as a tool, not just to lull his victim but also to maintain his own distance. When you choose what to reveal to someone about yourself and how, it’s still a process under your control. If Aaron wants to share an uncomfortable incident from his past he can, and it will seem as though he is being vulnerable, but if it’s a total fiction then we’re no closer to knowing him than we were before. It isn’t playing fair, and as in the first film, those violations of the interpersonal contract of disclosure are uncomfortable. But now that we see Aaron’s entire narrative with Sara is very different from the one he has in the first movie, it means he’s still as much a mystery to us at the end of this film as he was at the end of the first film. All we know is that he kills, and all the rest is up for grabs, If anything, he’s even more of a mystery than he was in the first film. At least in terms of the details - there’s a very clear vocabulary around intimacy and interpersonal connection and specific imagery and ideas to Aaron that provides a through-line, but there’s no myth-making here, no lore to bog down the story. At whatever level he’s consciously revealing things, he’s still a cipher, and that’s chilling.

There’s a pretty strong metatextual undercurrent as well - we are watching a film about the making of a film, and in some ways that makes us, the audience, collaborators as well. Sara’s complicit in helping Aaron to memorialize his killings, and we’re complicit in watching her do it. As in the first film, the majority is shot from the perspective of a single camera, we’re watching footage as it’s being shot, we’re seeing when it works and when it doesn’t work, and when there’s artifice, it’s captured both as part of the film Sara’s making and the film we’re watching. So where the first film felt more immediate, like we were watching everything unfold as it happened, here there’s a bit more of a remove to it, it’s a little more self-conscious, which takes some of the immediate tension out. I don’t think it really harms the film, because it’s an expression of the dynamic between these two people, but it does rob the story of some of its immediacy. It’s more of a head film, and less of a gut film, if that makes sense.

And on top of all that, the performances continue to be very strong. They have to be, since it’s really just two people talking to each other for most of the film. As in the first film, the dialogue was improvised from an outline, so it feels very natural throughout, and Sara’s more proactive, directive role here means we see sides to Aaron that we didn’t see in the first film. In some ways, this is as contrived a depiction of a serial killer as any other serial killer film (man invites someone with a camera to his home so he can have a record of both his attempts to bond with him and then their murder), but the character of Aaron really nails a lot of the real psychological ingredients of serial murderers here - there’s an underlying emptiness or vacuity and constant need, an intense desire for control, and a harmless, unassuming persona that slips when nobody’s looking. We don’t know the facts of his life, we don’t know how much (if any) of the things he revealed in this film or the first one are true, but we see what happens when he and Sara have trouble filming a sequence and he completely loses his cool, we see how Sara’s unflappability and willingness to take charge of the situation puts him on his back foot, and there are moments where the friendly, open, good-vibes persona drops and the darkness underneath, the rage, are clearly visible, if only for a moment. Again, it’s chilling when it happens. Just like the first film this is not an especially gory film by any stretch of the imagination. The horror here is in what people say and do, in the details carefully observed. 

It’s not as intensely minimal as the first film - the production qualities are higher, there’s a prologue and an epilogue, which gives it a more conventional feel, but not to a degree that hurts it. The last thing you want to do (and the first thing so many filmmakers do with horror sequels) is just make the same movie again. The settings are similar, again it’s mostly set in someone’s vacation home, and apart from the credits all of the music is diegetic, so it still feels pretty naturalistic. As in the first film, the firs-person perspective sometimes feels a little weird, but not to a degree that pulls you out of the movie. The first film wasn’t really a conventional horror film and neither is this one, they both mine pretty conventional horror-film territory in unconventional ways, but even though this one’s maybe a little more distant than the first, underneath there’s still that constant hum of unease and discomfort, wondering when the other shoe is going to drop, and the characters are acutely enough observed that it’s painful to watch in many of the ways the first film was. It ends on a suitably messy, complicated note, underscoring the idea that there aren’t many neat, tidy answers to be had, and that we’re as much a part of this as Aaron and Sara were. Apparently there’s a third one in pre-production, and I gotta say I’m at least curious.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix

Available on Amazon

Creep (2014): This May Seem Weird Now

When you think about horror movies, the horror of new relationships probably doesn’t come to mind immediately. Sure, there are films like Honeymoon that use monstrous transformation as a metaphor for the realization that maybe you don’t know your brand-new spouse as well as you thought, or thrillers like Fatal Attraction that describe how a casual encounter can have horrible consequences. But, broadly speaking, embarking on any kind of new relationship - not just romantic or sexual ones, even just friendship - can be scary, because it entails revealing things about yourself to another person, making yourself vulnerable. And there’s always an element of uncertainty there. How are they going to respond? Being intimate with someone is scary.

As is the case with Creep, a strange, persistently uncomfortable film that doesn’t really look or play like much else, and that’s very much to its credit. This is not to be confused with the (somewhat misogynistic) 2004 film of the same name that told the story of a young woman trapped in a disused part of the London Underground with something extremely nasty. No, the monster here, while certainly nasty enough, is something entirely plausible, which makes the whole thing hit just that much closer to home, to great effect.

It’s the story of a young man named Aaron. He’s a videographer by trade, and we pick up with him as he’s traveling out into the woods of what is presumably northern California, though it’s never really made clear, for a private gig. “Discretion is appreciated,” the ad said. And when he gets where he’s going, to an isolated vacation home, there’s nobody around. Nobody answers the door, nobody answers his calls. He’s just about to leave when the client, Josef, shows up. He’s very friendly…very, very friendly. He pulls Aaron in for a hug, saying “this may seem weird now, but by the end of the day it’ll be totally normal.” Josef explains to Aaron that he’s terminally ill, his wife is pregnant, and there’s every chance that he won’t live to see his child born. So he wants to make some video diaries of himself so his unborn son can get to know him after he’s gone. Aaron’s going to spend the day following him around, recording him, as a keepsake.

“This is a partnership,” Josef says.

To start, this film isn’t so much scary as it is, well, really creepy. And it’s not really the creepiness of your garden-variety horror film - Josef’s vacation house is bright and airy and modern, and there’s nothing strange out in the forest. This is the creepiness of a certain kind of person who actually exists in the world. Josef is uncomfortable to watch almost from the first moment he’s on screen, combining the bland amicability of a youth pastor or children’s program host with glimpses at some deep-seated psychological issues and a talent for ignoring social and interpersonal boundaries. There’s a real weaponization of intimacy at work here - Josef shares too much too quickly, and encourages Aaron to do the same. He asks uncomfortably personal questions and makes odd remarks. There’s a childlike quality to him, a vulnerability that suggests he was wounded very badly at a very young age and maybe he’s never really known how to relate to people.

So right from jump, something feels very, very off, but in a way that doesn’t necessarily feel like a horror movie. You hear stories of people who strike up friendships, acquaintances, work relationships, or even just passing encounters with people who don’t seem to know where and when to stop, who call at all hours, who keep asking if you like them or not, who share embarrassingly personal things about themselves and pressure you to do the same. That happens in everyday life all the time, and the effectiveness of this film lies in how it takes those kind of uncomfortable, but highly relatable encounters and spins them into something much worse. Most of the heavy lifting, then, is in the persistent uneasiness that accompanies really awkward, uncomfortable social situations with people you realize might not be totally stable. There are some jump-scare moments but they’re sort of….not exactly telegraphed, more like they’re integrated into the story in a way that makes sense so they’re as much a part of the character as they are jump scares. Josef’s the kind of guy who thinks it’s funny to leap out at someone as they walk through a door, so you get the jolt in a way that feels narratively plausible. And it suggests a certain meanness, the way certain types of teasing are presented as being all in fun, but sting nonetheless. Or how you can tickle someone until it stops being funny and starts being genuinely distressing. They’re all violations of trust, of intimacy.

The importance of intimacy to the story comes through in the cinematography as well. It’s shot almost entirely in the first person, using a commercial-grade video camera. So it’s nominally a found-footage film, at least in terms of its perspective, but it’s not really presented as such. It feels more like a film that’s just shot mostly from a first-person perspective, as if we’re privy to a video diary. Maybe now and then you’ll wonder “why is he filming this?” But since it isn’t explicitly one of these “all that remains of the night of that horrible tragedy is the footage the missing teenagers filmed” kind of movies, I found it easier to sort of just roll with it. It’s a personal film shot from a personal point of view.

It’s also an extremely minimal production. The whole film is just two people (and one voice on the phone), both of whom also wrote it (to the extent that it’s written - they improvised around a basic outline they came up with ahead of time) and one of whom is the director. There’s no score, there’s one camera, and there are minimal effects. It’s two people interacting with each other in increasingly uncomfortable ways and it feels extremely natural, which makes it work even better. If it reminds me of any other film I’ve written about for this thing, it’s probably Leaving D.C., which is similarly minimal, though this film is tenser and more unsettling, but like the former film, it’s very much centered in believable human experience and that’s why it works so well. This doesn’t scan like most horror films - it’ s set in sunny, cheery suburban environments and it plays for most of its runtime more like an indie drama about someone who finds themselves becoming increasingly entangled with a very lonely. awkward, emotionally arrested man, someone who has a real problem with boundaries for reasons hinted at obliquely in the beginning of the film. It seems more like something you’d expect from Mike White or Todd Solondz, as Aaron tries his best to navigate Josef’s feelings in a way that extricates him from the attentions of this incredibly needy person without hurting him. This is a horror film where most of the horror is expressed in conversations, which is a hell of a thing.

It’s a relatively short film, not even 90 minutes, but it does have some pacing problems. It starts to lose its focus a little in the back half, and so things meander for a bit before a fairly strong ending. There’s also going to be some “why would he do that?” questions asked of Aaron, but Aaron doesn’t know he’s in a horror movie, and once things get extremely strange he does start to fear for his safety. But to look at Josef, so lost and hangdog and forlorn, how could he possibly be anything other than just…kinda creepy?

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon

No One Gets Out Alive: Things Are Not What They Seem

The phrase “but it turns out that things are not what they seem” gets used so much in synopses for horror movies that I sometimes suspect whoever writes those things just has a document full of phrases - that included - from which they just copy and paste when summarizing a movie. It’s right up there with “but then their dream house turns into a nightmare” and “what began as a game becomes terrifyingly real.” It’s really difficult to muster a lot of enthusiasm for a movie whose description makes it sounds like fifteen other movies.

Luckily, No One Gets Out Alive, a movie that is both not what it seems and is about a situation where things aren’t what they seem is better than the generic title would lead you to believe, though it isn’t quite as good as it could be.

It opens with scratchy, grainy film footage of what appears to be an expedition to Central or South America. No dialogue, not a lot of exposition, just a trip into the jungle, and the retrieval of an enigmatic stone box. Cut to today, and a young woman listening to a voicemail from what sounds like her mother, who was very happy that she visited. Now she’s getting out of the back of a semi, flinching against the light, one of many people packed in the trailer, like cargo. She’s being hustled out, as if the driver is anxious not to get caught.

Her name is Ambar, and she’s come to Cleveland, OH from Mexico. She’s trying to start over, make a new life in the United States. Ambar is undocumented, though, which makes things hard. She takes an exhausting job in a sweatshop where she gets paid in cash. It’s a life on the margins, and she can’t keep staying in a motel - the proprietor wants to see her ID. So she snags an ad for a boarding house advertising cheap rooms. It’s run by a taciturn fellow named Red, who doesn’t ask for her ID, but does ask for a month’s rent up front. It’s an old building, run-down, in a depressed part of town. There are rules: No smoking in the rooms, no male visitors. Red says she’s one of two occupants at the moment, but Ambar can hear other women at night through the walls, sobbing. There are other rules: Red’s office is private. The basement is private.

Don’t go into the basement.

I know it’s not especially strong praise, but this film could have been so, so much worse than it is, and honestly a lot of the time I was very pleasantly surprised. It’s a much more restrained and understated movie than I was expecting - the editing is crisp and terse, and the film makes good, effective use of small reveals and careful, tasteful use of repeated motifs, both visual and narrative, throughout. Even more importantly, for a film that could be exploitative caricature - young woman all alone in a city full of people ready to take advantage of her - almost everyone comes off like real people. It’s not a character study or anything, but even the antagonistic characters are portrayed at a human scale and aren’t just two-dimensional villains, and interactions between people feel natural and believable. This is a film that is confident to let unsettling things happen in the background instead of relying on loud noises and jump scares, and that buys a lot of goodwill with me.

The first act is relatively quiet, focused mostly on Ambar’s tenuous situation and how vulnerable she is as an undocumented immigrant, and that builds some tension on its own. It has some parallels to His House, in that sense, though I think that’s a stronger film. Still, like that film, this is about a stranger in a strange land trying to build something for themselves while constantly being plagued by setbacks, and that does pretty good work on its own. Ambar’s desperation feels real without being forced or melodramatic, and as the first act progresses, we start to get hints of something being not right around the edges on top of what is already a very precarious position. If anything, the first act is maybe a little too restrained and quiet, and I worried that it was just going to putter along in this gear until the end, but the second act complicates Ambar’s situation further, and the pace picks up steadily moving toward the climax.

But the pacing is still sort of a problem. It’s a story about how things aren’t what they appear to be and that’s fine as far as it goes, but it also relies on a narrative feint where the truth isn’t what you expect it to be either. You’re lead to believe Ambar is in one kind of trouble, but it turns out to be much, much worse. Again, this is absolutely fine, but it gives the game away too early on - inside of the first act a number of clues are dropped toward what’s actually going on, and so the final reveal in the third act doesn’t hit with the force that it could. Part of this could be because I was spoiled for the last act going into it, but I think part of it is also that it signposts some things entirely too clearly at the expense of what you think is supposed to be going on. It’s tough to talk about it too much without spoiling the film, but the filmmakers don’t commit hard enough to the story of the kind of trouble that Ambar is supposed to be in for the truth to be much of a twist.

Part of what helps make up for this is the cinematography. It’s a dark, gloomy movie - daytime scenes are overcast, broken up by occasional more brightly-lit moments of relief that are nonetheless awkward or end up going sour, which nicely sets a mood. But the nighttime scenes (and most of the interiors in the boarding house) are sometimes so dark that it’s tough to know what we’re supposed to be looking at. When they’re lit, it’s appropriately drab and sickly or bathed in candlelight which is nonetheless not especially comforting. So the visuals, along with the acting and editing and characterization, go a long way. Most of the settings feel real as well, with the unfortunate exception of the boarding house interior, which feels much larger than it appears on the outside. The effect is less supernatural and more just revealing that it’s a set. That said, it doesn’t look especially cheap. It’s not a film that leans too heavily into gore or special effects for most of its runtime, but that changes in the final act, and then what’s there is believable and striking.

So the human elements of the story - Ambar’s attempts to establish herself in the U.S. and the obstacles in her way, the way she interacts with others and how they treat her. - feel true and generate a low-level sense of dread as you know things aren’t going to go well, and so the escalation to something worse and then no, something even worse than that should stack on top of the existing unease, but giving away important details early undercuts that. Even though it’s a smart film in a lot of ways, it also never really builds up the head of steam that it needs to. Once things do ramp up it mostly works, but the whole thing ends on a disappointingly conventional note in Final Girl mode, and it just feels like there were more interesting places to go with it. It all feels…fitful, like the flickering lights that signal something bad is about to happen throughout the film. Sometimes it works really well, sometimes it doesn’t. So no, it’s not what it seems, in that it’s a much better-made film than you’d expect, but if it had done a better job of selling us on what we were expecting the story to be, then the reveal of what it truly was would have hit even harder.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

The Wicker Man (1973): You’re Not From Around Here, Are You?

 Every now and then - most recently with the release of Midsommar - the idea of “folk horror” will come up in the conversation. It’s a very pure expression of a fairly basic premise, that of the outsider coming to an isolated community where ancient beliefs and rituals are still practiced and meeting with a bad end. What I gather distinguishes folk horror from films as wildly different from it (and each other) as Dagon and Children Of The Corn and Cannibal Holocaust is that in folk horror, the traditions being drawn upon are distinctly pagan in flavor and rooted in real historical traditions (the “folk” part(, and not just stock-standard crazy evil cult worship.

It’s not something of which I’ve seen a lot, but it’s really difficult to talk about without bringing up what is largely considered the modern beginning of the genre, The Wicker Man. This is another one of those classic films (it’s been referred to as “the Citizen Kane of horror films”) that I haven’t seen…well, no, that’s not entirely true. I have a dim recollection of watching it many years ago and not being especially impressed. But I was much younger and less patient then, so I thought it’d be good to give it another look and see if it still holds up decades later.

And the verdict is…well, sort of. It definitely has its moments and I can’t say I’ve really seen anything else like it (in a good way), but ultimately it’s more interesting as an exemplar of a style than it is effective as a horror film.

The film opens with a cheeky title card where the producers thank the lord and residents of the isle depicted in the movie for their cooperation, and I have to say, it’s a nicely off-kilter touch…much like thanking the residents of Halsingland for their cooperation in the filming of Midsommar. We cut to a seaplane flying across a stretch of rocky islands in what are presumably the Hebrides, before landing just off the harbor in a small village. The plane is flown by Sergeant Neil Howie, a police officer sent to the small, isolated island village of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a little girl. Howie floats out on the water as a crowd gathers at the harbor, gawking at him without sending a dinghy out to bring him to shore. A fair amount of shouting on his part doesn’t change this, and he’s told that nobody’s allowed to land in the harbor without the permission of Lord Summerisle. Howie eventually manages to convince them that refusing to cooperate with a police investigation would be a very bad move, and he’s allowed to come ashore.

What Sergeant Howie finds is a very strange place indeed. Summerisle is known for its especially delicious fruit, exported all over Scotland, but the local pub only has canned food. The usual evening pub crowd is unusually bawdy and lascivious. The local church and its attendant graveyard are left to ruin, overrun with weeds. And even though a letter from the island requested the police’s help, everyone swears that they don’t know the missing girl.

They have their own traditions here.

Right off the bat, this film is not so much scary as it is relentlessly uneasy - the juxtaposition of pagan belief with otherwise contemporary English village life lends the whole film a feeling of pervasive strangeness that dovetails well with the story of an outsider come to an isolated, rural place with its own strange ways. The people are never explicitly sinister or leering villains, this is just their way of life, as normal to them as any other, but there’s definitely the paranoia you expect when someone from outside comes nosing around. All conversation stops when Howie walks into the room, windows open and people peer out as he passes, and with that comes cheerful, friendly obstruction and noncompliance with the investigation. People are happy to tell him that no, they’ve never heard of this girl, and even the woman who presumably wrote the letter insists that there must be some mistake, even though it’s ostensibly her daughter he’s come to find. He can’t even search the local records without the explicit permission of Lord Summerisle. The small village with its secrets works well in establishing a mood because it is an environment at once familiar and alien, so nothing can be taken for granted.

All of that works fine as it goes, and it’s a good foundation on which to build a story, but it’s undercut by the characterization of its protagonist. Sergeant Howie is depicted as a Christian devout almost to the point of puritanism, which makes sense as a contrast to a village full of people practicing pre-Christian beliefs and rituals, but the story constantly trips over the clash between these perspectives. Howie flip-flops between being a policeman investigating a crime and a puritanical zealot in ways that don’t quite feel believable and end up distracting. It’d be one thing if her were a devout Christian experiencing a crisis of faith as he sees a community flourishing in the absence of his god, but almost from the moment he hits the island he’s a bull in a china shop, doing as much harm as good to his investigation by loudly objecting to everything he sees and as often as not exceeding his jurisdiction to satisfy his moral outrage. I think either story by itself could have potentially worked, had Howie been a priest sent to a post on Summerisle as the village’s vicar, primarily characterized by his shock at the absence of God on this island, or in a procedural story as a police officer trying his best to navigate an extremely unfamiliar culture while trying to find a missing girl. Either of those works, either of those has interesting story beats associated with them, but cramming the two together disrupts the flow of the story and worse, tends to make Howie unsympathetic, which I think makes the film less effective overall. A more sympathetic Howie and a story that didn’t feel like a police investigation interrupted by a lot of exposition and argument about faith would have made for an even more compelling story than what we get.

To its credit, it certainly doesn’t look or play like most horror films, and I’m always here for a singular vision. It’s extremely colorful, with lots of sunlight and soft focus and even when the locations are drab, the villagers and their community pop with color. The people are cheerful and smiling and even though there’s no leering villainy, it still all feels unsettling. The soundtrack is largely English folk music, which makes sense for a film about Britain before Christianity came, but the overall result is something that feels,- at least on the surface - pastoral rather than sinister, which adds to the utter strangeness of the village itself.

There’s a tremendous eye for detail in the strangeness as well. There are lots of little bits of business in the background from the villagers, the local drugstore is stocked with ancient remedies, not modern ones, schoolchildren are taught about May Day rituals as naturally in school as history would be anywhere, and everyone, multiple generations in on this island, are as natural and comfortable in their beliefs as would be anyone anywhere, but they’re just different enough from modern sensibilities (especially around sex, which bothers Howie to no end) that it’s a little disquieting. There are a number of musical interludes as well, which adds to the otherworldly feel at the level of narrative. Horror isn’t usually musical (Sweeney Todd aside), so again in this we’re slightly wrong-footed throughout, to the film’s credit.

It’s definitely easy to see the DNA for a film like Midsommar here. It has some of the same beats, the colorful village and geniality of the villagers, the way the real story is sort of hidden in plain sight the whole time, but between the character of Howie (and some desultory editing which tends to break the film up into vignettes rather than a single story with momentum), I’m not sure this one still works as well to the modern eye. It definitely, definitely has its moments (and the end, while somewhat overlong and convoluted, ends up as a doozy), but it maybe tries to be too many things at the same time. You can do a lot with the story of someone looking for a little girl who’s gone missing, especially against a backdrop as vivid and evocative as Summerisle, and bringing ancient beliefs into a modern context makes for a surprisingly uneasy experience, but piling on a debate about faith on top of everything else just ends up making it a bit of a muddle.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon