Late Night With The Devil: Illusionists

Not that anyone (I don’t think) actually believes that television and film are actually magic, but they get described in those terms often enough. And I get it, you’re talking about signals sent through the air (or as pulses down cables) that captivate us, make us laugh and cry and scream. Film and television show us the impossible from thin air. How is that not magic?

But of course it’s not. It’s technology, it’s editing, it’s special effects. It’s the illusion of continuity and motion, of images reproduced from little blobs or blocks of color, of meaning created through camera angles and lighting and music and more besides. The whole point of illusion is to show us things that aren’t there, or that aren’t what they appear to be.

Late Night With The Devil is, for the most part, a well-crafted story about illusion; it’s a story about what seems to be versus what is, and the price paid for success.

It’s 1977, and Jack Delroy is one of the most successful late-night talk show hosts on the air. Every night, his show “Night Owls” brings viewers the mix of sketch comedy, banter, and celebrity interviews one would expect from the genre, consistently at the top of the ratings without ever quite managing to dethrone late-night powerhouse Johnny Carson. But Delroy’s suffered a number of setbacks of late, including the untimely death of his wife Madeleine from cancer. Ratings are slipping, and forays into more sensationalistic waters haven’t really turned things around. His contract is up for renewal, and so Jack Delroy has one last chance to keep his show on the air. It’s Halloween night, and he has a very special line-up of guests ready to go. There’s the celebrated spirit medium Christou, a former magician-turned-skeptic named Carmichael Haig, and a young psychologist named June Ross-Mitchell. Dr. Ross-Mitchell has written a book about her work with a young girl named Lilly, who seems to suffer all of the symptoms of demonic possession.

It's Halloween night, 1977, and Jack Delroy is hoping for an audience with the devil.

What we’re watching is ostensibly the unedited master tape of the night’s broadcast, which in a way really sets up this idea that what we’re watching is a carefully crafted illusion. Delroy’s talk show is a television show that presents an appearance of bonhomie onstage while behind the scenes is carefully controlled chaos, naked ambition, people letting down their masks to reveal the cowardice, venality and desperation underneath. The smiles snap back into place once they come back from commercial. And the guests on the show itself are a conversation between reality and illusion. For all of his theatrics, Christou is really just cold-reading and being fed information by his assistant, Haig points out the ways that showmanship masquerades as the supernatural at every turn (in as pompous a fashion as you’d expect), culminating in a sequence about hypnosis that draws a sharp line between what is experienced and what is reality while suggesting that television itself might be a form of hypnosis. It’s not really a film where you can’t be certain of what you’re seeing (it’s pretty clear-cut on what’s going on), but it plays with these ideas of perception and artifice well.

In terms of artifice, period pieces are always risky, but this film does a nice job of capturing the 70s zeitgeist – the clothes, the color palette, the corny jokes, the cultural references, the sexism – and brings together a number of historical and pop cultural moments in a pleasing way. You’ve got the emergent religious cult weirdness of the late 60s/early 70s with allusions to  the Bohemian Grove, the Church of Satan, the Process Church, and anachronistically a little bit of the Branch Davidians. On top of that you’ve got the nascent interest in demonic possession sparked both by films like The Exorcist and interest in parapsychology, both of which set the stage for the recovered-memory Satanic panic of the 1980s. The film opens with lots of footage from riots and protests and sensational crimes like the Manson murders, setting the stage as a U.S. in turmoil, feeling like everything is falling apart. Delroy’s show is the kind of place people come to for pleasant refuge in a world where maybe…just maybe…the devil is real. This film has a very good idea of what its sandbox is, and it’s patient about building its world, laying detail in carefully, and (with one annoying exception) does a good job of not overexplaining things, leaving the audience to piece things together as everything comes to a head. The performances are a little on the stagey side, and although that makes sense for television, it’s the case even in the moments that are supposed to be behind the scenes; the exception to this being the actress playing Lilly, who is just fantastic – extremely unnerving but with a lot more restraint that I usually see from someone asked to play her role.

And this speaks to the film’s biggest problem, and it’s an appropriate one – verisimilitude. The conceit is that we’re watching the master tape of a live television broadcast that ended horribly, and when the focus is on the television show, it works really well. But there are these interstitial moments that are supposed to be what’s going on while they’re on commercial break, and they’re shot as fairly clean black-and-white handheld footage. What television network would have cameramen roaming around backstage filming confidential conversations? It doesn’t need the found-footage conceit to work, and it just ends up getting in the way. Worse, it dispels the illusion, and for a story where willingness to believe leads all kinds of bad places, it’s an irritating misstep in an otherwise well-made film.

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Longlegs: Bad Vibes

What makes a horror film scary? I feel like this is a question that maybe isn’t wrestled with as much as it should be, given the amount of dreck that stops at “murder a lot of people in as messy a fashion as possible” and calls it a day. But to be fair, it’s not always easy to quantify what makes something really scary. Often it comes down to, for lack of a better word, vibes.

And sure, vibes don’t come out of nowhere, they’re a product of things like performance and mood and cinematography, but they’re ineffable in the sense that either you’ve got the vision and the way to see it realized or you don’t. If you don’t have a vision, the best you’re going to do is something competently produced that might get a few jolts out of people, but isn’t really scary. Vibes can go a long way toward making up for flaws, because unless it’s really egregious, I won’t remember bad filmmaking choices, but the creepy, haunting, unnerving stuff will stay with me for ages.

Longlegs - a bleak, deeply unnerving marriage between police procedural and occult nightmare - does fumble things a little, but as a vision it is so fully and confidently realized that you’re mostly too busy trying to crawl out of your skin to notice them in the moment. It is all about the vibes.

It’s the story of FBI agent Lee Harker. She’s withdrawn, odd to the point of being off-putting, but she’s also shown an unusual amount of insight into difficult cases. And right now, her insight is very much needed, because the FBI have a serial killer on their hands…well, that’s not exactly right. They have a number of crime scenes, where entire families have been brutally murdered, typically by the father. What’s giving law enforcement trouble is that at every scene, they find a letter written in some kind of code that they aren’t able to crack. No other physical evidence that anyone else has been there, just the letters.

And each letter is signed “Longlegs.” 

As it turns out, Harker can decode these letters. She doesn’t know how, but she can. And she can tell where the killer’s been, or about to be. On paper, this shouldn’t work as well as it does, because on paper it’s a movie about a mysterious serial killer who shares what appears to be a psychic link with a detective. I fucking haaaaaaaaaaate shit like that. Hate hate hate hate hate. But here, it works. And I think it works because even though it’s the corniest kind of story you can tell, the way it’s told transforms it into something warped and sinister. So it’s almost like you’re watching a cursed version of a mediocre thriller. A lot of this is accomplished through performances that are uniformly a little…off. Everything’s a little stilted, everyone’s a little distant and strange. There’s a medical examiner who’s almost creepier than the actual serial killer, and it’s not because the medical examiner is evil or the serial killer in disguise…that’s just how the actor played him. Everyone in the film is like that to one degree or another, and that alone contributes to the feeling that you aren’t so much watching a movie as you are having a nightmare in which you’re watching a movie.

The visuals are equally unsettling - the film is set in 1990s Oregon, and everything is gray and cloudy and damp, with traces of snow clinging here and there. Interiors are often dimly lit as well, though not to the point of being unreadable. This is a world where there’s just not a lot of light, and we move from the institutional strangeness of FBI headquarters (if you’re at all familiar with the very good game Control, it’s definitely giving The Oldest House in places) to crime scenes that suggest awful, awful things without ever really tipping their hands entirely, to the cramped, stifling home of Harker’s mother, a woman damaged by some past tragedy to the point of hoarding and agoraphobia. Even Harker’s own home, which should feel warm and cozy, just feels like a place where something awful is just waiting around the corner all of the time. It’s the unease of places that you know aren’t normal, of homes that aren’t home-like, of innocuous spaces late at night, when they should be empty but aren’t. This is not a film where anywhere ever feels safe. There are flashbacks to crime scenes smeared with blood, bodies under blankets and location markers, again giving us glimpses that only fuel our imaginations, all punctuated with title cards in stark black and red. There are very few shots with more than one person in the frame at once (and sometimes shots where the tops of heads are out of frame, which is especially disconcerting), creating a sense of isolation and disconnectedness, emphasizing the alien feel of the entire thing. It’s something of a slow burn, punctuated with sudden moments of terrible violence, arresting, surreal imagery, and grainy flashbacks to the 1970s that shrink the aspect ratio to a square, like home movies that you’re pretty sure nobody was ever meant to see.

So the vibes are doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and doing it admirably. That said, there are some places where it trips a little, mostly in the third act. It spends the first two setting up this really unsettling world, but there are some elements of the story that are maybe a little too easy to see coming from very early on, and others that really get sprung on the audience in the last act in what does amount to a bit of an exposition dump, albeit one that manages to sustain the atmosphere of the first two acts. There’s an element that’s important to how the killer is doing what he’s doing that gets introduced in the second act, but because the whole film feels so fucking weird already, its importance doesn’t really come across and when it’s brought back in the third act, it does feel like it’s coming out of nowhere. Finally, there’s one particular twist that was just convenient enough to leave a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, even though it was, once again, revealed in fine, striking fashion; something hidden and in plain sight the entire time.

The overall effect is, as I’ve said, like you’re watching a film with elements that you recognize and a story that you’re pretty sure you should be able to follow, but feels wrong somehow, as if whatever evil lurks in the story has managed to infect the film itself. It’s been getting a lot of (simplistic) comparisons to The Silence Of The Lambs, and if you’re looking for that kind of macabre crime procedural, this is not going to scratch that particular itch. But if you’re willing to immerse yourself in its nightmare logic, it’s one that will stay with you.

IMDB entry

Lux Æterna: Film Horror

The process of making movies is sometimes referred to as “magic,” and that’s usually meant in a benevolent way, describing the process of surprising and delighting an audience. But magic also involves deception, trickery and misdirection. And other types of magic involve blood sacrifices and bargains with powerful evil. The more powerful the magic, the higher the cost.

Lux Æterna (Eternal Light), a short, dizzying blast of a film, makes a good case for the filmmaking process involving all of these things, if only metaphorically.

It begins with a quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky about the supreme happiness an epileptic feels in the moments before the onset of a seizure, followed by old black-and-white footage that illustrates the type of torture implements used in the Middle Ages to get witches to confess. And then from there, we’re presented with a conversation between two women, with one asking the other if she’s ever been burned at the stake. It’d be easy to dismiss this as arty nonsense, but it doesn’t take long for things to come into focus. The two women are Béatrice and Charlotte - Béatrice is directing a film and Charlotte is her lead actress. They’re preparing to shoot a scene in which Charlotte is going to be burned at the stake, and at least for the moment, it’s a quiet, pleasant conversation between two veterans of the industry about their experiences.

And then they’re called to set.

This is not precisely a horror film, the same way that Berberian Sound Studio was not precisely a horror film. It’s not a horror film, and it’s not a film about horror. It’s more a film about the horror of film, of the deep, dark holes into which people fall as a result of trying to get something up on the screen. We get about ten minutes of quiet, thoughtful conversation before we’re pitched headlong into the roiling chaos of a movie set. And it really is chaos - this isn’t a lot of people moving purposefully and doing their jobs like some kind of industrious beehive, this is a lot of messily egotistical people playing tug-of-war with everyone’s time and attention. Béatrice is an actress-turned-director and it seems like nobody has any faith in her, with her producer openly conspiring to get her fired and replaced with the director of photography, who himself seems like an obstinate shithead. There are extras and supporting actors to wrangle, some of whom are not happy with the demands being made of them. There’s a particularly annoying film journalist who’s managed to worm his way on-set and is trying to pull people aside at the worst possible times, and someone named Karl whose purpose there (if there is one) is never made clear, and all he does is pitch actresses on his “new project” when they need to be getting ready. The producer and DP yell at Béatrice, she yells back at them and at everyone else not doing their jobs, and Charlotte sits in the middle of it all, the closest thing there is to the calm in the eye of the storm.

It's a short film (slightly less than an hour), but I think that’s for the better because it’s a very uncomfortable experience. The majority (if not entirety) of it is shot using hand-held cameras, which gives everything a raw immediacy and a bit of seasick wooziness to it. Following Béatrice and Charlotte as they try to get from point A to point B to shoot a single scene only to be waylaid at every turn by yet another person who needs to speak to them right now about stuff that really doesn’t matter gives the whole thing the feeling of one of those dreams (or nightmares, depending on how you think about it) where you’re just trying to get someplace, but the harder you try to get there, the more lost and sidetracked you get. And the cinematography is as aggressive as the characters; there’s a lot of split-screen work used to show us two different people’s experiences at the same time, or showing us one person from two different perspectives, in some moments even turning away from one camera to confront the other in a manner that reminds me of nothing so much as Timecode, a film I haven’t thought about in years. It, too, was a film about the messy way films get made, but it never reaches the hysteric heights that this one does, nor does it make the point this film makes about women, the men who are sure they know what is best for them, and the way that the former are often (as they have been for hundreds of years) sacrificed for the egos of the latter. It’s not an especially subtle point, with a small handful of female characters endlessly surrounded by hordes of men cajoling, flattering, ordering and threatening them, clearly resentful of their agency or casually underestimating them. Whether the stake is real or set dressing, someone’s getting burned.

All of the disparate ideas - witch trials, the demands of cinema, the power of light to create feelings and experiences (some overwhelming - the film opens with a warning for people with photosensitive epilepsy and believe me they are not fucking kidding) come together in a climax where a lighting glitch turns a scene full of angry men ranting at three women posed on stakes into a stroboscopic frenzy that eventually swallows everything. But there is none of Dostoevsky’s ecstasy, just the final moment where the center fails to hold and everything falls apart.

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Freaks: The Nature Of Monstrosity

Horror films are, largely, about monstrosity. That could be a literal monster, some kind of thing that should not be, but it can also be some aspect of humanity grown warped and wrong. That could be the mind, the body, or character grossly distorted into something that is unsettling precisely because enough humanity remains for us to connect to it. The more we see ourselves in it, the more disturbed we become. Conversely, there are also the stories where the monsters aren’t the monsters, because either they possess human qualities like empathy and nurturing, or because the humans are real horrible fuckers.

And honestly, I’ve gotten to the point where “man is the real monster” movies feel sort of facile to me. Yes, people are capable of terrible things. I don’t know that that by itself, is an especially profound statement, and most films along those lines that I’ve seen handle it with the subtlety of a brick. After seeing Freaks, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the final word on the subject. And that was a film made in 1932.

It opens on a carnival sideshow, with a barker walking a curious crowd through the exhibits, pausing at one who is apparently especially gruesome. It is said that she was at one time a woman of exceptional beauty, now reduced to some kind of travesty upon whom it is difficult to look. We don’t see her, but one patron faints at the sight of her.

This film is the story of how this freak became what she is today.

Jumping back in time, we’re introduced to Hans and Frieda. They are two dwarves in this carnival’s sideshow, and they’re engaged to be married. But Hans has his eye on Cleopatra, an aerialist of typical size. He insists there’s nothing going on, but he’s clearly smitten. He isn’t shy about lavishing her with gifts, and Cleopatra isn’t shy about accepting them. She’s also not shy about accepting the affections of Hercules, the carnival strongman, when Hans isn’t around. They both eye Hans and Frieda’s people, the freaks of the carnival sideshow, with contempt. The fortune Hans is reputed to have, however, that has their attention.

None of this is subtle. This is your basic 1930s morality play, at its heart intended for the edification and moral uplift of the viewer. But that’s not what makes this film noteworthy, nor where its power lies. The sideshow freaks in this film are all people who were working as sideshow freaks when the film was made. These are people with any number of different deformities - microcephaly, congenital missing limbs, conjoined twins, dwarfism, and more - and it lends the movie an unnerving power because these aren’t effects or makeup or costumes. There’s no distance here, that comforting reassurance that it’s just a movie doesn’t quite land the same. Even to modern sensibilities this is still a pretty confrontational film in that regard, and it sets up a conversation about the nature of monstrosity. In this film, the freaks are a family, caring for and protective of each other. They don’t prey on others, and seem to be content with the same things that anyone would be - a roof over their heads, food in their belly, and warm sunshine on their face. The “normal” people aren’t all villainous - Cleopatra and Hercules actively scheme, some others are insensitive jerks, but many of their fellow carnival workers are friendly and as at ease with the freaks as anyone else. People are monsters, monsters are people.

As I said above, there’s not a lot of nuance here - this film has a moral and it’s going to give it to you - but I think what continues to make it so confrontational, so potentially uncomfortable, is that in watching it, we have to deal with our own feelings about what we’re seeing. The putative monsters are ultimately just people with feelings and hopes and insecurities, who differ from us only in terms of their biology. If we’re uncomfortable with them, that’s on us and not them. The antagonists aren’t exaggerated in their own monstrosity, they’re just your garden-variety cruel, insensitive, avaricious criminals who’d think nothing of bumping someone off for a fortune. But in their callousness, we’re moved to sympathize with the freaks. 

And I think that discomfort is why this film not only ended up being a lasting part of the cinematic canon, but also why its development and release were so turbulent. It pretty much got made in spite of the studio funding it, the director sank into reclusion after its release, and while it was being filmed, the cast had to eat separately from the other cast and crew at the studio because so many people couldn’t bear the sight of them. Actors approached about starring in the film refused because they didn’t want to be in the same room as the freaks. It was originally about thirty minutes longer but a lot of footage was lost when it was cut for being “too graphic.” Maybe it was really graphic, maybe it was just the freaks daring to be people, it’s hard to say. Some of the pushback was likely the mores of the time, but I think some of it was because the “monsters” weren’t actually the monsters - they were portrayed as sympathetic and kind, and I suspect that was more than a lot of people could handle. One of the hardest things to face is your own shortcomings; it’s easier to be disgusted by the flaws of another than to admit to your own.

These people lived lives, fell in love, married, had kids, all while being far enough away from what we consider “normal” that their primary means of support was exhibiting themselves to crowds of gawking onlookers. Were they all angels in real life? No, but none of us are. They were human, and in that regard, we’re left wondering exactly what separates us from monsters.

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