Honeydew: Very Little Meat And A Whole Lot Of Filler

Horror is, in my opinion, a genre that benefits strongly from the short story. It certainly isn’t impossible to do long-form horror well, but the longer the story the bigger the risk that you’re going to overexplain or bog it down. Short stories get in, set up a situation, and then take it to some fucked-up place, getting out while the shock still lingers. And I notice something similar in film - one of the most common weaknesses of horror films that I’ve observed over the many years I’ve been flinging my opinion out into the void is a tendency to drag in the middle or to whiff the ending, and I think that’s in part because sustaining feelings of tension or dread or unease or whatever for that long is tough. And for my part, I haven’t spent nearly as much time watching short films as I could be. I’m going to try and rectify that, though it’s tough since they rarely appear on streaming services.

But Honeydew is a great example of this exact problem. It starts off pretty strong, but then it drags into an absolute crawl at the end. It’s the poster child for full-length horror films that would have been better off as a short.

It opens on still shots of woodlands, a lone barn, sprawling wheat fields, steam rising from the ground. There’s an old woman grinding seed into flour. There’s a loaf of bread in an oven. A young woman eats, and scratchy religious music plays on an old tape recorder. It’s nicely cryptic. Then there is a funeral, a few mourners gathered around a simple wooden cross. It all creates a burgeoning sense of rural unease. A poacher skins an animal, wanders into a nearby barn, and discovers something he shouldn’t have.

And now we’re watching an informational film about sordico, a fungal infestation of wheat. It’s being watched by a botany student named Rylie, She and her boyfriend Sam are driving through the country, headed for some kind of getaway. And as is often the case, they make a wrong turn. And as is often also the case, they lose cell reception and their GPS stops working. So they camp for the night, only to be woken up by someone who says they’re on his land. He gives them directions to get where they’re going and tells them he’ll be back in awhile to make sure they’re gone. So they pack up and head out again and what do you know, they happen across a farmhouse! Do we have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen next? Is that farmhouse going to hide a terrible secret?

Yes we do, and of course it will.

I know, I sound dismissive, but I think it’s because the opening of the film showed a bit of restraint - it created a sense of unease without spelling everything out in the first ten minutes, using just isolated images juxtaposed against each other. And it’s mostly good about showing instead of telling. Sam and Rylie have a somewhat strained relationship, but it’s communicated through small things. The farmhouse is home to the old woman we saw earlier making flour. And she’s nice enough, but she’s also pretty strange right off the rip. There’s maybe a little too much silence between the things she says, an oddness. There’s her very strange son who communicates only in grunts, and his face is bandaged for some reason. He really enjoys old Popeye cartoons. We know that there’s something not right here (if only because we know we’re watching a horror movie), but exactly how it’s all going to go down isn’t immediately obvious. Should they stay? Of course not. Do they stay? Of course they do. So, dumb protagonist behavior aside, it’s a strong opening.

But after that, it starts to go downhill.  It’s hurt most by an almost complete lack of tension, because it’s only got one pace – slow. Which, at first, is fine. The evocative opening and the unhurried pace initially give the film time to build some atmosphere, but then it never tightens up or takes off. It just keeps going at that same slow, methodical pace, and so even though the setting’s good and the performances are suitably restrained and everything gradually unfolds into something that gets stranger and stranger, it starts to feel lethargic and aimless. It is never a good sign when I doze off in the middle of a film and let me tell you, that is exactly what I did. It feels like someone took a short film and stretched it out to almost two hours without actually adding anything, and pretty much the entire second act feels like the film is waiting around until it hits a certain running time before it moves on to something like a climax. And when it does reach a climax, it…continues to sort of plod along and then the whole thing just sort of stops. There’s no tension, no stakes, just a bunch of things happening with entirely too much time in between each thing, and then the third act explains what’s going on and the film ends.

And it’s too bad, because I think the filmmakers have some chops. The cinematography is suitably moody – rural vistas, dimly lit basements, shabby country squalor – and the soundtrack is mostly spooky minimalism, all thumps and clatters and wordless chanting. The editing is a standout, it’s almost percussive in a way and makes use of split-screen to mostly good effect.  I really think all the best bits could have been compressed into no more than an hour, and probably less and it would have worked a lot better. It would have gotten in, set up a situation, dropped in the protagonists and snapped the trap shut before they had time to realize what was going on. As it is, there good things about it, there are a number of good moments, but overall the whole thing just feels inert.

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Historia De Lo Oculto: We Interrupt This Broadcast

There’s this short story by Charles Stross that I really like, titled “A Colder War.” It posits a world where U.S./Soviet relations were still just as tense as they were in our world in the period from about 1947 onward until the early Nineties, but also a world in which Lovecraftian beings with their strange magics and even stranger technologies and sanity-warping enormity exist. Instead of ICBMs, satellite footage shows trailer trucks moving through Russia carrying huge impossible shapes under tarps covered with protective sigils. It’s an intersection between cosmic horror and political thriller, and I am here for it.

Historia De Lo Oculto (History Of The Occult) isn’t exactly this, but it’s also not dissimilar either, and it makes for an interesting mix. It’s hurt by a spotty translation and pacing issues early on, but it picks up and comes good in the end.

It’s late at night in Argentina, in a house somewhere out in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. Four people are hunched nervously over a stack of binders and folders, staring at a television. They’re producers on the investigative news show 60 Minutes Before Midnight, and tonight is their last broadcast. After they aired a piece on the current president’s business ties, suddenly almost all of their advertisers pulled out of the show all at once and the station decided not to renew their contract. So they’ve got one last shot at it, and things are appropriately tense. They’ve gone to the mattresses after receiving enough advertising money from one last sponsor to air one last show, holed up in this house in what could be described as an “undisclosed location,” taking a huge gamble on exposing what they believe is massive corruption in the current presidential administration. It’s a time of considerable political unrest, and there’s a massive protest rally planned to start at midnight, exactly when this program ends. So everything is cloak-and-dagger. There’s a minimal crew at the studio along with the host and the program’s three guests for the evening. They’ve sent one of their reporters to another house far outside the city limits on a tip that they’ll find something important there, though nobody knows what. And their last remaining sponsor, the ones who bankrolled the last episode, send over a box with materials they think might be useful. It all has to come together exactly right.

And this is where it starts getting weird. One of the guests for the evening is a self-proclaimed warlock, and the box they receive contains a powerful hallucinogenic root and instructions for a ritual.

The president has some very powerful friends.

Right off the bat, this film reminds me of stories like All The President’s Men, where the majority of the action is people on the phone or sitting in a room poring over files and documents. Which may seem like an odd choice for what is ostensibly a horror film, but there’s a sense of urgency communicated right up front - it’s the last night of this investigative journalism program, which appears to be getting taken off the air due to covert government interference, they have an hour to get information out that could potentially topple the current regime, all leading up to a protest rally at midnight. So even though it’s a bunch of journalists holed up in a house somewhere in the suburbs, there’s tension there. Adding to this is a film-noir feeling that comes from it being shot almost entirely in black and white (the “almost” is very important - color is used to striking effect in places), ramping up the feeling of intrigue. A lot happens in shadow in this film, and it reinforces the idea that this is all furtive, clandestine, covert.

So it could just be sort of an Argentinian take on Good Night, And Good Luck, but there’s all the weirdness around the edges - the mysterious murder of a John Doe, his body discovered surrounded by signs and sigils, the current administration’s ties to a mysterious corporation who once numbered someone called “Brother Darkness” among their ranks, some strange inconsistencies in people’s memories. There’s a repeated television advertisement for an initiative to protect the nation’s children, describing them as “the fuel on which our future runs” that becomes more sinister the more it is repeated. There’s the sense of something about to happen, something about to be revealed and you aren’t getting more than snatches of it, that largely works when the rest of the movie doesn’t.

I don’t know that it’s entirely the film’s fault - the translation job seems a little sloppy and clumsy, and I suspect some of the meaning and mood is lost as a result. Of greater concern is the pacing, which becomes sluggish and unfocused in the second act, so even though it’s not even 90 minutes long there is some feeling that it’s sort of spinning its wheels. After a pretty strong opening, it really starts to sag and occasionally strange things will happen, but there’s not much to connect them or give them a context, so they don’t have the impact they could. There are a lot of questions and possibilities raised to maybe not as much effect as they could be, and the television interview sequences especially suffer from the clumsy translation, making some characters feel less sinister and more like cryptic blowhards.

But in a lot of ways, the sense of desperate isolation helps carry it even at its weakest moments, and things really start to come together in the third act as the tension starts to ramp up, things start to connect, and a lot of what came before pays off as everything converges - documents, official confirmations, revealed identities, a mysterious object in an even more mysterious house, and a hallucinogen-fueled ritual that lays reality bare. The whole thing ends on a really strong note that to me almost - not quite, but almost - entirely makes up for its weaknesses. If you’ve got the patience to wait out the slow, confusing parts, this is a pretty good one.

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Hagazussa: A Series Of Unfortunate Events

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

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

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

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

And then she starts hearing voices coming from the woods.

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

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

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

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Some Thoughts On V/H/S Part 3

Well, I suppose it was inevitable. The murmuring over the third V/H/S/ movie - to be titled V/H/S Viral - has begun. The first two made money, and all things considered it's a pretty tidy franchise to maintain. It's an anthology, so you don't need to worry about all of the weird convolutions of continuity that you get when you take something that works well as a single story and try to stretch it out into an entire saga (still looking at you, Saw). You're not telling a single story that doesn't know when to stop, you're telling lots of little stories. So that's good. And found-footage, as a style of film-making, works best when it looks cheap, so you've got a situation where a bunch of different directors can put together something for relatively little money and put it in front of an audience with less risk of diminishing returns than a more conventional franchise. From the cost side, that's a win.

And from the artistic side, I think it's a win too. Personally, I think we need more venues for short horror films, because horror lends itself to short stories. Some of the scariest stuff  I've ever read were short stories. There's no time to get settled in - things happen and you have to deal with them, and it's over. Concise, creepy, and at less risk for over-explanation. I rate the first V/H/S largely as a success, and even the two weaker entries still did something interesting. The whole thing had a sheen of furtive nastiness to it that gave the strongest entries a real edge. It really did feel like you were watching something wrong, something never intended for others' eyes. The second one didn't work as well, I thought. The roster of directors was strong, but I really felt like it was a little too far up its own ass - too many of the entries seemed to either be more concerned with riffing on the nature of found-footage than telling a story, or telling a solid story in a way that largely elided the constraints (and subsequent narrative power) of a found-footage approach. On top of that, the bridging narrative seems to be cohering into some kind of overarching mythology, and that's rarely a good sign. That's one sure-fire way to sap all of the mystery out of the series, and it's the sort of thing I could see taking over the series further down the line until it stops being an anthology series altogether and just ends up being about a bunch of stock teen-meat cannon fodder being hunted down by these mysterious collectors of bizarre videos. It's not there yet, but I can see it from here.

But the hook here, apparently, is that it's no longer old VHS tapes (which will hopefully be a way to silence the idiots who complained about one of the entries being a Skype call being recorded on a videotape and consequently missing everything that was good about the entry), now it's viral videos - things people find on YouTube. I'll be curious to see what gets done with it. The V/H/S series has a lot of promise - it seems like a good idea from a cost standpoint, it's a format that encourages experimentation and risk-taking, and if you don't like one story, wait a couple of minutes. But success finds a way to ruin things, and I can already see the seeds of potential problems planted. Explain less, show more. Please. Don't ruin a good thing.

V/H/S/2: 2 Clever By 1/2

Although normally I'm firmly in the "sequels are a bad idea" camp, I'm more than happy to make an exception for anthologies, where you don't have to worry about reducing subsequent iterations to tangled continuity and whatever gimmick someone decided was the reason people liked the first one in the first place. Plus, short films - when they're good - are especially effective in horror, because they don't overstay their welcome. Something scary happens, and then it's over before it can be over-explained. It retains its punch. The scariest horror fiction I've ever read has, with a few exceptions, been short stories and novellas. So giving a bunch of different directors an opportunity to do their particular thing in a lean, efficient fashion appeals to me tremendously.

The first V/H/S was pretty good - five short films shot using the found-footage conceit, and mostly being pretty good despite the danger of that particular approach being run into the ground. It was at its best when it fully embraced the found-footage aesthetic, and at its weakest when it called attention to the conceit by deviating from it. When found-footage films are at their best, it's because there's a rawness and an immediacy to the footage that makes it easier to believe that you aren't just watching a movie - that this actually happened, and you're witness to some awful document.

This makes it all the more puzzling as to why V/H/S/2 wastes so much of its energy and potential on an examination of the conceit for its own sake, at the expense of actually telling scary stories.

The framing story - titled Tape 49 - is, maybe tellingly, more self-aware than the framing narrative was in the first film. A pair of private investigators are hired by a woman to track down her son when he sort of drops out of sight. The two of them break into his house, and find not a whole lot of anything except piles of videotapes, TVs, notebooks, and his laptop, which has some sort of video diary on it. One of them starts poking around the house trying to look for him, the other starts looking at the diary and the tapes.

 It's paced better than the framing narrative was in the first film and is much more coherent, so it ends up being much creepier and an actual addition to the story. However, part of it also involves the missing son essentially explaining where the tapes come from to a certain extent and hinting at a network of collectors. This smells like the beginning of a mythology, and this is exactly the sort of shit that gets sequels into trouble. The point isn't where these tapes are coming from any more than the point of Hostel was to explain how the murder-holiday business was run. It's that they exist, and the protagonists are now caught up in it, and what happens now? To the extent that attention is being paid to the existence of the tapes, it takes away from our ability to accept their existence and immerse ourselves in the stories they tell.

Phase I Clinical Trials

The first entry is a tidy little ghost story about a man who volunteers to test out a new prosthetic eye, on the condition that the visual information the eye receives be recorded for the manufacturers to use as test data. As you might expect, this new eye is capable of seeing all sorts of stuff we shouldn't be able to see, and things get very weird, very fast. To the extent that it works, it's effectively scary- when the camera is your eye, you can't really look away and everything has to happen on-camera, and the ghosts don't need to do too much to elicit fright. A lot happens that isn't explained outright, and although not having a complete picture of what's going on is good (and thinking about it a little afterwards fits a lot of pieces into place, giving this one a little staying power), how it gets there feels so artificial and unnecessary at points that there could have been a better way to handle it. This is largely down to some very wooden acting and dialogue. This segment is one of the most naturalistic, and so the staginess of the characters is really disruptive to the feel it's trying to create. Also, in what's going to be an unfortunate theme throughout, it's a little too low-rent for its premise. The clinic where the prosthetic eye is implanted looks less like the sort of hospital you'd expect would be capable of implanting an artificial eye, and more like my vet's office. Again, it calls attention to itself and takes you, even for a second or two, out of the story.

A Ride In The Park

This is sort of the "funny one" of this entry, but it feels a little slight. A man is going out for a bike ride, and turns on the little GoPro video camera he has mounted on his helmet to record some footage of the ride. Why he's doing this isn't really clear, and the artificiality of the camera's conceit make it feel a little shoehorned in. His ride goes along nicely until he runs into some people who are sort of oddly shambling down the trail, almost as if…okay fine, they're zombies, and now he's stuck in the middle of an outbreak of the walking dead, caught live on helmet-cam. The segment has a good mixture of gore and slapstick moments, reminding me of some of the animated shorts shown at Spike & Mike's Sick & Twisted festivals or the movie Braindead/Dead Alive, and although I'm pretty sick of zombie movies (especially jokey ones), a surprisingly touching ending redeems this one to a degree. On the other hand, it meanders a little, which although appropriate for a movie about the walking dead, feels like the conceit was supposed to carry it more than it actually did. And again, some of the dialogue was really, really shitty. Part of the strength of found-footage is verisimilitude, but if the actors can't pull it off, it comes off even more stagey and artificial than a conventional film approach.

Safe Haven

This segment is the most fully-realized, and probably the most horrifying, but is also the one that is least classically found-footage. The story of a film crew making a documentary about a controversial People's Temple-type cult, it features a mixture of cameras, both sourced on the protagonists (everything from conventional video cameras to button-sized spy cams) and from surveillance footage. Because there are so many points of view, it loses some of what makes found-footage movies most effective, because our point of view isn't limited or constrained - we have as much access to everything that's going on as we would in a conventionally shot film, and we lose some of the you-were-there feeling that you get when you only see what the one camera happens to see at a given moment. It becomes especially distracting when you realize the whole reason a particular camera is placed where it is (it doesn't really make much sense in the context of the film) is probably to capture specific scenes at the end, and it feels like a cheat, like the filmmakers were less concerned with making a found-footage film than making a scary film and finding a way to fit a found-footage aesthetic on top of it. 

It's too bad, because it's probably the closest to capturing the out-of-control, utterly-batshit terrifying-things-are-happening-and-holy-fuck-what-do-we-do-about-it feeling that marked the first V/H/S at its best. When the film crew realizes what the cult plans to do, it's too late, and it's oh so much worse than anyone could reasonably expect. Unfortunately, the filmmakers didn't know when to stop, and in the final shot, a poorly-done effect undoes a lot of the goodwill engendered by the rest of the segment. 

Slumber Party Alien Abduction

This one struck me as ugly and sort of pointless. We open on a bunch of obnoxious suburban kids harassing each other, and it's the best, most naturalistic acting in the entire collection - this is exactly how annoying preteen kids act. Mom and Dad are going away for the weekend, and older siblings are doing the babysitting. Needless to say, these teenagers have their own fun in mind, and the preteen kids do their utmost to sabotage their older siblings at every turn. As promised in the title (which bugs me - it feels so lazy, like the filmmakers didn't care enough to keep anything a surprise), aliens show up, and everything goes nuts. Not in an especially interesting way - kids are being shitty, then there are aliens. There's also a disconnect between what we're seeing through our single-camera perspective and what the protagonists seem to see. From our perspective, there's all kinds of bizarre shit going on - bright lights and loud noises out of nowhere - but none of the protagonists seem to care. It feels like someone forgot to tell them they were supposed to be surprised by these things. 

When the shit hits the fan, the footage is almost too realistic - it's too fragmented to get a sense of space, direction, or sequence, just a lot of running and screaming with the camera pointed at absolutely nothing. It's disorienting and abrasive - lots of bright lights, bright colors, and oppressively loud noises on top of the shrieking of the protagonists, and in the utter absence of reference points, the audience is confused instead of scared because just trying to figure out what we're supposed to be watching is exhausting.  There are a lot of people to keep track of, and the point of view is hard to follow, and again, the most important effects don't work, which just makes the whole thing feel like some cheap, stupid home horror movie much like some of the kids are making at the beginning of the segment. If that had somehow played into the events, like this was some kind of joke that got out of control, it could have made for an effective subversion of the found-footage conceit, and could have built to some good tension. Instead, it feels like a deliberately shitty found-footage movie, like a perverse joke on the audience that ends on a gratuitously nasty note. The whole thing feels juvenile and sort of contemptuous of the audience, and it doesn't earn any of it.

In sum, V/H/S/2 is disappointing, and I think it's because it spends more time thinking about the conceit and trying to subvert it than actually doing something within its constraints. Most of the cameras are placed in implausible ways (a prosthetic eye, mounted to a bike helmet, strapped to a dog), and when they aren't, there are so many that it might as well be a conventionally shot movie. Very few of the segments really achieve a sustained sense of naturalism, and the one that does is almost willfully over-naturalistic to the point of incoherence. Instead of relying on realistic threats, most of the segments stretch for something supernatural and fail to convey it convincingly. In other words, these are found-footage movies that feel like they're trying to run away from being found-footage movies as fast as they can, and although that potentially makes for some really interesting critical readings, it doesn't make for good scary movies.

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V/H/S : Video Nasties

Part of the reason I'm sick of found-footage horror movies is that the more of a proven commodity they become, the further and further away they get from the things that make a found-footage narrative especially effective. After a certain point, at their worst, they might as well be conventionally shot movies with a little red recording light in the corner of the frame. If you're going to make something a found-footage story, it should be not only be shot in a certain way, but the story should be told in a certain way as well. Found- footage with a minimum of backstory is good, because the whole idea is that  it's just raw footage, the documentation of something nobody was ever supposed to see. The lack of provenance is what makes it scary. In that respect, V/H/S works quite well on balance.

V/H/S is an anthology of five short movies, plus a framing narrative, all shot as one type of found-footage conceit or another. At its best, this anthology rediscovers what makes found-footage movies so powerful. It falls short a couple of times, but overall makes a convincing argument for continued exploration of the form.
The framing narrative - titled Tape 56 -  is about a bunch of scumbags who get their jollies from vandalizing abandoned houses and molesting women on the street, all while videotaping their antics. Somebody has offered them money to break into a house and steal a specific videotape. "You'll know it when you see it", the man says. The house is oddly empty, except for an upstairs bedroom, which contains a stack of TVs and VCRs, a bunch of videotapes, and a dead body sitting in a chair. One of the idiots sits down in front of the TVs and starts plugging in videotapes, each one of which is a separate story.

On the one hand, Tape 56 does set a tone of unblinking nastiness that serves some of the best stories in the anthology well. But otherwise, it's pretty unfocused - sure, the unexplained is an advantage in scary movies, but there's not really enough information here to draw any conclusions other than this house is bad, the tapes are bad, and these guys are bad. Each interstitial segment tries to advance the story with action, but because we're returning to it between separate, discrete stories, it's more distracting than anything else. It might have been more effective if we didn't hate these guys from the word go, and if not much happened until the very end. As it is it's too choppy and chaotic to make much of an impression.

Amateur Night

The first entry proper is about three fratboy types who have acquired a pair of glasses with a small video camera embedded in the frames. As you might expect, the whole plan is to go out to the bars, score some tail like a bunch of bros will, and then record some homemade Girls Gone Wild action. Never mind consent, never mind permission, if there's a more literal instantiation of the Male Gaze, I can't imagine what it is. The story itself is short, sharp, and mean - the guys bring a couple of girls back to a hotel room, and the whole thing is extremely rapey from the word go. It really feels like you're watching a video that could be used as evidence in someone's trial - it's intensely uncomfortable and wrong-feeling throughout, and things go south very quickly and in spectacular fashion in a pretty surprising way. The claustrophobically small hotel room, realistically lit, and rapid pace give it a raw, breathless feel that doesn't give you much time to look away or settle down. Does more for contemporary horror in 20 minutes than the Saw series did in six or seven feature-length movies.

Second Honeymoon

Tonally, this is pretty much on the other end of the spectrum from Amateur Night. It's the slowest burn of the group - a somewhat awkward collection of recordings, documenting a married couples' vacation. It's pretty evident after a few minutes that these two are having their troubles;  lots of things left unsaid, lots of uncomfortable silences and even more uncomfortable interactions between the two of them. The footage rumbles and mutters like oncoming storm clouds. It benefits a lot from showing instead of telling, and even the most innocuous exchanges possibly hold some clue as to what's going to happen to both of them. When it happens, it has all of the queasy, voyeuristic creepiness of the most unsettling parts of The Poughkeepsie Tapes. Again, it doesn't overstay its welcome, but might actually benefit from repeated watchings - once you know what's going to happen, you wonder if you could have seen it coming.

Tuesday the 17th

This segment is possibly the shortest self-aware slasher movie ever. It's less a story than a series of necessary plot steps - teens going out into the woods where some teens had previously died, some go off to try and have sex, pointy objects end up places they shouldn't - but that's sort of the point, and that's itself conveyed pretty economically. It starts off pretty straight-faced and initially delivers a sense of unease pretty well, but the more it becomes apparent that it's less about the characters and more about the worlds in which horror movies happen and how found-footage films fit into that, it trades a lot of that unease for commentary, which takes a lot of the edge off of it. It's all sort of over before you knew what hit you, and an uncritical viewing that takes it at face value is probably going to be disappointing, but it's the segment that has the most potential for further analytic discussion. On the other hand, it's just goofy enough in its premise and execution that it kind of kills the vibe built up to this point.

The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger

This one does something pretty interesting with the form itself - it uses a Skype conversation instead of a camera to convey the same queasy feeling of seeing something you weren't supposed to that makes the first two segments so effective. A young woman is having a conversation with her boyfriend, who is still a week or so away from moving out to wherever she is. It's pretty routine stuff to start, but there's oblique references to her "accident", and the longer the conversations continue, the more you realize there's something probably really wrong with her - and something definitely really wrong with him. Had they stuck with that story, it would have fit right in and maybe have been the most disturbing piece in the collection, but it tries to do too much for its running time, throwing in the supernatural and then a weird twist, and the piece ends up losing focus, leaving us saying "what the - what? Huh? What?" when we should be shaken by what we've just seen. On the one hand, it's a really novel, effective use of non-cinematic recordings to tell a story, and to tell it in a way that wouldn't have even been possible when The Blair Witch Project came out. On the other, the filmmakers didn't trust that and tried to cram a bunch of shit in that the movie didn't need.

10/31/98

The final segment is sort of the less overtly vicious companion to Amateur Night. We follow a bunch of dudes going to a Halloween party who end up at the wrong house (whether by accident or design) and seriously in over their heads. It's much less gory than the other segments, but no less scary for it. The pacing is half slow burn and half "oh sweet holy motherfucking shit", and like the protagonists, we barely have the time or attention to take everything in or piece it all together. This shit is happening as sure as if they were filming a race or air show and happened to catch the devastation and chaos. Bizarre things are caught in sidelong glimpses as the camera (cleverly and appropriately incorporated into one of the Halloween costumes) happens to be pointed in the right direction. That we get no explanations or backstory is especially effective here - we have an idea of what we saw, but there are still all sorts of reasons it happened the way it did and we'll never know which ones were the right ones. The protagonists - and by extension the viewing audience - are all hapless witnesses, way out of their league.

It wouldn't have occurred to me before I watched this, but found-footage movies have a lot of potential to be better in the short format than a full-length narrative. In life, homemade footage of even happy occasions is incomplete, a product of the moment, with half-glimpsed looks at the camera, things happening offscreen, and a spur-of-the-moment quality to it. These are all things that help scary stories as well, and I wonder if this wouldn't be a bad thing to turn into a regular series. I'm normally not a fan of franchises, but I wouldn't mind seeing another collection like this. It seems like an opportunity to  showcase all sorts of directors, be cost-effective and so encourage experimentation with the form and as a result would probably make for a better viewing experience. Not all of these work, but they're all admirable shots at doing something fresh and interesting.

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Outcast: Show, Don't Tell, But Don't Show Too Much Either

Monster movies are a tough proposition these days. Unless you're talking about a slight variation on the human form (vampires and zombies, of which enough already Jesus no more), doing a really good monster means creating something out of whole cloth, out of practical and/or digital effects. Which isn't impossible, but it requires a pretty decent amount of money most of the time - the kind of money most horror movies don't have to throw around. As much as I love the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's take on The Call of Cthulhu, I would love even more to see it made with WETA-level resources behind it. Making smaller monster movies requires being clever and inventive and doing less with more. This is because the effectiveness of a monster movie can live or die on the quality of the monster.

You can't not show the monster - as Stephen King said in Danse Macabre, at some point you have to put on the mask and go ooga-booga. The problem is what happens when you show the monster. I think we've largely lost our ability to suspend disbelief as a result of better and better effects work. Artifice is easier to spot, and more likely to take us out of the movie as the result. I also think there's a cultural unwillingness to really buy into stories anymore, so the likelihood that we're going to be looking for artifice is pretty high anyway. We're more likely to see the zipper on the back of the suit, and that zipper's going to undo a lot of whatever narrative goodwill a movie had gotten from us up to that point.

This is why I ended up being disappointed by Outcast. It's a movie that does so much right for most of the movie, before dropping the ball at the end. At its best, it's a nicely underplayed story of the uneasy tension between the modern world and one much, much older. Unfortunately, the story dictates that at some point a monster will have to show itself, and along with the narrative choices surrounding it, that tension is lost.

Outcast opens without a lot of exposition - we see two sets of characters going about their business, and it's apparent pretty early on that the movie is going to be about what happens when these two groups of people finally meet. Liam and Cathal have some business in a Traveller camp somewhere in Ireland. Negotiations are made, permissions are asked, ending with a series of symbols tattooed onto Cathal's back using the old tapping method. No motorized guns here, this is an ancient method, used to write ancient symbols for an ancient purpose.

Mary and Fergal have just moved into a run-down housing estate in Scotland. Fergal doesn't seem like he gets out much - he's shy and awkward around people. Mary doesn't like him spending too much time away from the house or making friends. She really doesn't like the idea of him meeting girls. They discard their van in a field next to an abandoned factory. Mary sets it on fire, and through the smoke, she tells Fergal that this is the end of the road.

They go back to their apartment, and Mary paints a series of runes on the wall in her own blood.

This movie is about inevitability, basically. Mary and Fergal have stopped running, and Liam and Cathal are coming for them. Once they arrive in Scotland, Liam and Cathal begin performing rituals, small sacrifices. They are trying to find Mary and Fergal, who have managed to neatly vanish from the sight of most people. The rest of the movie is about what happens as both groups move toward each other, and as Fergal does what all young men do, and takes up with another despite his mother's objections. And people are starting to disappear from around the housing estate.

For most of its running time, Outcast is a nicely underplayed story of people who move in the shadows of the modern world, people who follow ancient, secret ways in the middle of modern ideas of progress. These aren't the witches and wizards of Hogwarts, consorting with Muggles, these are people like you and me, who just happen to know how to curse others, how to melt into shadows, and how to make the dead speak. So in that sense, they are completely unlike us. Nobody ever sets out the rules for the viewers, we are spies observing the conversations of others, and it's our job to figure out exactly what it is they're saying. As we piece it together, we realize exactly what these people are and why others are starting to go missing. I like movies that make you think and pay attention - that show you things and let you become scared by their implications, rather than movies that show you things and tell you that you should be scared because these things are scary, if that makes any sense.

If that's all this movie were, it'd be great. But these people are going to collide over the fate of the beast that's killing people in the estate, and that means we need to see the beast eventually. It's not bad, necessarily, but the longer it's on camera the harder it becomes to take it wholly seriously. And it's pretty much on camera non-stop for the whole climax of the movie. There's also additional exposition that we probably don't need, and to the extent that the story is about the beast, a lot of the plot and narrative choices felt obvious to me, even in places where they had enough ambiguity to play with our expectations a bit. For most of the film, there's little clear sense of who the good guys are and who the bad guys are - motives are complicated and none of these people are ones you'd want to cross. Their story is compelling, the beast's is less so. In the end, what happens is exactly what you think is going to happen, and I think that does a disservice to what came before.

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Atrocious: Rewind, Fast-Forward, Rewind, Fast-Forward

It's weird - ever since I wrote about how sick I was of found-footage movies, I've ended up watching more of them than I did before. I don't know if this is masochism, the result of thinking more about them in general, or an indicator of how many there are out there, but I'm crossing my fingers that it's just a phase.

So anyway. One of the things that makes found-footage films tricky is that they have to walk an even finer line in terms of plausibility than conventionally shot films. The whole conceit requires that the camera be an element in the narrative as well as a means by which to convey the narrative. Put simply, you've got to find a reason to have somebody filming all the damn time, even under circumstances under which any sane person would put a camera away and run. Some movies handle it better than others, but when it starts to become a stretch, it'll take you right out of what's supposed to be a very immersive narrative style. Anything that reminds you that you're watching a movie, rather than the only existing evidence of the mysterious events surrounding someone's last hours, is problematic. 

So in that sense, Atrocious is kind of playing with fire.

A family of five is getting ready to take a vacation in the Spanish countryside, and the kids are bored before they even leave. Oldest son Cristian and middle child July investigate old ghost stories and urban legends for fun, and now they can't finish up their most recent project. They're going to an old house that's been in their mother's family for ages, and just remodeled after ten years of sitting empty. Supposedly, the ghost of a little girl haunts the countryside and leads people lost in the woods back home. So maybe it won't be a total waste on the ghost-hunting front after all.

The house is suitably out of the way, so there's no danger of the kids getting into town to have any fun. Cristian and July are stuck there with their little brother Jose, playing cards and being restless. There's a decrepit hedge maze out behind the house, closed off with a rusted gate. A perfect place to get lost, in hopes of seeing a little girl ghost. Of course, a friend of the family points out that there are many versions of that old ghost story, and the little girl isn't so friendly in some of them. In fact, in some of them she's the vengeful spirit of a little girl who fell into a well and died. A well very much like one Cristian finds in the hedge maze.

This is all well and good as ghost stories go, and pretty decent fodder for a found-footage movie, but the director decided to start the movie by showing us brief flashes of the climax first, followed by a rapid rewind through the rest of it to take us back to the beginning. Sort of a more intrusive, less elegant version of beginning in medias res and then cutting to a title card that says "X days before" or something like that. The beginning proper is a title card indicating that the footage is police property. So then the conceit is that we're seeing raw footage of some terrible event, captured by the kids' cameras.

For the most part this works out well - there's a good mix of innocuous footage with apparently-innocuous-but-not-really footage, and for the most part everything is underplayed. It takes awhile for the tension to spin up, maybe a little too long - some of the things we're supposed to find creepy are hard to discern, and it's just not the same when you have actors saying "wow, that's creepy" about something we can't see. But there are still the strange noises at night, their parents' weird insistence that they not go outside at night, and then the mysterious disappearance of the family dog. For starters.

And this is where things get problematic. Part of the tradeoff for well-constructed "found" footage is some ambiguity - a realistically handled camera won't frame shots perfectly, and there's always the danger that something will get missed. The climax is somewhat prone to this, but just as it starts to build up a good, coherent head of steam, just as we're about to get some payoff, everything gets fast-forwarded and we get treated to photos and newscast footage of the horrible events we were just watching mere minutes before. That segment concluded, we get yet another rewind, another look at the final events of the climax, and then we get our payoff. Which, narratively, isn't so much of a payoff because there's very little to telegraph it for the observant viewer, even subtly. Sure, you could call it a twist, but it feels more like a last-minute substitution, and unearned at that. The end result is sort of like listening to someone start to tell you a story, stop, restart, stop, restart again, and then end it in a way that doesn't make much sense given everything else they've said up to that point. No, wait, it's not like that, it is that.

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Yellowbrickroad: Miles To Go Before You Sleep

Every now and then, there comes along a really good scary movie that manages to combine or change up conceits and make it work. Yes, this stands in opposition to my contention that a good scary movie should find a narrative line and stick to it, but when a well-made film manages to upend your expectations or provide something aesthetically novel, it can make for some breathtaking filmmaking. Martyrs comes to mind, as do Cthulhu and The Descent. To that list, I'd like to add Yellowbrickroad, a powerful, well-executed exercise in creeping madness.

In 1940, everyone in the small town of Friar, NH up and left. They walked away from their houses, from meals on the table, from their lives, to head up a trail outside of town. Rescue parties found nothing but corpses - some dead of exposure, more slaughtered by an unknown hand, many more completely missing. Eventually, the town was repopulated. Curiosity seekers came, but nobody could find the trailhead, and the locals weren't about to tell anyone. Friar is a town with a secret.

Cy and Melissa, along with their psychologist friend Walter, have made a long-term hobby out of the study of the Friar disappearance. They've hit a lot of dead ends, followed up a lot of fruitless rumors and false leads. But finally, after much hammering away at New Hampshire bureaucracy, Cy has managed to secure the original case file with the coordinates for the trailhead. This is big. The three of them organize an expedition, adding forestry expert Teddy, mapmakers Erin and Daryl, and medical intern Jill to the team. They're fully equipped and supplied, they're all competent hikers, and their purpose is clear as they set off for Friar.

The locals in Friar are appropriately surly and insular - not just for a shunned town, but for New England in general. So when the GPS coordinates they have for the trailhead dead-end at a movie theater in the middle of town, it's like the town itself is trying to give the expedition the cold shoulder. One local - Liv - takes pity on the group and promises to show them where the trailhead is actually located if they take her along. She's got her own gear, she knows how to get around in the woods, she won't be a burden, she promises.

Good to her word, Liv shows them a trail up into the high country, marked with a stone that says "Yellow Brick Road" on it. Apparently, The Wizard of Oz was a big local favorite. Daryl and Erin take sextant readings, write down coordinates, do the math. Cy takes photographs, and Walter runs everyone through videotaped tests of cognitive function to make sure the expedition isn't getting to them. It's a long trail, and the further in-country they hike, the longer it seems. Daryl finds a hat - it's old, definitely from 1940, but looks like it was abandoned earlier that day. It freaks everyone out a little.

They hike further in, and begin to hear music. It's from The Wizard of Oz. The GPS tells them they're somewhere in Bolivia. The music gets louder. Walter tests Cy, asks him where he was born.

"I was born…I was born on the trail."

It's a good movie that manages to make the wide-open spaces and big sky of the New Hampshire wilderness seem claustrophobic and oppressive. Small things go wrong, then bigger things, then even bigger things until the true scale of what is happening crashes in on us like the music that haunts their every step, crescendoing into suffocating, ragged noise. These are seven people drowning in the forest around them, being swallowed up by a wilderness that does not obey nature's laws.

Yellowbrickroad does a good job of making you feel the weariness and isolation of the protagonist's situation - they're prepared, they're geared up, they're competent, and none of it matters. When they fall apart, it's messy and slow and sad. You root for them to stick together, but there's a dreadful inevitability to it all, and the worse it gets, the weirder it gets. It'd be too simple if they were just picked off by some unknown evil, one by one. It's less like they're singled out and more like they're at the mercy of some natural event that's as unnatural as possible. There's something wrong about these woods, and there always has been. This isn't a "who will survive" movie. This is a "how bad is it going to get" movie, and the horrors it has in store unfold implacably, until the breaking point is reached, at which point it gets even weirder, and even worse. These people wanted to know what happened to the town of Friar in 1940, and they get their wish.

Don't get me wrong, there are couple of missteps - for a movie that relies on a slow, deliberate buildup of dread, some things happen a little too quickly, and it's noticeable. The practical effects in one scene are just clumsy enough that it takes you out of the movie for a minute, and at a pretty crucial point too. Although these are disappointing blemishes, the movie as a whole does a good job of bringing you back in by being visually striking and inventive, using simple effects (and excellent sound design) to create an almost Lovecraftian sense of cosmic terror. The whole third act is a headlong plunge into nightmare, and by the time the credits rolled, I was out of breath. There are far worse things than being lost, than being unable to go home. There are trails that sing and call to you, trails that come to an end somewhere beyond time, space, and sanity.

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