What We Like, Redux: The Blackout Experiments/Haunters: The Art Of The Scare

I’m going to do something a little different this week - some of is due to circumstance (the film I’d intended to write about was such a bust that I ended up dozing off in the middle of it, which is a sign to me that maybe I shouldn’t write about it), but also something that’s been percolating away for the last couple of months. Back in September, I watched a film called Extremity, about an unstable young woman going through an extreme haunt (also known as “immersive horror experiences”) and all of the terrible ways it goes wrong. The film itself was a pretty mixed bag, it started strong and then fell flat on its face with a ridiculous third-act twist, but it got me thinking about real-life immersive horror experiences again.

It's intuitive to think of extreme haunts as your traditional haunted-house attraction turned up to 12, but I don’t think that really captures what’s going on. A lot of them are closer to immersive theater or performance art than that, and make demands of the participants that aren’t anything remotely close to what you get at your traditional haunted house or haunted corn maze or haunted hayride or…you get the idea. And so, in following my curiosity, I watched a couple of documentaries - The Blackout Experiments is about Blackout, one of (if not the) first immersive horror experiences, and Haunters: The Art Of The Scare is mostly about the history of fairly traditional haunted house attractions, but also centrally features McKamey Manor, one of the most notorious extreme haunts. And I came away from these two films thinking about how well they also outline some of the different ways in which people approach horror films. I haven't thought about stuff like this in awhile, so it seems like a good time to revisit it.

The Blackout Experiments

This documentary follows the experiences of three people as they go through Blackout for the first time, and then follow them as they continue to go back, over and over again, charting their emotional journey and relationship with the event. It’s run by two people with theater backgrounds - founder Josh Randall is an alumnus of the Tisch School for the Performing Arts - and began with the idea that it was getting harder and harder to really, genuinely scare people in a haunted house setting, so Randall and collaborator Kristjan Thor started thinking about the conventions of the haunted house. One of the things they observed was that it’s standard practice that the actors in these attractions not physically interact with the guests. And so they wondered…what would be possible if the performers were allowed to touch the guests? And what if it were built less around stock-standard ghouls and witches and ax murderers, and more around deep, real fears? 

The result is something best described as confrontational. It’s minimalist, run out of an office space marked only by three dots on the door to indicate what’s there. Guests have to sign a waiver and submit clean bills of health (physical and mental) to qualify for attendance. Until fairly recently, it was an experience designed to be gone through alone, though they’ve started doing group events. You’re asked about your background and your fears as part of the application process, and so to some degree the experience is personalized, intended for you specifically to go through alone. You arrive outside their building at the intended time, the door opens, and hands snatch you and drag you inside. You’re shoved against the wall, and so it begins.

In many ways it’s the antithesis of the typical haunted house, in that there’s little to no décor, and not a lot of props, just very dark rooms filled with the omnipresent performers, who do indeed touch the participants, shout at them, bark orders and restrain them as needed. Participants witness (and take part in) tableaux that are less your standard monster-movie stuff than situations that put them on one side or another of a power dynamic played out in ugly, immediate fashion. In fact, the whole thing has strong element of psychodrama and kink to it. There’s a safe word that immediately and irreversibly ends the experience, and you get the sense that a lot of the ordering around and holding people in place or pushing them up against the wall is as much about their safety and managing the experience as it is about creating an atmosphere and the safety of the performers. It gets very heavy - there are elements of breath play, mock executions, even waterboarding. This is not for someone looking for spooky fun, but nor does it seems to be gratuitous brutality for the sake of shock. Most of the film is seen through the eyes of Russell Eaton, who eventually attends multiple Blackout events, and we sort of follow his journey from his first visit to what is presumably his last one, a bespoke event staged specifically for him, in his own house. 

His isn’t the only story featured - there’s another young man who taps out after a few with the sense that maybe they pushed a button he wasn’t ready to have pushed, and someone whose attendance starts reminding his partner - an addiction counselor - of addictive behavior. But Russell’s is the most fully realized. He introduces himself as someone who had a troubled childhood and who is comfortable with darker experiences. They might not be okay for everyone, he says, but he thinks they’re okay for him. He seems a little self-conscious. But Blackout seems to do something for him, there’s something cathartic or revelatory for him about being confronted with his deepest fears and insecurities and coming out the other side. So he keeps coming back. He’s eventually invited to join a “Blackout Survivors” group - people who’ve had repeated experiences going through it, where they share their feelings and insights, talk about what it’s done for them. It’s something like a support group, but you don’t get the sense that any of them are suffering. They’re enjoying community, enjoying being able to talk to other people about something that only they  could understand. His relationship to the experience goes up and down - there’s an especially intense part to one experience that feels to him like a breach of trust, but he comes back, and it’s interesting to see where it ends up, and for Russell at least, it seems transformative.

The creators seem to be pretty thoughtful about what they’re doing - they try out any new elements on each other first to see what would make them most effective, and as they’re discussing what they’re putting together for Russell as his custom experience, they discuss his specific fears and consider whether or not specific elements might be going too far. They seem to be aiming for something, trying to evoke a very specific experience that pushes limits in a safe way. And I think that’s why I came away from watching this even more curious about experiencing Blackout. The idea of pushing beyond your limits, confronting your deepest and darkest fears and anxieties and vulnerabilities in a way that is fundamentally safe seems compelling to me. Harrowing, but in a way that has the potential for growth.

Haunters: The Art Of The Scare

Conversely, this film is mostly about the more commercial end of the haunted house industry - and this film really did illustrate for me how much of an industry it really is, complete with people who are professional “scare actors,” for whom this is full-on seasonal employment. Sometimes it’s commercial in the sense of mass appeal, the varying degrees of homegrown events put on by enthusiasts at a financial loss (and in the case of one featured creator, some strain on his marriage). These are hobbyists with a genuine love and enthusiasm for coming up with ideas, improving on what they’ve already done, looking forward to October every year and putting things together in their garage for the community to enjoy. And then sometimes it’s commercial in the sense of big budgets and licensed IPs for the sake of making a profit, as in the case of Universal Studios’ annual event, an extension to an existing amusement park.

Either way, it’s the rollercoaster type of scare - actors in makeup and costume leaping out at people, relying on startles and pushing traditional buttons with mostly the traditional types of monsters and archetypes. You’ve got your ghosts, your witches, your zombies, your werewolves, your masked axe murderers, and the participants move through these mazes where things pop out or they walk through rooms (safely separated from the performers by railings or partitions) where you see moments you’d expect from any number of horror movies play out. The participants shriek and scream and then giggle and clutch each other. It’s a thrill ride, like any other thrill ride, something that spikes your adrenaline for a little bit, but that you probably won’t take home with you.

And then you’ve got Russ McKamey, who runs McKamey Manor. He established it first in San Diego, and then after running afoul of a number of zoning and licensing issues, now runs it at locations in rural Tennessee and Alabama. McKamey Manor is billed less as an immersive horror experience and more as an endurance test, one where a $20,000 prize ostensibly awaits someone who can go the full ten hours, which nobody has. What glimpses we get remind me a lot of extreme underground horror films, the kind that forsake plot and character development for set pieces of extreme violence and degradation for its own sake. There’s lots of verbal abuse and people being drowned or force-fed things, being caged or locked in boxes, muzzled and blindfolded with duct tape. Honestly it looks like an attempt to reimagine the haunted house as something closer to a snuff film. Participants have to sign a waiver acknowledging the possibility of everything from having their heads and eyebrows shaved to dentistry without anesthesia to possible bodily injury and death. Participants wear humiliating adult-sized onesies for the whole experience, and everything is recorded with highlights going up on McKamey Manor’s website and social platforms. The other, more commercial haunted house operators look down on things like Blackout and McKamey Manor, not seeing the “fun” in it - to their minds, people are paying to be tortured and think it’s sick. And honestly, when it comes to McKamey Manor, I kind of agree. It seems less like people are being scared than it is that they’re being brutalized, that it’s more about how much they can take than how they’re engaging with it. But their perspective also assumes that the purpose of a haunted house is the easy jump-scares, the horror equivalent of empty calories. And I’m not sure I’m on board with that either.

And just as the creators of Blackout have backgrounds in theater, Russ McKamey is, first and foremost, a showman. He makes his living in a variety of ways, including as a wedding singer and DJ. He loves to perform, and McKamey Manor is all theater. He doesn’t do it for the money - admission is one bag of dog food, which he donates to an animal rescue charity - and he operates year-round, with an ever-growing waiting list. The creators of Blackout don’t do too many interviews, and participated minimally in the documentary because they want to preserve a sense of mystery about the experience, but McKamey puts himself front and center throughout the whole thing. He loves the spotlight and he knows how to play to it. But unlike Randall and Thor, McKamey plays fast and loose where Blackout doesn’t - he only started allowing safe words very recently, and moved the operation someplace where they told him in effect “if they signed a waiver, you’re covered.” He’s received a number of complaints, including cases where performers ignored safe words and ended up injuring participants. More troubling to me is that he uses former participants as performers, largely untrained, many of whom are assisting in potentially dangerous things because, as they cheerfully state, they want to put other people through what they went through. Part of being willing to push people to their limits is acknowledging the existence of those limits and knowing what is and isn’t safe, and all of the obvious theater aside, it really does seem like McKamey is playing with fire in a way that Randall and Thor aren’t.

And so, in these two documentaries, I see examples of ways in which people engage with horror film. The big-budget commercial attractions are a lot like big-budget, mass-appeal horror films. They’re engineered to the nth degree and rely on familiar jump-scares for the purpose of entertainment and profit. Plenty of people like that stuff - that’s why the budgets are able to be big. But they don’t really do much for me. It’s not fun to me to be startled and not much else. McKamey Manor, on the other hand, is a lot like underground horror. It’s low-budget brutality without context or larger meaning, a barrage of graphic brutality for people numbed to anything else. That’s not really my deal at all either. I have no problem with graphic violence in horror, but it’s a tool, not the point. Blackout, on the other hand eschews bombast, spectacle, and the obvious, unsettling by going directly to the source of our fears and insecurities and doing just what it needs to in order to pluck that nerve. And that is absolutely my thing, which might explain why I’m generally bored by the first type and disgusted by the second, but fascinated by the third. People come to horror to be entertained, to be subjected to ever-increasing stimulation (and to develop a perverse machismo about what they can endure), and to be moved to something, however uncomfortable, that might change how they see the world.

The Blackout Experiments
IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

Haunters: The Art Of The Scare
IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

The Blair Witch Project (Or: How To Make A Good Found-Footage Horror Film)

When found-footage is good, it’s really good, because it deprives us of distance. Distance is, in my opinion, the enemy of horror films. The more we can distance ourselves from what we’re watching, the less effective it is. Unsympathetic protagonists create distance. Highly implausible behavior and contrived situations distance us. Bad special effects distance us. Self-reference distances us (and this is why The Cabin In The Woods is not a horror film, but instead a film about horror films). Basically, everything that discourages emotional investment and reminds us that we’re watching a movie distances us, and the more distant we are from the film, the less power it has to move us, really affect us. And I think some people like it that way - what they’re looking for isn’t horror, it’s violent entertainment. 

But I’m not one of them. I like it when a film sticks with me, haunts me, makes me feel things. For me, that’s kind of the point. And writing about scary movies on a (mostly) weekly basis for the last several years makes it harder for that to happen. It’s hard not to have a critical eye over time, and so I really value the films that pull me out of that critical distance, that sort of force me to experience them. And the thing about found-footage (and mockumentaries, to a degree) is that by not using conventional cinematic language, by presenting what purports to be raw footage, we’re denied the distance of a typical movie-watching experience. If we buy into it, then this isn’t a movie - it’s a document. We’re no longer an audience - we’re witnesses to something unfolding. And even though that’s not really true, the easier it is to forget that, the easier it is to get pulled in. It’s not just films, either - I’m a sucker for stories told this way in almost any medium. I like stories presented as recovered correspondence, as oral histories, as collections of official documentation…I really like that feeling of witnessing or unearthing something. It’s another layer to that feeling of discovery that can make a story feel powerful.

And so this is why I have such a love-hate relationship to found-footage horror films. As a style of filmmaking, it has so much potential, and I love that. But that potential is so often squandered, and I hate that. They’re films that are very easy to make, but very difficult to make well, and they really do have to be made well for me to get invested in them, because the instant you present something as a document, anything that reminds me it’s a movie is going yank me out of the illusion faster and harder than the same sort of slip-up in something that doesn’t pretend to be other than a movie. Too much contrivance in a film is distracting and can make its quality suffer, but any whiff of contrivance in a found-footage film immediately puts me off. And most films - even legitimate documentaries - are contrivances to one degree or another. They’re put together according to a design. Hiding that design to preserve the idea that this was unintentional footage is tough. Paradoxically, it takes a lot of effort to make something look effortless, and it requires, I think, a very different way of approaching filmmaking from conventional cinematic technique. Not just in how the film is shot, but also what is shot, how the story is told, how you approach the idea of acting, and the degree to which you need to consider point of view. And in found-footage, you are much more constrained than you are in conventional film narrative. You don’t have your whole toolkit and arsenal of cheats to fall back on. And so lots of found-footage films reveal the limitations of their filmmakers in the degree to which they fall back on these tools in ways that end up breaking the illusion.

And so after watching a whole bunch of found-footage horror films of wildly varying quality, I want to talk about the genre by looking at The Blair Witch Project, the film that arguably kicked off its proliferation. It wasn’t the first found-footage horror film (that was arguably Cannibal Holocaust, a film I have no desire to watch), but it was the one that really highlighted how effective, successful, and -let’s be realistic - profitable they can be. I think it may be the best example of the genre there is, it’s one of my all-time favorite horror films, and so I want to talk not just about it as a film, but what it gets right about found-footage that a lot of other films get wrong.

The film opens with no music, just the title, white on a black screen, and a title card that says:

“In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary.

A year later their footage was found.”

That’s it. No “the horrible and bizarre events of that day” or anything like that. Just, these three people disappeared, and here’s the recordings of their last known days. Simple, straightforward. The first time I saw that title card, I got chills. Whatever I’m about to see, the three people involved vanished afterward. It immediately gives everything to follow a sheen of dread because you know however it ends, it isn’t going to be good. This is one thing a lot of found-footage films get wrong…they tip their hand too early by telling us what we’re going to see is because of something awful and evil and horrifying and it’s just trying too hard to get us on board. Going this minimal and matter-of-fact reduces any feeling of contrivance. This just tells us that what we’re about to see is recovered footage from three filmmakers who disappeared a year before. It set up the premise, foreshadows something bad, then gets out of the way.

(It also establishes that this footage has been recovered somehow. I’ve seen more than a few found-footage films that end on a really ominous note, but as a result leave hanging the question of how we’re seeing any of this in the first place. Even when the ending is good, that tends to leave me with a bad taste in my mouth.)

Everything after this title card is sourced from one of two cameras - a color camcorder and a 16mm film camera. The footage was apparently degraded in post-production to look more period-appropriate, but they did a really good job of it, because none of it looks like anything other than raw footage to me. There’s no corny camcorder overlay with battery indicators or recording lights (which wouldn’t show up on the recorded footage, just in the viewfinder), just either color video or black and white film. The camcorder has a built-in mic, and the 16mm has no sound source of its own - for that they have a boom mic and a DAT recorder for film audio. That’s it. Everything we see in the film is from one of those two sources, and having a film source independent of its sound source allows for things like voiceover in a way that makes narrative sense, and there are moments in this film where seeing one thing and hearing another (or having the sound source further away than the film source) creates feelings of tension and disconnection without stepping outside what’s possible in the situation.

If you’re going to present something as raw, recovered footage, that’s what it needs to look like. It can’t be obviously pro-grade footage with a camcorder viewfinder overlay, you can’t have montages or Steadicam shots. Things like that immediately communicate that this is a movie pretending to be raw footage and breaks the illusion. There are all kinds of similar techniques that directors employ to tell a story, but making a convincing found-footage film means forsaking those things and just telling a story using either one or two cameras as here, or being willing to cobble together something from a whole bunch of separate sources that vary wildly in quality and perspective. The addition of things like GoPro cameras and camera drones open things up a little, but it’s still a very limited palette by necessity. Here the filmmakers have to tell the entire story using only two cameras, and so then the burden falls to the acting and editing to tell the story, because the camera’s vocabulary is so limited.

And so this footage tells us about the last days of Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams. They’re film students making a documentary about the local legend of the Blair Witch, the ghost of a woman burned for being, well,  a witch in the 1800s.They’re going to Burkittsville, MD (formerly Blair), they’re going to interview some of the locals, and then head into the woods that she’s purported to haunt. Heather and Josh know each other already, and Mike is someone Josh brought in. Heather directs and narrates, Josh runs the 16mm camera, and Mike does sound. They pack up their stuff, do some grocery shopping, and head to Burkittsville. Sure enough, they find locals with all kinds of stories - after Elly Kedward was burned on suspicion of witchcraft in the 1800s, a little girl reported seeing a woman whose feet didn’t touch the ground out in the woods. A hunting party was found ritualistically dismembered at a site known as Coffin Rock. In the modern day, the Blair Witch is a bogeyman parents use to get their kids to go to bed, people hear strange noises and see mysterious vapors in the woods, and a man named Rustin Parr murdered a number of children, claiming to be under the influence of the Blair Witch.

Of course, these are all just local legends. As they move into the woods, it starts to become apparent pretty quickly that none of them are really outdoorspeople. Heather’s leading the expedition, but even though she insists that she be the one to read the map and compass, everything takes longer than she says it will. A 90-minute hike to a cemetery takes hours. The hike from the cemetery to Coffin Rock also takes hours. They get maybe three segments done on their first day before making camp, exhausted from entirely more hiking than anyone planned, and it isn’t clear that Heather knows how to get back to their car. Meanwhile, Heather insists she has everything under control.

And then the mysterious noises start.

It’s a short film - not even quite 90 minutes - but it’s very well-paced. It all begins with strange noises at night, escalates to mysterious objects, and then worse, then much, much worse. None of that is especially unusual for films about people in the woods when and where they shouldn’t be. But the tension starts early. Part of that is the premise - we know these three people disappear, never to be found, so there’s already a sense of impending doom. But another part of it is the friction between the three characters. Heather is driven and ambitious, a little intense, and it starts to become abrasive soon enough. Mike doesn’t know her well, so he gets annoyed pretty quickly. Josh does know her, but you sort of get the sense that he’s maybe getting a little fed up with her, like he’s tired of dealing with her when she gets like this. And she does have an obsessive quality to her - she records all kinds of stuff with the camcorder, like she’s making the behind-the-scenes featurette for their documentary as they go, and constantly having a camera in their faces makes Josh and Mike really, really irritable. Her insistence that she knows what she’s doing even as they get more and more lost makes things even worse. This film is as much about the psychological disintegration of these three young people as they get increasingly more tired, hungry, and lost as it is anything else. 

But then…there’s those mysterious noises. And for that matter, how is it that they’re following their compass and ending up right back where they started? It’s like the forest is conspiring against them. The annoyance and frustration of being lost turns into real fear - they’re due back at work, they have to get the production equipment back, they have family and friends and loved ones that are going to start worrying. The fear then turns into terror as they realize that if they can’t get out of the woods, they are going to die there. And all the strange noises, the mysterious rock cairns outside their tent, all of it…well, the only logical explanation is that they’re not just hopelessly lost, they’re hopelessly lost and some malevolent locals are messing with them. Because they certainly don’t believe in ghosts. 

So if you can’t really create tension and fear with camerawork and lots of fancy effects, you’re going to have to rely on your actors to sell the story, and this is another place a lot of found-footage films fall down. Even if the footage looks real, if the people in it don’t act like real people, again, the illusion falls apart. What is supposed to be documentation of actual people going through something incomprehensible ends up looking like a conventional film made very much on the cheap. A lot of cruddy found-footage horror films fall prey to the same problem as cruddy conventional horror films - their characters aren’t people so much as archetypes or caricatures, walking embodiments of a single personality trait. And that might not just be the acting, that could very well be the writing instead or as well. It’s one thing to write dialogue, and it’s another to write dialogue that sounds like actual, spontaneous conversation instead of performed exposition. And this was another place where the filmmakers made a really smart choice - the dialogue in this film is improvised. They cast people with improvisational experience, those people developed characters, and then they were given a daily outline for what had to happen on any given day of shooting, but how they got there was up to them. As a result, the dialogue sounds like actual conversation, because it basically is actual conversation. The interactions between them feel believable, because they’re happening naturally and spontaneously. As a result, it really does seem like we’re watching actual footage of actual people actually losing their shit, and once things really start rolling, it’s really raw and intense. It carries the tension that can’t be captured in the cinematography and then some. Too many found-footage horror films are scripted and acted like conventional films, and feel off as a result. If you’re going to make your story believable as a discovered document, then how people talk and act can’t be too polished or stagey, because that’s perfectly okay for movies, but it’s not how actual people talk and act. Likewise, the filmmaking has to be believable. The protagonists are film students, so they have some skill with their equipment, but the camerawork is believably shaky when they’re distressed, and it’s rarely if ever neatly placed to conveniently capture anything scary. It’s frenzied, blurred, pointed at the ground because the person holding the camera is running for their fucking life. There aren’t a lot of conventional scares in this film, and hardly any effects. It’s all in mood and details and more mood. A lot of things happen in pitch black, with only sound from a camcorder mic to capture it. The end result feels raw and messy, exactly like it would if it were real footage.

As the film moves on, their increasing instability, the threat of exposure and starvation, and the really weird things happening to them all converge, sharpen to a point. They’re all at each other’s throats and on the verge of complete breakdown, there are things happening to them every night that defy any comfortable explanation, and they’re exhausted, hungry, lost, and terrified that nobody will ever see them again. No matter how hard they try, they keep going around in circles, and there’s something out there watching them. It all comes to a conclusion, a terrified crawl through an abandoned house in the middle of the woods, lit only by the lights on their cameras, leading to an end both enigmatic and awful. We’re denied any tidy explanation, just cameras left running, pointing where they fell. I saw this film in theaters maybe 7 or 8 times (I got a little obsessed myself), and the end didn’t get less powerful over time, it got more powerful. It was some edge-of-the-seat, suck-your-breath out shit.  And I think it worked because the actors sold it. They were identifiable, relatable people, so even if you didn’t especially like them, you could empathize with them, connect with their easily apparent humanity. And by the end, they’re in rough shape. This, again, goes back to how the film was made. 

This film was shot in eight days, with all (or at least the overwhelming majority of) footage being recorded by the cast members themselves, using the cameras they were carrying in the film. They shot the film themselves, and just as the dialogue was improvised, so was the day’s action. The filmmakers used a lot of techniques I’d expect to see in live-action role-playing, a form of collaborative theater where the participants tell a story sketched out to varying degrees ahead of time through improvisation, often on location, with rules established ahead of time to govern the flow of action and the outcomes of conflict. It’s a form of theater where the actors are the audience, telling the story to themselves, for themselves, capturing the energy and spontaneity of live performance within a loose narrative framework. The filmmakers provided the cast with GPS units that would lead them from location to location (as well as escape routes out of the woods, in case they got lost, which they apparently did on three separate occasions), and once they arrived at location, they’d find a milk crate with supplies and instructions waiting for them. They’d drop off the film they’d shot the day before and pick up what they needed for the day, including an outline of the day’s story beats. The cast had agreed upon procedures in the event that they needed to break character (including safe words), and as long as they got where the GPS and outline for the day wanted them to go, how they got there was largely up to them. The production crew was out of sight, but never too far away.

This was also by design, both for safety concerns and because the production crew created the atmosphere to put the cast in the right head space. They invented an entire mythology for the Blair Witch and convinced the cast that it was a real local legend. When the cast filmed talking-head segments in town, the producers planted ringers among the townspeople to feed them stories about the Blair Witch, so the line between fiction and reality would blur. And that blurring extended to the remainder of the shoot. As filming went on, the production crew gave the cast less and less food and water in their supply drops, so all the discomfort on film was genuine. The cast wasn’t told what was going to happen to them on any given night, and the production crew would come into their camp while they slept to plant mysterious objects, disrupt their gear, and even shake the tent while they slept, and so all of those reactions of shock and fear that end up on film were real. The cast members used their own names to make it easier to stay in the moment (and to contrive their “disappearance” for a publicity campaign), they got more and more tired and hungry as the shoot went on, their tempers frayed from exhaustion and constant fear of what awaited them at night or the next day. They really were at each other’s throats. The more the line between fiction and reality blurred, the more believable everything that ended up on the screen seemed. When you inhabit these characters, immerse yourself in them, in a situation that isn’t on a soundstage, and you don’t know what’s going to happen next, everything comes much more from a place of real feeling, and it shows. You can tell a good story using conventional cinematic techniques in ways that allow for either artificiality or verisimilitude, but if your whole conceit is that this is recovered film footage, shot by relative amateurs, of something that happened to them, they’re going to need to be believable as real people going through real terrifying experiences, and in that way you really DO need something more like theater than film, because otherwise it’s too easy to spot the acting. 

It’s not perfect. Few films are. Watching it again for the first time in about 10 years or so, a couple of things leap out at me, It’s supposed to be raw footage, but some of the talking-head segments at the beginning switch between video and film in a way that suggested it was edited somewhat in post-production, giving the game away a little, and the end, as striking as it is, relies a little heavily on the audience remembering one relatively small piece of information from the beginning of the film, and contextualizing it correctly, which a lot of people didn’t know to do. Apparently, multiple endings were shot (so it looks like I’m gonna need to get the Blu-Ray at some point to see them), some more conventionally sensationalistic than others, and I wonder how they’d hold up. The ending we get is a little confusing, but still a supremely creepy image nonetheless. There was originally a whole newscast-style framing device covering the discovery of the footage, but it was omitted for feeling too contrived. I think this was a good instinct on the part of the filmmakers - you don’t want to overexplain (though the detail that the footage was discovered embedded in the middle of an otherwise-undisturbed foundation of a house from the 1800s would have been a nice touch - it’s unsettling without being too specific) and a lot of found-footage films make this mistake, and just like it’s hard to nail the mundanity of actual behavior, it’s hard to nail the mundanity of local news coverage as well (a lesson that The Poughkeepsie Tapes and Hell House LLC failed to learn). But even though there are flaws, this film, in my opinion, more than gets over on both its willingness to let the footage tell the story without overexplaining or spelling too much out for us, and in the strength of performances that are as much authentic anger and distress as performance. If you’re going to make a horror film that purports to be the last recorded document of a bunch of people who met a terrible end at the hands of something potentially unexplainable, then you can’t just make a regular movie and slap some viewfinder graphics on it. You have to be willing to immerse your cast in the experience and let them document it, and be willing and able to tell a story with messy, flawed, imperfect footage. You have to be willing to abandon as much distance as possible. Anything less risks being just another gimmick. That's the reason so many films have tried to capture the lightning in a bottle that this one did, and the reason so many have failed.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Reading Horror Instead Of Watching It

Due to a combination of technical mishaps at just, like, the worst possible time this week, I was unable to write up a movie for consideration in time for today. So, instead, I think I’m just going to freestyle a little about three horror novels I’ve either read or am in the process of reading right now, and have dug or am digging. Two of these books are either in production as films or have had their rights optioned, and I kind of wonder how well the third would work, so I’ll call it close enough for jazz.

Penpal by Dathan Auerbach

Penpal is constructed as a series of episodic recollections from different points in the narrator’s childhood and adolescence, and focuses a lot on the unreliability of memory and a childhood perspective that doesn’t quite appreciate the enormity of what’s happening at the moment. Basically, we do a lot of things as kids that it’s only years later we realize were really dangerous, or maybe we consider a specific person’s behavior and realize what seemed innocuous as children really wasn’t, and this book takes that idea and explores it to startling effect. The narrator got hurt when was a kid, he had a best friend with whom he lost touch, a teen romance nipped in the bud, and a school project to find penpals by sending out balloons with notes attached ended up having far-reaching consequences for him and people around him. It creates a tension between the innocence of the narrator’s childhood recollections and our adult understanding of the implications of the events he’s recounting, and as the book moves on, things get worse and worse as the narrator, now an adult, come to a reckoning with his mother about what happened all those years ago.

It hinges a lot on small details and reveals, and does so with sharp effectiveness - it’s one of the few books I’ve ever read that elicited gasps from me. It’s had its film rights optioned, and I think that if someone like Mike Flanagan - someone who knows how to get the most out of small details and understands people as people, not just plot objects - got hold of it, it would make one hell of a horror film.

A Head Full Of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

It’s easy for possession narratives to collapse into cliché, into the same riff on The Exorcist that we keep seeing in one form or another. But A Head Full Of Ghosts pulls off a really nice balancing act. It’s the story of one blue-collar family in Massachusetts, whose lives are upended when their oldest daughter begins acting very, very strangely. It’s told from the perspective of her younger sister, and bounces back and forth in time, told in a quasi-epistolary fashion via modern-day interview transcripts and blog entries, the past represented by diary entries and other sources of information as the family’s economic and emotional situations collapse, leading them to accept help from a local priest who, in turn, thinks that their story would make an excellent reality television show. Which sounds like it’s being set up as some kind of blunt satire of show business and what people will do for fame (which would be boring, in my opinion), but it’s not - it’s an account of the destruction of this family’s lives in the wake of a force that might (or might not) be supernatural.

The plotting uses periodic twists to maintain a sense of unease, alongside some sparingly used but highly effective imagery to illustrate the older daughter’s deterioration. The family themselves sometimes threaten to fall into caricature, but the cruelty that an older sister can visit on an utterly worshipful and trusting younger sister is acutely and devastatingly observed.

The film version is in pre-production, directed by Oz Perkins, whose I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House struck me as a stylishly mixed bag, but he certainly knows his way around a camera, so if the writing isn’t as bloodless and convoluted as that film, it’ll be another one to watch.

The Croning by Laird Barron

I’m smack-dab in the middle of this one, and though I wasn’t quite sure where it was going at first, it’s turning into a nicely atmospheric slow burn that reminds me of a lot of what I like about H.P. Lovecraft’s writing without all of the baggage he brings with him. It opens with what might be reductively described as a gritty, Game-of-Thrones-style retelling of the story of Rumpelstiltskin, but as the adventures of the royal spymaster tasked with discovering the mysterious dwarf’s real name wind on, it makes the mischievous fairytale character a harbinger of ancient evil, before leaping forward to a nightmarishly druggy interlude in modern-day Mexico which introduces us to Don and Michelle, the central characters for the rest of the book so far. From there, it begins bouncing backward and forward in time (I am starting to see a pattern here) through events in their life, narrative asides from their children and friends, and all along, the specter of that long-ago trip to Mexico haunts the edges of Don’s fitful memory. Something evil happened to Don back then, something with roots in the opening fairytale, and slightly wrong, unsettling details about Don and Michelle’s life together flit in and out of the narrative.

Although nothing’s really developed outright by where I am in the book, the sum product of all of these different stories - stories from different places and different times, many colored with the patina of an unsavory family history -  create this feeling that there’s something very bad coming, something very old, and very powerful, a feeling of fates long ago sealed. It’s an audacious book, and it’d make a hell of a film, or maybe a limited-run series, if handled with taste and restraint.

Available from Amazon
Penpal
A Head Full Of Ghosts
The Croning

Good Movie Alert

So I noticed the other day that the Turkish horror film Baskin is now available for streaming on Hulu. It's definitely worth a look, so go get that shit.

On The Legacy Of Resident Evil: The Evil Within and Resident Evil VII

Mostly I like to write about horror films, occasionally horror on television (for as rarely and briefly as it remains good), but more and more I’m thinking about games as visual media as ripe for examination as more passive forms of viewing. As I’ve said before, I’m a coward when it comes to playing scary video games, but the existence of broadcast playthroughs of games mean I can watch them like I would any other film or television story, and somehow that remove, the subtraction of agency, takes a lot of the sting out for me. The first indication that this might be worth looking into was the game SOMA, which was simultaneously as scary and thematically rich as some of my favorite horror films of the last few years, enough that I said to myself “holy shit, I have to write about this.” If it had been a movie, it would have been amazing, but the degree it used player agency as part of the story added a certain something that really you can’t get outside of active interaction with a narrative.

I don’t really find either The Evil Within or Resident Evil VII up to that standard, necessarily, but as relatively recent iterations on a long-running series of horror games, I think they’re worth examining in comparison. They’re both reasonably scary, though I’m not sure I’d really call either one of them thematically rich. But as artifacts, as different takes on what gets carried forward in a medium where sequels and remakes are pretty much as common as horror film, I’ve been thinking a lot about both of them lately. And the Resident Evil series is extensive and long-running enough to essentially have created its own aesthetic, so it’s worth seeing how that aesthetic changes and gets remixed over time.

Resident Evil

So first, some background. The Resident Evil series began with its titular namesake back in 1996, as a story about a group of police officers sent to a mysterious mansion in the middle of a forest, to investigate what happened to a previous group of police officers who had been sent there to investigate suspicious goings-on of some sort. There’s a helicopter crash, an attack by a pack of mysterious dog-like beasts, and so the survivors of the follow-up team are scattered and cut off from each other. The game follows you as one of the surviving officers as you investigate the spooky, Gothic mansion. As it turns out, the mansion has a serious flesh-eating zombie problem.

Much of the horror associated with the original game lies in both its core gameplay mechanics and its narrative. Mechanically, there’s a strong emphasis on helplessness and disempowerment. You’re a cop, and you have weaponry, but ammunition is scarce relative to the number and durability of zombies you encounter, so every situation becomes a choice between using what few resources you have and running away. Inventory space is very limited, so you routinely have to make difficult choices about what kinds of equipment you’re going to keep on you at any given point, and you’re more likely than not going to miss what you leave behind. Running away is made more difficult by the slow, clumsy movement mechanic, which is probably more a limitation of the technology than a deliberate design choice. Nevertheless, it adds tension because running becomes no guarantee of survival against enemies who, in fine zombie tradition, are slow but never, ever stop. You try to run, but they’re always there. It recalls the common nightmare feeling of being pursued by a monster but feeling yourself robbed of all energy and forward momentum.

In games we’re used to being the hero of the story and dispatching enemies of whatever stripe with relative ease and aplomb as we master the mechanics associated with the game. Here, the mechanics are simple and actually sort of work against you. In any genre other than horror, this would feel a bit crap, but here it adds to a sense of tension. You move slowly, without agility, your ability to deal damage and recover from damage is limited, and to make progress you have to solve puzzles that require you to fetch keys of one sort or another to unlock new areas, and the keys themselves range from the prosaic (actual keys) to the bizarre (why the fuck is this door locked with a medallion? And why is that medallion embedded in a statue somewhere on the other side of the mansion?). So you’re slow, limited in your ability to defend yourself, and you’re constantly backtracking through areas that may very well be filled with zombies, dodging harm to basically run errands. The act of getting a door open can be, at times, downright heroic.

And that’s just the mechanics. This is all in service of a story that starts as pretty straightforward by horror standards (spooky mansion, flesh-eating zombies and zombified dogs) and just gets weirder the deeper in you go. You aren’t just dealing with zombies, as it turns out. You’re also dealing with giant snakes, giant spiders, giant carnivorous plants, flesh-eating crows, and poisonous moths among other stuff. And the mansion - a warren of hidden passages and trapped rooms for reasons never adequately explained - gives way to vast secret underground lab facilities, complexes of concrete and steel and bizarre experiments involving mutagenic viruses responsible for all the monsters on the surface. As the environment changes, so do the threats. The labs introduce examples of the mutagen run rampant - riots of superfluous eyes and limbs erupting from vaguely humanoid forms, reminiscent of the sort of biology-run-amok that makes John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing so unsettling. And as environment and antagonist shift, so do our allegiances, as members of your team are revealed to be double agents working for the sinister corporation behind all of this experimentation - a pharmaceutical company called Umbrella.

So...yes. To recap: You are a member of the small-town equivalent of a SWAT team sent to a mansion in the middle of the woods, where you find monsters created by a pharmaceutical company in a bid for world domination.

It’s all a little silly.

It’s all a little silly, but when you’re in the middle of it, it’s actually pretty tense and engaging because you’re struggling to stay alive (for the most part - resources are far less strained in the endgame than at the start) as things around you keep getting more and more batshit. You’re a in a mansion, then you’re in a secret lab, then you’re taking a submarine (accessed, if I remember correctly - it’s been about 18 years since I played the first game - by unlocking access to it with a marble plaque of a ship’s steering wheel because of course) to yet another underwater secret lab which leads to another even larger lab complex, and you go from zombies to giant plants and lizards and arachnids to things that aren’t even really life as we recognize it anymore and oh yeah, this is all part of a vast conspiracy engineered by a company that makes cold medicine. The what-the-fuck factor is off the charts, and this is important to note because it’s going to come up later.

This, mind you, is just the first game. A quick Wikipedia check tells me that counting sequels and offshoots and remakes, we are currently looking at twenty-seven games either complete or in development between 1996 and 2017. I am not going to discuss every one of these games, but I do want to quickly hit the highlights because it’s going to be important to set up the recurring elements in the series and how they play out in the newest iteration of the series proper (Resident Evil VII) and what I’m arguing is a spiritual sequel (The Evil Within) and how the two are both similar and different. So the first game really establishes a lot of things that persist throughout subsequent entries to the series, most notably the following six elements:

1. A Fixed Cast of Characters

The first Resident Evil game introduces us to a basic cast of characters, who persist throughout the series. New faces get added along the way, but in general we end up with the sort of consistent rotating cast you’d expect to find in any soap opera or, say, the Saw franchise. Nobody exists in this narrative world who doesn’t have some tie to the protagonists or antagonists, and they tend to keep popping up, with plenty of shifting allegiances, double agents, triple agents, antiheroes, the whole lot. We will see the same names and faces again and again, even if their roles do change.

2. Scarcity and Safety

Like the cast, specific resource mechanics persist from game to game. Certain weapons show up over and over again (handguns, shotguns, grenade launchers), herbs of different colors show up as healing items, and can be combined to create more powerful healing items, game saves are accomplished through some kind of technology in the environment (traditionally typewriters), and there are designated “safe” rooms in the game space where save points can be found alongside item crates where you can store items for which you have no room in your inventory. Like the cast, specifics vary from game to game, but these are pretty constant. Scarcity - of resources, and inventory slots to carry those resources - are pretty constant as well, at least early on. Around Resident Evil 4 that becomes less of a thing (culminating in the pants-on-head action-movie ridiculousness of Resident Evil 6).

3. Puzzle-Solving For Progression

Movement through the game’s world (and thus, through the story) is regulated by the need to solve convoluted puzzles, whether the environment makes them appropriate or not. You could possibly make the argument that fitting themed plaques into slots on a door to open it makes a kind of sense in an eccentrically-designed mansion. Rich people can be fucking weird. But this same mechanic pops up again in Resident Evil 2, which takes place in the nearby town of Raccoon City, and there’s no sensible reason why the Raccoon City Police Department would use the same themed-plaque system for securing its own damn headquarters. And yet, if you want to get into the squad room, you need to pry the medallion from the base of the statue in the lobby. In all fairness, sometimes it’s something that makes sense contextually, like a fuse to insert into a box to provide electricity to a shorted-out security door, or someone’s keycard. But sometimes it’s a plaque with an eagle on it, which needs to go into the door with an eagle on it (and not, you know, the wolf door). Why? Who knows?

4. Weirdness, Science, and Weird Science

The use of odd puzzles in mundane places is echoed by a similar juxtaposition of technology with the baroquely Gothic in character and environment. Often you’ll have traditionally Gothic elements coexisting alongside the more technological elements (like the way the games begin in spaces like mansions and move to laboratories), but sometimes they’ll be commingled and embodied in the antagonists as well. In Resident Evil: Code Veronica, for example, the primary antagonist is a wealthy member of a noble family who is obsessed with his twin sister, to the point that he dresses like her and assumes her voice and acts her out. The main antagonist in Resident Evil 4 has this whole sort of Napoleon-meets-Little Lord Fauntleroy aesthetic going on for reasons never explained. It even happens in smaller moments, like Resident Evil 2 (or maybe 3, again, it’s been awhile), where you encounter Raccoon City’s mayor in his office, with his daughter’s body laid out on his desk in front of him, and he gives a speech about her beauty and how he couldn’t save her that, in his operatically melodramatic insanity and grief, could have shown up in a Bram Stoker story. It’s worth noting that the abovementioned dude with sister issues is also a scientist for the Umbrella Corporation, and that his family mansion hides yet another massive lab complex, because...

5. Insanely Powerful Evil Corporations

The Umbrella Corporation is the consistent antagonist behind the scenes across all the games, and their scope and reach just scale up and up and up as the series goes on. Pretty much every villain in each individual game is somehow employed by Umbrella, which, although ostensibly just a very profitable pharmaceutical company on the surface, moves over the course of the series from “pharmaceutical company doing some iffy research on the side” to “pharmaceutical company with improbable resources bent on world domination” to “massive multinational with endless resources, vast armies of mercenaries, technology so fantastic as to border on actual magic, and secret control of pretty much the whole planet and now they’re just fucking with people because evil.” Umbrella is behind basically every conspiracy and bad thing in the world of Resident Evil, and the idea of conspiracy, secret organizations, and secret organizations within secret organizations just proliferates exponentially as the series continues. And it’s always Umbrella pulling the strings.

6. The Further You Go, The Less Human Everything Gets

Finally, each game features a consistent progression in the type of ground-level antagonists you face from more to less recognizably human. You typically start with flesh-eating zombies (or mindlessly aggressive enemies in the tradition of 28 Days Later’s “rage” zombies), then face monstrous animals or lizards or insects, then either human or non-human adversaries whose biology has become corrupted and distorted, until the final encounter is typically with a creature who is less recognizable as any kind of living creature than just an amorphous mass of tentacles, claws, eyeballs (always eyeballs, lots of eyeballs), and bony protrusions. Basically, the further in you get and the weirder the circumstances get, the weirder the enemies you face as well.

These don’t always appear to the same degree in any given individual installment (the final antagonist in Resident Evil is mostly recognizable as human, for example, and the Gothic elements are pretty much entirely stripped out of Resident Evil 6), but they’re consistent enough to make up what I see as the core of the Resident Evil aesthetic. So, all of that ground laid, I want to take a look at the two most recent expressions of that aesthetic. And yeah, there are going to be spoilers for both Resident Evil VII and The Evil Within, so forewarned, forearmed, etc.

One Long Nightmare: The Problems Of The Elm Street Franchise

(This post was originally intended for publication a couple of days after Wes Craven died, and it didn’t feel right to put it up so close to his passing. )

I’ve never really been much of a fan of the series of films that started with A Nightmare on Elm Street, but I also recognize that it’s been years and years since I’d watched any of them. Although I wasn’t about to go to the same kind of effort to be either surprised or disappointed all over again that I did for the Hellraiser series, I thought it might be worth getting the big picture on the (ugh) franchise and maybe reconsidering them as a body of work, if not as individual films. I was never a fan (as with so much 80s horror of the loosely-construed slasher genre), but, like with The Exorcist, to the extent that the Elm Street films are a pretty big part of popular culture, it didn’t feel right to completely neglect them.

So I ended up taking more than a few hours one afternoon to watch Never Sleep Again, the extensive documentary covering the making of the first four films in the series. What I ended up getting was a pretty good look into some of the earliest days of horror franchising, and thus in many ways ground zero for so many of the systematic shortcomings of commercial horror film in the United States today. The Elm Street films are the epitome of a cautionary tale.

When Wes Craven made Last House on the Left, he captured lightning in a bottle - an unhinged, discordant burst of galvanic rage that channeled so much national discontent and disillusionment into a deeply unsparing and maybe slightly dangerous film. And for that, and some of his later accomplishments, he’ll always be (rightly, I think) one of the most well-respected directors in American horror. But A Nightmare on Elm Street, perhaps his most well-known contribution to the genre?

Sorry, but, it isn’t great.

This is too bad, because it’s a really compelling idea: The ghost of Freddy Krueger - a reviled neighborhood child molester/murderer, burned to death in an act of mob justice - strikes back at the children of the people who lynched him through their nightmares. The film came on the heels of Halloween, arguably the first slasher film, and presented a similar adversary - implacable, unstoppable, revisiting the place of their antagonistic birth to take revenge on the descendants of the people who wronged them. Krueger was more explicitly supernatural than Halloween’s Michael Myers (who would eventually be reconfigured into a far less interesting supernatural threat over multiple sequels and reboots), and so where Myers was minimalist and austere, Krueger could be baroque and beyond conventional logic. Dreams are the place anything can happen, where the laws of physics and causality are suspended. Myers communicated that small-town America was no longer safe, Krueger communicated that your own mind was no longer safe. All bets were off. Again, that was the idea, but even given the rapidity with which the conceit turned into hokey, non-threatening pop culture, the original film wasn’t an especially strong case for it to start.

Part of it is that A Nightmare on Elm Street really hasn’t aged well, but that’s not entirely fair to the film. It feels cheap to me to criticize films for being a product of their times, in terms of their aesthetic and technical shortcomings. But I’d argue that even for the time, it wasn’t especially good. The dialogue is terrible. No teenagers ever talked the way they talk in this film, even in the 80s. And I know, because I was there. “Up yours with a twirling lawnmower”? “I’ll punch out your ugly lights”? Who the fuck wrote this? It’s all incredibly wooden and stilted and there’s not much the actors can do with it. And no, people do not generally go to horror films for the dialogue, though I think that’s a mistake - there’s no reason, I think, to expect any less from horror film than drama in terms of dialogue and characterization. Film is film. But I’ll allow that the point of a horror film is not usually the dialogue. Even by those standards - standards where otherwise unremarkable, workmanlike dialogue would be sufficient, this is still just fucking crummy writing, and it’s actively distracting. The characters become less believable, the situation becomes less believable, and so our investment in the characters and what is about to happen to them diminishes.

The film is also tonally inconsistent - Krueger starts off as a mostly silent antagonist, and this is, I think, when he is at his scariest, because he’s just this force that doesn’t have to obey the laws of time and space, and even when he starts talking, it’s mostly violent threats which, used sparingly, would probably be okay. If the only information you get is “this creature has no aim but to torture and kill you,” that’s direct and effective. But then, as the film proceeds, you get hints of the wisecracking pop culture figure he’d become, and that works less well. Some of the setpieces aren’t especially convincing, and their cheapness makes them look more silly than scary even for the time and given the state of effects technology. But, again, I have to give the film credit here for trying something new with the resources they had, even if they didn’t quite stick the landing.

In terms of its conceit, what Craven was basically trying to do was take the masked-killer idea in some interesting new directions, and the basic premise could still be viable today. There’s a great kernel of an idea in having to weight sleep deprivation against making yourself vulnerable to a killer who cannot be stopped because he is out of reach of the physical world, and a modern treatment that uses hallucinations and cognitive impairment stemming from sleep deprivation as an explanation for the deaths and as a framing for Krueger (half-glimpsed things, or things seen plainly even though nobody else sees them) could be scary as fuck - basically, Mike Flanagan should be tapped to direct a Nightmare on Elm Street film, because based on his work in Absentia and Oculus, he could rock that shit right.

But, really, that’s not what happened. Attempts to take the then-new genre in a slightly different direction aside, this is still a slasher movie at its heart, with all the puritan morality and focus on violence that implies - note that even here, the first to die is the girl who had sex with her lunkhead boyfriend. Ultimately, it still comes down to teenagers being mowed down, adults refusing to take the problem seriously, and only the virginal Final Girl escaping the slaughter. Were Krueger another mortal in a mask with some kind of gimmick, A Nightmare on Elm Street would be absolutely nothing special. The unreal/surreal settings of his murders - the new thing the film brought to the table - were instrumental in elevating it, at least theoretically, above schlock, but would also end up being the series’ undoing, as they pushed subsequent stories further into fantasy and comedy territory, and gimmick replaced mood.

Of course, A Nightmare on Elm Street wasn’t a slasher-film also-ran. It was a very successful film, and, as detailed in Never Sleep Again, it struck me how once the first film did well, two things happened immediately  - first, the producers said “how can we make more of these now and strike while the iron’s hot,” and pretty much everyone who got tapped for one of the sequels said something along the lines of “we should do something different, you know, change it up” without seeming to have any idea of what made the first one successful in the first place.

So the “let’s put out another one now” mentality is a problem, and we see how it’s a problem with the second film right away - A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge is almost like a C-grade imitation of a Savage Steve Holland teen comedy, only people die in really gory ways periodically before we go back to the wackiness. There’s all the well-documented homoerotic subtext (or, let’s face it, text), but that’s not a liability, that’s actually interesting. No, the second film takes all the tone problems with with the first film and redlines them. This is an actively goofy film when people are not dying. Everyone is a caricature, and though Freddy is less quippy in this one, a lot of the potential menace is undercut by just how ridiculous the entire enterprise is. The death scenes feel even more like setpieces here than they did in the first one. The director, interviewed in Never Sleep Again, talks about how he wanted to take the franchise in a fresh new direction, which is the sort of thing you expect from someone directing the fourth or fifth film, not the second film. And this film really feels like it was made by people with no sense of the first film’s strengths at all - which, given that it was a decision driven primarily by financial interests (Wes Craven wasn’t even consulted), makes sense. One film in, and the next iteration is already just product.

And here is where we see the problems of franchising taking hold - the more films get made, the further away they get from whatever made the first one good, and the more they are abstracted into elements that are repeatable and quantifiable, that can be rearranged and permutated over multiple sequels. What made the first film good was, I think, its aggressive weirdness - deaths completely detached from conventional causality. Like, anything could happen and be gory as fuck while doing so. Though I’m not much of a fan of any of the films in this series, I have to admit that the scene in the first film where a young man gets sucked into a bed and sprayed out as a fountain of blood has a certain power to it. But if you think about it, the focus of the first film isn’t really Freddy - it’s these kids trying to get adults to understand that something is killing them and the adults being completely ineffectual for a variety of reasons. That’s actually a nightmarish thing right there - the feeling that you are trying to do something to no effect. You scream but people don’t react, you run but you don’t go anywhere, you hit someone but the blow lands with the weight of feathers. Waking life in the first film was oddly dreamlike at times, and that’s kind of cool.

But the subsequent films did neither jack nor shit with that, choosing instead to focus increasingly on Freddy as the central character, turning him into almost like a foulmouthed Warner Bros. cartoon character, with the new group of kids really there as set dressing for increasingly cartoonish setpieces. By the fourth film, Freddy is less an object of fear and more a cartoon bad guy - like an evil wizard or scheming Scooby-Doo villain, and you know the good guys, with their newfound secret powers, are going to defeat him, because at that point these aren’t even horror films anymore - they’re oddly gory fantasy films. And with every film we find out more and more about Freddy and as is always the case, the more we know, the less frightening he is. The more we know, the more internal mythology is constructed around the character, the more bound the character is to the rules and logic of that mythology, and considering that one of the big strengths of the first film - you know, the one that made all the others possible - was the anarchic nature of the antagonist (he did not even recognize the laws of physics, you know?), that’s a bad thing to have happen. Then it’s not scary, it’s just an exercise in watching the protagonists discover whatever piece of this mythology will let them defeat the bad guy.

Monsters, in my opinion, shouldn’t be pop cultural figures. They lose their teeth the more we know of them. The more they stand in the light, the less frightening they become. Nightmares, once confronted and understood, have no power, and that’s exactly what happened here.

And so after six increasingly sillier films, the franchise was ostensibly laid to rest in 1991 with Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, about which Wikipedia says: “Doc discovers Freddy's power comes from the ‘dream demons’ who continually revive him, and that Freddy can be killed if he is pulled into the real world. Maggie decides that she will be the one to enter Freddy's mind and pull him into the real world. Once in the dream world, she puts on a pair of 3-D glasses and enters Freddy's mind. There, she discovers that Freddy was teased as a child, abused by his foster father, inflicted self-abuse as a teenager, and murdered his wife. Freddy was given the power to become immortal from fiery demons. After some struggling, Maggie pulls Freddy into the real world.”

Yep. That is exactly as silly as I expected it to be. And given that it featured cameos by Roseanne Barr, Tom Arnold, and Alice Cooper, the transformation of the story from one of horror to one of comedy appeared to be complete. Which is the only possible outcome, really. The more you elaborate, the more you add, the more you iterate, the further away from the primal power of the original you get, until what started as horror becomes comedy or shitty fantasy or science fiction. And this happens because the creation of these films is not in the hands of filmmakers. It’s in the hands of producers and studio executives whose only concern is profit, with no eye toward what made the original good or sense to get out of the way when someone’s managed to do something that works. That the immediate reaction to this film was “let’s make a lot more of them and give them to people who had nothing to do with the first one” makes this devolution inevitable.

And then, three years later, Wes Craven comes back with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, the seventh Elm Street film, and only the second with him directing. And I have to admit, it starts with an interesting premise - the whole thing is a self-reflexive examination of the Nightmare on Elm Street films that posits Freddy having a life of his own outside the films, a film in which Wes Craven and others from the first film are both themselves and characters in the film - but, sadly, in the end it reverts to type, too bound to commercial considerations to really commit to its premise.

New Nightmare opens on what appears to be a scene from a new Nightmare on Elm Street film - Freddy has created a new robotic glove, and he’s about to sever his own hand to attach it, and just as he does we pull back to see that it’s a film set, on which Heather Langenkamp’s husband is working as an effects technician. But then something goes wrong with the glove effect and it goes berserk, attacking her, her husband, her husband’s coworkers, and her son. Then Heather wakes up - it was all a nightmare.

So we open on a scene from a movie about nightmares, which just turns out to be a movie about a movie about nightmares, which turns out to be a nightmare of a movie of a movie about nightmares. This is awesomely labyrinthian, and at least at first the commitment to the idea is great - bringing in the actual producer and director/writer and cast members, all playing themselves, with this idea that this phenomenon has affected all their lives in different ways - Heather has a husband and son and isn’t so into doing horror anymore (plus she’s had stalker trouble) - and all of this actually mirrors Heather Langenkamp’s life outside the movie, no less. Wes Craven is writing a new script for a new Nightmare film - a script that begins at the same time as a series of earthquakes, and people start having nightmares again, almost like he’s conjuring this into reality like Sutter Cane in In The Mouth of Madness, another art-becomes-life film that came out the year after this. Maybe there was something in the air with directors who made their bones in the 70s starting to think about their effect on the culture, I don’t know.

But, back to the Nightmare. At least at first, this nicely self-referential conceit is played straight enough that there’s an interesting story getting told about the blurring of art and life, and the idea that in the end everything is narrative. It could be the story of Craven’s creation taking on a life of its own in the collective unconscious, it could be the Repulsion-style story of Heather’s emotional deterioration in the wake of a tragedy and the cost of being associated with such a prominent piece of popular culture. It could have done some really interesting work around art and celebrity and our relationship o our monsters while still being really scary and unnerving.

Instead it settles for being yet another Nightmare film, just with some self-reflexive trappings and a hokey rationalization for what’s happening (there’s an ancient spirit of evil that inhabits stories throughout history and it’s using the Nightmare franchise to break through to our world)  that ultimately makes it, especially in the third act, just as full of corny jokes from Freddy Krueger (who looks even more like a fantasy character than ever) and gratuitous effects work (plus fanservice) as any of the others. And maybe that’s metacommentary as well, that no matter how hard any of the people involved in starting this thing rolling try to escape or transcend or improve upon it, in the end everyone reverts to the same story, the same gimmicks, the same setting that’s worked all along. It’s not so much Freddy that is unstoppable and unkillable as it is his myth and the commercial value of that myth at the expense of art and interesting films. I don’t think that’s what they were going for, but, well, who says the author really knows what his story is about, anyway?

Luckily, I don’t think Wes Craven’s legacy as a filmmaker will be wholly defined by the Elm Street films, as closely as he’s associated with them. (Unfairly so, given how quickly he was shoved aside in favor of directors willing to work cheaper and make fewer demands in service of a profit.) His early work also include The Hills Have Eyes, which, though not as transgressive as Last House on the Left, was plenty gonzo in its own right, The Serpent and the Rainbow, which, although not supernatural, is still a solid foreigner-way-out-of-his-depth film, the unapologetically weird The People Under The Stairs, and Scream, which I think is a much, much stronger take on some of what he was trying to do with New Nightmare, a slasher film set in a world where slasher films exist, a film aware of its own mythology, and most importantly, tense and scary as shit. Sure, Scream went on to spawn three unnecessary sequels, but it never turned into quite the joke that the Elm Street films did. Killers - supernatural or otherwise - will eventually be laid to rest, but the profit motive won’t.

And that’s why A Nightmare on Elm Street got a “reboot” in 2010, and yet another remake is being bandied about now as well.