Ogsuyeog Gwisin: Burying The Story

As much as I dislike the dismissal “if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” I have to admit, every now and then I run across a movie that makes me think “well, this is awfully familiar.” My inclination is to blame it on lazy filmmaking or producers desperate to cash in on something transiently popular. Am I being harsh? Probably a little, but every time a film falls back on familiar, well-word stories or plot devices or imagery, it tends to take me right out of it. Maybe it’s because I watch a lot of horror movies, but it especially bugs me there. Some people take comfort in familiar things in their entertainment and I’m not immune to or above that, I just don’t like it in horror. The last thing I want out of horror is to say “oh look, more ghosts with grossly distended features…yay.”

And this isn’t the biggest problem with Ogsuyeog Gwisin (The Ghost Station), but that’s mostly because it fumbles its third act. Otherwise, what you’d have is a pleasantly solid, but derivative Korean take on Japanese horror.

Na-young Kim is a reporter at a tabloid news site, and she is in both hot water and deep shit. She took a picture of a young woman in a subway station to present as the “It Girl” of the summer, and didn’t bother to get her consent. It gets more complicated as the “It Girl” turns out to have been a man cross-dressing, and now he’s suing the tabloid. Na-young is on the hook for a settlement that consists of an utterly bankrupting amount of money, and the tabloid’s going to leave her high and dry…unless she can put together some stories that will dramatically increase clicks and ad revenue. And, being a tabloid, the more sensational the better.

And just her luck, her brother works for public transportation, and he says one of his coworkers mentioned some mysterious deaths…the most recent in a whole series of them…at Ogsu Station. They think it’s cursed.

So what we have here is sort of a Korean attempt at the sort of films that would become known as  “J-horror,” as the plucky young reporter sets out to uncover the explanation behind a bunch of unusual deaths, and ends up getting in way over her head. It’s definitely not afraid to borrow elements from Ringu (an old well features prominently) and Ju-On (creepy ghost kids), but in some ways this works to its advantage, because the borrowing ends up giving the film a solid narrative backbone in the form of a mystery that needs to be solved. Things unfold pretty nicely along those lines, with everything become gradually clearer as the film progresses and the gradual unfolding of the mystery providing an opportunity for the audience to put things together for themselves. 

And there’s some interesting subtext too, in that Na-young isn’t really digging into this story because the truth must be told, at least not initially, it’s because she’s in trouble with her boss and if she doesn’t deliver, she’s ruined. So there’s something predatory about it, at least to start, which is sort of a refreshing twist on her character. She grapples at points with all of the death and buried secrets being greeted with more and more enthusiasm at work because they’re driving engagement like nobody’s business. Not to mention how the deeper she goes, the darker and weirder everything gets, and she sees things she absolutely cannot explain. There’s something malevolent here, but she has to keep putting herself in harm’s way because there’s a demand for coverage of this cursed station now, and it’s this or saying goodbye to her livelihood. It’s a nice departure from the hapless innocent.

And that’s about the only deviation from formula we’re going to get. The film gets off to a relatively slow start after an opening that feels a touch predictable (fairly standard “this place is haunted” shenanigans that end up with someone dead) but does settle into a groove in the second act with some nice startling moments paying off in ways that aren’t especially telegraphed. Again, it’s nothing fancy – this film has one gear, and that’s Na-young or her brother poking their nose where they aren’t supposed to, talking to people that they don’t realize are dead, and then boom! Creepy ghost jump-scare. I don’t normally like jump-scares, but the filmmakers know better than to set them up so you see them coming a mile away. They’re sharp and crisp and punctuate the unfolding revelations of what happened on this land long before the station was build, and how some things just cannot be buried.

But then we get to the third act. It’s not a gigantic off-the-rails clusterfuck or anything. Again, this film is resolutely on rails. In fact, by the third act it’s clear that it’s going to keep going back to the same well (ha-ha) over and over again based on what was established in the second act, and so what was working really well to add a certain amount of eeriness and tension threatens to become predictable. And then at the climax, instead of bringing it to some kind of end, they  focus on an element to the story that was barely addressed in the first two acts. It feels like the filmmakers realized that they either didn’t have an ending, still had twenty minutes to come up with so it could be feature-length, or maybe both. The result feels like the third act is tacked on, as if they’d forgotten about part of the story and decided to deal with it all at once instead of weaving into the first two acts. 

The result is that instead of the film wrapping up and coming to a satisfying close, it sort of veers into something that doesn’t really feel organic to the overall story. Worse, it doesn’t do as much with it as it could have– there are elements to it that could tie really nicely into existing story elements, but it contents itself with sort of sputtering out in an end with a fraction of the impact it could have had. Despite having its moments, ultimately it just feels like an assemblage of parts.

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

Available on Amazon

The Burned Over District: An Attempt Was Made

 (I will probably get a little spoilery in this one, but the story doesn’t really have twists and turns, so it shouldn’t be too much of an issue. The story also doesn’t have much of a story.)

Making films is difficult. Maybe I don’t fully appreciate just how difficult, but I know that even low-budget indie films still require a great deal of money and equipment and logistics, and generally don’t have the luxury of multiple locations, high-end cameras or lighting, a schedule that allows for experimentation or even multiple takes. And this is a point raised usually in defense of films that fall short - the idea that making a film is hard work and so criticism is unjustified. That is patently horseshit. You could run a marathon while wearing wrist and ankle weights and be working really hard the whole time as a result, and it isn’t going to make you the winner. You can appreciate the difficulty of doing something and still recognize when it isn’t a success.

Like this week’s movie, for example, in case you were wondering why I was ranting about criticism. The Burned Over District is a clumsy, amateurish attempt at cosmic horror that doesn’t so much miss what’s good about cosmic horror (although it misses that too) as it does miss the basics of storytelling.

It begins as a hazy, sun-drenched reverie. An attractive woman, gazing at someone lovingly. There’s no dialogue, just soft music, softer lighting, and what seems to be a quiet moment with a loved one. And then it is over, cut short by broken glass and blood and crumpled metal. A man and the woman we’ve just seen are sitting in the front of a car, and she appears to be badly injured. As it turns out, her injuries are fatal, and that is how Will Pleasance loses his wife, Natalie. Cut to some weeks later, and his mother (his shrill, awful mother) and his sister are visiting him to see how he’s doing. He isn’t doing well, which really is to be expected when you’ve watched the person you love die right in front of you. His sister’s sympathetic, his (terrible) mother less so, and then they leave.

Sometime later, Will’s out hunting in the woods and in the process of trying to take down a deer, encounters a hole in the ground. A really, really large hole that goes pretty deep. It looks like it might have been an old well, since the sides seem to be lined with brick. But now it’s just a gaping maw, above which dangle a number of crude wooded shapes bent out of twigs and saplings.

Almost like talismans.

There’s no really elegant way to get into this. The film is basically “man loses wife, is very sad about it, then cult shit out of nowhere.” The two things aren’t really connected at all. Like, to the point that in the scene where Will discovers the hole, a friendly older man just pops up suddenly to express his concern and deliver a big exposition dump about the history of the hole. Which is on Will’s property, which makes it odd that he’s never seen it before, especially if he spends any amount of time in the woods hunting. That he’s out there hunting without any safety orange on and with his finger perpetually on his rifle’s trigger is a whole other matter, but he and Natalie have apparently lived out here for a long time, and he’s never seen this hole before today, even though it’s been out here for centuries. And then there’s someone right there to explain it to him. The whole film is nakedly mechanical in that sense, a collection of things that need to happen that never feels like an actual period of time in someone’s life. It’s not chaotic, but things do happen without any real rhyme or reason. Why is Will’s mother back at the house? Who knows? Why is Will’s sister driving back into town in the middle of the night? No idea!

This is made even more obvious by how the story (such as it is) is actually being told moment to moment. The performances come from the ACTING! school of acting, all hammy and melodramatic and two-dimensional. And the writing comes from the WRITING! school of writing, all speeches and cliches and things that nobody ever actually says. It’s a film full of people saying lines, instead of characters inhabiting a believable space. And what they have to say isn’t even especially interesting. So yes, there’s an evil cult in this town that’s been worshiping what’s in the hole for ages (big surprise), and they are boring. The moments when the cult’s leader makes grand pronouncements like cult leaders do, they ramble, they go on and on, and they’re almost less oratory and more just him kind of explaining the same things over and over again while the other members stand around in sort of quasi-Mennonite outfits for no apparent reason.

And I cannot stress enough how ineptly the story is handled. It’s not especially complicated or unfamiliar – man, grieving the recent death of his wife, discovers that the town he lives in holds a dark secret. That is not in and of itself a problem, you can do some good stuff with that. The problem is that the story has an almost-complete absence of connective tissue. Natalie’s death has almost no role in the overall story, even as a facet of Will’s character. Basically, he’s drunk, sloppy and reckless, there’s a nightmare sequence early on, a sort of vision much later and that’s kind of it. At one point, someone intimates that the cult had something to do with her death, but it’s never followed up. I think we’re supposed to get the idea that Will isn’t thinking straight because of grief, but there’s no attempt to establish that or contextualize his actions. It seems almost irrelevant: Wife dies, I’m sad, whoops, there’s a portal to some interdimensional evil on my property that I’ve somehow never noticed and it’s being worshipped by a cult made up of most the townsfolk. There’s no discovery, one thing just sort of happens after another in isolation. He and Natalie have lived in this small, ostensibly tight-knit town for some time and somehow Will has to be told that there’s one really powerful, influential family that owns everything, and nobody else in town seems to know who Will is. That’s what makes small towns such fertile ground for horror - everyone knows everyone else, and everyone’s keeping secrets. For that matter, we're introduced to most of the townspeople as weird cultists first, and then as respectable citizens, which is just...ass-backwards. Again, the effectiveness of this kind of story lies in not knowing who to trust, at the revelation of which friendly neighbors are in thrall to some eldritch menace. When you know it's everyone right off the bat, there's not much you can do with that.

This is so egregious that there’s one scene where Will’s sister is sitting in the kitchen having a drink, then the wind blows a door open, some mysterious force shatters the cup in her hand, and she is subsequently compelled to…walk out into the middle of the woods where she discovers a ritual sacrifice going on. That’s the only way they could get her out there to witness that? It boggles the mind. Add to that the bog-standard pompous speechifying by the cult leader, and the odd way that the story seems to wrap up at the halfway mark to make room for a second half that is one long revenge sequence, and it’s a baffling experience.

There are a few redeeming qualities – it’s obviously got a smaller budget, but it looks pretty good. There’s lots of beautiful footage of snowy woods and mountains, clouds scudding across the sky, and the lighting is generally stark and nicely lurid in places. In general, the film has an aesthetic that would sit nicely next to homages like The Void, and the filmmakers are surprisingly good at not telegraphing startling moments given how not-good they are at so many other things. The violent moments are goopy and visceral in a way that fits with the overall aesthetic and manage to avoid being either gratuitous or silly, but the whole thing is so incoherent, the climax is so hilariously cliched (complete with a Final Girl cocking a shotgun), dragging out entirely too long before ending in what was probably supposed to be a moment of awe and horror but comes across like a bunch of people standing around, unsure of what to do next.

That it’s not especially original isn’t an issue – there are only so many stories in the world – but top to bottom, the execution is so fumbling and inept that it even screws up the basics. They tried, yes. But they failed.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

Analog Horror: Do Not Adjust Your Set

Periodically there are revolutions in filmmaking. The introduction of sound, consumer-grade film cameras, consumer-grade video cameras, digital effects, most recently platforms like YouTube and Vimeo allow anyone with an account to upload their work and allow it to find an audience. The results are…well, mixed, but of course they’re going to be mixed. At its best, there’s an opportunity to see things that’d never be given the light of day by the film industry, because they’re so idiosyncratic and resolutely noncommercial.

One particular example is the nascent movement/genre/category/whatever known as “analog horror.” I was introduced to it with The Backrooms, and in the wake of writing about it, I had a number of other similar efforts suggested to me, and I sat down to go through the collected works of three different creators. There’s even more than these out there, but these were the titles that kept coming up, so this is more of a representative sampling, than a comprehensive survey.

The term “analog horror” is sort of ironic, in that all of this work is made possible by advances in digital filmmaking, effects, and distribution platforms. But I get what it’s referring to. It’s all very homemade, typically the project of one person, with varying levels of outside assistance (and as often as not, external financial support from platforms like Patreon), and it all tends to work in the same spaces. The subject matter is typically cosmic horror, stories told using bygone media - local television, educational and training videos, low-budget animation - and bygone technologies. It’s glitchy, grainy, fuzzy, full of the wobble of poorly-tracked videotapes, cheap film stock, low-resolution images full of digital artifacts, and the crude, inhuman blare of early speech-synthesis software. There’s a sense that something has been unearthed, some long-forgotten ephemera that documents a world that could have been our own, or maybe is our own and we’re living in blissful ignorance, unable to correlate the contents of the universe. They’re successful to varying degrees, but it does seem to be the case across the titles I watched that brevity is on their side. The best of it works in short, bite-sized pieces, and tends to start to losing focus the longer the videos become and the longer a series goes on.  But at its best, it’s unnerving, full of dread, and I’m not sure it’d be possible or effective in a more conventional presentation.

Local 58 TV

This is probably the strongest of the three that I watched. It’s a series of short videos framed as broadcasts from a small, local television station, the kind that filled its off-hours programming with informercials or old movies, or simply concludes its broadcast day with a still image and a scratchy recording of the national anthem. Sometimes it’s just a framing device, and sometimes it’s integral to the overarching narrative that emerges. Stories work as stand-alone entities, and take a variety of forms. There’s grainy dash-cam footage of a driver led seriously awry by their GPS, a macabre children’s cartoon, an end-of-broadcast reel intended for a very specific situation, a weather broadcast about some very strange weather, among others. But as the series goes on, specific themes and ideas begin to emerge, so that by the end, a story is just beginning to take shape, but only just. We’re left with the nagging sense that there’s some horrible truth at the edges of our understanding, almost comprehensible. This series benefits from knowing that this kind of storytelling is a delicate balance of suggestion without revealing too much, giving just a glimpse into something horrible behind a façade of institutional blandness. That’s a tough balance to maintain, and the result is a series of brief glimpses into a friendly small-town institution that turn into something far more sinister, creating sharp jabs of icy dread with impeccable timing and precision.

Highlights: Contingency, Weather Service, Real Sleep

 

Gemini Home Entertainment

Conversely, this is probably the weakest of the three. It’s working with similar raw materials to Local 58, but it doesn’t wield them as deftly, and that makes all the difference. The framing device is a small video production company that manufactures educational material and promotional material for small businesses, but it’s a conceit that gets abandoned or at least departed from on a pretty regular basis, and the result feels less like we’re gradually piecing together some horrifying truth across disparate instances of otherwise innocuous media, and more like we’re being told a fairly stock cosmic-horror story through the most roundabout means possible. There’s a tendency to return to the same device of suddenly distorting the sound and video over and over again, and at their weakest, slack running times with little narrative movement make some of the individual videos unfocused and dull. There are good moments here and there, and at its best it punctures the cheery façade of an educational video about local wildlife or storm safety with glimpses of the bizarre that go as fast as they appeared, leaving you feeling uneasy, but more often than not, it feels belabored. I think it could work as a more aggressively curated set of videos, but as it is, it feels like it takes way too long to tell us a story that we’ve already figured out about a third of the way into the series. 

Highlights: World’s Weirdest Animals, Storm Safety, Deep Root Disease

 

The Mandela Catalogue

This one is easily the hardest one to summarize, because it takes the basic elements of analog horror as established by the other two titles and throws them all into a blender, creating the feeling that we’re watching a prolonged nightmare in which shards of old videos and antiquated technology periodically surface. It’s not so much about a single company as it is a place – Mandela County – and the people who live there. There’s a police department, a local computer and electronics store, members of a paranormal investigation club from a neighboring county, and something called The United States Department Of Temporal Phenomena. It’s weird right from the beginning, establishing a world that’s suffered some kind of existential anomaly, focusing on how it impacts one community by examining a few incidents from different angles and perspectives. The storytelling is executed using a wide variety of styles, from old religious cartoons to glitchy, low-resolution imagery to educational videos to simulated Internet conversations to live-action footage that at times resembles the grainy pointillism of Skinamarink, and at others, black and white footage with actors and dialogue that reminds me of nothing so much as a YouTube-era riff on German Expressionism. At its best, it’s unsettling, tense, and oddly melancholy by turns, evoking the feeling of a small town that’s slowly crumbling, but again, the whole enterprise goes on a little too long and it starts losing focus as it goes. This type of storytelling really does seem to be at its best when it keeps things short and doesn’t overstay its welcome, and there’s so much to this story that it feels like it’s spinning its wheels toward the end, but when it’s good it’s disorienting, laden with dread, and absolutely singular in its vision. It’s hard as hell to explain why it works, but it does.

Highlights: Overthrone, Exhibition, The Mandela Catalogue Vol. 333

Local 58TV on IMDB

Local58TV on YouTube
 

Gemini Home Entertainment on IMDB

Gemini Home Entertainment on YouTube
 

The Mandela Catalogue on IMDB

The Mandela Catalogue on YouTube

The Pond: Stagnant

I sort of feel like trailers are a necessary evil for this thing of mine. I like going into films as blind as possible, but if I’m curious about something or am just casting about for more films to consider, trailers (and trailer compilations on YouTube if I’m being totally honest) can give me a quick thumbnail sketch, not just in the trailer itself, but how it’s put together. If the trailer indulges in the stylistic cliches of the moment, the film probably will too. If it doesn’t, if it shows me something promising, then cool. Now I’ve got another movie to check out.

Usually it serves me pretty well, but I gotta say, I feel like I got suckered this time. When you watch the trailer for The Pond, it’s promising - you think it’s gonna be some out-there folk/cosmic horror shit, but no, it’s just a pointlessly cryptic slog that feels like someone watched shows like Katla and Zone Blanche and thought it’d get over on quirk alone. It does not.

That said, it’s got a pretty striking opening shot. It’s an aerial view of a body lying in the middle of a field. The shot is held for a bit, before the body…just gets up and walks away. It’s a little odd, a little sinister. But that doesn’t last long. We cut to a man sitting in a small, modest trailer, typing out things on a laptop. He doesn’t even have a name, he’s credited as “The Professor.” And he’s definitely the stock academic – salt-and-pepper beard, rustic sweater, sleeping with a former student, the whole deal. He’s living on a remote island in a rural part of Eastern Europe, studying…something? It’s never clear, he’s just looking at a bunch of maps of incidence rates of things like death from disease, obesity rates, paths of hurricanes and deaths by accidents, and they’re all connectable by Fibonacci spirals. Then he types out some quasi-profound stuff like “SOCIETY PRODUCES FEAR” and he looks up some stuff about how we can only see a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum…so there could be things out there we cannot see! Spooky! When one shot shows him consulting a website called “The Daily Science,” it is…not reassuring. He was apparently suspended from his position at…a university, I guess?...because he has some weird ideas about impending apocalypse. At least, I think that’s the deal. Nothing is made very clear, which is in and of itself not always a bad thing, but this film has a bad habit of dropping all kinds of stuff into our lap with little to no context or opportunity to figure things out for ourselves. There’s little telling, and no showing. Just a bunch of stuff that’s supposed to add up to something and never really does.

So he’s out here with his former student and his daughter by his late wife, in some kind of academic exile. He’s convinced that there’s something terrible coming and he’s on the verge of grasping it, and so he’s out here in the sticks, in a trailer camp on the edge of a large pond (hence the title, though the importance of the pond is never made clear) in a small community of people whose chief defining characteristic is that they’re all kind of weird. There’s another guy that the professor plays chess with, and they have conversations that I think are supposed to be mysterious and inscrutable but just come off as the musings of a college freshman who just discovered weed, there are two obnoxious little girls who keep pestering the professor to let his daughter play with them, there’s a woodsman with an anger management problem, and a boatman who ferries people across the pond. He doesn’t speak at all, he just sort of sits slumped and unresponsive in the boat with a strange piece of headgear that looks sort of like pillows that you just keep strapped to your head. It’s all reminiscent of that whole strain of television that sort of sprung out of Twin Peaks, the rural community where strange things are happening, except in my experience those shows have actual characters with lives and relationships. Here, less so. It’ s just a bunch of people out in the middle of nowhere being gratuitously weird. Every now and then the professor’s daughter will talk about a monster that she sees in her nightmares, and every now and then someone in an effectively creepy mask made out of branches will sort of show up in the background. Nobody really comments on it.

So the narrative falls flat, and so does the execution. This film was written and performed by people for whom English is not a first language, and though I won’t fault anyone for that by itself, I think the decision to have English be the film’s spoken language was a mistake. The dialogue is clumsy and stilted, as are the performances. People don’t say things so much as they recite them, and it’s all slightly off – not the worst translation I’ve ever heard (still looking at you, Seytan), but…just awkward enough to inhabit some kind of linguistic uncanny valley. It's sort of off-putting, and again, this by itself isn’t necessarily a problem, but it doesn’t feel intentionally off-putting. Everything is delivered so flatly, with so little emotion that it’s almost parodic, a comedic approximation of Scandinavian art films where people stand stiffly and say things that you get are supposed to be profound but just seem like nonsense. I don’t know that the filmmakers were going for profundity so much as surrealism, but they didn’t hit that either. Mostly it’s just obtuse, and there’s no payoff, no revelation of some kind of purpose behind the strangeness. What horrifying truths I think we’re supposed to glean all show up in the last ten minutes, and because our ability to invest in these characters is minimal, and the stakes never really made apparent, they feel less like horrifying truths and more like “oh, okay.”

And absolutely none of this is helped by the film’s pacing – well, I say “pacing,” but there’s one pace: Slow. Things just sort of happen at the rate of a drip, People say things, they move from one place to another, occasionally something odd or unsettling pops up in the background before moving on to the next thing, without notice or comment. It’s a bad sign that I was only about a third of the way through it before I was moved to check to see how much longer I had. It’s not slow enough to create a feeling or mood, it’s just a metronomic plod with no rising tension, no moments of action, just one thing after another. It’s clumsy, frustratingly slow, and…drab. Gray, overcast, colorless, and that’s a legitimate choice, but when everything else about the film is equally colorless, the overall feeling is…well, again, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it oppressive, it just sort of lands at dull. At 90 minutes, it’s a trudge. Flat people delivering clumsy lines in a gray setting. The number of even slightly unsettling moments can be counted on one hand, and they pass as unremarkably as any other moment in this film.

Slow, strange, cryptic, bleak, all of these are valid choices, I think. But cryptic only works if the audience can, by the time the film is over, make some connections for themselves. There doesn’t have to be one correct interpretation (miss me with all of the videos “explaining” the endings of movies) or anything, just the opportunity to derive some meaning from it. And slow, strange, and bleak only work if they evoke a mood, if they make the audience feel things. Nothing about this film inspires feelings beyond impatience and frustration. The trailer promises something upon which the actual film can’t even begin to deliver.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet Of Curiosities: A Whitman's Sampler Of Horror, For Good And Ill

It’s been awhile since I tackled a horror anthology. When they’re good, they do with film what good short story collections do with literature. As I’ve said on a number of occasions, it’s easy for horror to get sort of bogged down in the longer form - I think horror is at its best most often when it’s concise and doesn’t overexplain or overstay its welcome, and the longer the story goes on, the tougher it is to really sustain whatever mood or feeling the story is trying to evoke.

But if I’m being honest, I didn’t necessarily watch Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet Of Curiosities with the express intent of writing about it, but it made a distinct impression (not always good, but still), and the film I intended to write about this week ended up being sort of a dud - it wasn’t horror (even by my admittedly generous standards) and moreover it was, well, just sort of there. And I think didn’t think “gosh, that was a really dull story in some very lovely settings” was going to be much of an insight. Cabinet Of Curiosities doesn’t always work - it doesn’t have a single cohesive tone running through the stories, and many of the episodes drag on too long, but there are some real gems in there too.

There are eight episodes, each with a different writer and director, and they end up breaking down into three groups: EC Comics-style morality tales, H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, and more straightforward horror. So, I’m going to group the episodes that way, instead of strictly chronologically.

EC Comics-Style Morality Tales

Episode 1: Lot 36

Nick is an Iraq War veteran with a lot of resentment about the way he was treated when he came back home, and he’s decided to blame it on minorities and immigrants. He does what he can to get by, and that mostly consists of a tidy little scam he’s got running with the owner of a local self-storage place. Periodically, the owner will place the contents of units that haven’t paid their rent up for auction. This is apparently pretty commonplace, as the existence of the show Storage Wars would suggest. Except that Nick is able to outbid everyone else with the assistance of the owner, and then they split the profits from the content of the unit. So the owner’s basically double-dipping with Nick as his proxy. Nick’s in a bit of a tight spot - his truck gets vandalized by an angry competitor, he gets banged up in the process, and the last couple of hauls haven’t been great. So the most recent lot - Lot 36, the property of someone who just died of a heart attack - needs to pay off. And Nick finds all kinds of stuff in there - lots of antique furniture, including what appears to be a séance table…

…and three books about the summoning of demons. The fourth volume is missing, and Nick can get a lot for a complete set.

I think there are a couple of things that keep this from being an especially strong episode. First, it feels like thirty minutes of story rattling around in forty-five minutes of run time. The setup is fairly simple - weaselly jerk gets in over his head out of sheer greed and ends up tinkering with forces he doesn’t understand - but it’s not presented in a way that’s enough to sustain half of a feature-length film. It feels padded, and the time isn’t really used to flesh out the characters. Which is another problem - most of the characters feel like they inhabit the same world, but there are two who feel dropped in from a much more cartoonish story, and it’s jarring as a result. This could have been played much lower-key and I think it would have worked a lot better. But instead we have some unnecessary back-and-forth before the story really comes to a head, and when it does, the inevitable moral comeuppance feels sort of bolted on, like they decided at the last minute to make it that kind of story.

Episode 2: Graveyard Rats 

Masson is a grave robber in post-WW1 Salem, Massachusetts, doing his best to keep his head above water. He’s in debt and increasing competition in his unsavory trade is making it harder and harder for him to really bring in profitable hauls. Not to mention the rats, who seem to be able to tunnel right up through the caskets and make off with the pretty, shiny things that Masson needs to make any money. But he gets wind of a wealthy aristocrat who has just been laid to rest, and so once again he sets out in the dead of night, locates the grave, begins digging, unearthing the casket, only to find that the rats have beaten him to the punch, making off with the entire body. The bottom of the casket is completely gone, and in its place, a tunnel leading down deep into the earth.

And so, desperation nipping at his heels, Masson crawls into the earth.

In some ways, this episode is an improvement over Lot 36, in that it’s much more concise. It’s only about eight minutes shorter, but it uses its time much more efficiently, establishing the situation and then using most of its running time on Masson’s claustrophobic journey through an extensive warren running under the graveyard and the horrifying things he finds there. There’s much more beneath the earth than he thought, and what started as a dive down becomes a frenzied scramble to reach the surface. This episode is much more in the classic mold of the EC Comics-style morality tale, complete with a twist comeuppance that ties the whole thing together elegantly. And all of that is good about it, but it’s based on a story from the time in which it’s set, and something about the dialogue, though appropriate for the period, comes off as more affected than anything else. I don’t know if it’s the performances, but it all feels sort of stagey and artificial and so I found it hard to really get into it. Everything felt a little caricatured, and though campy is definitely in the wheelhouse of these sorts of stories, here the ingredients didn’t quite gel.

Episode 4: The Outside

Stacey is a shy, awkward teller at a bank. She has a loving husband, she enjoys doing taxidermy in her spare time, but she feels left out of things at work, where the other tellers - so much prettier and more glamorous - natter on about the expensive, exclusive things they buy, the vacations they take, gossip about the other employees at the bank, and Stacey wants more than anything to be able to join in, to be accepted by the rest of them. And one day, she gets her chance - one of the other tellers invites her to her annual Christmas party, and Stacey does everything she can to doll herself up, labors over just the right present, worries over every detail. And, of course, she’s totally out of place and out of her league among these women, and her handcrafted gift has nothing on the fancy gifts the hostess has gotten everyone - tubes of fancy skin lotion called Alo Glo. It’s the latest thing, extremely hard to get, very exclusive. And Stacey is sure it’s everything she’ll need to be just as pretty as the other women, to finally belong. Except when she uses it, her skin starts to redden and peel. But that’s normal, she thinks. So she uses more. And more.

And her body starts to change.

Of the three morality-tale episodes, this is easily the most successful. It locates body horror in a glossy, garishly colored vision of 1980’s Midwestern life seen through a slightly fisheyed, distorted lens. It all looks slightly unreal, and the performances follow, pitched at a level of deadpan absurdity that brings to mind Fargo by way of David Lynch. Stacey is both protagonist and antagonist, her own worst enemy as her insecurities consume more and more of her waking life. And what I think makes it work is that it’s played very straight, on a very even keel, no matter how horrible it gets (which it definitely does toward the end) and it ends in a way that isn’t typical for morality tales, refusing to tie everything up neatly and ending on a distinctly unsettling note.

H.P. Lovecraft Adaptations

Episode 5: Pickman’s Model

The time is 1909, and the place is an art school in Arkham, Massachusetts. Will Thurber is there to become the best painter he can, to make great art. Like his fellow students, he’s fiery, passionate, and extremely competitive. And mid-term, along comes a new student named Richard Pickman. Pickman is older than the rest of them, and has something of a shadowy past, his family having been the subject of some rumor. But he’s an excellent artist, inspiring a mixture of awe and jealousy in the rest of the students. He seems driven by something, even more than the rest of them, as if he’s trying to exorcise something through his art. He and Will strike up a friendship, and Pickman invites him around to his quarters to view the paintings he’s been working on outside of class.

Paintings that give Will nightmares.

Right off the bat, I’m going to give the filmmakers for both this and the other Lovecraft adaptation props for choosing stories outside of the Cthulhu mythos. That’s already pretty well-trod ground at this point, so it’s nice to see some of his other work getting attention (and removing the grosser elements of Lovecraft’s sensibilities in the process). The settings feel right, and unlike Graveyard Rats, the characters act and sound like people from the early 20th century without coming off as performances or caricatures (though it is sort of interesting to see what part of the U.S. Pickman's accent is going to visit from one scene to another). But I think this episode, more than any other, suffers from an overlong running time. It’s slightly more than an hour, and the original story was pretty succinct, so there’s more than a little wheel-spinning. And, although it’s been a long time since I read the original story, I don’t recall the climax and conclusion being part of the story at all - it’s much more generic horror, out of step with Lovecraft’s style, and feels like it was appended to flesh out the running time. It isn’t necessary and doesn’t add anything to the story.

Episode 6: Dreams In The Witch House

Walter Gilman has spent most of his life trying to part the veil between this world and the next. It’s personal for him, as he saw his ailing twin sister Epperley, in her final moments, dragged away through some portal into a mysterious forest. It’s haunted him ever since, and he’s determined to find a way to get to her and bring her back to the world of the living. But for all of his time as a member of the Spiritualist Society, he’s never found a legitimate instance of someone speaking to the dead. They all end up being frauds and charlatans. At the end of his rope, he follows up on a dubious lead about a substance referred to as “liquid gold” - a drug that allows you to see into the spirit world and gives you access to the “Forest of Lost Souls.” So Walter - at a loss for reliable housing and about to experiment with some really dangerous shit - rents a room in a boarding house that’s seen better days. It’s going for cheap, and the last occupant - a woman named Keziah Mason - was executed for witchcraft.

The walls are covered with arcane writing and symbology. And there’s something scuttling behind them.

Unfortunately, I think this was the nadir of the series - the episode is disjointed, the performances range from decent to hammy, there’s not much of a clear through-line for the story, and things that I’m pretty sure worked well on the page end up coming across as silly on the screen. Is it the quality of the effects? Is it being maybe too faithful to the text? Possibly. All I know is that between one particular casting choice (whose performance is fine), the setting, and the way the story is realized, the whole thing sort of feels like Harry Potter on bath salts, but not, you know, in a good way.

Straightforward Horror

Episode 4: The Autopsy

It all begins with a horrible mining accident. An elevator full of miners is coming up at the end of their shift, when one of them, Joe Allen, comes barreling along behind, landing on top of the elevator cage. Something tumbles out of his hand - some kind of small, spherical piece of technology. It starts humming and beeping, and then it explodes, killing him and the other miners. This is the worst accident they’ve seen in awhile, and so the sheriff, Nate Craven, calls in for expert help. There are something like eleven autopsies that need to be conducted in short order, so the mining company can distance themselves from it and avoid any liability. So Nate calls in his old friend, a medical examiner named Dr. Carl Winters. Carl’s getting on in years, but he’s very good at his job, and knows the score. A makeshift morgue has been set up for him, and he’s going to be at it all night. Once he’s settled in and has all of his equipment laid out, he looks at the file to determine where to start.

And as he does, Joe Allen’s body starts to move.

I think all of the straightforward horror episodes are the strongest ones in the series, and this one’s a doozy. It’s got a great graveyard shift vibe, this doctor all alone across the hall from a roomful of corpses, lit from above, everything else silent as the rest of the town sleeps. The performances are convincing and understated, with some later revelations emerging naturally from what went before. And once it gets rolling, it’s a doozy - sharp, merciless, grisly, and even more impressive, it’s as carried by one extremely unnerving monologue as it is the more explicit stuff. In its own way, it’s as Lovecraftian as the actual Lovecraft adaptations (if not moreso) and it just tightens the screws tighter and tighter and tighter until it ends with a great twist and moment of discovery. Short-form horror at its best.

Episode 7: The Viewing

It is very much 1979, and wealthy, enigmatic recluse Lionel Lassiter has invited four people to his home for a special occasion. There’s the famous music producer Randall Roth, astronomer Charlotte Xie, best-selling author Guy Landon, and celebrity psychic Targ Reinhhard. If they know each other at all, it’s only by reputation, and none of them really know why they’ve been invited here. Lassiter and his doctor, known only as “Dr. Zahra,” want their input into the nature of an artifact that has come into his possession. Words, music, the mind, the stars - he thinks all of these will be important. So he prepares them with a mixture of cocaine and a bespoke drug of Dr. Zahra’s design, to put them all on the same wavelength. They walk into the next room, where the artifact sits on a pedestal, part sculpture, part meteor.

And then someone touches it.

What follows is mostly everything going berserk all at once. This episode was directed by Panos Cosmatos, whose previous films - Mandy and Beyond The Black Rainbow - are definitely an acquired taste, but one that I very much have. If you’re on his very specific wavelength, you’ll be into it. If not, it’ll probably seem like self-indulgent nonsense. And it sort of is. His films are very much about style and aesthetic over everything else, but it works, at least for me, because in addition to pressing very specific aesthetic buttons that are very much my shit, he turns everything up to the point of near-surrealism. This is no different. Lassiter’s house is a marvel of early 80s cocaine chic (complete with gold-plated AK-47), the majority of it is shot like a music video from the time period, and Lassiter is delightfully sinister - like Timothy Leary gone rancid. When things pop off (literally, in some cases), it lurches immediately into Cronenberg territory, a little bit of alien biology and a little bit of Scanners. Sure, some of the other characters are saddled with kind of goofy dialogue and Cosmatos really likes his shaggy-dog endings (which I think is a weakness), but if you can overlook those things, this is a ride - equally strange, funny, and gross.

Episode 8; The Murmuring

We open on a research presentation. Nancy and Edgar Bradley are ornithologists, studying the murmurations of starlings - when they flock, it’s more like a swarm than anything else. There’s an intelligence there, and they’re getting close to a breakthrough. So they pack up and head out into the country, someplace close to the water, where they can observe flocking from a great distance, record their songs and film the murmurations as they happen. They can focus on their work, and very much not focus on their recent tragedy. Edgar’s holding up, Nancy less so. It’s a secluded home on the beach that’s been tended to by a caretaker ever since the original tenants - a mother and son - vacated it. At first, everything’s fine, Nancy’s maybe a little hesitant, a little closed-off, a little private, but given what they’ve just been through, that’s understandable.

And then Nancy starts seeing apparitions - a crying boy, and a screaming woman.

This is very much a straightforward ghost story in the traditional style - beautiful old home with lots of secrets and dark corners, beautifully overcast and windswept vistas, and ghostly figures urging someone to tell their story. Much of the tension comes from Edgar’s insistence that Nancy is seeing (and hearing) things as the result of unprocessed grief and Nancy trying to convince Edgar that what she’s seeing is real while at the same time being in absolute denial about her grief. So it’s as much a story about the corrosive effects of unprocessed grief and trauma as it is about the supernatural and how one parallels the other (much like the director’s equally excellent prior film, The Babadook). It’s spooky without relying on jump scares, atmospheric, and smart, with excellent performances from both protagonists.

So by my estimation, about half of the episodes are good (with two being flat-out excellent), three are flawed, and one just doesn’t work. Given how diverse the episodes are in tone and how different the source material and directors are, this is probably not a bad ratio. I’d be happy to see another season of this, if only to see more good work from established writers and directors and picking up some new ones to check out. And, apart from some of the stuff from Turkey and India that they’ve got right now, some of the better examples of horror on Netflix right now.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Paura Nella Citta Dei Morti Viventi: Rinse, Repeat

As someone still in the process of familiarizing myself with classic Italian horror, one conclusion to which I’ve come so far is that although much of Dario Argento’s work is easy to appreciate (and certainly creates a template others have followed), Lucio Fulci’s work is, to me, more interesting. It’s less sophisticated - actually, in some ways it’s downright primitive - but that gives it a sort of gonzo verve that I don’t really get from Argento’s films. Even Suspiria, which is admittedly pretty bonkers, takes a bit to really spool up. But from the very beginning of The Beyond, it felt like “strap in, this is gonna go places.” And it did. There’s something I like about a film that’s just willing to go berserk, I like the feeling of having no idea what’s coming next.

And so I have to say, I was looking forward to Paura Nella Citta Dei Morti Viventi (City Of The Living Dead, also screened in the United States as Gates Of Hell), the first in Fulci’s “living dead” trilogy, of which The Beyond was the second film. I was looking forward to it, but it ended up being kind of disappointing. It’s as gonzo as I expected, but it’s also oddly meandering, which makes for an overall frustrating viewing experience.

This film gets right down to business. Plain, stark opening titles over a tracking shot through a cemetery. A priest wanders through the cemetery, as if lost in thought. The location is Dunwich, Massachusetts, where as we will learn later “all those witches were burned.” Elsewhere, in New York, a group of people are holding a séance with a psychic named Mary Woodhouse - a séance that starts to go awry when Mary has visions of the priest we just saw hanging himself. Cut back to the priest, who has in fact just hung himself. Mary screams and falls to the ground, convulsing. Then she dies. Perhaps it’s a slow news day, because a reporter named Peter Bell notices all the commotion outside the brownstone where Mary died, and figured there was a story there - especially after the police are really evasive about what happened.

So Peter sneaks into the hospital, trying to figure out what happened to Mary, when she sort of just…wakes up again? Maybe she got better? It’s never really explained. The important thing is that this priest committing suicide in a cemetery in a town where witch trials were once held ends up being some kind of supernatural hat trick, opening one of the gates to Hell. Now the ghost of this priest is wandering around and the dead are coming back to life. This is less than ideal, and Mary, along with Peter, sets off to find the cemetery where this priest hung himself, because if they don’t close the gate by All Saints Day (the day before Halloween), the dead will flood out of their graves and overrun the planet.

That’s pretty much it, and the rest of the film alternates between Mary and Peter trying to find where this cemetery is based on her visions and everything going really, really badly in Dunwich in assorted ways to assorted people. So, to start, it has a lot of the same hallmarks as the film that would follow it. It’s got the same wooden acting (almost nobody in the film seems especially fazed by anything that happens, at least, not until it starts getting really gross) and dialogue so awkward and clumsy that it’s almost surreal. The approach to storytelling isn’t so much storytelling as it is just things happening without much rhyme or reason. About the best way to describe it is that it’s crude. But, like The Beyond, this is one of its virtues as well. The limitations mean that some things end up being communicated via interesting shot composition or elements just blinking in and out of existence, and the extensive effects work is simultaneously cheap, novel, and tactile. This is a very…gooey…movie, and there were a couple of points where my feelings were exactly balanced between “well, I’ve never seen that before” and “oh god, my lunch is really restless at this moment.” It’s pretty inventive on that front, and I have to say, having to rely on simple optical and practical effects make it visceral, both figuratively and literally. This is what I like about Fulci’s films - they are very much experiences and they’re far enough out of my comfort zone that I never know where they’re going to go, even if I’m kind of queasy as I take the ride.

But those are the strengths. The weaknesses are, unfortunately, just as compelling. I don’t know that I can call this an ensemble film so much as it is a film with a bunch of characters in a few separate locations, but the end result is something less like a single movie and more like a collection of side stories without a single actual story to hold it all together. This gives the whole thing a meandering feel, where it just sort of moves from one set of characters and locations to another without much in the way of urgency or singular driving action. Sure, Peter and Mary are theoretically the main protagonists, but they don’t get any more or less screen time than any other group, so it just sort of feels like they’re over here, doing some stuff. There’s also Sandra and her therapist Gerry, Gerry’s suspiciously young girlfriend Emily, then Emily’s younger brother John-John (yes, “John-John”), Bob, who appears to be the town pervert, a couple of lovebirds who come to a nasty end, some dudes in a bar, and a man in whose garage Bob takes refuge, and his teenage daughter. The film bounces back and forth between all of these groups, and a lot of the film is similar action playing out in each group - characters are confused, something spooky happens, something disgusting happens right afterward, and somebody generally dies - so it feels repetitive as well as highly mechanical. Open scene, establish people, introduce creepiness, introduce gore, lather, rinse repeat.

The result is a movie that’s only an hour and a half long, but feels like two and a half hours, and on top of that, the end is a baffling mess- the film doesn’t so much end as it does just…stop. It’s not so much anticlimactic as it is nonsensical. I’m glad I watched The Beyond first, because I suspect if I’d started here, I wouldn’t have gone any further with Fulci’s filmography. At least I know he managed to pull it together (relatively speaking) for his next film.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon 

Okaruto: Missed It By That Much

Most of the found-footage movies that get made anymore tend to be of the raw-footage variety - you know, “this terrible thing happened and here’s the recovered footage to tell the story”, that kind of thing. Which makes sense, there’s an immediacy to it that can ramp up the tension and fear just by virtue of not knowing what comes next, like you are experiencing the events just as the protagonists did. That’s the quality that gives The Blair Witch Project its sense of disintegration and madness in the face of an invisible menace and [REC] its careening, oh-shit-things-just-got-worse momentum. But I think there’s also something to be said for the mockumentary, the docudrama in which an investigative team seeks to answer a question and gets far more than they bargained for. It sacrifices some of the immediacy, but also allows for possibly a more complex story to unfold.

Okaruto (Occult) builds its story quietly and deliberately, leading the viewer down weirder and weirder roads until you realize you've ended up someplace batshit insane without quite knowing how you got there.

The film opens on three young women visiting a scenic waterfall. They’re just goofing around, passing the camera back and forth on a bridge that goes over the falls, when suddenly there’s a commotion at one end as people run from an assailant. When all is said and done, two people will be dead and a third scarred by the hand of a knife-wielding assailant. At this point, the film flashes forward several years to a documentary crew trying in retrospect to make sense of the attack, working with a friend of one of the victims. The film moves back and forth between investigations in the present and a Zapruder-like examination of the camcorder footage from that day. Little details take on greater significance, and not everything is exactly as it seems at first.

This is, on its face, pretty much Spooky Found Footage Movie 101. What makes Okaruto interesting is the way in which it hints at the much larger mystery hiding behind the initial one. There’s very little in the way of conventional scares, with everything unfolding primarily through conversation and small moments. Every turn, every reveal, makes the story a little stranger, and it shifts pretty quickly from being about the victims and bystanders of the original stabbings to being about whatever those stabbings set in motion. There are red herrings and false leads, but pretty quickly the focus shifts to Edo, a survivor of the original attack who seems to be something of a drifter, and from there the film becomes more about Edo’s life now and how it has changed since he survived the attack. It functions a lot like a pot of water being brought slowly to a boil - everything seems innocuous enough, or conventionally spooky enough to make you think that you have a decent handle on what’s going on, but by the time you realize that you’ve ended up in another different type of horror altogether. There are no real spikes in drama or tension - things just sort of happen in or out of frame, and there’s an unflappability about everyone involved that disguises exactly how high the stakes are getting until you realize what’s being planned, and then it’s too late. Things have developed their own momentum, and you’re just along for the ride.

As events move closer to their inevitable conclusion, the film gets tenser and tenser, counting down from hours to minutes to mere seconds, and just when you think you've wrapped it up neatly as a folie a deux with a reasonable explanation, the end drops one more twist on you. And herein lies the film’s major problem. This has been a low-budget film all the way through, and generally that’s okay - that’s one of the things that found-footage films do well. They make cheapness a virtue instead of a distraction. And as long as the weird supernatural stuff is kept low-key, the obvious lack of budget isn’t too distracting. But then, in an effort to throw in one more fillip, the filmmakers attempt an end stinger that goes beyond low-budget into the realm of so cheap as to be downright silly. The end result is a big gamble gone wrong, robbing the film of a lot of the power it might have otherwise. It's sort of like ending The Blair Witch Project with cardboard-and-tinfoil outtakes from an old episode of Doctor Who. Which is too bad - if they'd ended it a little sooner or had been a little less direct, carried the quiet, deliberate subtlety of the rest of the movie all the way to the end, it could have been spooky as hell.

IMDB entry

How I Would Have Done It: The Banshee Chapter

(What I'd like to do in my How I Would Have Done It posts is examine a movie that I think didn't live up to its potential and, well, talk about how I would have done it if I'd been the writer or director. Mostly because just leaving it at "that was dumb" or "that sucked" is kind of unsatisfying, especially when there was something really good buried in there somewhere. I'll be discussing story elements in detail, so all kinds of spoilers await.)

The Banshee Chapter is one of those movies that looks great on paper. It's a story of cosmic horror based on a synthesis of history and real-life phenomena. Weird drugs, ethically bereft government research, mysterious broadcasts, all pointing toward something strange peering back at us from across the veil of reality. It begins with a journalist investigating the strange circumstances around the disappearance of an old college buddy, and the more she discovers, the deeper the rabbit hole goes, until she's immersed in the secret history of one of the darkest periods in American history, and the horrible price we have paid (and continue to pay) for our curiosity.

Or, at least that would be the case if the whole enterprise weren't dragged down by a pervasive narrative incoherence. The Banshee Chapter has a very hard time settling on the story it wants to tell and how it wants to tell it, and the end result is enough of a mess to undo the goodwill engendered by a strong premise. As such, if I were going to make the movie, a lot of things I’d focus on would have to do with streamlining the narrative and giving it a much clearer focus.

The Banshee Chapter: The Sum Of A Bunch Of Parts

For me, a big part of what interests me in horror is premise. A good premise can scare the shit out of you before you even read the story or watch the movie. I remember my father describing the basic premise of Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado to me as a 10-year-old child, and the idea scared me so much that it was years before I could bring myself to read the story. The opening title card to The Blair Witch Project gave me the same chill. A strong enough idea sets the stage for the story itself. It's not always necessary, but it can be attractive. And I have weaknesses for specific types of stories - secret histories, utterly unknowable forces from beyond space and time, and people investigating mysterious events among them. So when a story whose premise touches on all of those things, using real-world events as a touchstone comes along, I am there.

Unfortunately, The Banshee Chapter, in its inability to commit to a narrative approach or a coherent story, squanders an excellent premise.

It is nominally the story of journalist Anne Roland, who is looking into the mysterious disappearance of her college friend, struggling writer James Hirsch. James was writing a book about the aftermath of a series of clandestine government drug trials, and in the course of his research managed to obtain a sample of one of the drugs used. As foolish young people are wont to do, he has a friend of his videotape him while he tries the drug (a powerful hallucinogen), and it starts off as a pretty mild trip - James hears some weird sounds, okay fine - before things begin getting very weird. James sees mysterious figures watching him, approaching his house. The radio starts playing some sort of strange sequence of tones - tones his friend can hear as well. Then a figure flashes by the camera, and all is chaos.

Chaos that ends with a stuttering, noisy image of James, his face slack and deathly white, eyes totally black, mouth streaming with blood. And then he's gone.

What Anne discovers in the course of her research is that once upon a time, the U.S. government did a series of experiments with different hallucinogens in an effort to discover some kind of mind control drug they could use in interrogation and counterespionage. At least one of these substances had a curious effect - everyone who took it saw the same thing, and felt like something was watching them back. Something went terribly wrong, and the research was buried. It appears as though James got in touch with some people who had dug it back up again, and this leads Anne on a trip down the rabbit hole, as she becomes involved with some very strange people, and sees some very strange things, suggesting that something is watching us from just beyond our perception, perception that can be shifted by just the right alteration in brain chemistry. So we've got secret science, horrors from beyond reality, and people who live on the fringes of everyday life, changed by the terrible knowledge they have. This is the sort of premise that gets me on board right away. Unfortunately, the execution of this premise fails on multiple levels.

The problems begin with how the movie leaps from one narrative conceit to another - it opens with an establishing title card, and then cycles through actual archival footage, (obviously) faked archival footage, modern found-footage home recordings, all of which finally shifts to a conventional narrative style, all within the first three minutes of the movie. There's no central framing device - there's voiceover at the beginning from the protagonist as if this is all being told in retrospect, but given the events of the movie, that doesn't make sense. One character is introduced through 1970s-style retrospective footage, like we're watching a docudrama, even though we aren't. There's footage of old experiments scattered throughout the film to no apparent purpose, because it's established early on that Bad Shit Happened, and revealing what happened bit by bit doesn't actually add any new information to the overall story. Everything we see in these experiments is either supported by earlier scenes or doesn't add any specific information - just "whoo, this was some weird shit." Which we already know. There's one bit at the end that's supposed to be a surprise, I guess, but it's heavily foreshadowed, doesn't really add anything meaningful to the story, and isn't really a reversal or reveal of anything surprising. Scenes throughout the rest of the movie hop from being shot in a conventional omniscient style to being shot from a found-footage style using phone cameras for no apparent reason, sometimes shifting within a single scene. It draws from about three or four different styles of storytelling, but never establishes a rationale for doing so, and this distracts from engagement in the story instead of enhancing it. There's just too much going on cinematically,  so it feels less like a story and more like a bunch of scenes from two or three different movies spliced together on accident.

This piling-on extends to the actual story as well - you've got government drug studies (that really happened), a hallucinogen which provides its users with what feels like a window into an alien world (and is a real drug), and mysterious shortwave radio stations broadcasting cryptic combinations of numbers for no discernible reason (and really exist), but the whole thing lacks a central narrative thesis. Is it about the studies? Is it about this drug? Is it about these mysterious broadcasts? Is it about the mysterious disappearance of this one young man? It ends up being about the mysterious disappearance, but by the time it gets to that point we've already been told about the drug studies and the weird drug, as well as being told outright that the people who took this drug saw something horrifying and traumatizing, so there aren't really any surprises left. The mysterious broadcasts barely figure in at all, and feel shoehorned in as a result. The whole thing feels like it's supposed to be a "person investigating this mysterious thing goes deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole and things get weirder and weirder" story, but everything's pretty much laid out up front, so it's less a journey into the heart of darkness, and more just this person discovering a bunch of stuff we already know. It's not necessarily a problem that the audience has information the characters don't, but in this type of story, you really need the audience to find out stuff along with the characters for it to be effectively scary. There's little to no horror in discovery as a result - oh, sure, some of the details are kind of creepy, but they're revealed haphazardly, and at a point when everything's already sort of going to hell and we know bad shit is happening, so their impact is largely lost.

As if the general narrative incoherence isn't bad enough, the story itself lacks internal consistency. I don't like nitpicking over plot holes or inconsistencies, it feels less like actual criticism and more like a way to appear smarter than the filmmakers. However, if the holes are big enough to take me out of the story, to break my engagement in the moment, then that's a problem. Why does the drug also affect people who haven't taken it? Why is James' friend getting the hard sell from the cops when there's videotaped evidence exonerating him in his friends' disappearance? (And we know there's videotaped evidence because we've seen it.) Why did James' friend also disappear, and why doesn't anyone mention this fact until the end of the movie? Why doesn't Anne recognize "Friends From Colorado" as the title of a book when she's familiar with the author and his work (as she should be, as both she and James were writers)? Anne is supposed to be a journalist, but she has absolutely none of the skepticism or savvy you'd expect of one, and makes really bad decisions not just in all of the places people make bad decisions in horror movies, but also in places where we have every reason to believe that she knows better. It goes way beyond "why aren't these people behaving as perfectly rational actors" territory and into "wait, that actually doesn't make sense" territory, and that further disrupts immersion in the story. At the very beginning, James suggests that the frightening experiences some people have had after taking the drug informs the name of "the chapter" (hence the title), but it's never made clear to what he's referring - is it a chapter of his book? And what do banshees have to do with it? It's a small thing, but it's teased and then never paid off, which contributes to the overall lack of narrative focus.

This lack of believability isn't helped by the acting and dialogue either - people in this movie are exposition generators to a distracting extent. There's a character whose entire purpose in the story is to explain what numbers stations are - and nothing else. He shows up in one scene, tells Anne what numbers stations are, Anne quizzes him about his work for the NSA, he clams up, and he never shows up again. People don't talk to each other in this movie, they tell each other things, if that distinction makes sense. Anne even says stuff out loud when she's alone that nobody ever says out loud when they're alone because it is apparently necessary for us to know these things, and for whatever reason, they aren't communicated through action. The tendency to tell instead of show becomes so literal as to have a character describe the H.P. Lovecraft story From Beyond to another character, when the point of the film is to tell a very similar story. The filmmakers had so little confidence in or connection to their own material that they actually had one of their characters say in essence "hey, this is like this one scary story - scary, huh?" You make a story Lovecraftian by dealing with similar themes or imagery, not by name-dropping H.P. Lovecraft. You couldn't get more "telling" instead of "showing" if you tried.

There are some suitably spooky settings - the house of a Hunter S. Thompson-esque writer/drug casualty, abandoned stretches of McMansions, empty deserts, an old fallout shelter - but they largely go squandered because most of the movie ends up being the protagonist wandering through really dark places with a flashlight, pretty much so that when she turns to shine her light someplace, there can be something standing there that wasn't there before. Most of the horror in this movie ends up being jump scares - sudden appearances of things where there was nothing before, accompanied by some kind of musical sting. Used sparingly, they can be effective, but that's all there is here, used to the point of punctuation. Any given scene in this movie ends up being dialogue, foreshadowing, jump scare, cut to next scene. There's little atmosphere or mood, because we can't really see anything, and everything feels like setup for something icky to pop up out of nowhere. After the first couple of times, it gets tedious and irritating.

And that's finally what's most disappointing to me about The Banshee Chapter, because all of the right parts are there. You've got horrifying science, bizarre drug experiences, and mysterious messages - all of which could be used to tell a story about the secret history of the world (and I am a total sucker for those sorts of stories). You have someone investigating a mystery that brings her into contact with increasingly stranger people and discovering increasingly more horrifying things (and I am a total sucker for those sorts of stories as well) and leads to the realization that there is something out there in the dark, just beyond the veil of reality, waiting for us (which is a very Lovecraftian idea, and yep, total sucker for those sorts of stories as well). This is the perfect premise for a slow-burn story of cosmic horror, where things don't feel quite right and feel even less right as the story goes on until the full weight of implication crashes in on the protagonist (and by extension us) and the true scope of how wrong everything is is revealed. It could be a trip down the rabbit hole into the strange subcultures still lurking in forgotten corners of the country, digging up ugly secrets which in turn hint at even worse lurking in the dark beyond. That it's all based on stuff that actually happened is just absolute cake. There's so much potential here, but the presentation is so slapdash in its cinematography, staging, plotting, and writing that much of what's naturally scary about the material is lost. Instead of a story about the strange secrets stashed in abandoned places, and the horrors to which they point, all we get is halfhearted nods to those things through scattershot exposition, in between the same old interchangeable boogeymen jumping out of the same old interchangeable dark.

IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon
Available from Amazon Instant Video
Unvailable from Netflix

Dead Birds: Insert Scary Thing Here

Scary movies inspire a lot of different emotions - horror, terror, tension, dread, disgust, anxiety, sadness, take your pick - and can work in any number of different ways, which is part of why I think the distinction between horror movies and thrillers is sort of artificial and I keep just tacking toward using the term "scary movies" instead. Often they do this by getting us engaged in the story as it's presented - whether it's through identification with or sympathy for the protagonists, interest in the specifics of the situation in which they find themselves and a desire to know how they got there and what's going to happen, or just imagery plucking at the nightmare, lizard-brain depths of the subconscious with no regard for logic - we want to watch, and we feel things, and this experience tells us something about ourselves or the world that we might not know otherwise. Scary movies are really good at this because they can get at things that aren't safe, that may be uncomfortable.

Dead Birds, on the other hand, inspires little more than indifference, or maybe curiosity as to why this story was told at all.

The setting is the Civil War-era American South, and a detachment of Confederate soldiers has just made a deposit of gold at a small-town bank when they are rudely interrupted (read: gunned down in a welter of cartoonish gore) by a group of six irregulars intent on taking the gold for themselves. As they ride out of town, they make for an abandoned plantation house one of their fellow soldiers told them about before dying of his wounds. It's made clear early on that they shouldn't be riding out toward "the old Hollister place" - an itinerant preacher tells them there's no such place and they should turn back, they seem to ride through the forest for ages without any landmarks, and when they do get there, it's a big old place set back in a sea of dead corn. The scarecrow gives them the creeps (and we know this because one of them tells us that the scarecrow gives them the creeps), and a bizarre-looking beast one of them compares to a hairless mountain lion gets shot as it comes running at them through the corn. It's a pale, veiny thing that looks absolutely nothing like a mountain lion, but it doesn't seem to bother them that much.

Once they get to the house, they begin to search it to make sure they're the only ones there. And like you do after a heist, one guy starts enlisting another guy to screw the others out of their shares, we see that there's a bit of a love triangle between two of the men and the woman in their crew, and there's a freed slave who seems pretty acutely aware that they're as likely to shoot him and take his share as anything because hey, Civil War-era South. As they explore, odd things start happening - one person hears children's voices, another thinks someone else is in the house with them, there's a door to the basement they can't get open, and then they find a book…

…a book with instructions for raising the dead.

And then night falls, and a storm traps them in the house with something else.

Horror set during the historical past is a dicey proposition - not only do you need to get the audience to believe that the terrible things you depict are happening to people we should care about to some degree, but also get them to overlook the additional layer of artifice imposed by things like period settings, costumes, and dialogue. It's hard to scare people when they're acutely aware that they're just watching a movie, and nothing says "you're just watching a movie" like locations that look like sets instead of places, clothes that look like costumes instead of what people wear, and dialogue that sounds like a bad imitation instead of words that are actually said by people. These don't seem like Confederate irregulars - they're too clean, too healthy, and they talk like modern people who are trying to talk like they imagined people did in the 1800s, which means every now and then someone inserts a "I reckon" or "for true?" into the sort of shit people say now. (I'm not even sure people actually said "for true" in the 1800s, for that matter.) We're not at all transported back into the Civil War - the artificiality of the conceit never goes away.

Apart from believing them as people from another time, it's hard to care about these people at all. They're thieves, so they're unsympathetic, they're ready to turn on each other, so they're unsympathetic, and they're all taciturn and seem completely unfazed by pretty weird shit (until the third act, when the hysterics get turned up like someone said "okay, be scared…now"), which deadens any opportunity to establish a mood. Why should we care about these people?  They're barely people - they're ciphers with maybe one trait each (the leader, the woman, the kid, the asshole, the black guy, and the one who isn't any of these other things), and all of their communication is in grunts and monosyllables. A large part of the first act of this movie is people wandering around this huge house alone or in pairs, occasionally trading sentences to minimal response, reacting to nothing. I enjoy a good slow burn, but usually it's a good idea to use the time when nothing's happening to establish who these people are, so that when things do start happening, we identify or connect with the characters enough that their experiences resonate with us. The only thing we know about these people by the time the first act is done is that the leader and the woman are a couple, the kid has a crush on the woman, and the asshole wants to screw the black guy (and maybe everyone else) out of their share of the gold. Small foundation upon which to build any engagement or goodwill on the part of the audience.

Case in point: When they find the strange book - full of anatomical diagrams, arcane writing, and things drawn in what appears to be blood, someone recognizes it as a ritual for raising the dead and says so. The others basically say "huh," and keeping searching the house. Any mystery that book could provide falls dead, not just because it would make sense in context that the character who knows this might not want to share that tidbit with the others, but also because this unpleasant bit of information elicits no real reaction. This isn't some tactical realism complaint, though you'd think given some of the other stuff they've just seen by this point, it should at least make them uncomfortable that a book like this is just lying around. More importantly, it's just dropped in our laps as the audience, with no build-up, no context, and no sense that it's affecting the people on the screen. They don't care, so why should we?

This passiveness and inertia extends to the structure of the film itself. There's no sense of pacing - in the first act, barely anything happens to the protagonists, and barely anything indicates that there's any real reason for them (or us) to be worried. They're in more danger of turning on each other than anything else, but this too is communicated through monotone, mumbling conversations between people with little discernable personality, so there's no tension at all. In the second act, when weird stuff starts happening, it happens in isolation to everything else going on around the protagonists, so we see a thing happen, but nobody apart from the person affected reacts or responds to it right away, so it doesn't feel like it really matters. It's not a natural progression of events, it's just a series of scary things that have been inserted into the movie because scary things have to happen in scary movies.

This almost mechanical approach extends to the horror elements (and they really do feel like elements, rather than an organic outgrowth of these people in this place at this time) as well - unnaturally pale children appear from nowhere and suddenly turn into hideous creatures, mysterious beasts roam the corn outside the house, there's a scarecrow that creeps everyone out, people hear voices, there's the aforementioned book, and basement door that mysteriously won't open (until it does). They don't emerge from exploration or discovery or a sense that something is escalating, they just sort of happen at intervals, the characters maybe say something about them (or if it's a more direct encounter, we don't see them again for a bit, if at all), and then things continue as they did before. These moments have all of the verve and intensity of a title card insert that says "A scary thing happens now."

This tendency is ratcheted up in the third act, when the scary things are piled on fast and thick (without any real increase in tension) with a lot of exposition mixed in to tell us (rather than show us) that bad things happened here. No, really -  at two different points, a character actually stands at the foot of someone's bed and tells them what happened in this house.  And this sort of has to happen because the horrible events that are supposed to serve as the engine of evil in this place are sort of incoherent - there's some internal logic to what happens, but it still feels less like an organic series of events and more like a bunch of images and set pieces that someone thought would look cool and then worked backward to create a story that would justify inclusion of all these things. There are a number of loose ends and unexplained inconsistencies, and although I think leaving some things unexplained is generally a good thing in horror movies, here it feels less like they're being left deliberately ambiguous and more like somebody just forgot that this stuff happened after it served its purpose in whatever scene it was featured.

In the end, people die (or don't, or do) and by the time the sun rises everything is resolved (or is it…? Oooohhhh, spooky!), and we're sort of left wondering what the point was of any of it. And no, it's never clear why the film is called Dead Birds, though it's just as inert and unremarkable as one, so yay for giving me a chance to make a cheap title joke, I guess?

IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon
Available from Amazon Instant Video
Unavailable from Netflix Instant (Available on Netflix DVD)