Three Short Films By Curry Barker: Between Life And Death

Last month, I watched a short film called Milk & Serial, and it was good enough to get me rethinking my general dismissiveness toward YouTube as a source of original horror filmmaking. It was a sharp, vicious little piece of found-footage horror featuring some surprisingly strong performances, and it looks like a lot of it was the work of a young man named Curry Barker, who wrote, directed, edited, and co-starred in it. My interest was piqued, and since watching it I’d been meaning to check out some of his other work. He does sketch comedy, but he’s made a few other short films as well, so I thought I’d take a look at three of them this week. Some of them are stronger than others, but I’m impressed with what I’ve seen.

There are a few elements that tie these three films - Enigma, Warnings, and The Chair - together. They’re all about the space between life and death, and a vein of deadpan absurdity runs through all of them to one degree or another, as all three feature protagonists who are having difficulty grappling with some element of adult life. Whether it’s responsibility, or the need for human contact, or the need to be fully present in a relationship, all of these films have at their center men whose world is unraveling around them, and who face their circumstances with varying levels of exasperation. They’re less terrified and more puzzled and annoyed, but not to a degree that’s overtly comic. There are definite moments of wry black humor, but I don’t know that I’d call any of these comedies. These are ordinary people in extraordinary situations, and none of them are what you’d call heroic.

They’re all small productions, and two of them are very much just Barker and some of his regular collaborators shooting in one or two locations, but there’s a real sense of restraint and a willingness to build tension through small moments, carefully composed shots and impressionistic editing. There’s a refreshing lack of jump-scares or the usual premises, and it’s clear that Barker knows if you set things up correctly, then even a little detail - like a note, or a blurry figure in the background - can go a long way toward setting the mood.

Enigma

This film opens on squalor. A young man is kneeled over his toilet, vomiting, while empty bottles, fast-food wrappers, and other garbage lies scattered all over the place. This is Adam, and he’s having trouble being a functional adult. He doesn’t leave his apartment unless he has to, orders food in a lot, and is falling out of touch with his friends and family. He has regrets, he wonders where his life went wrong, and all the while he’s scrolling through his phone, looking at all of his friends on social media as they party and figure out how they’re going to kill themselves before the world ends, in slightly less than a week.

This is a melancholy story, told from the point of view of a sad guy for whom even the end of the world isn’t enough motivation to get out and live. Adam sort of wanders through the last days on Earth, making excuses for why he can’t go out, remaining a prisoner of his own self-doubt and guilt. It strikes a good balance between the enormity of what’s coming (a countdown to the end is cleverly inserted as bits of background scenery) and the way life goes on regardless – people keep delivering pizzas, people keep working behind a register, while others get out and make the best of what’s left. Some think it’s more of the same catastrophizing that’s been with us for decades, some think it’s a hoax to cull the population and make purveyors of assisted suicide rich, others are just vibing, whatever comes will come. As is often the case with stories like these, the end of the world is an opportunity to examine how we live and the importance of human connection. So in that sense there isn’t anything really all that unusual here, and it’s the least scary of the three, but there are nice moments of deadpan humor alongside pathos that serve the story well and keep us empathetic. I wouldn’t call it a black comedy…more of a dark gray comedy?

Warnings

It’s a late night at the end of what was probably a pretty wild Halloween party, and Sean’s walking out to his car, discussing how he almost got hit in the street by another car. When he reaches his car, he notices a note stuck to the window above the driver’s side door handle…

“I am begging you to stop.”

Needless to say, Sean gets freaked out and tries to ask his friends Kendal and Regan what’s happening, but they have no idea what he’s talking about. He’s a little confused, a little disoriented, and when he goes back out to his car, he finds another note, this time on the inside of his car. And he’s starting to hear voices.

This one is a creepy little psychological horror film centering on Sean’s attempts to understand what’s going on as the world around him gets stranger and stranger. It does a lot with very little, relying on the conceit of the notes and the way that everything becomes increasingly more disjointed the more Sean tries to understand what’s happening.  There’s nicely paced uneasiness throughout, combined with little bits of visual wit that creates this nicely discordant note – it’s funny and strange at the same time, and the aftertaste from the strange lingers a little longer than the funny does. There are some nightmare sequences (or are they?) that give everything a little bite as well, and the filmmakers do a good job of keeping us guessing about where it’s all going. It’s maybe a little slight, but definitely falls in horror territory and has its share of unsettling moments.

The Chair

Reese is out running some errands - getting dinner and flowers for his girlfriend Julie to celebrate their six-month anniversary - when he notices a chair sitting on the sidewalk. It looks to be in good shape, so he decides to grab it and take it home with him. As soon as Julie sees it, she hates it. It doesn’t go with the rest of the décor. It’s creepy. It makes her nervous. It feels evil, and she wants Reese to get it out of the house. So, in a fit of pique, Reese stubbornly sits down in the chair…

..and the next thing he knows, he’s back on the street where he picked up the chair in the moments before he puts it in the car. And somehow an entire week has gone by.

This one is more ambitious than the other two, and also the most effective as a horror film. It’s a bigger production with a cast outside of the usual ensemble, shot in a wider aspect ratio than the others. It’s a disorienting story that starts off being about a diffusely creepy chair, but soon reveals itself as a story about the unreliability of memory and what it must be like when it starts to fail. Abrupt, fragmented editing keeps us as off-balance as the protagonist, and real events wind around hallucinatory reverie, offering a few different explanations for what’s going on, but to its credit, the film doesn’t commit to one explanation over the other. There’s a cohesive visual vocabulary, which suggests there is some underlying logic to what’s happening, but it’s ultimately elusive. We know enough to know something is going on, but not enough to see it clearly, which is a wonderfully unsettling feeling. There’s also some really nice use of composition alongside the editing, it’s probably the least humorous of the bunch, and even though the end sort of fell flat for me, it was an enjoyably uneasy experience and probably makes the clearest argument yet for Barker having the sort of filmmaking chops that you’d like to see get more of a budget and wider distribution.

I have to admit, as much as I know intellectually that filmmaking technology has gotten better and more affordable over time, it’s been tough for me to take the leap to recognizing that there’s some really good work being made by young (don’t say it) auteurs (oh dammit, you said it) on a platform that I’m used to thinking of as sort of a video junk drawer. The Philippou brothers made the move from YouTube to the big screen, and I think if there’s any justice in the world, filmmakers like Kane Parsons and Curry Barker will be next, because they’re sure as hell making stuff that’s fresher and scarier than yet another Conjuring sequel.

Enigma: IMDB | YouTube
Warnings: IMDB | YouTube
The Chair: IMDB | YouTube

Dead Silence: American Gothic

Pretty much my brief for this site is that I think horror movies should be taken seriously as cinema, and at their best be taken seriously as art. Serious, serious, serious serious serious. But there's definitely something to be said for movies that are scary for the sake of being scary, where the impulse to consider its imagery in context or to read the overall film is subsumed in the desire to just watch the spectacle and take the ride.  Not saying there's no way to view these films critically, just that sometimes you run into one that's so thoroughly itself that to do so almost seems beside the point.

So yeah, Dead Silence is like that.

The first clue that we're not in for your typical mid-Aughts po-faced scarefest is the Universal Pictures logo from the 1930s. The second is a title card explaining the origin of the word "ventriloquism" from the belief that the spirits of the dead could speak from breath in the stomach. The credits play over grainy black and white footage of someone drawing designs and diagrams, then carving and building…a ventriloquist's dummy.

That's right, they're going right for the evil ventriloquist's dummy. That's what's up.

Meanwhile, back at the movie, Jamie and his wife are taking a break from trying to fix the sink to enjoy some takeout Chinese and puzzle over the mysterious package he's just received in the mail. It's a very well-made ventriloquist's dummy, dropped off at their door by an unseen person. In the time it takes Jamie to run across the street to get dinner and a rose for his sweetheart, well, he comes back and follows his wife's beckoning voice back to their bedroom where holy shit she's dead on the bed with her tongue ripped out. 

Needless to say, Jamie's the only suspect in what appears to be his wife's murder. Naturally, there's only one way to straighten the situation out: Jamie needs to go back to his hometown to find out if his wife's mysterious death is connected to a local legend about the vengeful ghost of an old ventriloquist. You know, like you do.

This pretty much sets the tone for the movie. Jamie's hometown is called Raven's Fair (let me say that again - it's called Raven's Fair), and it's a town whose glory days are long gone. Everyone's left who can leave, Main Street is shuttered and decaying, and it seems like the only people left are the undertaker, Jamie's father, and Jamie's young, suspiciously attractive stepmother, who seems to be a good thirty years younger than pretty much everyone else. The ruined theater (described as "a grand theater" in its heyday) is called the Guignol Theater, so no, there's no subtlety here.

That's to the movie's advantage. Dead Silence is unapologetically lurid - lightning flashes, lanterns, and flashlights are the primary sources of illumination, and it's pretty much raining all the time, except when it's dark. And when it rains - yep, it pours. Abandoned rooms aren't just dusty, they're choked thick with cobwebs. Jamie's father lives in a huge stone mansion with lots of dark wood and antique furniture covered by drop cloths. And did I mention that Jamie's family name is Ashen? Ashen? Who does that? That's amazing. This enthusiasm for the material extends to moments of quirky humor -  the obligatory police officer chasing Jamie is sort of cartoonishly world-weary - he carries an electric shaver everywhere with him to fight a losing battle with his five-o'clock shadow, and this pays off in a nice gag during the climax. 

In fact, that's probably the best way to describe this movie - it's a cartoon. Everything is exaggerated and highly stylized to good effect, the story isn't especially deep, but it doesn't need to be - ventriloquist dummies are fucking creepy, and so ventriloquist dummies inhabited by the spirit of a vengeful ghost are going to be EVEN CREEPIER. What this movie is about is momentum and scares - putting the viewer in a place where they're watching something that's scary both because it capitalizes on things that scare us (ventriloquist dummies, the dark, mysterious voices) and our awareness of the sort of set pieces that will end in a scare. You know when you're being winched to the top of the roller coaster that the plunge is coming and it's going to be terrifying. There was more than one point in this movie where I actually found myself saying "oh shit, here we go." Waiting for the plunge. 

It's a story made with tremendous affection and generosity for horror from a simpler time - there are some nods to newer ghost movies in the appearance of the ghost's victims, but it' s largely a product of unrelenting atmosphere and a story played (mostly) straight and with a refreshing absence of self-consciousness. It's a celebration of a certain type of movie you don't see much any more - it's gruesome and creepy without being really gory, spooky without relying overly on cheap startle moments, and saves a final surprise for the end that's actually pretty well-earned by what came before without feeling like bait for a sequel. In short, Dead Silence is really fun, wholeheartedly gothic in its appeal to our base fears, and a nice reminder of the joys of a simple scare.

IMDB entry

Purchase from Amazon

Watch on Amazon Instant Video

Unavailable from Netflix

The Role of Intent Part One: What He Was Really Saying Was…

So I've been short on time to work on the blog lately. Unfortunate (and a little frustrating, and so I'm thinking about ways to expand what I write so that it's not weeks between entries), but it happens. One of the things I hadn't had time to do was address a recent comment on my reconsideration of Srpski Film. Someone by the name Anonymous was nice enough to write…

"Not to be too critical, but you guys are all pretty much way off the mark. You are all trying to see this movie through what you have heard on CNN and you should understand that the director and people in Serbia didn't watch CNN and their view of their country is way different than yours. The closest you got to what the movie is about is your statement '...that this is the sort of film Serbia produces'. It is a film within a film critiquing the Serbian film industry, its tight connection to the Serbian government and the modern propaganda that it serves. The painting on the wall is the last supper before the battle of kosovo [sic] (14th century). The scene is intended to show how cinema is used for propaganda purposes to stain Serbia's reputation and loosen its grip on Kosovo. The guys that made the film are tired of what they call 'Red Cross' movies and that is the meaning behind the speech Vukmir makes about the victim being the priciest sell."

…which was nice of them, I thought. Who knows how long I would have gone completely misunderstanding the film? It's a good thing Anonymous came along to set me straight.

However, since this blog is one guy, and not "guys", and this guy gets busy sometimes, it took me awhile to read the comment. And while I was in the process of formulating a response (which I wanted to do before I published the comment, so the exchange could go up at once), Anonymous was nice enough to clarify…

"So I see that you censor posts that are not agreeable to your (misinformed) viewpoint. Doesn't matter because the true interpretation of this movie is out more and more on the net and your little piece here looks laughable next to it."

Well, damn. It turns out that I was misinformed, and my "little piece" was laughable. I was wrong about a movie.  Which is funny, because to the best of my knowledge, I've never claimed to be any sort of authority, let alone  "right" about movies.

And so I've been thinking about authorial intent. Specifically, how thoroughly unimportant it is.

Trying to pin down what a movie is "about" is a tricky thing. Sure, there's the plot - in that sense, Srpski Film is about a former porn star who takes one last job to make enough money to support his family and ends up getting tangled up in something very bad. But at the end of the day, a plot is just a sequence of events. When was the last time a synopsis scared the hell out of you? With a few tweaks, I also just described part of one of the storylines in Boogie Nights and the general plot of Wonderland, neither one of which are generally considered horror movies. Shift the role of the porn star from the foreground to a background role as the protagonist's girlfriend and you've got Sexy Beast, which although an awesome movie, is by no means horror.

So there's got to be something else there that gives the movie some emotional freight, something to which we can respond both rationally (we understand what is happening) and then emotionally (it makes us feel a certain way, given a particular context). Much of the experience of a movie isn't the events themselves as much as how the events are expressed, and that's a slipperier thing than just a straight synopsis. There are specific choices in visual, aural, and verbal content that can make the most horrible thing feel mundane, and the most mundane thing feel absolutely horrible. The plot engages us rationally, imagery engages us emotionally. If you want to get people to feel something, you need to use imagery to speak past their capacity for rational comprehension and get in their head, speak to their gut, get reaction instead of response.

(Alternatively, you can use imagery that's really, really specific to you and nobody else, and then you're Matthew Barney or, to a lesser extent, David Lynch.)

So if you're trying to freak an audience the fuck out, you're going use the sort of imagery that's most likely to elicit that, and that varies from culture to culture. You're going to need imagery that speaks directly to the hopes and fears and values of an audience for whom these things are at least in part a product of their time and place. Culture's like the water in which a fish swims, (or like the Force) - it's all around us, in us and outside of us. We are products of our culture.

Think about some of the landmark films in U.S. horror - the giant insects and lizards of the post-WWII era, products of this newfangled "radiation" thing, the mindless body-snatching alien stand-ins for Communists during the Cold War, the crazed hippies of The Last House on the Left, a product of the Sixties and post-Vietnam rage. Would Them! have been so scary to countries for whom radiation wasn't an issue? It would have been scary, yes, because giant ants are fucking terrifying, but it wouldn't have that it-could-happen-here frisson that it had here. Would Invasion of the Body Snatchers have been as scary in the Soviet Union? Probably not. The Last House on the Left remake might have freaked some people out, but the original was off in uncharted territory, in part because it fed on anxieties about youth culture and its perceived threat to respectable suburban types. If you want to communicate something to an audience, speak to them in a language they'll understand.

Which brings me back to Srpski Film (yet again) and what films are "about."

So in my extended piece on this particular movie, I contended that it worked as a story about the victimization of people living under a totalitarian regime, the role of surveillance in their lives, how this victimization affects subsequent generations, and how these pressures and legacies can reduce people to beasts or break them outright. I thought I made a decent case for this perspective, but Anonymous disagreed. His/her contention was that the movie was really and truly about the frustration Serbian filmmakers experience in trying to make art in a country where the state still exerts strict control over film production and distribution. And that's definitely something I've read in interviews with director Srdjan Spasojevic. So I can believe that's where he was coming from. But saying that the movie has one true interpretation ignores all of the history from which its imagery was drawn. It privileges what's being said over how it's being said, when you can't really extricate one from the other. It's as much about totalitarianism as it is about trying to make art as it is about a former porn star getting back in the game one last time.

"But how can a movie be about anything apart from what the director makes it?" asks the complete and total strawman I've made up for this bit. Well, how we say something imparts as much meaning as what we say or why we say it. We communicate in the languages with which we're most familiar, and I think that's as true of culture and the imagery we derive from it as anything else. It's called A Serbian Film because it's in Serbian - not just the spoken dialogue, but the imagery as well. There's a legacy of totalitarianism, of people trying to get by under surveillance and omnipresent control that is evident in the imagery of the film, the metaphorical language of the film.

Even if Spasojevic made Srpski Film about the plight of the Serbian filmmaker (and I have no doubt that's what inspired him, but was that really the central thesis?), how he chose to tell that story adds an entirely separate layer of meaning to the film, and that's a good thing. Personally, I think that when directors set out to make a movie with a really specific message, they usually product something shitty and didactic. Srpski Film doesn't do that. It doesn't beat you over the head with "this is terrible and you should feel terrible and wonder how this could possibly happen in a just world," it just says "yeah, this is happening and you're watching it. What are you going to do?"

At the end of the day, what the viewer gets from the film probably matters most. Not what the director was trying to say, not what someone else thinks the director was trying to say. A good film is "about" many things, and I think it's a mistake to constrain our interpretations.

Next time: What happens when intent is inferred from content, and the upcoming sequel to The Human Centipede.

On Fandom And Its Problematic Demands: Silent Hill

Warning: Spoilers will follow.

Not all of the problems with modern horror movies are due to business concerns. Some are, but the reason studios churn out sequel after sequel and create "franchises" is that they continue to be profitable. People keep going to see the movies, no matter how mediocre or even shitty they are, as long as they push specific buttons. However, as pernicious the effect of the profit motive on art might be, I think the effect of devoted fandom is no less damaging.

As I see it, the negative effects of fandom are two-fold: On the one hand, fans can be accepting - almost too accepting, as if value is conferred upon something merely by its association with the object of fandom. The qualification "for fans of" often just means "this movie can't stand on its own as a piece of film, but it is guaranteed to appeal to people for whom genre tropes are more important than the whole." And yes, opinion is only opinion, taste is subjective, but I think we can agree that all horror movies are not equally successful at what they set out to do. However, horror film is also a genre (an unfairly maligned one), and as such, devotion to the genre may supersede rigorous criticism. Enough people already talk shit about horror movies, why add to it? 

Hence, the "for fans of" dodge - you can engage in something resembling criticism and still identify yourself as a fan of the genre. So on the one hand, to the extent that a fan community organizes around the genre, rather than appreciating well-made films, there's a potential market for, well, crap. Crap gets distribution, crap gets fan-centered media outlets to publicize it enough to garner it an audience, and that audience is uncritical enough to continue the cycle. But at the end of the day, that's just another expression of the profit motive. 

On the other hand, fans can be mercilessly critical about issues of canonicity. Once a story or world has been established, devoted fans' attention to continuity and consistency can approach orthodoxy. Hell hath no fury like that of someone who finds out that Halloween is being remade, or that zombies are fast now, or that Robert Englund isn't playing Freddie Krueger in the remake. If there's going to be a sequel to a popular film, it needs to not only live up to the first, but be consistent and in continuity with the first. As a result, you get the sort of Pandora's Box that is the overarching story (such as it is) behind the Saw series. Or, in the case of movies adapted from other media, insistence on rigid consistency and continuity with the original property. Never mind that often what works in one medium does not work well in another. When Tolkien's Ring trilogy was adapted for the screen, there were people furious that every single side story and incidental character was not included. In one of the most ambitious film adaptations mounted in the modern age, one stretching to damn near 12 hours in its extended form, people were angry that they didn't include a singing gnome who appears for somewhere around one chapter. 

Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining is, in my opinion, one of the best horror films ever made. It does, however, take many liberties with the original book. Stephen King didn't like the liberties and threw his endorsement behind a miniseries version shown on television. The miniseries was certainly more faithful to the book, down to dialogue. The miniseries did have things to recommend it, but the one thing it wasn't was balls-out terrifying. What works in books doesn't work on the screen, and vice versa. Strict continuity is often at the expense of narrative and aesthetic quality.

Case in point? Silent Hill.

Silent Hill is based on a series of video games dealing with supernatural goings-on in the titular resort town. Something terrible (or several somethings) happened in Silent Hill a long time ago, and ever since the town has served as sort of an amplifier for the fears, sins, and weaknesses of people who wander into town. The games serve as sort of an anthology of mostly unrelated stories with only the town in common. As video games go, the Silent Hill games are especially notable for eschewing a lot of the campiness found in horror video games in favor of palpable dread and genuinely creepy, unsettling imagery. As a series, the games owe a lot to modern horror film, especially Jacob's Ladder. The second game - dealing with a man who receives a letter from his long-dead wife to meet him in Silent Hill - is a story of long-buried guilt and despair, played out in grainy images of decaying buildings, damned things writhing and vomiting in straitjackets of their own skin, with a soundtrack of industrial thumps and clanks and radio interference. It's easily one of the scariest games ever made. If you're going to adapt a horror game for the big screen and not make it a lurid, overheated mess, this is the series to use.

On the other hand, attempts by fans to make sense of the story behind the games yield accounts contorted and confusing enough to be right at home halfway through the Saw series. The story of the first game, for example, is thoroughly confusing at best, a case of too many elements crammed into one place, each demanding explanation and connection to the others. To wit, from a fan plot analysis hosted at IGN.com…

"Cheryl never really existed. In fact, neither did Alessa. Both of the girls are only conjurations of Dahlia's cult. See, the cult wanted to bring their lord Samael to the mortal world, so that he could take control of the universe. But for the cult to benefit they would have to be able to control Samael. The only way to do this was to summon Samael into an unborn fetus, a child that the cult could raise and teach to control its powers, all for the benefit of the cult, of course. Dahlia conceived the child somehow, with the help of Dr. Kaufmann. But when the child was born, only half of Samael's Dark Soul had been summoned into the child."

Or, from the Wikipedia entry for the second game…

"At this point in the game, the letter from Mary vanishes entirely from the envelope. In another room, a final meeting with Angela sees her giving up on life and unable to cope with her guilt any longer. She walks into the flames of a burning staircase and is not seen again. Two Pyramid Heads appear, along with Maria, who has been resurrected once more; as she is killed again, James realizes that Pyramid Head was created because he needed someone to punish him. The envelope from Mary finally disappears and both Pyramid Heads impale themselves with their own spears. James makes his way to the rooftop, finally reaching what seems to be Mary. Depending on the choices made by the player throughout the game, this may be either Mary or Maria disguised as her."

So we're already starting off with a pretty gnarled set of ideas, images, and storylines. What works in a game, based on accrual of experience over hours of gameplay and multiple possible courses of action, is going to need to be pared down and streamlined to make an effective movie. Just like the removal of one singing gnome from the Ring trilogy (or, for that matter, not telling the entire battle at Helm's Deep as an incidental flashback), a good adaptation is going to pick and choose from the source material to tell the best story in that world.

And here's where fandom becomes a problem. Everyone takes something different from the game, everyone's experiences are a little bit different, and each and every devoted adherent of the series has their own ideas about what absolutely must be in the movie for it to be good, or for it to be a "real" Silent Hill film. Fans of the series are vocal, and are potential moviegoers. They're going to generate the buzz needed to get more than fans of the game into the theaters. As the director himself said in a production diary, "I know a few fans who have seen the film and I have listened carefully to their comments. I think overall we have been very respectful and that fans will not be disappointed. Silent Hill fans want a movie that they can respect…If the film is successful in the eyes of the fans then I will be happy to make a sequel. If the fans aren't happy with my adaptation then it will be difficult for me to tackle a second one."

So already we have, in addition to the studio underwriting the movie, a fanbase with their own set of demands. And who are these fans to whom the filmmakers are being respectful? Some excerpts from various and sundry discussion forums…

"I need to know the plot of the film before I generate any excitement over it. If the final product is just another film adaptation of a video game then I will probably be disappointed with it regardless of how much time and effort is poured into it. I don't know why individuals feel the need to alter the storyline in a video game in order to bring it to the silver screen but I see this kind of @#$% all of the time."

"what was up with the movie, curect me if i'm wrong but the Rose Da Silva did not have a gun to protect herself from monsters she was just running around looking for her daughter i thought that part was lame."

"I wish they'd just make SH movies actually based on the games already. I came to like the SH movie after awhile- it grew on me. But when I first saw it I was so annoyed how they turned the Order into these pathetic witch burning Christian people. And of course made Harry a woman... anyway, you know who'd make a good Walter? Triple H, the wrestler."

"The entire time me & my closest friend kept shouting out the names to songs. We're both giddy little fangirls. I'm SO glad they kept the music."

"Ugh. So why haven’t I given the movie a worthless rating? Mainly because Pyramid Head was just that cool (even though his total screen time probably hovers around 4 minutes)"

"completely ignore the first film’s existence and make a film perfectly based off of silent hill 2 or silent hill 1. most likely silent hill 2 since the first silent hill movie’s story is the retarded bastardization of the first game’s story."

"I don`t wanna see dozens of people running around in Silent Hill! It`s an empty and abandoned town with just a few characters who hold "darkness in their hearts" (the second SH game). Stop to turn the cult into an ultra-stupid sect who burn witches. That`s not what Silent Hill is about!"

No matter what the filmmakers do or don't do, no matter who they include or omit, somebody is going to be vocally unhappy and insist that the filmmakers' failure to accommodate their idea of what Silent Hill "really is" means that the entire undertaking is bankrupt.

Unfortunately, in this instance, the need to balance the desire to make a scary movie against commercial considerations against fan opinion meant that what could have been a really good, unsettling horror movie with its own vision and aesthetic turned out as a disjointed series of scenes into which entirely too much source mythology got crammed. There's just enough good in the movie to make you wish for what could have been. 

Silent Hill (the movie) is the story of the Da Silva family - Rose, Christopher, and their adopted daughter Sharon. Rose and Christopher are worried because Sharon sleepwalks constantly, putting herself in danger on a regular basis. Christopher thinks she needs medicine, Rose wonders why she keeps screaming something about "Silent Hill" during her episodes. Silent Hill is a former coal mining town, evacuated due to a massive underground coal fire akin to an Appalachian Chernobyl. The ruins of the town have been fenced off and nobody goes there anymore. After an argument over Sharon's condition, Rose takes Sharon, gets into the car, and heads for the smoking remains of Silent Hill. Rose has trouble getting directions - all of the locals insist that nobody goes there and nobody should. It is a shunned place. Rose insists, with the dogged persistence of the mother trying to save her daughter's life, and pushes forward. A late night accident  overturns Rose's car on the outskirts of the town, and she blacks out on the steering wheel. When she recovers, Sharon isn't in the car.

Faced with no other choice, Rose follows her daughter into the town of Silent Hill.

Silent Hill is the picture of a ghost town - empty buildings standing just as they had a decade ago, wrecked cars, litter in the streets. The entire town is blanketed by a thick gray fog and a gentle but constant rain of ash from the fires below. It is dead quiet and completely deserted. It is a bleak place, but initially, nothing seems out of the ordinary (as abandoned towns go). But after enough time spent wandering the town, Silent Hill begins giving up its secrets - the fog rolls away to reveal streets and buildings, entire city blocks, sheared away into emptiness. The neighborhood church is not topped with a Christian cross. Air raid sirens announce the coming of night, of a darkness in which the town peels away to reveal a smoldering industrial hellscape underneath. A darkness in which monsters walk the town.

Silent Hill has many weaknesses, but its audiovisual aesthetic is not among them. The sound of the movie is dominated by hums, distant crashes, bursts of noise. What music there is is repurposed from the game - it's menacing, but in ways not usually used in Western horror films. When was the last time a mandolin sounded so creepy? Visually it's of a piece - this is, at its heart, the story of a little girl who was nearly burned alive and lingered too long, and in her lingering poisoned the town. This town is her waking nightmare, and imagery of fire and ash dominates. The world blackens as night falls, with streets and buildings and walls floating up and away like burning paper caught in an updraft. The creatures of this nightmare world are malformed, as if half-melted or made from burn tissue. They writhe and stutter step, in agony themselves, and when some of them stretch and flex to scream, burning embers are revealed in their cracks and crevices. This is not carelessly chosen imagery - though it might appear to suffer at first from Abandoned Hospital Syndrome, everything we see is an echo of the events that lead to the town as it is now. The recounting of the events are told through scratched and grainy film stock, a home movie of damnation and horror. It's not quite like anything else I've seen. 

Unfortunately, atmosphere and visuals alone don't get it done this time. The dialogue is not good, even for stock b-movie dialogue. It's awkward enough to bring you out of the movie on more than one occasion. Characters taken directly from the game fail as often as they succeed - there is a police officer whose uniform looks more like a fetish outfit than an actual uniform in faithfulness to her original design - and the backstory is entirely too complex. There's a cult that doesn't need to be there, there's a demon whose role is only clear at the end, if then, it appears as though there are multiple parallel realities, and although some monsters are directly connected to the central events of the story, others aren't, and appear to be there because they are popular characters in the game, rather than because they serve the internal logic of the film.

The biggest pitfall with any adaptation is the temptation to put elements from the original property into the adaptation not because they contribute to the story, but because they "have" to be there, lest a community with some acquired sense of ownership scream for a boycott. The Silent Hill games are a rich source of ideas for horror film, but insistence on adhering to some sense of canon in a series of games lacking in internal consistency or narrative throughput means that what we get are not ideas but gestures and references, isolated setpieces intended to evoke the game's experience, rather than contributing to a good, solid story. Profit can take one good movie and bleed its premise dry, throwing away the husk until it grows back enough for a "reboot", but fandom can take one good premise and, like children fighting over a favorite toy, pull it into multiple pieces. What could have been lies on the floor, leaking stuffing while the children who pulled it apart continue their eternal argument over to whom it really belonged. 

The Last Exorcism: The Play's The Thing

"A ceremonial chamber essentially provides a stage for a performer who wishes complete acceptance from his audience. The audience becomes, in fact, part of the show. It has become fashionable in recent years to incorporate the audience into theatrical performances. This started with audience participation, with selected members of the audience called up to the stage to assist a performer in his role. Gradually this developed to such a degree that entire audiences mingled with the cast."- Anton LaVey, The Satanic Rituals

Belief is tricky, especially when applied to horror. I had a discussion about this with my wife the other day, spurred by a showing of the movie Death Tunnel on SyFy. The brief is "college girls spend night in haunted sanatorium, bad things happen", and let's face it, what else are you going to get with something titled Death Tunnel?

(Well, what you get is a lot of post-Saw choppy editing and intercutting between the past and present that seems to take up the first half of the film and really not much else, but that's not the point.)

So my wife points out that by spending the night in an abandoned, purportedly haunted mental hospital, the college girls are just asking for it - no sane person would do this for exactly the reasons outlined. I rebutted by pointing out that part of the logic of the movie is that they live in a world where these sort of things don't actually happen. They don't see anything wrong with it for the same reason we don't see anything wrong with it - shit like that only happens in horror movies, and as far as they know (since even the Scream movies don't get that close to a Pirandello play), they aren't in a horror movie. The belief that ghosts and demons (and even uncatchable criminal mastermind serial killers with ridiculously baroque methods) either exist or don't exist makes all the difference in the personal narrative we construct for our lives and circumstances. Most horror movies have characters who don't believe in these things, so that the proof that they do exist is that much more upsetting - the protagonists are not only in mortal danger, but their entire worldview is being upended at the same time.

The Last Exorcism is an excellent and scary film which is, at the end of the day, about belief.

Reverend Cotton Marcus is a man divided. Raised from early childhood to be a preacher - when other children were outside playing ball, he was studying scripture - he is very good at his job and has been for some time. We see footage of him leading what appears to be a small Evangelical service and he is preaching up a storm. He paces up and down between the pews, raises his hands to the heavens, flings his arms out wide, all the time clutching his well-word copy of the Bible. It's practically one with his hand, like an extension of his arm. His audience is transported, and his calls for amens and hallelujahs are gladly fulfilled. To all appearances, the Reverend Cotton Marcus is at one with the Holy Spirit.

But back at home, with his wife and son, he is not so fervent. His life is one for which he did not ask - he was the fourth or so generation of Marcus men to be preachers. His job was chosen for him before he could speak. His lifetime preaching has shown him the power of the Word to transport, and perhaps to distract. He has realized he can say anything and it will be joyfully received, as demonstrated by footage of a powerful sermon in which he segues smoothly into and out of a line-by-line recitation of a recipe for banana bread without anyone noticing. He's a basically decent man, but it was never a calling for him, and the wear is starting to show.

This is made worse, and his concern more pressing, by the other specialty of the Marcus family: Exorcism.

Cotton doesn't believe in demons, but he believes that other people do. Until recently, he has been able to reconcile his own doubt with the services he provides by telling himself that if others' beliefs suggest that demons are to blame, then the rituals Cotton performs will banish those problems by banishing the "demons", no matter what Cotton thinks. He is a rational man providing irrational aid, but a recent case involving the smothering death during an exorcism of a boy with autism was Cotton's proverbial straw: He can no longer provide this service knowing that it is not only fraudulent, but also beginning to claim lives. So he has asked a documentary film crew to come along with him to his last exorcism, so that he can expose the service for the fraud it is. He picks an envelope from his P.O. box at random, and he and the crew are off to the Sweetzer farm in rural Louisiana.

Louis Sweetzer is a man who has seen his share of trouble - wife dead of breast cancer, he's starting to find comfort in the bottle and a very strict form of Christian faith - the local pastor says Louis left the church because their teachings were "insufficiently medieval" - one which has lead him to homeschool his children and forbid anything secular in the home. He believes his daughter Nell is possessed because his cattle are being mutilated to death (an angry, resentful son?) and her cross pendant has begun to burn her skin (a nickel allergy?). They live in a community full of superstition - the camera crew captures locals prattling on and on about Satanic cults, UFO sightings, mysterious omens. Cotton spends some time with Nell, and she seems genuinely sweet and innocent. She's 14, but seems much younger, occupying much of her time drawing pictures of religious figures.

This is all going to be by the book - a very religious father is keeping his kids from having much of a childhood and the seclusion, combined with the local susceptibility for the fantastic, is making everyone a little crazy. Cotton knows what this is like, and he prepares everything he needs for the exorcism - his family copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, his cross (hollowed out to admit a smoke cartridge), an MP3 player with an assortment of "demonic" sounds on it, monofilament line to make pictures in the room shake, conductive rings to cause muscle spasms in Nell during the exorcism. He is as much a pro at putting on this show as he is preaching, and his patter is smooth and sure. From the outside, his act even looks a little corny, and as much as Cotton seems to be a good person trying to right his past wrongs, the ease with which he pulls off the exorcism con is a little uncomfortable. Money is exchanged, and Cotton throws in a message from the beyond about how it's bad to keep your sadness "bottled up" and how "that bottle" is going to bring Louis nothing but misery. Job done, footage secured, Cotton and crew are off to their motel, miles away, in preparation for the long trip back to Baton Rouge.

Until Nell shows up in Cotton's motel room, in the middle of the night, feverish and not remembering how she got there. Until Nell attacks her brother with a knife. Until Nell kills the family cat.

Until Nell starts talking in a voice that isn't hers.

The Last Exorcism is a well-constructed example of the slow burn - we don't even get to the Sweetzer farm and a low faint hum of dread until about halfway through the film, and it's two-thirds of the way into the second half before the shit really gets ill. The worst of it is tightly compressed - things go very bad, very fast. Until then, we are learning everything we can about Cotton, the Sweetzer family, and the worlds in which each of them live. The performances are all solidly on the right side of low-key - these feel like real people, not stock characters in a demonic possession film. Cotton treads the line between family man, man of God, and con man well enough to generate genuine ambivalence - you don't want to hate him, but you're not really sure you should like him, either. It's a more nuanced portrayal of the priest who has lost faith than you usually get.

Nell's innocence isn't little-girl cloying, either. In one especially effective scene, she admires the Doc Martens one of the film crew are wearing, and when the crew member gives them to her, her face lights up with delight and disbelief. A gift? For her? It's actual joy we see. Louis is a hot-tempered servant of an angry God, but he's also a tired, sad father, full of doubt and grief, still mourning a wife lost despite medicine's best efforts. His son Caleb is full of anger at everything and contempt for his father. This is a movie in which we are supposed to care about the people who are going to face something monstrous, and I did. You know going in that something bad is going to happen to them, and it makes you sad knowing this will end in tragedy for all involved.

As we learn the family's story, as we learn more and more about Nell and her mysterious fevers and disquiet, the pictures full of blood and death she has begun to draw, explanations unfold for the events at the Sweetzer farm. The last act of the movie is filmed in deep shadow, and there's no guarantee that the light is going to show us anything we want to see. Hints and suggestions from throughout the movie begin to pay off, and just when we think the worst is over, it gets yet again worse, veers further into the unnatural. It becomes ever clearer that there is playing your part, and then there is playing a part, and that some rituals are more real than others. You can believe whatever you want, but when the monsters show up in whatever form they come, mythical or secular, your beliefs will not save you.

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Hostel: Not (Not) Another Teen Movie

I caught the last bit of Hostel II on SyFy (I hate even typing it) tonight, and as was the case the first time I saw it, all I could think was "well, that was pointless."

I'm inherently distrustful of sequels in pretty much any genre of film unless they were planned out ahead of time (e.g., the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Night/Day/Dusk Watch, etc.). Especially when it follows an originally unknown quantity. It seems like it's more and more the case - especially with horror films - that if a movie ends up being successful, the initial reaction is not "oh, well done", but "okay, let's make another." Every time the word "franchise" gets thrown around, I get a headache and can do nothing but mutter "goddamnit" for about a minute or two.

Hostel II was pointless because it didn't add any new fillips to the first's storyline (except now it's girls getting killed), it provided us with unnecessary detail about how the bad guys worked (telling us more about the bad guy almost always makes the bad guy less scary - the Hellraiser movies are a great example of this in action), and it ostensibly told us a story from the point of view of the victimizers as well (which, again, dilutes the impact of the story if handled poorly. I don't think they handled it poorly, but they didn't really do anything surprising with it, either.)

But this isn't about what I didn't like about Hostel II, it's about what I liked about Hostel.

Hostel was marketed as a disturbing movie about a group of college-age guys who are busy partying their way across Europe when they fall afoul of a human-trafficking murder-for-pay racket. The first half of the movie is practically a teen sex comedy, and the second half is when shit gets ill. The advertising emphasized grim Eastern Bloc basements, outfitted with chairs with built-in restraints and horrible stains. Bad things happen here, it said. In retrospect, that's too bad, because I think that tips the film's hand a little. I recognize that it's really hard to market a movie successfully without giving the game away a little (except for Muriel's Wedding, which was decidedly not the feel-good Abba-filled romp the box cover made it out to be), but, well, maybe I'll eventually try my hand at a "how I would have marketed it" post or two.

So, anyway, Hostel. I know you have to give up a little about what the movie's going to be if you're going to get the audience you're trying to get, but I would have much rather preferred that we didn't know going in just how awful things were going to get in Hostel, because the contrast between the first half and the second half in terms of mood is incredible, while continuing the basic themes of the first half in the second.

Start to finish, Hostel is a spring break movie.

Or, at least, it's a movie consistently concerned with consumption, tourism, and the industries that spring up to satisfy both. Josh and Paxton are pretty much your basic all-American fratboys, products of privilege who make their way from country to country doing pretty much the same thing they'd do back home - drink and fuck a lot - and do so supremely confident of their place in the world. They've come to Europe the same way college students come to Daytona or Padre Island or Fort Lauderdale - they're just visiting, they aren't from around here, and just want to know where to find the cheapest drinks and prettiest girls. They'll trash the place and then leave. In that sense, Europe isn't that different from any other spring break location in the U.S.. There's a whole industry built up around spring break - alcohol suppliers, bars, party promoters, travel agencies - all focusing on a very specific market: College students looking for release, debauchery, an excuse to behave in ways they would never behave at home and the resources with which to accomplish that goal.

Josh and Paxton make friends with Oli, an Icelandic backpacker on a similar adventure. Oli tells them about a place in Eastern Europe where everything is even cheaper and the girls are absolutely gorgeous. It's a hostel - one of many catering to young people on holiday. As is often the case with summertime/vacation friendships (see: Grease, "Summer Lovin'"), they don't really know Oli that well (the revelation that he has a kid surprises them and us), and when he eventually disappears, they're mildly concerned but not much else. They have no idea what's happened to him, because as far as they know, everything's fine. Oli will be back, or not. With these sort of transitory relationships, people sometimes just disappear.

Josh and Paxton end up in a really bad situation the same way that most people end up in bad situations on spring break - they have entirely too much to drink and aren't paying attention to their surroundings. The only real difference is scale. Usually these sort of slip-ups lead to comedy in spring break movies - waking up next to an ugly girl, a guy, or some sort of farm animal. In Hostel, it leads to something much worse, and this is why I wish they hadn't given this part away in the ad campaign.  I think it would have been much more effective if we'd discovered just how horrible things had gotten at the same time they did. As it is, we know what's coming. It's just a matter of when.

And this is where attention shifts from one spring break to another.

Just like Josh & Paxton, the people who have come to the unnamed building in Eastern Europe have come looking for the opportunity to behave in ways they could never behave at home in an environment free of guilt or consequence. There is a whole industry built up around the desires these people have, and although the scale of guilt-free behavior and the cost to indulge in it is much, much higher than for Josh & Paxton's, it's the same impulse, and there are people making money from catering to that impulse. One spring break even feeds the other, as teens who have come looking for cheap, easy fun become the cheap easy fun for an entirely different population. On spring break, people sometimes just disappear. Our protagonists and one antagonist even meet on the train, mirroring the sort of loose affiliation between college students from all over the country arriving at a single destination.

The idea of this parallel is driven home by the American businessman at the end, whose raw enthusiasm and anticipation for doing something naughty and forbidden would be as at home at a wet t-shirt contest or strip club as a murder holiday. And just like someone has to come along behind the kids at Padre Island or Lake Havasu to clean up the empty beer cans, go-cups, used condoms and garbage, there are people cleaning up the limbs, the blood, and the personal effects of the unfortunates taken from the hostel. The human wreckage of spring break.

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In Defense of Rob Zombie's Remake of Halloween.

So what did reviewers say about Rob Zombie's remake of the John Carpenter classic Halloween?

Variety said...

"a hectic, professionally assembled pic that just about cancels itself out on every level by the end."

The San Francisco Chronicle said...

"maybe 65 percent as sick and depraved as 'The Devil's Rejects,' but no less stylish."

The Onion A.V. Club said...

"Zombie's Halloween comes up short where it matters most—it just isn't that scary."

Dr. Gore's Movie Reviews said...

"Zombie needs to stop fantasizing over his drive-in double feature past and try to make something new. He explicitly understands the horror and exploitation movie trigger points and can crank out the blood and guts as well as anyone. But it’s time to let the 70’s go and move on."

Cinema Suicide said...

"Rob Zombie may have no ability to create any kind of suspense or atmosphere, but as a wet, splattery horror movie director, he’s turning out good movies."

Christian Spotlight on the Movies said...

"all this polish and talent seems wasted on a a flawed story with a dramatic message devoid of redemption, peace and hope."

Now, to be fair, it also got a number of positive reviews. But out of the few reviews sampled above, the one with which I find myself in most agreement is the one from Christian Spotlight on the Movies. Honestly, I think they were the closest to getting it.

Variety saw it as "canceling (itself) out", and I'm not even sure I know what they mean. The Chronicle lamented its lesser degree of depravity, but found it...stylish? Dr. Gore and Cinema Suicide wished Zombie would go back to blood and guts and wet, splattery horror instead of what he did here, and the A.V. Club didn't think it was scary. I watched it, and I found it effective and gripping. So what did he get right?

I guess it depends on what you mean by "scary." John Carpenter's original traded on suspense, a sense of cat-and-mouse. The violence would probably be considered tame by today's standards, but it gave us The Shape - Michael Myers as a hulking absence, only seen as a blank, white, implacable face. It's a dark movie, lots of shadows, and that face emerges out of them and you know that shit is about to get real. In that sense, it's stylized and clean, in a way.

Zombie's version is no less stylized, but it's grimy. Michael Myers isn't just a mysterious escapee from a mental hospital, he's the product of abuse, neglect, and poverty. There's a boy in there who never learned right and wrong, or why he should care about what they are. His mother is a stripper, his stepfather's picture can be found in the dictionary next to the entry for "skeevy", and although the time period isn't really specified, he appears to be a child of the 70s, a product of an unhygenic period in history. The scenes of young Michael's home life leave your eyeballs needing a shower. Contrast this to the clean white of the mental hospital, which ends up not so much suggesting cleanliness and purity as a blank canvas against which Myers' and his handcrafted masks are placed as shocks of color. There's just as much violence here as there is at home, and over the years, his youthful pleas to go home are replaced by silence. He isn't in a better place, just a different one. When he escapes, he paints the white walls red. As an adult, he's just as much a hulking shape as the original, but a dirty, grimy one. Even the mask he eventually adopts is dirty. This dirtiness carries over to the events of the movie.

This is an actively hostile movie. It aims to make you uncomfortable. This is a good thing. As the first "slasher" movie, Halloween gave us the unstoppable killing machine, and each successive iteration has trivialized the deaths that occur in their wake to the point that they are used as a quantitative measure of a movie's quality - how frequent, inventive, and spectacular are the "kills"?  Freddy Krueger - a child murderer - becomes a pop culture icon who dispatches teenagers with witty one-liners. Death becomes a punchline. Not here. Here, death is tangible, messy, unpleasant, and people suffer visibly as a result of Myers' actions. The death scenes in this movie remind me most of the crime scene photos from the Tate/LaBianca murders, awkward and horrible. People attacked by Myers attempt to crawl away, covered in blood, screaming and begging for help. Myers sobs at his mothers' abandonment, at not knowing why he cannot go home. The last survivor, covered with blood, ends the film screaming as something inside of them breaks, dies a little at what they have survived, at what others did not, at what they had to become to survive.

Everyone suffers in this movie, physically or emotionally. The fake-out ending of the original is replaced by a less-supernatural alternative - Michael may not vanish at the end, but given what he has done, his continued existence isn't necessary. Which brings me back to the Christian Spotlight review - this is a movie devoid of redemption, peace, and hope. It isn't tense, and it isn't suspenseful, but those would be the wrong notes to strike. Its mood is one of dread, of crushing inevitability. Everything is oppressive, dirty, and claustrophobic. No light, no hope, nothing clean, nothing pure - the best we can hope for is blankness. Michael's abusive home life twists him into something empty and monstrous. In response, Michael destroys everything in his path. Those not left dead are left broken. Life begins in ugliness and ends in ugliness. It trades depravity for despair, atmosphere for suffocation, cancellation for negation. If this isn't horrifying, what is?

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