Bitesized Nightmares: Exactly What It Says On The Tin

In my continued exploration of indie horror film on YouTube, I decided that this week I’d take a look at the work of Kyle Edward Ball, who would eventually take what he learned making videos for his channel Bitesized Nightmares and turn it into Skinamarink, a masterclass in mood and minimalist dread. The name of the channel tells you everything you need to know – the films are very short (mostly somewhere between three and six minutes each), and they’re based on nightmares submitted by viewers of the channel. It’s really easy to see the genesis of Skinamarink in these videos, which rely largely on ambient sound, slow tracking shots alternating with long takes, and grainy, blown-out cinematography with stark divisions between light and shadow. Narration and music play more of a role here than they did in Skinamarink, but otherwise it’s really easy to see these shorts as proofs of concept. There are 39 videos in the series (along with related material), so I decided to arbitrarily sample ten videos. If this sounds like your thing, there’s plenty more to watch beyond these selections.

Nightmare 1

This film feels like the thesis for the whole thing – it’s short, with some narration describing the dream, and  just a slow tracking shot that ends in a mysterious figure. There aren’t any jump scares or musical stings, just quiet, inexplicable dread that’s maybe undercut a little at the end by…well, it’s not exactly a jump scare, but it’s sort of an unnecessary startle that looks fake enough to break the mood. There are a lot of elements here that will recur through the other videos, and in retrospect this does feel like a filmmaker who is maybe not yet as confident in their tools as they will eventually become.

Nightmare 5: Eyes

The structure of this one is pretty similar to Nightmare 1 - narration sets the scene, and the visuals are mostly just a long tracking shot down a long, dimly lit hallway. But music and sound design do a lot of good work here (it’s worth wearing headphones while you watch these) toward making the scene feel menacing, and, just when you think it’s over, it’s not. It’s not intensely scary, but there’s a nice jolt to it.

Nightmare 9: Two Doors

At this point, I feel like I’m starting to see some growth, like Ball is stretching his legs a little and incorporating some new elements. It opens with some moody exterior shots of a house at dusk, and tells its story by using light and shadow to convey the impression of moving figures. At this point, what’s really coming through is the way nightmares are often inexplicable – you don’t know why things are happening, just that they are, and even if they don’t make a lot of sense logically, the things that are happening have some kind of terrible importance. They may not make sense, but there’s still a feeling of danger.

Nightmare 13: Witch

Here is where I start to really see the inclusion of the garish, blown-out color that characterized much of Skinamarink. This one is about a child in peril and a mysterious long-haired figure, shot in sickly greens from a low angle, as if our point of view is that of someone is hiding under a bed. The limited perspective also ramps up the tension – you can’t see what’s going on, you can’t know what’s going on outside of what little you can see, so anything could happen at any moment. Closing your eyes doesn’t help, because you know the figure is still there and you’re pretty sure something bad is going to happen to the child. But as in all of these, there’s not a lot of closure or exposition.

Nightmare 17: Dinner

This is the most cryptic, and creepiest one of the bunch up to this point – a slow tracking shot on a dollhouse (that appears to be watched by at least one indistinct figure) transitions into an actual house interior, where a figure mostly hidden by shadows gestures for us to come in. A little bit of setup ends in a nice little jab that, if overdone would have been a jump scare, but in this instance just puts a little sting into it before a macabre closing line. It’s closer to more conventional horror than the others, but not to a point that feels overdone or contrived.

Nightmare 20: Distorted

This one is a tableau that makes people sitting and watching television into just one of the creepiest things ever, through a use of distorted audio paired with equally distorted facial expressions. The end result reminds me of something David Lynch might do more than anything else. I don’t know if Ball was getting better over time (I mean, probably) or what, but this one and Nightmare 17 both actually got under my skin a little. It’s also a pretty good showcase for the important of editing and rhythm, since to the extent that there’s a formula, a lot of it comes down to long slow or still shots interrupted by a change in perspective at just the right moment, and timing it for maximum impact really does seem like a delicate, precise thing. Which is, I think, a big part of what makes Skinamarink such a success. It takes the idea of making small things very disturbing to its limits, and I feel like I’m watching Ball really getting comfortable with his tools by this point.

Nightmare 24: Mom

The title sort of made me go “ah, geez,” because nightmares involving a mother are gonna be especially creepy, and this one delivers. Like in Nightmare 17, the narration is an integral part of the experience instead of table-setting, and it’s got a really good closing shot that makes excellent good use of a partially closed door with only darkness beyond it. I never really thought about how scary hands could be until I started watching these shorts.

Nightmare 28: Doll

This one’s impressive if only for the way it manages to take a bunch of things that by themselves aren’t that creepy – some stop-motion of a paper doll being constructed, a close up on a sleeping face, and the sound of children laughing – and combine them in a way that ends up being really unnerving. There isn’t a lot of narration, this one is carried mostly by the imagery, but there’s just a little bit at the end that adds a nice chill without actually explaining anything. It’s almost a cliché that our own imagination is going to come up with much worse things than anyone can show us, but this one strikes me as a pretty good argument for its validity.

Nightmare 32: Cold Hand

This one is a bit slight, but it does a very good job of building a lot of tension through stillness. A faceless figure sitting at the end of a bed in a dimly lit room is already unsettling, but when the shot holds on them for an uncomfortably long time, it’s even moreso. The narration comes in late, and layers in enough detail to make up for visuals that, at this point, feel maybe a little familiar. It also manages to make snoring sort of menacing, which I thought was interesting.

Nightmare 35: Machine

This is easily the most abstract of the bunch. There’s some introductory narration, but the visuals are pretty much all texture and light, with a shot of an outstretched arm and some medicine bottles linking the visuals and the narration. It doesn’t have the tension that the last few did, but it’s oblique enough  that you feel like you’re getting a window onto someone’s very private fears. It also plays with the format that’s been established up to this point so that what you will have come to assume is the end gets upended for a shot no less abstract than the rest, that again gets held a little longer than is comfortable. It gives the whole thing a feeling of uncertainty, like any of the “rules” of the format can be broken.

Any of these, by themselves, would just be a nicely spooky morsel, but if you watch a bunch back-to-back, it has the same effect that Skinamarink did – it accumulates, so that even though no one moment is a “scare,” per se, over time the tension builds and builds and builds until you’re sure that whatever releases it is going to just make you scream. Even though for a lot of these I found myself thinking that it was well-done but maybe not that scary, I realized about halfway through that I was sort of looking off to the side of the screen, as if I was afraid of what I’d see if I looked right at it.  Like Skinamarink, either you’re on this wavelength or you aren’t, and if you aren’t you’ll probably find a lot of these shorts sort of dull or pointless. But if Skinamarink got under your skin, these will too, for all the same reasons.

Bitesized Nightmares on YouTube

Ouija - Origin Of Evil: That Is One Tasty Burger

So just last week I was talking about how much I don’t like films made off the back of other films. Sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, re-imaginings, et cetera. Don’t even get me started on franchises. I think it’s the way it turns film into product. I’m not going to get all precious and “my cinema” about films, but…it’s the difference between a home-cooked meal or fine-dining experience and a burger and fries from your fast-food place of choice. But here’s the thing: Sometimes those fine-dining places get a wild hair up their ass and do their own take on the burger and fries. It’ll be a burger and fries, but the meat is top sirloin, the bun freshly baked, the fries hand-cut and fried in duck fat. The form is fast food, but the execution isn’t.

That’s the analogy that came to mind while I was watching Ouija: Origin Of Evil. It’s a prequel to an apparently not-especially-good film about a haunted/possessed Ouija board. Hardly a novel idea, but it’s executed with such taste and care that the finished product is way better than you’d expect.

It's Los Angeles in 1968, and Alice Zander is conducting a séance for a middle-aged man and his visibly skeptical daughter. They’re trying to contact the man’s late wife, and Alice reaches into the beyond to make contact. The table rattles, doors open and shut, candles blow out and relight. A shadowy figure appears behind some curtains before rushing toward the daughter, screaming. The séance ends, the father and daughter leave, with Alice refusing to accept payment.

Once they’re gone, Alice goes back inside and calls to her own daughters to come out, while she breaks down the various devices she used during the séance. The younger daughter, Doris, had made cabinets rattle. Her older daughter, Lina, was the apparition behind the curtain. Lina wasn’t supposed to rush the man’s daughter, but Lina thought she was a bitch. Alice points out that that little stunt cost them their pay. And it’s pay they desperately need. Alice is a widow, and the wolves are constantly at the door. Doris prays at night to her father, she thinks he’s just gone away on business, but Lina and Alice know the truth. He isn’t coming back. Alice is tired and worried, Lina is angry in the righteous, passionate way that teenagers are. She’s straining at the leash, desperate for independence. And it’s this independence that leads her to sneak out at night, to go to a friend’s house while her friend’s mother is away at her bridge club. They listen to music, sip booze. There’s a cute boy there that Lina fancies. Then her friend pulls out this new game her mother got. It’s a Ouija board.

Lina sees how freaked out her friends get at the possibility of communicating with the dead, and mentions it to her mother as a possible new prop. Needless to say, Alice grabs one and goes to work doctoring it, magnetizing the planchette so she can manipulate it hands-free from under the table. Doris wants to know if she could use it to talk to her father, and even though Alice and Lina discourage her, once they’ve left she gives it a try. Something responds.

But it’s not her father.

In the interest of full transparency, the director made one of my favorite horror movies ever as his feature debut, so I’m a little biased. That said, everything I like about his style is on display here and it elevates the result. Like his previous films Absentia and Oculus, this film leverages the power of restraint, of not going loud or making things obvious. The scary moments tend to happen in the background, without an unnecessary amount of fanfare, and I think this makes these moments even more effective. They reward the attentive viewer, catching you unawares and being that much more startling as a result. There are some near-mandatory jump scares, and yes, they’re still jump scares, but inventive staging and - again - a lack of buildup or forecasting make them about as good as those get. It’s a film full of little moments that make you go “GAAHHHHH!” The performances are suitably restrained all-around, with no scenery-chewing to be had. Alice and Lina and Doris seem like a real family, with complicated feelings about life after their father/husband has died, Lina is a resentful teen, Doris just wants her father back, Alice is trying to keep their heads above water, and they’re all wrestling with grief in different ways. It’s not enough to provide much thematic subtext, but it also keeps everyone from feeling one-note. There’s a priest who manages to be smart and thoughtful, and even the expected romantic spark with Alice isn’t overplayed. The relative lack of histrionics throughout is refreshing.

It’s also visually self-assured. The whole thing is shot as if it had been made in the early 70s, and the attention to detail (including reel-change marks) is cool, but the picture quality is still a little too clean to look like an actual film from the 70s, so as it is just seems like a really good period piece instead of a historical artifact. But it also means there’s an analog warmth to the visuals that keeps the whole thing grounded. The narrative is fairly well-paced (with one exception in the second act), and in contrast to last week’s The First Omen, the connection to the film it precedes comes only at the very end, so it works as a self-contained film, with a satisfyingly creepy ending.

On the less-effective side of the register, it does feel at a couple of points like the director’s good judgment is in a tug-of-war with a studio that wants things to be bigger, louder, and more obvious. There are couple of unnecessary musical stings, and an exposition dump at the end of the second act, that leads into a plot development that’s over the top enough to elicit an eye-roll; but largely they let him cook on what is basically a work-for-hire deal, and he took something that could have been as pedestrian as the original film apparently is (ooh, evil Ouija board! Nobody’s ever done that before) and made it genuinely spooky.

There’s an art to making a good classically scary movie, and I feel like that art gets forgotten. You don’t need to shove a bunch of screaming distorted faces at the audience, you don’t need dopey teens doing the dumbest things (at one point, Lina says “splitting up would be the dumbest thing we could do” and I got a good chuckle out of that), you don’t need blaring musical stings to tell us that what we’re seeing is scary. You just need to trust your audience’s intelligence and the result is going to be a lot better. A burger and fries is still just a burger and fries, but made correctly, with really good ingredients, it’s going to be exceptional.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon

Late Night With The Devil: Illusionists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Longlegs: Bad Vibes

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

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

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

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

And each letter is signed “Longlegs.” 

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry

A Wounded Fawn: Hell Hath Plenty Of Fury

It’s tempting to say that the fables and fairytales we’re told as children have been sanitized (and there is some evidence that the original stories by the Brothers Grimm were, well…really grim), but if you stop and think about it, there is some heavy shit in those stories. It’s just that as kids the gruesome can be as entertaining as the relatively innocuous can be frightening. So when the Big Bad Wolf wears the grandmother’s skin to deceive Red Riding Hood, it isn’t necessarily met with horror by children. But present someone wearing someone else’s skin to an adult and it’s a whole different vibe. Gretel And Hansel knows this...that fables and fairytales are generally really fucking scary.

And that’s why I think A Wounded Fawn works as well as it does. It’s an interesting, surreal fable that nestles neatly in between Piercing and Fresh, while going to darker and stranger territory than either of them.

The film sets out its stall early, beginning in an high-end auction house, where a sculpture of the Erinyes is up for bidding. Lots of people representing very wealthy people, one hand holding their phones, the other gesturing to up their bids. The sculpture is finally sold to a woman named Kate for more than twice the opening bid, and we follow her home, as she sets the sculpture down and opens a bottle of wine. A knock on her door brings Bruce, the representative of another client from the auction. He wants to make Kate a backdoor deal for the sculpture, paying her twice her bid and throwing her a bonus on top of that. She asks for a percentage of his commission on top, and he winces, but agrees. She asks him why the additional effort, and he says that his client saw something beautiful, and wanted it. Kate does not live to see the sunrise.

Cut to Meredith, a museum curator out with some friends. She’s met a guy - handsome, charming, who has invited her on a weekend getaway. She’s looking forward to getting some for the first time in awhile, even if she doesn’t know much about him. He was at a recent antiquities auction for whom her museum had done some provenance work. His name is Bruce.

He sees something beautiful, and he wants it.

So right off the bat, you’ve got your dude who is obviously not what he seems and the woman that he takes somewhere for nefarious murder-type purposes. And, like in Piercing and more recently Fresh, things do not go like he planned. Which is, in and of itself, not that surprising. There’s definitely an audience for films where someone takes a woman to a secluded location and then tortures her for an hour and a half before killing her, but those aren’t really my kind of film. So the reversal of expectation is in and of itself expected. But where Piercing and Fresh were both battles of will between the protagonist and antagonist, as well as studies of weak, fragile men who commit violence against women, this film almost immediately gets weird with it, showing us everything that follows from Bruce’s perspective. And it’s kind of a doozy. Like I said, the film really is giving you an idea of what’s going to happen by beginning with an image of the Furies, and this is mythology given teeth. Kate was not his first, not by a long shot, and what follows is a long night of retribution that dives into imagery that is equal parts classic Greek mythology and surrealist art. We aren’t sure where it’s going to go, but it isn’t going to be anyplace good.

Part of what makes the film work is the degree to which it is stylized. It’s shot on film, which in addition to the grain and texture gives it a slightly retro feel. Much like Piercing, this looks like a solid remaster of a much older film, and the only real concessions to modernity are mentions of ridesharing services and smartphones. Otherwise, this could easily be a giallo-inflected horror film from the late 70s or early 80s given a loving restoration. Warm lighting and appropriately bloody, gooey practical effects add to this feeling and lend the film an immediacy that underlies even its most surreal turns. The performances are solid, and though the dialogue’s a little purple (much moreso as the film gets stranger), it’s not to the point of distracting and even makes sense given the nods to classic mythology. It also benefits a lot from a very crisp editing style and cinematography that favors alternating longer takes with vivid stills and quick close-ups, almost like punctuation marks, which creates tension even if it does rely a little too heavily on at least one type of shot.

It's not clear how much of what is happening is supernatural and how much could be explained by the hallucinations of someone who is badly injured, but I think that’s sort of the point – the most practical explanation is that we’re watching someone finally have a reckoning with the life they’ve lived up to this point in a way that combines memory and art and myth into a nightmare fugue, another is that the myths are all real and this person’s time has come in the ways of old. The conclusion does land on one particular explanation, but only at the very end, with a long final take that reminds me of a more blackly comic version of the ending of Pearl. But in this sense it reminds me of the better parts of As Above, So Below, harnessing classics and myth to tell a horror story.

That said, there are some definite flaws. The second half of the film goes a little slack with an extended pursuit sequence that consists of someone just sort of running through the woods and seeing things, which feels a lot less interesting after the close tension of the film’s first half, It also use some of the same jumpscare-adjacent shots a little too often, and there’s one sequence involving a wood-burning stove that ends up just being silly, but it ends well, and the strange turn it takes works in its favor. Not a complete success, but its ambition is impressive and it has a strong, consistent vision that makes me want to see more takes on myth in horror. Fables and fairytales and myths are intended to be instructive, and scaring the shit out of people is certainly one way to teach them that their bad deeds will lead to a bad end.

IMDB entry
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

Where The Devil Roams: Love Will Keep Us Together

There’s only a handful of directors who make me legitimately excited when they put out a new film. Some careers are more uneven than others, and it’s not unusual to follow a good film with a turkey. But even more than that, it’s not that many directors whose work really engages me, shows me something that stays with me long after I’ve seen it. There’s good filmmaking, and then there’s filmmaking that makes me feel like I’ve seen something transformative. There are only a few directors who make me say “they’ve got a new film coming out? I am fucking there.”

Among them is…well, it’s not a single person. You might call them a filmmaking collective if that weren’t the most pretentious-sounding thing ever. The Adams family is a married couple - John Adams and Toby Poser, and their daughters Zelda and Lulu. They write, direct, act in, shoot, edit and score their own films, with some outside help for effects work and marketing, via their Wonder Wheel Productions imprint. But their films are, in some important way, homemade. It’s often the case that writing and directing is shared. When one of them isn’t on-screen, they’re behind the camera. This would be a novelty if their films weren’t so good. I’m not familiar with their dramas, but they’ve made a couple of horror films that do seriously impressive things with the budgets they have, and have a style and vision absent from a lot of larger productions. They’re a little rough around the edges, but are so much more interesting than most films with far larger budgets. I’m a fan, pure and simple.

Where The Devil Roams is probably their largest production yet, and maybe it does overreach a little, but all of their usual strengths are intact, so this is still a striking addition to horror film. There’s nobody else out there making films like they do.

The opening is scratchy black and white. There’s a stage, and an attentive audience. A legless man comes out from stage left, and begins to read a prologue about the devil Abaddon and his doomed attempts at love. His heart is lost, his love scattered in pieces. The audience applauds, and so our story begins. It’s the story of three people - Seven, Maggie, and their daughter Eve. Seven was a country doctor, and the horrors he saw during World War I left him so traumatized that the sight of blood renders him catatonic. Maggie worked for him as a nurse, and Eve cannot speak, but sings with the voice of an angel. They have a family act of sorts featuring Eve’s singing, and they travel a dying carnival circuit, among the freaks and carnies, trying to eke out a living. It’s getting harder and harder to get by, and sometimes things get desperate to the point of violence. There’s one act that consistently does well. He’s a magician of sorts, calls himself “Mr. Tipps,” and his act consists of some religious testimony, followed by the dramatic appearance of a pair of shears, which he then uses to snip off his fingers, one by one. One evening, after the show, Eve comes by his tent out of curiosity, and watches him take a special needle and thread out of a box, and carefully stitch his fingers back on.

He has, he says, made a deal with the devil.

Their films typically have a pretty unhurried, conversational pace, at least at their outset, but this one is a much slower, at times almost obtuse affair compared to previous works. It’s not necessarily clear exactly what’s happening for most of the first act, and even once it is, the whole thing relies more on mood, as sort of a tone poem, than anything else. It’s a film with a lot of stillness and air between words, and I think right at the point where I was asking myself “okay, where is all of this going?” was when it all started to cohere. And it does cohere, but it takes a little bit. It’s definitely a film that requires more patience and goodwill on the part of the viewer than most.

But even at its slowest, there are things to appreciate about it. One real strength of their films is their striking, distinct visual sense, and this one is no different. There are a lot of beautifully framed shots, set up almost like tableaux, and because this film is set in the Depression-era U.S., there’s an interesting aesthetic at work, using a mix of black and white, desaturated color, and full vivid color, and the action is punctuated by photographic stills, sepia-toned, full of dusty light, reminiscent of crime scene photos from the early 20th century. The carnival itself tends toward the macabre in the appearance of the performers, and as a result the whole thing has an unearthliness to it that feels like something between the works of Guy Maddin and Diane Arbus. Dialogue and performance has typically been the weak point in their previous films, but here it actually adds to the dreamlike (or nightmarish) quality of the film, along with a score consisting mostly of drums, bass, distorted guitar and ethereal singing. It’s as singular a treatment as anything else they’ve made.

And for the most part, it rewards the viewer’s patience. Gradually, as more and more about these people is revealed, the clearer it becomes that the prologue was indeed the thesis for the film. It’s a story about love, attachment (in more ways than one), and the sacrifices we make for the ones we love. We desperately try to hold things together, to hold ourselves together, to keep our relationships together, and when they or we come apart, the things we have to do to repair that…well, we find ourselves doing things we never thought we’d be able (or willing) to do. The unhurried pacing (punctuated by striking moments of violence as the film progresses) muddies the final act a bit, drawing things out a little longer than they needed to be, though it does come good with a tragedy that escalates things quickly in horrific fashion, leading to a final image as startling as anything else they’ve done.

It’s definitely not as tight as their other two horror films, and I think their attempts to make a period piece might have stretched their resources, but the Adams family are responsible for a singular vision that doesn’t owe jack shit to traditional horror cliches. Even flawed, their films are absolutely worth your time.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

The Devil’s Rain: (It’s) Hail(ing), Satan

One of my more vivid memories of childhood is looking through the movie ads in the daily newspaper, because they were always designed to be as eye-catching and, in the case of horror films at least, as lurid as possible. Promising all kinds of truly horrific sights, my still-developing brain hadn’t yet learned to take things with a grain of salt, and the visuals in the ads would send my imagination into overdrive. A few of those films stuck in my brain and since I’ve become an amateur horror film enjoyer, every now and then I’ve taken it on myself to check them out, to see if the reality could come anywhere near living up to my childhood expectations. I mean, the answer is no. It’s always going to be no, because the imagination conjures far worse things than film does most of the time and I had a really vivid imagination as a kid. Maybe one of them has come close, but that’s it.

The Devil’s Rain, then, is another instance of me indulging a curiosity from childhood and this one’s probably the least frightening of the bunch. It’s not really a good movie by any metric - it’s borderline comic in places, featuring a cast that makes it even harder for viewers of a certain age to take it seriously, but it does have its moments.

It opens, without music, on credits laid over selections from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, pretty well-established shorthand for “this is going to be about hell” at this point. That leads into, well, a dark and stormy night. No, really. It’s pitch-black and the rain is absolutely pelting down. Inside her house, Emma Preston stares fretfully out the window, worried about her husband Steve, who’s out there somewhere. Her son Mark tries to reassure her, but she says something about how all of this is happening just as she saw it. So that’s odd. And soon enough, Steve’s truck pulls up in front of the house, and he gets out. But he doesn’t come inside, he just stands out there. He tells Emma that someone named Corbis wants a book that she has in her possession, and to come to Redstone - a deserted mining town nearby - with it.

And then the thing that was her husband dissolves into a puddle of slime.

With this, Mark resolves to head to Redstone to confront Corbis, insisting that the book - a large, dusty, old-looking tome that they keep safe under the floorboards of their home - is not theirs to bargain with. It’s actually a better start to the film than I might be making it sound. There’s a sense of isolation and threat to the sequence with the rain and the dark, and there isn’t too much exposition so we’re left knowing that something bad (and unnatural) is happening, something the Preston family has been anticipating for a long time, but that’s about it. Unfortunately, it’s sort of downhill from there for the most part. The general pace of the film is “people go one place, and then they go another place,” so then the action jumps away from Mark’s confrontation with the mysterious Jonathan Corbis to introduce us to Mark’s brother Tom and his wife Julie, who…just happens to be a psychic.

Why is she a psychic? As it turns out, it’s mostly a narrative device to explain Corbis’ whole history with the Preston family and to drive the characters from one location to another. Mark goes to Redstone, and then Tom and Julie follow when she gets a horrible vision about what’s happening to Mark, so really it’s sort of a movie about the members of a single family taking a trip from their homestead to an abandoned mining town and discovering that whoops, there’s an evil cult there. That sounds kind of reductive, but at least until the end of the film, that’s really kind of it. The acting’s mostly melodramatic, and the dialogue (especially in the confrontation between Mark and Corbis) is pretty purple and overblown. It’s not an easy film to take seriously.

And this isn’t helped by what are obvious budgetary limitations. The whole thing takes place in a couple of locations, one of which is an abandoned mining town, which is where the film spends most of its time. The stunt work is not the most convincing I’ve ever seen (a car plows into a tree at maybe 0.5 miles per hour, a tumble down some stairs might be the gentlest I’ve ever seen on film), and the practical effects work ranges from the surprisingly effective to the downright laughable. And the cast is full of people who were, as another review put it, either on their way up in their career or on their way down. If you were a kid in the 1970s or 80s, the majority of this cast is going to be very, very familiar to you from various films and television shows of the era. And it’s not their fault, but their familiarity does detract from any atmosphere this film might have at any point. At least two or three of them are so well-identified with other characters or shows that it’s difficult in the modern day to see them as any other character. You should be going “oh shit,” but instead you’re going “hey, it’s that guy!”

It's not all bad – the opening is pretty strong, the character of Corbis is surprisingly sinister, there are some genuinely creepy moments sprinkled throughout, and the climax makes up for the lack of action beforehand by being as deliriously gooey as Lucio Fulci at his best. There’s some potential camp value to the film having had Anton LaVey as a technical consultant, but the film itself isn’t really that campy. As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that I’d love to basically see the satanic cult version of Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, and this ain’t it.

It might seem unfair, like I’m holding this film to modern standards that it has no chance of meeting. But this came out after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and before Halloween, so in context it really does seem like an example of the sort of thing that horror was beginning to outgrow. And it doesn’t help that it doesn’t have the relentless eeriness of another low-budget film about cult goings-on from around the same time, Messiah of Evil. Between its overall clumsiness and its cast, I think this one hasn’t aged so well. Not in the cultural sense, there’s nothing objectionable about it, really, it’s just difficult to take seriously. This is one for watching with some friends and some beers.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon (this is available on Blu Ray? WTF?) 

Malignant: Out Of My Head

It’s probably safe to call me a member of the No Fun Club when it comes to horror films. I don’t especially like horror comedies, and I like my horror to be bleak and unsettling and not especially interested in entertainment. I get that, and I’ll own it. This is mostly because the whole reason I started writing this a really long time ago was because I felt (and still feel) like horror isn’t extended enough respect as cinema. And so, as a result, I tend to be very much into Very Serious Horror That Is Not Fun At All, Because Entertainment Is Bad.

And that’s probably not fair. And I realize this because although I didn’t find Malignant frightening, let alone bleak or unsettling or whatever, it was so much fucking fun to watch that I can’t dismiss it. It’s a love letter to earlier eras of horror film crafted with thought and vision and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

It opens on a shot of an old, gothic-looking building, looming over a stormy night. A title reads “Simion Research Hospital, 1993.” Inside, Dr. Florence Weaver is recording a report about a patient named Gabriel to tape (we know it’s videotape because it’s got that viewfinder overlay with a blinking red light in the corner, like you don’t actually see on videotape unless it’s in the movies). And then, as you’d expect, someone interrupts to tell her that Gabriel has gotten loose. There’s a lot of hurrying down corridors lit in lurid, flashing colors, as this other person exposits that Gabriel isn’t affected at all by electricity, that he’s almost drinking it up, and there’s a trail of bodies along the corridor. Something’s been cornered inside a room, almost feral. Finally it’s subdued and strapped into a chair. That’s when Dr. Weaver says “it’s time…to cut out the cancer.”

On that note, we jump to the present day, and a young woman named Madison. She’s visibly pregnant, and very tired. She’s been working extra shifts to save up money for after the baby comes. Her husband, Derek, is lounging on the bed watching television, presumably tired after his arrival from Abusive Creep School. Madison is really concerned about this pregnancy after suffering a number of miscarriages, and Derek starts off unsympathetic, before moving pretty quickly to cruel, and from there he gets rough, pushing his pregnant wife into a wall. She hits her head hard enough to leave blood behind. When Derek walks out, she locks the door behind her and lies down on the bed, where she has a horrible nightmare about a mysterious figure getting into the house and stabbing Derek to death.

And when she wakes up and walks out of the room, Derek’s lying there, dead. Just like she saw it happen.

So what we’ve got here is Madison and her sister Sydney trying to convince the police that she didn’t kill her husband, and that’s she’s having visions of more murders as they’re happening. And, as you’d expect, the pair of detectives assigned to the case aren’t believing her. If this sounds like something you’ve seen before, maybe more than once, that’s probably not an accident, because this film is an homage to a whole range of things. It’s got elements of 1980s slasher films as well as the weirder, grungier stuff Stuart Gordon was doing back then, along with giallo, proto-slasher films like Black Christmas, and thrillers like Eyes Of Laura Mars. It’s not self-consciously retro, it’s got the effects budget of a more modern horror film, but everything else about it screams one flavor of 80s schlock or another.

And it works. It works because those flavors are note-perfect. This is a film from a reality much like our own, but one where there’s a mysterious gap in the dictionary where the word “subtle” should be. I really thought that the opening scene would end with an off-screen voice calling “cut” and establishing the protagonist as an actor in B-grade horror movies, but no, that’s just the vibe. From jump, it’s ridiculous. Performances are consistently over-the-top, the dialogue is immediately overheated and mostly consists of pure exposition of the “you know you haven’t been the same since [insert long string of events here]” variety and lots of stating the obvious (during a firefight, someone actually says “they’re shooting at us” without any irony whatsoever.) You’ve got the stock wisecracking police detectives, and a crime scene technician whose sole defining features are that she is 1) mousy and single, and 2) clearly hot for one of the detectives. And everything is played completely straight, without a single ounce of self-consciousness or winking at the camera. Which is exactly how you do something like this.

Almost all of the scene-to-scene beats are predictable, which is a big part of why I didn’t find the film scary, the rhythms are so familiar that they’re almost comforting. But they’re all executed with a great sense of visual style - a shot that follows Madison through her own house from a top-down cutaway view, the doors and walls stretched impossibly high comes to mind, as does the way the killer is presented as an entirely black shape as if he’s a living silhouette, all black leather and a stylish gold dagger like he stepped right out of an Argento film. There are plenty of Dutch angles, everything is slathered in the most lurid reds and blues you can find, and there’s sinister music painted over every scene. With the exception of a few sedate exteriors, everywhere in this film is shadowy, covered in cobwebs, foggy, and with light pouring in from one angle or another. It’s like the cinematographer was instructed to make everything look like a nightmare sequence from one of the early Elm Street films. Much like the dialogue and performances, it’s all so earnestly overblown that it comes out the other side as art.

And it’s all paced with a wonderfully delirious sense of escalation. By and large it seems like the story of a young woman who has some kind of mysterious psychic link to a killer, and it continues along in that vein until the last act, when everything gets more grisly before going utterly apeshit. It gets much weirder and much bloodier than everything preceding it without getting any more serious in tone, blending the giallo-style flashbacks that reveal exactly how everything really happened with some classic body horror. Like everything else about this film, it swings for the fences and I found my jaw in my lap at how melodramatic and audacious the whole thing ended up being. As much as I’m partial to grim, unsettling, straight-faced horror, I have to admit I was absolutely delighted to take this ride. I guess I needed a reminder that I don’t need to always treat this like some kind of intellectual crusade, that it’s okay to loosen up and get out of my head sometimes, and I’m glad this film provided it.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available from Amazon 

No One Will Save You: Taken Away

There’s a podcast that is, as near as I can tell, about films that are so bad they end up transcending their own badness. It’s called “How Did This Get Made?” and although I’ve never listened to it, that phrase got me to thinking. See, I’ve seen some real stinkers over the years I’ve been writing this thing, but I’ve never really asked myself how those really garbage films got made. I know how they got made. There’s a mindset out there that horror movies don’t need to actually be good, they just need to deliver scares and gore and maybe some titillation. So somebody puts up the money, the assumption being it’ll be a pretty safe bet to turn at least a modest profit. This can describe exercises in ineptitude and in slick mediocrity alike.

And it’s not like the people responsible are really to blame for this - if a casual look at box office numbers and the state of criticism in the enthusiast press is any indication, a lot of the people spending money on horror films aren’t exactly picky. Maybe scares and gore and titillation is all some people are looking for. Hell, the notion of a horror film that’s actually thoughtful and intelligent and made with some level of artistry is so alien to some critics that they’ve invented the term “post-horror” or “elevated horror” to describe it. And…no. It’s not elevated, you’ve just set the bar that fucking low because you’re a condescending jackass. How do those films get made? They have commercial potential. That’s it.

And this is why I find myself asking how No One Will Save You got made. It is by no means inept or mediocre. But in its premise and narrative and execution, it’s very hard to sum up neatly, and it’s certainly surprisingly non-commercial for something distributed by 20th Century. It’s not like anything I’ve seen before, and that’s not something I say very often.

It opens on a lovely old farmhouse set back in the woods on a beautiful, sunny day. A young woman named Brynn lives there, and she’s up and about, sewing cute sundresses, packaging them with ribbon and thank-you cards to mail off presumably to paying customers. It’s easy to imagine that she has a successful Etsy store. The house is sunny and full of charm, and in her basement workspace, she’s got a whole miniature town laid out across a long table. A picture-book village being kept by a picture-book young woman, shot in picture-book colors and lighting. You half-expect animated birds to land on her shoulders before she bursts into song. She grabs the packages she needs to mail and drives into town. The town is Mill River, and it’s as lovely and charming and bright and sunny as her house and the world that encompasses them both.

But all is not well here. As Brynn drives through town, heads turn to stare, lips curl in disgust. She waves at someone, and the wave goes unreturned. She tosses the packages in the mailbox, shunned. From there, a visit to her mother’s grave, and then home to write a letter to her friend Maude. She notices an odd circular patch of dead grass on her lawn, and gives it extra water.

And then, that night, when all is dark - that real country dark, just you and the stars - Brynn notices that her door is open. The door is open, and she hears footsteps. Footsteps and low, inhuman chattering.

This is the kind of film that might get tagged as “high concept.” It’s ultimately an alien-invasion film very much in the mold of something like Signs or Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (with which it shares a basic visual vocabulary, all tall, skinny grey aliens and floods of light so dense they’re almost solid), but as the film goes on it gets gnarlier than Close Encounters ever did, and all of this is surrounded by the mystery of how Brynn ended up with the life she did, young and alone in this big old house, a pariah to the local community. And, on top of all of that, it’s doing this with an almost total absence of dialogue. Apart from a diegetic piece of music with sung lyrics, there are a total of five words spoken throughout the entire film, and two of those are repeated, so it’s only three distinct words. It could be very easy for this to devolve into a gimmick, but it doesn’t - there are a lot of things almost said, faint murmuring in the background too indistinct to make out, so the end result feels more like an entire film of the awkward silences that come when the person you’re talking about enters the room. The tentativeness before saying the thing that’s hard to say. It’s not that people don’t talk, they just don’t talk to Brynn. And since Brynn is the only person on screen for large swaths of the movie, it creates a palpable sense of isolation. The film’s title feels like it’s directed at her.

And this is on top of the faint but persistent strangeness of the film’s tone. It really does feel like it takes place in some kind of idealized all-American small town, but almost as soon as that impression is established, it becomes clear that something’s off - the way nobody talks to or even smiles at Brynn, all of the miniature houses arranged as if she’s building her own perfect little town, in her letters she alludes to something she regrets. From the start, there’s a sense that something’s off here. There’s a mystery to unfold, and then when night falls, it all turns into a siege film.

And the siege film works pretty well. It’s a mix of cat-and-mouse and fraught confrontation, and the beats are all pretty familiar but executed crisply and with restraint and a good sense of rhythm. The aliens start off as your garden-variety greys, strange but not especially threatening. But as the film goes on they become increasingly more inhuman, their features becoming more exaggerated, their manner more savage. They chase Brynn, roaring, clambering and skittering like spiders. There starts to be some suggestion that maybe they’ve already infiltrated the town, leading to a bit of body horror to round things off. Between the wordlessness (compensated for by a score that knows exactly when to sting),and a lot of the action taking place in a big house late at night, there’s a good, solid hum of tension to it that never really crescendos but never flags either, ticking along like a slightly too-loud metronome. You can’t really ever quite relax, right up to a climax that eschews edge-of-the-seat thrills, leaning more into revelations about how Brynn’s life ended up like this, before dropping an ending into your lap that somehow manages to recapitulate the film’s sunny opening in a way that is now, with context, chilling.

It makes sense that a film about an alien invasion is going to deal with the idea of people being taken away, but there’s a lot of different ways you can be taken away - alien abduction, sure, but also nostalgia, wishes for a better time, and worse. Some are taken from us too soon. Somehow this film manages to do justice to all of them. It’s both intensely familiar in its feel and simultaneously like nothing else, and I’m sure a lot of people aren’t going to know what to do with it. That’s their problem. There’s a lot to like in a film that harnesses nostalgic ideas about Americana and classic alien-invasion imagery and uses them to tell a surprisingly tense story about the escapism and denial of nostalgia. I’d rather watch that that the umpteenth iteration on Saw any day. I don't know how this got made, but yeah, more risky stuff like this, please.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu 

Pengabdi Setan (2017): The Family Skeletons

Never let it be said that I’m stubborn about the movies I watch. I’m stubborn about plenty of other things, but not that. Awhile back I watched an old Indonesian horror film called Pengabdi Setan (Satan’s Slave) and yeah it was crude, kind of clumsy and downright goofy in spots, but it had a real energy to it, a wild-eyed earnestness that got it over the rough spots. Good shit. Well, it came to my attention that someone did a remake of it in 2017, and before I checked that out, I watched one of the director’s later films, Impetigore, which I wrote about last week. I was…disappointed. It was visually impressive but the story was repetitive, sort of obvious, and it didn’t take long to squander any goodwill the impressive opening garnered. And that took the remake of Satan’s Slave off my to-watch list.

But here’s the thing - I have a few friends whose tastes in film I trust, and one of them had really good things to say about the remake and…even more unusual…even better things to say about its sequel. So I’ve got a remake…made by someone whose other work didn’t do it for me…that also includes a sequel. That’s kind of a hat trick of Things That Make Me Not Want To Watch Movies.

But, I gotta say, this particular person doesn’t miss often in my estimation, and as it turns out, the 2017 remake of Pengabdi Setan (Satan’s Slave) is actually pretty damn good.

It’s 1981, and out in the Indonesian countryside, there’s a family going through a tough time. Bahri and his wife Mawarni live with Bahri’s mother, and with their four children - Rini, Tony, Bondi, and Ian. Mawarni used to make a good living as a pop singer, but three years ago she was struck by a mysterious illness that’s left her bedridden, frail, and barely able to speak. Money’s extremely tight because the royalty checks from Mawarni’s albums are drying up, and the medical bills do not pay themselves. There’s a lot to do - make sure the younger kids are fed and off to school, look after Bahri’s mother, and attend to Mawarni’s  needs, listening for the bell that she rings when she needs something.

And when, after a particularly restless night, Mawarni finally passes away, it’s very sad, but it’s also a form of closure. The waiting’s over, and now the grief can begin. Bahri leaves for the city, to arrange for new sources of income. This leaves Rini, the oldest, in charge of the house. And that’s when it all starts - Bondi starts acting strangely, figures walking through the graveyard that backs up to the family house…

…and, in the middle of the night, the sound of a bell.

I don’t unilaterally dislike remakes - I do think they can be lazy attempts to capitalize on nostalgia, and ones that are shot-for-shot identical seem pointless to me. But this ends up working as an interesting riff on the original - one that keeps the same basic structure, but remixes it enough that it isn’t entirely predictable. Roles are shuffled around, events are recontextualized, and the result is very different from the original without being unrecognizable or even unfamiliar. It’s basically the same story told through two different zeitgeists, and that makes all the difference. The original was broad and intense, with all the subtlety of an emergency siren. It was a story about how you have to say your prayers or the monsters will come, damn near close to a morality tale. It was almost an after-school special with ghosts and zombies. This is a much less didactic film, one that makes the circumstances of this family’s misfortune less cut and dried, and religion doesn’t necessarily save the day this time around. There’s also a bigger focus on the relationship between all of the different family members, and though it’s not the master class on dysfunction and secret-keeping that Hereditary is, there’s definitely some overlap along those lines. A mother dies, and what she took with her to the grave is going to come back to haunt everyone. It’s the story of a family sticking together in the face of adversity, at the mercy of forces that have been aligning against them out there in the dark.

It’s also a much more subtle film. It does a really good line in spooky, creepy, classic ghost-story ambience, and though the beats are nothing especially novel, they’re executed well and don’t rely on quiet-quiet-quiet-quiet-BANG! jump scares. This is a film with lots of shrouded figures in windows and doorways, shots where there’s nothing in the room until there is, and even when it’s pretty clear how it’s going to go down, it uses that familiarity to create the anticipation that the inevitable payoff needs to get under our skin . Most of the film takes place in the family home, which is old, run-down, kind of grungy, with lots of corners and long hallways and not a lot of light. It manages to be sprawling and claustrophobic at the same time, and since a lot of it takes place at night, in the dark, there really isn’t a point when it feels like a safe place to be. The use of sound is also really important here - small things like the ringing of a bell, knocking on doors, old Indonesian pop music, all of it heralds something bad, and I like how much atmosphere and tension the film gets out of relatively minimal gestures like that. It’s not really a gory film (with one relatively brief but vivid exception), and the effects work is significantly better than the original. That’s not a high bar to clear by any means, but it means the sharpest moments hit like they should. It doesn’t have the raw, gonzo energy of the original and I do miss that, but the overall result is a much consistently better film, one that does a nice job of maintaining a steady simmer of tension throughout.

I do have a couple of complaints, though. The translation is a little lacking, as is so often the case, but the feeling still shines through. It’s also a much more involved story than the original, expanding the family and the people around them, and though I appreciate the moments of revelation, I think some of them were maybe a little rushed and didn’t have quite the impact they needed. This was most notable at the very end, which provided a nice twist and nod to the original, but the execution felt a little abrupt, so something that should have landed like a bombshell instead sort of blew past the viewer in a rush to set up the sequel. But, I have to say, based on how well this worked, I’m actually sort of curious about the sequel, and I never say that. I get the sense that family secrets aren’t that easily outrun.

IMDB entry
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Enys Men: Lost At Sea

I don’t know that I’d call myself a sucker for cryptic, enigmatic horror films, but if I were put under oath, I couldn’t really deny it either. I think this goes back to my contention that horror is, at the end of the day, not about thrills and chills and gore and jump-out-of-your-seat moments exclusively, like some (many) professional critics seem to think. There’s a whole palette of emotions that could be said to fall under the umbrella of horror, and to me, that’s the important bit: How does it make you feel? And you don’t need to be literal to evoke a feeling. Sometimes, watching something play out that sits just at the edge of comprehension, that may not make logical sense but fills you with unease…that’s the territory of nightmares, and what are horror movies if not our nightmares?

So yeah, I don’t think a film has to make strict “sense” to work. Cryptic, enigmatic, oblique, tone-poem movies can work and work well, but also risk falling apart into incoherence, and that’s unfortunately what I think happens to Enys Men. There’s a lot going for it, but it never really comes together and the result is something that is ultimately more confusing than haunting.

There isn’t really a story so much as there is a series of events and possibly recollections. There’s a woman (credited only as “The Volunteer”) who lives on the remote island of Enys Men, where her sole regular duty appears to be observing a small patch of flowers, noting soil temperature and the condition of the flowers on a daily basis and recording the results in a logbook. The records go back quite some time. She gets up, checks the flowers, checks an abandoned mineshaft by dropping a rock down into it and noting how long it takes to hit bottom, then she goes inside and makes her breakfast. It’s a rocky, wind-swept island, all rocks and moss and the crumbling stone ruins of what appears to have been a small mining village. She lives in the one intact structure on the island, a cottage that’s almost overtaken by the greenery creeping up its sides, as if the island is reclaiming any memory of human occupation. She has running water, but electricity is provided by a generator and rationed out for lights and some broadcast music in the evening. Her only contact with the mainland is a dodgy two-way radio and a supply boat that comes by on a regular basis. There’s a standing stone in her front yard, a monument to some long-ago tragedy.

Otherwise, she’s alone all the time, just her and all of the ghosts of this island.

Not to be too reductive, but it being a story of someone who’s ostensibly going mad from loneliness, told in largely disconnected static moments, results in something that is sort of like The Lighthouse as told through the lens of Skinamarink. It looks like something from a bygone era - scratchy, grainy film and a saturated color palette that nonetheless consists mostly of mossy greens, grays and browns, with striking patches of color - the sea, the sky, the woman’s bright blue eyes and brighter red coat, a bright red generator contrasted against a gray stone wall. The sense of isolation is effectively conveyed by the film being very quiet. There’s very little music  - the score is mostly ambience with some string and horn swells at especially fraught moments and there’s some diegetic music from her little radio, tinny and faint. There’s almost no dialogue as well (it’s about 10 minutes in before you even hear a voice), so you get these long stretches of silence punctuated by the rattle of a generator, the squawk and buzz of the radio. They aren’t jump scares per se, but the sudden cuts to them do have a startling, unnerving effect. This is probably the most effective thing about the film - the way it alternates long takes with sudden cuts keeps you off-balance. The camera spends as much time off of the woman as on, maybe more, which makes the island itself as much of a character as she is.

The quiet is unnerving, and so is the apparent monotony of the woman’s existence, described through repeated motifs of her daily routine which start to give way to what could be flashbacks or visions, and the way they combine and recombine starts to make everything stranger as the film goes on, in a fashion reminiscent of I Am A Ghost, another story of a woman all alone in an isolated location. What is at first innocuous becomes, over repetition, sinister, and for the first act at least, there’s a real eeriness to it all. But after the first act it starts to fizzle out, and I think it doesn’t work as well as it could for a couple of reasons. First, the pacing is very, very slow. This isn’t always a problem (in Skinamarink, for example, it works toward the dreamlike mood and a sense of constant tension), but here it serves to bog down the film in the second act, and any tension built up during the first dissipates. It starts to feel very repetitive, but not in a way where the repetition communicates anything. A film moving slowly isn’t a problem, but it does need to move. There’s less of a sense of disintegration or escalation than there needs to be as the film goes on. And this ties into the second problem, and that’s that ultimately it’s very difficult to make sense of what’s actually happening. There are what appear to be elements of the supernatural and even some body horror which have some kind of logic to them, but as everything moves away from routine and toward something more fragmentary and irrational, it seems less like the supernatural or a deteriorating mental state and more just a bunch of scenes that sort of relate to each other without committing to a particular through-line. The brief is mostly “person living in relative isolation starts to lose it,” or maybe “is she losing it or is she really being haunted” but the end result is mostly confusing - how much is memory and how much is losing grip on reality isn’t clear, and though there are some moments in isolation that are eerie and unsettling, the whole never really gels like it should and it just sort of ends without pointing toward any particular understanding. Which, again, isn’t necessarily a problem if you’re just going for pure mood, but there’s enough underlying story here that some kind of revelation is expected, and not enough structure for us to really grasp it. 

It's a shame, because the editing, cinematography and sound design are all really good - the aesthetics are there and very distinct, which is important for a visual medium. It definitely has a vision, which goes a long way with me, but the execution is messy enough that it feels like a missed opportunity.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

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