From Beyond: Pushing Boundaries

As a teenager, one of my favorite horror movies was Stuart Gordon’s adaptation (if you can call it that) of H.P. Lovecraft’s story “Herbert West: Reanimator.” It was the first in a series of Lovecraft adaptations he would do, and he had a very definite style. You could rely on them to be full of melodramatic acting, effects that were probably about as good as he could manage on the budgets he had, and a weirdly sexual undercurrent that was more unsettling than titillating.

In this respect, From Beyond is sort of the platonic Stuart Gordon Lovecraft adaptation. It doesn’t have the black humor of Re-Animator but it also doesn’t have the pervasive nastiness of Castle Freak. It’s a film about appetites and a hunger for stimulation and experience that gets increasingly more deranged, and the film getting more deranged right along with it.

It is late at night, and Crawford Tillinghast is working in the attic of a large, old house with what appears to be an array of very sophisticated computer equipment. He is assisting Dr. Edward Pretorius with experiments that would allow them to, upon attuning to exactly the right resonant frequency, view things normally invisible to human beings. Generate a magnetic field that vibrates large tuning forks, throw open the doors of perception. That’s the idea at least, and as Tillinghast runs the equipment through its paces, the room begins to fill with a queasy purple light, and suddenly the air is filled with swimming and floating…things. It’s working. He calls out to Dr. Pretorius, who comes into the room, sees their success and promptly turns everything up to 11 against Tillinghast’s protests.

There’s something out there in the ether. Something big. And now it can see them.

Needless to say, it does not go well for Pretorius or Tillinghast, and by the time a neighbor has called the cops to report more weird lights and noises, they arrive to find a distraught Tillinghast trying to flee the house, and Pretorius’ body upstairs in the attic, his head…twisted off. So, of course, Tillinghast ends up locked up in a mental hospital while awaiting trial for Pretorius’ murder, explanations for how he managed to twist another person’s head clean off be damned. Dr. Katherine McMichaels is assigned to evaluate him to determine whether or not he’s competent to stand trial. But McMichaels has a reputation for a degree of brilliance matched only by her disregard for ethics. She’s compelled by Tillinghast’s account of what happened, and want to take him back to the house to see this equipment for herself. She wants to know how it works. So Tillinghast and McMichaels return to the scene of the crime, accompanied by police officer and hearty skeptic “Bubba” Brownlee. It doesn’t go well for them either.

This film is contemporary to the original Hellraiser, and both films are very much about the hunger for sensation and experience. About wanting to feel more, the lengths people will go to accomplish that, and the often terrible costs. Hellraiser explores it through the supernatural, this film uses weird science instead, but BDSM figures prominently in both as a signifier for exploring the outer realms of feeling. As it turns out, Dr. Pretorius had some pretty serious kinks, and it even seems to be the case that this was the whole reason he was pursuing this line of research in the first place. And the more McMichaels works with the resonator, the more she develops the same urges. So this is a film that is very much about appetite. We witness McMichaels develop something almost like an addict’s dependence on the resonator device, one that produces dramatic shifts in her behavior. Brownlee is constantly talking about food, cooking hearty dinners for the three of them. The resonator ultimately produces radical physical change, and radical hungers to accompany them. In one particular scene, these hungers are sated while an alcoholic in the throes of delirium tremens looks on in horror. All examples of the wreckage caused by appetites.

There’s also some examination of the ethical concerns of research and patient care in the margins. Parallels are drawn between the strange science that drives the film and the state of mental health care at the time, in the form of a psychiatrist who holds McMichaels in contempt for her disregard for the well-being of the people upon whom she experiments, but also does not hesitate to dismiss the idea that Tillinghast isn’t culpable for Pretorius’ death, and is more than happy to use equally injurious methods in the name of “treatment.” The real difference between Pretorius’ resonator and ECT, for example, is that one is legally sanctioned and the other isn’t, but they’re both technology that gets into the brain and stirs things up.

Which is a lot for a film that is best described as “lurid.” The resonator paints everything in purples and magentas (the color out of space), one character’s perspective is depicted in smeary thermal-camera vision, the dialogue is as purple as the resonator’s glow, and the acting is done in the broadest of strokes. The effects are reminiscent of those in John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing on a somewhat lower budget, but with a couple of exceptions work pretty well even to modern eyes. It’s all slimy and goopy and full of things that look somewhat human until they erupt into something that isn’t human at all, and even if it’s clear that they’re effects, they still have a grungy power to them. I don’t think any of this is a problem – I actually find it kind of endearing. That might be nostalgia talking, but it’s exactly the intersection of melodramatic, violent and bizarre to which such loving homage was paid in Malignant. It’s bonkers and still has the ability to startle all these years later. There’s more than a little uncomfortably nonconsensual behavior, and the way mental health is discussed hasn’t aged especially well either, but that was pretty par for the course in 1986.

The first time I saw this, I was 17 or so, and expected another Re-Animator, but wasn’t really prepared for what I got. It’s a much more straight-faced affair, with a suitably bleak ending, and there are some moments that are still pretty startling and transgressive today. It’s sort of equal parts Hellraiser, The Thing, and early Cronenberg, which makes it much better than I thought at the time.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon 

Analog Horror: Do Not Adjust Your Set

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

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

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

Local 58 TV

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

Highlights: Contingency, Weather Service, Real Sleep

 

Gemini Home Entertainment

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

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

 

The Mandela Catalogue

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

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

Local 58TV on IMDB

Local58TV on YouTube
 

Gemini Home Entertainment on IMDB

Gemini Home Entertainment on YouTube
 

The Mandela Catalogue on IMDB

The Mandela Catalogue on YouTube

Underwater: As Above, So Below

Two of the most forbidding environments you can make movies about are deep space and the depths of the ocean. They have a few things in common - they’re both dark, they’re both cold, and they’re both extremely hostile to human life. We know for a fact there’s life in the deep ocean (and boy is some of it fucking weird-looking), and life in deep space is a source of constant speculation, explored in films both horror and not. But I don’t think it’s any accident that H.P. Lovecraft drew most of his inspiration for his best known work from both outer space and the deep sea. Places we were not meant to go, containing things we were never meant to meet.

One of the best films about the terrors of space has to be Alien, and I have to say, watching Underwater - a film about the terrors of the deepest ocean - I couldn’t help but be reminded of that film. Which isn’t to say it’s plagiarism, it really isn’t. but it has enough similarities that it’s difficult for it to escape Alien’s shadow. It never quite rises to greatness, but it’s helped along by generally strong performances and direction that doesn’t make any real missteps.

The opening credits set the scene in compact, efficient fashion, using a mix of time-honored news article headlines, architectural specifications, and topographical maps. A mining company has managed to plant a drill at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, which plunges over 36,000 feet down from the sea floor at its deepest points. Pitch-black, crushing levels of pressure. The drill is down there, as well as Kepler Base, a facility of 316 crew whose job it is to control and maintain the drill. The opening credits also tell us that the project has been dogged by controversy - accidents and “mysterious sightings.” But accidents happen, and arguably anything at that depth is going to be mysterious.

Cut to the interior of the base. Long, utilitarian hallways, fluorescent lights, work suits hung up on hooks. Night-shift mechanic Norah Price is brushing her teeth when there’s a rumble. Could be nothing, but then again, that far down with only the base’s structure between you and a nasty death by either drowning or implosion, you want to pay attention. It happens again. It feels like an earthquake.

And then it happens again, and Kepler Base begins to come apart at the seams.

From here on out, there’s just one objective - escape to the surface. Along the way, Norah encounters other survivors - including Lucien, the base’s captain - and not a lot of hope. About 70% of the base is compromised, and most of their escape vehicles are either nonfunctional or inaccessible. Lucien proposes that they suit up and walk across the ocean floor to the drill itself, using pipelines as guides, and using the equipment there to head for the surface. Are the suits rated for exposure to those depths for that long? Nope. Will breathable air supplies be an issue? Yep. Do they even know what the hell is going on out there that caused the base to collapse? Nope. Is this their only option apart from dying a horrible death from drowning, oxygen deprivation, or being crushed to death? Yep. Everything and everywhere is blocked by collapsed structure, water’s pouring in, and, well…they don’t appear to be alone in the base.

One of the biggest strengths to this film is that it’s very well paced. It hits the ground running and doesn’t really stop. With maybe one or two exceptions, this is a film about constant forward momentum, and the urgency works very much in its favor. In that sense (among others), it’s less like Alien than it is something like The Descent - a group of people faced with an increasingly hostile environment and only one way out. Alien was a slow burn, and this is about as far from a slow burn as you can get. The first half of the film or so is effectively a disaster movie, one that maintains the tension without sacrificing much in the way of believability or giving into histrionics. These are people who make their livelihood in a base hundreds and hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, and they’re generally competent and good at keeping their heads straight. In an environment like that, panic could easily be fatal, and it’s kind of a breath of fresh air to have protagonists who generally know their shit. This sense of actual people in an actually difficult situation, responding like people actually would is helped quite a bit by a strong cast who manage to infuse their characters with definable personality under conditions that don’t really lend themselves to character studies. There is the one obligatory wisecracker who manages to keep the quips coming no matter how dire their situation and okay, that one felt a little contrived, but he wasn’t actively grating. Interactions aren’t the tetchy naturalism of Alien - these are people who generally support and trust each other and are able to keep their eye on the ball. The setting does stumble a tiny bit (why on earth would emergency airlock releases use a swipe card and touchscreen keyboard?) but not enough to really distract, especially since it’s also when the film’s at its most relentless.

So we begin with a tight, focused disaster story that shifts focus in the second half to something potentially more sinister, and what’s frustrating is that I think it’s here…right at the moment when it has a chance to become something bigger and stranger…this is the moment when it suffers most from its inability to rise above its inspirations. It’s not bad by any means, just…workmanlike. The effects are solid, but not especially striking. The action doesn’t really slow down, but it sort of needs to, a little, so the implications of what we’re seeing can sink in. It’s not bad, and it doesn’t feel calculated, but it also doesn’t really do anything that I haven’t seen before. Barring the quality of the effects work and the performances, it kind of turns into any number of other Alien-but-underwater creature features you might see pop up on TV on any given Saturday afternoon. It hits all its marks, but doesn’t really do anything different or interesting with them.

Well, that’s not entirely fair. There are some blink-and-you-miss-it allusions late in the film to something bigger and darker and the ending nicely inverts some things, but the sort of constraints that give the first half of the film so much urgency really limit what can happen in the second half, and when it really needs to open up and get weird, it rushes past that to head for the ending. It sounds like I’m damning this film with faint praise, and maybe I am, but that’s the frustrating thing - it’s not a bad film, really, but it’s most easily compared to a great one, and the contrast, along with an inability to commit to some ideas that would really set it apart, does it no favors.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

The Backrooms: Strange Terrain

A few months ago, I was made aware of a whole bunch of different creators doing unconventional short-form horror on YouTube. Which makes sense, really - the quality of what’s possible with consumer-grade video equipment and effects software has gotten so much better over the years, and YouTube is a platform where anyone can set up an account and upload stuff for whatever audience is out there. Horror runs the gamut from slick Hollywood productions to grungy shot-on-camcorder stuff as it is, so it makes sense that it’d find its way there too.

And I have to say, having just dipped my toes in, what I’ve noticed is that it runs the gamut - there’s the fairly conventional stuff produced on a budget, but then there’s the instances where things get, for lack of a better word, really fucking weird. This doesn’t mean it always clicks with me, but at the very least I have to applaud how far out there some of it is willing to go.

And so today I want to talk about a collection of short films I’m going to refer to collectively as The Backrooms. They represent a really impressive example of independent filmmaking, as well as a certain type and style of story that I hold close to my heart.

But before I dive in, first, a little context. The Backrooms is a product of Internet-based collective storytelling, where multiple contributors produce creative work (images, writing, video) around a central idea. It began as a single image on 4chan (which, if you aren’t familiar…don’t) and from there, it took off into organizing wikis and evolving narrative and lore, built and developed by multiple independent collaborators. In that sense (as well as others), it’s not that different from the SCP Foundation. It’s a bunch of people creating an emergent narrative around a set of central rules or principles or idea.

So, to be clear, I’m not going to be writing about the entire phenomenon, just a collection of 16 short films made by Kane Parsons, which stand as a single narrative within the larger fiction. Other people have written about or made films in the world of the Backrooms, though what little else I’ve seen hasn’t impressed me so far to the degree that  Parsons’ work has.

It all begins with some industrial test footage - an array of some sort, all pointed at a suspended metal ball. There’s a hum, and a crackle, and the ball vanishes. Call it a proof of concept. It demonstrates that something…we aren’t sure what…is possible. There are notes, diagrams, voices discussing something technical. It gives way to an impersonal concrete room full of equipment, cabling, and the low hum that comes with dangerous amounts of electricity. It’s all pointing at a rectangle of metal mounted on the wall, about the size of a doorway. This is the application of that proof of concept. And it doesn’t work right away, but eventually the equipment holds, the hum is replaced by a screeching, tearing sound, and where the metal rectangle was there is now a blindingly bright light. It all builds to a crescendo and then…stops.

Where there was a plate of metal, there is now a hallway. A hallway that stretches into someplace that shouldn’t exist.

What follows is a largely oblique account of the exploration of the space that’s been pried open in reality. If it were just an exercise in visual effects, it’d just be a impressive demo reel. Don’t get me wrong, it’d still be impressive - Parsons started making these at 16 years old, and when I think about the kind of shit I was writing at 16, it’s humbling, What I think makes this collection of short films work to the degree that it does is that it takes the time to build a story, largely told through inference but still there, out of individual, disparate sources of footage. It’s very much found footage, but avoids a lot of the obvious pitfalls that pull more “professional” efforts under. There’s very little exposition (until the last two entries, which are the most conventional and I think the weakest as a result), instead building the story in sequence out of a mix of internal research footage, business development presentations, as well as footage sourced from people outside the facility who stumbled on this space outside of space accidentally, to no good end. It’s not hard to follow, but it doesn’t hold your hand either. Installments range in length from about a minute and a half to about 14 minutes, and few overstay their welcome. There’s a pervasive feeling of uneasiness and uncertainty which at its best sharpens into dread, and there are a couple of jump-out-of-your-seat moments along the way. There’s the sense that the company responsible for this research is tampering with things they shouldn’t, that there were places we were never meant to see.

So it’s already a pretty smart application of the found-footage approach, which is nice to see. But on top of that, it’s a narrative in a style for which I have a huge weak spot - a secret history of the world told in the intersection of the anomalous and the mundane, the point where the unknown is breached by some human institution determined to understand or explore or contain it. In that sense it shares DNA with the SCP Foundation (the film adaptations of which I’m generally less impressed by), the video game Control, the film Annihilation, the miniseries The Lost Room, among others. I love stories like this, where the mysterious, the unexplainable, the possibly horrifying is attended to by scientists and engineers and bureaucrats. The SCP Foundation’s dry filing classifications and experimental logs, Control’s mid-century modern office stretching out to an impossible vastness, endless halls filled with mundane objects kept in secure observation rooms, personnel in Annihilation occupying a facility that overlooks a growing stretch of land that refuses to obey the laws of nature, The Lost Room’s story of an entire motel room vanishing and how its contents are finding their way back into the world, changed. All of this is absolute catnip to me. This collection works as well as it does in this mode because it never really tips its hand in that regard. The footage is often mundane in nature, as blandly institutional as the Backrooms themselves, and whatever dialogue we get is just the bored chitchat of people who’ve done this a dozen times before and radio communications about procedure and mission updates. At least, until things go wrong, which they do.

And the Backrooms themselves are wonderfully uncanny - endless expanses of drop ceilings, fluorescent lights, institutional carpeting and sickly bland yellowish walls to start, giving way to even more bizarre expressions of the mundane the deeper they go. The further in you go, the stranger the geometry becomes, the less sensical - it’s all familiar and not in and of itself scary, but there’s the strangeness of empty office buildings to start with, and then the doorways start being the wrong size or shape, or positioned strangely on the wall, hallways in the floor and the spaces that lie beyond them, and what inhabits them. Nothing is ever really explained, so the things that interrupt the monotony seem even worse somehow. It takes settings so commonplace that we take them for granted and recombines them until they feel alien and arbitrary, and the end result is this strange feeling of being…not exactly in another world, but more like this world has glitched out. Copying and pasting never seemed so alien or sinister before.

These sixteen shorts are just the thinnest slice of the world of the Backrooms committed to video, but what little I’ve seen so far outside of this collection hasn’t impressed me as much. A lot of it tends gets the form right, but misses the importance of atmosphere and storytelling. Like they know what to put on the screen, but not why. But if anyone ever decides to make a film adaptation of The Navidson Record, I’d put Kane Parsons in the mix immediately.

IMDB entry
YouTube playlist

Historia De Lo Oculto: We Interrupt This Broadcast

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

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

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

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

The president has some very powerful friends.

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

The Deep House: Keen Insight Into The Obvious

Imagination is a powerful thing, and there’s a school of thought that says that nothing you put up on a screen can be as frightening as what the audience imagines is happening. Suggestion’s a powerful tool, understatement is a powerful tool, inference is a powerful tool. On the other hand, it’s possible to hint and tease too much and never pay things off. In the words of Stephen King, “sometimes you have to put on the mask and go ooga-booga.” And scary movies can live or die on this. You can set up a ton of atmosphere and dread through suggestion and then the instant you reveal whatever it is, its shortcomings undo all the goodwill you’ve built up. Monster movies are especially vulnerable to this, since it’s so hard to do a good, convincing monster. But for that matter, a movie like Skinamarink, in all of its opacity and unwillingness to really go ooga-booga, plays a dangerous game. I think it succeeded, but it’s certainly a polarizing film and I think that’s part of the reason why. It relies almost entirely on inference.

The Deep House definitely has the opposite problem. It’s a haunted-house story with a mostly-effective new spin on things, but a lot of what it does well is undone by an irritating inability to trust its audience.

We open on blocky, low-res camera footage of two people hiking through a forest toward a large abandoned building somewhere in Ukraine. They’re Ben and Tina, a couple of urban explorers who run a YouTube channel where they document all of the abandoned places they visit. They met in grad school, Ben’s from England, and Tina’s the daughter of French immigrants who landed in Illinois. The YouTube channel was Ben’s idea. On the one hand, it’s because he likes the idea of getting out there and seeing the histories of forgotten places for himself, instead of through the dry expanse of academia. But on the other, he really wants to go viral. He wants millions of views. He wants to be Internet famous, whether he admits it to himself or not. Tina doesn’t really share his passion either for urban exploration or Internet fame. She’s come to enjoy the exploration part, but she mostly tolerates it, for his sake. So she gamely traipses through the abandoned ruins of a hospital in Eastern Europe while Ben jump-scares her for clicks.

The hospital ends up being sort of a bust, but they’ve got something big planned - Ben’s gotten a line on a lake in France that’s isolated and out of the way and has the ruins of an entire village on the lake bed. Never mind abandoned hospitals and factories and whatnot. This is something nobody’s ever explored before, totally undiscovered. So they secure a bunch of diving gear, an underwater camera drone, and plane tickets to France. Tina practices holding her breath underwater.

And when they finally get to this little village in France near where the lake is supposed to be, they find instead a thriving tourist spot, lots of families out on the lake swimming, boating, just having a day by the water. Not at all undiscovered. Tina relaxes a little, suggests they just play tourist for a bit, drink some wine, chill out. Ben sulks. This isn’t how you go viral. But he warms to the idea that they’ll just have a nice little vacation…until a local tells him about a remote branch of the lake deep in the woods, off any road or trail.

One with a single, perfectly preserved house at the bottom.

It is not spoiling anything to say that the house is more than it appears to be, after all, we came here for a horror movie. And yes, it’s basically a haunted-house story, but setting everything underwater does add something to what could have been, on dry land, a pretty stock haunted-house story. This kind of story thrives on atmosphere, and setting the whole thing underwater (and it was shot practically, no cheap CG effects here) means there’s a gloom and murk to it that you wouldn’t get otherwise. The light is fitful, and floating, drifting objects help give it a feeling that’s simultaneously otherworldly and kind of oppressive. There’s also a ticking-clock urgency to it, since they’re diving deep. They have a limited amount of air and will need time to decompress on their way back to the surface. Combined with making their way through what ends up being a sprawling, fairly labyrinthine house that only has one way in or out, and there’s a tight simmering tension to the whole thing.

There’s also a definite, though lower-key, tension to the dynamic between the protagonists. Ben’s a bit unlikable, not especially respectful of Tina’s feelings and overly focused on making his channel a hit. It’s not to the point of obsession or unrealistic, he just comes across as shallow and opportunistic enough that he’s kind of a dick and he’ll probably get them in trouble. Tina cares about him, but you get the sense that she puts up with a lot and has for some time. She wants to be supportive, but he doesn’t make it easy. This isn’t dysfunction on the level of Dani and Christian from Midsommar by any means, but there’s a definite tetchiness that comes up. It’s really played out in asides and sidelong looks and in the way she slips back into French when she says something she doesn’t want Ben to be aware of. It’s easy to infer.

But that’s really the biggest problem with this film - it does do inference and environmental storytelling pretty well, but it’s also unwilling to rely on that to carry the story. It cannot let what we see speak for itself. Once they dive and begin exploring the house, the amount they talk to each other strains credulity, given how limited their air supply is. And this is only made worse by the fact that most of what they’re saying is just describing things both we and they can see for themselves. As they’re swimming through especially murky water, Ben will say “the water’s murky here.” Like, no shit. “There’s a door here.” Yes, we can see that. So can you, so can Tina. So can anyone looking at your footage. It’s almost like the filmmakers didn’t think we could understand what was going on right in front of our faces, so they had to have the characters tell us what we were seeing, and for most of the film it’s pretty grating and works very much against its strengths.

And yes, the alternative would be a film largely devoid of dialogue, but I really do think it could have done with more silence. And it’s not like it would have been an entirely silent film. But it feels like that person who just talks incessantly because they’re uncomfortable with silence. And in the final act it gets worse, with a denouement that just spells out exactly what’s happened in this house, and it’s to the story’s detriment. The important parts have already been figured out by an attentive viewer, and the details they fill in don’t really add anything. It gives us just enough to imagine the worst, and then shows it to us anyway, in case we didn’t get it the first time.

It all serves to mar a film with some really good atmosphere, a nice sense of mounting dread as further exploration of the house reveals an increasingly discomfiting history (spelled out nicely through detail and environmental storytelling in ways that don’t require the protagonists to tell us what we’re seeing even though they do anyway), and a suitably bleak ending.  I don’t know what it is about horror that makes so many filmmakers feel like they have to spoon-feed their audience, but fuck it gets tiresome.

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The Outwaters: Too Much Of A Good Thing

If there’s one thing I’ve never ever said about a found-footage film, it’s that it does too good of a job at what it’s trying to accomplish. There are definitely some good found-footage films out there, but there’s also a lot of hackneyed trash, so I’m just happy when one is actually good, never mind too good at what it’s trying to do. But as it turns out, that’s entirely possible. The Outwaters is a found-footage film that does a lot of things right, but in its pursuit of verisimilitude, it ends up being so realistic that it sacrifices pacing and a strong buildup toward its climax. There’s still a lot to recommend it, but it’s not exactly a slam-dunk.

The film opens tersely, with the audio from a 911 call playing over still images of four people. Something awful is happening in the background, screams and crying all garbled and distorted, snatches of speech coming through almost at random. The four people - Robbie Zagorac, his brother Scott, Michelle August, and Ange Bocuzzi, all went missing in August of 2013. There’s a click, and we’re presented with a title card introducing footage taken from three memory cards, presented in chronological order, discovered in 2017. That’s it, no overheated “this is the only record of the horrible events of that night” or shit like that. Minimal and dispassionate. What we’re going to see is an account of these four people who went missing. That’s it. So we’re off to a good start.

And the footage that opens up the first card is all very slice-of-life - Robbie giving Scott a backpack as a birthday gift and some of the sort of elliptical conversation people who actually know each other share. We can gather that their father is dead, Scott writes short stories, and that Scott has a strained relationship with their mother. There’s little rhyme or reason to it, it’s just snatches of the sort of stuff you record to capture important moments, but bit by bit a picture develops. Scott and Robbie are helping their friend Michelle make a music video. She’s a singer-songwriter in sort of a retro 70s Southern California mode (appropriate, since the three of them live in Los Angeles) and they’re going to go out into the Mojave Desert, camp overnight and shoot for a day or two. Scott and Robbie enlist Ange - I’m not clear if she’s their sister or just a childhood friend, but she flies out from the East Coast to help with hair and makeup and costuming. The trip out into the desert is uneventful, they get good footage, and then Robbie notices something odd - a strange charge in the air, like an oncoming storm. Then there are loud peals of thunder. At night, a strange light in the distance.

And then it all goes wrong.

In terms of what I look for in found-footage horror, this does a lot right - the dialogue and performances are naturalistic in their awkwardness and mundanity. It doesn’t feel contrived, it feels like the kind of stuff you’d find on some random person’s video camera, and it tells a story in the edges without being artificially expository about it. We get a sense of everyone’s relationship to each other without having it spelled out for us. The premise isn’t contrived either - they’re going out into the desert to shoot a music video, hence the camera and sound equipment. None of this “we’re making a documentary about this totally everyday thing for reasons” nonsense. Shots in the first couple of acts are often artful without feeling outside of the ability of a reasonably talented camera operator. My one gripe here would be that the music, although diegetic, often doesn’t seem to be sourced within the scene, but rather dropped into the audio mix in post-production, so it seems more like found-footage with a soundtrack at points than strictly recovered footage. But overall it feels convincing as recovered footage.

And this holds once they get out to the desert and - more importantly  once things start going wrong. Shots aren’t perfect, in fact, most of the second half of the movie consists of Robbie running around in the dark scared (or worse) out of his fucking mind and as a result, plenty of footage is of a camera being held at his side, pointing at nothing in particular or even shooting the landscape upside-down, which adds a nightmare vertiginousness to the proceedings. And the limited subjectivity pays off a lot - out imagination does a lot of the work here, aided by brief glimpses of awful, blood-smeared things in the darkness as everything, including a sense of time and space, starts to break down. Sound design makes good use of space, with far-off wails and immediate booms of thunder and strange cries and feedback. It’s as if we’re caught in a storm that tears reality away like flesh from a face, revealing the bloody nightmares underneath.

The problem, then, is twofold. First, the film’s a little too long at almost two hours. The first half of the film moves at a pretty languid pace, and though it’s less bothersome here, since it’s intended to establish these people, I did start to feel twinges of “get on with it” after a little bit. But it’s really in the second half where it really starts to show, as there’s really only so long you can sustain a constant barrage of (admittedly) horrifying imagery before it starts to become sort of numbing and lose its impact. It threatens to go from “get on with it” to “wrap it up.”

This isn’t helped by the second problem, which is a definite lack of structure. Again, this works perfectly well in the first half, but as it starts to set up the beginnings of the idea that something isn’t right, the second half suddenly slams into high gear out of nowhere and then doesn’t let off the gas until the end. Now from the perspective of verisimilitude this makes total sense -  you find yourself in a waking nightmare, nobody’s going to stop and explain it, shit’s going to get weirder and more horrifying regardless of your ability to comprehend it. But it really does come out of nowhere and goes on long enough that it starts to feel samey, just more horrible shit being stuffed into our eyeballs. In isolation it’s all very well-executed, but there’s so much of it without any sort of narrative arc or much opportunity for us to even infer things that it all starts to feel shapeless. There are some hints early on that something isn’t right, and they’re paid off well in the final act, but they don’t have the space they need to breathe among all the chaos.

I think if they’d spend more of the second half of the film slowly building up the feeling of wrongness and really turned it up for the final act, it would have worked a lot better. As it is, it doesn’t respect neatly packaged narrative and that’s as it should be for the kind of film it is, but it also ends up working against it. I think it goes to show, once again, just how much of a tricky balancing act found-footage films are. Most of the time, you get people who just can’t commit to shooting something that doesn’t look like a conventional film and so what’s supposed to be raw footage shot by amateurs just looks like something made by film students on the (very) cheap. Here, I think we’re sort of dealing with the other end of the continuum - it’s so committed to realism in all of its awkward, messy imperfection that the momentum we need gets sacrificed. But to the extent it works, it really, really works, enough that I’m willing to put up with it being a little too good at what it’s trying to do.

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The Empty Man: Image And Substance

“Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long”

        - T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Marketing is a hell of a thing. I get that you need to on some level convince audiences to come see your movie, and part of doing that is trying to convince them that it’s going to be good. I don’t think I’m offering any penetrating insight on that front, but goddamn is it annoying when the marketing for a film frames it as one type of film when it’s really another. Maybe I’m still feeling burned by discovering the hard way almost thirty years ago that Muriel’s Wedding was not, in fact, a romantic comedy about a young woman’s love for Abba, but The Empty Man is marketed as yet another movie about a bunch of kids who mess with a Bloody Mary-style urban legend and get more than they bargained for. And it’s not that.

Well, it’s not not that, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a brooding, unsettling journey into something much bigger and darker than that, and it’s a lot smarter than its ostensible premise might lead you to believe.

The film opens on four friends taking a hiking vacation in Bhutan. They’re trekking through remote villages and up into the mountains. It’s slow going, and just when they’ve gotten far away from the nearest village, one of them takes a tumble down a crevasse. He’s not okay, and there’s a huge snowstorm coming in. They find shelter in an abandoned house and things…start to get strange. They don’t end well.

An indeterminate amount of time later, in Webster Mills, Missouri, James Lasombra is living the life of a man whose wife and child are gone. Long hours at his store selling security equipment, an especially depressing birthday dinner by himself at a Mexican chain restaurant, rattling around inside a house too big for one person. It isn’t clear right away what happened to them, but whatever it was, there’s a lot of tiptoeing around it between him and Nora, his neighbor. As it turns out, Nora’s daughter has gotten involved with some new-age self-help group and has apparently discovered the secret to transcendence. You know, like you do when you’re young. And then she disappears. Local law enforcement isn’t rushing to do anything, though, because Nora’s daughter is 18 and appears to have packed up and taken a bunch of her clothes and possessions. Nothing about this says foul play, and she’s old enough to make her own decisions. But Nora feels like something’s wrong, and James - who used to be a police officer- agrees to do some digging.

Starting with the phrase “The Empty Man made me do it,” written in blood on the mirror.

For a film that’s supposed to be about a bunch of teens running afoul of an urban legend, it’s pretty audacious in its construction. The prologue in Bhutan is about the length of a short movie on its own - to the point that I paused to check that I had the right film - and it puts some pieces into place that the film takes its sweet time to pay off. In fact, that’s probably one of the film’s bigger strengths, that it’s not afraid to take its time. It rarely feels like it’s dragging or spinning its wheels, but it is a very deliberately paced movie, very careful and spare. There’s not a lot of dialogue, mostly short, economical conversations that don’t get too stagey, and the performances are consistently on the low-key side of believable. It uses a lot of shots with little to no dialogue to communicate details - the sequence where James spends his birthday by himself in a Mexican restaurant is a great example. It’ s both comic and deeply sad and works as an economical sketch of what his life is like, even sneaking in some details that become more important later. There are a lot of little character touches like this, and the film is especially good about doing exposition through glimpsed details and asides, the kind of exchanges people with a shared past actually have, fragmentary flashbacks that feel like shards of past intruding on the present. It's exposition inferred rather than laid out plain and contrived.

It’s also not what you’d call a loud movie, in the sense that it doesn’t really go for jump-scares or melodrama. There are moments of violence, but they’re largely brief and sudden, otherwise unaccompanied by any fanfare, over as quickly as they begin. The score is mostly cold ambience, like a winter wind and the cracking of icicles, and it’s a shadowy film - there are a lot of single light sources creating oases in the middle of darkness, people moving in and out of light. It’s less concerned with scary moments than it is a constant, sinister hum, a feeling that something isn’t quite right. This isn’t a movie that jumps up and screams in your face, this is a movie that sneaks up from behind you, leans over and whispers terrible things in your ear. The quiet, spare, approach and deliberate pacing mean it gradually unspools, taking a winding path where gradual recollection and revelation play out against a landscape that feels like a trip down a rabbit hole - we’re in Bhutan, then we’re in Missouri, a hiking trip goes wrong, then a bunch of kids start going missing, there’s an urban legend involved, and that somehow opens up into something else entirely, like James wandering impossibly deeper and deeper into the bowels of an old building downtown, these strange secrets stretching farther than anyone would expect. And it just keeps twisting and spiraling into some pretty unexpected places - there are nods to postmodernism, Tibetan mysticism, cosmic horror, and it hangs together well, self-assured and quietly chilling.

On the downside, the deliberate pacing extends even to the end, which could have been tighter - it’s long enough from the big reveal to its culmination that by the time it gets where it’s going, a lot of the impact has been lost and it feels more like a foregone conclusion than anything else. In that sense, it kind of ends not with a bang, but a whimper. But the ride to get there is surprisingly good - smart and restrained and atmospheric as all get-out. I often find myself watching otherwise disappointing movies and thinking how much better their basic premise could have been in better hands. This time I came away feeling like I’d seen what could have been a really tired, obvious premise done really really well, like a gourmet version of a White Castle slider. The marketing promises junk food, but you get cuisine.

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Messiah Of Evil: So Crazy It Just Might Work

Something I’m beginning to notice is that once you start getting into older horror films (like, say, from the late 1960s onward) that aren’t the touchstone classics of their time, shit starts getting really weird. This isn’t just true for horror films - I can remember seeing a revival of a 1965 mystery called Who Killed Teddy Bear? that was easily one of the strangest, campiest things I’d ever witnessed on the big screen - but I’m starting to really notice it in horror films. Go back to the 1950s and mostly it’s stuff that has become quaint, go forward into the mid 1980s and, with some exceptions, things get formulaic for awhile. But it sort of feels to me like there’s a sweet spot from the mid 1960s to the early 1980s where the rules hadn’t really codified yet, and all kinds of oddities got made.  

And Messiah Of Evil is absolutely an example of exactly that. It’s a strange little fever dream of a film that, despite obvious shortcomings, manages to be surprisingly compelling.

It doesn’t waste any time, opening without any context at all on a man running through what appears to be suburban backyards, terribly bothered by something. He acts almost like he’s overheated, pausing to let a sprinkler douse him. He’s lying down on someone’s lawn, and a young girl comes out of the house, looks at him curiously…and slashes his throat with a straight razor out of nowhere. Smash cut to the title card. Does this man have anything to do with what follows? Kind of? Does the girl ever appear again? Nope. Does it matter? Nope. It’s played with such wild-eyed earnestness that you can tell all bets are going to be off. This cuts to the blurry, washed-out, backlit figure of a woman wandering down a hallway and a shrill, panicky monologue about how "they" are coming and how no one will hear you scream. So that's...no, that's still pretty fucking weird. 

From that, we cut to a young woman named Arletty. She’s driving into the Southern California town of Point Dume, looking for her father, an artist named Joseph Lang. There’s a voiceover from her as she drives, about how she and her father grew apart over time, until their only communication was the occasional exchange of letters, and how she hasn’t heard from him for months. She’s concerned, and wants to know what’s wrong. When she arrives in Point Dume, she finds her father’s beachfront combination home and studio abandoned. He left his diary behind, however, and in it he writes of being plagued by nightmares, of the town and all its residents being gripped by a horrible darkness.

In the diary, he begs Arletty not to come looking for him.

This is a film made in the United States by American filmmakers, and it’s shot on location in Southern California, but watching it, nobody would blame you if you mistook it for a lost Lucio Fulci film. There’s a lot of the same gonzo strangeness here that The Beyond had, the same lack of subtlety and willingness to just put something absolutely bizarre up on the screen in nearly every scene, whether it makes strict sense for the story or not. There’s nothing really naturalistic about this film at all, but an obviously shoestring budget also gives it a certain evocative rawness that you don’t really see much anymore outside of attempts at homage. It’s weird to compare something favorably to Manos: The Hands Of Fate, but it’s got that film’s same visual sense that you’re watching something between a community theater production and home movie from a parallel nightmare dimension. The acting’s better, but the dialogue is just as affected and melodramatic to the point of surrealism.

There isn’t a single conversation or interaction in this film that feels normal or natural (there’s a sequence in an art gallery - run by a blind woman - that’s especially bizarre for no apparent reason), whether it’s how people talk, how they hold themselves, the way they look at each other, everything’s just flat out weird. There’s no solid ground for the viewer, so there’s a low-level discomfort even in the moments where nothing’s actually happening. So it’s got Italian horror’s tendency to go pedal-to-the-metal strange, and  it’s also got Italian horror’s use of vivid color down pat - there’s a sequence in a movie theater that’s especially striking in this regard, and a moment toward the end that uses the paint in Joseph’s studio to create something that feels really unnerving without relying on gore. It’s not afraid of using light and color and garishly cheap-looking blood, it’s not afraid to hold a shot a little longer than you’d expect or to cut away at an odd moment, and like those classic Italian horror films, it’s all played so straight that it blows right past campiness into something almost operatic. I’m usually partial to more naturalistic films, but this one’s so relentlessly weird that it works. It just absolutely full-tilt commits to the strangeness, which is what you need for a film like this.

All of this is contrasted with settings that are - with one important exception - mundanely suburban, which just further contributes to the whole thing feeling like a nightmare, where people don’t talk like people, where the surroundings are familiar but somehow off, where everyone carries themselves as if they are harbingers of some underlying dread, not obviously stated but palpable nonetheless. Joseph’s combination house and studio is located in what might be a former church, and mostly consists of a single large, open space dominated by huge canvases of somber crowds of people and commercial interiors. At times it feels much larger than it actually is because it’s hard to tell where the actual space ends and the spaces depicted on some of the canvases begin, and the result is often disorienting on top of whatever else is happening in the scene, not to mention all of the silent, impassive faces staring back at you. Work areas and living areas are scattered throughout as well, so the whole environment feels itself like something from a dream, in the strange logic of a place that is both your bedroom but also a studio but also somehow dropped smack dab in the middle of a public area.

And then in contrast to this, you have everywhere else in town. Point Dume is a small town on the coast in Southern California, near Malibu, and it’s as everyday as that would suggest - there are grocery stores, movie theaters, motels, the whole lot, and by itself it’s not especially spooky, but it’s also largely deserted. It’s likely that the filmmakers got permission to shoot where they did in the middle of the night, which would explain the strange empty feeling, but it’s really effective. You’ve got this small suburban town in sunny California, right on the beach, and though nothing seems shuttered or abandoned, there’s nobody around. The lights are on, but nobody’s home, and this adds to the feeling of being stuck in a strange dream. At least, until there are people there, and then terrible things happen. That they’re happening in spaces like movie theaters and grocery stores just adds to the strangeness of it all.

The plot itself is pretty bare-bones - woman comes to a small town looking for her father, discovers the town has some strange, terrible secret, and the residents start bumping people off in ways that are presumably gruesome, given that most of the violence occurs off-camera or through clever editing. But somehow that’s worse, because either we don’t see what happens and people just vanish, or we see the aftermath, awful and sudden  It’s an interesting counterpoint to Dead & Buried, a film that would come along about ten years later, assaying similar Lovecraftian subject matter (town with a dark, occult secret) in a similar location (a small coastal town), but where Dead & Buried was more gothic in its approach - a fogbound fishing village in New England - this is sunny everyday California, and though Dead & Buried had its strange (and to its credit, very strange) moments, it was a much more grounded affair than this. It felt sinister, where this film feels almost hallucinatory. The result is a film that doesn’t always (or even usually) cohere, but is very rarely dull.

IMDB entry
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Prince Of Darkness: Indistinguishable From Magic

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C. Clarke

There’s an element to cosmic horror that I think sometimes gets overlooked, beyond the whole tendency to reduce it to tentacles and madness, and that’s its technological piece. Sure, you’ve got the stories of cultists making sacrifices to ancient gods, but as often as not those ancient gods are mixed up with equally ancient extraterrestrial races, concerned with foul experiments on humanity. And this is one of those combinations I really dig. It’s not an amalgamation of horror and science fiction, strictly speaking. Alien comes to mind there, but that’s really a horror story told through the lens of science fiction. And it’s not one of those stories where what first appears to be horror turns out to be something like alien abduction - those are disappointing, as often as not. No, this is more like a case where the ancient and incomprehensible is rendered in terms of technology instead of magic, or as a commingling of the two, and the results feel foreign to our experience. And I think part of making a good horror movie (or at least a scary horror movie) is denying the audience the comfort of expectations.

Prince Of Darkness is one of the few films to plumb this very specific intersection, and in many ways it defies easy description. Unfortunately, it hasn’t aged all that well on a few fronts, but it still has its moments, and I think those moments are worth considering.

It opens with an old man lying in bed, breathing his last. He clutches a small box, and then he’s gone. A priest, called to his bedside, finds the box. Inside is a key to a reinforced door in an abandoned church in a run-down part of Los Angeles. Elsewhere, Dr. Howard Birack is teaching a graduate class on quantum physics, explaining how our understanding of things like time and space and causality break down entirely at sufficiently large or small scales. That beyond a certain point, the universe is chaotic and unknowable. Birack gets a call from the priest (who never gets a name), inviting him out to this abandoned church.

It turns out that the old man who died was the last member of a monastic order called the Brotherhood of Sleep, an order so secret that its work was concealed from even the highest levels of the Vatican. The brothers of this order have, for centuries, guarded something stored in the catacombs below this church. A tall cylinder made of metal and glass, filled with a turbulent green fluid. Carbon dating puts it at seven million years old.

Written in the old man’s journal: “The sleeper awakens.”

So Dr. Birack brings his students and a lot of equipment to the church. They’re joined by the priest, a biologist and his students, and an expert in ancient religious texts, whose job it will be to translate a book found next to the cylinder - a book written in a mishmash of Greek, Latin, and Coptic, passages erased and overwritten, over the course of centuries. They’re going to try and find out exactly what this thing is.

In style and subject matter, this film is pretty much a homage to the works of Nigel Kneale, who trafficked in similar territory in his own work. Some of it isn’t even subtle - one of Dr. Birack’s students is a transfer from “Kneale University” and the screenplay is credited to the pseudonym “Martin Quatermass.” I’ve seen some of Kneale’s work, and a lot of it is somewhat dated, but it’s still interesting in how it merges the scientific and the supernatural in really compelling ways. I don’t like the idea of remakes, but I would purely love to see Ben Wheatley tackle a remake of Kneale’s The Stone Tape. And that’s one of the best things this film has going for it - it’s an approach to the idea of supernatural evil that you don’t see very often. You’ve got a 2000-year-old religious text that contains differential equations and describes Jesus of Nazareth as a member of an extraterrestrial race tasked with imprisoning the occupant of this cylinder, with the idea that evil is a material thing, describable in terms of biology and physics. Strange dreams of future events, beamed directly into people’s brains as a stream of tachyons. In the news, the light from a supernova that occurred millions of years ago is just now reaching Earth. The sun and moon are both visible in the sky. Insects are going crazy, and people are starting to congregate around this abandoned church. As Lovecraft would put it, the stars are right.

So when it does work, it’s creepy and atmospheric, creating a feeling almost from the get-go that something very bad is coming, that events millennia in the making are gaining momentum. It doesn’t lean into many of the usual cliches about things like demonic possession and creates a pretty interesting visual vocabulary for itself in the process. It doesn’t always make a lot of sense if you look at it too closely, and not everything is explained, but I think that this actually helps it - we’re dealing with something beyond our comprehension, so of course it isn’t all going to make sense.

But there are parts that don’t work all that well, a lot of it (though not all) being a function of time. None of the characters are especially developed as people, and there’s a lot of them so after a bit they come off as kind of interchangeable. The dialogue is clumsy throughout, and the performances range from good and understated to wooden. Some of them are barely performances, not through any fault of the actors, but just because there are so many people that most of them barely get any time to develop at all, so there’s not much sense of who they actually are. It’s sort of hard to care about what happens to them as a result.

And in the moment to moment interaction, it really shows its age in terms of how it handles gender. Attitudes toward women in this film aren’t great, more chauvinistic than misogynistic, but it’s just obnoxious enough to be noticeable. In this building full of scientists and experts, the women are pretty much discussed entirely in terms of how available they are, and it’s off-putting enough to be a distraction, and the clunky dialogue doesn’t help. For a film that’s supposed to be about science trying to understand the supernatural (or the supernatural as phenomena that can be scientifically explained), it…doesn’t spend much time on the science, and the jargon doesn’t really hold up. I mean, it’ s not Star Trek levels of technobabble, but it feels at several points like an afterthought - all of these experts gather at this church and then sort of…go into different rooms and have conversations, so we don’t really get a clear picture of how science explains this thing. It sort of comes up in passing here and there, but it feels like understanding the artifact and the implications of its existence should come first, and then things should start to go south, and it doesn’t really work that way. It’s sort of scattered in what story it’s telling.

And that’s the other big problem - the pacing. It starts off strong, creating this atmosphere of looming dread, and it ends pretty well as everything goes to shit, but the middle sags quite a bit. One thing Kneale’s stories do well is create a sense of discovery, where you’re finding out along with the characters what it is they’re dealing with, and here we’re sort of shut out of that part of the story, and it suffers as a result. It’s not a very dynamic film at all, and that weakens the third act and threatens to bring the second act to a screeching halt. I suspect some judicious editing would tighten things up a bit, and I don’t think it’s just a matter of modern sensibilities preferring faster-paced films. I like a good slow burn, but this film’s missing the sort of things that would make for a good slow burn - establishing the people, gradual reveals of what they’re dealing with, mounting dread as everything builds toward a climax. Here we have an assortment of scenes put together that don’t really gel after the very promising first act.

But at the same time, when it works (and there are definitely moments when it does), it works really well. The effects work still mostly holds up, and even when it doesn’t it’s not egregious. It’s easy to overlook the technical shortcomings because it’s often in service of vivid, creepy setpieces. The cinematography is functional - solid without being flashy (with the exception of some inventively unnerving dream sequences), everything scored with ominous, pulsing synthesizer, and it ends on a strong, nicely inconclusive note, which redeems it to a degree.

So I think what we’re left with is something ambitious, trying to do something beyond the obvious, something that starts strong and ends, well, pretty strong, but really bogs down in the middle and doesn’t have performances that can carry it past the pacing problems. Which is too bad, because the idea of evil as a function of particle physics and ancient creatures from beyond the stars alike - that place where science and magic blur and become indistinguishable - is strange, fertile territory for exploration. And it’s been too long since anyone journeyed there.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Housewife: In Dreams, I Walk With You

I appreciate a well-crafted narrative as much as anyone, both because a well-told story is engaging for its own sake, and it because it can be enjoyable to appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into it. And you don’t always get that in horror film. Genre filmmaking is vulnerable to a reliance on cliché and timework expectations in general, and I think horror films are especially vulnerable to this - it’s very easy to make a commercially successful film that neglects character, mood, and skillful narrative in favor of cheap shock. And plenty of folks like that, but…I dunno. It feels like empty calories to me. So I like it when filmmakers actually make horror films that are actually films.

But…that’s not really what I’ve come here to talk about today. Today, I’ve come here to talk about films that concern themselves less with character and skillful narrative and more with just grabbing you by the collar and telling you to strap in because you are about to go for a ride. The kind of films that you just let wash over you.  

Housewife is very much one of those films, a striking combination of Dario Argento and David Cronenberg, a film more felt than thought about, a film that says pretty much from the start “hang on, because you are in for some weird shit.”

It begins with a big, old house, and a room with a shrine, dominated by a painting of a stern-looking woman, another woman praying feverishly to the picture. Elsewhere in the house, two little girls - sisters - stay inside their bedroom. They have to stay there when their mother is talking to “the visitors.” The older of the two discovers that she’s begun menstruating, and unsure of what’s happening, she calls for her mother. When her mother sees what has happened, she…well, she begins wailing in anguish. Acting like this wasn’t supposed to happen. Which isn’t encouraging. She tells the younger girl to stay in the bedroom, close her eyes, and play a counting game. She does, and counts, and keeps counting, and keeps counting. Her mother doesn’t come back. She opens her eyes to find the bedroom door open, so she walks out into the hallway, follows sounds of splashing…

…only to discover her mother drowning her older sister in the toilet.

The little girl is Holly, and both her sister and her father die that night by her mother’s hand. We don’t know why. We fast-forward to Holly’s adulthood. She’s married to a painter, Timucin, and they’re trying to have a child. Holly’s childhood left its mark - she really, really doesn’t like using toilets. But she and Timucin seem okay otherwise. And then an old friend - well, more than a friend - comes back into their life. Her name is Valery, and the three of them used to share a small place in New York, as well as a bed. Holly’s a little upset that Valery’s just shown up after two years of being incommunicado, and you get the sense that maybe this unconventional relationship didn’t end happily. But she’s here now because she’s in town for a seminar being held by a group called The Umbrella of Love and Mind. Is it a self-improvement workshop? Is it a cult that calls itself a “family” and teaches people to travel through the dreams of others?

Why not both?

So Holly and Timucin and a couple of their friends attend the seminar, and that’s where…well, it’s not where shit gets weird, because the whole thing starts weird, but it’s where it starts to get really weird. This is a film that is not really heavy on story or even plot - it sort of sets things up and then once the pieces are all in place it just starts stuffing imagery and ideas into your eyes in a way that’s engaging, even if it doesn’t always make clear, linear sense. In some ways, it’s very artificial - especially in the dialogue, which is stilted in a way that suggests it was translated or written by someone who wasn’t a native English speaker. I was actually sort of surprised that it wasn’t subtitled like the director’s previous film. This doesn’t help the narrative’s coherence, but what we lose there we gain in a pervasive strangeness. The characters aren’t explored in-depth, but they feel like people, and the relationship between Holly, Timucin, and Valery is communicated as much by showing as telling - details come out eventually, but well before that how the three of them interact gives you a pretty clear picture of who they were to each other. It’s a relationship that feels lived-in and intuitive. Other characters are less fleshed-out, but it doesn’t matter so much because once the table’s set, with Holly being singled out by the group’s enigmatic leader, Bruce O’Hara, it hurtles deliriously toward the end.

The film takes a lot visually from the work of Dario Argento - there’s a real giallo vibe to the cinematography, with lots of people in stylish, aggressively modern settings contrasted with flashbacks and dream sequences shot in soft focus, lighting heavy on reds, blues and golds, There’s a real dreamlike surrealism to these sequences that contrasts nicely with the stuff happening in the present and waking world, and the acting often has the same sense of operatic intensity you see in Argento’s work. This isn’t a naturalistic film, it’s stylized with distinct visual sensibilities used to locate parts of the film either inside or outside of the present and the real, establishing and then subverting the difference to good effect.

The story isn’t necessarily one that Argento would tell, though - narratively, it takes its cues from the early work of David Cronenberg. The meeting that Holly and Timucin attend has the same blandly sinister vibe present in Videodrome, that same intersection of salesmanship and showmanship putting a friendly face on something very dangerous. What the group does - “dream surfing” that allows them to walk around inside another’s subconscious - isn’t that far off from the strange psychology of The Brood or Scanners, and the nesting doll of a narrative, where dreams and reality commingle freely, isn’t that far off from the simulated worlds of eXISTENz. It doesn’t feel like plagiarism, just a lot of the same vibes and ideas put together for a different purpose, expressed with a distinct visual palette. This film doesn’t concern itself with Cronenberg’s questions about the relationship between biology and technology, or technology and autonomy. It has its own ideas about the new flesh, and as the film goes on, it moves from the psychological horror that you get when the line between the conscious and subconscious start to blur into the body horror of pregnancy and birth, ending on a startling note of cosmic horror that lingers just long enough for its punch to remain intact.

A lot of this recalls the director’s first film Baskin - the pervasive dreaminess sharply contrasted with gruesome, bloody imagery, the feeling that there’s something going on just outside of our awareness, the feelings that there’s more to this story than we’re getting. Like that film it doesn’t always make a whole lot of sense, but also like that film there’s a real sense of vision at work here, and this one feels more strongly realized, more self-assured than the director’s debut. It’s very much one of those films that you have to let wash over you and experience, rather than think too closely about - if you stop to think about it for too long, it kind of falls apart, but if you go along for the ride, well, it’s a hell of a ride. When the credits rolled, I sat up and said “DAMN!” out loud in the privacy of my own home, and that isn’t something that happens very often at all.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon