Chernobyl: Palatable Fictions

Nothing spices up the prospects of a horror movie like the phrase “based on a true story.” Of course, it’s total bullshit as often as not, but it does give the film a frisson of danger, like maybe this isn’t as safe as our usual serial-killer, ghost, or monster movies. And as often as not, what you get is…a fairly pedestrian serial-killer, ghost, or monster movie. What a lot of these films fail to understand is that the reality is so often so much worse than anything a screenwriter or director could come up with. The horrors that are possible in the real world far outstrip our imaginations.

Chernobyl - a five-part miniseries about the titular disaster - is based on a true story, and it’s very faithful to that story. No ghosts, no monsters, no serial killers. And although very few people would call it horror, make no mistake. It is.

It’s early, early in the morning on April 26th, 1982, The night shift at Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located in Ukraine, has just come on duty, surprised that they’re going to be running a safety test. The test was scheduled for the day shift, but delays pushed it back well into the evening and then into the night. The night shift hasn’t been trained or prepped on the test procedures, and they have maybe ten minutes to figure it out because the supervising engineer, Anatoly Dyatlov, is bound and determined to see it completed and shouts down any reservations. So the completely unprepared night crew - including a reactor control engineer who’d been on the job for all of three months - begins reducing the reactor’s power output for the test. And something goes wrong. The reactor power starts plummeting. Steps are taken to raise the power output, and then the power starts spiking, going higher than it was ever meant to. An engineer presses the emergency shutdown button. And then something explodes. And then something else explodes.

The structure that holds Reactor 4 has been replaced by a column of fire.

If you aren’t familiar with what is still one of the worst nuclear accidents in human history, there are any number of accounts that you can read, but what very few of them can do - and what this miniseries does extremely well - is provide a sense of immediacy. This is not a careful, considered retrospective, told from a safe distance. This is a depiction of the disaster as it unfolded, and it is kaleidoscopic in its dread. In some ways, it almost serves as a survey of horror while still being a factual account of something that actually happened. Dramatic license is taken here and there, but every episode finds a new way to horrify us. It begins with the panic and terror that immediately follow the explosions as workers at the plant gradually discover just how absolutely wrong everything has gone and how absolutely fucked they are. The reactor core is completely exposed and burning, spewing instantly lethal amounts of radiation into the air. It is literally the worst-case scenario and it’s happening. Everything has gone wrong, and unless something happens immediately, millions of people will die, and it’s all on the backs of a handful of engineers who, merely by being on-site, have signed their death warrants. As in your typical slasher movie, people split up to look for survivors and some of them never return.

And then there is body horror, as we’re witness to exactly what radiation sickness looks like at the absolutely massive doses these people have taken. It’s never fast, and it’s always agonizing. And the amount of death is staggering, matched only by the death to come if steps aren’t taken to bring a raging nuclear inferno under control. Every bit of dust carried by the breeze carries death. And as the series moves into the remediation following the accident, we see just how many more people are going to sacrifice themselves just to keep it from getting worse. There’s a sick, clammy dread that comes with knowing that everyone we’re watching is doomed. Whether it’s a week, a few months, or a few years, what they do here today is going to kill all of them. With this comes the realization that the Soviet Union was massively underprepared for an event like this. Firefighters rushed into lethal amounts of radiation thinking they were just dousing an electrical fire. Equipment that could measure radiation levels was either broken, locked away where nobody could access it, or just shorting out because its measuring capacity couldn’t go that high. People acting on bad information and passing that bad information up the chain to do further damage. Officials motivated less by saving lives than saving face, blandly insisting that nothing is wrong. It’s like the cliché of disbelieving law enforcement and parents writ large, your anxiety rising as you realize that there’s something really dangerous out there and nobody’s going to take it seriously.

And then as the investigation and resulting trial begin, we are shown exactly how an obsession with preserving the infallibility of the state, shoddy workmanship, dangerously careless engineers, substandard training and an inability to face the reality that the worst has happened lead to catastrophe. It was no one thing that lead to the reactor’s explosion, it was so many little things, one thing on top of another, one mistake on top of another, one bad judgment on top of another, all leading to this. And then when you think your capacity for horror is exhausted, we see how the state deals with those who would see the truth come to light, crushing them into forgotten people, erasing them and leaving them to die by their own hand in disgrace. The destruction, this miniseries says, is total.

It's bleak, it’s harrowing, and it’s superbly made. Performances are top-notch throughout, careful and down to earth, full of small moments and character arcs as people are changed forever by what they’ve seen. The cinematography juxtaposes gray, drab, overcast cityscapes with sun and trees, finding beauty even in destruction as a bright blue light flares into the sky from the wreckage and radioactive particulates float through the air and land gently, like fairy dust. The soundtrack is ominous electronic hums and pulses and clangs derived from the ambience of a neighboring power plant, and the chattering of dosimeters work as well as any sudden shrieking violin would. Each episode tells a contained story featuring a different aspect of the disaster before ending where it began, with the same question - what is the cost of lies? - before concluding with an epilogue that robs you of any of the distance afforded by fiction. These were real people, and this is a real place.

Horror movies are palatable fictions, moments of terror and dread that we experience vicariously knowing that they are fiction. We vent our fears safely through them. What happened at Chernobyl was at least in part due to a culture of palatable fictions, and the resulting horror is undeniable. Easily one of the best things I’ve seen in a long time.

IMDB entry
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À L’intérieur: What's Black And White And Red All Over?

I’ve talked before about how the once-vaunted New French Extremity ended up being more hype than substance (not to mention nebulous as all get-out - the Wikipedia entry includes a whole lot of films that aren’t even French), but for every Frontiere(s), which wouldn’t know subtlety if it walked up and smacked it in the face with a lead pipe, there’s a Martyrs, which has a thesis, actual narrative craft, and a willingness to let some things remain ambiguous. What these two ends of the continuum have in common, and seems to be broadly characteristic of the movement (to the extent it actually exists) is a confrontationally graphic use of violence and a tendency toward nihilism. When it’s done well, it makes for a singular experience that is by no means for everyone. And when it’s not done well, you get Frontiere(s). 

À L’intérieur (Inside) is definitely done well, and what it lacks in narrative sophistication it makes up for in atmosphere, tension, and a use of violence that blows right past glib and titillating and lands smack dab in the middle of outright grueling. I can’t remember the last time a film made me exclaim “that is fucked up” out loud so many times before it was over. It's an unrelentingly intense, disturbingly intimate siege film marred only by one totally unnecessary stylistic choice.

The totally unnecessary stylistic choice makes itself known immediately, with what is pretty clearly a computer-generated animation of a child in the womb, floating peacefully. It’s fake, it’s clearly fake, and it’s faintly ridiculous. There’s an opening voiceover as a woman talks about how her child is safe and nobody’s going to be able to take it away from her now. Which is maybe a little intense, but then there’s a screeching of metal, a shattering of glass, and a cutaway to a visibly pregnant woman sitting in the wreckage of a car, dazed and bloodied, a man slumped over dead in the seat next to her.

The woman is Sarah, a photojournalist, and the man was her husband. She lost him in the crash, but her baby is still alive and healthy. Flash forward a few months, and it’s Christmas Eve. She’s going to deliver on Christmas Day. What does she care? The man she loves is dead, she has no interest in seeing her extended family, no interest in celebrating anything. So she makes plans for her editor to drive her to the hospital tomorrow morning, and settles in for the evening, all alone in a house that’s a little too big now. And then there’s a knock on the door. There’s a woman outside, asking to come in and use her phone. Sarah’s understandably skittish, being all alone in the middle of the night, so she begs off, suggesting the woman go to a house down the street, it’s Christmas Eve, there will be plenty of people home elsewhere.  But the woman persists, so Sarah says that her husband’s just gotten home from his shift and is asleep. The woman promises to be quiet, but Sarah isn’t giving in.

And then the woman says “your husband isn’t home, Sarah. He’s dead.”

There are at least a couple of general reasons to watch horror. One is entertainment - the adrenaline thrill that comes from being startled, from tension and release. It’s the ability to experience scary situations vicariously. Horror as thrill ride. The other is art, in the sense of experiencing a creative work for the sake of the experience it evokes, the way it makes you feel. This can be more complicated than thrills, and can prod at our boundaries, maybe take us beyond them. When you go past your limits, everything is new. Inside is most definitely not entertainment. As is the case with Martyrs, people who watch horror films to see teenagers get skewered by a masked maniac are not going to like this film, because the violence in it has consequences. It’s not the punchline to a joke. There’s visible suffering, it’s up close and it’s damage and pain, people don’t die right away and it’s messy. It’s upsetting because it’s supposed to be. You’re not supposed to enjoy it. 

But even by those standards, fuck this is a violent film. Blood is everywhere, right from the opening scene and impressionistic opening credits that turn it into something textural. The majority of the film takes place inside Sarah’s house and by the end it is absolutely painted red, as is Sarah.. Blood sprays, spurts, spills, smears all over the place. You can’t get away from it. Harm is quick and brutal, except when it’s prolonged and agonizing. Whatever sharp object someone can find, it’s getting used in as graphic a fashion as possible. It’s not a complicated story, Sarah’s being put through a wringer and she has no idea why, and by extension so are we. That’s the point - the absolute senselessness of it, the way this horror finds its way in in the form of The Woman (she is never named). This is happening, regardless of how you feel about it. It’s an intimate film, mostly two people in a single location, and a lot of it happens up close. The violent moments, sure, but also conversations, examinations of faces exhausted, in agony or fear or rage. Apart from a blackly funny sequence toward the start featuring a nurse who absolutely cannot read the room, there's pretty much no humor either. It’s not a film with a lot of opportunity for distance.

But there are films like this that are just endurance tests without a lot of value otherwise, and a big part of what separates this from grosser, more exploitative stuff - still looking at you, Frontiere(s) - is that it’s clearly made with skill. This is a film that uses lighting really, really well - shadowy interiors, backlit figures like darkness cut out of the world, remorseless fluorescents, complemented by a grain to a lot of shots that gives it a rough and immediate texture without looking cheap or like an attempt at pastiche. The pacing is efficient, accomplished largely by interrupting action with sudden, shocking cutaways that keep the audience on the back foot. This isn’t a film that strictly adheres to the rhythms of a scene, anything can happen at any time, and so once it gets going, it always feels tense. There isn’t a lot of exposition - it doesn’t need it, like I said, it’s a pretty straightforward story - but there’s enough ambiguity that you’re sort of left wondering exactly what has happened, little throwaway lines that make you say “wait, what?” and are never followed up, so there’s this faint air of mystery to it all that lingers once it’s over. Performances are believable all around, with The Woman especially standing out - she’s calm, feral, and piteous by turns and the energy is always palpable. Sarah spends most of the film in shock, literally or figuratively. This is a woman who’s already grief-stricken, thrust into something so much worse. And the whole thing is scored using minimal, pulsing synthesizer, some strings and white noise, it’s effective all the way through without ever being intrusive, coloring scenes without upstaging them.

That said, there are some moments that beggar belief - one group of police officers makes a baffling choice regarding someone they already have in custody, people who by all rights should be dead aren’t, but just as often it adds to the surreally nightmarish feel of the whole thing, where not everything is explained neatly and so you sort of wonder how much of this is or isn’t actually happening. The film never commits either way. More egregious is the repeated use the dodgy CG effects of a child in the womb, as if the baby is reacting to everything going on around it. It’s hokey, the effects look cheesy, and it adds nothing to the film. You could cut out those interludes (of which there are more than a few) and it would only help the film. But despite that corny nonsense, the film gets over because everywhere else it’s utterly sharp and ruthless, unsparing and implacable. This was one that had me feeling wrung out afterwards. It’s a hell of a thing, and maybe the only other film apart from Martyrs that justifies New French Extremity in horror. 

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

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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.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
 

Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer: The Act Of Killing

I am not generally a fan of serial killer films as a subgenre. They’re often ridiculous, their antagonists somehow criminal masterminds with creative flair matched only by the access to the resources they need to stage baroque murder scenes. Even The Silence Of The Lambs and Se7en - two of my all-time favorite films - fall prey to these clichés to some degree, and lesser films indulge them wholeheartedly, trivializing and reducing serial killers to a cartoonish Other, like zombies or vampires or mummies. And, in reality, they aren’t. They aren’t brilliant, they aren’t clever, and they sure as shit aren’t antiheroes. A lot of serial-killer films - at least horror films - forget that, and I think it can be kind of gross and disrespectful, especially when their victims aren’t anything more than props for cheap scares. Which isn’t to say that I don’t like any horror films about serial killers, but I think the ones I do like are all ones that take their characters and the costs of what they’re doing seriously, and don’t glamorize or romanticize any of it at all.

And that type of film really gets its start with Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer. It’s a bleak, unsparing corrective to the idea of the serial killer as a monster apart from humanity and their murders as something creative or even artistic. The late Roger Ebert once described another film as one that “is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don’t shine.” And I can’t think of a better description for this film than that.

It’s the story of three people - there’s Becky, her brother Otis, and Otis’ roommate Henry. Becky shows up at Otis’ place in Chicago, on the run from her abusive husband. She left her daughter at her grandmother’s house and plans to send for her once she’s settled in. Otis is out on parole after a stint in jail, though it isn’t clear why he was there. He met Henry while he was on the inside. Henry’s quiet, reserved, polite. Henry murdered his mother when he was about 24 years old.

Henry goes out a lot at night.

The film tells its story largely in terms of juxtaposition - it’s both the story of a young woman trying to get her life together, getting out from under a bad living situation, and also the story of two men whose ability to assign value to human life is severely compromised. Most of Becky’s segments on her own take place in the daytime, soundtracked by upbeat pop music, as she finds her way around Chicago, trying to figure out what her life is now. In those moments, it’s almost like we’re watching a drama about a young woman trying to find her way in the world. The segments focusing on Henry and Otis take place mostly at night, in the parts of Chicago where tourists never go, and bad things happen there, scored by ominous, pulsing synthesizer. There’s no mistaking what kind of story it is. It’s also a story that takes place in the margins - Henry works when he can as an exterminator but it isn’t steady, Otis works at a gas station, deals weed on the side, and meets with his parole officer monthly. Becky finds work as a shampoo girl at a salon, and it’s a definite step up from her previous job dancing at a strip club. Their world is cars that are barely holding together, squalid apartments, shady characters dealing stolen goods out of a storage unit, furtive assignations with sex workers in dimly lit alleyways. Theirs are lives marked by histories of parental abuse and neglect, of barely getting by from one week to the next, of bad decisions with lasting consequences. You can see how they never really had a chance. It feels like we spend most of the film submerged in the dark, and the brief flashes we get of life outside of their world feel almost like another planet entirely. Becky’s part of their world - she’s suffered as much at her parents’ has as either of them - but she’s also hopeful, optimistic. And has no idea what Henry and...increasingly...Otis are capable of.

Likewise, the first act establishes what kind of story it is through visual juxtaposition. It alternates shots of  murder victims, lying where they fell, long circling shots taking in the devastation, soundtracked by the echoes of their last moments, screams and pleading, as if the violence still lingers in the air, with moments of Henry going about his business - paying for lunch at a diner, going to work and collecting his pay, noticing women who might be headed someplace alone. For the whole of the first act, all of the violence is observed as aftermath if observed at all - there’s an especially chilling detail with a guitar that would be totally innocuous if we didn’t know exactly how Henry came across it. This shifts gradually in the second act as Henry begins to show Otis what’s possible as long as you don’t get sloppy or fall into a pattern, and from here on the violence is increasingly there on camera for us to observe. It’s messy, abrupt, and ugly, blood and the moans of someone slowly dying, begging for their lives. It comes out of nowhere, with little fanfare. One moment, Henry’s having sex in the back of his car and the next he’s choking the woman to death. There’s a home invasion sequence shot through a camcorder, which lends it the kind of queasy, intimate immediacy that most found-footage films never even touch. It honestly feels like you’re watching something you weren’t meant to see. And the film goes on, we’re faced more and more with exactly who Henry is, who Otis is becoming, and we aren’t allowed to look away. Henry’s had a lot of practice, knows what will and won’t attract attention. Otis quickly discovers he has a taste for killing, taking to it with the enthusiasm of a little boy who’s just realized that just because your parents say you can’t do something, that doesn’t actually stop you from doing it. There are some really dark impulses there that maybe surfaced briefly earlier in the film, but come out more and more as things escalate.

It's also a very grounded story, devoid of flourish. The dialogue is naturalistic, consisting of conversations between people who aren’t especially articulate, who are divorced as much from themselves as each other, and the performances are largely understated, free of unnecessary histrionics. Otis isn’t very bright, he’s impulsive and mean in a needling, belittling way, and it’s tough for him to keep his various appetites in check. Henry, by contrast, is quiet and unassuming, able to move through the world without attracting much attention or notice. He’s careful, and it’s why he hasn’t been caught yet. Becky is young but there’s a tiredness around her eyes that tells us everything we need to know about what she’s been through up to this point. Henry’s most likely the first man Becky’s ever met who hasn’t tried to abuse her in one way or another, and to her, that’s kindness. He protects and defends her around Otis, and you get the sense nobody’s ever done that before either. Her attraction to Henry and willingness to put her trust in him are immediate, predicated on not much more than him extending basic courtesy to her. She imagines a life with him, and the moments her face lights up with hope for something better are hard to watch, precisely because we know her hope is seriously misplaced. There’s a tension there, between the three of them - Otis is almost pure id, he wants what he wants when he wants it, and doesn’t think before he acts. Henry knows Otis is a liability, and Becky sees Henry as a hope for a better life. So it’s as much about the relationship between these three people as anything else, almost like a love triangle, as fucked-up as that sounds, and as the film progresses the strain between Henry and Becky on one side, and Otis on the other gets tighter and tighter, until it finally snaps..

The film is based loosely on the story of Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, actual serial killers responsible for, in Lucas’ case, possibly eleven deaths. It’s difficult to tell, because Lucas cheerfully confessed to hundreds of crimes in order to secure additional perks while in prison. Like the real killers on whom they’re based, Henry and Otis aren’t glamorous. There’s no flair for the artistic, no themes to their killings. Just a lot of ugly, pointless death. 

That’s the reality, and the film ends on a cold, awful note that settles in your stomach and spreads to your bones. Killing isn’t art, it says. It’s just killing.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
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Ich Seh Ich Seh: Not Everything Is What It Seems, But You Kind Of Already Know That

The trick to a good mystery is keeping information back from the audience until just the right time. I mean, the clue’s in the name - mysteries require keeping things mysterious, so that the reveal is meaningful and affects the audience’s understanding and experience of the story. If, in a scary movie, you’re trying to create an atmosphere of unease, or paranoia, or a sense that there’s something wrong but you can’t quite put your finger on it, then withholding information in order to reveal it at a dramatic moment is a really solid way to do that.

But it requires that you not give things away too soon, which is where Ich Seh Ich Seh (I See I See, released in the U.S. as Goodnight Mommy) drops the ball. It’s slow-paced, unsettling, and atmospheric for a good part of its runtime, but there’s a lot less mystery there than it thinks, and the film suffers as a result.

We open on a lazy summer day in the Austrian countryside, where brothers Lukas and Elias are playing hide-and-seek in a cornfield. It seems like one of those days you only have when you’re a little kid, free of all responsibility and content to go where they day takes you. They live in a fancy modern home, far away from the city. It looks like the summer home of someone who doesn’t have to worry about money. And then, at some point, their mother comes home. She’s been in the hospital, having some plastic surgery done, and so she arrives, unrecognizable with her head swathed in bandages. She needs to rest, she needs to avoid the sun, she needs peace and quiet and to be left alone.

She isn’t acting like their mother at all.

So almost from the get-go, everything seems slightly…off. The acting in general is a little on the inert side, but it works with the mood that’s established. Their mother seems cold and distant, but especially so when contrasted with a home recording that Elias plays, of her singing them a lullaby and telling them how much she loves them. For some reason, she won’ t speak to Lukas directly, as if he’s done something unforgivable. She doesn’t even want to acknowledge him, and when Elias asks why she won’t, she just says “you know why.” It feels harsh, and vindictive. She’s hard to connect with. Late at night, she goes out into the woods, takes off all the bandages, and screams. It’s just the three of them, out in the country, and the emptiness surrounding them is tangible, expressed through lots of long, static shots of empty rooms and surrounding countryside with no other people to be seen. There are all kinds of odd touches - first, her presence, face mostly obscured, evokes films like Eyes Without A Face and Hellraiser 2, so her just standing there is kind of unnerving. For some reason Lukas and Elias collect hissing cockroaches in a big terrarium. Blinds keep getting raised and lowered, the boys sneak around the house so they don’t disturb their mother, and she gets disturbed very easily, by all kinds of things. The vibe is very sinister, without clearly pointing to a specific outcome. Even little things seem faintly wrong.

At least, that’s how it starts, going by slowly as one day becomes another and the boys wonder what happened to their mother, with a constant undercurrent of unease. But then about 20 minutes in, a major plot point gets revealed. It’s not the filmmakers telling us outright, they’re not revealing the big twist in the first act like some other movies do. No, it’s just something we aren’t supposed to be aware of quite yet, but the way scenes are staged and the way some dialogue is written, it inadvertently gives the game away, and the film deflates as a result, because it turns what should be a startling revelation that recontextualizes everything that went before into a foregone conclusion. We stop trying to figure out what the fuck is going on well before the end of the first act, and so it ends up being an hour or so of knowing exactly what is going on and just sort of waiting to see how it turns out. This was also a problem with the filmmakers’ later film The Lodge, which shares a lot of thematic and character beats with this film, remixed and relocated, but very much a variation on a theme. In that film, information that would have had a real impact if it had been held back until the end of the first or even second act is explicitly revealed in the first 10 minutes or so, and it sucks a lot of the air out of the room. In both cases, a revelation is supposed to be just that, a revelation, but instead just ends up being affirmation of something that anyone paying attention to the film has already figured out well before the other shoe drops. Here it doesn’t feel like a conscious choice, like it is in The Lodge (and clumsily handled, at that), but the effect is the same.

And then, on top of that, it shifts in the third act to something much darker, nastier, and violent than the first two-thirds of the film. It makes sense narratively, but tonally it’s really jarring. You’ve settled in expecting diffuse creepiness, nefarious goings-on, a world slightly out of kilter, and then out of nowhere it turns absolutely brutal. By this point the outlines of the situation are completely spelled out and in terms of what’s really going on, there are no surprises left. And in some ways, that makes the third act even more grueling, knowing the reality of the situation and what’s likely to come, and indeed it ends with a bleakness that is almost punishing. Maybe the filmmakers did us a favor by tipping their hand early, because all of it crashing down at once might just be too much. But somehow I think what really happened was that they just thought they were being more subtle than they actually were, and the big revelation isn’t a big revelation because we’ve known for most of the movie and we’re just waiting for it to end. The result is something that manages to be anticlimactic and shocking at the same time, and it kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Martyrs (2015): The Courage Of Our Convictions

I have sort of a love-hate relationship with remakes. They reek of creative bankruptcy, of filmmaking at its most mercenary. But it’s also rare that a remake is an absolute strict shot-for-shot duplicate of its original, and sometimes the changes highlight interesting cultural differences or assumptions about their intended audience. I can think of a few instances where I’ve held remakes in the same esteem as the original, or even found them better, but that’s pretty rare -at best, they’re often superfluous, just telling a story that’s already been told and not screwing it up. At worst, they miss the point of what made the original good in the first place.

Martyrs, released in 2008, was one of the few films to come out of the overhyped New French Extremity that was actually good, and it has a lot of what I look for in good horror movies - it doesn’t overexplain, it goes some unexpected places, and there’s a real thematic through-line to it. It’s also one of those rare horror films that I think makes a good case for its graphic violence as part of its narrative. It’s easily one of my favorite horror films. But it’s definitely not for everyone - it’s really intense and unsparing, and the final act is especially uncomfortable. It can be hard to watch. It’s not a commercial prospect.

And that’s what the 2015 remake of Martyrs is. It’s a commercial prospect. Like most remakes, at its best it’s unnecessary, at its worst it undoes much of what made the original so good.

The film opens with a little girl, chained to a chair in an otherwise-empty warehouse. She manages to slip her restraints, carefully creeping out of the building. Once she gets free of the building, she begins to run. She begins to scream.

Her name is Lucie, and she gets placed in an orphanage. She’s uncommunicative, scared, traumatized, and it’s only over time and the gentle persistence of another girl, named Anna, that she starts to come out of her shell. But there’s not much to tell - the authorities’ search of the warehouse turns up nothing, she doesn’t know why she was being kept prisoner. She was beaten, starved. She confides in Anna that she sees monsters. The monsters come in the night and cut her, hurt her.

Flash forward 10 years later, and we’re at a house way out on the fringes of suburbia, where your typical nuclear family - mother, father, older son, younger daughter - are getting their day started. There’s teasing, there’s harassing the son for not completing his chores, there’s the daughter gloating at her brother being in trouble. Pretty standard stuff, really, and then the doorbell rings…

…and there’s Lucie, all grown up, holding a shotgun.

It’s tough to talk much more about what happens, because so much of what made the original good was how it kept you guessing, how the story evolved and your assumptions changed as it went on. Anna promised Lucie when they were young that she’d always be there for her, and that’s an easy promise to make when you’re a kid, because you never think that it means you’ll find yourself driving out into the middle of nowhere, where your friend, covered with years and years of scars, has just done something horrible. This film asks us to reckon with the cost of devotion, the lengths to which it will make us go.

It’s clear immediately that the whole reason this remake exists is to try and tap into a market that doesn’t like subtitles. It’s relocated from France to the U.S., it’s all in English, and the cast is largely actors from the U.S.. It’s not like the original had anything fundamentally French about it, but almost everything about this film establishes it as a particular flavor of reasonably slick, not-especially-challenging mass-market horror film, exactly the stock in trade of Blumhouse, the production company that financed it. The cinematography is surprisingly stylish in places, but everything is sort of softly-lit in a way that places it somewhere between a film and a made-for-TV movie, and some of the outdoor shots betray its budget by looking very much like a soundstage. The music is your stock horror-film ominous ambient sound, but it’s not too intrusive, and the performances are believable where they need to be and the dialogue just hovers on the line between serviceable and stagy. So on first blush this reads very much like any number of slightly-better-than-mediocre horror films turned out by studios and filmmakers expertly calibrated for exactly that - something that will provide entertaining jolts without being too unsettling or uncomfortable. And that was my worst fear going into it - that this would be watered down into something unrecognizable, a glib and formulaic assortment of jumpscares.

But to its credit, for most of its runtime it isn’t that at all. It actually follows the beats of the original pretty closely, and that is very much to its benefit. It doesn’t look away from what Lucie has done, or from the thing that has been tormenting her as long as she can remember. The thing that I think made the original so powerful was that it wasn’t just about violence or pain - it was about suffering, specifically, which is something I think a lot of horror movies made in the U.S. are reluctant to really depict. That’s the point where it stops being entertaining and starts being a little too real for most folks. And this film, much to my surprise, doesn’t really downplay that. The dialogue is maybe a little on-the-nose in places, but I’m willing to chalk that up to me already knowing what’s going to happen going in. It’s also a little stagy, a little expository, but not so much so that it’s a constant distraction, and again it’s something typical to this type of mass-market horror film. They aren’t character studies.

So, to a degree, a lot of this film is superfluous - it isn’t much less graphically violent than the original and it’s surprisingly faithful to the original story, albeit told in a slightly (slightly) less artful fashion. But as slick, moderately stylish mass-market commercial horror goes, it’s better-told than the average. This is in part due to being based on a much stronger story than the average, but I’m willing to give the filmmakers credit for not screwing with a good thing for most of the film.

Emphasis on most. In my write up of the original, I pointed out how horror films made in the U.S. so often have these pat, good versus evil endings. The original doesn’t do that - its ending is bleak and a lot is left ambiguous. Well, this film pretty much undoes all of that in the third act, where it goes full mass-market horror film, removing almost all of the ambiguity and turning what was an emotionally grueling ordeal into your stock Final Girl climax, complete with villainous monologuing (so much monologuing), improbable escape, violent revenge, and “get away from her!” It drags on entirely too long, makes changes from the original that feel nonsensical, and underlines everything three or four times in a way that is, frankly, insulting to the viewer. It’s a climax that exists in a world absolutely devoid of nuance or inference, so utterly conventional and obvious that it pretty much erases all the goodwill that the first two-thirds of the movie earns.

For someone who’s never seen the original, someone expecting the usual, it’s probably going to be a lot heavier and more intense than they were expecting. But it still feels deeply watered-down to me. And it’s not a matter of it being less violent - it isn’t, not really - it’s a matter of how thoroughly it panders to expectations in the end. I’m sure the filmmakers were given a brief to turn this uncomfortable, confrontational foreign film into something palatable for a mass market. And for the most part they rode a line between that palatability and what made the original so good with a lot more skill than I was expecting. For most of its run this remake gives its audience something I don’t think they’d expect, but I guess that makes it all that much more important to ultimately give them what they want. They had an opportunity to really rise above the mediocrity, to give the audience something that would stay with them. But when it really mattered, when it came time to bring it all to a close, they chickened out and played it safe. One of the worst things I think you can say about a film centered on the cost of faith and devotion is that it lacks the courage of its convictions, but well, here we are.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

Hunter Hunter: Predators

Pretty much any monster movie (and I’ll include serial killer films in there because ultimately that’s what most of them are) leans into the idea that the monster is a predator and its victims are its prey. So, in other words, it’s just replicating relationships that exist in nature, but since we, as a species, are supposed to have transcended those base transactions, and so that’s where the horror comes in. That despite all of our evolution and technology, under the right circumstances, we can be reduced to a target, to food. That we aren’t so special after all.

Hunter Hunter, then, is an absolutely harrowing film about the relationship between predator and prey, and it goes some unexpected places.

Joseph and his family - his wife Anne, and daughter Renee - live off the land, in a remote parcel, far even beyond rural, out where tourists don’t usually go and even the seasonal crowd hasn’t built homes (though that’s certainly changing). Joseph and Renee are out setting trap lines, collecting pelts and meat. The pelts they can sell in town, the meat’s what they’ll eat to survive. This is how Joseph lives, how his father lived, how his father’s father lived, and so on and so on as long as this has been their land. He’s focused on the work and showing Renee what needs to be done when he notices one of his traps has had its catch gnawed away, all that’s left in the trap is a leg. It looks like the work of a wolf. This is going to have to be taken care of quickly - winter’s coming, and that’s when they move to their other cabin further south, and they’re going to need supplies to take with them. Pelts aren’t bringing in the money they used to, and food is starting to run low. The last thing they need is another predator taking the prey they need to survive..

Especially one that isn’t afraid to venture into another predator’s territory.

So Joseph resolves to set up traps and stake out the area, waiting for the wolf to reveal itself. He and his family represent a dying breed - they live off the grid, off the land, hunt and trap to keep themselves fed. He’s aware he’s part of a world that’s vanishing as modernity encroaches, and he’s very much the taciturn alpha male, with the protectiveness that comes along with it, that desire to stand between his loved ones and the dangers of the wild. He doesn’t want Anna and Renee to know how bad this situation is, how much danger they’re in, but Anna and Renee are no pushovers, they’re accustomed to this life as well, and capable of taking care of themselves. That said, you get the sense that there’s some restless, some dissatisfaction there. Anna wonders if Renee wouldn’t be better off going to school like any other kid her age, and it’s getting harder and harder to make a living off the land, and maybe a house in town wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all. Joseph doesn’t want to hear it. He’s got his pride, but that idea that the modern world is pushing in, imposing itself on nature, is an idea that runs throughout the film. 

It’s a very tense film - it’s mostly about Joseph’s attempts to survey the forest, to try and find signs of the wolf, and Anne and Renee’s attempts to keep the household going while he’s away and radio silent. In either case, you’ve got people in a forest that is very still, very quiet, and where that quiet is likely hiding something that sees them as food. The slightest sound could portend disaster, so things (especially in the first half) operate on a constant low boil, the awful waiting before the even more awful action. The music is minimal, mostly ambient hums and understated strings (with one especially striking exception at the very end), and the cinematography alternates sprawling shots of the woods and ominous, cloudy skies with more claustrophobic moments, all in a mostly drab, desaturated palette. This isn’t the nature people go to on vacation, this is the nature people live and work in, unsentimental at best, cruel at worst. 

At first it doesn’t seem like a horror film - some horror films announce themselves from the opening credits, others take varying amounts of time to reveal themselves, and this one takes its own sweet time to get there, but make no mistake, this is a monster movie, but you don’t really see the monster all that much, and that’s to the good - a lot of this film is in little things, in inference, things briefly glimpsed, so the few really graphic moments hit that much harder as a result. The characters are all believable as regular people - Joseph might be a little bit of a caricature, but not much, and there are a number of beats that underscore the fundamental humanity of the people on screen, for better or worse. There’s some denial here - Anna and Joseph want to protect Renee, and so maybe they aren’t as honest with her as they should be, but in the end it isn’t really their undoing. These are competent, capable people who think they understand the world they live in and the rules of that world. 

When it turns out they don’t, it upends everything in a climax that I can only describe as shocking, as trite as that word is, for as sudden and intense as it is. The end is jarring, even, and probably really polarizing. I go back and forth on it - the majority of the film has been constant simmering tension, so when the turn comes, it’s startling without feeling totally inconsistent to the rest of the movie. I think it’s shocking, but also that it plays fair - and it sets off something that builds the film to a primal howl before ending on a smash to black and total silence, leaving me with an empty feeling in my stomach for what I just witnessed. Remember: It’s about predators, and prey, and whether or not that relationship can adapt to the modern world moving in around all of them.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon

Reading Horror Instead Of Watching It

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

Penpal by Dathan Auerbach

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

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

A Head Full Of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

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

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

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

The Croning by Laird Barron

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

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

Available from Amazon
Penpal
A Head Full Of Ghosts
The Croning

SOMA: The Mind/Body Problem, Revisited

I want to do something a little different this time. See, I can watch scary movies of any and all stripes and engage with them - like, I can watch them and feel scared or unsettled or disturbed or horrified, but I’m still able to examine them critically and maintain a certain amount of critical distance (well, for the most part, there’s one film I’ve started two or three times and keep noping out of because it freaks me out too much, but someday, someday). I can watch scary movies and hang in there.

But games? When it comes to horror games, I am a fucking coward.

I enjoy playing video games and have for years, but there’s something about the narrative immediacy of them that makes scary games really hard for me to handle. I get freaked out really badly, really fast. Now, this isn’t true of all of them - the campiness of something like the early Resident Evil games keep them from being too unsettling, and the later ones are basically just monster-focused action like the namesake film (ugh) franchise. But, for example, the Silent Hill games, especially the second, are deeply unsettling, and I get nervous playing them. My first trip through Silent Hill 2 actually felt less like I was playing a game than dealing with an artifact of evil pressed onto disc. The persistent atmosphere of despair, the washed-out appearance of the town, the way everyone in the town had their own trauma, their own private hell, the role that descent, both metaphorical and literal, played in the narrative, all of it made me seriously anxious, enough that I didn’t finish it. Basically, Silent Hill 2 as an almost-straight adaptation would have made an excellent horror film, (at least better than the one we got). Even in non-horror games, the occasional scary bits (like the Dunwich Building or Dunwich Borers quarry in the modern Fallout games, never mind the entirety of the Dead Money DLC for Fallout: New Vegas, or even the dark, abandoned house on a rainy night of the definitely-not-horror Gone Home) make me a little uneasy until they’re over. Take away even the little bit of distance afforded by being a passive observer (because even found-footage films don’t have this effect on me) and I am just not about it.

So I generally avoid horror games, or did for a long time. But now we live in the era of Twitch and Let’s Play and what is essentially the recorded and broadcast playthroughs of games, and I can go along for the ride - once I’m no longer in control of the game, it’s not all that different, necessarily, from watching a film. Sure, it’s a lot longer (so closer to a TV series) but once I’m back to being an observer instead of a causal agent, I relax.

Which is a whole lot of words to basically explain why I’m writing about SOMA. It’s a game I watched someone play during my hiatus, and one that immediately made me think “I should really write about this.” It’s a chilling, bleak examination of what it means to be alive or to be conscious, notable because it is ultimately a tragic story rather than a conventionally frightening one. There are no real monsters in SOMA, just people and technology made monstrous, often by the best of intentions.

It begins as the story of Simon Jarrett, a young man from Toronto who was badly injured in a car accident. The car’s other occupant was killed, and he was left with severe head trauma, resulting in persistent brain bleeds. We play from Simon’s perspective as he wakes up from a nightmare on the day that he’s scheduled to go in for an experimental brain scan. He’s a test subject for a new treatment, where the brain is scanned, mapped, and modeled, and that model subjected to different iterations of treatment to discover which treatment plan would be best - because it’s a virtual model of the brain, they can fail as many times as necessary in the search for a treatment without doing the patient any harm. What isn’t really brought up to Simon is the notion that a model of someone’s brain at that level of granularity is, in effect, a backup copy of your consciousness, insofar as our conscious experience of the world - perception, cognition, and memory - all happen in the brain. This, however, becomes very important when Simon sits down inside the scanner. There is some clicking, whirring, bright light...

...and when he opens his eyes, he is somewhere else entirely.

Not just somewhere else, but also somewhen. Simon has managed to leap forward by decades and wake from the scan in Pathos-II, an underwater research and satellite manufacturing facility. It’s dark, debris is strewn everywhere, and most of the equipment is covered by mysterious, glowing, warty tentacled growths. Things are breaking down and falling apart, and there are robots. The robots talk to Simon.

What’s more, they don’t seem to realize they’re robots.

This is where it gets a little...high-concept. Pathos-II is a station in the late throes of crisis, stranded at the bottom of a blasted world. There has been an extinction-level event on the surface, and the station’s inhabitants only survived because they were on the ocean floor. Everyone Simon knows or cares about is long dead. The station complex - a series of connected facilities - is run by an autonomous artificial intelligence, whose primary function is to keep the inhabitants of the station alive, and the use of both the scanning and modeling technology pioneered in Simon’s day and an advanced technology called structure gel (which basically acts as a medium capable of repairing either mechanical or biological systems) gives it all kinds of options for achieving its goal.

Because it is an artificial intelligence, many of these options are frighteningly literal-minded and miss the more elusive ideas human beings have about life, or the quality thereof. Simon encounters people who do not realize that they are copies of their consciousness downloaded into robot bodies, as well as human bodies, kept functioning in excruciating pain and fear by mechanical means. Immobile, yoked to artificial lungs grown out of the structure gel that pervades the station like a cabled, glowing parasite, begging to go home. Shambling horrors, both mechanical and biological, consumed by the gel which animates them into a parody of existence.

They are all alive, as the AI is mandated to keep them, after a fashion. But one of the best things SOMA does is explore ideas about what it means to be alive or the implications of replicable consciousness, not through speeches or even one central defining struggle, but through the presentation of its logical outcomes. If we can put a human consciousness into a robot body, how does it adapt to that? Can it? If a body is alive, but not conscious in any meaningful sense, is that life? If you copy your mind over into another body, what happens to the first one? Simon and Catherine (one of Pathos-II’s survivors) busy themselves with the project Catherine and her colleagues began working on after life was extinguished on the surface - scans of many of Pathos-II’s employees have been copied into a virtual environment called the Ark, which Catherine wants to launch into space as, essentially, humanity’s last gasp. And so Simon and Catherine travel the length of Pathos-II, its rusting and flooding corridors, its buildings left as bizarre charnel houses in the wake of the AI’s spasmodic attempts to repurpose people as things it can keep alive, the sad story of the complex’s final, tragic days before Simon’s arrival, the howling darkness of the deep ocean floor. All to cast something to the stars that will serve as our species’ final memorial.

SOMA is definitely a horror game, and the central relevant mechanic is the need to avoid the more monstrous inhabitants of Pathos-II. There’s no combat, all you can do is run and hide. The monsters range from powerful industrial robots given crazed life by the AI to humans overridden and overgrown with structure gel, essentially animated corpses with the most basic of drives. But honestly, this is the least interesting (and I think least horrifying) aspect of the game. The monsters help tell the story, but the need to avoid them is a distraction, something that pulls you out of the story. The real horror here is the gradual realization of what has happened, what is happening, what will happen. Simon essentially arrives not long after everything has gone horribly, horribly wrong, and the wreckage of the last days of Pathos-II are everywhere. It is at every level a tragedy, the story of the last of humanity and their ignominious end, and the parody of life that emerges from the ruin. As Simon, you have to make decisions throughout the game that determine whether people live or die, and what it means to “live” or “die” changes from situation to situation, and there is often no good choice. All of this set against the long, cold dark of the bottom of the ocean, the claustrophobia of creaking hallways, the thundering silence of desertion, isolation. Even though you have a companion for the majority of the game, you always feel terribly, terribly alone as you stumble upon the remnants of tragedy after tragedy, atrocity after atrocity, failure and decay. It is this oppression, this constant serving as witness to horror, this solitude, and the dreadful implications of every choice you make, this is the horror of SOMA. I’m not sure it would survive a transition to film or television, but if it did, it’d be one of the scariest fucking things I would see all year.

Wikipedia entry
Official site
YouTube playlist of the playthrough I watched

Some Thoughts About Cheap Shock

(Note: I get pretty spoilery about the films Martyrs and Frontiere(s) in this post, and if you haven't yet seen Martyrs, close this tab immediately and go watch it first.)

So while I'm assembling part 2 of my survey of the entire extant Hellraiser franchise (those posts take longer because they're, like, three times as long as a regular one), I'm also trying to keep an eye on new stuff coming out, which lead me to a trailer for a Turkish film called Baskin (which looks really promising). That film is not the point of this short post as much as the comparisons it garnered were. So it's getting compared to Martyrs and the New French Extremity in general. Which definitely gets it a slot on my to-check-out list.

But it also got me thinking that within the canon of the New French Extremity (which, let's face it, sort of ended up fizzling out, at least as horror went), there's a great opportunity to think about the use of graphic imagery by examining two films - Martyrs, and Frontiere(s). The first is, I think, easily one of the best horror films of the 21st century so far, and the second is, I think, a pretty big disappointment. Both deal in graphic violence and helpless people experiencing prolonged suffering in close detail. And, as a result, both have been criticized as trafficking in cheap shocks, as is often the case when a filmmaker - especially a genre filmmaker - uses graphic imagery. It's dismissed as an attempt at cheap heat, getting attention by being outrageous instead of doing something substantive. 

And so here's the thing - by comparing these two films, I think we can usefully distinguish between graphic violence as a substitute for good storytelling, and graphic violence as a tool for good storytelling.

Martyrs is, at its heart, a movie strongly concerned with ideas of suffering, transcendence, and sacrifice. Lucie begins the film escaping from unseen tormentors, at whose hands she suffered. As it transpires, her tormentors were using suffering as a tool to hasten transcendence, to follow the examples of history's martyrs to try and find out what lies beyond death. Martyrs sacrifice themselves for a higher purpose, and in their suffering they are offered a glimpse of the divine. And when Lucie catches up to her tormentors, we see that she continues to suffer, haunted by the specter of a woman she failed to free before she fled. As martyrs do, she mortifies her own flesh in penance for her sin. And when Lucie's tormentors catch up to her, Anna steps in and takes her place - Anna sacrifices herself, and we are walked through the stages of Anna's martyrdom - the beatings, the starvation, the flaying - on her way to transcendence. She suffers in Lucie's place, she martyrs herself, and she sees what lies beyond (or perhaps not - her final words, whatever they are, might very well have been a lie intended to deny the people who tortured her any satisfaction). All of this - Lucie's inner torment, her revenge, and Anna's martyrdom - is presented graphically, yes, but it is at every point contextualized. We see this because we need to see this - we need to see the cost exacted on Lucie, on Anna, just as audiences for the medieval passion plays of which Martyrs feels like a modernization needed to see the ugly details of Christ's sacrifice, to truly know what the cost was. How do you tell a story about martyrdom without knowing what the martyr endured? Here, then, the graphic violence was a tool for good storytelling, one with textual and metatextual justification.

By contrast, Frontiere(s) is largely a series of bloody scenes attached loosely by a common set of characters. It's about a group of criminals (why their criminality is important isn't really articulated beyond "we have to get out of Paris, like, now," nor are the actual riots they were escaping) who flee a rioting city for an isolated country inn, apparently run not by cannibals, not by neo-Nazis, but by neo-Nazi cannibals. I pondered the ridiculousness of this in my original post, and time hasn't really given me any additional insight beyond "well, if one of these two things is bad, then both together must be really bad." It's like the narrative equivalent of an amplifier that goes to eleven. Once they all get to the inn, they're captured and tortured and/or killed for food. It's mostly just moving characters from point to point, where different bloody set pieces occur, and if there's a thematic reading to be had, I didn't really see it. I suppose it suggests notions of racial superiority leading to a level of dehumanization that literally makes other people into cattle, maybe you could make an argument for widening class divides that sees a poor rural class resorting to cannibalism to survive - to literally consume city dwellers whose excesses are figuratively consuming them - but these are not things clearly articulated in the film. I am mostly just looking at the elements - racial purity, a rural setting with urban characters, and cannibalism - and thinking of some things that might emerge. The violence in Frontiere(s) signifies nothing other than "this is what happens when helpless people run into neo-Nazi cannibals." There's a lot of blood, and a lot of screaming (which seems to be the director's thing) but there isn't really much of a "why" to it beyond "because they were there, and because this is what bad people do." The antagonists are caricatured because their extremity justifies the extremity of their actions, and the extremity of their actions exists free of context. All of the blood and pain and people hung on hooks, butchered, are there because they are. They are spectacle. They are the cheap shock for which even films like Martyrs are criticized. 

So I think it's a useful heuristic - does the violence in a film illustrate, elaborate upon, or articulate something about the characters or the human condition? Or are the characters designed and arranged in such a way as to rationalize instances of violence? Anna and Lucie's relationship, their history, they tell a story before a single drop of blood is shed, but the four young criminals of Frontiere(s) are only people to the extent that it gets them to the inn for the bloodshed to occur.

Does the violence help tell a story, or is the story a framework for violence? I think there's a difference, and mistaking the former for the latter is a problem in how people read horror film.

Asmodexia: Revelations

Demonic possession movies do a good, solid line as horror films go. They’re sort of the utility players, never really falling out of favor but never really dominating the slate in any given year. I don’t know that I’m a sucker for them as a type, but I have to admit, I’ve liked a lot of the ones I’ve seen since I started writing this thing, and The Last Exorcism and Ahi Va El Diablo come immediately to mind as two of my favorite horror films. There’s often a real disease or illness subtext to them - The Rite presented us with possession as chronic illness, The Taking of Deborah Logan presented it as degenerative illness, and in most possession films, it ends up being the real cause behind what initially seems to be some sort of mental or physical malady. I guess this is appropriate since one of the earliest explanations for what we now call mental illness was possession by evil spirits. It’s a link forged in history and culture.

So the brief for Asmodexia suggests that its hook is possession as communicable illness. At first I was leery, because that could end up being yet another hackneyed riff on zombie films, of which I am most definitely tired. Much to my delight, it is not that at all. It’s a slow, careful crawl toward dread and the horror of revelation.

The film opens with closeups on a VCR, a videotape marked “Luna,” footage of a mysteriously traumatic childbirth, and a man screaming to a terrified woman, forcing her to look at the child who has just been born. It isn’t at all clear what has just happened, and then we flash-forward to 15 years later. Which, at first, made me sigh, because I am tired of pointless flashback-and-“years later” constructions.

Except that it’s “15 years later...3 days before the resurrection.” Huh.

The body of the film is three basic stories - an old man (the one from the flashback) and his granddaughter, a woman confined to a mental hospital, and two police officers investigating a series of mysterious deaths. All of them take place in and around Barcelona while, in the background, strange things are happening. It’s an unseasonably hot December, it’s coming up on the end of the Mayan calendar, Christian sects throughout Spain are engaging in all kinds of ritualistic behavior, and all over the country, more and more people are exhibiting the signs of what anyone else would call demonic possession. It’s apocalyptic in every sense of the word - the old man and his granddaughter wander from place to place, performing exorcisms as they go, almost like plague doctors treating an epidemic. The woman in the hospital watches as the order of the hospital crumbles around her as more and more of the patients succumb to the supernatural infection. The detectives, always one step behind the old man and his granddaughter, are trying to figure out what the pattern is behind these deaths, just one step behind the chaos beginning to embrace the world. Everything is falling apart.

It’s initially a difficult sell - the structure is clear enough, but the film starts very slowly and is at first a little hard to follow. It’s very elliptical, mostly made up of long, static shots with little interrupting them, or conversations between two people in isolation from everything else. These scenes are broken up largely with dissolves, so it feels like we’re shifting between three different movies without necessarily there being a lot of continuity from moment to moment. It takes a little bit to locate everyone in the story, so the first act especially feels like it jumps around a lot, especially given how little context it has at first with the opening flashback. There’s also sort of an overuse of dramatic music stings and ominous ambient music over what seem like otherwise innocuous scenes - I get that the filmmakers are trying to create an atmosphere of unease, but it’s a little ham-handed in places, and doesn’t always feel like the sound is being contrasted with the image in a meaningful way.

But none of that is really, ultimately, that much of a problem because this is a film that rewards patience and careful attention. It’s not at all immediately apparent how everything and everyone fits together, and so the beginning of the film is a little confusing, but things do cohere - there are connections between the people in these three storylines, and they aren’t always what or how you’d think. Really, the film is a process of revelation - what these people have in common, what they are in the process of doing, what has happened in the past, and what is happening now. It would be a cliché to say that nothing is what it seems, but the appeal of this film is the way it goes about fitting all the pieces together. Even for a movie about possession, everything’s a bit off around the edges, like it’s not following the demonic-possession playbook exactly, and what may seem like quirks at first begin to make sense the longer you watch. The tableaux broken up by dissolves, the weird clashes between sound and image, and a story that seems a little off on the details all contribute to this feeling of dreamlike wrongness. It isn’t really until the last 15 minutes or so that the full implications of everything you’ve seen really begin to click into place, and so the cold, sick, sinking feeling you get in the pit of your stomach is a strong payoff of everything that came before. It’s the slowest and quietest and coldest of burns. I’ve talked before about the “horror of revelation,” that moment when the awful truth begins to make sense and comprehension is terrifying, and this film is an excellent example of that horror at work.

IMDB entry

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Antichrist: Nature Red In Tooth And Claw

One of the side effects I’ve noticed of writing this thing of mine is that occasionally friends will ask me for movie recommendations, and I’ve learned to preface any recommendations by feeling them out as to their basic comfort level for different types of stories and imagery. Because, see, there are horror films, and then there are horror films. There are the entertaining horror films, the ones that provide a thrill ride, some vicarious scares, a shiver and a startle, and it’s all in good fun. There’s something liberating about being scared in a safe environment, at opening the pressure valve on our everyday anxieties with a shriek, and lots of people like those sort of movies. But then there are the - for lack of a better term - serious horror films. The ones that are intent on plumbing our nightmares, digging deep into our collective unconscious and emerging with something unspeakable in their hands. These are the ones that face the worst we have to offer and speak to it in imagery that communicates directly in the ugliest way. These aren’t thrill rides, these are serious plunges into the worst corners of human experience, and they are not here to spook you. They are here to make you very uncomfortable.

I have been working up the courage to watch Antichrist pretty much since I started writing this thing. It is a painting of sadness, dread, grief, and rage both implosive and explosive. It will not entertain you, but it is a monolithic testament to the idea of horror.

The movie is about two people: He and She. That is all we get. They are stripped to their gender identifiers, and this is important. The movie opens in lush black and white, an aria plays, everything is in slow motion. He and She are having vigorous sex in their shower. Water falls slowly enough to be captured as single drops. In the other room, their son - Nick, the only person in the movie with a name - climbs out of his crib and wanders into another room. He sees snow falling outside at the same languid rate as the water falls upon He and She in the throes of their passion. Nick bypasses the baby gate, climbs up onto a desk, reaching for the snow, and as He and She reach their climax, Nick falls out an open window, slowly, almost luxuriantly. several stories to the concrete below.

People say that the death of a child is incomprehensible, that it is the worst thing that can possibly happen and is impossible to imagine. This, the worst of all things, is the linchpin event. She is still hospitalized a month later, her doctor keeping her on a steady regimen of tranquilizers. He is not happy about this. He is a psychotherapist, and he thinks the doctors do not know what they are doing. He is sure that he knows what is best for She. He acknowledges that treating your own family is normally one of the worst mistakes you can make as a therapist, but in THIS instance, he knows he’s right to do so. His arrogance does not lose a step.

So He checks She out of the hospital, has her flush all of her medication down the toilet, and begins his role as her therapist, when what She needs is her husband. Surprisingly, it does not go well, and He decides that more drastic measures are necessary. He resolves to take them to Eden, their cabin deep in the forest, where She worked on her dissertation, and there He will cure She.

He knows best.

What follows is a portrait of a couple in total and absolute nihilistic free-fall, as issues of control, consent, and the prisons of gender intersect with a wilderness not just indifferent, but actively malevolent. Eden is a bad place, and it takes their private strife and stretches it across a bloody canvas.

The violence in this film is total - it is physical, psychological, and emotional in scope. She is a raw, open wound, less paralyzed by her loss than contorted and deformed by it. It is a wild, primal grief and He attempts to impose logic on it, to define and constrain her experience in terms of reason and logic and rules and science, in utter negation of what she is experiencing. His arrogance in his own expertise is the arrogance of every man (especially but not restricted to every medical or therapeutic professional) who is utterly sure that they understand a woman's experience better than they do. She is suffering - she blames herself for Nick’s death and she wants desperately to die. He won’t let her. He is sure he can fix her, cure her, and in doing so he doesn’t much cross the line between husband and therapist as burn it down and piss on the ashes. He is professional when she needs someone loving, and he wants love when she is in crisis. He makes her do fear exposure exercises, patronizes and infantilizes her. She is close to feral in her self-destructiveness, and He blithely dismisses it as another puzzle to solve, another case to work. Anywhere else this would be a problem, but in Eden, everything is reduced to its most primal state. This is the forest, this is nature red in tooth and claw, evinced in shocking imagery and a relentless sense that the forest is closing in. The forest does not want them there, and the longer they are there, the worse things will get.

So, then, this isn’t just a psychological horror film or just a supernatural horror film, but both. The horror is absolute. It is the horror of losing a child, and it isthe horror of watching someone make absolutely the wrong decision at every turn (don't treat your spouse like a client, don't go into the woods), it is the horror of a relationship descending into madness, and it is the horror of a vision of nature that is utterly malevolent without once feeling unnatural. There are horror movie beats - mysterious noises, nightmares, going places at night by lamplight, unnatural visions - but they're used in service of a story that transcends typical horror cliche. This movie doesn't use monsters as stand-ins for human problems, the human problems evoke the monsters, call the dead, raise the spirits of the forest, of nature itself. If women are of nature and men propose to stand outside nature, here is where nature rises up and smites man for his arrogance.

And this is the final piece of the puzzle - He and She are in a sense all Hes and all Shes. Throughout this film, the idea that women are irrational objects to study and "correct" is interrogated - She is an example of how this is utterly corrosive to a woman's spirit and identity, when it is completely internalized. Her dissertation was on the history of misogyny, and too late, He realizes what so much time immersed in those ideas has done. And He is an example of the folly of this rational approach, so common among men who are used to having agency and influence, who are used to a world where making the rules means that the rules apply. But here, in the forest, in the realm of nature, of the woman, no matter how much you want to stamp your foot and make the world obey the rules you formulated, Mother Nature is not trying to hear your shit. The mistakes of poorly done therapy resulting from a man’s belief that he knows the mind of a woman, imagery evoking the witch hunts, medieval ideas about anatomy and witchcraft, even the practice of suttee - it's all here, displayed in its horror for righteous condemnation. It is an excoriation, a Boschian howl of rage uttered by a wounded animal.

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