Nosferatu (2024): The Shadow

“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole.”

                                                                                 - Carl Jung, from Modern Man in Search of a Soul

I don’t think I’m coming up with anything revelatory when I say that vampires are often symbolic of what psychologist Carl Jung referred to as “the shadow.” It’s the part of us that we don’t like to acknowledge, our flaws, failings, shames, as well as our more potentially monstrous qualities. Qualities that are, nevertheless, part of us. Vampires historically represent our darkest desires and the equally dark means by which we satisfy those desires. This is all firmly in “no shit, Sherlock” territory.

And yet, they’re also just as often depicted as romantic figures, doomed to spend an eternity watching their loved ones waste away while they live forever, as if they’re the real victims here. You don’t even need to go as far as the Twilight movies to find this, though they’re probably the most egregious in this regard. And…I don’t like that. I tend to prefer films where our sympathies lie with the victims, not the monster. It’s possible to write a monster who is sympathetic, or has sympathetic elements. Hell, it’s possible to write a vampire like that, but if we’re talking classic vampires, as often as not they’re suave and charming, with fangs. And I like my monsters to be monsters.

Which is one of many things the 2024 remake of Nosferatu does right. It manages to take a well-traveled story and put some interesting spins on it, while still acknowledging its roots in German Expressionism. It’s reverent, but not rigidly so, and takes advantage of an established story to tweak some of the particulars in interesting ways.

It opens on a lonely little girl, who wishes only for a friend. There’s something special about her, she has visions, prophetic dreams. And it is in her dreams that someone comes to visit her, someone who wishes to be her friend.

Someone rotting and hulking, with long sharp fingers, and sharper teeth. And the sharpest of appetites.

The film picks up many, many years later, with the little girl - Ellen Hutter - all grown up and married to Thomas Hutter, a young man with employment at a prestigious real estate firm. He is eager to establish himself, to begin building his household so he and Ellen can begin their family. Mr. Knock, a senior partner at his firm, has a very special assignment for him. They have a very wealthy client, Count Orlok, who wishes to purchase an old, dilapidated property in their city; Thomas is dispatched to Carpathia to meet the client and secure his signature and payment.

Needless to say, it goes much, much worse than expected. If you’ve read Dracula, or seen adaptations of Dracula, you know the characters and the general story beats. Bram Stoker’s estate sued the ever-living fuck out of F.W. Murnau for making the original Nosferatu, which just moved Stoker’s story from England to Germany and changed a bunch of names. Fortunately, some copies of Murnau’s film escaped court-ordered destruction, and it’s gone on to become one of the most influential horror films ever made, inspiring multiple remakes and copies, and even fictional accounts of its making. So if someone is going to make yet another run at this story, it’s going to need to be very good and make some kind of unique contribution to justify its own existence, and luckily this film does exactly that.

First, it does some interesting things with the protagonists. The two most important women in the story - known originally as Mina Murray and Lucy Westenra – are usually portrayed as delicate hothouse flowers, fainting paragons of femininity who exist only to be rescued and defended. Here, they have a fair amount of agency. Anna Harding, wife to Thomas’ friend Friedrich (a prosperous shipbuilder) has two children and another on the way, and doesn’t want to see her husband and father of her children going off doing weird, dangerous shit. She isn’t shrewish or hectoring, just assertive as someone in her position would be. And Ellen Hutter is much more central to the story than Mina Murray usually is. She appears to have some kind of psychic ability or insight into the spirit world, and it is this ability that draws Orlok to her as a child. It’s not addressed explicitly in the film, but Orlok claiming her as a child and coming to collect her once she reaches adulthood does feel a little like she has been groomed, which makes Orlok even more monstrous in a way not normally seen in versions of this story.

Ellen refuses to be sheltered and defended, and is essential to the monster’s undoing, not just Hutter’s prize for defeating the monster. She is haunted and tormented by what happened to her as a child, and as Orlok’s influence begins to assert itself, she turns feral, in a performance reminiscent of (and apparently directly inspired by) Isabelle Adjani’s absolutely unhinged turn in Possession. It’s striking, and gives the character much more power than she usually gets. The doctor is competent, the Van Helsing character is suitably eccentric, but in a way that isn’t necessarily comic. He’s less a vampire hunter than a renegade scientist occupied with mysticism, and this film’s Renfield isn’t who you’re expecting. Making Harding a shipbuilder adds a little something to the Demeter’s return (its brief moment in the story more interesting than the trailer for the feature-length exploration of its voyage released a couple of years ago), and there’s a return to the idea of the vampire as disease-bringer, as its return heralds the arrival of a plague that punctuates the urgency of the situation throughout the second half of the film. Nobody is dramatically different, everyone plays the same roles, but who they are is just different enough to feel fresh.

And this film’s Count Orlok is one of the most impressive takes on a vampire I’ve seen to date. Ironically, part of what makes him feel so different from prior depictions is a return to the earliest ideas for the character. He’s a Carpathian nobleman, with an appearance roughly similar to that of Vlad Tepes and the assured arrogance of the nobility. He is someone who does not countenance being refused and will exercise his considerable power to take whatever he wants. He’s a decaying figure in decaying royal finery, with a voice that fills space and a raw appetite for blood that disregards gender and charm. This vampire does not seduce. He feeds. There is nothing romantic about this vampire. He is a monster in totality, and even shrouded in darkness, his evil radiates from the screen. There are some hints that he has been drawn or summoned here through the use of old, dark magic, and it serves to emphasize that he is something utterly outside of humanity.

And this film has a lot of darkness in it. It’s not shot in black and white, but it might as well be for as desaturated as everything is. There’s a blue tint to things that suggests cold, contrasted with the warm tones of home and hearth (and the cleansing, purgative power of fire) and the bright red of blood. This is a world with very little color, and even less as Orlok’s influence spreads, shown in one striking sequence as the shadow of a clawed hand stretching across the city. It’s one of many nods to Murnau’s original expressionist use of shadow, incorporated throughout. It’s a less-stylized film than Murnau’s original, but it definitely knows its roots.

There have been so many tellings and retellings and remakes and reboots of the classic Dracula story (not to mention all of the other vampire films out there), but this one more than any other I’ve seen engages with the idea of shadow, both cinematically and in the Jungian sense. This vampire is just on this side of humanoid, human enough that that’s how we read him, but horrible enough to evoke a sense of repulsion and horror; it’s underscored at the climax in a way that manages to engage with more romantic ideas of the vampire, simultaneously acknowledging and subverting them, ending the film with a deeply powerful image that takes the beautiful, the primal, and the grotesque and burns them into your brain. This vampire, more than most, is our shadow.

IMDB entry 

Kairo: Alone In The Dark

I have a pretty ecumenical take on horror. I don’t want to limit it to specific forms or subject matter, because that’s boring and if you want that, there are plenty of professional critics happy to pigeonhole horror films as films that provide shocks and jump scares and gore and nothing else. Like I said, boring. I find jump scares and gore, by themselves, boring. At their best, horror films are just as capable of grappling with questions of human nature and experience as any drama, they just paint those questions with a broader palette, and one that tends toward shadows. Some critics want to call those films “elevated horror,” mostly because they can’t bring themselves to admit that horror films can be art too. But that’s an artificial distinction. Horror is just horror. Some of it (a lot of it) is derivative, pandering dreck, but at its best, it examines the human condition.

Kairo (Pulse) is a great example of this. It’s a glacially paced story about the loneliness and alienation of the modern world and the role that technology plays in it, and though over-long, it proceeds with the chilly inevitability of a nightmare.

The film follows two different storylines in parallel. In one, Michi - an employee at a plant nursery - is tasked with tracking down her coworker Taguchi, who has been working on a program that would allow them to track their sales more efficiently. He hasn’t shown up for work in several days. Elsewhere, university student Ryosuke is trying to set up internet access from an ISP installer disk. Once he’s done, his web browser navigates to a page on its own - a page displaying image after image of people sitting alone in dark rooms, barely moving or speaking. One of the figures looks up at him. Spooked, Ryosuke turns off his computer and unplugs it. Elsewhere, Michi finds Taguchi at his apartment. He’s acting distant, moving and speaking slowly, and doesn’t seem to respond when Michi asks him for the disk he was supposed to have. Left to her own devices, Michi goes searching through his stuff, eventually finding the disk.

When she turns around, Taguchi has hung himself. He appears to have been dead for some time.

At Ryosuke’s place, in the middle of the night, his computer turns itself back on, displaying the same site as before. Shadows, sitting in the dark.

The beginning of the internet as we know it today was attended by any number of movies that tried to capitalize on the novelty of this new form of communication, and it’s so easy to make hokey, shitty movies about evil websites or demons that live in the computer. This is not one of those movies. Technology is central to the film’s conceit, but it feels less like another iteration on the haunted house or cursed object, and more like a vector for some kind of spiritual contagion. Modern living already facilitates isolation, technology that allows remote, anonymous communication exacerbates it, and the result, this film says, is people who dwindle away to ghosts, to nothing, to shadows. There’s a more conventionally supernatural explanation in the story, but that’s what it is - it's the story of a lonely world that’s only growing lonelier.

This film is part of the late 90s-early 2000s run of Japanese horror films that have come to be known collectively as “J-horror,” and it’s got very much the same aesthetic as other films from this period. It takes place in a gray, overcast Japan, in concrete apartment buildings permanently stained by rain. There’s very little music (just the occasional tasteful sting to punctuate startling moments) and even less background noise, making this an uneasily quiet film. This works to its advantage as a film about isolation, and along with pacing that could generously be described as deliberate, the result is somehow both dreamy and nightmarish. It’s a languid, chilly story full of eerie, obliquely creepy moments that proceed from a visual vocabulary with an internal logic, like any nightmare where you aren’t sure exactly what’s happening, but you know that whatever it is, it is evil and wrong and coming for you with a mindless implacability. It’s cryptic, but not so cryptic that you can’t follow what’s going on. The film has atmosphere in spades, it doesn’t yank your attention toward the scary bits, instead trusting you to follow what’s going on. It doesn’t need to make a lot of noise because the silence is even worse, and the result is very effective at keeping the audience uncomfortable and priming them for the big moments.

But this approach comes with some problems - the film’s just shy of two hours long, and you feel every second of it. I don’t mind slow movies, especially ones so committed to building a sense of inescapable dread, but this really could have had about 15 minutes or so trimmed without, I think, harming the overall result. There were points where I felt my attention starting to wander because the silence and stillness was tipping over into stasis. Any film that relies on the existence of the internet to drive its premise is going to risk looking dated, and though it’s mostly relegated to the background once things really get going, there’s still something that feels dated in how unfamiliar most of the characters are with how computers work in even the most basic way. Ryosuke bears the brunt of this as a young college student who manages to know almost nothing about consumer-grade computers or software. And sure, this film was made during a period when not everyone knew much about computers (and long before haptic devices like smartphones or tablets), but to modern eyes, he just looks…kinda dumb, in a way that I don’t think was intentional. I appreciate that not everything is explained into the ground (the next person who tells me that they’re going to explore the “lore” of some antagonist from a horror film is getting a very metaphorical foot up their ass), but if you look at what’s supposed to be happening a little too closely, it does seem kind of shapeless and hand-wavey. But this is a pretty minor complaint for a film that sets a tone, commits to it, and ends in impressively bleak fashion.

This is also one of a number of Japanese horror films that got American remakes, and I think I’m going to start doing some compare-and-contrasts, because I think there’s some space between the culturally specific concerns of films like this and the way they get translated for audiences in the U.S. that’s worth talking about. But I suspect any remake is going to have a hard time replicating this film’s monolithic sense of depression and isolation, as much as I’d like to see someone try.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

Milk & Serial: J/K Bro, It’s Just A Prank

I don’t think this is any kind of huge revelation or anything, but some of the best horror films being made right now are not coming out of the studio system. Which makes sense – studios are in the business of making profitable films, and when you’re in the business of making profitable films, you aren’t going to want to take chances. You want product that’s going to bring in an audience. Has this lead to a glut of remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels and (ugh) franchises? Yes. A lot of slick, glossy exercises in jump scares. And there’s an audience for that, but I’m not it. So in an environment where there are actual alternatives to the studio system and consumer-grade cameras and editing software are getting better, you get people willing to take chances and pursue their vision and actually getting it out there in front of eyeballs like mine, and it’s refreshing.

Milk & Serial is a great example of this. It’s a sharp, nasty, unnerving bit of short horror that does a really good job of working within its limitations and making its apparent amateurishness an asset.. And it’s on YouTube, of all places!

The whole thing picks up in medias res, as a dude nicknamed Seven is setting up some kind of a prank as part of his buddy Milk’s birthday party. Milk and Seven have a YouTube channel called “Prank Bros,” where they are…well, two bros, pulling pranks. It’s a pretty involved stunt, using bullet squibs and an actual handgun firing blanks. Seven’s invited some rando to Milk’s birthday party, someone he knows from, well, somewhere else, and Milk isn’t happy about it. While they’re arguing about it, there’s commotion from the living room and they run in just in time to see this rando holding a gun on their friend Naomi. He fires and Naomi goes down. And then, once the initial shock has passed, she pops back up and they all start singing “Happy Birthday.” Those kinds of pranks.

The party is brought down a little when someone knocks on the door to complain about the noise. Nobody recognizes him, and after they placate him he goes away, only to be discovered hanging around outside.

The next day they find him sitting in their living room.

It’s a little more than an hour long, clearly shot on a shoestring budget, and it ends up being really impressive – it doesn’t have much to work with, but it tells a story that doesn’t need much to work well. It’s a story told through the cameras that Milk and Seven use to film their pranks, which are consumer-grade camcorders, there are phone cameras, there are even spy glasses at once point – it creates the feeling that everything these two guys do is recorded to be turned into content. At the same time, it’s pretty clear pretty quick that this isn’t strictly raw footage. So calling it a found-footage film (which is how it’s marketed) sort of does it a disservice. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem too bound to the conceit, and the ways it breaks plausibility are fairly easy to overlook in favor of what it does well. It looks like jittery cinema verite, shot by the kind of frat-bro assholes you’d expect to do a prank show on YouTube, giving it a nastiness and immediacy that fits the narrative perfectly. It really does feel like you’re watching something that’s going to end up being evidence in a manslaughter trial or something similar, and still manages to fit in some nice camerawork, using focus to dramatic effect in a couple of places and benefitting from an abrupt, clipped editing style that jumps between perspectives with a suddenness that communicates tension and unease even at relatively mundane moments.

On top of that, the type of story it is, told the way it is gives it some thematic heft. It is nominally a film about a prank that goes wrong, and it does a good job of keeping the audience on its toes. It’s almost a nesting doll of a story, and setting things up that way means that it’s very much a story about the line between truth and fiction. Where do the pranks stop and real events begin? What even is real in this context? It’s true for both the audience and for characters in the story as well – we’re watching a story that looks just like something you might find on some random YouTube channel, and we’re watching it on YouTube, so there’s a lot of reflexivity to it. Meanwhile, the longer the story goes on, the harder it is for the characters in the film to tell what’s actually happening and what’s a setup for yet another prank until it’s too late. It ends up going some very dark places, and it works in that regard because the performances are strong and naturalistic - which they really need to be for a found-footage movie -  and in at least one case, sincerely unnerving. So you get what looks at least initially like something you might actually find on YouTube (and you’re…watching it on YouTube), you get a sense of how it’s going to unwind…until it doesn’t unwind that way and you realize that something really, really bad is going on.

Some time back, I wrote about a film called I’m Just Fucking With You, which largely squandered the opportunity to be a horror film that digs into the inherent viciousness and cruelty of pranks. This film doesn’t squander it, instead it faces it head-on and then blows right past it in something that reminds me of nothing so much as Creep and the segment “Amateur Night” from V/H/S – it’s persistently uncomfortable in the best way and is a great example of how budget doesn’t dictate quality.

Between the Adams family, analog horror like Local 58, Kane Parsons’ work on The Backrooms, and people like Kyle Edward Ball and the Phillipou brothers getting feature-length films distributed off the back of their own work on YouTube, this is a really good moment for indie horror, and I’m excited to see what comes next.

IMDB entry
Available on YouTube 

The First Omen: The Burden Of History

So much of what I don’t like about sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes, reimaginings, etc., is how they so often pale in comparison to the film from which they spring. They tend to be exercises in reduction, pulling one thing from the original film and beating it into the ground over however many attempts are made to wring more cash out of the original idea. And everything else that made the original gets missed, ignored, or worse, deliberately jettisoned for a “fresh new take” on the property. Do you really need a fresh new take on a story after only one film?

Which is what makes The First Omen such an oddity to me. It’s actually pretty good; moreover, it would have been even better as a stand-alone film. If anything, the narrative debt it owes to the original film works against it, dragging it down instead of letting it be its own thing.

It’s Rome in 1971, a city teeming with civil unrest, and a novitiate named Margaret has come here to become a nun. She’ll be working at an orphanage that takes in women who are unmarried and pregnant, providing a home and education for their children once they’re born. The assignment hits home for her - she was orphaned and made a ward of the church herself, though her memories of those times aren’t all pleasant. She was a troubled girl and got her fair share of discipline from the sisters who ran the orphanage. And now she’s come all the way from the U.S. to seal her vows in the heart of Catholicism. While getting a tour of the facilities, Margaret spies some drawings done by some of the children. It’s the usual whimsical crayon scrawls, except for one that depicts a number of sad, hollow-eyed young girls looking up at a bigger girl floating above them, disheveled and slightly deranged though no less sad. It’s the kind of drawing that would likely inspire a wellness check in modern times. She’s told it was done by Carlita, a troubled girl with a history of violence, who spends most of her time segregated from the other girls.

Bad things tend to happen around Carlita, and nobody wants to talk about it.

In some ways, this film is at a fair disadvantage. Even if we factor out its connection to a film about the Antichrist, it is still yet another film where a nun or priest or someone about to become a nun or priest finding themselves at a monastery or convent that seems to be hiding a dark, dark secret. So it’s difficult to sustain any sense of mystery from a couple of different directions. If there’s a convent, there’s a dark secret. If there are nuns, at least some of them are complicit in hiding this dark secret. And because it is a prequel to The Omen, we have a pretty good idea how it’s going to end. Even if we don’t know how it’s going to get there, we know where it’s going. And in horror movies, you really don’t want to see the end coming from a mile away. Maybe it’s because this sort of story has a pretty narrow range of possibilities associated with it, but it was really hard to shake the feeling that this film was checking all the boxes on a list of things that need to be in a convent/monastery with a dark secret movie.

And that sucks, not just because formulaic, predictable stories are the ruin of good horror, but also because this film is really well-made in a lot of ways. The performances are generally on the right side of understated and there’s an acuity and restraint to it that films like this rarely have, if ever. For once, the dark secret doesn’t just stop at “well we’re nuns but we’re actually evil nuns,” there’s at least a rationale there, for as much as it matters. I think more could have been done with it in relation to the film’s time and place, but I appreciate it not just being a bunch of Satanists in habits and wimples. And it’s actually pretty scary! There is no shortage of startling moments, but they aren’t jump scares, and as often as not they’re presented in ways that are inventive. There’s especially something sort of unblinking about how this film treats the female body, and there’s one moment around childbirth that’s as unsettling as anything David Cronenberg did in The Fly or Dead Ringers. I feel confident that these filmmakers could have made a really good movie about the church as a patriarchal force, resistant if not actively hostile to change, intent on controlling women’s bodies and done so in a way that could have been stark and horrifying, if they weren’t saddled with the need to tell a story that dovetails with a film made in 1976 (and remade in 2006, for that matter).

And that’s really the sticking point: The need to tell a story that leads into an existing story really hobbles and constrains this film, to the point that the end drags out for far, far too long in order to absolutely cement this story in relationship to The Omen. The world-building and exposition may be necessary (or at least somebody thought it was necessary) because this is a prequel, but it compromises the quality of the film as a singular film. It shoehorns it into a well-established formula and gives it a foregone conclusion for an ending, and damned if the film isn’t still pretty good in spite of all that. I really want to see more from these filmmakers, ideally not straitjacketed by a studio’s need to create more product in the Omen franchise space.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu

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 

Cuando Acecha La Maldad: When The Strength Of Men Fails

Something I’ve observed about movies dealing with demonic possession is how often human frailty is a central part of the narrative. More precisely, that evil is able to do its work and triumph because of human frailty. The devil, these films seems to say, doesn’t really need to work all that hard at it because people can basically be counted on to do the wrong thing, or to buckle at the exact moment they need to stand firm. Father Karras’ doubt in The Exorcist, the fervor of Thomasin’s parents in The VVitch, the sheer volume of dysfunction in the Graham family as a whole in Hereditary. All evil needs to do is sit and wait and let us do all the work.

And Cuando Acecha La Maldad (When Evil Lurks) is another strong entry in that particular canon. It’s a bleak, visceral take on the perniciousness of evil and how it’s aided by human frailty. I think it doesn’t quite stick the landing, but it’s a hell of a ride to get there.

It’s the middle of the night somewhere in rural Argentina, and brothers Pedro and Jimi hear gunshots out in the woods. It doesn’t sound like someone hunting - the timing of the shots is off, and it sounds like a revolver and not a rifle. Needless to say, they’re not going to go looking. Not in the middle of the night. Besides, it might be the neighboring landowner, Ruiz, and they’d rather not get on his bad side. Pedro’s already pretty sure Ruiz doesn’t like him. So, the next morning, they set out in the direction they were pretty sure the shots came from, and soon enough, happen upon the remains of a person, strewn along the forest floor. It doesn’t look like an animal attack - the cuts are too clean. His belongings are scattered around, including parts of some mysterious brass device, and a journal. There’s a photocopy of someone’s ID, and a map. It looks like he was headed to Maria Elena’s place. She’s reclusive, has two sons, and nobody’s seen or heard from her in awhile.

As it turns out, Maria Elena’s had her hands full. Her oldest son, Uriel, is…sick. Very sick. And sick in a way that medicine cannot cure. Uriel is hosting something. Incubating something not of this earth. And in this Argentina, that’s just a fact of life. These things happen, there are rules and procedures for dealing with them, and you have to be very careful, lest you taint everyone and everything around you with its evil. It is supernatural evil as contaminant, as virus. Pedro and Jimi realize that the body in the woods was someone dispatched to “help” Uriel - that is, euthanize him safely, in a way that would prevent the demon he carried from being born into the world. Nobody else is coming, Uriel isn’t going to last much longer, and when he dies, it will bring ruin to the entire village. So Pedro and Jimi decide that they know what has to be done.

They’re going to get Ruiz and his truck, and drive Uriel as far out of the village as possible and leave him to die there. They’re going to make it someone else’s problem.

Needless to say, their less-than-brilliant plan doesn’t go off without a hitch. And that’s when the deaths start, and Pedro, knowing that he and Jimi and Ruiz done fucked up, decides to do the right thing…well, no, he decides that he’s going to get his family together and get the hell out of Dodge. What follows feels like a simultaneous attempt to outrun disaster and reckoning for all of the mistakes Pedro has ever made. He’s running as fast as he can, his entire life unraveling one step behind him. It’s set in a world that shares some narrative similarities to the equally impressive Asmodexia – it is a world in which evil is a known fact, and has been for some time. And like that film, there’s a sense that we’re coming to this story late, as everything is drawing to an  inevitable close. One character refers to “the end of faith,” and there’s definitely a feeling of institutional apathy or indifference, as if everyone has just resigned themselves. And apathy and indifference are, historically, what lets evil flourish.

It’s a film very much with its own vision for an otherwise well-surveyed topic, though. Possession in this film is something foul – this isn’t your typical “really pale, shackled to the bed and spilling tea it couldn’t possibly have” thing, this is the metaphor of evil-as-disease painted in the broadest strokes, in bloated, festering, pustulent bodies, whose fluids communicate its evil as surely as any contagion. It’s evil as ebola or bubonic plague. It’s an ailment that is physical and spiritual in nature, and the line between it and human failings are blurred. People who are possessed say horrible things to manipulate others and cause them doubt, but so do people who aren’t possessed, who still harbor lingering bitterness and grudges. Where is the line between them drawn? Human failing, like indifference and apathy, does its part to help evil thrive, as Pedro and Jimi pretty much make every wrong decision you can make, let their impulses get the best of them time and time again, and all of it helps evil along. In that it also reminds me of The VVitch, how normally loving family impulses get bent and twisted to serve evil’s ends. Pedro is far from a perfect man, and he doesn’t redeem himself at all, but he’s just one more imperfect person in a story full of imperfect people, so he isn’t solely to blame. Everyone is. Evil is already everywhere.

None of this is, on paper, especially new. Possession-as-disease is nowhere near a new idea (though this is an especially down-and-dirty take), and as I’ve already beaten to death, human failing is a big part of this type of story. But I have to say, this is, in terms of visual storytelling, a real cut above. It places instances of graphic, shocking (and shockingly graphic) sudden violence right alongside moments that are singularly quiet and eerie, communicating wrongness with surprising restraint. It’s as content to put everything in our faces as it is to suggest and leave things off-camera, and the result can be a little disorienting, but not in a bad way. There’s a real absence of safety in this approach, and the rhythms of the film are such that those moments will absolutely catch you off-guard. It’s a film that has no interest in letting you catch your breath and that’s as much about its willingness to abandon predictability as the urgency of Pedro’s situation. There’s a sense of dread inevitability, that evil has already won and is just waiting for Pedro to catch up to that fact, and in that sense I’m reminded of The Dark and the Wicked. What does it want? Who knows. It’s just there, a fact of the world, utterly merciless and implacable. They’re going to lose, it’s just a matter of how long they have left.

Perhaps my only real complaint about the film (apart from a slightly dodgy translation) is that the ending is a little anticlimactic. It’s certainly not a hopeful ending, but after the horrors Pedro (and by extension, us) has witnessed, I expected something world-consuming, and it doesn’t quite get there. But then again, this is a film about the futility and impotence of flawed people in the face of evil, and in that sense it feels right. The outcome was never in doubt, and the strivings of men to hold back the tide meant nothing.

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The Reflecting Skin: The Nightmare Of Childhood

“Kids can be so cruel.” Let’s think about that for a second. It’s certainly true, as any veteran of childhood or adolescence can attest. But it’s also often used dismissively, as if it’s a self-evident statement, not something to explore. But it’s worth looking at more closely because it’s almost two sides of the same coin. Cruelty is part of innocence, because if you don’t know that what you’re doing hurts someone or something, you’ll do it, and you’ll laugh, and their pain is no lesser for it. It might even be worse. Childhood can be full of casual cruelty because often you haven’t yet learned regard for anything outside yourself. And all too often, horror sells the idea short by going no further than the idea that if it’s creepy when an adult does it, it’s even more creepy when a kid does it.

I’ve had the cult film The Reflecting Skin on my radar for awhile, and I’m sorry it’s taken me this long to get around to it, because it’s really striking. It’s lyrical, haunting and strange, a story of cruelty, and tragedy, and innocence lost, all wrapped tightly together like a ball of venomous snakes.

It’s rural somewhere in the 1940s, a stretch of lonely farmhouses standing in oceans of wheat under an unblinkingly blue sky, and the film begins with summer childhood shenanigans, three friends playing out in the fields, up to some kind of mischief. It’s horrible, and bloody, and the three friends - Kim, Eben, and Seth - laugh and laugh and laugh at the prank they’ve pulled, oblivious to their own viciousness. In its wake, we follow Seth back home. His family runs a gas station and garage, and they’ve got another boy, Cameron, off fighting in the Pacific. There’s a peculiar, solitary woman who lives a little way. It was she who was the target of Seth and his friends, and he’s sent to apologize. She’s reclusive, pale to the point of colorlessness, clad all in black and although she looks young, she tells Seth very seriously that she is over two hundred years old.

Seth knows what she is. His father reads pulp novels about creatures like this.

What follows is the story of one summer in Seth’s life - the mysterious neighbor lady, the secrets everybody keeps, and a string of unexplained deaths striking at the little community’s most vulnerable members. It’s like an Andrew Wyeth painting came to cold, surreally detached life, and it’s a story suffused with pain. Everyone in this film is damaged somehow, estranged from their own feelings and experience, wounded by life in one way or another. There’s Seth’s mother, seething with rage at the disappointment of her life and taking it out on Seth and her husband alike. There’s Seth’s father, taciturn, resigned, passive and ultimately pathetic. Joshua, obsessed with his own sins, and Dolphin, the mysterious neighbor lady, brought from her home in England to this rural place by a husband now long-gone, repressed and constricted and utterly alone. And lurking in the margins, the sheriff and his deputy, both with eyes like stone, and a nameless young man in a black Cadillac, whose intentions are unclear but don’t seem wholesome at all. The result is a lot of cruelty, because everyone is disconnected from themselves and from everyone else, consumed by their own horrors and obsessions. And in childhood, you don’t know any better, so Seth, already damaged by his mother’s abuse, moves through this broken and damaged world, hurting and being hurt and not knowing the why of any of it, while real evil lurks right under everyone’s nose.

And it’s a story told vividly. This would never be mistaken for a realist piece or character study, not when everyone is so alien and alienated, but it leaps off of the screen. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, with color choices that can only be described as painterly, and careful consideration for composition in every shot. It’s full of little details and moments that aren’t exactly subtle, but convey the impression that everything about this film is pointed in the same direction, devoted to telling this story using every means at its disposal. Hell, there are moments where even the editing is breathtaking and evocative. The orchestral score is lush, prickly and foreboding, giving it the feeling of some kind of timeless fable, and the result is rife with a sense of strangeness. It’s a film that is perfectly willing to have bizarre things happen and not bother to explain them (the sheriff’s introduction is both startling and oddly funny, and Seth finds…something…in the barn that becomes a confidante), but at the same time it doesn’t feel gratuitous or contrived. It’s a bleak existence seen through the eyes of a child, and even if it doesn’t make literal sense, it makes emotional sense. The whole thing feels like a languorous nightmare.

I think it’s lazy to call things “Lynchian,” and all too often just means something is a little quirky, but here I think it does make sense. Thematically, it operates on a somewhat similar wavelength – everything and everyone seems at a slight remove from reality and each other, as if they’re sleepwalking through their own lives and only capable of communicating in the most direct, emotionally naked way possible without the heat of actual emotion. There’s a strong undercurrent of desire contorted by repression as well, and the suggestion of a small town hiding dark secrets, so I definitely see similar notes to Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, but maybe less hermetically sealed, if that makes sense. It’s a story of growing up and the loss of innocence, and a story about wounded people trying to find connection, and a story about the senselessness and inexplicability of sudden untimely death, a fable told in the merciless glare of a perpetually, unbearably blue summer sky. I don’t think I’ve seen something that hit me like this since Possession, and though this doesn’t plumb that film’s lunatic depths, it comes a lot closer that most anything else I’ve seen.

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Gwledd: Conspicuous Consumption

There’s something about the wilderness - there’s an uneasiness to our relationship with it, a wariness. Even people who love the wilderness acknowledge that it is not safe. Like our wariness of the dark, I think it goes back to our earliest days as a species, when things lying in wait in the dark, or the forest, or the long grass, or the lake, could leap out and end us. And just like we light fires against the dark, we build walls to keep the wilderness out. Modernity is not just about ease and comfort, but also about protection. A reassurance that yes, we have tamed the wilderness, and it can no longer hurt us.

Of course, this is a foolish idea, and Gwledd (The Feast) is a sharply and skillfully told story about how we presume mastery over the wilderness at our peril.

In the middle of the Welsh countryside, there is a diesel-powered drill boring into the earth, like something you might use to explore for oil or take core samples. Its operator lurches away from the drill, staggers across the green, green fields, and collapses insensate, blood leaking from under his ear protection.

In the middle of the Welsh countryside, there is also a house, and the entire story takes place here and in the surrounding woods. Inside, a family is getting ready to host guests for dinner. There’s Glenda - a farm girl who married up, upon whose family property the house is built. There is Gwyn, a successful politician and Glenda’s husband, and their two sons, Guto and Gweirydd, both of whom seem profoundly out of place, city boys plucked from their flats and set down in the middle of rolling hills and tall trees. Glenda is nervous - she doesn’t host often and she’s eager to make a good impression. She’s arranged for Lynwen, a young woman who works at the nearby village pub, to come out and assist with food preparation, service and cleanup. But Lynwen wasn’t able to make it, and recommended Cadi, who also works at the pub, in her place. Cadi turns up, oddly quiet, at the gate to their property. No car, no bus, no bicycle. One minute she isn’t there, and the next she is.

As if she appeared from thin air.

So you’ve got an obviously wealthy family with a nice, aggressively modern home out in the middle of the country, and the entire story takes place over the course of a single day. The film begins by sketching in the family, who they are and who they are to each other. There’s an ambivalence to Glenda - she seems proud that she’s erased almost all signs of her rustic upbringing by tearing down the old family home, but made a point of saving old quilts and blankets and one of her mother’s old dresses. The abstract painting in the dining room is a rendition of the property and its boundaries. She has left home, and she has never left home. Gwyn is a gruff, emotionally distant man’s man who likes to sit out in the woods, sip whiskey and shoot rabbits that he then leaves Glenda, the former farm girl, to skin. Guto is a troubled bad boy, floppy hair, electric guitar and neck tattoo, who liked living in London, with its parties and easy access to heroin. Gweirydd, has temporarily dropped out of medical school to train for a triathlon, and right off the bat there’s something dissolute and unwholesome about him.

They could have been a poor little rich family caricature, but they aren’t entirely. There’s a restraint to their depiction that keeps things from getting too histrionic (until it’s right for them to do so). You do get the expected beats for this sort of story, but they aren’t the sum total of these people. Glenda fusses and orders Cadi about, but isn’t above helping to make the food, even joining in with Cadi when she starts singing an old familiar song. Gwyn is very much the potentially corrupt politician, but doesn’t seem especially unlikable or abusive and seems to genuinely see his office as a privilege. He has appetites, yes, but they’re human-scale. Guto and Gweirydd are the resentful children you expect, but they aren’t raging assholes and they have their reasons. Guto is irresponsible and directionless, but he’s sensitive and passionate. Gweirydd  does seems like the kind of rich dilettante who decides he’s going to take a break from med school to be an athlete, but like Guto, he seems wounded by his father’s disapproval and emotional distance. The cliches are there, but everyone seems actual like people underneath those cliches. And Cadi floats through all of this, almost entirely silent.

And in that sense, Cadi sets the tone for the film. It’s not especially dialogue-heavy (several minutes elapse before anyone speaks at all), nor does it have music outside of a few diegetic pieces. It tells its story through silence and its sharp interruption. The film is punctuated across its running time by title cards that move from innocuous (“I want to make a good impression”) to disquieting (“She mustn’t be awakened”) and by scenes and segments that play out quietly until something ends the quiet – a scream, a gunshot, a piercing sound, a shocking act, cutting to the next scene and its relative quiet abruptly, so we don’t have time to fully process what’s just happened. It could threaten to become cliched or repetitive, but it doesn’t. It adds to a feeling of inevitability, like a steady march. 

And it's chilly and austere, all overcast countryside and a home that’s made out of sharp angles, glass, bleached wood and brick with more than a hint of the mid-century modern about it. Shots are artfully composed, themselves all lines and angles and figures placed in relation to the house, or each other, differences in focus and glass between them,  with good use of slow fades and superimposition. It’s a slow burn, but one that lets you know, however subtly, or not that something is wrong right off the bat, and it’s content to build the unease and the surrounding story in the background, through asides and details dropped in gradually. The first two acts are table-setting (in some cases literally) but there’s a constant drip of unease. You know immediately something bad is going to happen, even if the shape of it isn’t immediately apparent. Some things that start little and start early become big and bad by the end, some things are revealed late to good effect, some things you may be able to see coming from early on, but not in a way that gives it all away. This film is exceptionally good at giving you bits of information gradually and allowing you to make the connections yourself.

And when it all comes to a head halfway through the third act, it does so in blood and flame and screams. There’s one bit of what I thought was unnecessary flashback and there’s some brief montage at the end that felt unnecessary and sort of tacked-on, but these are minor quibbles. It’s another excellent addition to the fine British tradition of films about the pagan power of nature and the awful cost of disregarding it.

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Lo Squartatore Di New York: Not A Nice Place To Visit, And I Certainly Don’t Want To Live There

As near as I can tell, there are a couple of different types of Italian horror films that get filed under giallo. You’ve got the stylish (or at least stylized) murder mysteries, where lots of people get stabbed or strangled or otherwise dispatched by mystery figures in black leather, and then you’ve got the zombie/demon movies, where some gate to hell or another gets opened up and all kinds of gooey monstrosities emerge to kill, eat, and both eat and kill people. Where do cannibal movies fit? If/when I ever make a point of watching any, I’ll let you know, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. I know that giallo describes a wider range of movies than this, but this is what I’ve observed so far. And regardless of which of those two types it is, there’s one thing they have in common: They’re bonkers. Not a shred of subtlety to be found. The more I think about it, “outrageous” really fits, in that they’re both wildly unconcerned with plausibility and also likely to evoke outrage.

And in both those regards, Lo Squartatore Di New York (The New York Ripper) fits the bill in spades. It’s the kind of film that gets described as being “very much of its time,” but really that just means it’s sleazy and gross on multiple levels. Worse, as far as I’m concerned, it seems to bring together the two types of giallo I outlined above, but does so without including the strengths of either. The narrative doesn’t hold together, and it’s bloody and violent without being either stylish or over-the-top enough to get over. It’s kind of the worst of both.

That said, I have to applaud the opening. We get a scenic view of what is presumably the East River, and an older gentleman walking his dog along the trash-strewn asphalt adjacent to the riverbank. Ah, city living. He finds a chunk of wood and he throws it. Like the very good girl she is, his dog brings it back. So he throws it again, and she dives into some bushes to retrieve it. But when she comes out, he looks at her in dismay, as the camera cuts to her standing there holding a decomposed human hand in her mouth. It’s not an especially surprising scene, I would have been more surprised if it had gone any other way, but then it freeze-frames on the shot of the dog holding the rotting hand and plays all of the opening credits over it. It makes you look at that hand. The movie is saying “you are in for some shit,” and it’s right.

Cut to world-weary police lieutenant Fred Williams at the precinct house, taking the statement of a dotty old landlady who is reporting one of her tenants missing. Does his cop intuition tell him there’s more to this than a flighty young woman who’s taken off for an impromptu trip? No, not really, but he’s the protagonist, so he’ll have to do. We move from New York’s finest standing around looking bored to a young woman riding her bike to the Staten Island ferry. She accidentally scrapes against a car along the way and the driver makes a point of loudly explaining to her that she’s a menace to society with the brains of a chicken and how “you women” should stay at home where they belong. And yeah, that’s…this movie came out in 1982, and that’s pretty much how the whole film is going to be. As luck has it, he’s parked on the ferry, and as they get underway, this young woman takes the opportunity to slip into his car and write “shit head” on the inside of the windshield in lipstick.

But before she can finish, she is interrupted by someone with a switchblade. Permanently.

So Lieutenant Williams gets assigned to investigate the Mysterious Case Of Why Women Are Turning Up Dead. He is ostensibly assisted by a psychologist named Dr. Paul Davis, who will be helping him develop a profile of the killer. I say “ostensibly” because mostly all Dr. Davis does is play chess, look smug, and belittle the people around him. What follows is a lot of stuff happening, in no particular order. This is a film that doesn’t move from scene to scene so much as it lurches from scene to scene, and though you can make out something of a story, there’s not a whole lot of attention paid to pacing or structure or anything like that. Characters are routinely introduced with little to no context in the way that you expect that connections between them will be revealed, or that they’ll cross paths and things will make more sense, but not so much. In most cases (at least the women), they’re in the movie to get murdered and that’s kind of it.

So this is a film about a police investigation into a series of murders, but I can’t really call it a procedural, because that implies that there’s anything resembling procedure. This film makes leaps in logic that would easily take Olympic gold if it were an event. Apparently, Wiliams is able to determine the killer’s age and that they’ve lived their entire life in New York City from…a blood test. That’s…that’s not a thing. The killer makes a point of calling the police to taunt them, and even though this taunting consists of the killer saying “you’re so stupid” a lot and quacking (yes, quacking), Davis determines from this that the killer is very intelligent and cultured. In theory, Williams is working with Davis to catch the killer, but they confer maybe three times over the whole film – large sections go by apparently having forgotten this was supposed to be happening. Davis’ analysis of the killer is empty psychobabble, but really, that’s just par for the course. It’s easy to tell that everything in this film is based on someone’s speculation about what police work and psychology are, since presumably there was no money or time for a consultant, and so they just made shit up. Most of the film is just ping-ponging between characters, setting up red herring after red herring. Is it the man with two fingers missing, who attacks a woman on the subway? Is it the wealthy doctor with some very specific kinks? Is it the young painter whose girlfriend narrowly escapes the killer? Is it Dr. Davis? Hell, is it the police chief? The answer will surprise you, because it’s totally unrelated to any of the clues the film has planted.

So it’s a clumsy, incoherent story, told in clumsy, incoherent fashion. The dialogue’s as stilted as you’d expect from an Italian production set in New York (Williams to the police chief: “Well, if it isn’t the big chief person himself”), although there’s enough location shooting that it feels like New York, and it’s New York of the early 80s, all grubby and run-down, subway cars scabbed over with graffiti and dingy apartments and porn theaters in Times Square. All of which is explored in the most prurient and salacious way possible. Is there any real reason why one of the murders requires a lengthy sequence at a live sex show? Not really, and yet here we are. There are more than a few shots of nude female bodies on morgue tables, many of the women happen to be naked when they get killed, and there’s one sequence involving a nude woman and a razor blade that is genuinely nasty. The effects are still obvious, but well-done enough that it isn’t as comical as it could be. And there’s one sequence with the wealthy doctor’s wife and two men in a bar that had me wanting to take five or six showers once it was over. Put simply, the film is misogynistic as fuck. Women exist in this movie to be naked and/or stabbed. They’re sex workers, or someone who had the nerve to talk back to a man, or stuck-up rich women slumming for rough trade, and even the one the film goes out of its way to tell us is a genius? She’s also prone to hallucinations. Bitches be crazy, am I right? We learn that Davis is most likely gay – does it end up mattering? No, thank goodness, given the genre’s track record with homosexuality, but it’s portrayed through a fairly leering one-off scene that ends up contributing nothing to our understanding of him either. It’s an uncomfortable film to watch, and not in the sense of being confrontational, so much as it feels like you’re stuck in conversation with an oily little creep who thinks jokes about rape are funny.

It just sort of bounces back and forth between murders and aimless conversation until the third act, which keeps you guessing (or more specifically, confused) right up to the end, revealing a rationale for the murders absolutely head-clutching in how convoluted it is. Even by giallo standards, it’s kind of a doozy, coming out of nowhere, just like everything else about this film. It’s a thriller without the visual flair of those giallo at their best, and it’s got the graphic violence of the more straightforward horror giallo without being evocative, and it manages to preserve all of the gross attitudes of the period. So it’s evocative of another time, absolutely, but it’s a time that nobody in their right mind would want to revisit.

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Seytan: We Have The Exorcist At Home

The Exorcist is one of the most well-regarded horror films ever made. It’s a classic, surprisingly forward and transgressive for its time. It’s scared the shit out of a lot of people. And like any successful horror film, it’s also spawned sequels, prequels, reboots, re-imaginings, almost all of which pale considerably next to the original. You don’t make something monumental without seeing it crudely duplicated over and over, every successive attempt missing the point more and more.

And I think the peak (or maybe nadir) of this has to be Seytan (Satan), a hilariously shameless Turkish rip-off of The Exorcist, its crudeness startling and comic in equal measure. I cannot call this a good film, but it’s definitely a ride.

It opens on an archeological dig in the Middle East, and a somber, bearded man combing through the unearthed artifacts. He finds a small, sinister-looking idol, stares at it meaningfully for a few minutes, before walking up to a larger idol to compare them. The larger idol, well…it looks like a papier-mâché attempt at Godzilla. This kind of ends up setting the tone for the movie in general.

Meanwhile, back in Turkey, Ayten is a well-to-do woman who lives in a large house with servants and her daughter, Gul. Her husband appears to be very absent, not even bothering to show up for Gul’s upcoming birthday. But Gul seems happy enough, a pretty regular kid who has an imaginary friend to keep her company and  a Ouija board to play with. Ayten’s got her hands a bit full, though – she has to plan Gul’s birthday party, figure out how to get Gul to warm up to her new gentleman friend Ekrem, and deal with that loud rustling and banging coming from the attic at all hours.

It sounds like a bunch of rats up there. 

Okay, so, when I say this is a rip-off of The Exorcist, we are talking damn near shot-for-shot, right down to a musical motif that sounds like Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” to a legally actionable extent. If you aren’t familiar with The Exorcist, just know that there are literally dozens of you out there. It’s basically the ur-demonic possession movie, the one that sets the standard and creates the vocabulary, for better or worse, for all of the ones that come after it. If you are familiar with The Exorcist, this is all going to seem very familiar. It opens in the desert at an archeological dig, moves to the home of a wealthy woman in the city and her daughter’s mysterious illness, the whole deal. Almost all of the beats are the exact same. Some adjustments are made for the replacement of Catholicism with Islam, but it’s all pretty vague on that front, sort of generically religious instead. The priests are replaced with an imam (the bearded man from the opening) and Ekrem’s friend Tugrul, who is an expert on exorcism and demonic possession as a cultural construction of mental illness. Tugrul has all of Father Karras’ guilt, having just put his mother in an insane asylum because he can’t care for her anymore. The crucifix that features in one of the most transgressive scenes in the original has been replaced by what looks like a letter opening with a devil’s head on it, but when I say it’s all the same beats, I mean it – the progression of Gul’s symptoms are the same, she undergoes the same grueling medical treatments, all the supernatural manifestations line up the same way.

But at the same time, it’s approximated so crudely that it comes out the other side as something much more bizarre and unintentionally comic. It's contemporary to the original (circa 1974), and was clearly made on the cheap even for its time, and the version I watched is not at all remastered or cleaned up or restored. It’s grainy, blown-out, there are moments where the quality of stock they’re using changes visibly so a few minutes have this bluish cast out of absolutely nowhere. They aren’t quite Manos: The Hands Of Fate-level production values, but they’re definitely close. This is especially evident in a burnt-in subtitled translation that had to have been done by the first person they could find with any grasp of English, for how inept it is. I’m used to translations missing the mark here and there, but this is egregious to the point that they sort of go on their own journey parallel to the film. They start off reading like they got run through a translation program a few times, and then you start to see editing marks intended to denote misspellings or unclear phrasing, left in the subtitles. But then it gets better, moving onto snarky asides about the dialogue and an honest-to-God parenthetical note to look something up on Google later. Nobody, and I do mean nobody, proofed these before superimposing them over the video file and this has to be the first time I’ve seen subtitles also serve as a Greek chorus on the quality of the movie and appear to turn self-aware. And that’s the unintentionally comic stuff. There’s also an actual punched-in-the-balls gag, complete with pained mugging, just sort of dropped into the middle of a scene. It’s like putting a pratfall, complete with slide whistle, into the middle of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

And yet, as comic as it is, the crudeness also gives it a fever-dream intensity that does serve as an interesting contrast with the original’s slow burn. This is a film that loves a sudden cut and a fast zoom, and quick cuts back and forth between close-ups. It likes to hold shots a little longer than you’d think (which makes Gul’s electroshock therapy especially disquieting, a genuinely unsettling moment in the middle of all the goofiness) and pretty much all of the shots are static. So that simultaneous urgency and stiffness, along with the surreally broken dialogue and low-budget effects best described as “chunky,” gives it a certain nightmarish edge as well.

It has none of the feeling of mounting dread that the original does, and there’s not a single ounce of subtlety or nuance to be found. It’s got pretty much all of the story beats of the original with little to no narrative connective tissue, just scene, cut, scene, cut, scene, cut, scene all the way to the end. But its weird primitive energy makes you feel like you’re not entirely sure what you’re seeing. It’s one of those films that feels like maybe you actually watched it late one night, or half-hallucinated it as you drifted in and out of sleep. Or like the cinematic equivalent of Ghana’s singular movie posters, something that bears some resemblance to the original film, while diverging in ways that careen off into the far reaches of sanity.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

The Strangers: Knock Knock

Having just come off of a month when I made a point of watching nothing but the kind of stuff I usually avoid, I think that for the most part, the take-away is that I avoid those kinds of film for a reason. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t learn anything, but very little changed my mind. It didn’t feel like a bummer or anything, but I came out the other side looking forward to sinking my teeth-eyes into stuff that seemed promising.

And so I decided to start with The Strangers. I know this came out awhile ago, but this isn’t my first shot at it - I’ve started it a couple of times in the past and each time I’ve had to shut it off. Not because it’s bad, but because it creeped me out so much that both times I ended up saying “nope, not today.” I finally made it all the way through, and yep, it’s an absolute masterclass in tension and threat, with an impeccable sense of restraint.

The films opens with a title card and narration explaining that it’s based on true events. Is it? Maybe, maybe not, but if nothing else it reminds me of the opening to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, that stark title card and somber voiceover promising something grim. And it definitely starts grim. We get the interior of a house, petals scattered on a bed, more petals scattered around the kind of box that contains an engagement ring, a record running into its end groove on the turntable, over and over. Glass on the floor. A shotgun sitting out, along with an axe. Blood on the wall. This is the aftermath of something terrible, discovered by two young missionaries who end up making a panicky 911 call instead.

The night before, James and Kristen are coming back from a wedding, arriving at the house we’ve just seen. It’s all set up for something romantic, petals everywhere and a bottle of champagne with two glasses out, but as we see them, Kristen has dried tears on her face and James is extremely quiet. There’s an awkwardness between them. Nothing is really said out loud, but it’s easy enough to figure out. James asked her the kind of question that accompanies flowers and champagne, and he didn’t get the answer he was expecting. So here they are, left to make the drive back to a home decorated for a celebration that will never happen. So what we have at this point is essentially a drama about a moment in their relationship that has just turned into something else. Take out the opening title card and scene and this could just as easily be a straightforward drama, and I really like that about it. I like horror movies that are dramas until they aren’t, that are about actual people with feelings and lives. There’s a sad tentativeness to them, a lot of feelings all happening at once. James is calling his best friend to come get him as soon as he sobers up, to ride back with him, to spare Kristen an extremely awkward road trip. He’ll sleep on the couch. Kristen takes a bath and cries. The pain they’re both experiencing is evident.

And then there’s a knock on the door.

What this relationship drama turns into is a siege film, but one that is almost excruciatingly patient. Most siege films are loud, intense, mile-a-minute once they get started, but this film is very minimal and careful in its approach. It’s all about little moments, blink-and-you-miss-it moments, sudden, sharp moments that stab into an uneasy quiet. Really important beats as often as not happen silently in the background, where figures gradually emerge from the shadows, or are suddenly there under a single streetlight, and then gone again. It’s bad when you can see them because you know they’re there, but it’s even worse when you can't see them because you don’t know where they’ve gone and that is worse. The tension is constant, and there’s never really a moment where the masked figures menacing James and Kristen aren’t in control of the situation. It’s very cat-and-mouse, in the classic sense of a cat toying with its prey until it’s exhausted, only then finishing it off.

This sense of restraint carries through to the performances, much to the film’s benefit. Dialogue is sparse and to the point, but you still get a sense of who these people are because the actors do a very good job of playing actual people, complicated and vulnerable. Kristen and James begin the film navigating a lot of different feelings, it’s clear from the performance that Kristen loves him and doesn’t like that she’s hurt him, but isn’t ready for marriage yet. She doesn’t want to leave him but doesn’t know what comes next, either. James is feeling crushed, rejected, humiliated, all of the intended romantic gestures for what was supposed to be a special night surrounding him, shouting out his failure. It makes everything that follows even worse, in the sense that they’re already so devastated, and we’re entering their story on a tragedy. And then when everything pops off, when it becomes about life and death, Kristen responds by focusing on staying alive and James responds by trying to be the big strong protector, trying to be her knight in shining armor. But in doing so, he’s dismissive of Kristen, telling her she couldn’t have seen what she saw. He’s sort of in denial but also hellbent on taking charge, and so maybe we can see why she wasn’t ready to marry him just yet. It’s not really his fault, he’s a pretty traditionally masculine guy who’s just been dealt a serious blow to his self-image and he’s trying to recover, to reassert himself. He isn’t a coward or a bully, but it’s pretty clear pretty quick how inadequate his response is going to be in the current situation. And none of this is spelled out in neon, it’s all little asides and how they carry themselves. We get a sense of who they are as people just by watching them, which is what you want.

The same care that goes into pacing and performance is also evident in the cinematography. It uses a lot of hand-held camerawork, which serves to make everything feels more intimate at the start and then more urgent the further in we get, it’s not found-footage but there’s an immediacy to it as a result. There are also shots that are very still, very specifically composed to draw our attention in a specific direction, to great effect. Most of the film takes place very late at night, so the streets are empty and everything is quiet. Everyone’s asleep, and the house is deep in the country so the nearest neighbor is nowhere close. The isolation is palpable. And the house itself is very much a home, lots of cozy wood paneling and well-worn furniture, a place on the wall where James and his brother’s heights have been recorded over the years. James’ intentions mean there’s a lot of warm light from candles, and because it’s late at night, there are lots of shadows and isolated light sources. The assailants are all wearing white masks, so, like Michael Myers before them, they sort of fade in and out of the shadows, their stark, ghostly faces sometimes just hanging in the darkness.

There’s a refreshing lack of explanation here, a refusal to give us any kind of concrete answers or explanations for what we’ve just witnessed. Even when the assailants finally remove their masks, we never see their faces. There is no grand, elaborate reason for all of this, no monologuing. It just is, and the sun rises and we come back to where we began, knowing everything that happened the night before. It’s simple and horrible and stark and plain. It’s horror, and it’s exactly what I needed after a month of things missing the mark in one way or another.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon 

Red Krokodil: Life Sucks And Then You Die

I’ve taken the opportunity to do something a little bit different this October. During a time when more people are watching (hopefully) good horror films, I’ve been making a point of watching the sorts of horror films I normally avoid, for whatever reason. So far I’ve covered a film made by someone who makes horror films for megaplexes, a film from a genre I don’t really like, and a film that I started to watch once and abandoned after about 15 minutes because the acting and dialogue really sucked. And to wrap up this loosely-themed spooky season, I’m tackling underground horror, also sometimes called “extreme horror.” These are films, usually made very much on the cheap, that are intended to be so shocking or upsetting or transgressive that they’ll never receive any kind of wide release.

My window into this world is a company called Unearthed Films, whose stock in trade is almost entirely underground horror. They specialize in limited-run DVD and Blu-Ray editions of things like the August Underground and Guinea Pig films, something called the “Vomit Gore Trilogy,” and a collector’s edition-quality release of A Serbian Film. If you’re unfamiliar with these titles, the links I’ve provided are safe to click, but this is real “if you know, you know” territory. If you don’t, I wouldn’t go looking – I’m not really sure you’ll be better off for having done so. None of it is illegal, strictly speaking, but these are definitely the kind of films that get banned or seized by customs occasionally. I don’t watch films like this for the same reason I don’t really like slasher films. In general, they aren’t about people as much as they are pretexts for putting a lot of really unpleasant stuff on film or video to titillate fans of graphic violence and people whose sensibilities are so numbed that nothing else affects them. They’re just cinematic endurance tests, and that doesn’t interest me.

Which brings me to Red Krokodil. It’s part of Unearthed’s catalog, the subject matter is right in the wheelhouse, and most importantly, it’s one of the rare films of this kind to actually show up on a mass-market streaming service. As committed as I am to the bit, I’m not spending additional money just to watch something called Slow Torture Puke Chamber. It’s not as sensationalistic as it could have been, and it does seem to aspire to something more than just gross-out, but it just doesn’t get there.

It opens with a crawl describing the drug of the title. Krokodil (Russian for “crocodile”) is a homebrew heroin substitute, a morphine analogue made by combining cough medicine that contains codeine with a bunch of gnarly solvents like benzene and hydrochloric acid, as well as red phosphorous, medicated eyedrops, iodine, and a bunch of other shit never intended for human consumption. It first showed up in Russia, where poverty and draconian drug laws made it a last-ditch solution for heroin addicts. It’s made entirely from over-the-counter ingredients, so pretty much anyone can make it. And its effects are short-lived and the withdrawal exceptionally painful, so batches get cooked up in haste, under less-than-laboratory conditions. The result is where it gets its name, an injectable drug so full of impurities that skin around the injection sites quickly takes on a gray-green, scaly quality, as ulceration and necrosis set in. Trust me, you do not want to do an image search. You will see things far worse than anything in this film.

It's followed by an exterior shot of a Russian city, bombed-out ruins covered by some kind of haze or fog. And in this city lives a man, alone in a tiny apartment. His kitchen counter is covered with chemicals, a small pot bubbling on the stove with something black and tarry in it. The man is filthy, unshaven, his hair lank and greasy, and he’s clad only in bloodied bandages around his hands, elbows, and knees, and a pair of stained undershorts that are almost more holes than fabric. He inspects himself in the bathroom mirror, and notices a new set of lesions spreading from behind his ear. He pokes at them carefully before returning to his work.

There really isn’t a story to this film, and certainly no plot. It’s less about the horror of the titular drug (which is plenty horrific in real life) and more about using it as a vehicle for a recurring motif – holes as disintegration, but also as something through which something more can be glimpsed. There are holes in the body, holes in the walls and doors, shattered windows. Sometimes blood comes through, sometimes light, sometimes a view to another place, sometimes monsters. Though, to be honest, this really makes it sound more cohesive and illustrative than it really is. Mostly it’s just aimless footage of a filthy man lolling around an even more filthy apartment alternating with occasional reveries in nature (which, to be fair, do provide some respite from the squalid claustrophobia of the apartment) and hallucinations which range from dread-provoking to just sort of puzzling. Sometimes he just sort of lies there, sometimes he has nightmares, sometimes he’s in pain. He cooks up and shoots up, and occasionally looks out the window. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of narrative to it, even implied. The dream and nightmare imagery is either so innocuous or oblique that it’s hard to tell what we’re supposed to take away from it. It’s either meaningless, or so intensely personal and specific that it might as well be meaningless, since we’re never given any kind of insight into the man’s experience. Interspersed throughout is a voiceover monologue about, I dunno, life, the universe, childhood, the flesh…it’s the sort of obtuse portentous rambling you’d expect from a stereotypical student film, a lot of stuff that probably sounded deep as shit to the person who wrote it but just comes off as self-important nonsense.

The technical execution isn’t bad, I’ll give it that. The music and sound design are both pretty good, establishing an emotional tone that probably could have done all the heavy lifting without the monologue. The cinematography in the outdoor sequences is competent, and the interiors (as gross as they are) make good use of harsh white light filtering in through the windows, as if it is perpetually daytime outside the apartment and perpetually nighttime inside. There’s some allusion to a nuclear war having occurred or occurring, and the light that streams in does convey the feeling of someone caught in the glare of the blast. It’s not a gratuitously gory or disgusting movie, much to my surprise – I could think of a much more lurid story featuring this drug than what we got – but it’s still not for the squeamish. It’s still a film about the effects of a drug that starts eating your flesh away as a matter of course, and the restraint means that the moments we do get have an impact. I wonder how much of the restraint was a function of budget, since the practical effects are few and far between, but again, what’s there is pretty effective.

It's not hard to watch in the sense of pain and suffering, but it’s certainly hard to look at, between the overall squalor and the occasional bits of body horror. It could have leaned into the latter a lot more than it does, and I’ll at least give it props for that, but it doesn’t really use it in the service of anything especially compelling or even easy to follow – it’s a lot of moments strung together, some of which work in isolation, but most of which don’t, and even at just under 90 minutes it still manages to feel interminable as a result. Finally, it ends on a note that was probably supposed to be really powerful, revelatory and transcendent, but mostly just elicited an eyeroll from me. Yes, we get it, life is pain and loss feels like the end of the world, this is in no way an obvious or hackneyed idea and nobody has ever made this observation before.

I suppose that underground horror is a lot like above-ground horror, in that it’s occasionally capable of something interesting (I still maintain that A Serbian Film, as unpleasant as it is, has artistic merit), but a lot of it won’t be. It’s easy to mistake naked atrocity for substance and justify it as exploration of humanity’s dark side, but that requires acknowledging the humanity in the first place, and though this wasn’t as sensationalistic as it could have been, it wasn’t really about humanity either. It was a lot of degradation and disintegration that ultimately didn’t mean much.

So that’s four films that represent things I don’t like. I’ll admit that Malignant, though not very scary, was surprisingly enjoyable. And Terrifier, though ultimately just more people getting fed into a metaphorical (this time, at least) woodchipper, did have more visual flair and style than I thought it would. But Bite really was as bad as I thought it was in its first 15 minutes, and whatever people who enjoy extreme horror get out of it, it’s nothing that I really need to experience for myself. So I’m going to keep trusting my instincts. Now, back to the stuff I’m actually looking forward to checking out.

IMDB entry
Available from Tubi