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 

Nude Per L’Assassino: Sex And Violence And More Sex

Horror movies, like pretty much any other movie, are products of their time and the culture in which they’re made. And horror movies also tend toward transgression, since they’re largely dealing with the kind of stuff more polite entertainment doesn’t. What this means in practice is that the older the film, the more likely it is that it will have…not aged very well. Values and norms change over time, and some things that used to be acceptable aren’t any more. So I’ll sometimes find myself watching a movie where I’m more grossed out by the way the people in it behave than I am by blood and gore.

In my limited experience, gialli are especially susceptible to this. A type of film made largely in the 1970s and 1980s in Italy, gialli have some ideas about sex, sexuality and gender that are by modern standards pretty repugnant. And Nude Per L’Assassino (Strip Nude For Your Killer) is definitely no exception. I mean, with a title like that, it was never going to be subtle. But even though it isn’t as viciously nasty as some I’ve seen, the way it seems to be equal parts murder mystery and softcore sex film ends up being pretty distracting.

It comes in pretty hot, opening with a woman at a doctor’s office getting an abortion. It’s not as lurid as it could have been, thank goodness, but it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going on. Halfway through, she appears to expire quietly in the chair. It’s an unusually low-key sequence, ending with the doctor calling someone in a panic. They’re going to move her back to her apartment and make it look like she died of natural causes. They dump her in the bath and start the water running, then they leave.

Some days later, a mysterious figure catches up to the doctor as he’s about to walk into his house, and stabs him to death.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, fashion photographer Carlo is busy trying to bed an attractive woman while he’s out in public…taking photographs, I think? He’s very much the kind of dude who doesn’t take “no” for an answer, which is gross enough, but somehow it’s worse that the woman he’s pressuring into sex (in a public place, no less) relents and goes along with it. Apparently, “no” means “yes” in this movie, and it’s pervasive. When Carlo brings her back to the fashion design house, he sort of dumps her on the head of the agency and finds out that one of their models apparently died of natural causes. Hmmm. And then only a couple of days later, another employee dies. It takes a bit for people to start putting it together, but a mysterious killer is targeting everyone who works for this design house. Someone’s out for revenge.

The biggest problem with this film is the same problem as pretty much any other Italian movie in the genre from the mid-70s – pretty much every man in this film is one flavor of pig or another. It’s more chauvinistic than misogynistic or homophobic (I still haven’t gotten the taste of New York Ripper out of my mouth), but there’s plenty of dudes who don’t take no for an answer, who have no sense of boundaries, who’ve never heard the word “consent.” And on top of that, most of the women in this film are sexually available in one way or another. Carlo has a brief, tense exchange with aspiring photographer Magda, who is intent on proving herself as a photographer on her own merits, but this doesn’t stop her from turning around and seducing Carlo in a darkroom for…reasons? It really does underscore the idea that boundaries and consent don’t really mean anything. No matter what she says, she really wants it. Even a scene with two cops interviewing someone can’t resist having one of the cops spend the whole thing leering at a scantily-dressed woman in the office. Why is she scantily-clad? That’s a good question. With the exception of two nurses in a brief hospital scene, pretty much every woman in this film ends up getting naked, whether it makes sense or not. It ranges from the somewhat uncomfortable - there’s a brief scene of a woman getting slapped around toward the end - to the pathetic, as another executive at the design house attempts to pay a woman to sleep with him, and when he’s unable to perform, he cries for his mother. I didn’t feel dirty after watching it (still looking at you, New York Ripper), but I did yell “ew, gross!” more than a few times at the way dudes acted in this film and at the subtext about sexual availability. I’m usually able to calibrate for older films, but in this instance it ends up being distracting.

So it’s very much of its time, to the point that it is kind of a distraction, but there’s also not a whole lot of movie outside of the gratuitous T&A. Apart from that, it’s sort of a mixed bag. The editing comes straight from the school of “meanwhile, in another movie,” the acting is nothing to write home about, and there’s very little mystery to it. It’s not so much that the killer is immediately obvious as it is it just one person after another dropping like flies until the very end, where the killer is revealed mere seconds before process of elimination would make their identity clear to the audience. It doesn’t have the stylishness of Argento’s work or the deranged vision of Fulci at his weirdest, but it’s mostly cohesive (if not especially interesting in how it develops the story) and it does manage a decent amount of suspense with a repeated motif of running water, heavy breathing, and a near-subliminal insert shot from the beginning of the film heralding the killer’s arrival. The deaths are quick and nasty, full of blood that looks like tempera paint, but they aren’t overly sadistic, and both men and women get killed. So it isn’t as icky as I was afraid it was going to be, landing more on inappropriately horny in a way that mostly just made me roll my eyes. It’s grainy, with pops of color and rainy streets at nighttime, and it’s got the requisite cop-show up-tempo score mixed in with some lighter pop music from the period. I’m beginning to see what people mean by “Eurosleaze” after watching this, and though it has its merits as a style of film, the “sleaze” part makes it a little tough to appreciate.

Film - especially horror film - is a place where you can explore difficult or upsetting ideas, grapple with uncomfortable emotions and express things in strong, vivid terms. I don’t like moral panics or pearl-clutching, and I don’t think that any particular creative work’s value should be determined by its adherence to a particular set of norms and values. Judging the films of 40-plus years ago by the values of today doesn’t make much sense to me. But anything that yanks me out of a movie is going to be a problem, and this one’s just juvenile and gross enough to be distracting. 

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

Available on Amazon

Compare & Contrast: Kairo/Pulse

I want to try something a little different this week, something I’ve been thinking about trying for awhile. If a foreign horror movie does well, as often as not it’s going to get a U.S. remake. And these remakes range from almost shot-for-shot duplicates of the original film to ones where tattered scraps of the original film cling to something otherwise wildly different. I think these exist mostly because the film industry in the U.S. makes a regular habit of underestimating the intelligence of audiences. Reading subtitles isn’t difficult, and if you’ll avoid a film because you don’t like to read…well, you’re part of the problem.

But within that space, there’s some potential to make observations about the differences between them. What survives the transition, and what doesn’t, which details changed and which ones didn’t. These choices can be revealing about the assumptions made by either set of filmmakers, and what sort of cultural touchstones go into making horror films, and what those say about their respective cultures. So what I’d like to do in a compare and contrast post is look at the original film and the remake side-by-side, to see what worked, what didn’t, and what the choices made in each film might tell us about the societies that produced each film.

A lot of this, for me, begins with what was colloquially referred to as “J-horror,” a group of horror films made in Japan from the late 90s to early 00s. It does seem to be sort of a watershed moment that marked increasing interest in horror films made outside of the U.S., and at a point where streaming hadn’t yet made access to films from all over the world easier. So along came remakes of the higher-profile J-horror films. So that’s where I’d like to start with this. My last post was on the film Kairo (Pulse), which is a (rightly) well-regarded example of the form. A bleak, chilly meditation on loneliness and urban isolation, it received a remake, titled Pulse, in the U.S.. The two films share a few similarities, but they are by far more different than similar, and I’ll likely be spoiling details of both films, so if you haven’t seen Kairo, maybe come back once you have - it’s pretty good. Overlong, but pretty good. The remake? Well, not so much.

AHOY! SPOILERS AHEAD! 

To start, both films share the same basic premise: Some kind of mysterious signal is transmitting itself over the internet, people who are exposed to it start committing suicide, and ghosts are starting to appear wherever these suicides occur. After that, things really diverge narratively and cinematically. In Kairo, the film followed two parallel storylines, that of Michi, an employee at a plant nursery, and Ryosuke, an economics student, as they separately discover this strange phenomenon. Pulse replaces the two parallel storylines with one, that of a young college student named Mattie and her friend group. This doesn’t really help or hurt the film, but the characters are so stock that it’s kind of annoying. It’s often difficult for me to pick up on character nuances in subtitled films, but in the remake it’s clear that these are two-dimensional college-kid caricatures, more concerned with partying and getting laid than anything else. Worse, the addition of a model-handsome miscreant who goes from “dude who bought a stolen computer” to Mattie’s love interest in rapid order is so fucking tiresome. He’s literally just some dude who purchased stolen property and maybe twenty minutes later he’s her biggest confidante, and by the end they’re making out. It isn’t necessary, it does nothing for the story or the characters, it just gives the filmmakers a chance to shove a dude with razor-sharp cheekbones and impeccably groomed beard stubble into the whole thing. That’s what a lot of horror movies in the U.S. were back in the 00s - impossibly good-looking people getting bumped off for reasons. Neither film was ever going to be a character study, but it’s really difficult to see this as anything but ticking boxes on some kind of focus-grouped checklist.

The changes to the film itself - the art direction, the specific story choices, the narrative details - are much bigger and really work to make the original and remake into two sharply different films. Kairo relied a lot on mood and atmosphere - it was a quiet, relatively empty movie, somber and melancholy. It took place in a drab, overcast part of Japan, full of rain-stained brutalist apartment buildings, and its important moments were simple- a silent figure in the corner of the room, mysterious black stains on the wall, people sitting still in barely-lit rooms, pale figures that bent and twisted as they walked. The result was eerie and full of dread, with the inexplicable horror of a nightmare. Pulse is not a quiet, empty movie. You’ve got your nightclub scene, you’ve got your bustling college campus, you’ve got evil cyber-ghosts who are all glitch and stutter and visual noise, a riot of special effects who make weird growling noises and suck people’s souls out of their faces. Do they come through electronic devices? Yes, except when they just pop out of washing machines for no apparent reason. They suck your life force out through the magic of special effects, then you lose the will to live, and then you just…vanish? Maybe we’re supposed to assume that they kill themselves, but this is a film that’s far more squeamish about the idea of suicide than the original was, even though it was sort of central to the original’s thesis. Sometimes they get these creepy black growths spreading all over their body and then they turn into ashes in yet another display of digital effects. And then more screaming, more jump scares, and an ending that sheds all of the quiet sadness of the original for an unnecessary monologue that just restates what we’re seeing with our own eyes. There’s no mood or atmosphere here, just a lot of yelling and musical stings to let us know when to be scared and pale, hairless figures screaming at people before doing special effects at them. It’s borderline-incoherent in the degree to which it just sort of seems like a bunch of cliches pulled out of a bag. Psychology gets some mostly-irrelevant lip service, there’s this weirdly antagonistic shrink who just sort of appears out of nowhere and harangues the protagonist, there’s a professor who talks about stalking and then isn’t seen again for most of the movie…until he gets killed, and there’s a lot of cyber-gibberish (“but I shut down the system!” “It doesn’t matter! THEY ARE THE SYSTEM!”). Pulse doesn’t feel like anything except a pointless racket.

Pulse is also a much more literal film than the original. In Kairo, computers weren’t really the point. It was a film about loneliness and alienation, and computers just facilitated that, a window into other lonely lives. Sure, there was some stuff about spirits spilling through into our world because their realm was full (a nice nod to “when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth”), but like everything else in the film, it was never really fleshed out. It was cryptic and opaque, but there was enough internal consistency that it felt like nightmare logic, like there was a sense to be made if only we looked hard enough. In Pulse, computers are the entire point. Technology is slathered all over every frame, everyone constantly checking their cell phones (not even smartphones), “cyber”-this and “cyber”-that, hackers, every single bad internet cliché of the early 2000s jammed into the movie, and eventually, after a lot of wandering around getting scared (and the occasional borderline-pointless nightmare sequence shot in a style I can only describe as “aggressively desaturated”), it turns out that some telecom engineers delved too greedily and too deep and unleashed some kind of malevolent presence on our world. So no, it’s not the malaise of modern life, it’s these evil creatures that want to feed on our will to live. This is explained at length in a third-act infodump, though it’s far from the only time that we get told stuff that was already apparent to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention. Symbolism’s for the other guy, we’re going to make this as simple as possible because we have no faith in the intelligence of our audience.

Where Kairo was quiet, Pulse is loud. Obvious, hamfisted, devoid of mood or atmosphere, made up of a few segments lifted from Kairo absent any real context surrounded by 2000s-era mass-market horror film cliches. The original made sense as a piece of Japanese film. The loneliness of modern urban life, increasing isolation, black stains on the wall evoking the shadows of Hiroshima, restless spirits. All of these make sense in the context of Japanese history and culture. The remake grabs bits here and there, but disregards any of that context, and the results, besides being noisy and overwrought, also verge on nonsensical in places, mostly because they seem thrown into a different, more generic horror movie without regard for why they’re there. Really, the more I think about it, the more this seems like it was originally an unrelated movie about evil websites or evil cellphones or something, and they lifted two or three bits from Kairo to rebuild the movie around. It’s got almost nothing to do with the original, it’s not even in conversation with the original, it’s just a butchering of a much-better film.

IMDB entry for Kairo
IMDB entry for Pulse

Kairo on Amazon
Pulse on Tubi
Pulse on Amazon

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 

Siksa Kubur: Death Is Not The End

I made this observation a few weeks ago, but it continues to interest me how you can start to pick up on particular cultural touchstones once you’ve watched enough horror movies from a particular country or part of the world. Spain really likes demons and demonic possession as the prime mover behind its horror, Japan has its nods to animism, the importance of the family unit, and water as a symbol for the presence of the supernatural, England does a lot with ancient beliefs and pagan tradition. This doesn’t describe every film from these places, of course, but they pop up enough to seem like things particular to those places.

And I’m starting to figure out some stuff about Indonesian horror as well. It’s interesting how much of it serves as cautionary tales about what happens when you don’t live a pious life – curses that follow generations when someone violates Islamic traditions are pretty common – and just how…wacky…it is. At their best, Indonesian horror films, whatever they might lack in technical polish or savvy, have a wide-eyed earnestness to them that carries the films over rough spots, like an Islamic Chick tract. It’s very no-fucks-given, and Siksa Kubur (Grave Torture) is one of the better examples.

Sita and Adil are brother and sister, who until recently worked in their family bakery. But something terrible happened, something driven by religious fear, and now they’re orphans, taken in by an Islamic school where they are taught a trade alongside being taught how to be good Muslims. But Sita isn’t having it – it was religion that got her parents killed, stories about the torment that the impious suffer even as they lie in their graves. The soul is tortured in the afterlife, the body is tortured after burial. She’s angry and determined to believe that it wasn’t her parents sinning that got them killed – it was religion that killed them. Her teachers can’t answer her questions, they just call her a sinner for her troubles, and she doesn’t want to stay there. She grabs Adil and they head for a tunnel that’s supposed to take them off the school grounds, but it goes on a little too long, it gets a little too dark, and they meet someone there. A young boy named Ismail…

…which just happens to be the name of a former student who died under mysterious circumstances.

Probably this film’s biggest strength is the way it plays around with conventions of the genre. Normally Indonesian horror films are pretty straightforward, but this one isn’t afraid to leave the whole “protagonists have to return to some kind of cursed village to undo something terrible” story in the dust and set everything much more firmly in the modern world. It’s a story about the tension between faith and doubt, how religion is used as justification for violence, the way unresolved grief can become obsession, and the nature of morality. Which is a lot to pack in, but it doesn’t really feel forced, everything plays a role in getting the audience to the end of the story, which takes detours through revenge stories, attempts to apply scientific methods to the supernatural (an obsessed sibling out to disprove supernatural phenomena gives this some definite Oculus vibes), meditations on aging and mortality, and stories about the wealthy and powerful attempting to cheat hell. You think you know where it’s going, but there’s a real WTF-ness in how the story unfolds in some surprising directions as it goes, but without ever feeling jarring – everything emerges from what precedes it, while packing in the requisite moments of supernatural menace and a walloping dose of “say your prayers and you won’t get tortured in the afterlife” that is becoming, to me, an absolute staple of Indonesian horror films.

Another staple of Indonesian horror films is energetically janky effects work and this film is no different in that regard. In this case, though, the production values are really good otherwise so it’s a more jarring contrast than in other Indonesian films where the whole thing feels sort of grungy and so relatively primitive effects work blends right in. In a couple of places it’s especially glaring, almost comic when it shouldn’t be. Blackly comic, but still. On the other hand, there are a number of moments that do a lot with less – voices where there shouldn’t be any, little bits of creepy business in the background, an especially grisly game of hopscotch – which buy the film a fair amount of goodwill for the moments when things don’t really land. The performances are a little variable, but the actors playing Adil and Sita – as children and adults – do a really good job and keep the film feeling grounded. And even when the performances aren’t as strong as they could be, there’s a lot of raw emotion in them which gives the whole thing a feeling of intensity and genuine unease that you don’t always get in horror films. Sometimes the story feels like it’s turning on a dime but it manages to make it work in the end, especially in a third act that gets seriously weird in places – I can’t remember the last time I saw a film actually pull off nested nightmare sequences this well.

Apart from the uneven effects work, there are a couple of other problems – the end is an absolute head-scratcher, the setup for the central conceit is a little convoluted (like, that’s a lot of work and planning just to prove a point), but it manages to stay away from easy jump scares, has some nice moments of visual flair, and some surprisingly heartfelt acting that manages to elevate it above your basic ghost story and your basic Indonesian religious tract. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s nice to see something a little more contemporary-feeling from this corner of the world.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

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 

Chakushin Ari: Ghosts In The Machine

One of the things that I’ve really come to appreciate after writing this thing for so long is just how much any given horror film is informed by the values of the culture it comes from. What scares someone can tell you quite a bit about what’s important to them, and if you watch enough movies produced in a particular place, the more you start to see the same underlying themes and imagery show up consistently. England, for example, does a good line in horror that taps into pre-Christian traditions; the United States likes its overtly bloody parables about the dangers of premarital sex.

I’ve watched my share of Japanese horror writing this thing, and some things about modern Japanese horror really clicked into place for me after watching Chakushin Ari (One Missed Call) this week. Which is good, because the film itself only works fitfully, and has some serious pacing issues, especially toward the end.

One night, college students Yumi and Yoko go out to dinner after class, and like any other young people in the early 2000s, they’ve got cellphones. Not smartphones, just those tiny-ass little cellphones with the most basic messaging and camera functions. Yoko gets a notification that she missed a call - oddly enough, it was a missed call from her own number, and there’s a voicemail. When she listens, she hears her own voice saying “it’s starting to rain,” and then there is a horrible scream. So that’s creepy.

Even creepier is that the voicemail is timestamped two days in the future.

The conceit, then, isn’t that hard to figure out. People get mysterious voicemail recordings of the moments before their own death at some point in the future and when that day comes, those people…well, die. Yoko dies, and Yumi becomes determined to try and figure out what the hell is going on. So this film fits right into a cinematic tradition that also includes the cursed videotape of Ringu and the Internet ghosts of Kairo. I think it’d be easy to chalk these all up as reactions to technology, the ways in which modern devices are bad for us, but I’m not sure that’s it, at least not in this case. It occurred to me watching this that Japan’s indigenous religion is Shinto, which as I understand it is an animist religion. So it holds the belief that objects have spirits -houses, trees, ponds, you get the idea. So why not videotapes, cellphones, or computers? I don’t think it’s a “technology bad” thing as much as it is the idea that technology, like everything else, could be expected to have spirits of its own, and when someone dies badly, maybe that gets carried on into technology just like it could into a house or forest or doll or lake. In a culture where ghosts are just a part of life, they can be anywhere.

It also follows in the footsteps of films like Ringu and Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara by folding a legacy of parental abuse into the narrative. Like Ringu, the whole thing is handled less like a horror story than it is a mystery where the protagonists are trying to trace the chain of causality for a bunch of supernatural deaths back to its beginning, and like those films, it seems to all start with an abusive mother, and like in Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara, it seems like the struggles of a single parent and the pressures of trying to be a good mother in a culture that doesn’t really make allowances for single parents lead to violence and trauma. In a culture where ghosts are everywhere and family is important, these are the sort of things that will be scary. It’s even of a piece with these other films in terms of its cinematography - this is the drab, overcast Japan of Kairo and  Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara, full of dreary tower blocks, themselves full of cramped apartments. There’s even a dig at tabloid news, as one of the unlucky recipients of a voicemail is featured on a sensationalistic news program where a medium will attempt to combat or exorcise the evil spirit (it doesn’t go well), and that struck me because these are usually fairly intimate films, in that they are, like a lot of horror films, about something hidden and terrible that a small group of people are trying to escape or fight in secret. To have it acknowledged that the whole country is tuning into this phenomenon feels a little strange. Not bad or detrimental to the plot, just…strange. As if people dying mysteriously after receiving phone calls from beyond the grave is just the latest thing.

So there’s a decent bit to unpack here, but ultimately that’s sort of it, because the execution of the story itself lacks something. It’s got all of the parts of its contemporaries, but doesn’t have the striking imagery of Ringu, or the claustrophobic feeling of doom that suffuses Kairo, to name two. It’s a very quiet film, with little to no music, and in the first half or so, this tends to make things feel a little inert. There are creepy moments here and there, but nothing really startling, and a relative absence of tension makes it hard for these moments to really have an impact. There’s a lot of investigation, which means a lot of people going from place to place and asking people questions, and in those moments isn’t really distinguishable from any other drama that you started watching halfway through. You know things are happening, but it’s tough to really get drawn in. There isn’t a lot of action, which is fine, but there’s also not a lot of mood or atmosphere, and that’s a problem. Slightly clumsy translations in the subtitles don’t help, but on top of that the performances feel a little one-note. This might be because I’m relying on the subtitles, it’s often hard for me to gauge performances when they aren’t speaking English and that’s on me, but everything felt a little flat.

Many of these problems do abate somewhat in the second half of the film, as Yumi starts to piece together what’s happening and what kind of horrible legacy has lead to all of these deaths, but the action feels a little bungled as well. It’s sort of exposition-heavy - not in the sense that someone just stands there and tells you everything, to its credit there’s some really good use of flashback to catch us up - but more in the sense that it’s in the second half that everything starts happening. The problem here is that it’s trying to present a narrative that solves the underlying mystery, that makes clear what exactly happened, but it throws in enough stuff that, while good for some scares, also confuses things a little. And, most egregiously, it has one of the most obvious fake-out endings I’ve seen in awhile (or maybe it’s just because I noticed there were still 20 minutes left when everything ostensibly resolved) and instead of hitting you with the twist fast and sharp and then ending, it drags out the reveal and the twist for entirely too long, to the point that ultimately I was just waiting for it to end.

It's sort of odd - I’ve watched films that weren’t especially thematically rich, but worked well. And I’ve watched films that were thematically rich and worked well. But I don’t think I have, until now, seen a film that was pretty thematically rich but just didn’t work. It’s like it had substance in spite of itself.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

Ouija - Origin Of Evil: That Is One Tasty Burger

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

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

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

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

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

But it’s not her father.

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon

Near Dark: Families Of Blood And Choice

If it isn’t clear from previous posts, I am extremely picky about vampire movies. Mostly because I feel like they’ve been done to (ha-ha) death, and if I’m being honest, the Twilight series both made serious bank and sort of ruined the concept for awhile. I’m not really a fan of the vampire as romantic figure, like you get with Interview With The Vampire or the Twilight series. The whole “oh woe is me for I live forever and must watch all beautiful things wither and die” schtick? Miss me with that. Films like 30 Days Of Night are more my speed. I like it when they’re threatening.

Needless to say. Near Dark has been on my radar for some time as a highly-praised hidden gem of the genre. But it wasn’t easily accessed on streaming until recently, and so when I saw it was available, I jumped on it immediately. And now having seen it, I definitely understand its cult-classic status; it’s a sharp, gritty Western about the nature of family that deals in blood in a couple senses of the word.

It’s a lazy night in rural Oklahoma, the mosquitos are out, and three good ol’ boys are scuffling and shit-talking like you do when you live someplace where that’s all there is to do. They spy a pretty young lady enjoying an ice cream cone, and one of the three - a strapping young man named Caleb - decides to shoot his shot with her. Her name is Mae and it goes fairly well, but she’s awfully concerned about getting home before sun-up. Caleb thinks she’s got a strict daddy and he’ll just charm her out of trouble, but there’s something vehement, almost desperate about it. So Caleb decides that he’s going to blackmail her. He’ll get her home before sunrise, but she has to kiss him. And Mae kisses him, and then bites him. Hard. Hard enough to draw blood, and hard enough for her to drink. Which she does before leaving a dazed Caleb on his own to recover. And when Caleb finally comes to, he feels like shit - sick, woozy, gagging.

When he stumbles out into the sunlight, he starts to burn.

Along comes a Winnebago, its windows lined with foil, and Caleb gets snatched up by the occupants. There’s Jesse, Diamondback, Severen, Homer…and Mae. Whatever it is they do, they don’t like to leave witnesses, and Severen cheerfully explains that he’s going to cut Caleb’s head off. Mae points out that she bit him but didn’t bleed him out. So now Mae has made him everybody’s problem. They have to explain to him what he is now, and what it’s going to take for him to survive. They’re going to see if he’s got the stomach for it. Meanwhile, back at the family homestead, Caleb’s father and little sister are worried because Caleb’s gone missing. Local law enforcement doesn’t seem too bothered - young man like that, he’s probably just off with a girl or something and he’ll come home soon enough. But they know Caleb better than that. So we have Caleb, and two families. There’s his father and little sister, and then this motley band of…well, nobody’s saying the “v” word, but they drink blood and can’t go outside during the day. It’s not much of a leap.

There’s nothing romantic about these vampires; theirs is a life of one stolen vehicle after another, hiding in barns and garages, sleeping under tarps and never staying in one place for too long. Very few of the usual cliches apply – sunlight’s lethal but they don’t give a shit about crosses or running water or garlic. They don’t even have fangs, but they kill and they drink and they live through almost everything else. The violence is quick and brutal – practiced killers who have learned that this is what they need to do to survive. And some of them, especially Homer and Severen, seem to really, really enjoy it with the glee that comes from realizing that rules are just constructs and there’s nothing stopping you from refusing them. But there’s a raw desperation to them akin to any group of people on the run - they’re just one step ahead of getting caught, they can’t ever settle down in one place, and at the end of the day, what they have is survival and really not much else. Mae seems to see some beauty and wonder in the idea of being alive long enough to be around when the light of distant stars finally reaches Earth, but none of the others seem to find joy in anything other than respite and murder.

Vampire movies with a family subtext are nothing new at all – the idea of one vampire siring another makes it a pretty short leap. But there are a bunch of ways to do it, as The Lost Boys, Twilight, Interview With The Vampire, and My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To can attest. This film pits biological family (the blood part of blood being thicker than water) against a potential family of choice (that, well, drinks blood). Jesse and his brood are very much in the margins, and it could be argued that there’s not a lot of choice involved, but they’re a bunch of people bound by sharing the thing that makes them different from the norm. So there’s some subversion going on here. Usually it’s the biological family who are the terrible assholes and the family of choice who are welcoming and kind, but here, it’s tenuous. Caleb wants nothing more than to return home, but doesn’t think he can, and the family of choice, usually the safe haven for outsiders, is accepting him begrudgingly at best. Either way, it comes down to blood.

This film also came out in the same year as The Lost Boys, but where that film was closer to slick, glossy teen dramas of the time, with a definite comic streak (and a butchering of one of my favorite songs), this is deadly serious, gritty and raw the way exploitation films of the period were; it’s easy to see the influence of this film in the nomadic True Knot of Doctor Sleep and the ultraviolent road trip of The Devil’s Rejects. It takes full of advantage of the sprawling landscape of the Southwest, the long stretches of road only sparsely dotted by gas stations and roadhouses and the sort of dark that swallows people up. Jesse’s brood are apex predators, practiced at existing in the margins where people aren’t likely to be missed.

And for a lower-budget film, it definitely has some moments of visual flair – there’s a shootout in a small bungalow that makes light more dangerous than the bullets flying, and there’s lots of fiery sunrises and sunsets, long lonely vistas scorched by the sun. The soundtrack is lush synthesizer and stabs of action-movie guitar, which serves to both ground it in the 1980s and heighten the exploitation-film feeling. The protagonists are pretty uniformly decent and The Good Guys, a father who wants his son back, the adorable younger sister, and a good ol’ boy in way over his head. But the antagonists have some flavor to them – Severen, the gleefully unapologetic killer, Jesse the dour patriarch who, with Diamondback (very much the mother figure) is just trying to keep their little family alive and off the radar, Mae is sort of a nonentity, mostly defined by her affection and protectiveness toward Caleb, and Homer, who might be the most interesting one – he’s someone who has been a little kid for a very, very, very, very long time, and the resentment and loneliness are palpable.

So there’s a lot to recommend this, and probably my only complaints are that the tension between one family and the other isn’t really as fully developed as it could be. Caleb’s not really running from anything, and the story can’t seem to settle on this new existence being either alluring in its freedom from morality and consequences or a desperate fight for survival that he’s been thrust into. There are elements of both, but they’re never really fleshed out, and I found the ending a little pat and free of meaningful consequences. But apart from that, it’s a hell of a ride and that rare vampire film that I actually like.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

A Wounded Fawn: Hell Hath Plenty Of Fury

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

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

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

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

He sees something beautiful, and he wants it.

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

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

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

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

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Dabbe 6: Too Much Of A Good Thing

One of the reasons I don’t think sequels and remakes work well in horror is that a sense of finality is important, and the impulse to take the same characters and drag them through a series of increasingly improbable events dilutes that, and it starts getting harder and harder to explain how all this weird shit keeps happening to the same people. The horror is lost and replaced by “welp, here we go again.” And that’s why I think the Dabbe series works well - instead of putting the same people in increasingly contrived situations and piling up elaborate, pointless continuities, this series puts different people into variations of the same basic situation. You start fresh each time.

Well, up to a point. Dabbe 6 (or Dab6e: The Return) has all of the cinematic strengths of Dabbe 4 and Dabbe 5, but at this point, the degree to which each film tells the same basic story is becoming formulaic, and at almost three hours long, it’s…too damn long.

We begin, as always, with something that happened in the past. Here, a man sits in his house surrounded by magical paraphernalia, and a woman, hidden behind a screen, is handing him personal objects and clippings of hair and nails belonging to someone else. She’s paying him to curse someone named Mukadder, and it sounds like a pretty gnarly curse. Flash forward an indeterminate amount of time, and Atye is, along with her husband Cafer and sister Ayla, taking care of her ailing mother…

…whose name is Mukadder.

You can probably guess where this is going, especially if you’ve seen Dabbe 4 or 5. Ayla is in the room when Mukadder dies of something horrible, and Ayla immediately starts suffering from visions and hallucinations and waking nightmares. Her behavior becomes violent and erratic, and Atye begins to wonder if she’s possessed. Her husband - who is an unfaithful scumbag - is dismissive of the idea, insisting that it’s psychological - a traumatic response brought on by witnessing the death of her mother. The psychiatrist treating Ayla is running out of ideas and rational explanations. Against her own better judgment, she refers them to a psychiatrist who has been, essentially, professionally disgraced for considering possession and curses as a possible explanation for mental illness. Once the pieces are all in place, shit goes berserk.

And that’s really the strength of this film and the other films in the series I’ve seen - the filmmakers use the camera like a blunt instrument, packing in dramatic lighting, unusual framing and angles, ghostly manifestations, interludes of total chaos and startlingly visceral moments of violence, all with the kind of raw, frenetic energy captured in the original Evil Dead. It’s got its first-person moments, but it isn’t really a found-footage film, not as aggressively stylized as the rest of the film is. Lots of deep red and green lighting and the frame is often heavily vignetted, which lends a bit of claustrophobia to the whole affair, like the darkness is creeping in around the edges. It’s not afraid to mix up the subtly creepy and the absolutely in-your-face, gory close-up stuff, and it gets a surprising amount of mileage out of things like jump cuts and skipping frames. Reviews on IMDB (for what that’s worth, which isn’t much) reduce it to a jump-scare film, but it’s not that predictable or mechanical. Yes, there are a lot of scary things popping up out of the shadows, but it feels relentless and confrontational, and the film manages to be simultaneously expressionistic and gross. The performances aren’t especially nuanced, but that’s fine - the actress playing Ayla goes at her scenes with the gusto necessary to keep that out-of-control feeling going. The translation is a little clumsy, but gets the job done, and only gets embarrassing around the psychological or psychiatric material, which is kind of part for the course for horror in general.

And so if this were as tightly constructed a film as the other two, it’d be solid. But it suffers because everything takes much longer than it needs to. The film goes back to the nightmare sequence well a little too often (with an extended multi-person sequence that spills into the ludicrous), and films like this benefit from being tightly paced. This one isn’t. At two hours and forty minutes, there’s plenty of air between moments, and a lot of the tension drains out of it. This unnecessarily slow pacing also robs the climax of a lot of tension, going on for so long that by the time the twist is revealed, it sort of feels nonsensical and then gets dragged out and out and out and out.

Not that it’d be a surprise anyway, because although the way the story is told is distinct, this film hits all the same beats as the others. It seems like in any Dabbe film, you’ve got a pair of sisters, possession by a djinn, a tension between science and faith, a curse laid on somebody in the past, the need to return to a shunned, abandoned village, and a last-minute twist revelation that reveals someone unexpected to be evil. And this one checks all the boxes. The first time it was enjoyable, the second time it was “oh, this is familiar,” and this time it’s “wow, they really do just stay telling the same story over and over, don’t they?” Which is too bad, because there’s energy, intensity and vitality to it that’d shine if it had received a more aggressive edit, and if they played with those elements some more - familiar doesn’t have to mean predictable - it’d be proof-of-concept for a much better way to keep a (ugh) franchise going. But it is starting to feel a little churned out.

IMDB entry
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We Need To Do Something: It Was A Dark And Stormy Night

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is an annual competition to see who can write the worst opening sentence in fiction, named for the author of the novel Paul Clifford, which begins “It was a dark and stormy night.” It’s been going since 1982, which is a lot of genuinely awful opening sentences, and I’ve found it pretty entertaining in the past, but to my mind, a sentence written to be deliberately awful is never going to be truly awful. Knowing it was constructed to be bad makes it entertaining to me. It’s sort of a corollary to the idea that a film made explicitly to be a cult film will never actually be a cult film. There’s an earnestness that you need and can only get when the filmmakers are being utterly serious. It’s the gap between ambition and execution, not to mention disregard for filmmaking convention, that makes bad films into cult sensations. If the Bulwer-Lytton contest is an example of something being funny because the people are in on the joke, films work the opposite way.

But nobody’s going to mistake We Need To Do Something for a cult film, or a comedy, really. It takes place on a dark and stormy night, and it’s just a misfire. It’s clumsy and muddled, with a few good moments, but not nearly enough to redeem it.

I’ll say this, it’s got a nice opening shot of a woodsy suburban neighborhood at dusk, as gray storm clouds start to roll in. It’s foreboding, but not overly so. Cut to a family walking into what appears to be a nice, if small bathroom in someone’s home. Lots of brick, tile, glass block, sort of evoking Spanish style alongside angular modernity. They’re laying down a blanket, and appear to be settling in to ride out a storm. It’s a married couple - Diane and Robert, and their two kids, Bobby and his older sister Melissa. They’ve got boardgames, and Robert’s sipping from a big insulated water bottle, but it’s already clear that something’s a little off. Melissa was late getting home and keeps insisting she was doing homework at her friend Amy’s house, but she’s evasive about it. Robert’s kind of abrasive and short-tempered, and Diane keeps messaging someone on her phone, but won’t let Robert see it and it turns into a whole thing. Meanwhile, it’s getting dark outside and, well, stormy. Then there’s a loud crash outside the door, and when Robert tries to see what it was, he discovers that a tree has crashed through their house and is now solidly blocking the door.

They’re trapped. And there’s something else out there.

It’s not impossible for movies that start off being about something that could actually happen and escalating into the supernatural to be good (see, for example, The Descent), but it doesn’t feel like this film can make up its mind about what it’s trying to accomplish. It doesn’t help that the entire family starts off annoying going into it. Robert and Diane begin the film deep into the first act of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, all sidelong looks and snapping at each other about things they won’t say out loud. Robert is especially bad – it’s clear right off the bat he’s an abusive alcoholic trying to be in charge of a family that stopped respecting him a long time ago, Melissa is your basic sullen, nobody-understands-her teenager, Diane is brittle and a little shrill, and Bobby is an odd duck in a way that is slightly off-putting. If there’s one through-line to this entire film, it’s the feeling of being stuck in a small room with a bunch of very irritating people, and the result is impatience as much as it is tension. You’re trapped in there with them, but not in a way that promotes sympathy.

So you’ve got protagonists who are various shades of unlikeable, and a story best described as confusing. It begins as a standard survival story – you’ve got a bunch of people trapped in the same place, without enough resources to go around, and on the one hand, it makes sense that this family holes up in the bathroom when the possibility of a tornado is on the table. That’s what you’re supposed to do. But on the other, they bring a blanket and…some board games. No water, no snacks, no flashlight, no radio. As someone who grew up in prime tornado territory, those are the basics. But, to be fair “suburban family has no fucking idea what the basics are” is a plausible narrative, and if the filmmakers had committed to that, slowly drawing the families’ secrets out as things got worse…well, it still wouldn’t have been a slam-dunk, the writing is broad and the performances not especially nuanced (Robert especially threatens to chew the scenery), but I think the clarity and focus of that kind of story, especially in such a claustrophobic environment, would have had some punch to it.

Instead, the filmmakers inject a supernatural element (with, to be fair, one of the more effectively startling moments of the film), and again, if they were to commit to that, that’s fine too. But the film vacillates, giving neither narrative the room it needs to breathe. The build-up works, at first, but then takes this unnecessary elaborative detour that takes the supernatural element and scrambles it all up until you aren’t sure what the fuck is happening apart from the actual suffering being experienced by these four people. The survival story doesn’t work because they’re so angry with each other to start that you can’t really tell the story of a happy family descending into savagery. The supernatural story doesn’t work because, apart from being confined to two or three moments in the film, it can’t commit to a particular logic or direction, it’s just spooky shit that is initially revealed to be due to one thing, but no, maybe it’s another, or maybe it’s the first thing, or…you get the idea.

And this lack of focus even shows up in the narrative fundamentals. This is a film that, at different levels, doesn’t really think through the details. We get a shot at the beginning that establishes the bathroom door as opening onto the interior of the house (as one would expect), but once the storm is over it seems like the door is looking out onto an exterior, as if the tree demolished the entire house, which…that’s not how collapsing trees work. A trapped snake conveniently becomes un-trapped, blindness disappears as soon as it arrives when it’s necessary for the character in question to act, a smartphone lost in the rain is found perfectly functional. And the supernatural piece gets all of its development in flashback (said flashbacks containing some stuff about self-harm that borders on romanticization, at least enough to feel icky) and that part of the story ends up being all muddy because it’s not satisfied with a very simple, straightforward cause, it piles stuff on and ends up close to incoherent.

There are bits here and there that could be pieces of a better movie, a couple of effective set pieces, some details that are actually nicely underplayed, and some repeated imagery which could be leveraged into a suggestion of dream logic and the idea that this might not be what it appears to be, but nope. It’s not funny enough or strange enough to be a cult film, not deliberately outrageous enough either. It’s just as banal and clumsy as “it was a dark and stormy night.”

IMDB entry
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