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

Chernobyl: Palatable Fictions

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

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

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

The structure that holds Reactor 4 has been replaced by a column of fire.

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

Splinter: Mostly Killer, No Filler

I have a hard time with monster movies, because suspension of disbelief is really important for me to get into a horror film, and believable monsters (like, creature-monsters) are tough to pull off on the sort of budget most horror movies get. Cheap effects look cheap, and the cheaper they look the harder it is to suspend disbelief. There are, of course, exceptions - The Thing still gets to me today even though the effects work is dated, and the mediocre prequel - which used reasonably good digital effects - seems bloodless by comparison.

Splinter, then, is very much an exception to the rule. It’s not especially rich thematically, but it IS a crisp, tense siege film with some really smart effects work.

We begin in the expanse of Texas, all scrubland, oil wells and long lonely roads. A gas station attendant tries to stave off the boredom by investigating some noises he hears behind the building. What he finds appears to be a dead dog covered in some kind of spiny growth.

Elsewhere, we get introduced to two couples. Seth, a biology grad student, and his girlfriend Polly are planning to do some camping as a romantic getaway. Except Seth is absolutely the stereotypical brainiac and manages to bungle setting up the tent badly enough that it becomes unusable. There’s some bickering before they agree to get back on the road and find a place to sleep for the night. Dennis and Lacey are on the run from…something, it’s not clear, though it’s probably the cops. Lacey doesn’t look too good. She’s fidgety and strung-out. They’re trying to get to Mexico, but their car (well, the car they’re driving) breaks down and Lacey starts to panic. And along come Seth and Polly. One hitchhiking ruse and armed takeover of the car later, Dennis and Lacey and Seth and Polly are Mexico-bound. Lacey’s mad that Seth isn’t the kind of doctor that can write prescriptions, and Seth and Polly are mad that they’ve been hijacked by armed fugitives.

I don’t know what makes characters in horror movies so prone to hitting animals in the middle of the road, but that’s sure enough what happens and when Dennis gets out to inspect the damage, he notices that the roadkill has some weird spiny growth coming out of it. The car’s undamaged, but they need to gas up, so they stop at the next gas station they find. Oddly, it seems unattended.

And then they find the attendant. Well, what’s left of him, covered in that same spiny growth.

And, as it turns out, there’s something outside as well. So our four protagonists end up barricading themselves in the gas station, while god-knows-what roams around outside, It’s a fairly straightforward setup - there’s the tension of the threat outside, and the tension between the four characters. They can’t leave the gas station, they can’t call for help because Dennis doesn’t want the cops involved, and they can’t stay there forever. So, like any good siege movie, the prime mover here is the need to escape without getting killed. It’s a pretty lean film  - the performances are economic, with each character largely defined by a single characteristic. Seth is nerdy and ineffectual (until the third act), Polly is feisty, Dennis is a criminal, and Lacey is dopesick. That’s sort of it. The dialogue is fine, nothing too caricatured, but none of it is especially nuanced either.

But it doesn’t really pull you out of it either, because the filmmakers handle the classic problem of the monster movie well. Monster movies are tough because you have to show the monster eventually, and when you do, it’s going to be pretty difficult to make it plausible unless you’ve got the best effects houses in the business on the job, and they’re generally not doing horror films. So it’s a balancing act – show it enough to make it a threat, but not so much that the seams show. On that front, this film works admirably, with a mix of makeup, practical effects, sound design, quick cuts, blurry close-ups and tight shots working to both create a plausible, unsettling monster and keep the pace quick and sharp. It’s aware of the limitations but also not especially constrained by them, and the actor(s) playing the monster move with a twitching, jerking physicality that really captures a feeling of a host hijacked by an organism. And just as the makeup alone isn’t doing all the work, to make the creature convincing, the camera tells the story as least as much as the performances and script do. There are a lot of tight and close shots, creating a sense of confinement inside the gas station, and the filmmakers know when to linger on a shot and when to cut away quickly. It’s a very bloody film - splashes and streaks and pools of the stuff - but not an especially gory one. The worst violence happens offscreen and reactions tell us what we need to know. There is the gas station, lit by cold, sickly fluorescents and outside, nothing but yawning dark. To its further credit, it makes very little attempt to explain the threat - there’s a nod to some kind of petrochemical research shenanigans, but just a nod. It’s less important to know how it got here than it is to deal with it being here, and I appreciate that.

There are some pacing issues - it doesn’t waste time (it’s not even an hour and a half long), but even so, the first act feels a little slack compared to the third, when everything comes to a head. It feels like once the four protagonists are brought together, there’s too much time spent on them in the car. That could work, if we were being lead to think this was a hostage film and have the horror elements sprung on us in the second act. That wouldn’t be a bad way to go, but we know right off the bat that there’s a monster out there, so when the other shoe drops in the second act, it feels a little like a foregone conclusion. But it’s a pretty minor quibble.

On balance, this is a really good example of a low-budget horror film that not only doesn’t overstep its limits, but actually makes sort of a strength out of them. It uses its single location well, it’s lean and efficient and has some interesting turns, and the threat never feels implausible or silly. It’s a little slight, but I would really like to see what the filmmakers could so with a richer, more expansive story, because this film convinces me they’ve got the chops for it.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

God Told Me To: Deus Ex Machina

A deus ex machina is a plot device in which an improbable or unlikely occurrence resolves a difficult plot point, and is literally translated “god from the machine.” Usually it’s considered a bad thing, a lazy way of resolving a part of a story, the sort of thing that happens when someone writes themselves into a corner. And I’m sympathetic to that - the best stories to me are the ones where you don’t see the resolution coming but in retrospect was in front of you the entire time. You know, the polar opposite of High Tension.

God Told Me To manages to take the idea of the deus ex machina in a couple of different directions. It’s a down-the-rabbit-hole movie that in its increasing weirdness provides an improbable explanation for a series of events. But it also deals with the idea of god in relation to the machine that is the social structure and power dynamics of modern society.

It opens on a bustling day in 1970s New York City. People are going about their business, crowding the sidewalks and hailing cabs and all of the other things a shitload of people in a sprawling city do. And then a shot rings out. Someone falls. And then another shot, and another person hit. And another, and another. People scatter, panicked, and the police are called in. Eventually they locate the sniper, perched on top of a water tower, and Detective Peter Nicholas climbs the water tower against everyone else’s orders to try and reason with the shooter. All Nicholas manages to get out of him is that “God told me to,” before the sniper jumps to his death.

This is tragic, of course, but it’s also the big city. Mentally unstable people lashing out violently aren’t really anything new in that respect. But then Peter is called to the scene of another crime - a series of mass stabbings at a supermarket. And then a police officer opens fire on the crowd at the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. And then a man murders his wife and children, sitting placidly waiting for the police to arrive. They all say the same thing…

“God told me to.”

Needless to say, Peter immediately becomes obsessed with figuring out exactly what is happening. One delusional person acting out violently? That’s one thing, but when people from different walks of life all get up one day and start killing on the behest of what appears to be God, that’s something else entirely. And Peter Nicholas is a religious man - a devout Catholic in a place and time where faith doesn’t have the heft that it might once have. For him, this isn’t just about the mystery of what is driving apparently random people to kill, it’s also about the mystery of faith, about God’s will, and what it means when God doesn’t just let good people die, but seems to be taking a more proactive role in the process. Peter is tormented by this, and there are already signs that he’s got some baggage that he needs to work on. He was an orphan, raised in a Catholic boys’ home, and although he is separated from his wife (who is as secular as he is religious) and seeing another woman, he can’t bring himself to divorce her. There’s more guilt and regret between them than enmity, and well…the church frowns on divorce.

And this is the machine - the institutions of power upon which the city is built. New York City in the 1970s is a place beset by multiple ills – the immediate fallout from the social upheavals of the late 60s and early 70s, institutional corruption, a failing infrastructure and a restless population. Cynicism abounds as people mock Peter for his faith, and urban decay and crime both thrive as well. It’s a city in turmoil, and the Catholic church is an extremely powerful part of the city’s power structure, and the realization that maybe people like the archbishop and the mayor and other wealthy citizens know more about this than they’re letting on emerges gradually over the course of the film. For Nicholas it’s a journey toward discovery and understanding, and it’s safe to say he’s not discovering anything good. The rot runs deeper than he could ever know.

It's definitely a film of its time - there are some attitudes that are unfortunate by modern standards, but it holds up surprisingly well in a number of ways. The filmmakers had almost no budget and shot guerilla-style, so the whole thing has a raw immediacy to it. This also means minimal effects work and a reliance on colored lighting and quick cuts to get the point across, but this adds to the feeling of urgency rather than seeming cheap. There are some moments of body horror where the effects they do use are work well, and it all takes the film to some pretty unexpected places.

It’s not often that a low-budget horror film also traffics in big ideas, but this one is a film about an unseen force spurring people to kill while also being about faith in the face of its absence from society as a whole, institutions that serve only themselves (everyone in this film acknowledges the church’s power but very few are believers). It’s simultaneously a fable about the corrupting influence of power, and a down-the-rabbit-hole investigative film and the sort of it-could-be-anybody exercise in paranoia of predecessors like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and successors like Fallen. I was pleasantly surprised at how much there was to unpack.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

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 

Underwater: As Above, So Below

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
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The Backrooms: Strange Terrain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
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Deep Fear: Not As Deep As It Thinks

Trying to make a movie - any kind, really - that is “about” something is, in my opinion, generally a losing proposition. Mostly because all films are about something insofar as they’re a product of a particular time and place in a particular culture, rely on a particular level of technology (which feeds into an aesthetic), as well as the experiences and worldviews of the director and cast in terms of the choices they make. Whether people are consciously aware of it or not, thematic narrative is an emergent property of the filmmaking process. So when someone consciously decides that they’re going to make a film that addresses a specific theme or issue, they run the risk of making it didactic, hectoring, and obvious. Not always, but usually the ones that work the best in my experience address whatever it is in terms of someone’s experience, through the circumstances of their life. There’s a difference between telling a story that leads to the viewer saying “that’s fucked up” and making your entire film 90 minutes of you telling the audience “well, actually, this is fucked up.” It really does come back to “show, don’t tell” most of the time. 

And this is one of the problems with Deep Fear, though not the only one. It’s only fitfully effective, lacks structure, and in its attempts to say something about a larger issue, can’t quite overcome its clichés. 

It doesn’t get off to a promising start, with one of those prologues that tells us what we already know, that there’s something bad down in the tunnels below Paris. A graffiti artist is listening to music on a cassette Walkman circa 1989, but it just happens that he can fast-forward exactly to the start of the next song. As someone who actually used that technology, that is…not really a thing. Right off the bat, it seems like plausibility is not going to be a concern. Soon enough, there are strange noises coming from the end of a tunnel, artist gets dragged off. 

Fast-forward about four years or so, and three friends are sitting in a bar, shooting the shit over drinks. Henry is celebrating his last weekend as a civilian before reporting for military service. Max and Sonia are there for moral support. Well, Sonia does nip off to the restroom to meet an acquaintance who sells her a little baggie of something to keep the party going and clues her in to something fun he’s going to be doing tomorrow night if she and her friends want in .And this is how Henry, Max, and Sonia meet up with Sonia’s friend Ramy for a night of exploration. See, Ramy knows a way into the Paris catacombs, the ancient tunnel system running under the span of the city, once used for the disposal of the dead, now an enormous labyrinth ripe for exploration and the sort of things you do away from the prying eyes of the law. 

There are all kinds of things down there.

Apart from the on-the-nose prologue, it takes awhile to set things up, spending a lot of time with the characters Which is fine, but it doesn’t do much to develop the characters themselves. Henry is kind of a bro, Max is a dorky hypochondriac (we know he’s a dork because he wears glasses), and Sonia is…not white. That’s kind of it. So we’re given the opportunity to learn about them, but there’s nothing to learn. There’s a nightmare sequence that underlines Sonia’s otherness in a way that feels shoehorned in, and kind of unnecessary given what happens later. Ramy is their guide, and otherwise kind of a nonentity. There are a few other characters, but they’re even less than that. None of them are especially obnoxious, but nor is there enough to really feel much of a connection to them either. 

Once they get down into catacombs, things pick up a bit with the blind claustrophobia of the setting. There are lots of tight squeezes, uncharted areas, and unstable tunnels, and the precariousness is pretty well-realized. It’s by no means of the same caliber as The Descent, but it’s reminiscent, especially in terms of needing to manage your way through increasingly smaller spaces and worrying about collapses, not knowing if there’s another exit somewhere. There’s good potential here, and a run-in with some neo-Nazi skinheads sets up the opportunity for real tension (as well as making the earlier nightmare sequence less necessary than it already was), but though it provides the impetus for everything that happens in the third act, it’s sort of forgotten almost immediately until it becomes relevant again, but when it does, it’s not in any meaningful way. It’s a very fitful film in this way - it has promise that goes undeveloped, tension that dissipates when its cause is sort of abandoned for the next thing, and the third act starts by developing something interesting before discarding it for a pretty stock-standard “people get picked off one by one by implacable monster” thing. The nature of the monster, without spoiling it here (don’t even read the IMDB entry for this one, really, the brief blurb gives too much away), isn’t especially imaginative either. It’s something we’ve seen before, and ultimately it doesn’t amount to much beyond people getting fed into a metaphorical meat grinder, with an ending that makes a fairly on-the-nose statement about the immigrant experience in France. 

It's interesting to think about alongside As Above, So Below, though - that film used the premise better but had an utterly ridiculous protagonist. This film had the better protagonists (or at least more believable as people) but didn’t use the premise all that well. There’s also a touch of Creep (the somewhat icky 2004 one) in the idea of the ghosts of war continuing to lurk under the surface of the cities wounded by it, and though it isn’t as invested in humiliating its protagonists as that film, it’s not really doing anything with the idea either. It sort of feels like the filmmakers had a generically solid idea for a monster movie set in the Paris catacombs, but decided it needed to “mean something” and so they made character and narrative choices that amount to “treating people badly because they’re different from you is bad.” Which isn’t exactly earth-shaking as revelations go. Fairly shallow for a film set so far below ground.

IMDB entry

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Phantasm: The Undertaker’s New Clothes

 I always feel a little uneasy when I plan on tackling something that’s considered a classic in one way or another, especially when it’s something I’ve never seen before. There’s always the concern that a longtime favorite won’t have held up, but when something I’ve never seen before has a history and reputation and a devoted following and it doesn’t click for me, well…

…well, then you get Phantasm. It’s a definite cult classic, spawning multiple sequels and firmly embedded in the horror lexicon. Years ago I watched it (or tried to) and I remember feeling confused and underwhelmed enough that I don’t think I finished it. But that was a long time ago, my tastes have broadened, and it’s a gap in my cinematic education. But having seen it now, I find myself very confused by the adoration for this film, because I really don’t think it works.

It opens on a man and a woman, in a graveyard, engaging in what I think is supposed to be sex. It’s tough to tell, because they aren’t really doing the things you expect from a couple having sex, like expressing enthusiasm, or moving. The man mumbles something about how good it was, in a tone of voice you usually associate with falling asleep. But suddenly the woman has a knife! And she stabs him! For just a moment, her face is replaced by that of a gaunt, unsmiling old man. On to the next scene. The man who we just saw getting stabbed was Tommy, and his friends Jody and Reggie meet outside the funeral home adjacent to the cemetery where Tommy met his end to discuss his passing (“hell of a way to break up a trio”) and the upcoming service (“I just don’t get off on funerals, man. They give me the creeps”). Jody’s thinking about leaving town, but he has his little brother Mike to think of. They lost their parents in a car accident, and ever since, Mike’s had real abandonment issues, sticking to Jody like glue. Jody told Mike to stay home because the funeral would be upsetting, and so Mike sneaks out to the cemetery (on a very loud dirt bike) and hides in the woods to spy on the funeral through a pair of binoculars. You know, like you do. And once the service is over and the mourners have left, a tall thin man comes up to the grave, grabs the casket as if it didn’t weigh a thing, and loads it into the hearse.

It's the man we glimpsed while Tommy was dying.

So a sad young boy with abandonment issues and creepy voyeuristic tendencies discovers that strange things are afoot at the local funeral home, and after that it’s all over the place. There’s no real story to speak of, this is a movie where something happens, then something else happens, then another thing happens with varying levels of abruptness. It’s one of those movies that’s so cheap and so clumsy that it attains a level of surrealism -see also Messiah Of Evil and Carnival Of Souls - but unlike those films, it never really manages to develop much of an atmosphere or mood, so all you’re left with is one what-the-fuck moment after another, and if anything the cheapness and clumsiness undercuts a lot of the horror, rendering what should be tense, eerie moments comical.

In between scenes of Mike and Reggie and Jody talking in various combinations and a puzzling interlude with an ostensibly blind and mute fortune teller, there are a couple of nightmare sequences that, to be fair, have a certain raw vitality to them, and the strange things afoot at the local funeral home are certainly very strange - whatever you think is going on, you’re probably wrong - and events go places you wouldn’t expect if you were going into the film blind. But then the action stops so Jody and Reggie can play a quick song out of nowhere. A tense chase scene involves an ice cream truck and is thus scored by an especially tinkly version of “Three Blind Mice.” Mike interrupts a potentially tense scene by literally running through it hollering at the top of his lungs, There’s little sense of continuity and no sense of narrative flow or rising tension, and that combined with wooden acting and beyond-wooden dialogue, consistently cheap art direction, effects and set design, all has the potential to lend everything the sort of gritty strangeness you’d need for the film to get over. It really does have that weird fever-dream vibe, but some of the choices made here…well, it’s hard to tell if they’re supposed to be intentionally comic or not. The result is a film that’s hard to take it seriously even on its own level, or even to meet the movie halfway. It feels like store-brand giallo, or the kind of film out of which Mystery Science Theater 3000 makes an absolute meal.

It does have its moments, albeit few and far between. There are some effective visuals - the antagonist is a tall, thin, unsmiling undertaker who cuts a striking presence and seems to be everywhere at once, and he’s responsible for the moments when things do work. There are some other interesting visual choices here and there - washes of bright red for a particular point of view, a moment in an antique store with an old photograph that’s effortlessly dreamlike and unsettling - but there’s too few of these scattered too thinly throughout to really feel like more than missed opportunity. And so it’s really frustrating and baffling for me, trying to find the film’s appeal as a horror film. I can understand its appeal as a weird bad movie, but it’s given the reverence of something like Halloween or Night Of The Living Dead and I just don’t get it. It’s certainly striking for its time - it was released close enough to Halloween but far away enough from A Nightmare On Elm Street that I can see how could really make an impression on someone who had no idea what to expect. The rules hadn’t been codified yet. But it’s hard enough to get past the flaws now that the gap between the film I saw and the reputation it has me doubting my own sanity a bit.

IMDB entry
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Shock Waves: Blast From The Past

One of my most vivid memories of being a kid growing up in 1970s Oklahoma was looking through the movie ads in the newspaper. It was the ads for horror films that piqued my interest the most - for probably obvious reasons - and I was kind of a sheltered little kid, so the sort of things promised by these lurid assemblies of art and ad copy were absolute nightmare fuel to my very active, very vivid imagination. And I was raised to believe that the best way to deal with your nightmares was to face them, so I ended up being both afraid of what these films promised, and terribly curious about them at the same time. 

Does this help explain why I, very much a grown adult human, like to write about scary movies for fun? Don’t be ridiculous. But in all seriousness, one of the benefits of living in an age where a lot of stuff is available on physical media or streaming is that I’m able to go back and revisit the films I remember seeing ads for in the paper as a kid. It’s interesting to see to what degree they do or don’t live up to what I pictured in my head. Rabid? Not so much. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Absofuckinglutely. 

So Shock Waves is sort of an indulgence, in this sense. I always wondered what kind of film it was as a little kid, but there was no way I was going to get to see it at my tender age and it never showed up on cable. So here I am, years and years later, finally settling up with one of those films that burned their way into my tiny little brain. As it turns out, it’s a surprisingly restrained film given the subject matter, and somehow its limitations work for it, rather than against it. The result is something surreal, rather than gory or sensationalistic.

The film begins in voiceover on a static image of some German soldiers, circa WWII. We’re told about Nazi experiments into developing hardier, more resilient soldiers, and battlefield rumors of Nazi troops who fought barehanded through the harshest conditions without ever slowing down or stopping to rest. And how out of all of the divisions of SS troops deployed during the war, one unit was never accounted for. This shifts to a boat out on the water, a man and his son out for a day of fishing, when they discover a dinghy adrift with one unconscious passenger inside. It’s a young woman, who starts lashing out in fear as the two attempt to rescue her. And we shift to the woman in voiceover, saying when they found her, she wasn’t even aware that they were trying to help her, and that at that point she couldn’t remember any of what had happened to her. But clearly, something had. Something terrible.

It all started on a chartered boat trip - sightseeing, scuba diving, that kind of stuff. Seven people on the boat - Ben, the captain, Keith, his first mate, and Dobbs, the galley hand. Their guests are Chuck, an affable bachelor, Norman, a peevish, abrasive car salesman, and his patiently enduring wife Beverly, and Rose - the woman we see being rescued. Things were going along fine until they hit that patch of water where their compass stopped working. Until they collided with another ship and started taking on water. Our protagonists scramble onto the same dinghy we saw at the beginning, and head for a nearby island. 

The ship they hit, it turns out, is an old, abandoned wreck. It looks like something from WWII. And then the figures begin walking out of the wreck, along the ocean floor. Figures in Nazi uniforms.

No, the math isn’t complicated. There’s old Nazi experiments unaccounted for and a bunch of people trapped on an island. What we have ourselves here is a movie about Nazi zombies. That’s not really spoiling anything. You could figure it out (as I did) from the movie poster alone. But it also doesn’t really play like any modern conception of a zombie movie, Nazi or otherwise. It isn’t hard to follow, and really there’s not that much story there anyway. The protagonists land on the island, they discover they aren’t alone, and it goes badly. But how that story gets told in ways you wouldn’t expect. This film has a narrative style best described as stiff - it’s not disjointed, per se, but every scene feels very much like a single, isolated sequence, and so the film as a whole feels less like a continuous story and more like a series of narrative snapshots arranged in a comprehensible order. It's not clumsy, but it’s definitely an assemblage of scenes rather than a movie, if that makes sense.

This extends to the performances, which are all varying shades of wooden, and dialogue that never sounds like anything other than lines being delivered. There’s also not a lot of overlapping dialogue or interruption or crosstalk, so that sense of narrative isolation burrows all the way down into the acting itself. It feels very much like everyone says their lines and then waits for the next person to say theirs before they start talking again. It’s not off-putting, but it does feel odd. And when the action really starts to pick up (which takes a little while), almost all of the actual violence takes place off-camera. I’m assuming it’s because they didn’t have the budget for a lot of effects work, but in some ways I don’t mind that - there will be a reveal (many of which work pretty well) and then a cut to the aftermath. There’s a terseness to it that actually sort of works with the stiffness of the acting and direction to create something almost like an aesthetic. Not minimalist…maybe brutalist filmmaking, since it creates a feeling of distance or remove. It’s like we’re not watching things happen to people, we’re watching people reenacting things that happened to other people.

That sense of remove means that it doesn’t generate as much heat or tension as I’d like. But there are also a number of interesting stylistic choices that I appreciated. It was made in 1977, so like a lot of other films from around that time period, it’s sort of making up its own conventions instead of adhering to an existing formula and that pays off at times. The film begins in voiceover and it’s several minutes before we get actual dialogue, the film itself is one long flashback, and I don’t know if it’s the first Nazi zombie movie ever made, but it’s a definite contender for that title, and the way it handles zombies isn’t really the “slow” zombie of something like Night Of The Living Dead or the “fast” zombie of something like 28 Days Later. They’re stealthy - they hide, they pounce, and they’re utterly, unnervingly silent. There’s an eeriness to them, especially how they walk along the ocean floor, rise from the water when and where you don’t expect it. The restraint works in a way you rarely see in zombie films. Hell, that you rarely see in horror films much anymore in general. They’re more like Michael Myers in the first Halloween film than they are what we’d think of as zombies. And there are some nicely off-kilter moments - an abandoned ballroom with a lone Victrola in the middle playing classical music, scenes plunged totally into darkness, long conversations with an off-camera character, some almost painterly uses of light and shadow, bodies lying motionless in shallow water. When I think of impressionistic filmmaking, zombie films don’t usually come to mind but there are some moments here that qualify.

The budget does show through at points, but more in how the story is told, rather than the quality of locations or practical effects. The cinematography is, with some notable exceptions, workmanlike, and the soundtrack is lots of simple early synthesizer, all burbles and swells and dissonant melodies and theremin-like ambience. But because this very simple, stripped-down approach carries through at every level of the film, it actually works.

 

It’s sort of a tradeoff - the film exchanges tension and thrills for strangeness, so it’s not as scary as it could be, but what we’re left with is something more interesting and unique, ending on a nicely unsettling and inconclusive note. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this, and I don’t know that it’s a forgotten classic or anything, but it’s very much one of a kind. Probably would have scared the crap out of me as a kid, though.

IMDB entry

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Rabid:The Social Disease, Redux

I’ve written here before about the films of David Cronenberg, and how they’re sort of hard to talk about while separating the film from the filmmaker. I try to keep my focus on the film itself as a finished product, since I think it’s easy for horror fandom - like any fandom - to pay more attention to the personalities behind a film than to the film itself. But as I’ve said before, it’s really difficult to do this with David Cronenberg’s films because there’s such a clear thematic through-line to his early work, and it’s in service of a vision that isn’t really like anything else in horror film. You sort of have to talk about his horror films not as horror films, but as David Cronenberg films.

I’ve looked at some of his early work here already - Shivers, The Brood, and Videodrome - and now, having seen Rabid, I think it’s probably best described in context as sort of a transitional film. It’s not one of his stronger films, in that it suffers from some of the same narrative shortcomings as Shivers (which preceded it) but doesn’t quite have that film’s audacity.

We open on a young couple - Rose and Hart - getting ready to go for a motorcycle ride in the Canadian countryside. All seems to be well, but they come around a bend and suddenly there’s a bickering family in a van stalled out across the middle of the road. They go over the hood of the van, Hart is thrown clear and Rose is trapped under the wreckage of the motorcycle.

Elsewhere - not too far down the road - is a plastic surgery clinic run by Drs. Dan and Roxanne Keloid. They’re meeting with Murray, their business partner, who’s trying to interest them  in the idea of franchising their clinic, turning plastic surgery into a mass consumer product. Dan is very resistant to the idea - he doesn’t relish the idea of being thought of as the “Colonel Sanders of plastic surgery,” but before anything can get settled, they’re informed of the accident by one of their recuperating patients, who saw the accident play out while they were outside getting some fresh air. Dan orders the clinic ambulance to provide aid, since the nearest full-service hospital is about three hours away in Montreal. Hart’s injuries are serious, but not life-threatening, so he’s triaged to get sent to the nearest hospital. But Rose is in a bad way - severely burned along one side of her body and losing a lot of blood. Dan makes the decision to perform surgery on Rose at his clinic, since she wouldn’t likely last long enough to make it to the city.

Once she’s stabilized, Dan and his assistant start in on an extensive series of skin grafts. He decides that they’re going to use an experimental technique in which the grafts are reverted back to what he calls “neutral field grafts” - that is, the cells of the graft become unspecified, so that they’ll take on the properties of whatever part of the body they’re grafted to. It’s an untested technique, but Dan’s confident that it will work. Flash-forward about a month, and Rose has been kept in a medically induced coma at the clinic to facilitate healing. She wakes suddenly, panicked and disoriented. When someone comes to check on her, she grabs him and…something…snakes out from underneath her arm and attaches itself to him.

Apparently, some of the cells decided to become something…new.

As it turns out, Rose now possesses an entirely new organ - a stinger-tipped sucker - that retracts from inside a puckered hole in her armpit. As it also turns out, Rose is now entirely dependent on human blood to survive. Animal blood doesn’t work, as she discovers the hard way. And as if that weren’t bad enough, this new organ of hers has some nasty side effects, including memory loss in the person affected, an inhibition of their clotting factor, and…oh yeah, the rapid onset of a rabies-like virus that leads to extreme aggression, then coma, then death. And it’s easily spread via saliva. So there’s really two stories here - there’s Rose and her new, increasingly untenable situation, which is a somewhat novel spin on vampirism, and the rapid spread of the rabies-like virus. Rose is sort of a Typhoid Mary, spreading the virus when she feeds, but not suffering its effects herself. Either one of these could have been enough to carry a movie on its own, but the problem is that combining them into a single narrative means neither gets explored or developed to the degree they could be. 

The epidemic piece is the more evocative of the two, ramping up in the background as the film goes on and making for some striking individual moments (especially toward the end, which is pretty much a punch in the gut), but I think epidemic stories really need to have an observable progression to really work - think about the scenes from a film like Contagion that illustrate the ease with which a disease can spread, showing how all it takes is one person in the wrong place to start an exponential growth in cases, and here that’s never really clearly charted. At a certain point in the movie, all of a sudden there are people in the middle of a major city showing symptoms without a clear indication of how it got there, given that everything started in a small clinic hours away. It’s emphasized that the virus incubates in a matter of hours and people suffering from it have a diminished capacity (and go comatose and die pretty quickly) so it’s tough to see how it just crops up someplace when we never really see how it travels there, or how it’s able to spread so quickly when the hosts don’t live for all that long. Rose spends most of the film confined to the clinic, so that’s where most of the cases crop up, but then enough time passes that the people from the clinic who get it should already be rabid and/or dead before they even make it to the city. It happens off-screen to enough of an extent that when it’s clear that it’s reached Montreal in a big way, it seems like it came out of nowhere.

Rose’s story is likewise underexplored, and suffers from inconsistent characterization. Rose wakes up from her coma unable to subsist on anything except human blood, and over the course of the film she bounces back and forth between someone who’s confused and afraid, a cool, calculating predator, and someone in denial about what she’s doing and what effect she’s having on the world around her. It’s not really a progression, it just alternates as is necessary for any particular scene, and apart from it feeling disjointed, it’s all very much just a collection of scenes - she’s over here, now she’s over there, and pretty much every scene she’s in boils down to her infecting someone, so it doesn’t take long to become sort of predictable. That Rose doesn’t really exhibit much in the way of horror or regret or disgust or confusion in those moments, slipping instead into predator mode, doesn’t really help - for a good chunk of the movie she’s less of a character than a plot device. 

Her story is pretty much a monster story, but unlike Cronenberg’s later film, the remake of The Fly, we don’t get much insight at all into her feelings about what she’s become apart from some denial at the end. The mechanism of her vampirism is the most novel thing here, and it’s of a piece with Cronenberg’s particular view of biology as articulated in his other films, but it’s never explored the way it even is in Shivers, and apart from the analogy to sex (penetration, a sense of satiation), it’ not nearly as audacious as how Shivers reduced sex to a mechanical impulse, devoid not just of intimacy but also of conscious will, how The Brood used the idea of birth as an actualization of unresolved rage and trauma, or Videodrome’s cold, clinical look at the intersections of flesh and technology. There’s some of that here with the experimental plastic surgery, but that’s an angle that goes largely unexplored - people willing to go under the knife over and over again to reshape their flesh to increasingly specific requirements seems like it’d be fertile ground, but it barely matters here.

It does have its moments, mostly around the steadily worsening epidemic in Montreal, which is evocative in some ways of Night of the Living Dead, and things like being required to carry around vaccination cards certainly hit different now than they would have even three years ago, but they’re isolated moments. The film itself suffers throughout from the same choppiness that Shivers had, fragmented into a collection of discrete scenes that don’t really flow together. The end result is that a routine starts to develop, where scenes about Rose alternate with scenes about the epidemic, and its most interesting ideas go unexplored enough that really all you end up with is a vampire movie with a somewhat novel spin on how the vampirism works. It was only his second feature-length film, and like Shivers, the pieces are all here - the malleability of biology, amoral appetites, technology and modern living having unintended consequences, threatening to separate us from our humanity - but out of all of Cronenberg’s work, they’re at their least realized here.

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