Lux Æterna: Film Horror

The process of making movies is sometimes referred to as “magic,” and that’s usually meant in a benevolent way, describing the process of surprising and delighting an audience. But magic also involves deception, trickery and misdirection. And other types of magic involve blood sacrifices and bargains with powerful evil. The more powerful the magic, the higher the cost.

Lux Æterna (Eternal Light), a short, dizzying blast of a film, makes a good case for the filmmaking process involving all of these things, if only metaphorically.

It begins with a quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky about the supreme happiness an epileptic feels in the moments before the onset of a seizure, followed by old black-and-white footage that illustrates the type of torture implements used in the Middle Ages to get witches to confess. And then from there, we’re presented with a conversation between two women, with one asking the other if she’s ever been burned at the stake. It’d be easy to dismiss this as arty nonsense, but it doesn’t take long for things to come into focus. The two women are Béatrice and Charlotte - Béatrice is directing a film and Charlotte is her lead actress. They’re preparing to shoot a scene in which Charlotte is going to be burned at the stake, and at least for the moment, it’s a quiet, pleasant conversation between two veterans of the industry about their experiences.

And then they’re called to set.

This is not precisely a horror film, the same way that Berberian Sound Studio was not precisely a horror film. It’s not a horror film, and it’s not a film about horror. It’s more a film about the horror of film, of the deep, dark holes into which people fall as a result of trying to get something up on the screen. We get about ten minutes of quiet, thoughtful conversation before we’re pitched headlong into the roiling chaos of a movie set. And it really is chaos - this isn’t a lot of people moving purposefully and doing their jobs like some kind of industrious beehive, this is a lot of messily egotistical people playing tug-of-war with everyone’s time and attention. Béatrice is an actress-turned-director and it seems like nobody has any faith in her, with her producer openly conspiring to get her fired and replaced with the director of photography, who himself seems like an obstinate shithead. There are extras and supporting actors to wrangle, some of whom are not happy with the demands being made of them. There’s a particularly annoying film journalist who’s managed to worm his way on-set and is trying to pull people aside at the worst possible times, and someone named Karl whose purpose there (if there is one) is never made clear, and all he does is pitch actresses on his “new project” when they need to be getting ready. The producer and DP yell at Béatrice, she yells back at them and at everyone else not doing their jobs, and Charlotte sits in the middle of it all, the closest thing there is to the calm in the eye of the storm.

It's a short film (slightly less than an hour), but I think that’s for the better because it’s a very uncomfortable experience. The majority (if not entirety) of it is shot using hand-held cameras, which gives everything a raw immediacy and a bit of seasick wooziness to it. Following Béatrice and Charlotte as they try to get from point A to point B to shoot a single scene only to be waylaid at every turn by yet another person who needs to speak to them right now about stuff that really doesn’t matter gives the whole thing the feeling of one of those dreams (or nightmares, depending on how you think about it) where you’re just trying to get someplace, but the harder you try to get there, the more lost and sidetracked you get. And the cinematography is as aggressive as the characters; there’s a lot of split-screen work used to show us two different people’s experiences at the same time, or showing us one person from two different perspectives, in some moments even turning away from one camera to confront the other in a manner that reminds me of nothing so much as Timecode, a film I haven’t thought about in years. It, too, was a film about the messy way films get made, but it never reaches the hysteric heights that this one does, nor does it make the point this film makes about women, the men who are sure they know what is best for them, and the way that the former are often (as they have been for hundreds of years) sacrificed for the egos of the latter. It’s not an especially subtle point, with a small handful of female characters endlessly surrounded by hordes of men cajoling, flattering, ordering and threatening them, clearly resentful of their agency or casually underestimating them. Whether the stake is real or set dressing, someone’s getting burned.

All of the disparate ideas - witch trials, the demands of cinema, the power of light to create feelings and experiences (some overwhelming - the film opens with a warning for people with photosensitive epilepsy and believe me they are not fucking kidding) come together in a climax where a lighting glitch turns a scene full of angry men ranting at three women posed on stakes into a stroboscopic frenzy that eventually swallows everything. But there is none of Dostoevsky’s ecstasy, just the final moment where the center fails to hold and everything falls apart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Deep House: Keen Insight Into The Obvious

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Titane: My Mother The Car

Let’s consider the idea that a film is “about” something. This can mean different things. At one level, it’s the plot. At another, it’s ideas and themes addressed through the events of the film and the characters within it. Possibly even how the film is constructed. At another it’s what all of the above says about the time in which the film was made and the culture of which it is a product. Not every film engages at all of these levels, or at least not to the same degree. Sometimes a film about zombies chewing up reckless teenagers isn’t much more than that. Sometimes you know exactly what you’re getting. It’s about what it’s about, and exploration of anything deeper than that can sometimes be challenging.

Titane (Titanium) is “about” a lot of things, but whatever you think it’s going to be, you’re probably wrong. Delirious, evocative, and singular, it defies easy categorization and refuses to hew to expectations, genre or otherwise. And the result is excellent - harrowing, moving, uncomfortable and tender in equal parts.

We begin in a car, driving down a highway in France. There’s a little girl in the back seat humming, making engine noises with her mouth while her father drives. This irritates her father, so he turns up the radio. She hums louder. He turns up the radio more. She hums even louder. She starts kicking his seat. He endures all of it. And just as she’s unbuckled her seat belt and her father turns to make her put it back on, he has to swerve to avoid a car in the other lane, crashing into a concrete guardrail..

There’s surgery. The little girl (named Alexia) has a titanium plate inserted into her head at the site of a severe injury. It leaves her with a dramatic, looping scar outlining a hill of puckered flesh. When she finally leaves the hospital, she lets go of her mother’s hand and runs up to the family car, embracing it. Kissing it.

Years later, Alexia’s working as a dancer in what appears to be something between a car show and a fetish nightclub. Scantily-clad women writhe on and grind against various makes and models of cars, from sports cars to pickups to sedans with wild paint jobs. Men circulate throughout, looking, but not touching. The bouncers see to that. At the end of her shift, Alexia showers, changes, and walks back to her own car. A man waiting outside asks her for a selfie. Then for an autograph. She’s just trying to go home, and he keeps following her as she walks away. She walks faster and gets to her car before him. He apologizes, says he just wanted an autograph. Says that he is in love with her and even if she doesn’t feel the same way, maybe they could be friends. Says he wants to kiss her. Doesn't give her much say in the matter. He puts his hands on her head and pulls her toward him through her car window…

..and it ends badly. You get the sense that this isn’t the first time.

If you think you know where this is headed, you really don’t. There’s Alexia, her life with her parents, an unusual relationship with cars, and in the background, the news reels off the anniversaries of missing-persons cases and a recent rash of murders. We don’t get any explanation, just events that unfold and spill out with a sense of hasty improvisation, of someone making it up as they go along because their bridges are burning behind them. There’s not a lot of dialogue. Conversations are brief and mundane, but not meaningless or opaque. It’s a film that tells its story through action, rather than words, and we learn who these people are primarily through what they do, through a look or a pause. The result is a film that never feels predictable, that captures the moment where an already-unhappy life begins to go completely off the rails. Like a car in an uncontrollable skid - you know it’s going to come to a stop eventually, it’s just a matter of how ugly the crash is going to be when it does.

And it’s a hell of a ride. A big part of this film is the intersection of metal and flesh in contexts both mundane and bizarre. A frame is screwed into Alexia’s skull to keep her head steady, hair gets tangled up in body piercings, people jab themselves with hypodermics, metal and flesh come together in ways that are violent, ways that are sexual. Right alongside this is a very strong sense of the malleability of flesh (through surgery, piercing, medication, and violence, self-inflicted and otherwise) and just as the body is malleable, so is identity, so is gender, so are our relationships with each other. There isn’t so much a single thesis as a constant combination and recombination of these ideas in ways you wouldn’t expect.

But make no mistake, there is horror here. This is a very violent film, and the violence runs the gamut from the implied (one of the most chilling scenes in the film is one where someone just gets off a bus, but context is everything) to the blackly comic to the absolutely excruciating. With the malleability of flesh and its meeting with metal comes body horror as well, adjacent to films like Videodrome and Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and allusions to the vehicular fetishism of David Cronenberg’s Crash. But it’s as much about transformation as all of that as well - not just the body becoming something else (through means both commonplace and more exotic), but also people becoming other people, becoming the person someone else needs for us to be, in ways that aren’t always healthy. It’s what happens when - like Cronenberg so often did in his early films - you don’t so much set out to shatter those taboos as just sort of disregard them, and let differing ideas and experiences normally kept separate exist in the same space. The result is unsettling and surprisingly lyrical, as much about the humanity of relationships told through monstrosity (as in films like Spring and The Endless) as it is about inhumanity.

It's also visually striking in how all over the place it is. There are sequences saturated in purples or pinks or yellows, dingy spaces lit by harsh fluorescents, softly lit, slow-motion reveries, hard, overlit sequences drenched in lens flare, nighttime exteriors and the streetlights that provide a feeling of safety in unsafe places, fire and sunlight pouring through smoke, It’s all here in riotous, chameleonic fashion without ever feeling jarring or contrived. The music is equally mercurial, moving between pounding techno, synth-pop and old spirituals, especially working to underscore the complicated dynamics of gender, both rigid and fluid. All of it works together - the music, the cinematography, and striking imagery - to tell the story that the economical dialogue doesn’t exposit, and to present ideas for interrogation. What does it mean to have a body? What does it mean for metal to become part of the body? What does it mean to be male or female? What does it mean to be someone’s daughter? What does it mean to be someone’s son?

This is a film that defies easy explanation, is dreamlike and gritty by turns, and vividly evokes a world where barriers - between metal and flesh, between masculine and feminine, between family and strangers, all break down. It’s not every day that a horror film wins the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, but I am completely unsurprised that this one did.

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Martyrs (2015): The Courage Of Our Convictions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Climax: Worse Trips

Bad trips are a great source of horror. There’s a sense that everything is out of your control, that there’s no safe harbor, no certainty you can turn to, and because it’s all a product of your own distorted perceptions, there’s no way to run from it. Wherever you go, there you are, and even closing your eyes just brings more awful visions. It’s as close as you can get to the nightmare from which you cannot wake up.

Bad trips played a big part in last week’s Mandy, but mostly as a way to get some really striking visuals up on the screen. It wasn’t even so much about an actual bad trip as it was the way bad trips have been typically portrayed onscreen and using that visual vocabulary to evoke a mood.

Climax is sort of at the other end of the spectrum. It’s less about the imagery of the bad trip, and more about the experience and consequences of a bad trip. It’s a queasy, emotionally exhausting portrait of psychological disintegration.

We open on a figure running and stumbling through snow, sobbing, shot from high overhead. They collapse, the ground streaked red around them. Roll final credits. It’s disorienting, to say the least. Before we can really get our bearings, we cut to a close-up on an old television, broadcasting audition videotapes, and here the story starts to come into focus. A choreographer named Selva is auditioning dancers for a touring production. We’re introduced to 20 dancers, mostly young, varying in how worldly they are. Some are achingly naïve, naked in their desire to succeed, others are more jaded, some come from tough backgrounds.

Cut to rehearsal, the company performing a routine in an empty school that they’re using as a practice space and dormitory. Their dancing is vibrant, raw, libidinous. They’re almost ready to go out on tour and this is their last practice. The routine finished, they gather around a bowl of sangria prepared by Emmanuelle - the company’s manager, a former dancer whose unplanned pregnancy cut her career short - dancing less formally to music provided by their DJ, breaking off into groups to gossip and drink and unwind.

Everyone brings their own thing into the troupe, as evident from their audition tapes and the conversations we observe. Some of them are more emotionally healthy than others, some are downright pigs, and you can see the attachments and divisions and jealousies and resentments that have already formed among them. Who’s sleeping with whom, who’s already slept with whom, who’s slept with everyone, who wants to sleep with whom, tensions and rivalries and yearning. And then, one by one, they start to feel sick and dizzy. They start getting overheated.

Someone’s spiked the sangria with LSD.

So we have all of these people with their hopes and fears and resentments and tangled intimacies, stuck in an empty schoolhouse in the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter, they’re starting to hallucinate, and they’re totally unprepared for it. Once the drugs kick in, it starts getting very ugly, very quickly. Blame flies and mob ugliness erupts as they realize they’ve been dosed, and then abandoned as they become consumed by their own internal hells. Desires are laid bare - whether to fuck or fight or kill, and the mask of civilization that keeps their worst impulses in check is ripped off. Every grudge, every secret jealousy, every need, it’s all out in the open as the dancers lose their ability to maintain any sort of emotional equilibrium. The way people love each other, hate each other, hate themselves, it’s all naked and exposed to the world, with no mediation, and all sense of good judgment falters. These aren’t the bad trips of Mandy or exploitation film in general - there’s no swirling light or chromatic aberration or imagined monsters and hellish landscapes. Just screaming and tears and piss and vomit and blood, casual emotional cruelty.

The film’s style mirrors the internal state of its characters. We don’t know what they’re seeing or feeling specifically, but everything about the film communicates the disorientation and profound alienation of the bad trip. The opening dance number is shot as a single take, and then the afterparty conversations are quick, short takes cutting fast from one set of people to another, almost like the camera is blinking. Then. once things start to fall apart, the second half of the film is a single unbroken take, the camera fixing onto one person and following them around from place to place, room to room, and as things go from bad to worse, that long, unbroken take becomes a journey through something like a haunted house, where something terrible is likely going on behind any given door.

The camera abandons one person to follow another, and people wander through scenes of others’ grief or rage or lacerating self-abuse, with the natural lighting of the opening giving way to deep shadows and sickly reds and greens, shots tilting at unnatural angles or flipping over upside down entirely to heighten the feeling of disorientation, a feeling which extends to the way the film is structured. The events themselves are chronologically ordered, from the end of rehearsal to the aftermath the next day, but the film begins with its end credits, the opening credits appear halfway through, and the title appears at the end. It all converges to heighten the feeling that things are out of control, out of order, that something has gone seriously amiss, ending in the room where it all started, now lit entirely in reds, shot upside down, bodies writhing and contorting in violence and lust and both intermingled, like something out of Bosch, abstracted and visceral at the same time.

In its raw, jagged displays of emotion, lack of stable center, tremendous harm happening in passing or on the periphery, it’s all like the bright, brittle desperation of that party that’s gone on just a little too long, where the fun’s all starting to look desperate and feverish, but turned up to a deafening pitch. You want to go home, you want to be someplace warm and safe and familiar, but home is a long way away, and by the end, everyone has abandoned themselves and all sense for whatever consumes them from the inside out.

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Some Thoughts About Cheap Shock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Calvaire: Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places

I think it’s pretty well established at this point that horror films don’t just evoke horror anymore - dread, fear, anxiety, terror, revulsion, there’s a whole palette of feeling and experience with which a filmmaker can work and still be seen as making horror films. I think this is generally a good thing. I think seeing horror films as a vehicle for scares, shocks, and cheap thrills is limiting and probably a little condescending, and the more moods and shades of feeling available, the more corners of the human condition they can illuminate, and the more possibility there is for horror films to be the art they can be.

That said, it wasn't until I watched Calvaire (Ordeal) that I realized just how rarely horror taps into feelings of sadness, loneliness, and sorrow by comparison.

Marc Stevens is a singer for hire. He does weddings, parties, private engagements. We meet him as he sits at a mirror, putting on stage makeup, getting ready to perform old love songs for a roomful of women at a retirement home. He has a little banner with his name on it tacked to the wall, he comes out in a cape with his name on it. His music is prerecorded, and he serenades a shabby, fluorescent-lit room full of aging pensioners with all the charm and sincerity you could ever want. He’s a hit. He’s been here before. He’s always a hit. He returns to his dressing room to take off the makeup and get ready to hit the road for his next engagement. One of the women comes back to his dressing room, and Marc knows her by name. She’s worried that the next time he comes around she won’t be alive any longer, and she makes a fumbling pass at him. It’s exactly as painful as you’d imagine, and the camera doesn’t look away. Marc isn’t cruel to her in his rejection, but she is cruel enough to herself for both of them. And it’s not just her - one of the nurses at the home, responsible for paying him, buttonholes him on the way out and makes a pass of her own. She seems desperately lonely. They all do. You get the impression that Marc’s visits are one of their few bright spots, and they’ve invested a lot in him. He’s obviously uncomfortable with it as he coaxes his brightly painted van stubbornly to life. He can’t stay. He has to hurry to his next gig.

Well, you can’t have a person on their own, driving through the countryside without car trouble, and sure enough, Marc’s van - which sounded none too healthy when he left the retirement home - breaks down in the middle of a very foggy nowhere, in the middle of the night, after a close call with an animal. He spots a sign for an inn some distance away, and he heads for it. It’s late, but the innkeeper - a man named Bartel - lets him in and makes up a room for him anyway. It’s been awhile since anyone stayed at the inn, Bartel says, but the rooms are clean and he’ll fix Marc something to eat. Bartel tells him he can look at his van in the morning, and he tells Marc that he used to be a performer, too - a comedian. He understands artists, because he used to be an artist too, before he lost his wife, Gloria. Bartel seems lonely too. But he wants to help Marc and enjoys his company.

Just don’t go down to the village, Bartel tells Marc. They don’t...understand...artists there. Not like Bartel does. He understands Marc very well.

Marc reminds him so much of Gloria.

What ensues serves as your basic spiral into nightmares, as Marc learns more about Bartel, the village nearby, and his own role as a fresh face in this very isolated community. It definitely gets bad (it’s called Ordeal for a reason), but what I find especially interesting about Calvaire is that no matter how horrific it gets, it never loses its steady undercurrent of sorrow and loss - the feeling that everyone in this film (perhaps even Marc) does what they do out of some desire to feel love and connection. These people aren’t monsters, no matter how monstrous their deeds, they’re just stunted and deformed by their lack of love and ability to connect to each other in healthy ways. Bartel and the men of the village are mirror images of the women at the nursing home and the nurse there. They are all yearning for the resurrection of their memories, of the fondest recollections of their past, or maybe just for a chance at love and connection in a world that doesn't provide it. In that sense, Marc's predicament is just a nightmarish reflection of his everyday life. Same shit, different day.

And shit is probably a good word for it. The film's palette is a thoroughly dismal one - everything is dingy and shabby and run-down and muddy and squalid and decrepit. The nursing home is clean, but maybe a little frayed around the edges. Bartel’s inn is also clean - mostly - but much older and in rougher shape. The village is basically an unbroken sea of mud and shabby, sickly-lit buildings. Shafts of light break through overcast skies, only to illuminate marshland, wet, churned fields with sparse, stubby tufts of grass peeking out. Everything is dirty, everyone is selfish, nothing is pure. It doesn't go out of its way to draw attention to the terrible things that are happening - there’s no melodramatic music (in fact, outside of Marc's songs and one especially unsettling interlude in the village, there’s no music at all), there is little in the way of obvious camera staging - a mixture of quick cuts and long takes is used to linger on suffering and move things from bad to worse economically. 

And things do go from bad to worse - horrible things happen casually, because out here in the backwoods, life is different from how it is in the cities and towns. Bartel isn't lying when he says the villagers are different - they’re all brutish men, inarticulate to the point of silence, and occupied with strange, unwholesome customs. A lot goes unsaid in this film, but if you read between the lines, the story is really, really not a happy or pretty one. It’s not often you can describe a horror film’s tone as sordid, but that’s exactly how it all feels. What begins as sadness darkens to dread, which descends into grotesquerie before landing at outright nightmarish surrealism as things get worse for Marc who, throughout it all, really does seem blameless. He’s a man trying to do his job the best he can, despite all of these people projecting their need for love, long-lost love, love irretrievable, onto him. By the end, Marc is almost gone, swallowed by all of the dreams and memories people have projected onto him.

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Livide: The Tableau Vivant

I’m sort of in a place right now where I’m really interested in movies that get over (intentionally or not) based on their aesthetics, rather than their story. It seems like it’s not all that often any more that horror filmmakers consciously try to create something that works in terms of design and art direction, rather than plot or premise (or god forbid, special effects technology). I know this is a little old-man-shouting-at-the-clouds, and I’m not saying it never happens, maybe just not as often as I’d like. For a genre so occupied with the territory of nightmares, why not spend more time trying to replicate that particular surrealist landscape, where image and feeling prevail over logic and causality?

Maybe it’s because it’s a really tough sell, not just from an economic point of view (you rarely go broke underestimating the intelligence of an audience), but from a creative one as well. To really drive a movie through imagery rather than story, you need to be damn sure that what’s seen communicates what needs to be understood because you don’t really have the luxury of complex exposition. People have to see something and feel in their gut why it’s bad or wrong or scary without being told, and that’s hard to pull off for almost anyone. It seems to me like a Sargasso Sea of flawed-but-interesting and ambitious failures.

Unfortunately, Livide (Livid) is not going to break that streak. It’s striking, dreamlike, and macabre (a tone that is itself hard to hit), but not as cohesive as it needs to be in the end.

Lucie Klavel has just started a new job, assisting a home-care nurse in her daily rounds. Mostly she assists with medical care - preparing injections and medication, that sort of thing. Her first day on the job with the stern, peremptory Mrs. Wilson starts off uneventfully enough, and ends at the shuttered mansion of Mrs. Jessel, a formerly formidable ballet instructor who, in her old age, persists in a vegetative state. She is a frail, skeletal figure in repose in the middle of a big bed, interrupted by a respirator and an IV tube. Mrs. Wilson tells Lucie that there are stories about Mrs. Jessel having a treasure hidden somewhere in the enormous house, though she herself has never found any sign of it.

And so Lucie takes this story back to her boyfriend, William. He’s kind of a dope - dreams big, but doesn’t take the time to think things through. The kind of guy who decides to steal a TV from a store across the street from a police station. William sees this as their big chance - find the treasure, pay off some debts, live life free of care. He ropes his friend Ben into the scheme. The three of them will sneak into Mrs. Jessel’s house, find the treasure, and then be well-off forever. If this sounds like a stupid, poorly-thought-out plan, well, that’s William for you.

So, breaking into an old mansion belonging to a mysterious old woman to look for a treasure only rumored to exist? What could go wrong?

It’s a very simple story at heart - of course stuff goes wrong. Specifically, a lot of really weird shit happens. It’s a big, dark, old decaying mansion, filled with the accumulated rot and clutter of decades, including moths, pictures of ballerinas, lots of taxidermy, and as it turns out, much worse. The hapless three get separated almost immediately, divided and conquered by the house, its inhabitants, and its history.

The strength of Livide lies, for most of its runtime, in its atmosphere. An odd, dreamlike feeling suffuses the whole thing, even before it gets going. Little moments of strangeness happen in the middle of everyday life with no real build-up or fanfare. They’re just sort of...there, ultimately suggesting that there’s a thin line between our world and the next (even between the world of the film and other horror films, as evinced in a sneaky, contextless little homage scene that worked well both as an isolated instance of strangeness and as a self-aware little wink at the genre), a line that thins, blurs, and is finally erased the further and further the three protagonists move into the house.

The dreamlike feeling is what drives the movie, which - like dreams - relies mostly on striking visuals to communicate what’s going on. The story is simple, and mostly there as something on which to hang the visuals, the specific scenes, the isolated moments. But this is the problem with dreams - lots of striking moments and images aren't necessarily a story, and Livide doesn’t quite commit wholeheartedly to this approach. If you're going to go the imagery-over-substance route, you have to push all-in on the imagery and be willing to forgo plot. This film bothers just enough with a story that it feels more incomplete than anything else.

Mostly it begins to fall down when it attempts to tell the story of Mrs. Jessel and why things are how they are. It's not so much a matter of things not being what they first appear to be, because they sort of are, it's just not necessarily the entire story. Basically, we are given one monster, then another, and then we learn as often we do that some monsters are more monstrous than others. The repeated imagery of moths, clockwork, taxidermy, and ballerinas makes for a strange, haunting experience, and one that does have an underlying logic revealed over the course of the film, but the last act abandons that understated creepiness for something far gorier and it loses something as a result. In its climax and denouement, some moments that seem to be important feel glossed over, and other moments that feel like they should be quick and sharp are unnecessarily prolonged. The end is ragged and inconclusive, leaving you feeling as if you’d missed some important piece of information that would tie it all together.

There are moments where this film effectively combines the beautiful with the unsettling and horrific, but doesn't really connect or build those moments effectively enough to tell a strong story on their own, and the exposition we get doesn’t fill in the gaps well enough. We’re left with tableaux vivants - living pictures, strung together into something that almost coheres into meaning, but doesn’t quite make it.

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Ten Of My Favorites - The Second Five

Following from my previous post, I offer another five of what are ten of my favorite horror films. I know it's not an especially unusual list (going over the first five. I'd argue that it's basically an exercise in "no shit"), but these are largely the ones that have stuck with me ever since I first saw them, in many cases for years. I've seen plenty of stuff that I consider favorites, but these are ones that have never gone away.

6. The Silence Of The Lambs

I've said ad nauseam that I don't like conventionally constructed serial killer movies, and I mean it. But every rule has its exceptions, and in this (and Se7en), I have my exception. It's a measured, largely somber film that offers very little on-screen violence (although what violence there is is gruesome to a degree almost but not quite at odds with the restraint of the rest of the film), but doesn't look away from terrible aftermath or emotional violence - as gross as it is in spots, I think the scene where Buffalo Bill mocks the screams of his prisoner disturbs me more than any of the gore. And in Hannibal Lecter, you have a remarkable character - someone whose evil is rarely (but not never, which is important) openly displayed, but rather coiled within him, a dangerous trap waiting for a misstep to spring it. He's built up to be this monster, and when he is introduced, immaculately groomed, standing perfectly still in the middle of his cell, it is a chilling, alien moment, terrible intelligence behind his eyes and the slightest observation calculated to cut like a razor. Once you know how events play out, you realize just how much and for how long Lecter toyed with the authorities, slipping private jokes into the most innocuous of phrases, setting out a trail of clues the whole time. And when the mask slips, the contrast of the mannered with the bestial is bracing. Somehow, it's worse when he lightly brushes Starling's finger than when he clubs the guard to death.

7. Martyrs

It's not often that you run across a film that can actually grapple with some pretty high-minded ideas (the virtue of sacrifice, ordeal in the service of transcendence) while still being utterly visceral and unpredictable. What really sells Martyrs for me is its sense of viciousness and despair once it really gets going. We're presented with a mystery early on, but it seems to be unresolved until things are clarified with a shocking juxtaposition, painted in gouts of blood over a canvas of cozy domesticity, which in turn is then further iterated into a sort of ghost story told with contorted, agonized figures who turn out to be something other than what they appear, and open the door to a further, even less comprehensible truth, which tells another story, and another, and the pain never lets up, because the pain is sort of the point of the movie, examined from different angles, like a triptych, variations on a scene of suffering. You're kept completely on your toes throughout, and no matter what nightmare places the story goes (and it is unsparing in its violence and scenes of - and this is important - suffering), it's telling a coherent, thoughtful story the whole time. It's almost painterly the way it uses terrible imagery as metaphor, but it never stops punching you in the stomach. It's sort of my platonic ideal of the modern horror movie - one that balances extremity with serious ideas and skillful cinematic technique.

8. The Devil's Rejects

A lot of the things I like about this movie are the same things I like about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - it's a wild-eyed gonzo rampage told using the aesthetics of grindhouse cinema (yeah, I know, I just wrote that and I'm sort of rolling my eyes at it too, but I can't think of a better way to say it). Now, because it's a modern film told using a specific retro cinematic style, it doesn't have quite the same punch as the films it emulates - it's played straight, but there are so many nods to other films (especially in terms of casting - watching this film is a fucking Who's Who for pop culture enthusiasts of a certain age) embedded in it that it's hard not to read it on some level as a commentary on the films from which it takes cues. But it's a love letter to those films, so you get this heightened distillation of all of these images and ideas from all these different movies, all compressed into one delirious rollercoaster ride. The stylization gives it an impact that some of its progenitors lack and lend it moments of perverse beauty in places. It's not the real thing, it's the hyperreal thing.

9. Lovely Molly

One thing I feel like is missing from most modern ghost stories is a real sense of dread. Ghosts are too often puzzles masquerading as threats - find out what the ghost wants (or what object you need to defeat it) and the problem is solved. But there are ghosts and then there are ghosts - as I said in my write-up of this movie, there are many ways you can be haunted, and Lovely Molly does an excellent job of weaving the different meanings of haunting together into a story that communicates both lingering evil and very real trauma and personal disintegration. It doesn't rely on cheap jump scares - no distorted figures in white jumping into frame here - just careful background details, little noises, objects framed in a certain way, all of which tell you why it is bad that Molly is back in this place, because it has always been a bad place for her and whatever hurt her as a child is still here. Death didn't shorten its reach. And then as things get worse, its escalation is observed in short, sharp intrusions of evil and madness into the world. We are given everything we need if we pay attention, and so the half-open closet door, the thud of hooves, the mysterious camcorder footage, all of it comes together into one terrible truth, finally embraced. It's devastating.

10. The Blair Witch Project

I managed to dodge the whole viral "these people really went missing" publicity campaign, because my first exposure to this movie was a picture in some magazine, showing the cast and crew celebrating getting into a film festival. So I knew it was fiction from go, but that did not matter, because the premise was so neatly encapsulated - these people mysteriously disappeared while making a movie, and now we've found their footage - and the way it was presented, as raw information, just completely hooked me. It was like nothing else I'd ever seen. It's easy to pooh-pooh found-footage horror since the Paranormal Activity franchise made them a huge moneymaker, but there's something really gripping about having all of the little tricks and strategies you use to keep yourself comfortable in a scary movie stripped away from you, and one of the strengths of this movie is uncertainty - it's not really clear if what you're seeing is due to the supernatural or just a portrait of the psychological disintegration of three students lost in the woods, utterly out of their depth. It stays this way for quite awhile, which gives it sort of a Shackleton Expedition snuff-film feel, like you're witnessing a preventable tragedy. But then in the last act it drops new information on you, and before you're really given a chance to collate everything, you're hit with a lot of really cryptic imagery and it's only after you stop to put the whole thing together that the full implications come crashing in on you. I must have seen it five or six times in the theater, and the final image of Mike, standing in the basement, still resonates with me, inexplicable but terrible.

Vinyan: Until Human Voices Wake Us, And We Drown

It’s easy enough to make scary movies in which bad things happen - watching something horrible happen as it occurs raises our hackles, triggers startle responses, gets us wondering about what’s going to happen to the characters with whom we nominally identify. The tagline to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre said it best: “Who will survive, and what will be left of them?”

But what about movies where the bad thing has already happened? We can all respond emotionally to the crash or the explosion, but there’s something to be said for films that manage to create something out of the experience of crawling from the wreckage. Case in point: Vinyan, which is less a horror movie than a hallucinatory tone poem about the rage, grief, and nihilistic despair that attends the loss of a child.

The film opens with the sound of crashing water, and what sound like screams. It’s suffocating, everywhere at once. When it subsides, it is because a woman has surfaced in the ocean. Her name is Jeanne, and she and her husband Paul are a presumably well-to-do European couple living in Thailand. They’ve been instrumental in helping to fund relief and rescue efforts in the area in the six months following the massive 2004 tsunami. It’s not just first-world philanthropy, though - they lost their son Joshua in the storm. Presumably carried out to sea in a massive wave. Crashing water, and the sound of screams. They’re at a small gathering for like-minded individuals, other rich white expats who have been generous with their money and time, and a woman who has been sneaking across military blockades into Burma to assess the situation there is showing some footage she shot surreptitiously to convince these people to help fund efforts there as well. In the middle of the footage, Jeanne asks her to stop and rewind, because she sees a little boy in the footage, walking away from the camera.

A little boy who looks just like Joshua.

And as far as Jeanne’s concerned, that’s all it takes. It was only six months ago, the grief is still so raw she’s practically bleeding. She wants to go into Burma. There’s a chance that her son is still alive and she is determined to take it. It’s going to be tough - the only way to get into Burma is to get in touch with the Triads, who do not fuck around. It’s a flat-out illegal trip into what is basically terra incognita. Jeanne does not care. Her mind is made up. Paul isn’t anywhere near as convinced, but who is he to say no? They talk to the woman who shot the footage and she puts them in touch with some people. And from there, it’s all one long trip into darkness.

Sometimes, when people talk about stories, they talk about the idea that the journey is more important than the arrival, or something like that. Vinyan is very much a film about a journey - it’s both a literal and metaphorical instantiation of the question “how far are you willing to go?” Part of it is geographical - they are still strangers in this country, unfamiliar with the language and local custom, and there’s never really a point once they get underway that they aren’t totally out of their depth. Everyone is taking advantage of them, capitalizing on their desire to find their son, and our awareness of their vulnerability runs like a tight wire through every frame. They spend most of the movie one bad decision or wrong word away from being just straight-up robbed and murdered and left to rot in the jungle. It’s hard to tell how aware of this they are. Paul seems to have some idea, but he’s largely ineffectual in the face of Jeanne’s single-minded determination, and the way he sort of helplessly objects only for her to undercut him without even really bothering to acknowledge him lends the proceedings a dreamlike feeling of impotence, like when you’re in a dream and something bad is happening but you move like you’re stuck in molasses or you try to scream and only a whisper comes out. In fact, the whole thing feels dreamlike - everything feels disconnected, desultory, characters slip completely out of frame and before we know it, we're as lost as they are. We’re as adrift as Jeanne and Paul.

And that’s the second big thematic through-line here - water is everywhere in this movie, so the ideas of drowning or being adrift and traveling echo throughout. Jeanne and Paul lose their son to water, they have to travel downriver by boat for most of the movie, stopping at increasingly dilapidated villages along the way, and there is rain, constant and torrential. Water is an element to which the protagonists return again and again - it is treacherous, and they can't escape it. As the film goes on, tellingly, they sometimes even seek it out. Lanterns are lit to float across the water, guide lights to show lost ghosts the way to the land of the dead. The further they go downriver, the stranger things get, the less attached to normalcy they become. They are at sea, they are rudderless. They are in over their head. They are going down for the third time.

It'd be easy to say that this is about a mother who goes crazy when her child dies, but that'd be reductive and it also misses the point that this voyage into the heart of darkness isn't just about Jeanne. Paul is also carrying his own grief and guilt and it drives him to make bad decisions as well. He may seem like a voice of reason, but he's equally as haunted and damaged by what's happened - and as we come to discover, his role in what happened, which may explain his willingness to indulge Jeanne - and the further they go, the more his ability to contain his own grief and guilt and rage fails him. The further they go (how far are you willing to go?), the more who they are is stripped away (who will survive, and what will be left of them?), until at the end of the journey, nothing remains but what kept them going to begin with, and in a place utterly alien and absent of anything we know as life, they are swallowed whole.

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Martyrs: The New Passion Play

Perhaps as a reaction to the uproar over movies like Antichrist and Srpski Film, I've been thinking a lot lately about the relationship of morality to horror film. I'm eventually going to spend a whole post rooting around in these ideas, and as I've been shaping it in my head, I've also started thinking about the relationship between horror films and fables and how  in the U.S., our fables and fairytales have been shaped (and changed) by a largely Christian morality that eschews ambiguity for certainty, for the happy (or at least instructive) ending.

Our horror films do much the same thing. This gets me to thinking about the instructiveness of tragedy or a more existential (if less comforting) take on the genre. Maybe it's this Western sensibility that inures us to shitloads of gore but gets us all up in arms if violence or suffering is presented without ironic distance. We need our happy endings, the wicked punished and the good triumphant.

But that's at least another post if not two. I also think about how horror movies spend a lot of time on the figures of the Christian pantheon - Satan, demons, rogue angels, etc. (still waiting for a big-budget adaptation of the Book of Revelation) - but not so much the church itself. Sure, there's the occasional renegade priest or church built atop a site of evil or whatever, but not so much the church as it actually has operated. The Passion of the Christ was way, way gorier than Hostel (and predated it by a year, making it the first torture porn film), and the Bible itself is filled with all kinds of awful stuff, presumably meant to be a cautionary tale. The Passion Play began as a folk reenactment of the trial, suffering, sacrifice, and transcendence of Jesus of Nazareth, and few details were spared, lest we underestimate the magnitude of what he did for others.

This has more to do with Martyrs than you might think.

The movie opens with a young girl running through what appears to be an abandoned warehouse. She is bloody, bruised, running out into the street barefoot and screaming. This cuts to grainy documentary footage of people exploring the abandoned building she escaped, pointing out where she was kept. She wasn't raped, but she was abused, chained to a toilet chair, beaten and starved. Nobody knows why, the girl (Lucie) won't say anything.

Lucie grows up in an orphanage, and through the documentary footage we see her grow. She starts almost feral, but over time the care and attention of another girl named Anna, she starts to come out of her shell. The heads of the orphanage want to find the people who tortured Lucie, but her memory isn't good. Anna may be the only friend she has - Lucie tells her what she can remember (which is very little), but makes Anna promise to keep some things secret.  She tells Anna not to say anything about the deep cuts that keep appearing on her arms…

…or the shadowy, emaciated figure who comes to her in the night and makes them.

We flash forward 15 years later, and a suburban family of four are sitting down to breakfast, squabbling about school and potential boyfriends and the torments siblings afflict on each other. The squealing daughter is being chased by the brother in a domestic parody of the movie's opening. Mother repairs a pipe in the backyard, father answers the door.

Lucie is standing there with a shotgun.

What follows is essentially the story of what we are willing to do for (and to) other people, and what happens when we stop running. Lucie runs from her captors, runs from the withered phantom who haunts and hurts her, runs until she can no longer run. Anna runs from what Lucie is, whether she intends to or not, until Lucie calls her for help and she answers, tending to Lucie's wounds, stitching up repeatedly scarred flesh. She's all Lucie has. Lucie has done something terrible, and terrible things keep happening to Lucie. Something follows her around, and at a certain point we begin to wonder how stable Lucie is and what loyalty is going to cost Anna.

Martyrs has a very specific story to tell, but does an excellent job of keeping us guessing. Who kept Lucie captive? Was it for her own good? By what is Lucie haunted? What connection does it have to her? How far will Anna go to protect her friend? How far will she go to protect everyone else? The answers aren't always obvious, and the less you know about the movie going in, the better.  At the end of the day, all of the blood and scars and wounds and suffering are, surprisingly, with great, ancient purpose. Transcendence through ordeal. It is a painful story told in splashes of red, sharp metal, harsh, unforgiving light, and the fist's hard report against flesh. Like the story of Jesus, it ends in salvation even if we can argue about whose salvation it is.

It is a rare movie that shows us something horrible and asks us to find something noble in it. Martyrs is one of the best attempts in my recent memory. It is a passion play for the modern age.

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