Knock At The Cabin: Apocalypses Great And Small

I get really nervous when horror that I like in other media gets slated for development as a film or series. If it goes right, it adds more really good horror to horror film. But if it goes wrong…it’s like someone playing your favorite song and missing all the notes, or deciding that what it really needs is kazoo and fart noises. You know what it could be, so when it falls short, it’s more disappointing than usual.

So when I found out that the book The Cabin At The End Of The World by Paul Tremblay was getting made into a film, I was happy about it. It packs a wallop, is at moments pretty cinematic even as a book, and avoids a lot of the obvious choices in favor of a relentless ambiguity that leaves you on the hook to the very end and past it. And then I found out it was being directed by M. Night Shyamalan. 

Now, I try to avoid talking too much about the specific directors or actors or writers involved in a film because I want to keep my focus on the finished product, and I think horror fandom focuses way too much on personalities. But Shyamalan’s track record has some pretty wide swings - you’ve got really solid efforts like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, but then you’ve got films like The Lady In The Water and The Happening, films that generally appear on those “how did this ever get made?” lists. Like, not just less good or mediocre, but actually inviting scorn and derision. When his films are good they’re very good (I really like The Village, do not @ me or X me or whatever it is now), but…I had to wonder which M. Night Shyamalan would be showing up for this.

Well, Knock At The Cabin (who the fuck thought this title was a good idea?) ends up being sort of a mixed bag, but I suspect the low points have little to do with the director. It’s skillfully made, but it’s brought down by some disappointing choices that feel like things studio executives would demand. 

Wen, who appears to be eight or nine years old, is vacationing at a lakeside cabin with her fathers Eric and Andrew. She’s catching grasshoppers, naming them, and noting their characteristics in a book like a budding scientist. Eric and Andrew are on the back deck, enjoying the view and some wine and snacks. It’s lovely and idyllic. The idyll does not, however, last long. Wen looks up, and there’s a man walking toward her. He’s very big, dressed in jeans and a white button-down shirt, like the Hulk became a Mormon missionary. He tries to strike up a conversation with Wen, but Wen doesn’t talk to strangers. The very large man says she’s right not to talk to strangers, so he introduces himself. His name is Leonard. Leonard asks about her grasshoppers, helps her catch some.

And up the road come three more people, dressed similarly, with long, sharp, homemade implements. You see, Leonard and his acquaintances Redmond, Adriane, and Sabrina, have a very important job to do, and they’re going to need Wen, Andrew, and Eric’s help.

They’re going to prevent the end of the world.

What follows isn’t really the siege film you might think it’s going to be. Sure, you have the trapped family and what appear to be four fanatics obsessed with the idea of sacrifice, but the bulk of the film is really more about the seven of them than anything else. If it’s a siege film, it’s a siege film in which for most (not all) of it, conversation replaces violence. Leonard and the other three are there to convince Eric, Andrew, and Wen that they need to help them, and they come across less like bloodthirsty zealots and more like four frightened people delivering some very bad news on a tight deadline. What they’re asking is unspeakable, but they seem aware that it’s unspeakable and are almost apologetic but no less urgent for all of that. It’s an interesting tack to take. Needless to say, neither Eric nor Andrew are on board, but they’re two very different people- Eric a quiet, reflective man of religious faith, and Andrew a tough, unbelieving pragmatist. But they aren’t cartoons in the slightest. What’s happening at the cabin is punctuated by flashbacks that sketch out their lives together, from early on in their relationship to adopting Wen. These are two men who love each other and who have been shaped differently by the forces with which they have to contend for that mere fact. Cold, silent visits with family. Polite lies to satisfy authority. Bottles across the back of their heads. Adversity has shaped them differently, and so they respond to this adversity differently as well.

Just in terms of execution, this film is put together extremely well. Shyamalan, for whatever you might think of the stories he tells in his films, has a lot of experience directing, and it shows. The dialogue is a little dialogue-y but not so much as to be distracting, and the performances are consistently strong. They manage the difficult feat of making the antagonists much more sympathetic than a lesser film would have them as being, and everyone comes across as a distinct, believable person with their own feelings and doubts and fears and flaws, and it’s in how they talk, how they carry themselves, the looks on their faces. Cinematically, I can best describe this film as very self-assured. Cinematography and lighting do a lot to keep what is effectively a single location from feeling static and adding tension, and frequent use of close-ups keeps the focus on the people, locating the tension in the turmoil that everyone is experiencing. Shot composition does its fair share to communicate relationships, the editing and (mostly) pacing are crisp, and the whole thing rides on a score of minor-key swells that communicates danger and unease without being shrill. 

From a technical standpoint, it is a very well-made film. And in terms of faithfulness to the source text (which isn’t always my biggest priority, I know what works on the page doesn’t always work on the screen), it’s very good for the first two acts. Like I said at the start, I feel like the book was already pretty cinematic, and apart from the opening scene, which I felt was shorter and more perfunctory than the book, losing a lot of the mounting dread in the process, it captures how I imagined it while reading pretty well. But the third act is, well, mostly a problem, diverging from the original at the expense of what made the source text so good to begin with.

This story, in either case, centers around sacrifice and apocalyptic endings. And in the source text, there’s a very personal apocalypse - a profound loss, and whether or not there’s an actual global apocalypse is left more uncertain. The film shifts the first in service of an obvious, definite answer to the second, and I think the film suffers as a result. The source text doesn’t give us any easy answers, so when the film does, it feels smaller somehow. And it really goes to town in the last act mopping up and eliminating any trace of the ambiguity that was so central to the original story. Not only was it not a cut-and-dried good-versus-evil story, but it was also a story that hinged very much on the tug of war between belief and doubt. And by the end of this film, there isn’t a trace of doubt left, not even about the smallest things, giving us something much safer, more sanitized, in exactly the kind of film that shouldn't feel safe and sanitized. The more I think about it, the more it pisses me off.

This was not indie horror. This was big-studio horror, with a big-name director and at least one name that would bring in box office. I can only imagine that somewhere, some studio suit with a deficiency of spine passed down a note saying that those things had to change because nobody ever went broke assuming audiences were dumb and thin-skinned and couldn’t handle ambiguity or seriously heavy feelings. It’s something that feels unique to the U.S., this idea of horror as being limited to safe thrill rides instead of confrontational art, and no, I’m not angry, just disappointed. No, wait, I am angry.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Hellhole: The Clue’s In The Name

(Just as a heads-up, I’m probably going to end up spoiling most of this one, but in a way it doesn’t really matter, because it’s nothing you won’t already see coming. This is in no way a subtle or surprising film.)

A good title can sell me on a movie. I’m a sucker for cryptic, oblique, understated titles (e.g., Hereditary, The Blair Witch Project) but every now and then there will be one that just begs viewing if only to find out what the hell it’s all about (e.g., The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Beyond The Black Rainbow). I think the problem, for me, is the ones that sort of fall in between, where they’re just sort of generically descriptive. Those don’t really spark the imagination, so it’s hard to imagine that the film will either.

This is one of many problems with Hellhole. It’s a film that is as dull, formulaic and obvious as its title would lead you to believe.

The film opens in Poland, in 1957. It is a dark and stormy night, and a car pulls up to a church, and a priest gets out, carrying an infant in his arms as he heads inside. He brings the child up to the altar, and proceeds to ask God for forgiveness as he pulls out a dagger. He’s going to kill the child, who has a strange birthmark on its shoulder. The police burst in and tell him to put the knife down. He tells them that they don’t understand, that this “evil seed” must be destroyed, and they gun him down for his trouble. If you’re wondering where you’ve seen this before, it was the end of The Omen, in 1976.

Flash forward thirty years, and a priest named Father Marek arrives at a monastery located way out in the sticks. They’ve largely been forgotten, or left alone, because they make a point of running a sanatorium for people who suffer from demonic possession, exorcising their demons and caring for them as they recover. As the prior sees it, it’s a necessary service that nobody wants to admit to. Father Marek is given a habit, a rosary (he brought his own), and his suitcase is searched. It’s very important, given their line of work, that earthly temptations are kept far away. His cigarettes and cell phone are confiscated. The evening meal is some kind of foul-looking gruel, dark and pasty, with…chunks…in it. Not that you expect ascetics to eat well, but this is especially unappealing.

After dinner, once he’s returned to his cell, Father Marek opens a hidden compartment in his suitcase. There’s a gun and a flashlight, and some news clippings about a series of mysterious disappearances in the area. The monks may have something to hide.

It’s a very dark movie. Not in the sense of sinister or brooding, just…underlit. It makes sense, since it’s a monastery, but it doesn’t help things. There’s some good, gloomy atmosphere toward the start but the rest of the film largely takes place indoors where everything looks the same. And this sameness is pervasive. I said up at the top that this film has many problems, and that’s not strictly true. It has one really big problem, in that it doesn’t have a single original or unpredictable bone in its body. You’ve seen all of this before, and it’s going to go pretty much exactly how you expect that it will, with an exception toward the end that doesn’t really help its case. As a result, there’s no tension, no surprise, and although it’s only 90 minutes long, it still feels like a slog.

It’s oddly devoid of tension, even in moments where there should be tension. Marek witnesses an exorcism that proceeds almost by rote - a young woman is bound to a bed, there’s prayer, she rears up and starts growling and convulsing, the bed starts shaking, and the prior’s crucifix bursts into flames. At no point does anyone evince anything stronger than mild concern. Most of them seem almost bored, and it certainly doesn’t look any different from any other exorcism you’ve ever seen in a movie before. The dialogue is serviceable (though the translation does make everything sort of an understatement) as are the performances and the soundtrack. Nothing special, but nothing awful. Just sort of there.  It’s just as rote in its action - Marek goes poking around where he shouldn’t be, not everything is what it seems, something spooky happens, rinse, repeat. And if that isn’t clear enough, the first act ends with a conversation (held in a confessional, because of course it is) that spells out what anyone actually watching the film has already figured out. No, Marek isn’t really a priest, he’s an undercover cop investigating the disappearances, which appear to be tied to the exorcisms they perform - exorcisms that the possessed inevitably don’t survive. Yes, of course they figure this out, and yes, the revelations you expect to follow - about Marek, about the monks, about what they’re really up to - they’re exactly what you’re anticipating them to be. There’s more to Marek than meets the eye (like the weird birthmark on his shoulder), it’s not by chance that he was assigned this case, and so on.

Normally I don’t like spoiling films that I’m writing about. Whether I liked it or not, someone should be able to watch it and decide for themselves, but this film is so predictable that anyone with any familiarity with the genre will, like I did, see every single beat coming. Until the very end, wherever you think the story’s going to go, that’s where it goes. There IS sort of a twist in the third act, and in theory it’s one for which I have sort of a perverse appreciation, but it’s handled so anticlimactically, it lands with such a thud that it’s actually more comic than anything else. In that moment, it almost felt like the film was shifting course to become a spoof of the sort of film it had been sincerely up to that point. Which is certainly a choice, though I can’t say it’s a good one.

And then THAT twist is reversed, but the filmmakers don’t bother to offer any narrative logic for it, almost like they realized that otherwise the film won’t have an ending, just a bunch of monks standing around saying “welp,” so nope, that didn’t count. I do have to give the film credit for not copping out on its ending (which contains the only interesting imagery in the entire film), but it’s far too little, far too late. The climax takes place in a cave under the monastery, around a well that is a portal to hell. A literal hellhole. It is a hole...to hell. This is what we have to work with here.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Dead End: Goes Nowhere

Given a choice between writing about a bad movie or a mediocre movie, I gotta admit, I am going to prefer the bad movie most of the time. There’s something about mediocre movies that’s almost worse, that almost make me angrier. I think it’s because they tend to be so formulaic, so transparently manipulative, and that reads to me like laziness and cynicism. It’s insulting to the audience. Bad movies, on the other hand, are generally ones that do something really wrong, that fuck up something (or multiple somethings) important, and there’s a car-wreck element to it, watching the film just spiral into something beyond recovery is sort of its own kind of horror. I doubt that “oh god, what were they thinking?” is what those filmmakers are aiming for, but it tends to be a more energizing experience than another Blumhouse jump-scare extravaganza.

And folks, let me tell you, Dead End is fucking terrible. Easily one of the worst films I’ve seen in months. It goes wrong early, and keeps going more and more wrong as it goes along.

It is the story of the Harrington family - father Frank, mother Laura, and their son Richard and daughter Marion. They’re taking a trip to Laura’s mother’s house for Christmas Eve dinner, with Marion’s boyfriend Brad in tow. There is squabbling. There are disparaging mother-in-law comments. There is Richard antagonizing Brad. There is Frank insisting that he do all the driving even though it’s getting late. Frank decided this year to take the back roads instead of the interstate, for a change. Frank dozes off at the wheel, narrowly missing a car coming the other way and swerving off the road.

When the dust settles and they get back on their way, the road seems unfamiliar. They pass a cabin filled with animal skulls and hatchets. The road goes on too long.

They pass a mysterious woman in white with a nasty cut on her forehead, clutching her baby.

So we have five people in a station wagon, trapped on what appears to be an endless, haunted stretch of road, and they aren’t alone. The problems really begin with the overall tone of the film. It was made in 2003, but the writing, acting, and characterization (or lack thereof) are right out of the 1980s, as are the production values. This film is relentlessly…shoddy, at every level. In terms of production design, it’s clear that this film was shot on a soundstage or on a very limited stretch of road, with a lot of close-ups, very few exterior shots of the car in motion, and car interiors that are clearly a stationary vehicle with moving scenery outside. The windows of the car are fogged or smeared to the point that Frank shouldn’t be able to see anything out of them, and it’s obvious that that’s to hide the artificiality of everything outside. We only see the car in motion for a few yards at a time, padded by a lot of establishing shots of a bend in the road or the highway in motion, and these shots get reused throughout the film. There are some gore effects used sparingly (and mostly effectively), but there are far more shots of people staring in horror and disgust at something just off-camera, and it’s clear that’s because they didn’t have the budget to actually reveal whatever it was they’re looking at.

This pervasive cheapness extends to the characters in the film. This is especially a problem because the majority of this film is people in a car, trapped with each other. For as much time as the camera spends on them, the characters need to hold up under that scrutiny, and their relationships with each other are going to end up doing a lot of the heavy lifting in between spooky moments. And what we get are…cartoons. Frank is every inch the befuddled, out-of-touch father who bitches about his mother-in-law and gets the name of popular musicians wrong. He’s so out of touch he thinks Atari consoles are still the height of consumer electronics in 2003! Isn’t that wacky? Laura is the daffy mom, more worried about the pie she made than anything else and constantly nitpicking Frank’s driving. Marion is mostly silent, Brad is a jock who talks about being “in the zone,” and Richard…well, Richard is absolutely fucking awful. He is an iteration of the obnoxious younger brother who communicates mostly in profanity when he isn’t slumped against the window listening to royalty-free music on a Walkman (in 2003) or antagonizing Brad with a non-stop torrent of homophobic slurs for reasons that are never, ever made clear. He’s the most unsympathetic character I’ve seen in a horror movie since Sal from Altitude, and that is saying something. When they stop at one point to look for a phone, Richard, no lie, goes off into the woods, tacks up a centerfold to a tree, and starts masturbating. Who does that? In lieu of character development, they take turns freaking out, yelling, screaming, going catatonic, losing their minds entirely, or dying. It doesn’t amount to much, it’s not grounded in anything resembling real human behavior, it’s just caricature and histrionics start to finish.

In terms of pacing or narrative momentum, well, for a movie that takes place on the road, it’s surprisingly inert. The underlying premise is a little one-note - they’re trapped on a seemingly endless stretch of road, and that’s only going to take the story so far by itself. There are moments, interludes, sequences that communicate the idea that there’s something supernatural going on, but they’re too few and far between and become repetitive quickly. There’s no progress, there’s no discovery. They drive, weird things happen, they drive some more, more weird things happen, maybe somebody dies or freaks out, they keep driving. That’s kind of it. Well, things do switch up a little in the second half of the movie, in what seems like it’s supposed to be the protagonists revealing dark, upsetting family secrets under the psychological strain of their ordeal, but mostly it just amounts to people blurting stuff out, other people reacting to it (or not), and then either it goes by the wayside or gets exaggerated into something ridiculous. It’s less cathartic than it is just kind of silly.

And that gets at the last really big problem with this film. Tonally, it’s all over the shop. There are a few beats that would be actually scary, moments that would raise tension in a film that was played darker and straighter and more subdued, but here everything is played so broadly that at multiple points it verges on slapstick. Sometimes it actually IS slapstick. At the point where the family drama gets mashed into the supernatural aspects and any semblance of structure goes out the window - characters that were catatonic are suddenly fine, characters that were fine suddenly lose their minds - it’s all become so cartoonish that it can’t be taken seriously. But on the other hand, there are a few graphically nasty moments, and the juxtaposition of the two ends up being more jarring than anything else.

I think I can see the general outlines of what the filmmakers were trying to go for - it seems like it’s supposed to be a riff on movies and television shows like Creepshow and Tales From The Crypt, where you have these grisly, lurid stories with some kind of moral comeuppance at the end told in broad, blackly comic fashion, but it never coheres because it doesn’t handle any of the individual elements well and they don’t mesh as a result. Making that kind of story means evoking a very specific mood, setting, and context, and nothing about the film clearly signals that this is how we’re supposed to be taking what we see. It can’t decide whether it’s a story about people trapped on a haunted stretch of road, or about a family who have all kinds of secrets coming apart at the seams, and the result is a largely nonsensical jumble of moods and sequences and choices that are impossible to take seriously, but laced with just enough nastiness to be uncomfortable. It’s too gory and mean-spirited to be a comedy, and it’s too broad and cartoonish to be a horror film. It’s not much of a black comedy either, because that generally works when you’re playing the horror straight, and when the comedy is actually funny. It ends in pat fashion, explaining every single thing we saw and underlining it two or three times in case we didn’t get it the first time around. What a mess.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Halloween: Night And Day

So, it’s confession time. In all of the years I’ve been writing about scary movies, there’s been a pretty big gap in my cinematic education…

…I’ve never seen the original Halloween.

I did see Halloween 4 back in the day, and one of the first things I ever wrote here was a defense of Rob Zombie’s remake, but as seminal horror films go, this was a pretty big oversight on my part. I’m not really a fan of slasher films and never have been, but even I have to recognize the landmark status of this film. It wasn’t the first slasher film (what was is debatable, was it Black Christmas? Blood Feast? Peeping Tom? I’ll let someone else have that argument), but it was a watershed moment for the style. codifying it as a genre unto itself and spawning legions of imitators, not to mention so many sequels, reboots and remakes that there are literally multiple Halloween timelines at this point.

So even though it’s not really my style of movie, it still strikes me as one that I should really address. And since Sundays are when I watch the films I write about here, and since this most recent Sunday was the titular holiday, it seemed like this was exactly the right time.

Of course, there’s always baggage any time you come to an iconic film late in the game. Out of the ones I’ve written about here, some didn’t work for me because they’ve become too well-known, too embedded in popular culture to have any surprises left, some still have all their original power intact, and as it turns out, this one falls somewhere in between. Some elements haven’t aged as well as they could have, and hindsight means it’s hard to see past the things that aren’t yet cliches in the film, but will end up becoming so. But there’s still a lot here to admire, much of it in contrast to the movies that ended up taking its ideas and turning them into cliche. You can see how a lot of filmmakers missed the point or took the wrong lesson away from this film.

It begins on Halloween night in Haddonfield, IL, in 1963. It opens on a point-of-view shot - we’re seeing things through someone’s eyes. Whoever they are, they’re peering through a window at a young man and young woman making out on a couch. The couple go upstairs to do what you do in situations like these, and upon the young man’s departure, our point of view goes into the house, goes into the kitchen, and picks up a knife. The point of view puts on a mask, and now we see through the eyeholes of the mask. We can hear our point of view’s breathing. The point of view goes upstairs, where the young woman is brushing her hair, and it stabs her to death before walking back downstairs…

…where it is revealed to be a six-year-old boy.

The boy is Michael Myers, and he’s just murdered his sister Judith. Cut to Halloween in Haddonfield, IL, in 1978. Myers has been remanded to a hospital for the criminally insane for the majority of his life, and his supervising doctor, Dr. Loomis, and a nurse are preparing to take custody of Michael and escort him to a hearing. When they arrive at the hospital, there’s been a security breach. Michael Myers is loose. He steals a car and heads for Haddonfield, to finish what he started fifteen years ago.

The events of the film take place over the course of a single day - it begins midday, night falls around the halfway point, and it ends before dawn. Framing it this way provides one of its first major strengths: This film uses pacing really, really well. It’s a much slower burn of a movie than subsequent imitators, and that works to its advantage. Because it’s set over the course of one day, the whole first half of the film is buildup, a slice of life in small-town Illinois. We’re introduced to our protagonists - Laurie, Lynda, and Annie - at school, as they’re enduring their classes for the sake of the fun they’re going to have that evening, unaware that they are being watched and followed. This is intercut with Loomis’ attempt to track down Myers and convince law enforcement that the people of this town are in danger. Meanwhile, Myers, back in his hometown, watches and waits for night to fall. A lot of this film’s power is in the way it makes you wait for something awful to happen, knowing that it will.

The relatively slow pace of the first two acts is the broadest example of this, but even on a scene-by-scene basis, this film does not rush. It takes its time, and draws everything out, but it rarely feels like it’s spinning its wheels. Even in the third act, at the film’s climax, it’s very deliberate - there’s an inevitability, an implacability to it, and even as familiar with the film as a pop culture artifact as I was (and having seen a remake that kept many of the broad strokes intact), there were still moments that made me gasp. The threat is clearly established early on, in the light of day, and we have to sit with the tension - we know something bad is going to happen, so when night finally comes, there’s a momentousness to it, a sense that shit is about to get very bad. Time is an effective element in this film.

And so is space, for that matter. This film’s other big strength is its staging. The whole first half of this film takes place in broad daylight, punctuated by instances of Myers stalking Laurie. It’s audacious - generally night makes everything scarier, but breaking that particular rule makes everything that happens that much more unsettling. And it’s never really front and center - this film does a very good job of letting creepy things happen in the background. We never really get a good glimpse at Myers during the day - he’s crowded into one side of the frame, just shoulders and a torso, or partially obscured by scenery. We know someone’s there, but they’re largely a mystery. Likewise, until night falls, all we ever really see is the aftermath of his violence (barring his escape at the beginning) - he’s moving through the world, and at first all we see is the wake he leaves behind him. So you get a sense that there’s someone bad out there and that they are doing bad things, but for the first half of the film, it’s all in the margins, visually and narratively.

But when night falls, it becomes a whole other matter. The violent moments in this film are generally minimal, though in two instances it lingers long enough that you get a sense the suffering and distress he’s causing, which is something that largely goes ignored in other films in the genre. Some die slowly, some die quickly, but it’s here, in the final act that Myers is revealed - the iconic blank white mask, the violence depicted as it’s happening instead of after the fact. There’s a reason Loomis is worried, he’s not a crazy old man, and now we see why. But there’s a restraint there many other films in the genre lack. It’s still more suggestion and aftermath than explicit gore - much like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, this film is a lot less bloody than you think it’ll be. But it works because we’ve had the entire first half of the film to get to know these people, so when they die, they are people dying, not cannon fodder for practical effects.

Visually it does a lot with a little, making excellent use of shot composition to reveal Myers emerging from the shadows, framed as a lone, stark figure who is suddenly there, then just as suddenly gone. The blank white mask does a lot of work in this regard because it’s a striking element that can just as easily blend into the background as be brought forward in our attention. A lot of this film works because Myers is lurking in the background, and it’s what he’s doing while other people are in the foreground unaware, or elsewhere in the house, that ramps up the tension and dread. As an audience, you know what’s coming and you’re sort of helpless to watch it play out, like a nightmare.

It does have its shortcomings, though. The dialogue’s pretty corny throughout, some of it landing clumsily, and some of the effects work hasn’t aged all that well (the opening sequence feels especially clumsy to the modern eye), but given that it was a low-budget independent film in the late 1970s, that it still gets over to the degree that it does is a testimony to the filmmaking skill behind it. Characterization is a bit thin, though in some instances this works to its advantage - we know nothing about Myers, and that’s as it should be. He would eventually be over-explained into the ground by almost all of the Halloween movies that followed, but here all we know is that he’s unknowable, and the unknown is frightening. There’s not much to Loomis either - he seems to be defined by his need to stop Myers, the Van Helsing to Myers’ Dracula. Annie and Lynda are mostly ciphers, teenage girls more interested in boys and partying than school. Laurie gets a little more depth - she’s the good one, the “girl scout,” but she isn’t prissy or prudish. There’s real adolescent vulnerability there - she’s smart, but it’s the late 70s, so that keeps her on the outside. It’s less a rejection of her friends’ ways and more the feeling that it isn’t an option for her, and you can sense some sadness around that. Which is more than characters in films like these usually get, but you can see how subsequent filmmakers would turn this into “masked murderer picks off horny teenagers, only to be foiled by a virginal Final Girl,” codifying the “rules” of the slasher film so thoroughly that Wes Craven would eventually turn that into something surprisingly fresh and interesting with Scream…which would of course get its own slate of sequels, adding smirky self-awareness to the mix. There’s a reboot of that franchise in the works as well.

And all of that bums me out, because there’s more than that going on here, and seeing where the cliches started makes me feel bad that this (and an absolute rat’s nest of sequels and remakes) would be its legacy, because it really does feel like it deserves more than that. I mean, it’s a classic, and rightfully so, but I wish what people took away from it instead was the value of restraint and suspense, instead of tits, kills, and body count.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Martyrs (2015): The Courage Of Our Convictions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

Blair Witch: We Faked It Because It’s Real

 (This one’s probably going to be pretty spoilery for The Blair Witch Project, so if you haven’t seen that and are planning on it - and I would definitely recommend it, it’s really good - maybe hold off until you’ve seen that film.)

Some time back I wrote up one of my favorite horror films, The Blair Witch Project, which was striking (and profitable) enough to essentially kick-start found-footage as a narrative approach to horror film. It was lightning in a bottle - coming at just the right moment in the zeitgeist, using techniques more common to theater than film, and leveraging the still-developing Internet for a publicity campaign that profited from an audience’s credulousness to build up a lot of hype ahead of time. William Castle would have been proud. It wasn’t the first found-footage horror film, but it was certainly the highest-profile (and most profitable) one. Did I mention it was profitable? It was profitable. And the thing about profitable horror films is that studios invariably want to capitalize on them to keep the revenue stream going - sequels, prequels, reboots, franchises, whatever. Do it again, it worked the last time.

But here’s the thing - you can’t really capture lightning in a bottle twice, as demonstrated by Blair Witch, a 2016 sequel to The Blair Witch Project. This film attempts to recapitulate the original, but in doing so misses so much of what made the original film good. Instead, it manages to fall victim to all of the found-footage film cliches that emerged following the originals’ success and ends up being an inchoate, formulaic mess.

This film is about James Donahue - the younger brother of the original film’s Heather. He’s never really gotten over his sister’s mysterious disappearance 22 years ago, and he still holds out hope that she’s still alive somewhere. He’s even got Google alerts set up for things to do with her disappearance. Usually they don’t pay off, but then one day he gets an alert for a video uploaded to YouTube, taken from a cassette some people found in the Burkittsville woods. It’s grainy and shaky and degraded, but it appears to have been shot inside of a very old, very abandoned, very familiar house. Someone’s running through hallways, bolting doors behind them, and then there’s a quick glimpse of them in a mirror…and it looks like it could be Heather.

And that’s all it takes - James, his girlfriend Lisa, his best friend Peter, and Peter’s girlfriend Ashley gear up to head into the woods to look for her.

The footage we’re watching, we’re told, was recovered after the fact from DV cassettes and video capture cards found in the forest.

This is actually the second time someone’s taken a grab at the brass ring. The first sequel - Book Of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 - wasn’t really a success either. There was apparently considerable studio interference with its production, and the end result is gimmicky and kind of incoherent. If you told me that it was an original screenplay retrofitted as a Blair Witch movie I’d have no trouble believing it. It did, however, make a couple of smart choices. First, it was shot as a conventional narrative, not as a found-footage film. Second, it didn’t attempt to re-tell the original story, instead being about a bunch of tourists (in a world where the movie The Blair Witch Project exists) who go camping in the Burkittsville woods, lose a bunch of time, and subsequently have to reconstruct what happened by reviewing footage they shot on their own consumer-grade video cameras. Not a bad conceit, really, and I think if it had been a stand-alone film it could have been really good.

(Now that I think about it, a film from the perspective of Heather, Mike, and Josh’s families, still haunted and traumatized by their children’s disappearances decades later, done in the style of a more explicitly supernatural Lake Mungo could be a really interesting sequel. Good luck getting that made, though.)

But those are smart choices. This film by and large does not make smart choices. This film, released 22 years later, attempts to hit many of the same beats as the original and do so in a found-footage format. What this means is that it ends up drawing less from the power of the original film and more from all of the cheap imitators that came after. A lot of the conceits and scenes that worked really well in the original mutated into cliché over time as producer after producer tried to replicate the originals’ magic, missing what made it good in the process.

To start, James and company all decide that they’re going to make a foray into those woods themselves and as it turns out, Lisa and Ashley are film students. Because of course they are. So Lisa’s going to make a documentary about it. And so here we have cliché #1 - there’s no reason this has to be a documentary, but that provides a pretext for the omnipresence of cameras to capture everything. It made sense in the first film because the whole story was “film students go into the woods and don’t come out.” The whole reason there was a film was that these people were in the woods to film things. But subsequent attempts at found-footage films try to take other stories and shoehorn in reasons for the protagonists to be recording everything, whether it makes sense or not. Next on the cliché list is the obligatory tech rundown, including a drone camera and miniature earpiece cameras with built-in GPS. This is another thing I see a lot in mediocre found-footage films - a lot of fuss and detail made over the big arsenal of recording equipment and multiple cameras the protagonists have.

This has never struck me as anything more than a cheat - the original film shot everything using two cameras and one mic and DAT recorder for sound. That’s it. The whole point is that our perspective is imperfect and incomplete, but a lot of films miss that point and instead do everything but find a reason for one of their characters to just happen to be wearing a Steadicam rig. And then on top of that, there’s a segment where they go out clubbing while wearing their earpiece cameras for…reasons? In The Blair Witch Project, there’s a brief segment where the three of them calibrate the cameras while they’re drinking in their motel room, but that seems to have mutated into a need to have a scene in every found-footage film where everyone’s out partying while recording and it almost never makes any sense at all. It consistently misses the point that those elements made sense in the context of the original film, and mistakes them for obligatory gestures.

Another problem with this film (common to found-footage films) is that at no point does it feel like anything but a movie. The first film worked so well - as a horror film and as an example of found-footage film - because it was naturalistic in the extreme. Dialogue was almost entirely (if not entirely) improvised, it was shot on location, the actors were only given a daily outline of what had to happen in the course of the day’s shooting. How they got there was up to them, and their environment was manipulated to make their discomfort and exhaustion real to a degree. The whole thing was closer to improvisational theater than to filmmaking. By contrast, this film was entirely scripted, and it shows. The dialogue isn’t especially wooden or anything, but it definitely sounds like dialogue and not naturally occurring conversation. The emotions don’t feel as real or as raw either, with some exceptions toward the very end, but even then it’s sort of too little, too late. It’s not impossible to write dialogue that sounds like actual conversation and it’s not impossible to get performances that feel extremely naturalistic, but it’s a lot tougher than just writing a script, and I think there’s a certain suspension of disbelief that we employ when we’re watching conventional narrative films where we don’t necessarily expect naturalistic performances and dialogue. There’s a tolerance level for a certain amount of staginess. But if what we’re watching is supposed to be raw footage pulled from an amateur’s camera? Any staginess sticks out like a sore thumb. At no point does the dialogue or the performances feel like anything but a movie.

Arguably, any given film should succeed or fail on its own merits, but not only is this film a sequel to another film and thus inviting comparison on that basis alone, it also goes out of its way to try and replicate beats and moments from the original. The pretext here is that we’re watching footage recovered from a bunch of DV tapes and video capture cards discovered out in the woods, just like in the original (and like the original, this information is communicated in stark white-on-black title cards that aren’t the only instances of homage, but they’re probably the least distracting). And just like in the original, once our protagonists get into the woods everything starts to go wrong. Some of it goes wrong in exactly the same way it did in the first film, which doesn’t really work because we’re expecting it. What’s startling the first time is anticipated the second. Some of it goes wrong in far less interesting ways than the original as well. The filmmakers don’t just stop at having unseen forces menace the protagonists, as the film goes on they also include briefly-glimpsed monsters and body horror, all slathered over with a thick layer of jump scares. A big part of why the original worked so well was because it established a mood first, and took its time doing so. As a result, even the slightest strange thing - mysterious cairns, stick figures hanging from the trees - carried with it a real sense of dread. Here, they’re just sort of set dressing, a way to say “hey, remember this?” and just in case that doesn’t do the trick, every other horror cliché you can think of gets chucked in as well. This is not a film that builds a mood so much as it just keeps turning up the volume louder and louder in an effort to scare us.

That’s yet another way in which it’s in strong contrast to the original. The Blair Witch Project was a relatively quiet film, low-key, with tension simmering gradually over its runtime so it wasn’t really until the last act that things started getting intense. It was relatively quiet visually as well - lots of long, quiet shots, shots held on people’s faces, footage of the forest itself. This is not a visually quiet film - the footage is constantly interrupted by glitches (except when it isn’t, and then it’s often shot from angles and with a steadiness that shouldn’t have been possible with the camera equipment they had, which is awfully convenient), scenes invariably end with a blast of interference, someone yelling at someone else to turn their camera off, or the camera crashing to black. Lots of the footage, especially in the third act, is shot on the run while people are bolting through the woods screaming at the top of their lungs. It ends up being more irritating and distracting than anything else, a barrage of imagery that never really coheres.

There are a couple of things it does do well, to be fair. James and company make contact with Lane and Talia, two sketchy locals who uploaded the footage in the first place, and they ask to join up as our protagonists head into the woods. There’s tension there - you’ve got four city kids who have no business being out in the woods and the two locals who take the legends about the woods very seriously. and it isn’t clear how trustworthy Lane and Talia are. The friction between the two groups works pretty well and adds some ambiguity in places that would have worked in a quieter film. .The most effective element of the film (one borrowed from the original) is the way time seems to slip out of joint the deeper they get into the woods - it’s a relatively minor element in the first film, and there was as likely to be down to increasing disorientation as anything else, but here they really lean into it in ways that work more often than they don’t. In those moments, it reminds me a little of an outdoorsy version of Grave Encounters at its best, though it also shares some climactic issues with that film as well. I think if they’d cut out some of the more blatant callbacks to the original and really made this a film about six people ending up someplace outside of time as we know it, really leaning into the desperation, isolation, and dread that come with that, then it might have worked. As it is, I think it just got included because it was in the first film (along with the cairns, the stick figures, someone who claimed to know where they were when they really didn’t, the abandoned house, all of it) and like everything else they just went bigger and louder and more obvious than the original.

At one point, a character says “we faked it because it’s real,” and I think that kind of sums up the problem. The original worked so well because its production methods emphasized realism to a degree that you don’t often find in film, and this film is very much fake in the sense of being artifice - it’s scripted, it lands on every found-footage film cliché you can think of, it leaves as little to suggestion as possible, and feels engineered from its first minutes. It’s a movie that treads the same ground that The Blair Witch Project did, but manages to forget everything that made that film so good in the first place. If it had been a conventional film narrative, well, I don’t know that it would have been good, but it would have had a fighting chance. As it is, it’s so clearly fake that it inspires nothing but annoyance.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

 

Dark Touch: Won’t Someone Think Of The Children?

It’s a time-honored technique: If you want to really freak people out, bring children into the picture. Put them in danger, put them in pain, or better yet, make them the antagonist. Nothing like a good creepy child to add value to a scary movie. Hell, we don’t even need to be talking about horror films - if you want to whip up some good old-fashioned moral panic, simply suggest that some type of film or music or literature or whatever will be dangerous for our children. The amount of self-righteous, authoritarian nonsense that gets pushed for the sake of “the children” is considerable. And that’s because it works - who wants to be the person who opposes child safety? Nobody, that’s who.

But this week isn’t really about moral panic. It’s about Dark Touch, an unsubtle exercise in formulaic nastiness that pretends to something more and fails.

It opens with sort of a false start - it’s late at night, raining, and a little girl runs out of her family’s house. She’s found outside, taken in by another family, and then her parents come to retrieve her. There’s some tense, oblique conversation, something goes unspoken and then…it’s a few years later? What was the point of that? I know I usually deride flashbacks for neatly underlining that a particular place or person is bad, and no shit, we’re watching a horror film, you don’t need to tell us bad shit is coming, but this…doesn’t even do that. It’s just a scene where a little girl runs out of her house and then gets brought back.

And then we cut to this little girl, a few years older, with her family. Her name is Niamh, and she and her family live in a small town in Ireland, far away from the big city. It’s her, her mother and father, and her infant brother. But it’s also here that the puzzling opening scene starts to make a little more sense. It’s the old story - a prosperous, middle-class family, nice house, cute kids, but when night falls, father goes into Niamh’s bedroom and locks the door. No wonder she runs away. And then, one night, it all goes wrong. Niamh screams at the top of her lungs, and the house rattles, objects shift. By the time it’s all over, Niamh’s parents are dead, crushed beneath heavy furniture, and the police find Niamh hiding in a cupboard. She clutched her brother so tight it suffocated him.

So, traumatized, Niamh is placed in the care of her neighbors, Lucas and Natalie. They have two children of their own and the memory of a daughter lost to cancer. It’s just until they get more permanent accommodations set up. This way she can keep going to school while the police look for the gang of vandals that obviously tore up her family’s house. And it all seems nice enough, initially, until one night when Lucas reaches for his belt in response to an errant child…

…and the house starts to rattle, and objects start to shift.

It is clear almost from jump where this movie is going. It’s weird that it tries to pretend at all to be anything other than what it obviously is, as if it’s as much in denial as the adults that populate the film. This is a story about a traumatized girl who can move things with her mind, set against a backdrop of pervasive child abuse. From the opening scene, this is a film crawling with children - infants, toddlers, pre-teens - in almost every scene. This is a small town with a lot of kids, and it becomes pretty clear that a lot of these kids are getting beaten or molested and that nobody talks about it. And now one of them has supernatural powers. So it’s also pretty clear that this isn’t about survival, it’s about revenge.

So no, there’s no mystery here - not in the soundtrack, which fills most of the space in the film with minor-key piano or buzzing ambience or swells, all intended to communicate that this is very sinister and spooky. It’s not a film that is content to let moments be. Nor is there any mystery in the basic narrative - it’s clear very early on exactly what has happened and who’s responsible no matter how much the characters in the film look the other way. What we’re left with offers no revelation, no actual horror. There’s nothing to discover, it’s very clear pretty early on exactly what’s going to happen, so there’s no tension - it’s just a matter of watching everything play out and wondering how far they’re going to push it. And as the film goes on, everything feels less and less grounded in plausibility (and the contrast between the very ugly reality of child abuse and supernatural powers makes the whole thing feel trivialized) and more and more like an excuse to do shocking things.

The film itself is equally obvious. The cinematography leans heavily into shadowy interiors and dark exteriors with few sources of external light, and the dialogue is extremely stilted and expository throughout. Combined with the intrusive soundtrack, it all has a real movie-of-the-week feel, where absolutely nothing is left to mood or inference that can’t be spelled out in the most obvious way. It does succeed to some degree early on in creating a very oppressive atmosphere by emphasizing abuse’s many forms and making it almost omnipresent, but it doesn’t last - as the movie goes on it becomes less interested in the cost of violence against children or the very real horror associated with it, and more and more interested in a supernatural riff on the “bad seed” film that uses the very serious topic of child abuse as a rationalization for violence, and that feels kind of gross to me.

It’s not that I have a problem with provocative or transgressive filmmaking in horror, far from it. But in my opinion, if you’re going to traffic in subject matter closer to taboos, you need to earn it. You need to treat the characters with a certain amount of respect, treat the topic with the gravity it deserves, and this film just doesn’t. Instead of locating the horror in the experience of victims of abuse, it ultimately uses that abuse merely as justification for everything that comes afterward. The humanity of its protagonists and antagonists alike gets lost along the way, ultimately discarded in favor of empty, escalating atrocity. It feels less like an articulation of trauma, or even of a small community’s complacency in the things going on behind closed doors, and more like an attempt to shock by pivoting all of the violence around children - either as the victims or the perpetrators - without ever really reckoning with (or even tapping into) the impact that either of those things actually has. It’s like I said, if what you’re bringing to the party is a load of bullshit, just bring up “the children” and hell, maybe that will get you over.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Game Over: Nope, Not Even A Metaphor

Every now and then I try to expand my horizons a little as I write this thing. I know for a fact that I have my wheelhouse (pretty much anything A24 distributes), and I’m very aware of the sort of stuff I don’t like, but I also know that there’s always the possibility that I’ll get stuck in a rut, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised in the past when I’ve pushed myself out of my comfort zone. Every now and then I’ll try to break one of my internal “rules” that I use when I’m flipping through movies looking for something to watch, just to see what happens. It occurred to me this last weekend that most of my viewing history lies heavily in North America and the UK, with a smattering of Japanese or Korean horror films. There are exceptions, but not many, so I went looking for something from elsewhere in the world. Broadening your horizons is a good thing.

Game Over, however, is not really a good thing. It’s a ludicrous, confused mishmash of stories that don’t really work together, with some pretty gross sexual politics to boot. I’m going to end up pretty much spoiling this one entirely, because it’s difficult to explain what’s wrong with it without getting into details. And there’s a lot wrong with it.

The film opens with a photo of a woman, with a number scratched into the corner of the photo.  We cut to a shot of this woman outside of her apartment, paying for a food delivery. The point of view is from across the street. Then it’s from just outside her window. Then inside the apartment, as nightvision. Someone is stalking her. And then they’re killing her, beheading her and burning her body.

Cut to a title card that says “One Year Later” and…another story entirely. We’re introduced to Sapna, a video game designer. She’s got a really nice place in Chennai, with a gated entrance, a security guard, and a maid, a woman named Kalamma who frets over her. She works on designing games, she spends a lot of time playing Pac-Man. She’s got a tattoo on the inside of her wrist, a pixelated heart with a game controller inside of it. She doesn’t sleep much. She doesn’t like leaving the house, she won’t return her parents’ calls. She really doesn’t like the dark.

And now, on New Year’s Day, she’s starting to suffer mysterious pains in her wrist, right where the tattoo is. Exactly one year after getting it. One year later. 

What does this have to do with the opening? Who can say? At least at first, this appears to be a story about how Sapna is more or less a prisoner in her own home for reasons that aren’t really clear at first, and the mysterious pain that may or may not be related to her tattoo. The first act is mostly just Sapna not wanting to talk to her parents, wondering why her wrist hurts, and going to therapy (where she goes through VR sessions intended to treat her fear of the dark, and strongly resemble a video game), punctuated by flashbacks to the events of a year before. When, as it eventually turns out, Sapna was abducted and sexually assaulted on New Year’s Day, on her way home from getting the tattoo. The anniversary is hitting her hard. 

And this is where one of my biggest problems with the movie comes in. I think it’s possible to use difficult, uncomfortable subject matter in horror and to use it well, but this…this ain’t it. At no point does Sapna’s pain and trauma and all of their consequences register as anything more than a prop, a contrivance to set up the events of the final act. She’s a woman in a country immersed in institutionalized rape culture - to the point that her parents effectively blame her for what happened to her - and it’s lingered on more than is necessary for the story, culminating in a pretty nasty sequence in a café, where Sapna discovers that her assault was recorded and distributed online when two bros at an adjacent table start arguing about whether or not she’s “the girl in the video” and bring up the footage on their smartphones. Sapna is suicidal by this point, but it’s not treated with any respect or gravity at all, it’s just there so an attempt can leave her wheelchair-bound during the climax. It all feels distastefully glib and more than a little prurient.

So there’s that, but then there’s my other big problem with this film - it careens from one narrative to another with little regard for any kind of through-line. If the first act is about establishing why Sapna is like she is, the second act is what seems to be a…ghost story? Apparently (speaking of contrivances), there was a mix-up at the tattoo studio where Sapna got her work done, and she got tattooed with ink containing ashes from…the remains of the woman murdered at the beginning of the movie. Maybe this is why she’s experiencing this mysterious the woman who was murdered at the beginning of the film. That also happened a year ago, and so maybe Sapna is experiencing her mysterious pain…because…ghost? It’s not really clear, we just find out that her name was Amudha, that she got tattooed at the same shop, and her mother came in after her death with the intent of getting a memorial tattoo that contained some of her daughter’s ashes but whoops! There’s a long film-within-a-film sequence as we (via Sapna) watch a tribute video Amudha’s mother put together after her murder celebrating her life and the cancer that she beat back into remission not one, but three times. Amudha got three hearts tattooed on her arm - one for each time her cancer went back into remission. 

And that’s going to be important, because in the third act it all comes together in the weirdest, most artificial way possible as the killer from the opening targets Sapna. Except it isn’t one killer, it’s three - a gang of men in identical masks and jumpsuits who apparently just go around murdering women, maybe because they got tattoos? That’s not really clear either, though Sapna’s parents are weirdly shaming about her having a tattoo, suggesting that it marks her as less virtuous and so maybe she was kind of asking for what happened to her and it’s all just fucking gross so let’s get back to the third act, which, if the first was half-assed psychological horror (it was) and the second was a half-assed ghost story (it was) , then the third act is a half-assed siege film that goes entirely off the rails as the initially metaphorical becomes really literal in just the most baffling way.

See, Sapna’s incessantly playing Pac-Man at the beginning. This is a game in which you are relentlessly pursued, and you’re constantly moving around a maze trying to avoid ghosts. Now, in the actual game, there are four ghosts, but in the version Sapna is shown playing, there are only three. There’s also the iconography of the heart - in video games, hearts can symbolize the amount of life or health a playable avatar has. Okay, with me so far? All of this metaphor become skull-clutchingly literal as the three killers (like the three ghosts in the version of Pac-Man she plays) stalk her through her own house, and now all of a sudden there are three hearts on her wrist, not one, like Amudha had, and so what happens next is that either Sapna and Kalamma gets caught and murdered, and then Sapna wakes up back at the start of the night with one less heart on her wrist just like in a video game. It makes no fucking sense in the context of anything that came before, except maybe in that it makes the first two acts seem even more artificial than they already did. Really, it just seems like an excuse to murder Sapna and Kalamma over and over again, prolonging their suffering in a way that seems downright sadistic. Basically, Sapna wakes back up, knows what to do differently the next time, then takes another shot at it, but each instance involves long, lingering takes on violence against her and Kalamma. 

So why is Sapna, as a character, traumatized? Because the filmmakers need something to make her helpless. When the psychological trauma doesn’t do, she attempts suicide and ends up with both legs badly broken so now she’s in a wheelchair with physical trauma as well, on top of parents who essentially blame her for her own rape. The bit with the ashes is, I guess, meant to either be something inspirational (though it comes off more maudlin than anything) or maybe that’s why she has “multiple lives” now, for…reasons? It really feels like the filmmakers had ideas for three different movies and couldn’t decide which one to make, so they made all of them instead, stitching them together with the thinnest of pretexts and using a genuinely upsetting subject as the springboard for a series of things that needed to happen to make the movie work. It’s shoddy storytelling and disrespectful to people who’ve gone through what they put their characters through. Suffering and trauma used as a prop, trauma from rape no less, in a film that has no idea what story it wants to tell. 

I’m not somebody who watches horror films to be entertained, really - I want to be unsettled, disturbed, moved to feel something I wouldn’t otherwise, and so I don’t have any problem with difficult or “problematic” subject matter. But, for Christ’s sake, make it mean something, and treat it with the respect it deserves. Don’t just treat it like a plot device. I definitely felt something when this film was over, but it was mostly just baffled, and a little mad at what I’d just seen. What a waste.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix

Demonic: As Generic As Its Title

Honestly, I don’t know which is worse - an actively bad horror movie or a mediocre one. I have definitely seen my share of both over the last nine-ish years or so, and it seems like the obvious answer would be actively bad ones. You know, because they’re bad. Wooden acting, lousy writing, effects that fall apart under the merest glance, plot twists you can see coming a mile away, you name it, it’s out there. But then I get to thinking: I’ve seen some truly terrible movies that at least had some kind of energy to them, however misbegotten. Some kind of earnestness, however misplaced. Mediocre films are often in their mediocrity highly calculated, films that know which buttons to push and maybe even have some idea why, but don’t do anything beyond that. And I think I find those exercises in button-pushing somehow more offensive, because they display a contempt for their audience that offends me. Again, I realize that film - especially genre film - is a commercial exercise to one degree or another, but it’s possible to make a film with profit in mind and still come away with something interesting. 

I recall an interview I read with the late Herschell Gordon Lewis regarding the making of Blood Feast, and he basically said that Blood Feast was an attempt to crank something as sensational as possible out for the late night drive-in crowd, and to do so as quickly as possible and as cheaply as possible to maximize return on investment. Lewis’ other big business was direct-mail marketing. The man was not an auteur, But Blood Feast is a fucking berserk fever dream of a film. After as certain point, intent matters less than the final product. Art can come from mercenary motives, just as the noblest of intentions can result in insufferable, stultifying bullshit. And at least either of those will leave an impression. But mediocrity - the wedding of technical competence and cynical calculation to a lack of imagination - that doesn’t yield anything that makes any contribution at all.

And that brings us to Demonic, a slick exercise in mediocrity, as characterless and generic as its title.

The opening credits and title happen over a barrage of newspaper articles and television news clips about a tragic murder-suicide at a home in rural Louisiana. A young woman attempted to conduct a séance and ended up murdering everyone there before hanging herself. There were some intimations that the séance was an attempt not to contact the dead, but to raise something…DEMONIC. End credits.

In the present day, an older man goes peeking around an abandoned house in the woods - the one from the opening credits. The chain holding the door closed has been cut, and he cautiously makes his way inside. He discovers blood on the floor and immediately bails to call the cops. So, you know, points there for handling it like that. The cop who gets the call is Detective Mark Lewis, who is busy buying a bottle of wine for the date he’s about to have to call off. He’s the closest officer and duty calls. Detective Lewis pushes a little further into the house, discovers four bodies throughout the house…and one of them is still alive. He locks the scene down and calls his erstwhile date, criminal psychologist Elizabeth Klein. There are three dead people, two missing, and only one who can explain what happened. Lewis needs Klein to find out what the survivor - a young man named John- can tell them. Cut to “One Week Earlier.”

One week earlier, John and his girlfriend Michelle are getting interviewed by a guy named Sam, who is part of a team of amateur ghost hunters convinced that this house, the site of these murders, is haunted. John has troubling visions, dreams where his mother is inside the house, telling him to let go. He has some kind of connection to the house, and so Sam, along with audiovisual tech Donny, occult expert Jules, and mastermind Bryan, want John and Michelle to come with them to investigate the house and record some potential paranormal shenanigans. Oh, also, Bryan is Michelle’s ex-boyfriend, and he’s an absolute dick. They’re going to try a séance, to communicate with whatever spirits dwell in this house where five people died after…conducting a séance.

What could go wrong?

The film is structured quite a bit like Temple, another recent disappointment: Start with the police discovering something bad has happened, then spend the rest of the film bouncing back and forth between the investigation in the present day, and the events in the past that led up to the bad thing. To its credit, it’s much more coherent than Temple was, and the characters more believable as people for the most part. And just as it jumps back and forth between the past and present, it jumps between third and first-person perspectives, courtesy of the cameras the ghost hunters had on them at the time and does so reasonably well. The recovered footage mostly looks like recovered footage and is well-integrated into the story. But this narrative structure does serve to kill what little momentum the film might have, though, and though it doesn’t break believability, it also doesn’t add much.

What it does add mostly is a tendency toward the obvious. It’s the story of this detective and this psychologist trying to put together what happened, relying on one person’s testimony. So you sort of know that there’s going to be some kind of shocking twist or revelation at the very end, either the detective or the psychologist will discover something that means the other is in danger as everything we’ve assumed is upended by this new discovery. And yeah, that’s exactly what happens - you might not be able to anticipate the particulars, but it’s not hard to see the broad strokes coming. You kind of land on the expectation that it’s going one of two or maybe three possible outcomes at most pretty early on, and it doesn’t really do anything unexpected. When it does finally resolve, it cheats by using a really blunt unreliable narrator device that sort of comes down to “we showed you things happening this way but ah-ha, it actually happened this way the whole time!” It’s sort of overstuffed at its climax, hurrying to cram a bunch of details into the third act. The result doesn’t feel scary, it feels like a plot being resolved. An observant viewer has seen this sort of story before, and there’s always the hope that maybe it’s going to get switched up or subverted somehow, but it doesn’t. A bunch of people went into a house with a dark past and tried to hold a ritual that would put them in touch with the spirit world and whaddaya know, shit goes south in a hurry.

So narratively, there are no surprises here. It’s put together with a solid amount of skill, however. It’s reasonably well-acted (with a couple of lead actors who are definitely working below their pay grade here), made up of mostly believable characters, some more sympathetic than others. Lewis is definitely the macho results-oriented detective, but he’s competent and professional and not without charm. Klein doesn’t fall too far into forensic psychologist cliché and gets believably freaked out when stuff gets weird. The ill-fated Scooby Gang aren’t especially fleshed-out as people but they are distinct without being reduced to caricature. The friction between John and Bryan is definitely there but never devolves into macho posturing to the degree it could, and Bryan shows just enough humanity to leaven his otherwise relentless assholishness a little. It’s like there are actual characters there, just under the surface, but we’ll never get to see them because this isn’t the kind of movie that does character study, like, at all. The cinematography is good as well, the house mostly looks like an abandoned property and not a set, though on reflection it’s probably too clean for a house that’s been abandoned for twenty years in Louisiana - there should be a lot more rot and decay given the temperature and humidity. Which feels like an oddly specific thing to notice, even to me, but as I was thinking about it afterward I kept coming back to how well-preserved everything was for a house spitting distance from a bayou. It looked like it had been abandoned for a couple of months, not a couple of decades, and that stuck with me. 

So this is a film that is not in any way inept. What it is, however, is obvious. It leans too much into its music - there’s not a scene that it doesn’t score ominously, and every scare is punctuated with shrieking strings or loud, hollow booms. It’s not at all content to just let things happen in the background, everything is underscored for the viewer as if we won’t know something is scary unless the film shoves THIS IS SCARY right in our faces. And it lacks imagination on that front as well. There’s no real atmosphere to this film - the abandoned house is an abandoned house, but it doesn’t feel especially foreboding. It doesn’t do any work in the details or in the background, instead resorting pretty much exclusively to jump scares to create any tension at all. They’re mostly well-timed, but that doesn’t make them any less obvious or manipulative. I couldn’t help but compare this film to Hell House LLC at times, because even though that film had its problems, what it had going for it was a really skillful use of recurring motifs and strange things happening in the background and slowly escalating dread built out of those little details. This film’s never really scary, just startling. There’s more to horror than just grabbing someone from behind and yelling BOO! in their ear, but this film doesn’t seem to know that.

And so that’s kind of the film’s whole deal - it’s cleanly executed on a technical level, but at every point, the parts are clearly visible. There’s no real mood or vibe or atmosphere, just an assemblage of clichés - you’ve got the abandoned house, the remains of a creepy ritual, a room with a bunch of dolls in it for some reason, a music box that starts playing by itself, objects moving by themselves, lights and cameras that stop working at opportune moments, and what little tension it manages is due entirely to jump scares. The protagonists are a little better than cannon fodder, but only a little, and because the whole thing is so obviously calculated and formulaic from the get-go, the end evokes little more than “ah, I bet this is so they can make a sequel.” There’s no heart to it, no real sense of tension, unease, horror, peril, anxiety, anything. It is deeply mechanical.

Once I’m done watching something, I’ll look it up on IMDB for details, trivia, etc. And one bit of trivia for this film leaps out at me, regarding a scene where Klein is reading something out of a book discovered in the house. A freeze-frame reveals the following text in the book: 

“The Seal of the Left Hand Path is an occult symbol that means all sorts of plot relevant things, soon to be revealed to the audience in dialog, because God knods [sic], this screenshot won't play for long enough for anyone to read it. Unless they pause. But let's hope they don't..." 

That’s the film in a nutshell. It’s an empty, calculated series of clichés that knows the details don’t matter, because the audience won’t pay very careful attention. They’ll be startled by the jump scares and call it good. It’s product, start to finish, as generic as its title, and supremely contemptuous of its audience. Fuck this mediocre nonsense.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix

Assimilate: The CW Presents Invasion Of The Body Snatchers

Usually I don’t go in for rating the films I watch on Netflix, especially since they moved from an out-of-five model to a dichotomous thumbs up/thumbs down model, but I need to change that. They’re using these data to formulate recommendation percentages for me, and so, based on the results that led to this week’s film, I really need to start telling them what I do and do not like.

This is because Assimilate came with a 96% rating for me, and boy, was it ever not close to 96%. It’s sloppily-constructed, derivative trash.

We begin with a prologue of sorts, in which a young woman is attempting to contact her mother via cellphone, but can’t get her mother to pick up. Outside, human figures howl and shriek and run past her windows. The young woman is panicked, probably because of all the howling and shrieking, and eventually the figures break in and come for her. Apart from possibly giving away the ending, in some tenuous way. this sequence has no connection to the rest of the film. It’s never mentioned or referenced again.

Cut immediately to morning in a small Missouri town, and a close-up on some leaves that have odd little bugs crawling all over them. But never mind that, let’s meet our protagonists! Zach and Randy are budding content creators who - thanks to Zach’s nebulously-defined skills with technology and Randy’s frankly obnoxious personality - are starting a web series about what life in a small Missouri town is really like. Mostly this seems to consist of them wandering around town, striking up highly artificial conversations with people they know while conspicuously pointing buttonhole spy cams at them in an utterly failed attempt to be covert. What this means for the film is that we periodically get shots from the point of view of these little cameras, but not in any way that makes sense or communicates a specific point of view. It seems to just be there as a pretext for some quasi-found-footage imagery, but the end result is more confusing than anything else.

But, anyway, Zach and Randy and then Kayla. Zach is secretly sweet on Kayla but they’ve been friends for years, so Randy keeps urging Zach to do something about it and Zach keeps being reluctant. Kayla’s got a little brother named Joey, and Joey’s just sort of there. There’s the town’s pastor, who is just as awkwardly chummy as you’d expect the town’s pastor to be, there’s the sheriff, and there’s a neighbor lady who is sort of a free spirit. Just another day in small-town Missouri.

At least, until mysterious insect bites start causing people to act…not like themselves.

If that seems abrupt, well, that’s because it is. To cut to the chase, this is (in case you couldn’t tell from either the title of this film or the title of this post), a variation on the body-snatcher film, where some intrusive outside force begins to possess or create duplicates of the people around the characters, with the intent of replacing the entire population. These can make for really good movies - there’s something very unsettling about the erasure of identity and individuality, along with not knowing who to trust, and the feeling that everyone and everything is closing in around you.

But for a film like this to work. there needs to be a gradual escalation of tension and stakes. You start with little things - people acting out of sorts in small ways, or having odd things happen in the background. The scope, extent, and nature of the problem is revealed gradually, so that by the time the protagonists realize what’s going on - how big it is, how deep it goes, and how utterly alien and sinister its origins - it’s close to too late. Zombies are scary (if they still are at all) because they look just human enough for us to want to respond to them as human, but corrupted and wrong enough that we know that we shouldn’t. It’s the same sort of thing in body-snatcher films, whether it’s the extraterrestrials of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers or the androids of The Stepford Wives, it’s discomfiting to see familiar faces gone completely flat and blank. And unlike zombie films, there’s some kind of organizing intelligence behind it all, which makes it even more sinister.

See, that’s what you want to do if you want to make it a good film. What you don't do, is what the filmmakers did here.  First, the film doesn’t really ever establish a tone. From the opening prologue onward, the filmmakers just sort of fling events at the screen in sequence. Hey, here’s a woman being threatened! Now here’s a small town somewhere else! These two guys are wacky! Now someone’s gotten bitten by a bug! Now everyone in town is acting strangely all of a sudden!  The tone shifts on a dime - one moment, the abovementioned neighbor is getting bit by some mysterious insect, and then all of a sudden all of the major figures in town are gathering in the church basement at night out of nowhere. There’s no gradual sense of escalation, no shift from one person to another, just everything’s fine and then suddenly it isn’t. This means there’s no menace or paranoia to it. Body-snatcher movies need some kind of baseline - it’s hard to establish that things aren’t normal unless you know what normal looks like, and this movie doesn’t bother with normal. It just goes from zero to “everything’s weird” in a matter of minutes, like it knows what beats it needs to hit, but entirely ignores the idea that you need space between those beats to set them up.

The other thing body-snatcher films rely on is the reveal of the threat’s nature, when the things that look like your friends and loved ones and neighbors and authorities are revealed to be shells for something…other. It’s another way it’s similar to zombie films, except with zombie films the tension is between the roughly human characteristics and the obvious monstrosity. Like, that person is our friend, but somehow that makes seeing them with half of their face missing as they shamble towards us even worse. In the body-snatcher film, they may be acting strangely, but they still look just like our friend, and it’s when the façade is torn away that the real horror comes in. In this film,  the potential for body horror is, with a couple of exceptions, largely unexplored - mostly it’s just actors staring blankly, which isn’t all that strange or unsettling by itself given how little we get to know any of these people beforehand. For all we know, this is just how they are.

I think some of this is explainable in terms of budget. This film was obviously made on the cheaper side, with production values hovering around mid-tier made-for-TV-movie levels, to match the acting, both broad and wooden at the same time.  There are lots of shots of little bugs swarming everywhere, but also these intercuts of cheap-looking, digitally generated spores floating through the air for...reasons? Late in the film, we get a couple of looks at the creatures responsible, and they’re pretty obvious digital effects. At one point, our protagonists discover a pod with a newly-hatched version of one character’s mother in it, but that’s about it, and you get the sense it’s because they didn’t have the money to create more pods and related practical effects. I’m not going to condemn a film just for being made on the cheap (Night of the Living Dead was shot on a shoestring, and it’s a stone classic), or equate the presence of elaborate effects with quality, but in this instance, the shoddiness and paucity of effects work at a point in the film where the nature of the threat is being revealed ends up calling attention to itself. Effects work needs to be believable, and it needs to communicate something other than “we could only afford one shot like this.” It’s no sin to work cheap, but overreach or lack of imagination can undo a lot of what you’re trying to accomplish.

The result is a massive disappointment. Numerous jump scares don’t substitute for dread or unease, there’s no cohesive story, just all of a sudden everyone starts acting strangely and only our protagonists know the truth. It culminates in a siege different from any number of zombie movies only in that you need to do a lot less makeup work when the conceit is “clones” instead of “zombies.” Well, it feels like it should culminate with that siege, but there’s still too much movie to go after that. From a pacing standpoint, it peaks too early and then lingers too long . Everything is obvious, everything is foregrounded, there’s no tension, it meanders, and is so transparent in its intent as to be almost insulting.  I hate reducing my evaluation of a film to “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” but goddamn, if it means Netflix doesn’t recommend any more stinkers like this, I’ve got thumbs for days.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available from Amazon