Bitesized Nightmares: Exactly What It Says On The Tin

In my continued exploration of indie horror film on YouTube, I decided that this week I’d take a look at the work of Kyle Edward Ball, who would eventually take what he learned making videos for his channel Bitesized Nightmares and turn it into Skinamarink, a masterclass in mood and minimalist dread. The name of the channel tells you everything you need to know – the films are very short (mostly somewhere between three and six minutes each), and they’re based on nightmares submitted by viewers of the channel. It’s really easy to see the genesis of Skinamarink in these videos, which rely largely on ambient sound, slow tracking shots alternating with long takes, and grainy, blown-out cinematography with stark divisions between light and shadow. Narration and music play more of a role here than they did in Skinamarink, but otherwise it’s really easy to see these shorts as proofs of concept. There are 39 videos in the series (along with related material), so I decided to arbitrarily sample ten videos. If this sounds like your thing, there’s plenty more to watch beyond these selections.

Nightmare 1

This film feels like the thesis for the whole thing – it’s short, with some narration describing the dream, and  just a slow tracking shot that ends in a mysterious figure. There aren’t any jump scares or musical stings, just quiet, inexplicable dread that’s maybe undercut a little at the end by…well, it’s not exactly a jump scare, but it’s sort of an unnecessary startle that looks fake enough to break the mood. There are a lot of elements here that will recur through the other videos, and in retrospect this does feel like a filmmaker who is maybe not yet as confident in their tools as they will eventually become.

Nightmare 5: Eyes

The structure of this one is pretty similar to Nightmare 1 - narration sets the scene, and the visuals are mostly just a long tracking shot down a long, dimly lit hallway. But music and sound design do a lot of good work here (it’s worth wearing headphones while you watch these) toward making the scene feel menacing, and, just when you think it’s over, it’s not. It’s not intensely scary, but there’s a nice jolt to it.

Nightmare 9: Two Doors

At this point, I feel like I’m starting to see some growth, like Ball is stretching his legs a little and incorporating some new elements. It opens with some moody exterior shots of a house at dusk, and tells its story by using light and shadow to convey the impression of moving figures. At this point, what’s really coming through is the way nightmares are often inexplicable – you don’t know why things are happening, just that they are, and even if they don’t make a lot of sense logically, the things that are happening have some kind of terrible importance. They may not make sense, but there’s still a feeling of danger.

Nightmare 13: Witch

Here is where I start to really see the inclusion of the garish, blown-out color that characterized much of Skinamarink. This one is about a child in peril and a mysterious long-haired figure, shot in sickly greens from a low angle, as if our point of view is that of someone is hiding under a bed. The limited perspective also ramps up the tension – you can’t see what’s going on, you can’t know what’s going on outside of what little you can see, so anything could happen at any moment. Closing your eyes doesn’t help, because you know the figure is still there and you’re pretty sure something bad is going to happen to the child. But as in all of these, there’s not a lot of closure or exposition.

Nightmare 17: Dinner

This is the most cryptic, and creepiest one of the bunch up to this point – a slow tracking shot on a dollhouse (that appears to be watched by at least one indistinct figure) transitions into an actual house interior, where a figure mostly hidden by shadows gestures for us to come in. A little bit of setup ends in a nice little jab that, if overdone would have been a jump scare, but in this instance just puts a little sting into it before a macabre closing line. It’s closer to more conventional horror than the others, but not to a point that feels overdone or contrived.

Nightmare 20: Distorted

This one is a tableau that makes people sitting and watching television into just one of the creepiest things ever, through a use of distorted audio paired with equally distorted facial expressions. The end result reminds me of something David Lynch might do more than anything else. I don’t know if Ball was getting better over time (I mean, probably) or what, but this one and Nightmare 17 both actually got under my skin a little. It’s also a pretty good showcase for the important of editing and rhythm, since to the extent that there’s a formula, a lot of it comes down to long slow or still shots interrupted by a change in perspective at just the right moment, and timing it for maximum impact really does seem like a delicate, precise thing. Which is, I think, a big part of what makes Skinamarink such a success. It takes the idea of making small things very disturbing to its limits, and I feel like I’m watching Ball really getting comfortable with his tools by this point.

Nightmare 24: Mom

The title sort of made me go “ah, geez,” because nightmares involving a mother are gonna be especially creepy, and this one delivers. Like in Nightmare 17, the narration is an integral part of the experience instead of table-setting, and it’s got a really good closing shot that makes excellent good use of a partially closed door with only darkness beyond it. I never really thought about how scary hands could be until I started watching these shorts.

Nightmare 28: Doll

This one’s impressive if only for the way it manages to take a bunch of things that by themselves aren’t that creepy – some stop-motion of a paper doll being constructed, a close up on a sleeping face, and the sound of children laughing – and combine them in a way that ends up being really unnerving. There isn’t a lot of narration, this one is carried mostly by the imagery, but there’s just a little bit at the end that adds a nice chill without actually explaining anything. It’s almost a cliché that our own imagination is going to come up with much worse things than anyone can show us, but this one strikes me as a pretty good argument for its validity.

Nightmare 32: Cold Hand

This one is a bit slight, but it does a very good job of building a lot of tension through stillness. A faceless figure sitting at the end of a bed in a dimly lit room is already unsettling, but when the shot holds on them for an uncomfortably long time, it’s even moreso. The narration comes in late, and layers in enough detail to make up for visuals that, at this point, feel maybe a little familiar. It also manages to make snoring sort of menacing, which I thought was interesting.

Nightmare 35: Machine

This is easily the most abstract of the bunch. There’s some introductory narration, but the visuals are pretty much all texture and light, with a shot of an outstretched arm and some medicine bottles linking the visuals and the narration. It doesn’t have the tension that the last few did, but it’s oblique enough  that you feel like you’re getting a window onto someone’s very private fears. It also plays with the format that’s been established up to this point so that what you will have come to assume is the end gets upended for a shot no less abstract than the rest, that again gets held a little longer than is comfortable. It gives the whole thing a feeling of uncertainty, like any of the “rules” of the format can be broken.

Any of these, by themselves, would just be a nicely spooky morsel, but if you watch a bunch back-to-back, it has the same effect that Skinamarink did – it accumulates, so that even though no one moment is a “scare,” per se, over time the tension builds and builds and builds until you’re sure that whatever releases it is going to just make you scream. Even though for a lot of these I found myself thinking that it was well-done but maybe not that scary, I realized about halfway through that I was sort of looking off to the side of the screen, as if I was afraid of what I’d see if I looked right at it.  Like Skinamarink, either you’re on this wavelength or you aren’t, and if you aren’t you’ll probably find a lot of these shorts sort of dull or pointless. But if Skinamarink got under your skin, these will too, for all the same reasons.

Bitesized Nightmares on YouTube

Three Short Films By Curry Barker: Between Life And Death

Last month, I watched a short film called Milk & Serial, and it was good enough to get me rethinking my general dismissiveness toward YouTube as a source of original horror filmmaking. It was a sharp, vicious little piece of found-footage horror featuring some surprisingly strong performances, and it looks like a lot of it was the work of a young man named Curry Barker, who wrote, directed, edited, and co-starred in it. My interest was piqued, and since watching it I’d been meaning to check out some of his other work. He does sketch comedy, but he’s made a few other short films as well, so I thought I’d take a look at three of them this week. Some of them are stronger than others, but I’m impressed with what I’ve seen.

There are a few elements that tie these three films - Enigma, Warnings, and The Chair - together. They’re all about the space between life and death, and a vein of deadpan absurdity runs through all of them to one degree or another, as all three feature protagonists who are having difficulty grappling with some element of adult life. Whether it’s responsibility, or the need for human contact, or the need to be fully present in a relationship, all of these films have at their center men whose world is unraveling around them, and who face their circumstances with varying levels of exasperation. They’re less terrified and more puzzled and annoyed, but not to a degree that’s overtly comic. There are definite moments of wry black humor, but I don’t know that I’d call any of these comedies. These are ordinary people in extraordinary situations, and none of them are what you’d call heroic.

They’re all small productions, and two of them are very much just Barker and some of his regular collaborators shooting in one or two locations, but there’s a real sense of restraint and a willingness to build tension through small moments, carefully composed shots and impressionistic editing. There’s a refreshing lack of jump-scares or the usual premises, and it’s clear that Barker knows if you set things up correctly, then even a little detail - like a note, or a blurry figure in the background - can go a long way toward setting the mood.

Enigma

This film opens on squalor. A young man is kneeled over his toilet, vomiting, while empty bottles, fast-food wrappers, and other garbage lies scattered all over the place. This is Adam, and he’s having trouble being a functional adult. He doesn’t leave his apartment unless he has to, orders food in a lot, and is falling out of touch with his friends and family. He has regrets, he wonders where his life went wrong, and all the while he’s scrolling through his phone, looking at all of his friends on social media as they party and figure out how they’re going to kill themselves before the world ends, in slightly less than a week.

This is a melancholy story, told from the point of view of a sad guy for whom even the end of the world isn’t enough motivation to get out and live. Adam sort of wanders through the last days on Earth, making excuses for why he can’t go out, remaining a prisoner of his own self-doubt and guilt. It strikes a good balance between the enormity of what’s coming (a countdown to the end is cleverly inserted as bits of background scenery) and the way life goes on regardless – people keep delivering pizzas, people keep working behind a register, while others get out and make the best of what’s left. Some think it’s more of the same catastrophizing that’s been with us for decades, some think it’s a hoax to cull the population and make purveyors of assisted suicide rich, others are just vibing, whatever comes will come. As is often the case with stories like these, the end of the world is an opportunity to examine how we live and the importance of human connection. So in that sense there isn’t anything really all that unusual here, and it’s the least scary of the three, but there are nice moments of deadpan humor alongside pathos that serve the story well and keep us empathetic. I wouldn’t call it a black comedy…more of a dark gray comedy?

Warnings

It’s a late night at the end of what was probably a pretty wild Halloween party, and Sean’s walking out to his car, discussing how he almost got hit in the street by another car. When he reaches his car, he notices a note stuck to the window above the driver’s side door handle…

“I am begging you to stop.”

Needless to say, Sean gets freaked out and tries to ask his friends Kendal and Regan what’s happening, but they have no idea what he’s talking about. He’s a little confused, a little disoriented, and when he goes back out to his car, he finds another note, this time on the inside of his car. And he’s starting to hear voices.

This one is a creepy little psychological horror film centering on Sean’s attempts to understand what’s going on as the world around him gets stranger and stranger. It does a lot with very little, relying on the conceit of the notes and the way that everything becomes increasingly more disjointed the more Sean tries to understand what’s happening.  There’s nicely paced uneasiness throughout, combined with little bits of visual wit that creates this nicely discordant note – it’s funny and strange at the same time, and the aftertaste from the strange lingers a little longer than the funny does. There are some nightmare sequences (or are they?) that give everything a little bite as well, and the filmmakers do a good job of keeping us guessing about where it’s all going. It’s maybe a little slight, but definitely falls in horror territory and has its share of unsettling moments.

The Chair

Reese is out running some errands - getting dinner and flowers for his girlfriend Julie to celebrate their six-month anniversary - when he notices a chair sitting on the sidewalk. It looks to be in good shape, so he decides to grab it and take it home with him. As soon as Julie sees it, she hates it. It doesn’t go with the rest of the décor. It’s creepy. It makes her nervous. It feels evil, and she wants Reese to get it out of the house. So, in a fit of pique, Reese stubbornly sits down in the chair…

..and the next thing he knows, he’s back on the street where he picked up the chair in the moments before he puts it in the car. And somehow an entire week has gone by.

This one is more ambitious than the other two, and also the most effective as a horror film. It’s a bigger production with a cast outside of the usual ensemble, shot in a wider aspect ratio than the others. It’s a disorienting story that starts off being about a diffusely creepy chair, but soon reveals itself as a story about the unreliability of memory and what it must be like when it starts to fail. Abrupt, fragmented editing keeps us as off-balance as the protagonist, and real events wind around hallucinatory reverie, offering a few different explanations for what’s going on, but to its credit, the film doesn’t commit to one explanation over the other. There’s a cohesive visual vocabulary, which suggests there is some underlying logic to what’s happening, but it’s ultimately elusive. We know enough to know something is going on, but not enough to see it clearly, which is a wonderfully unsettling feeling. There’s also some really nice use of composition alongside the editing, it’s probably the least humorous of the bunch, and even though the end sort of fell flat for me, it was an enjoyably uneasy experience and probably makes the clearest argument yet for Barker having the sort of filmmaking chops that you’d like to see get more of a budget and wider distribution.

I have to admit, as much as I know intellectually that filmmaking technology has gotten better and more affordable over time, it’s been tough for me to take the leap to recognizing that there’s some really good work being made by young (don’t say it) auteurs (oh dammit, you said it) on a platform that I’m used to thinking of as sort of a video junk drawer. The Philippou brothers made the move from YouTube to the big screen, and I think if there’s any justice in the world, filmmakers like Kane Parsons and Curry Barker will be next, because they’re sure as hell making stuff that’s fresher and scarier than yet another Conjuring sequel.

Enigma: IMDB | YouTube
Warnings: IMDB | YouTube
The Chair: IMDB | YouTube

Siksa Kubur: Death Is Not The End

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Chakushin Ari: Ghosts In The Machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

God Told Me To: Deus Ex Machina

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

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

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

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

“God told me to.”

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Dabbe 6: Too Much Of A Good Thing

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

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

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

…whose name is Mukadder.

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

The Burned Over District: An Attempt Was Made

 (I will probably get a little spoilery in this one, but the story doesn’t really have twists and turns, so it shouldn’t be too much of an issue. The story also doesn’t have much of a story.)

Making films is difficult. Maybe I don’t fully appreciate just how difficult, but I know that even low-budget indie films still require a great deal of money and equipment and logistics, and generally don’t have the luxury of multiple locations, high-end cameras or lighting, a schedule that allows for experimentation or even multiple takes. And this is a point raised usually in defense of films that fall short - the idea that making a film is hard work and so criticism is unjustified. That is patently horseshit. You could run a marathon while wearing wrist and ankle weights and be working really hard the whole time as a result, and it isn’t going to make you the winner. You can appreciate the difficulty of doing something and still recognize when it isn’t a success.

Like this week’s movie, for example, in case you were wondering why I was ranting about criticism. The Burned Over District is a clumsy, amateurish attempt at cosmic horror that doesn’t so much miss what’s good about cosmic horror (although it misses that too) as it does miss the basics of storytelling.

It begins as a hazy, sun-drenched reverie. An attractive woman, gazing at someone lovingly. There’s no dialogue, just soft music, softer lighting, and what seems to be a quiet moment with a loved one. And then it is over, cut short by broken glass and blood and crumpled metal. A man and the woman we’ve just seen are sitting in the front of a car, and she appears to be badly injured. As it turns out, her injuries are fatal, and that is how Will Pleasance loses his wife, Natalie. Cut to some weeks later, and his mother (his shrill, awful mother) and his sister are visiting him to see how he’s doing. He isn’t doing well, which really is to be expected when you’ve watched the person you love die right in front of you. His sister’s sympathetic, his (terrible) mother less so, and then they leave.

Sometime later, Will’s out hunting in the woods and in the process of trying to take down a deer, encounters a hole in the ground. A really, really large hole that goes pretty deep. It looks like it might have been an old well, since the sides seem to be lined with brick. But now it’s just a gaping maw, above which dangle a number of crude wooded shapes bent out of twigs and saplings.

Almost like talismans.

There’s no really elegant way to get into this. The film is basically “man loses wife, is very sad about it, then cult shit out of nowhere.” The two things aren’t really connected at all. Like, to the point that in the scene where Will discovers the hole, a friendly older man just pops up suddenly to express his concern and deliver a big exposition dump about the history of the hole. Which is on Will’s property, which makes it odd that he’s never seen it before, especially if he spends any amount of time in the woods hunting. That he’s out there hunting without any safety orange on and with his finger perpetually on his rifle’s trigger is a whole other matter, but he and Natalie have apparently lived out here for a long time, and he’s never seen this hole before today, even though it’s been out here for centuries. And then there’s someone right there to explain it to him. The whole film is nakedly mechanical in that sense, a collection of things that need to happen that never feels like an actual period of time in someone’s life. It’s not chaotic, but things do happen without any real rhyme or reason. Why is Will’s mother back at the house? Who knows? Why is Will’s sister driving back into town in the middle of the night? No idea!

This is made even more obvious by how the story (such as it is) is actually being told moment to moment. The performances come from the ACTING! school of acting, all hammy and melodramatic and two-dimensional. And the writing comes from the WRITING! school of writing, all speeches and cliches and things that nobody ever actually says. It’s a film full of people saying lines, instead of characters inhabiting a believable space. And what they have to say isn’t even especially interesting. So yes, there’s an evil cult in this town that’s been worshiping what’s in the hole for ages (big surprise), and they are boring. The moments when the cult’s leader makes grand pronouncements like cult leaders do, they ramble, they go on and on, and they’re almost less oratory and more just him kind of explaining the same things over and over again while the other members stand around in sort of quasi-Mennonite outfits for no apparent reason.

And I cannot stress enough how ineptly the story is handled. It’s not especially complicated or unfamiliar – man, grieving the recent death of his wife, discovers that the town he lives in holds a dark secret. That is not in and of itself a problem, you can do some good stuff with that. The problem is that the story has an almost-complete absence of connective tissue. Natalie’s death has almost no role in the overall story, even as a facet of Will’s character. Basically, he’s drunk, sloppy and reckless, there’s a nightmare sequence early on, a sort of vision much later and that’s kind of it. At one point, someone intimates that the cult had something to do with her death, but it’s never followed up. I think we’re supposed to get the idea that Will isn’t thinking straight because of grief, but there’s no attempt to establish that or contextualize his actions. It seems almost irrelevant: Wife dies, I’m sad, whoops, there’s a portal to some interdimensional evil on my property that I’ve somehow never noticed and it’s being worshipped by a cult made up of most the townsfolk. There’s no discovery, one thing just sort of happens after another in isolation. He and Natalie have lived in this small, ostensibly tight-knit town for some time and somehow Will has to be told that there’s one really powerful, influential family that owns everything, and nobody else in town seems to know who Will is. That’s what makes small towns such fertile ground for horror - everyone knows everyone else, and everyone’s keeping secrets. For that matter, we're introduced to most of the townspeople as weird cultists first, and then as respectable citizens, which is just...ass-backwards. Again, the effectiveness of this kind of story lies in not knowing who to trust, at the revelation of which friendly neighbors are in thrall to some eldritch menace. When you know it's everyone right off the bat, there's not much you can do with that.

This is so egregious that there’s one scene where Will’s sister is sitting in the kitchen having a drink, then the wind blows a door open, some mysterious force shatters the cup in her hand, and she is subsequently compelled to…walk out into the middle of the woods where she discovers a ritual sacrifice going on. That’s the only way they could get her out there to witness that? It boggles the mind. Add to that the bog-standard pompous speechifying by the cult leader, and the odd way that the story seems to wrap up at the halfway mark to make room for a second half that is one long revenge sequence, and it’s a baffling experience.

There are a few redeeming qualities – it’s obviously got a smaller budget, but it looks pretty good. There’s lots of beautiful footage of snowy woods and mountains, clouds scudding across the sky, and the lighting is generally stark and nicely lurid in places. In general, the film has an aesthetic that would sit nicely next to homages like The Void, and the filmmakers are surprisingly good at not telegraphing startling moments given how not-good they are at so many other things. The violent moments are goopy and visceral in a way that fits with the overall aesthetic and manage to avoid being either gratuitous or silly, but the whole thing is so incoherent, the climax is so hilariously cliched (complete with a Final Girl cocking a shotgun), dragging out entirely too long before ending in what was probably supposed to be a moment of awe and horror but comes across like a bunch of people standing around, unsure of what to do next.

That it’s not especially original isn’t an issue – there are only so many stories in the world – but top to bottom, the execution is so fumbling and inept that it even screws up the basics. They tried, yes. But they failed.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

Cuando Acecha La Maldad: When The Strength Of Men Fails

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Analog Horror: Do Not Adjust Your Set

Periodically there are revolutions in filmmaking. The introduction of sound, consumer-grade film cameras, consumer-grade video cameras, digital effects, most recently platforms like YouTube and Vimeo allow anyone with an account to upload their work and allow it to find an audience. The results are…well, mixed, but of course they’re going to be mixed. At its best, there’s an opportunity to see things that’d never be given the light of day by the film industry, because they’re so idiosyncratic and resolutely noncommercial.

One particular example is the nascent movement/genre/category/whatever known as “analog horror.” I was introduced to it with The Backrooms, and in the wake of writing about it, I had a number of other similar efforts suggested to me, and I sat down to go through the collected works of three different creators. There’s even more than these out there, but these were the titles that kept coming up, so this is more of a representative sampling, than a comprehensive survey.

The term “analog horror” is sort of ironic, in that all of this work is made possible by advances in digital filmmaking, effects, and distribution platforms. But I get what it’s referring to. It’s all very homemade, typically the project of one person, with varying levels of outside assistance (and as often as not, external financial support from platforms like Patreon), and it all tends to work in the same spaces. The subject matter is typically cosmic horror, stories told using bygone media - local television, educational and training videos, low-budget animation - and bygone technologies. It’s glitchy, grainy, fuzzy, full of the wobble of poorly-tracked videotapes, cheap film stock, low-resolution images full of digital artifacts, and the crude, inhuman blare of early speech-synthesis software. There’s a sense that something has been unearthed, some long-forgotten ephemera that documents a world that could have been our own, or maybe is our own and we’re living in blissful ignorance, unable to correlate the contents of the universe. They’re successful to varying degrees, but it does seem to be the case across the titles I watched that brevity is on their side. The best of it works in short, bite-sized pieces, and tends to start to losing focus the longer the videos become and the longer a series goes on.  But at its best, it’s unnerving, full of dread, and I’m not sure it’d be possible or effective in a more conventional presentation.

Local 58 TV

This is probably the strongest of the three that I watched. It’s a series of short videos framed as broadcasts from a small, local television station, the kind that filled its off-hours programming with informercials or old movies, or simply concludes its broadcast day with a still image and a scratchy recording of the national anthem. Sometimes it’s just a framing device, and sometimes it’s integral to the overarching narrative that emerges. Stories work as stand-alone entities, and take a variety of forms. There’s grainy dash-cam footage of a driver led seriously awry by their GPS, a macabre children’s cartoon, an end-of-broadcast reel intended for a very specific situation, a weather broadcast about some very strange weather, among others. But as the series goes on, specific themes and ideas begin to emerge, so that by the end, a story is just beginning to take shape, but only just. We’re left with the nagging sense that there’s some horrible truth at the edges of our understanding, almost comprehensible. This series benefits from knowing that this kind of storytelling is a delicate balance of suggestion without revealing too much, giving just a glimpse into something horrible behind a façade of institutional blandness. That’s a tough balance to maintain, and the result is a series of brief glimpses into a friendly small-town institution that turn into something far more sinister, creating sharp jabs of icy dread with impeccable timing and precision.

Highlights: Contingency, Weather Service, Real Sleep

 

Gemini Home Entertainment

Conversely, this is probably the weakest of the three. It’s working with similar raw materials to Local 58, but it doesn’t wield them as deftly, and that makes all the difference. The framing device is a small video production company that manufactures educational material and promotional material for small businesses, but it’s a conceit that gets abandoned or at least departed from on a pretty regular basis, and the result feels less like we’re gradually piecing together some horrifying truth across disparate instances of otherwise innocuous media, and more like we’re being told a fairly stock cosmic-horror story through the most roundabout means possible. There’s a tendency to return to the same device of suddenly distorting the sound and video over and over again, and at their weakest, slack running times with little narrative movement make some of the individual videos unfocused and dull. There are good moments here and there, and at its best it punctures the cheery façade of an educational video about local wildlife or storm safety with glimpses of the bizarre that go as fast as they appeared, leaving you feeling uneasy, but more often than not, it feels belabored. I think it could work as a more aggressively curated set of videos, but as it is, it feels like it takes way too long to tell us a story that we’ve already figured out about a third of the way into the series. 

Highlights: World’s Weirdest Animals, Storm Safety, Deep Root Disease

 

The Mandela Catalogue

This one is easily the hardest one to summarize, because it takes the basic elements of analog horror as established by the other two titles and throws them all into a blender, creating the feeling that we’re watching a prolonged nightmare in which shards of old videos and antiquated technology periodically surface. It’s not so much about a single company as it is a place – Mandela County – and the people who live there. There’s a police department, a local computer and electronics store, members of a paranormal investigation club from a neighboring county, and something called The United States Department Of Temporal Phenomena. It’s weird right from the beginning, establishing a world that’s suffered some kind of existential anomaly, focusing on how it impacts one community by examining a few incidents from different angles and perspectives. The storytelling is executed using a wide variety of styles, from old religious cartoons to glitchy, low-resolution imagery to educational videos to simulated Internet conversations to live-action footage that at times resembles the grainy pointillism of Skinamarink, and at others, black and white footage with actors and dialogue that reminds me of nothing so much as a YouTube-era riff on German Expressionism. At its best, it’s unsettling, tense, and oddly melancholy by turns, evoking the feeling of a small town that’s slowly crumbling, but again, the whole enterprise goes on a little too long and it starts losing focus as it goes. This type of storytelling really does seem to be at its best when it keeps things short and doesn’t overstay its welcome, and there’s so much to this story that it feels like it’s spinning its wheels toward the end, but when it’s good it’s disorienting, laden with dread, and absolutely singular in its vision. It’s hard as hell to explain why it works, but it does.

Highlights: Overthrone, Exhibition, The Mandela Catalogue Vol. 333

Local 58TV on IMDB

Local58TV on YouTube
 

Gemini Home Entertainment on IMDB

Gemini Home Entertainment on YouTube
 

The Mandela Catalogue on IMDB

The Mandela Catalogue on YouTube

Cobweb: Played

Goddamnit, I got suckered again. I just went through this a month or two ago with Pond, whose trailer looked eerie and unsettling, but as a whole movie was mostly a pompous, nonsensical slog. Sometimes trailers do take the absolute best bits in a movie and string them together, giving you the impression that yes, it’s all going to be like this. Sometimes trailers lie.

But at least with Pond, I was going in blind. Where Cobweb is concerned, I only have myself to blame. Well, myself and the filmmakers. People whose opinions I trust and respect found it disappointing, and under normal circumstances, that’d be enough for me to take that film off the list. But damned if the trailer for it didn’t make it seem spooky and menacing enough that it piqued my curiosity. As much as I heard it wasn’t very good, that trailer kept pulling me back, making me wonder if there wasn’t something to it. Well, the trailer got me again, because it managed to find the good parts of a film that isn’t even really the sum of its parts. It looks good, it has a reasonably good twist, but the execution’s all over the shop.

It's almost Halloween in an appropriately autumnal small town, and Peter is a little boy with a lot of worries. He’s quiet and shy, and thus a natural target for the class bully. But it’s more than that - he lives with his parents in an old, semi-spooky house, full of bumps and creaks as it settles on its foundations, as wood expands and contracts with the weather. It’s hard for him to sleep some nights, and he has nightmares sometimes. One sleepless night, he’d swear he heard knocking behind the wall, even though his mother says he just has a very active imagination. So he gets out of bed, and knocks on the wall himself. Something knocks back.

Something knocks back, and a small voice says “help me.”

The beginning of the film isn’t bad at all. There’s a chilliness to it, and Peter seems like a kid who is genuinely haunted by the shit he’s dealing with. But the problems start early. It seems like what was intended was for the story to start off being about this mysterious presence in the house, but as the film goes on, it will pivot to Peter’s parents maybe hiding some kind of terrible secret. You’ve got the concerned teacher who sees his behavior and when all of the kids in class draw Halloween-themed pictures, Peter draws something that any responsible adult is going to interpret as a cry for help. Is it the thing in the walls? Is it his parents? Is it both? And that’d be fine, but the first big problem here is that for something like that to work, you need for his parents to seem reasonable and loving and normal, right up to the point that the madness makes itself known. That way, the juxtaposition of their apparent normalcy and whatever comes through is upsetting, shocking, an “oh shit” moment. And from the very beginning, Peter’s family doesn’t seem normal at all. Right off the bat, there’s something really odd and off about them. It’s the same problem as how in The Shining, Jack Torrance seems dangerously unstable almost from the first moment he’s on screen, so his descent into homicidal madness really isn’t all that surprising. As a result, there’s no tension or contrast, and instead of an upsetting reversal of expectations, we’re left with a foregone conclusion, and so a lot of the movie feels like an exercise in waiting instead of something shocking and revelatory.

There are also problems with the flow of the narrative. The first two acts are oddly…not perfunctory, but there is the feeling of a bunch of sequences robbed of the connective tissue that would make it feel like a story. It’s one of those cases where it feels like the filmmakers had a bunch of spooky moments, rather than a fleshed-out narrative. The performances are generally stilted (except for Peter, whose actor does a pretty good job with what he’s given) because in part the actors have to deliver dialogue that’s clunky and artificial. Kids do not talk like the kids in this movie talk. Choices are made in the story that I don’t think hold up to real-world scrutiny, and seem made to position all of the pieces in place. There’s an air of contrivance to the story. It looks like things are going to improve in the third act with a pretty shocking act, but what should be a natural gut-punch of an ending ends up being just the beginning of a drawn-out, largely unnecessary confrontation. The climax consists of some pretty stock slasher-movie moments alongside a lot of unnecessary exposition that belabors a point that would have been better served by flashbacks instead of a bunch of stuff being said over and over and over again before the whole thing just sort of…stops. I get the sense that it was supposed to feel ambiguous, but it doesn’t, it just feels like they couldn’t think of a way to bring the story to a close, so they just ended it there. And it’s really frustrating because I see the pieces of what could have been a much better movie peeking out here and there. It’s got the courage to go to some pretty dark places, but once it gets there, it wastes the opportunity on the least interesting choices it could make.

I think this is why the trailer was so persuasive to me – trailers are basically isolated moments intended to sell the film, and this is a film that definitely has some really good isolated moments and imagery – the sheer, baffling strangeness of a backyard overrun with pumpkins, quick asides that communicate important details without being overdone, an impressively creepy nightmare sequence – but that’s all it is, a bunch of moments that never really come together, and what would have been a nice reversal of expectations squandered by letting it play out entirely too long until all of the implied horror is exhausted through over-explanation. Scares aren’t enough. It’s not enough to play the notes, you have to know why they’re being played in the first place.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
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Haute Tension: Final* Girl

It’s years in the rear-view mirror by now, but one of the through-lines for what got me writing about horror movies for fun was the New French Extremity. It’s not a label anyone really uses anymore, which is probably for the better, since - at least in terms of horror films - the whole thing sort of fizzled out quickly. To the extent it ever was a movement (which is debatable), it produced some excellent films, and some absolute turkeys.

Haute Tension (High Tension) is one of the most frequently mentioned examples of New French Extremity, but I have to say, it’s much closer to the turkey end of the continuum. What we basically have is an effective, if workmanlike, slasher film that starts off strong before being marred by a slack third act and what has to be one of the most head-clutchingly ridiculous twists I’ve ever seen in a film.

We begin at what is presumably the end. There’s a woman sitting on an examination table in a hospital gown. Through the gap in the gown, we can see that her back is striped with deep cuts and abrasions, some severe enough to need stapling shut. There’s a camera recording her as she mumbles something about nothing keeping “us” apart again. Then we flash back to this same woman, running through some woods, covered in blood. Something bad has happened, but we have to go back to the beginning to understand it. Marie (the young woman from the introduction) and her friend Alex are college students, off to Alex’s family home in the country to study for exams, far away from the distractions of the city. No booze, no parties, no boys. Lots of winding country roads, and they pass by a truck driver parked on the shoulder in a rusty cargo van. It becomes clear pretty quickly that he’s got someone else in the truck with him, in the act of fellating him. But Marie and Alex have driven on by this point. And they’re long gone by the time the truck driver tosses what turns out to be a severed head out the window. It’s a striking moment, I’ll give it that.

Meanwhile, Marie and Alex arrive at Alex’s house, and after meeting her folks and her little brother, Marie repairs to her guest suite to get some rest. It’s late at night, it’s been a long day, and it’s been a long drive.

It’s late at night, and there’s a knock on the door.

So I’d say it sets its stall out early, but in a way that really effectively builds the tension of the title. We’re introduced to Marie and Alex, take some time to get to know them and their whole deal, and then this sudden, shocking segment with the truck driver gets dropped into the story like a time bomb before returning to these young women on the road. Something very bad is going to happen, but it’s not going to happen yet, and now that we know this lunatic is out there, we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop, as Marie and Alex and Alex’s family are all blissfully unaware of what’s headed straight for them. In some ways, it reminds me of how the original Halloween teased Michael Myers through the better part of the film, always just slightly out of frame or out of focus or partially hidden behind scenery. The longer he’s out there, the worse it gets.

And I’ll say this, when this film works, its stock in trade is definitely tension. Once night falls, it doesn’t really take long for things to pop off. And once they do. they don’t really let up. We don’t really know anything about any of these people apart from Maria and Alex both being sort of party girls and Alex’s family seeming nice enough. But at least for the first couple of acts, sheer momentum gets the film over in the absence of much emotional investment in any of the characters. Once the action starts, it doesn’t really slow down. It’s a violent film (as slashers often are), but the violent segments are a mixture of off-camera restraint and almost confrontationally detailed. We don’t always see what’s happening, but what we do see is more than enough. There’s a lot of blood in this movie, spattering and pooling and spraying, and a lot of people in visible distress, and if it doesn’t always linger on the violence it does linger on their suffering and pain. It’s a grubby film as well – a lot of it is shot in sort of a sickly yellow that makes everything look sort of stained or used, at least outside of the farmhouse setting, and the killer is oily, sweaty, and grimy in a filthy jumpsuit, dirt under his nails, as bestial as his introduction would have you think. He doesn’t talk much, mostly just grunts as he brutalizes everything in his path. Crisp editing helps to keep the action moving, Marie trying to avoid this sudden menace in the confines of a fairly cozy farmhouse, so for the first couple of acts, it’s a film in almost constant motion. But that’s the first couple of acts. The third is where everything falls apart.

First, the film, despite being a French production, is dubbed into English, and although it isn’t too distracting at first (there is the odd verbosity you get when you’re trying to fit dialogue in one language to the speech patterns of another), as the film goes on more and more of the dialogue is in French and subtitled in English, and any attempt to make dubbed dialogue fit the actors’ speech goes right out the window.. It doesn’t seem like a stylistic choice, as much as someone just stopped doing their job. Why it wasn’t all in French and subtitled from the get-go is a mystery. I don’t know that it would have saved the film, but it would have seemed like less of a rush job. And for all of the tension of the beginning of the film, once the action moves away from the farmhouse the pace grows looser and looser until we’re left with a not-especially-exciting “chase scene” that consists of two cars driving at a sensible speed through the woods, capped by increasingly ludicrous levels of violence - cartoonish in a way that earlier moments weren’t - and false endings. It goes from claustrophobic and…well, tense…to something much more bland and formulaic.

But the worst of it has to be a reveal in the third act that makes very little sense in term of literally everything that came before. I don’t mind twists, for the most part. But a good twist relies on the film playing fair with the audience up to the moment it’s revealed, so that rewatching it (or even getting the flashback that spells it all out) gives you the opportunity to put the pieces together yourself, to see how the truth was staring at you the whole time. Clever use of misdirection and new context goes a long way, but this isn’t like that at all. It’s not just that there’s no opportunity to figure it out, or even anything we could observe that might suggest that not everything is as it seems. We actually see things throughout the film that actively contradict it. You can use clever staging of shots to hide things in plain sight, but this film doesn’t bother. It just…I guess for lack of a better term, it just straight-up lies about everything we’ve just seen, for no apparent reason. It adds nothing to the film except sort of a cheap “gotcha” moment. The end result is the feeling that the filmmakers had about an hour’s worth of a decently suspenseful if not especially substantive movie and realized they needed to come up with another thirty minutes, so they just sort of winged it. And it shows. In the sloppy dubbing, in a climax that wanders aimlessly, in a last-minute revelation that makes absolutely no sense, it fucking shows.

This is a film that gets mentioned as one of the biggest of the New French Extremity (for what little that’s worth), but it’s easily one of its biggest disappointments. It doesn’t have Martyrs’ well-crafted story, or Inside’s claustrophobic, confrontational tone. It’s closer to something like Frontier(s), with its reliance on blood and screaming and active contempt for storytelling. I was spoiled for the big twist going in (part of why I’ve taken so long to write about it) and I was still surprised at how half-assed it was. The more I think about this film, the angrier I get.

IMDB entry
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