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

Chernobyl: Palatable Fictions

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

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

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

The structure that holds Reactor 4 has been replaced by a column of fire.

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

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

The First Omen: The Burden Of History

So much of what I don’t like about sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes, reimaginings, etc., is how they so often pale in comparison to the film from which they spring. They tend to be exercises in reduction, pulling one thing from the original film and beating it into the ground over however many attempts are made to wring more cash out of the original idea. And everything else that made the original gets missed, ignored, or worse, deliberately jettisoned for a “fresh new take” on the property. Do you really need a fresh new take on a story after only one film?

Which is what makes The First Omen such an oddity to me. It’s actually pretty good; moreover, it would have been even better as a stand-alone film. If anything, the narrative debt it owes to the original film works against it, dragging it down instead of letting it be its own thing.

It’s Rome in 1971, a city teeming with civil unrest, and a novitiate named Margaret has come here to become a nun. She’ll be working at an orphanage that takes in women who are unmarried and pregnant, providing a home and education for their children once they’re born. The assignment hits home for her - she was orphaned and made a ward of the church herself, though her memories of those times aren’t all pleasant. She was a troubled girl and got her fair share of discipline from the sisters who ran the orphanage. And now she’s come all the way from the U.S. to seal her vows in the heart of Catholicism. While getting a tour of the facilities, Margaret spies some drawings done by some of the children. It’s the usual whimsical crayon scrawls, except for one that depicts a number of sad, hollow-eyed young girls looking up at a bigger girl floating above them, disheveled and slightly deranged though no less sad. It’s the kind of drawing that would likely inspire a wellness check in modern times. She’s told it was done by Carlita, a troubled girl with a history of violence, who spends most of her time segregated from the other girls.

Bad things tend to happen around Carlita, and nobody wants to talk about it.

In some ways, this film is at a fair disadvantage. Even if we factor out its connection to a film about the Antichrist, it is still yet another film where a nun or priest or someone about to become a nun or priest finding themselves at a monastery or convent that seems to be hiding a dark, dark secret. So it’s difficult to sustain any sense of mystery from a couple of different directions. If there’s a convent, there’s a dark secret. If there are nuns, at least some of them are complicit in hiding this dark secret. And because it is a prequel to The Omen, we have a pretty good idea how it’s going to end. Even if we don’t know how it’s going to get there, we know where it’s going. And in horror movies, you really don’t want to see the end coming from a mile away. Maybe it’s because this sort of story has a pretty narrow range of possibilities associated with it, but it was really hard to shake the feeling that this film was checking all the boxes on a list of things that need to be in a convent/monastery with a dark secret movie.

And that sucks, not just because formulaic, predictable stories are the ruin of good horror, but also because this film is really well-made in a lot of ways. The performances are generally on the right side of understated and there’s an acuity and restraint to it that films like this rarely have, if ever. For once, the dark secret doesn’t just stop at “well we’re nuns but we’re actually evil nuns,” there’s at least a rationale there, for as much as it matters. I think more could have been done with it in relation to the film’s time and place, but I appreciate it not just being a bunch of Satanists in habits and wimples. And it’s actually pretty scary! There is no shortage of startling moments, but they aren’t jump scares, and as often as not they’re presented in ways that are inventive. There’s especially something sort of unblinking about how this film treats the female body, and there’s one moment around childbirth that’s as unsettling as anything David Cronenberg did in The Fly or Dead Ringers. I feel confident that these filmmakers could have made a really good movie about the church as a patriarchal force, resistant if not actively hostile to change, intent on controlling women’s bodies and done so in a way that could have been stark and horrifying, if they weren’t saddled with the need to tell a story that dovetails with a film made in 1976 (and remade in 2006, for that matter).

And that’s really the sticking point: The need to tell a story that leads into an existing story really hobbles and constrains this film, to the point that the end drags out for far, far too long in order to absolutely cement this story in relationship to The Omen. The world-building and exposition may be necessary (or at least somebody thought it was necessary) because this is a prequel, but it compromises the quality of the film as a singular film. It shoehorns it into a well-established formula and gives it a foregone conclusion for an ending, and damned if the film isn’t still pretty good in spite of all that. I really want to see more from these filmmakers, ideally not straitjacketed by a studio’s need to create more product in the Omen franchise space.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu

Late Night With The Devil: Illusionists

Not that anyone (I don’t think) actually believes that television and film are actually magic, but they get described in those terms often enough. And I get it, you’re talking about signals sent through the air (or as pulses down cables) that captivate us, make us laugh and cry and scream. Film and television show us the impossible from thin air. How is that not magic?

But of course it’s not. It’s technology, it’s editing, it’s special effects. It’s the illusion of continuity and motion, of images reproduced from little blobs or blocks of color, of meaning created through camera angles and lighting and music and more besides. The whole point of illusion is to show us things that aren’t there, or that aren’t what they appear to be.

Late Night With The Devil is, for the most part, a well-crafted story about illusion; it’s a story about what seems to be versus what is, and the price paid for success.

It’s 1977, and Jack Delroy is one of the most successful late-night talk show hosts on the air. Every night, his show “Night Owls” brings viewers the mix of sketch comedy, banter, and celebrity interviews one would expect from the genre, consistently at the top of the ratings without ever quite managing to dethrone late-night powerhouse Johnny Carson. But Delroy’s suffered a number of setbacks of late, including the untimely death of his wife Madeleine from cancer. Ratings are slipping, and forays into more sensationalistic waters haven’t really turned things around. His contract is up for renewal, and so Jack Delroy has one last chance to keep his show on the air. It’s Halloween night, and he has a very special line-up of guests ready to go. There’s the celebrated spirit medium Christou, a former magician-turned-skeptic named Carmichael Haig, and a young psychologist named June Ross-Mitchell. Dr. Ross-Mitchell has written a book about her work with a young girl named Lilly, who seems to suffer all of the symptoms of demonic possession.

It's Halloween night, 1977, and Jack Delroy is hoping for an audience with the devil.

What we’re watching is ostensibly the unedited master tape of the night’s broadcast, which in a way really sets up this idea that what we’re watching is a carefully crafted illusion. Delroy’s talk show is a television show that presents an appearance of bonhomie onstage while behind the scenes is carefully controlled chaos, naked ambition, people letting down their masks to reveal the cowardice, venality and desperation underneath. The smiles snap back into place once they come back from commercial. And the guests on the show itself are a conversation between reality and illusion. For all of his theatrics, Christou is really just cold-reading and being fed information by his assistant, Haig points out the ways that showmanship masquerades as the supernatural at every turn (in as pompous a fashion as you’d expect), culminating in a sequence about hypnosis that draws a sharp line between what is experienced and what is reality while suggesting that television itself might be a form of hypnosis. It’s not really a film where you can’t be certain of what you’re seeing (it’s pretty clear-cut on what’s going on), but it plays with these ideas of perception and artifice well.

In terms of artifice, period pieces are always risky, but this film does a nice job of capturing the 70s zeitgeist – the clothes, the color palette, the corny jokes, the cultural references, the sexism – and brings together a number of historical and pop cultural moments in a pleasing way. You’ve got the emergent religious cult weirdness of the late 60s/early 70s with allusions to  the Bohemian Grove, the Church of Satan, the Process Church, and anachronistically a little bit of the Branch Davidians. On top of that you’ve got the nascent interest in demonic possession sparked both by films like The Exorcist and interest in parapsychology, both of which set the stage for the recovered-memory Satanic panic of the 1980s. The film opens with lots of footage from riots and protests and sensational crimes like the Manson murders, setting the stage as a U.S. in turmoil, feeling like everything is falling apart. Delroy’s show is the kind of place people come to for pleasant refuge in a world where maybe…just maybe…the devil is real. This film has a very good idea of what its sandbox is, and it’s patient about building its world, laying detail in carefully, and (with one annoying exception) does a good job of not overexplaining things, leaving the audience to piece things together as everything comes to a head. The performances are a little on the stagey side, and although that makes sense for television, it’s the case even in the moments that are supposed to be behind the scenes; the exception to this being the actress playing Lilly, who is just fantastic – extremely unnerving but with a lot more restraint that I usually see from someone asked to play her role.

And this speaks to the film’s biggest problem, and it’s an appropriate one – verisimilitude. The conceit is that we’re watching the master tape of a live television broadcast that ended horribly, and when the focus is on the television show, it works really well. But there are these interstitial moments that are supposed to be what’s going on while they’re on commercial break, and they’re shot as fairly clean black-and-white handheld footage. What television network would have cameramen roaming around backstage filming confidential conversations? It doesn’t need the found-footage conceit to work, and it just ends up getting in the way. Worse, it dispels the illusion, and for a story where willingness to believe leads all kinds of bad places, it’s an irritating misstep in an otherwise well-made film.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Freaks: The Nature Of Monstrosity

Horror films are, largely, about monstrosity. That could be a literal monster, some kind of thing that should not be, but it can also be some aspect of humanity grown warped and wrong. That could be the mind, the body, or character grossly distorted into something that is unsettling precisely because enough humanity remains for us to connect to it. The more we see ourselves in it, the more disturbed we become. Conversely, there are also the stories where the monsters aren’t the monsters, because either they possess human qualities like empathy and nurturing, or because the humans are real horrible fuckers.

And honestly, I’ve gotten to the point where “man is the real monster” movies feel sort of facile to me. Yes, people are capable of terrible things. I don’t know that that by itself, is an especially profound statement, and most films along those lines that I’ve seen handle it with the subtlety of a brick. After seeing Freaks, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the final word on the subject. And that was a film made in 1932.

It opens on a carnival sideshow, with a barker walking a curious crowd through the exhibits, pausing at one who is apparently especially gruesome. It is said that she was at one time a woman of exceptional beauty, now reduced to some kind of travesty upon whom it is difficult to look. We don’t see her, but one patron faints at the sight of her.

This film is the story of how this freak became what she is today.

Jumping back in time, we’re introduced to Hans and Frieda. They are two dwarves in this carnival’s sideshow, and they’re engaged to be married. But Hans has his eye on Cleopatra, an aerialist of typical size. He insists there’s nothing going on, but he’s clearly smitten. He isn’t shy about lavishing her with gifts, and Cleopatra isn’t shy about accepting them. She’s also not shy about accepting the affections of Hercules, the carnival strongman, when Hans isn’t around. They both eye Hans and Frieda’s people, the freaks of the carnival sideshow, with contempt. The fortune Hans is reputed to have, however, that has their attention.

None of this is subtle. This is your basic 1930s morality play, at its heart intended for the edification and moral uplift of the viewer. But that’s not what makes this film noteworthy, nor where its power lies. The sideshow freaks in this film are all people who were working as sideshow freaks when the film was made. These are people with any number of different deformities - microcephaly, congenital missing limbs, conjoined twins, dwarfism, and more - and it lends the movie an unnerving power because these aren’t effects or makeup or costumes. There’s no distance here, that comforting reassurance that it’s just a movie doesn’t quite land the same. Even to modern sensibilities this is still a pretty confrontational film in that regard, and it sets up a conversation about the nature of monstrosity. In this film, the freaks are a family, caring for and protective of each other. They don’t prey on others, and seem to be content with the same things that anyone would be - a roof over their heads, food in their belly, and warm sunshine on their face. The “normal” people aren’t all villainous - Cleopatra and Hercules actively scheme, some others are insensitive jerks, but many of their fellow carnival workers are friendly and as at ease with the freaks as anyone else. People are monsters, monsters are people.

As I said above, there’s not a lot of nuance here - this film has a moral and it’s going to give it to you - but I think what continues to make it so confrontational, so potentially uncomfortable, is that in watching it, we have to deal with our own feelings about what we’re seeing. The putative monsters are ultimately just people with feelings and hopes and insecurities, who differ from us only in terms of their biology. If we’re uncomfortable with them, that’s on us and not them. The antagonists aren’t exaggerated in their own monstrosity, they’re just your garden-variety cruel, insensitive, avaricious criminals who’d think nothing of bumping someone off for a fortune. But in their callousness, we’re moved to sympathize with the freaks. 

And I think that discomfort is why this film not only ended up being a lasting part of the cinematic canon, but also why its development and release were so turbulent. It pretty much got made in spite of the studio funding it, the director sank into reclusion after its release, and while it was being filmed, the cast had to eat separately from the other cast and crew at the studio because so many people couldn’t bear the sight of them. Actors approached about starring in the film refused because they didn’t want to be in the same room as the freaks. It was originally about thirty minutes longer but a lot of footage was lost when it was cut for being “too graphic.” Maybe it was really graphic, maybe it was just the freaks daring to be people, it’s hard to say. Some of the pushback was likely the mores of the time, but I think some of it was because the “monsters” weren’t actually the monsters - they were portrayed as sympathetic and kind, and I suspect that was more than a lot of people could handle. One of the hardest things to face is your own shortcomings; it’s easier to be disgusted by the flaws of another than to admit to your own.

These people lived lives, fell in love, married, had kids, all while being far enough away from what we consider “normal” that their primary means of support was exhibiting themselves to crowds of gawking onlookers. Were they all angels in real life? No, but none of us are. They were human, and in that regard, we’re left wondering exactly what separates us from monsters.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
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Splinter: Mostly Killer, No Filler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
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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
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Dabbe 6: Too Much Of A Good Thing

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

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

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

…whose name is Mukadder.

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

From Beyond: Pushing Boundaries

As a teenager, one of my favorite horror movies was Stuart Gordon’s adaptation (if you can call it that) of H.P. Lovecraft’s story “Herbert West: Reanimator.” It was the first in a series of Lovecraft adaptations he would do, and he had a very definite style. You could rely on them to be full of melodramatic acting, effects that were probably about as good as he could manage on the budgets he had, and a weirdly sexual undercurrent that was more unsettling than titillating.

In this respect, From Beyond is sort of the platonic Stuart Gordon Lovecraft adaptation. It doesn’t have the black humor of Re-Animator but it also doesn’t have the pervasive nastiness of Castle Freak. It’s a film about appetites and a hunger for stimulation and experience that gets increasingly more deranged, and the film getting more deranged right along with it.

It is late at night, and Crawford Tillinghast is working in the attic of a large, old house with what appears to be an array of very sophisticated computer equipment. He is assisting Dr. Edward Pretorius with experiments that would allow them to, upon attuning to exactly the right resonant frequency, view things normally invisible to human beings. Generate a magnetic field that vibrates large tuning forks, throw open the doors of perception. That’s the idea at least, and as Tillinghast runs the equipment through its paces, the room begins to fill with a queasy purple light, and suddenly the air is filled with swimming and floating…things. It’s working. He calls out to Dr. Pretorius, who comes into the room, sees their success and promptly turns everything up to 11 against Tillinghast’s protests.

There’s something out there in the ether. Something big. And now it can see them.

Needless to say, it does not go well for Pretorius or Tillinghast, and by the time a neighbor has called the cops to report more weird lights and noises, they arrive to find a distraught Tillinghast trying to flee the house, and Pretorius’ body upstairs in the attic, his head…twisted off. So, of course, Tillinghast ends up locked up in a mental hospital while awaiting trial for Pretorius’ murder, explanations for how he managed to twist another person’s head clean off be damned. Dr. Katherine McMichaels is assigned to evaluate him to determine whether or not he’s competent to stand trial. But McMichaels has a reputation for a degree of brilliance matched only by her disregard for ethics. She’s compelled by Tillinghast’s account of what happened, and want to take him back to the house to see this equipment for herself. She wants to know how it works. So Tillinghast and McMichaels return to the scene of the crime, accompanied by police officer and hearty skeptic “Bubba” Brownlee. It doesn’t go well for them either.

This film is contemporary to the original Hellraiser, and both films are very much about the hunger for sensation and experience. About wanting to feel more, the lengths people will go to accomplish that, and the often terrible costs. Hellraiser explores it through the supernatural, this film uses weird science instead, but BDSM figures prominently in both as a signifier for exploring the outer realms of feeling. As it turns out, Dr. Pretorius had some pretty serious kinks, and it even seems to be the case that this was the whole reason he was pursuing this line of research in the first place. And the more McMichaels works with the resonator, the more she develops the same urges. So this is a film that is very much about appetite. We witness McMichaels develop something almost like an addict’s dependence on the resonator device, one that produces dramatic shifts in her behavior. Brownlee is constantly talking about food, cooking hearty dinners for the three of them. The resonator ultimately produces radical physical change, and radical hungers to accompany them. In one particular scene, these hungers are sated while an alcoholic in the throes of delirium tremens looks on in horror. All examples of the wreckage caused by appetites.

There’s also some examination of the ethical concerns of research and patient care in the margins. Parallels are drawn between the strange science that drives the film and the state of mental health care at the time, in the form of a psychiatrist who holds McMichaels in contempt for her disregard for the well-being of the people upon whom she experiments, but also does not hesitate to dismiss the idea that Tillinghast isn’t culpable for Pretorius’ death, and is more than happy to use equally injurious methods in the name of “treatment.” The real difference between Pretorius’ resonator and ECT, for example, is that one is legally sanctioned and the other isn’t, but they’re both technology that gets into the brain and stirs things up.

Which is a lot for a film that is best described as “lurid.” The resonator paints everything in purples and magentas (the color out of space), one character’s perspective is depicted in smeary thermal-camera vision, the dialogue is as purple as the resonator’s glow, and the acting is done in the broadest of strokes. The effects are reminiscent of those in John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing on a somewhat lower budget, but with a couple of exceptions work pretty well even to modern eyes. It’s all slimy and goopy and full of things that look somewhat human until they erupt into something that isn’t human at all, and even if it’s clear that they’re effects, they still have a grungy power to them. I don’t think any of this is a problem – I actually find it kind of endearing. That might be nostalgia talking, but it’s exactly the intersection of melodramatic, violent and bizarre to which such loving homage was paid in Malignant. It’s bonkers and still has the ability to startle all these years later. There’s more than a little uncomfortably nonconsensual behavior, and the way mental health is discussed hasn’t aged especially well either, but that was pretty par for the course in 1986.

The first time I saw this, I was 17 or so, and expected another Re-Animator, but wasn’t really prepared for what I got. It’s a much more straight-faced affair, with a suitably bleak ending, and there are some moments that are still pretty startling and transgressive today. It’s sort of equal parts Hellraiser, The Thing, and early Cronenberg, which makes it much better than I thought at the time.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
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Susuk - Kutukan Kecantikan: The Needle And The Damage Done

Criticism of foreign horror films are, in some ways, a very fine line for me to walk. On the one hand, I appreciate them for the opportunity to experience new perspectives and see things cast in what is to me a new light, but there’s also the danger that I’m exoticizing them, prizing them for their mere difference from my own cultural default or worse, expecting something from them that they have no obligation to deliver. If someone wants to approach your bog-standard mass-market horror film made in the U.S. from their own non-U.S. point of view, they can do that. That is entirely their prerogative. In the case of last week’s It Lives Inside, the result isn’t going to be especially interesting, a mix of multiplex horror cliches and some simplistic treatment of the immigrant experience.

I didn’t really plan it this way, but Susuk - Kutukan Kecantikan  (Implant - The Curse Of Beauty, roughly translated) is very much the opposite of last week’s film – it’s made from a very specific cultural perspective with little regard for Western tastes. It has its moments, but it never really coheres.

Ayu and Laras are sisters making a living in Jakarta, in two very different ways. Ayu is a makeup artist who, when the film opens, is working on a bride-to-be ahead of her wedding. Her phone keeps buzzing, and it’s Laras, who’s leaving messages as she gets dressed for what appears to be a fancy night out. But Ayu’s busy and can’t take the call. When she finally gets a chance to listen to her voicemail, Laras is apologetic, acknowledging that she hasn’t been a very good sister, but that she’s working on turning things around, and Ayu’s reaction, interestingly enough, is a resigned sigh and wondering why Laras has to use her as “her excuse.” So it’s clear that their relationship is somewhat fraught, even if it isn’t clear why. We do get a sense, though, of what it might be as Laras travels through the city in a cab. She and the driver seem to know each other very well, and he doesn’t pick up any other fares. He’s taking her to her…appointments. With her…clients.

And this particular client appears to be a man of some wealth and influence. He’s very happy to see her, as he’s bought her a ring. And Laras, much wiser to the game than he is, knows what’s coming and tries to let him down gently, despite his insistence that he is willing to leave his wife and daughter behind to be with her. She knows this isn’t what he wants, knows how it’d look, knows what it’d mean for her. She tries to let him down gently, but he can’t believe it and, as is so often the case with men of wealth and influence, decides that if he can’t have her, nobody can, pushing her off of a balcony onto the roof of a car below.

Ayu gets the call and meets the cab driver at the hospital. She’s angry with him, telling him that he was supposed to look after her. Laras is in rough shape - multiple broken bones and serious head trauma. She’s on life support and isn’t expected to last much longer. There’s a tearful conversation, and Ayu, as her only living relative, makes the decision to discontinue life support. It gets turned off, her heartbeat slows, then stops with the steady whine of a monitor flatline…

…and then Laras sits straight up in bed and starts screaming.

A cursory examination of her x-rays reveals that Laras is wearing a number of susuk - extremely thin gold needles placed under the skin as talismans, as a means of binding powerful spirits to the wearer to confer a boon, often cosmetic in nature. Laras has had too many susuk put in, and the powerful magic they contain is keeping her in a state between life and death. And so Ayu takes her back to the rural village where they grew up, the place they left behind, to try and find a cure. Modern medicine has no idea what’s going on, so they need to try something more spiritual in nature. But there are bad memories in their village, resentments and grudges and secrets.

This film, to its credit, manages to be at once both culturally distinct and universal. Susuk is a specifically Malaysian practice. It predates the introduction of Islam to Indonesia (and as such, is considered haram) and is a practice without any real equivalent in North America (though now it has me wondering about the possible merits of an adaptation that centers on the cosmetic surgery industry – needles, beauty and all). So the language – not just actual language, but cultural language – is distinct, and there are no concessions to Western sensibilities here. This was an Indonesian film made for Indonesians. I have to engage with it on its terms, and I like that. But at the same time, there are ideas here that do transcend culture. This isn’t just a film about a sister’s attempt to lift a very culturally specific curse that is product of a culturally specific practice. It’s also a story about the sometimes-difficult relationships between sisters, especially when they’re all the other has. It’s a story about the lengths people will go to for beauty, it’s about shameful family secrets, and the pettiness and hypocrisy of small-town life. These are things anyone can recognize, and they ground the film well. The notes may be different but the song is familiar.

The execution, however, does have some problems. It’s sort of a fitful film  – its pacing is somewhat erratic, building dread and then letting it fizzle for extended periods of “take Laras to this person to see if they can help, then take her somewhere else,” and though there are some nice turns there (it’s the usual thing where the religious authority can’t help so they seek out someone who knows the old ways, but here he’s sort of a sketchy dude instead of a reclusive mystic), there are stretches where it feels like not much is happening, or not enough is happening to sustain a mood. It’s also a dark film. Not thematically (well, sort of, thematically), but actually dark, especially in the first half, and so a lot of moments that I suspect were meant to be startling (this film likes its mysterious figures showing up out of nowhere) don’t really land because you can’t really see what people are reacting to. You’ll see Ayu scream at the sight of something, but the something she’s screaming at is difficult to see. The exact nature of the supernatural menace inhabiting Laras is never really made clear beyond possibly being a powerful djinn, but also possibly just the restless spirit of another person, and the result is something that feels a little one-size-fits-all, rather than emerging from a specific mythology and tradition. There are mysterious figures in the shadows, creepy hallucinated moments, some quasi-possession stuff that’s impressively visceral and probably the film at its best, and even some fairly effective (if slight) body horror. The difficulty in locating a coherent logic made it feel a little generic in that regard, and though things do pick up in the third act, the climax takes place in the middle of the night in a rainstorm, so again it’s sort of tough to figure out what’s going on.

It doesn’t land with the impact that it should, because there’s this pervasive feeling of not being sure what’s going on. But, all told, I’d rather watch something that doesn’t always land but shows me new ways of looking at the world, that tells stories using imagery with which I’m not already familiar, than something thoroughly homogenized with the thinnest veneer of and gestures toward other cultures.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

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