The Role Of Intent Part Two: Any Movie Where…

The notion that there's a single "correct" interpretation of a film, as I talked about in my last post on the topic, is problematic. Sure, the movie has a story (so it's "about" the events), it has a directorial point of view (so it's "about" the director's intent), and both of these things are expressed using visual imagery and thematic language that's going to resonate with the target audience because of whatever makes that imagery and language emotionally effective (so it's "about" what makes the scary parts scary to a given audience). So, for example, The Shining is "about" a man who goes crazy while snowbound in an empty hotel. It's also "about" America's historical legacy of violence. Finally, it's "about" loneliness, isolation, the inability to provide for your family, and watching your marriage and family fall apart. Dissecting each of these is pretty much the basis of film scholarship. 

I think horror movies get into trouble when one of these narratives is used to draw conclusions about another. I also think horror movies are especially vulnerable to this compared to other types of film. Specifically, there's what I think of as the "Any Movie Where…" effect, in which the events of the story and/or how they're portrayed are used to draw conclusions about directorial intent. Right now, I can't think of a better case example than The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence.

Director Tom Six was already skating on thin ice when he premiered The Human Centipede: First Sequence. The premise of the movie is that a crazy doctor attempts to graft three people together, connecting their digestive systems in the process, to create a conjoined triplet in the form of a centipede. No reason is given why he wants to do this, but that's okay, because do you really think you can reason with a dude like that? It's not a movie with character development, it's a movie with an inexorable thesis. Even within those constraints, it wasn't what most people seemed to expect - it was pretty restrained with its blood and gore, and a premium was placed on black humor and a bright, almost-sterile setting. It's a clean, cold movie, and given the basic ickiness of its premise, that works to its advantage.

The sequel is pretty much the aesthetic opposite of the first movie. It's shot in black and white (but still shot beautifully), and the entire movie takes place in spaces as raw and ugly as the first's were sleek and bright. Our protagonist this time is Martin. Martin is a round, bug-eyed, sweaty, oily little man. Martin doesn't talk on camera, he just grunts, whimpers, squeals, wheezes and hacks out asthmatic coughs between shots of his inhaler. His life is as small and cramped and ugly as the doctor's was urbane. He lives with his mother, who resents him for driving away her (sexually abusive) husband. He works the third shift at a parking garage, where he passes the time by watching his favorite movie over and over and over again, assembling a scrapbook from the movie, dreaming of the day when he can make the movie come true.

His favorite movie? Naturally, it's The Human Centipede. 

Martin, as inept as the doctor was skilled, as hapless as the doctor was methodical, his tools as crude as the doctor's were surgical, wants to make his own human centipede. He is in no way equipped to do so, and he doesn't care. He gets his subjects by clocking them with a tire iron, he does the surgery with kitchen implements, attaches everyone with staples and duct tape. It is exactly as horrible as it sounds.  The climax of the movie is an orgy of blood, shit, death, and humiliation, signifying little outside of itself.  Which is not to say that it is a pointless movie. Like the first, it evokes a mood masterfully. Martin's world is cramped and squalid in all its features, soundtracked by industrial thumps and hisses, full of old brick, worn carpeting, dirty bedclothes, and shabby warehouse spaces. In many ways, it reminds me a lot of a less explicitly surreal Eraserhead. Both Martin and Henry have created something, and having done so, aren't sure what they should do with it. Martin chooses to play with his like a sadistic child, pulling the wings from flies on a horrifying scale. 

Basically, the sequel is chock-full of fucking horrible things, ranging from the relevant to the completely gratuitous, and it's this gleeful wallowing in gore and filth and the casual abuse of the human body that has so many people contracting the vapors over it. And to be honest, I don't have nearly as easy a time defending this movie as I do The Human Centipede. If you've never seen the first movie, this one isn't going to make much sense to you. And you're going to be too busy crying, retching, and crying over how much retching you're doing to really take it in. 

That said, as a companion to the first film, it works very well as another take on the same ideas - think of them as variations on a theme of Human Centipedes. Everything about the second is an aesthetic, narrative, and textual comment on the first. Martin's subhumanity and obsession with the first film signifies him as the stereotypical fan of the first film - who else would enjoy the first movie but a furtive, disgusting little deviant? Six can take jabs at both a section of horror film fandom and the critics who were so willing to dismiss the first film out of hand through Martin. The sordid violence of the second film pushes our worst expectations of the first in our faces, like saying "oh, you thought it was going to be a sick movie? This is a sick movie." It has the same undercurrent of black humor as the first film, but as relatively restrained (and no less chilling for it) as the first movie's denouement is, the second's is awful - not in quality, but in experience and implication. There's apparently a third movie planned, and I could see all three of them working together as sort of a triptych. The Human Centipede 2 is a very smart movie playing thuggish and dumb.

And that's where the relationship between intent and content gets tricky. Art uses extremes all the time - just look at the work of people like Chris Burden, Hermann Nitsch, Mark Pauline, and Matthew Barney for example. And sure, each one of these artists has had their detractors, but I think there's a lot less blanket dismissal based on specific content than in genre film.

If you, as a genre director, employ controversial, disturbing, graphic, or disgusting imagery, you run the risk of having your entire movie dismissed a priori merely based on the use of that imagery. "Any movie where you have (insert controversial thing here) is obviously just an attempt to shock people and attract controversy." Any attempt to talk about aesthetic or thematic choices is cut off before the conversation can even happen. "This is just pandering to gorehounds, because that's the only reason you'd ever show (insert controversial thing here) in a movie." It doesn't help when a subset of people respond to these movies with "I have to see this it sounds so fucked up and gross it'll be great LOL" when you're trying to make a serious argument for why a given movie should exist. If it's gross and it's in a genre film, it can't be art. 

Of course, established and respected "serious" directors are largely exempt from this - Pier Pasolini featured child abuse and shit-eating in Salo, John Waters had  weird chicken sex, singing anuses, forced impregnation and actual shit-eating in Pink Flamingos, Lars von Trier had hardcore sex and genital mutilation in Antichrist, and Harmony Korine had actual physical violence in Fight Harm (though that hasn't been released). And there are always people willing to apply the "Any Movie Where" heuristic to those movies, but there's at least enough leverage with each of these filmmakers to attempt a serious conversation. Try that with someone like Eli Roth, Tom Six, or Srdjan Spasojevic. Nope, when they do it, it's obviously just for cheap shocks. How could it possibly be anything else? It's just a horror film.

This is not to say that every horror film has artistic value. Good lord, some of them are complete shit. But at its best, horror is art, and sometimes that art goes very uncomfortable places, as art should be able to. It is possible to depict ugly, horrible things for something more substantial than cheap shocks. A movie is more than a collection of scenes, and genre is no reason to throw the consideration of context out the window.  And honestly, I'd like to see more horror directors taken seriously earlier into their careers than usually happens. That's not going to happen until people stop assuming that the content of a film dictates the intent of the people who made it.

30 Days Of Night: Goodbye To Romance

It all started with ads for the conclusion for the last movie in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn. I know I'm not the audience for these movies, and I understand the mechanism behind their appeal, but there's still something about the sight of a chalk-skinned, feral-eyed vampire marrying his doe-eyed teen love and this being a cause for celebration instead of the hideous parody it should be that just makes something rear up in me and say "hang on right one fucking minute."  These are not vampires. These are what happens when you take the sexless appeal of the average boy band and graft it onto the baroque construction of the vampire as romantic figure popularized by intermittently Catholic bondage author Anne Rice.

"But Cliff", my nonexistent strawman says, "what about the original story Dracula by Bram Stoker? Wasn't he a romantic figure?"

I would argue not.

"But Cliff, didn't you see Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation? Gary Oldman was all kinds of tragic and romantic and yearning and shit in that movie. And he cut quite the dashing figure in his dove-gray suit and top hat."

I did indeed see it. In fact, it's one of the few vampire movies I like. But I'd suggest that Dracula was actually the ancient, draconian thing who meets with Jonathan Harker. Dracula had many forms, and the liberation from Victorian repression he represented was a raw, atavistic force, not some romantic ideal. It is my opinion that Dracula's appearance was more a function of cultural mores about gender and courtship than something about the character. That some people construct the idea of the vampire around the elegant, tragic figure Mina sees says more about them than it does about the vampire.

Me, I see the abomination, the thing that lives forever by drinking the blood of the living. And that's why Stephanie Meyer's ridiculous stories got me thinking about 30 Days Of Night.

Barrow, Alaska is the northernmost town in Alaska. It's so far north that it experiences a month-long sunset. It's a cold, flat place, a small American town in the middle of a white desert of snow and ice. The movie opens with residents of the town making their preparations for the long night. Some residents are headed to Anchorage, some are stocking up on supplies, some are shutting their businesses down. Departing residents say goodbye to spouses, vehicles get put into storage. There's no sense of sadness - this is just how life is and always has been out here.

Miles away, a lone figure departs a massive black ship, and begins a long walk across the ice floes toward Barrow.

Eben, the town's sheriff, is busy with all of the last-minute work of getting his community safe and ready, along with small-town sheriff business. As the sun is setting, he's faced with theft, vandalism, and a hostile, unruly drifter making trouble at the local diner. On the surface, it doesn't seem like anything too unusual, except that what's been stolen are all of the town's satellite phones (found burnt in a pile outside of town), what's been vandalized is a local pilot's helicopter, somebody's killed all of the sled dogs in the town kennel, and the drifter at the diner keeps asking for raw meat.

The vampires in this movie aren't romantic at all. They are bestial things, with the same dead-eyed implacability as a shark. They do not seduce their victims, they bring them to ground. They do not drink - they rip, tear, and bury their faces greedily into their victims. They communicate in growls, clicks, and shrieks, along with some harsh, guttural language left forgotten to the civilized world. Their hands are claws, their eyes are black, and they have the teeth of piranhas in mouths raw with blood. They have come to this place, in the middle of nowhere, to feed for thirty uninterrupted days.

This movie isn't so much a vampire movie as we are used to thinking of them - a few true, well-equipped believers at war with a society of blood-drinking sophisticates. This is a siege movie, in which Barrow's dwindling survivors scurry from lit place to lit place, gathering supplies and weapons, struggling as much among themselves as with the predators outside. Old grudges raise their heads, misgivings tear the group away from each other, and all the while, the vampires circle outside in the snow and the dark, waiting for the one mistake that will deliver their prey to them.

Besides the refreshingly merciless take on the genre, 30 Days Of Night is shot beautifully, in what is at times an almost painterly style. The movie is dominated by blues, whites, and grays, interrupted by the warmth of light - sunset, lamps, fire - and blood, from black to vivid red.  The trails left behind as the vampires drag their victims away look almost like brush strokes, and in some scenes, the light from a streetlamp falls in such a way that the entire enterprise almost feels like a stage set - as if Edward Hopper's Nighthawks at the Diner were repainted in the most desolate manner possible. The ship heralding the arrival of the vampires is a black, hulking ruin, blotting out a chunk of the horizon like darkness itself cutting through the ice. A woman pleads for her life with the vampire about to kill her, begging to God that she be spared. The vampire repeats "God?" and looks up to the heavens as if anticipating a response. When the silence ends, it is with the vampire telling the woman "No. No God." Our dreams are not being answered, there are no fairytales here, no brooding immortals who sparkle in sunlight, wedding the true love of their centuries. That's for little girls who have not yet been told the truth of the world. All there is here is blood and cold and indifferent silence speared by the screams of carnivorous things.

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mia farrow childlike

serbian film decapitation rape scene

There is no way for this to end well.

American Horror Story, Episode 2: Can't You See The Blood?

Well, if you're going to leverage the success of your previous shows to do something spectacularly messed-up on a network that seems willing to take some chances, you'd best go big. American Horror Story came out of the gate like the tweaking party guest nobody could remember inviting - the one who won't stop sweating and really, really wants to talk to you about the gold standard and some really compelling business opportunities involving the collapse of Western civilization. A whole lot of crazy, all up in your face at once. I had some concerns after the first episode that a constant barrage of weird would be too distracting to be scary, and the second episode eases up a little on the sheer WTF-ery in every scene. It's still a little frenetic in spots, but with the cast of characters in place, the pace slows down a little. It's less a bunch of stuff being flung at you, and more something unfolding. Some piece of origami, maybe. Folded from a hideous picture, each glimpse, each angle, letting us in a little more to the horrible totality.

Just as the pilot opened in 1978, with the house sitting in ruins, this episode opens up in 1968, with the house serving as a boarding house for nursing students. In 1978, two boys intent on vandalism were mauled by, well, something in the basement. In 1968, the house is in fine shape, and some of the students are going out for the evening. Two others are staying in to study, and because they don't want to get themselves in trouble, late-60s-single-women-style. And when a man comes to the door, hurt and bleeding from a cut on his forehead, the nursing students let him in.

He isn't really hurt, and they don't survive the night.

It's looking more and more like this house is built as much out of atrocity as it is brick.

Meanwhile, the Harmon family, already busy disintegrating when they moved in, are hard at work fucking themselves up even more. They moved across the country to get away from everything that happened to them in Boston - Ben's affair, Vivien's stillbirth. Now Ben's affair is reaching out from one coast to the next. She's pregnant, and wants Ben to come to Boston to help "take care of it." Naturally, Ben lies his lying face off about it to his wife and daughter. Not that it matters as much at this point - he and his wife are forging a tenuous reconnection over her new pregnancy (yeah, that's healthy), and his daughter is pretty much openly contemptuous of him because of the affair. She doesn't fit in at school and she's cutting herself. On the other hand, she's made a connection with Tate, one of Ben's clients. Tate is probably not the healthiest friend to have, but he's pretty familiar with the house - including the knowledge that there is something in the basement. So Ben's off to Boston, and Vivien and Violet are on their own in the house.

And a woman comes to the door, hurt and bleeding from a cut on her forehead.

One of this show's strengths so far is how it keeps us off-balance. In the pilot, that was partially because we had so much information thrown at us. In this episode, it's more how new reveals upset what we think we know. The people who die here don't seem to leave, so it remains to be seen who else is a victim of the house. For the most part, we only have the Harmon's perspective, and that's not very trustworthy. It turns out Constance has a life apart from the house, and it's just as messed up as you might imagine. But Moira? Tate? Are we seeing them as they are? Tate is alternately full of rage and lonely, confused. He knows there's something important about the basement, but pleads ignorance as to what. Moira is a seductress to Ben and an older woman to everyone else. People don't really walk into this house. They're just sort of not there, and then they are. The jittery, disconnected editing of the pilot continues, as if what we're witnessing is fragmented, and the gaps suggest there are things we aren't actually seeing, but should. For the nursing students in 1968, the blood on the man's forehead was a lie, and the truth was much worse. This episode reinforces the idea that what we see may very well be the lie, and the truth might actually be worse. What can't we see?

Episode One

New Least Favorite Horror Film-Related Phrase Ever

The description of upcoming demonic possession film The Devil Inside as a "micro-budget franchise starter."

Goddamnit, this is Not Helping.

Screw The Book, I'll Wait For The Movie

I've just finished reading Pontypool Changes Everything, the book on which the movie Pontypool was (ostensibly) based. To say that the makers of the movie took liberties with the book would be like saying that Picasso's cubist work took liberties with proportion and perspective. The protagonist of the movie appears in one or two chapters in the last third of the book, never sits down in a radio station, and ends up pretty thoroughly dead about as quickly and uneventfully as he was introduced. The rest of the book is a nightmarishly squirrelly trip through the minds of assorted doomed people on the peripheries of a new plague that pretty much razes the human population of a chunk of Ontario. Yes, people eat each other and yes, it seems to be spread through language, but otherwise it has as much in common with the movie as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead did with Hamlet.


I mean, we're talking pissed-off babies cutting their own umbilical cords and going to live with other babies at the bottom of icy lakes, brothers and sisters catching and eating zombies after being abandoned by their parents, sex addicts personifying their Higher Power as a separate being who talks to them, and damn near the first third of the book is the story of the first guy to spot one of the plague victims, and the plague itself doesn't make an appearance until a few chapters in.

It's sort of a challenging read, is what I'm saying.

American Horror Story, Episode 1: A Body Is Like A House

Okay, now this is more like it.  If you're going to do a haunted-house story, a story about a shunned, damned place full of the unhappy echoes of those who have died within its walls, then don't pull punches, or try to make it some genre window dressing for some kind of soap opera (I am so totally looking at you, Bedlam). Just make it balls-out scary.

The first episode of American Horror Story is dense, layered, complicated, and bizarre to a degree I haven't seen since Twin Peaks. Like that show, it's also sharply scary. Unlike Twin Peaks, which took its time winding things up until you were in the middle of a nightmare without realizing how you got there (at least until Season 2, when it all kind of went in the toilet), American Horror Story pretty much grabs you by the back of the head and dunks your head in the sink.

The show opens in 1978, on a shot of an old, dilapidated brick mansion. The lawn is overgrown and the house is beginning to strangle under climbing vines. A young girl in a bright yellow dress stands outside the house, looking into one of the upper-story windows. Two boys come up the walk - twins carrying baseball bats. They've got vandalism on their minds, but before they can walk in and start smashing things, the girl speaks.

"You're going to die in there."

Of course this doesn't stop the boys from going in and smashing things, and of course, they die in there. Forward to the present day.

The Harmon family have moved from Boston to Los Angeles to try and pull themselves together. Ben's a psychiatrist in private practice, Vivien was a cellist, and Violet is their daughter. From the word go, this family is just barely holding together. Everyone is angry and lashing out at everybody else. We discover that Vivien had a horrible, traumatic miscarriage, then Ben had an affair as the loss pushed them apart, and Violet's pretty much disgusted with both of them. This move is intended to give them a chance to start over, as they move into the same house we saw in the beginning, now cleaned and remodeled. It dates back to the 1920s, its first owner a "doctor to the stars," according to the realtor. The most recent owners were a gay couple who put a great deal of work into the house.

Put a great deal of work into the house, and...ended up dead. In a murder/suicide pact.

So this is a house with a long, awful history. To start, we're only getting bits and pieces of it, as people are introduced (a neighbor, a maid, a client of Ben's, the girl from the beginning now grown, a disfigured man) and questions about them raised just as quickly. It's a good thing that FX has committed to 13 episodes of this show, because just from the pilot I'm getting the sense that it's going to take at least that long to untangle the knots we've had dropped into our lap. To say that not everyone is who they seem to be, well, of course not. But we get just enough to upend anything we might have concluded just minutes before. It's like three episodes' worth of dramatic reveals in one episode. I'll say it again: This is a dense show.

The density isn't just the amount of information we get, it's also in the recurrent themes and imagery. Sleepwalking, dreaming, and fire resonate throughout, analogies are made comparing bodies to houses (especially unsettling since the last resident of Vivien's body was dead before birth), and there's a hazy feeling that none of this is quite new, that perhaps, history is once again repeating itself - or maybe it's just the same story over and over again over the decades. You've always been the caretaker of the Overlook.

Even the production choices enhance the sense of unreality and dislocation - the camerawork is a continually shifting beast - odd angles, handheld jitteriness, and an odd, disconnected style of editing that makes it feels like frames have been dropped somewhere, as if continuity has begun to break down. Quick, almost-subliminal shots are cut into the middle of continuous scenes, adding to this sense that reality is slipping, for us as well as the characters. Sometimes this visual business becomes a little distracting, keeping us from really taking in the implications of a shot or a scene before we're on to the next one. It's only mildly distracting (though there was one particular scene that should have been absolutely terrifying and would have been if it hadn't happened and been over so quickly), mostly because you're so busy trying to decode things that the end effect is one of being swept up headlong into the turmoil contained by the walls of the house. That said, I'd like to see the show slow down and breathe a little more. When it does, the silences and steadily held shots can be just as chilling. More prosaically, the effects work is a little uneven - some works at creating a mood of nightmarish surrealism (or surrealist nightmare), others verge a little more on SyFy Original Movie territory. It's not a complete miss at its worst, but it's sitting on the verge.

Based on the pilot, this is going to live up to its title - it's the death of everyone who walks into the house, it's the death of the American family. It's a nightmare curdling in the middle of the City of Angels, and so far, it's shaping up to be an impressive piece of work.

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