I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House: Not With A Scream, But With A Whisper

Ghost stories tend to have two central components: The person or people who died, and the place where they died. Not always, you occasionally get stories about what Ghostbusters would call a “Class Five Full-Roaming Vapor,” something that haunts people rather than places, but a lot of ghost stories tie the spirit or spirits to a place. Something happened there that has kept them there forever, and largely films that follow this track present the ghost as a puzzle to be solved - if the protagonists can figure out why this spirit haunts this place, they can put it to rest. Victory (or survival) relies on understanding.

I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House is an ambitious film in many ways, not least of which is in how it seeks to overturn those two basic assumptions. Unfortunately, its ambition  sometimes gets in the way of telling an effective story.

It opens with a monologue:

“I have heard it said that a house with a death in it can never again be bought or sold by the living.

It can only be borrowed from the ghosts that have stayed behind. To go back and forth, letting out and gathering back in again. Worrying over the floors in confused circles. Tending to their deaths like patchy, withered gardens. They have stayed to look back for a glimpse of the very last moments of their lives. But the memories of their own deaths are faces on the wrong side of wet windows, smeared by rain. Impossible to properly see.

There is nothing that chains them to the places where their bodies have fallen. They are free to go, but still they confine themselves, held in place by their looking. For those who have stayed, their prison is their never seeing. And left all alone, this is how they rot.”

With these words, we are introduced to Lily Saylor, a hospice nurse who has just arrived in Braintree, Massachusetts, for her next assignment. She’s going to be caring for successful novelist Iris Blum, whose books Lily describes as the kind often purchased in airports and supermarkets. It’s a nice, economical image. Iris is frail, barely there, her mind going and on the way to gone. It’s a big, old house, and it’s very quiet. Lily’s monologue continues: “Three days ago, I turned 28 years old.”

“I will never be 29 years old.”

So right up front, we know Lily is not long for this world. So the rest of the film is about how it happens, not what happens, and this lends the film a nice, sustained hum of unease throughout. On paper, there’s really not a lot to this film - Lily takes care of Iris, and soon notices that some things are amiss with both the house and Iris. Things go bump in the night, and Iris keeps referring to her as “Polly,” which is weird, because the only Polly in Iris’ life was the protagonist of her novel The Lady In The Walls, a protagonist who meets a gruesome end.

The film is basically Lily’s investigation into these things, and the story unfolds gradually, drawing connections between Lily, Iris, and Polly without being excessively expository about it. This is not a film about excessive detail (except when it is, to its detriment, but more on that later), and it relies on lots of small gestures to communicate information and set a mood. It’s a nice change from more conventional ghost-story narratives where it’s the ghost itself that leads the protagonist to understanding, and really, the film’s thesis is pretty much spelled out in the introductory monologue - we think ghosts are tethered to their places, but they aren’t, and we think understanding their demise will solve their continued existence, but it won’t.

It’s not that we’re denied understanding - we get a sense of what has happened, is happening, will happen - it’s just presented gradually, in isolated moments that all happen in the same place, but at different times. And that feeds into the mood this film sets: Everyone is sort of unstuck in time - Iris by dementia, Lily by being alone in this big  house with Iris, so everything’s sort of untethered to start with. It feels like Lily’s telling us what happened after it already happened. The film is made up of lots of long shots of empty spaces, or at most two people, sometimes talking but as often not, the silences and conversations alike filled with empty air. Everything is punctuated by slow fades and dissolves, which gives it a dreamlike feeling. That, combined with the unease that we feel knowing what’s coming (if not how), is nicely jolting when the dreaminess is interrupted, which it is in ways sparing but precisely sharp.

So, then, this is a slow, mannered ghost story. It creates an evocative atmosphere, but it’s also, I think, perhaps too mannered in other ways. It’s kind of an odd duck in that it’s a contemporary film (roughly speaking, it appears to be a circa 1970s period piece) that feels like it’s going for the kind of stiffness and formality of speech and manner you’d associate with Henry James, and although this and the general airlessness of it aren’t necessarily a bad thing (it certainly helps to sell an atmosphere of slight unreality), there are a couple of points where it tips overboard. For example, the opening monologue as excerpted above begins well, but it goes on a little long and starts rambling, belaboring its point, and the moment dissipates. This film relies heavily on space and silence to create its atmosphere, so when a character starts to rabbit on about how beauty cannot truly see itself (and at its worst it really is some highfalutin’ nonsense), and does so in the stilted  manner in which everyone in this film speaks, it threatens to kill the mood it’s so assiduously created.

I don’t think it’s a deal-breaker - there’s a lot to like about this film, though it’s so stylized as to likely be an acquired taste, but its strength lies in minimalism, so when it abandons that and does so in a way that leads our attention to wander, it’s irritating. This film is at its best in stillness and hush, at whispering its awful secrets to us.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Bone Tomahawk: The Wild Frontier

I’m always a little skeptical about period pieces. Scary movies are already sort of a difficult proposition because they rely on more suspension of disbelief than drama or comedy - people like to be scared, but not too scared, and one way some people modulate their experience is by using improbabilities or inconsistencies in the film as sort of a safety valve. Some folks need to be reminded it’s just a movie, and one way to do that is to focus on its artificiality. And so anytime you set your film in another time, with attendant changes in dialogue and dress and setting, you’re adding artificiality - you’re making it easier for the audience to distance itself, and if you do it badly, it’s just going to look corny and stupid.

Fortunately, Bone Tomahawk isn’t corny or stupid. It’s a Western, set on a merciless frontier, that also serves as an exercise in slow dread.

The film opens cold, on a man having his throat cut by one of two road agents. They’re doing their murderous business and at the same time having a conversation that wouldn’t be much out of place in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. The sound of horses causes them to flee, and they take a wrong turn into someplace they shouldn’t be. Someplace holy, adorned with skulls, and one of them meets an end as quick and nasty as the people to whom they’d just been attending. The other flees.

Cut to “Eleven Days Later” and the small frontier town of Bright Hope. We’re introduced in turn to some of the people in town - Arthur O’Dwyer is a cowboy laid up with a broken leg, his wife Samantha is a nurse. Franklin Hunt is the town sheriff, old-timer Chicory is his “backup deputy,” and John Brooder is a man apparently of some means (and arrogance). Bright Hope is a small, but established frontier settlement, and though we don’t get a sense of how populous it is, the people we’re introduced to feel like actual people. In the lead-up to what comes next, the film does a good job of showing instead of telling - we get lots of little details about these people and the town, and not every detail means something to the plot, but they all tell us more about the world, giving it a little more depth, like life was going on here before the movie began.

And so Chicory, in his capacity as backup deputy, comes to Sheriff Hunt with a report: He was out on a walk, and noticed a suspicious fellow burying some suitcases in the ground out on the far edge of town, before coming into town and stopping for a drink at the local watering hole. So the sheriff and his backup deputy take a walk down to the bar to have a polite conversation with the stranger - a conversation that ends with the stranger getting shot in the leg. Sheriff Hunt isn’t cruel, but he doesn’t fuck around. And since the town doctor is drunk (yet again), Samantha is called to the jail to extract the bullet and treat the wound. It’s all calm, and measured. John Brooder escorts Samantha to the jail, and once she’s done with the operation and once the stranger’s fever has abated, non-backup deputy Nick will escort her home. Hunt and Chicory are called away regarding a colt missing from the town stable. When they get there, they find all the horses gone, and the stable boy eviscerated.

And when they get back to the jail, everyone is gone. The deputy, the stranger, and Samantha. There are signs of a struggle. Arrows buried in the wall. Their first assumption is Indians, and so Hunt begins to put together a posse and calls for “The Professor” - a native who lives in town - to identify the tribe that took them. It’s weird, though - usually arrows have heads made from sharpened flint.

These are tipped with sharpened bone.

As it transpires, the culprits aren’t any recognized tribe. As The Professor puts it, you can’t be a tribe when you have no language. These are feral, cave-dwelling people - “troglodytes” who eat human flesh, and they live four days’ ride from Bright Hope, in what is largely terra incognita. And so, Sheriff Hunt, John Brooder, Chicory, and Arthur O’Dwyer, who would not be dissuaded, ride out for the Valley of the Starving Men to rescue their people on what The Professor tells them is a suicide mission.

Now, before I go on, one of the really tricky bits of most Western narratives is the way they, at their heart, are always going to be stories about white colonists subjugating and massacring their way westward. It wasn’t a great time to be a woman or anything other than white, and setting up the monsters of the piece as “savages” is more likely than not going to be kind of a problem. The film does try to get ahead of this with a Native American character who frames the antagonists as being of no tribe, as of being so debased as to not even be Native American, but having this designation made by a Native American who lives among whites and dresses as they do has its own problems.

Like, it’s very difficult to tell this kind of story in this day and age without the ghost of every horrible thing that went into the white colonization of North America looming over it. The film doesn’t lean into Western clichés on this front, thank goodness, but neither does it really engage with or subvert them either. The massacres that came with westward expansion are acknowledged matter-of-factly. They are neither unambiguously condemned nor justified as right, just a fact of recent history, which is probably better than leaning into a more traditional “red savages” narrative, but...when it’s a Western, and there are savages, however un-Native American they’re framed as being, it’s still there, and it didn’t feel right to me to write about this film without at least acknowledging it. Maybe “not actively offensive” is the best we can hope for here.

But, all that said, this isn’t a thoughtless or careless film, or one that goes for the obvious. It’s a quiet film - some somber strings punctuate important moments, but otherwise it’s just the sounds of the prairie, the badlands, the frontier town where the pianist in the local bar has a tidy little pricing scam running, so although we get the obligatory saloon, we don’t get the honky-tonk piano we’ve come to expect. The dialogue is definitely archaic, but believably so, avoiding a lot of the Yosemite Sam-style clichés that would be easy to fall back on. The characters aren’t overstated or cartoonish - they are definite types, yes, the sheriff is very much a Western sheriff, and Chicory has a bit of Gabby Hayes in him, but at every step we’re allowed to see more of them than just those obvious references, and so they never seems like cartoons. There’s also a real vein of wry, understated humor running through the film that helps humanize the protagonists, and because it’s not broad or overplayed, it throws the horror into contrast. In the final act, when things get really dire, it even adds a certain amount of pathos.

And indeed, things do get dire. A lot of the horror comes from the way the film posits the frontier itself as predatory. The elements, animals, humans, humans existing at a level barely above animal, the dangers inherent in even the slightest injury in a time when medicine was primitive and infection more likely than not, resources and help being spread thin and far away - all of these things conspire against our protagonists on their journey. It reminds me a little of The Descent in this respect - they’re going into unknown territory without any backup, in conditions where survival is perilous, where anything going wrong is going to have big costs, and of course things start going wrong. The quietness of the film extends to the horror as well - it’s not telegraphed or overdone, just as much a fact of the environment as anything else. Violence is sudden and sharp, and happens off-screen as often as not. It’s not gratuitously gory, so when it does get gory, there’s real impact. The overall tone throughout is one of restraint, punctuated with awful things that happen without warning.

It’s a measured, deliberate exercise in stripping away hope, in making things harder and harder for the protagonists, before they even get where they’re going, and where they’re going is horrible, a place of atavism and butchery, and it’s scary because we have reason to care about these people, and then when we finally see what they’re up against - covered in powdered bone, making an unnatural sound somewhere between a keen and a roar - and what they do to their captives, it’s nightmarish. The frontier is a dangerous place, with depths you explore at your peril.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

The Eyes Of My Mother: Little Girl Lost

In films, evil is easy. It isn’t hard to come up with something or someone evil in fiction because you’re the one describing the character, and if you want to make the sum total of their existence that they are evil, you can do that. But that’s not always especially interesting, I don’t think. Sometimes it’s absolutely fine, and heaven knows I do hate excessive backstory and explanation in horror films, but to contradict myself, I also think there’s worth in creating a monster that is more than its monstrosity. So often in life, the people we would call evil are not just evil, their evil comes from human desires and needs and weaknesses, and exploring the tension between the universality of the monster’s desires and the singularity of how they go about achieving them can yield really interesting results.

Consider, for example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein - the monster does monstrous things, but it also has a mind and an interior life, one preoccupied with the same things so many of us struggle with. Outside of fiction, the serial murderers Jeffery Dahmer and Ed Gein did terrible, terrible things - things beyond the pale of typical human conduct - but were also both by all accounts lonely and awkward, and did the terrible things they did to try and fulfill some basic human need for companionship in the only ways that made sense to them, given their inability to assign value to human life.

It’s that intersection of loneliness and utter absence of anything like a moral compass that gives The Eyes Of My Mother its stark, unsettling power.

This is the story of Francisca, a little girl who lives with her mother and father out in the country. Francisca’s mother was an eye surgeon back in Portugal, and when one of the cows they keep dies, she has Francisca practice dissection on it. She’s teaching her daughter what she knows. Francisca’s father is a silent presence who moves through the house, sometimes drives into town to run errands.

On one of these occasions, while her father is away, a young man comes to visit Francisca and her mother. They’re out in the middle of nowhere, and it’s just Francisca and her mother, and this young man. The young man is pleasant enough, but he smiles a little too widely.

By the time her father returns home, it’s too late. Francisca’s mother is dead.

From here, we follow Francisca as she grows up, in this house in the middle of the country. It’s her and her profoundly repressed father, living with the constant reminder of their traumatizing loss. They don’t talk about what happened. They don’t talk at all, and the rest of the film is largely occupied with the things Francisca does to feel less lonely in this stiflingly lonely environment. It’s hard to say much more about the film without giving it away - it’s not that the story really has twists, it’s just that so much of the film’s impact lies in what happens, what new turn Francisca’s quest to no longer be alone is going to take, that to recount much of it takes away a lot of the movie. However, it’s clear within the first ten or fifteen minutes that there’s something really wrong with her, probably was even before she lost her mother, and the rest is just a matter of what new shapes it takes as she grows up and where it’s all going to lead.

And this is what makes this film as powerful as it is, I think - it manages the very tricky balance of eliciting some kind of sympathy for Francisca while not at all diluting the horror of what she’s doing. Take a young girl who grows up with a surgeon’s detachment toward the body, an emotionally distant father, and a mother taken from her too soon through a shocking, awful act of violence that she witnesses, and something is going to snap deep down. Francisca never really had the chance to learn how to relate to other people, and she’s trying her best with the tools she has at her disposal, but those tools lead to awful ends. We can respond to her profound loneliness and inability to connect with other people, her utter brokenness, but how she’s chosen to cope with it is monstrous.

This by itself could end up overheated and lurid and kind of tedious. I mean, at worst this could basically be a Lifetime Original Movie with gore. But, much to my delight, this is instead yet another in the run of films I’ve written about recently that brings a strong, assured sense of composition to the table. It’s really, really nice to be able to write about horror films and be able to talk about editing and sound design and cinematography on a level beyond “there is sound and lighting and the camera is pointed at people.” I know at some point the streak will run out, but this is yet another horror film that feels like a film. Between being shot in black and white, effective use of chiaroscuro, and a largely affectless acting style, it feels a lot like David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Like that film it’s centered largely in one location, in a world where emotions don’t really get expressed and there are lots of long, awkward silences. Wide shots punctuate the film, with people dwarfed against the world, clouds and trees and four walls pressing down on them. Everything is very still, until it isn’t. Shots tends to be long and cuts between them sudden, and all of this - the cinematic style, the spare but effective use of largely ambient music, and the characterization all come together to create a supremely uneasy experience.

There’s a real sense of restraint (and when to abandon it) at work here. In general, this film does a lot with suggestion - it doesn’t shy away from violence, but doesn’t linger on it either. Quick edits just before something awful happens cut to the immediate aftermath, meaning we get just enough to fill in the blanks a lot of the time. A conversation will start to go wrong, you can sense things turning, and then we cut immediately to Francisca scrubbing the floor yet again. It tells you everything you need to know without showing it to you, which makes the times the film doesn’t look away that much more powerful. Throughout, the violence is presented dispassionately, but somehow this just makes it worse - this, combined with an immediate immersion into Francisca’s dysfunction (as well as having seen firsthand exactly where it comes from) creates this deeply uneasy feeling where we’re never permitted the luxury of dehumanizing Francisca, but neither are we spared the horror of her day to day life. We have to feel both, and it’s as disturbing as the suffocating, monochromatic world in which it all takes place. The one thing that didn’t quite land for me was an ending that feels a little abrupt and a little anticlimactic, but it’s the kind of end that feels inevitable given what we’ve seen, and it’s entirely consistent with the mood of the film overall. What Francisca does is horrible, but she isn’t doing it to be horrible. She’s doing it because this is how she grew up, this is the only thing she knows, and nobody was ever really around to teach her any different. Her life is drab and gray and filled with horrors, but because it’s all she knows, they aren’t horrors to her. They’re friends.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Available on Netflix

The Autopsy Of Jane Doe: Blood Will Tell, If You’ll Let It

One of the more pleasant side effects of coming back from a long hiatus is having a backlog of movies that I’m interested in or have heard good things about to work through. I’ve got a running list of things I want to see and plenty of stuff on deck on three different streaming services, but it’s nice to approach this from the perspective of “which one do I want to do today?” instead of “well, what’s out there right now?” The downside is that a lot of these films have also had time to build up my expectations, either based on the strength of their premise or critical reception. As fair as I try to be, it’s hard when hype  whatever the source- gets in the way. I mean, it isn’t the worst thing in the world when a scary movie isn’t as good as I was hoping for.

I bring this up because I had high hopes going in for The Autopsy Of Jane Doe, but even though it starts strong, it ends up whiffing, in what feels to me like a lack of confidence in what it has done up to that point.

We open on a crime scene in rural Grantham, VA, with an investigation in progress. Law enforcement and forensic personnel traipse in and out, cataloging evidence, documenting the scene. It’s done quietly and competently, without tiresome banter or much in the way of cliché. A family appears to have turned on each other (in violent fashion - guns, knives, smears and gouts of blood everywhere), and normally this would be the engine that drives the movie - why did these people kill each other? Why does it look like they were trying to break out of their own home? - but it isn’t.

Someone tells the sheriff that he needs to come down to the basement, where there’s another body, partially unearthed in the basement’s dirt floor. No identification, no prints in the system. This a problem for the sheriff, who can construct a plausible narrative for the press regarding the rest of the crime, shocking though it is in this small town. But this unidentified body, this Jane Doe, well, he needs to find out how she fits in, and quickly.

Enter Tommy and Austin Tilden, father and son, third and fourth generation coroners. In sharp contrast to the crime scene, they’re blaring rock-n-roll as they perform an autopsy. It’s nicely jarring, but doesn’t feel flippant. They have a job to do, and it’s nice to listen to music while you work. It’s the last body of the night, and Tommy’s instructing Austin in the subtleties of determining cause of death. It’s not always the obvious thing, and you need to do the whole investigation before you draw a conclusion. We get a sense of their dynamic, and there are a few balls up in the air - a tragedy they’ve been dealing with for the last couple of years, Austin wants to move away but can’t quite bring himself to leave his dad alone, Austin keeps putting work ahead of his life, that sort of thing.

And then in comes the sheriff with the Jane Doe from the crime scene. He needs a cause of death tonight so he knows what to tell the local press in the morning.

So Austin and Tommy get to work - the deceased is female, in her early twenties (appears to be in her early twenties, notes Tommy), no external signs of trauma or obvious fatal injuries. And then they open the deceased’s eyes, which are cloudy, which you’d expect from someone who had been dead for several days. Except this body doesn’t look more than a couple of hours old. Hasn’t even settled into rigor mortis yet.

And, as it transpires, her wrists and ankles have been smashed. And her tongue severed.

And this is the part of the premise that really drew me to this film and really is the film at its strongest- two people, in a basement morgue, in the middle of the night, doing an autopsy that gets stranger and stranger as it goes on - moving from things that are unusual to things that are outright medically impossible to things that suggest very specific explanations for what they’re finding, unearthing more and more horrible things as they do their job. The idea that you could tell a horror story through discovery, through evidence, with each new revelation worse than the last, adding another piece to the puzzle, I mean…that has “Absolutely My Shit” written all over it.

And that really is how it all starts off. It’s mostly quiet, and full of lots of long, still shots and sudden cuts between them, and this does a nice job of building unease. The music and sound design are largely spare, and sudden shifts between quiet and diegetic sound are used effectively to contribute to the overall tension without signposting it too obviously. It really does start strong - two people in a well-lit room discovering increasingly unsettling things about this body which resist explanation. If the film had stuck with its strengths, it could have found a way to make small details disturbing, to mine shock from discovery and tighten the screws in anticipation of an explosive payoff.

But it doesn’t have the courage of those convictions -  it’s when things start to escalate and move away from that scenario that the film starts to falter, as it begins to externalize the threat in ways that feel a little muddled, both narratively and cinematically Tommy and Austin are largely believable (and nicely competent when shit starts getting weird) as people - they’re father and son and still dealing with a family tragedy of their own, and I like that it never descends into histrionics or some horrible unspeakable family secrets - it’s all at a human scale, inferred and talked around rather than exposited for the most part, which makes the conversation where it’s all laid out for us feel just that much more formulaic.

And that’s what it comes down to - there’s a real shift to the formulaic here after a certain point. Some of it is obvious early on (one particular detail in the first 15 minutes or so basically screamed “this will mean something later on,” and it did, which bummed me out), and the film does ratchet up the spooky a little too much, too fast, but not irretrievably so. After a given point, however, the filmmakers made a choice to shift the story from one about discovery to one about an external threat, and there’s very little about that external threat that doesn’t fall victim to cliché. When the focus is strictly on what the body can tell Tommy and Austin, it’s gripping. When the focus shifts to something more explicitly supernatural, it becomes a story about explanations and solutions, and there’s flickering light and smoke and rote spookiness. It all feels a little pasted in, a little predictable, a little stock,  to the point that the end feels downright glib, which is wildly at variance from the tone at the film’s beginning.

Which is too bad, because the premise is not one you see every day, and it starts off with a lot of promise. If it’d had the courage to stay slow, and spare, and still, and careful, and keep everything but the autopsy itself at a human scale and not get too obvious, it would have been something really special. There’s a lot of horror to be drawn from letting a mysterious body speak for itself, but before it really had a chance to do so, someone barged in and started shouting over it.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Available on Netflix

The VVitch: Grim Fairy Tales

So here’s the thing about fairytales: As quaint and cutesy as they might be in the modern day, they were, like fables, originally cautionary in nature, a product of a time largely uninformed by science and reliant on the oral tradition. The versions we get today are largely sanitized, with happy endings, the original blood and gore toned down, and rendered less upsetting by the distance that the modern age brings to stories from another time. But once upon a time (heh), fairytales, like fables, were intended to scare the shit out of impressionable children, using the dangers of the world they lived in to reinforce the things they needed to know to stay alive.

The VVitch (subtitled A New England Fairytale) is a very well-done example of what a fairytale might look like returned to its original, awful power.

The year is 1630, and William - along with his wife Katherine, oldest daughter Thomasin, middle son Caleb, young twins Mercy and Jonas, and baby Samuel - stands accused by the plantation government of practicing his religion in a manner unsuited to the community. William, unwilling to live someplace he perceives to have abandoned Christ’s true gospel, packs up his family and moves out into the wilderness where they can make a home of their own.

But there’s a cost to this. Leaving the plantation behind means leaving the comfort of community behind - doctors, reliable shelter, food stores to get through the lean times. It was a time when shunning or excommunication carried a real potential cost to survival, and as it transpires, William and his family are having a hard time of it. Their corn crop is meager and won’t last them through the winter, the traps he bought with Katherine’s heirloom silver cup aren’t catching any animals, the chickens aren’t laying good eggs, they have nothing to sell or trade. Starvation is looming.

But still, life goes on. What crops they have get tended. The goats have to be herded back into their pen after Mercy and Jonas let them out. Thomasin keeps an eye on baby Samuel while Katherine works. Thomasin plays peek-a-boo with Samuel, and Samuel giggles with delight as Thomasin covers her face…

..and then when she pulls her hands away, Samuel is gone.

This is the inciting event, as quick and sudden as lightning, that begins a long, dark unraveling of this one family, trying to make it on their own in the wilds of the New World. William’s family (we never learn their surname) is under tremendous strain from multiple directions at once. They are already struggling to survive, and must also to contend with a child missing (and good as dead) on top of their rapidly dwindling food supply and a Calvinist version of Christianity in which they are forever unworthy. condemned from birth to irreconcilable sin and corruption, only to be granted grace if an unknowable God so chooses. Their faith is so constraining that its weight presses down upon the film, its demands hanging over every conversation, every scene like the brooding storm clouds ever-present above the tree line. 

This, then, is a world in which the presence of a remote, unknowable God is almost physically palpable to these people, and so is also the presence of evil. This was a time when supernatural explanations for events were more likely than scientific ones, when people understood the world through scripture and fairytales. This is how William and his family understand the world and their place in it, and when you’re facing isolation, slow starvation, and the death of your youngest child, and your best explanation is unavoidable sin, corruption, and the presence of literal evil in the form of the Devil and witchcraft, things are gonna go wrong pretty fast.

And they do. There are a lot of secrets in this family - William’s keeping secrets from Katherine, Katherine’s keeping secrets from William, William’s asking Caleb to lie to spare his mother, Caleb swears Thomasin to secrecy, and meanwhile, Jonas and Mercy are running around being awful little shits and stirring up trouble at every opportunity. As things go from bad to worse, everyone basically turns on each other - everyone blames Thomasin because she was the last to see Samuel and they resent her, and she resents them for blaming her when they all have their own failings and hypocrisies. Much like Hereditary, nobody really communicates with anyone else, and this is evil’s way in - fracture the family, drive them apart, make them vulnerable to evil’s influence.

Also, much like Hereditary, the supernatural is behind what appear to be natural misfortunes, though here everyone’s more willing to accept the supernatural as a possibility - but it’s their own human frailties that cause them to misunderstand where evil actually lies and blinds them to its actual presence. The Devil preys upon desire, tells people what they want to hear, and this makes them receptive. Once the door is open, the Devil finds his way in and takes what he wants. Both films deal with the ways in which natural secrets and familial dysfunction let supernatural evil in, and how our own flaws and failings blind us to its influence until it’s too late, but Hereditary takes place in a modern, rational world that denies the supernatural, and The VVitch takes place in a world that acknowledges and fears the supernatural. And yet, it doesn’t matter in the end.

And this is what makes it deeply tragic as well as scary. The family is largely sympathetic - William is a decent, goodhearted man, not cruel or abusive, he does things for the right reasons, but as often is the case, they backfire. For as much as he excoriates himself for the sin of pride, when it comes down to it, he can set it aside for the sake of his family. Katherine is maybe less sympathetic, but believably so, given that she’s left her home in England and all its comforts (at one point, Thomasin reminisces about having a home with glass windows, and Caleb can’t even remember it) to follow her husband into the untamed wilds of a foreign country, and it’s largely brought her nothing but misery. Thomasin and Caleb are decent kids with realistic fears and worries given their worldview (there’s an especially heartfelt sequence where Caleb tearfully interrogates his father on the nature of grace because he’s afraid his little brother has gone to hell and that’s a lot to put on a kid his age), but there’s only so much scapegoating Thomasin can take. They’re people, not caricatures, and though the dialogue threatens to tip over into affectation occasionally, it’s generally on point (and historically sourced, apparently, which helps). As non-contemporary periods go, it’s pretty well-realized, and these are believable people with accessible, understandable hopes and fears and frustrations.

And all of this is beautifully shot - impenetrably dark forests, cloudy, overcast skies looming over everything, everything gray and bleak. The score is all ambient hum and chimes and dissonant strings building to hysteric crescendo, followed by sudden drops into silence and though it’s well-executed, it tries a little too hard sometimes to underscore what we’re seeing. The sound design, however, is excellent and pays off extremely well at the end.  It’s all paced for a slow burn - very quiet, restrained and deliberate, set up almost as vignettes rather than one continuous story, and though the slow pace threatens to bog the film down in the middle, the way it shifts attention back and forth between the natural misfortune and family conflict and the supernatural omens and portents of black magic’s presence, it keeps moving and inexorably dials up the bad shit until the very end. It’s an end that you’ll probably see coming, but to its credit, it feels less predictable and more just dreadfully inevitable. The Devil is patient. The Devil plays the long game. The Devil was there all along, hiding in plain sight.

IMDB entry
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Available on Netflix

It Follows: A Film Divided

In my opinion, one of the strongest elements of a good horror film is mood, atmosphere, “vibe,” whatever you want to call it. The stronger the mood, the easier it is to lead the audience where you want them to go emotionally, making even slight gestures lead to strong reactions. And a big part of evoking mood is having a coherent, well-considered style to the film. When everything - acting, dialogue, sound design, scoring, and cinematography - works together toward a singular vision, it does a lot of heavy lifting, usually to much more interesting results than indiscriminate gore and screaming.

That last bit, however, is important - it needs to be working toward a singular vision. When it doesn’t, even the most carefully designed and composed film can end up a bit of a mess. Pick the story you want to tell, and tell that story, and make sure every element contributes to that story, and not another one.

It Follows is a carefully designed film, and it starts strong, but doesn’t quite know what story it’s trying to tell, and lands with much less impact as a result.

The film opens on a quiet nighttime suburban street, and a young woman running out of a house. She runs out into the street, a neighbor asks if she’s okay, and she says yes, but she’s obviously not, She circles back around to her car, gets in, and drives as far away as she can. We cut to her sitting with her back to a lake’s edge, lit by her car’s headlights. She’s on her phone, leaving a message for her father. She’s telling him how much she loves him, and apologizes for all of the times she caused him trouble. She’s talking like she’s never going to see him again.

And then a sudden cut to day, and her broken body, dead eyes staring up into the sky.

And then our protagonists - Jay, her sister Kelly, and their friends Paul and Yara. They’re hanging out, as teenagers do, just another lazy evening. Jay’s got a date with this new boy she’s been seeing. Paul seems to feel some type of way about it, but doesn’t say anything. It’s all very low-key. Kelly, Paul and Yara hang out and watch a movie, Jay goes on her date. They go to the movies as well. And then go park the car somewhere secluded, and do what teenagers do when they go park the car somewhere secluded.

Only for Jay to wake up, chloroformed and tied to a chair. Jay’s new boyfriend needs for her to see something. It’s walking toward her. And we know from the opening what will happen if it reaches her.

As it transpires, Jay has inherited a curse. Her boyfriend got it from a one-night stand, and he’s passed it on to her. If she has sex with someone else, she’ll pass it on to them, and so on. Until she does, she’ll be stalked by a ghost, of sorts. It can look like anyone, and only people who carry the curse can see it. It’s coming for her, slowly but surely. She can run, she can drive, but it will find her eventually. If she dies, it will come for her boyfriend, so passing it on doesn’t really solve the problem, it just forestalls it.

Jay is understandably traumatized (and acts it, which is rare in horror films), and so she and her friends attempt to keep her safe, all the while trying to figure out how to undo this horrible thing that has happened to her, and from which she cannot escape.

It’s a pretty compelling premise on its face - you can’t avoid it, you can’t hide from it, and you will die when it reaches you, and the best option you have is to find someone to have sex with, knowing that by doing so you’re basically passing on a death sentence. It’s actually a pretty unsettling twist on the whole “teens who have sex get murdered first” tradition in slasher films, and embodying it in a lone figure who might look perfectly normal, slowly walking toward you in the background, or out of a crowd, or down a hallway lends the whole thing a feeling of paranoia similar to that mined in films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The camerawork does a great job of communicating this. The film is very carefully composed, there aren’t many closeups, and a lot of the work is done with long shots, distant figures barely glimpsed, small figures placed in really wide shots. Positioning a slowly walking figure either in the center of the shot or in the background creates a understated visual vocabulary for when someone is in danger. The threat is established early in the opening sequence, so the rest is awful implication - the audience knows what happens when it catches up, so seeing it coming is bad enough. The sound design is largely ambient, with low-frequency tones punctuating moments of danger, and isn’t at all intrusive. A lot of thought went into presentation here.

Sometimes, though, maybe too much. The stylistic approach taken with its setting feels like it pulls against the spare, effective minimalism of the premise. This feels very much like a film out of time - it’s set in Detroit and its outlying suburbs, and the Rust Belt setting keeps it grounded, and naturalistic. These look like real neighborhoods and real homes and real schools. The setting and a synthesizer-heavy soundtrack locates the film in the late 70s or early 80s, feeling similar to the original Halloween without being too self-consciously retro. Or would, if it weren’t shot through with anachronism. The young woman at the start calls her father on a cellphone, but nobody else in the film seems to have one, and the protagonist’s homes still have old rotary wall phones. The kids watch movies (1950s science fiction movies, at that) on old CRT televisions, but then Yara spends the movie reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot on something that looks like a Kindle built into a makeup compact. Jay’s movie date is at a theater where the film is accompanied by live music played by an organist

This isn’t “oh look, the Roman soldier is wearing a wristwatch” negligence, this is a deliberate choice by the director in an effort to create a dreamlike atmosphere (at least, according to IMDB). But it doesn’t, not really - it’s tough to really nail that mix of present and past, and here it ends up being more jarring and distracting than anything else. The naturalistic setting pulls us into the world, but the odd atemporality pulls us right back out again.

This extends to the scripting and acting choices as well. The dialogue is largely naturalistic - these teens are not super-glib or witty, they’re fumbling, sometimes inarticulate, like actual teenagers are, and that’s good. That works with the setting. But then there’s just a little more air in the dialogue than you would expect - pauses in conversation are a little long, everything feels a little slow and quiet, almost languid, and though it works well at the beginning to set up the world of these kids as one largely absent of tension, it persists even after the threat has been made clear - there really aren’t many emotional peaks or valleys in this film, and  this ends up robbing the film of energy it needs to really sell the danger that Jay is in.

On sort of a related side note, the world of this film is one in which adults barely exist, mostly seen from a distance or heard from off-screen. Even though it appears to be set during the school year, the five teenagers at the heart of the movie pretty much move around without any restriction or apparent concern from their parents, and before shit really gets bad, it has the idyllic feel of summer vacation, even when it’s gray and autumnal outside. All of this leads to a feeling that this is a world out of time and season, which would be fine except that again, it feels like it’s not working in concert with a relatively gritty setting or a premise that requires tension. 

I mean, oddly enough, what a lot of this brings to mind is Napoleon Dynamite, in terms of setting and feel, and that’s…really, really not a horror movie.

There are some other missteps as well - making the spirit invisible but still physical leads to a couple of slightly dodgy effects sequences, including a climactic showdown between the spirit and the kids that just feels goofy and somewhat contradictory to the film’s internal logic (which the director has said was intentional, but it ends up making the threat feel less threatening), and I feel like the central conceit - you pass this curse on by having sex with someone - went underutilized, considering it existed right alongside the sexual politics of adolescence - especially unsupervised adolescence.

These characters are at a point in their lives where they’re just now exploring feelings of attractiveness and desire, and through no say of their own, it’s now coupled with life-or-death stakes, but it never really seems to matter or connect. Paul is the prototypical Nice Guy from jump - he’s jealous of Jay’s new boyfriend, pretty creepy in his own right, and his ideas for helping Jay are pretty clearly just expressions of entitlement, and it’s addressed, but only a little, and only in passing. Jay’s boyfriend observes that it’ll be easy for Jay to pass it on because she’s a girl, and that seems like a great opportunity to dig into ideas about objectification and the presumed sexual availability of women, but again, it’s just sort of glossed over on the way to something else.

There are a couple of feints toward what I thought would have been much better endings than the one we got - much more provocative, certainly, and more powerful in their implications, but what we’re left with instead is vaguely icky - a clumsy, reductive showdown, followed by the Nice Guy getting what he wanted all along, and nothing really changing, winding the film down in kind of an inconclusive mess. It’s incredibly frustrating, because it’s clear a lot of thought went into this film, but it really does feel like half of the choices made ended up sabotaging the other half, and what tension and dread we do get are squandered. It’s one thing to see what you want to do, it’s another to see it clearly.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Hereditary: They Fuck You Up, Your Mom And Dad

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.  
They may not mean to, but they do.  
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,  
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

- Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, over and over: Some of the best horror out there is horror that encompasses both the natural and the supernatural, that juxtaposes real-life horrors with fictional ones. I think this is because things are often scariest when we feel some personal connection to them, some empathy with the characters on the screen, and if the people are relatable and their struggles are relatable, then when really horrifying things start happening, it just tightens the screw that much tighter.

(As an aside, during my hiatus from this thing, I’ve been reading a lot more horror, and if you like this sort of thing and haven’t read A Head Full Of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay, go fix that problem right now because it’s a pitch-perfect example of exactly this).

It’s not for everybody - a lot of horror films are really meant more as entertainment than anything else. The protagonists are sketched in, their fates largely predetermined and largely embraced by the audience. Cheap shocks, glib violence, and people who don’t matter make for horror films that are basically entertainment the way that roller coasters are entertainment. Or maybe public hangings.

I mean, I can look down my nose all I want, it’s still profitable. My opinion isn’t going to stop it, even if I do think it’s laughable that terms like “elevated horror” and “post-horror” are being bandied about to describe what is generally just really well-executed horror that doesn’t insult its audience’s intelligence and pays attention to style and cinematic craft. Like, that’s not a separate genre, that’s just what it’s like when it’s good. And often, part of what makes it so is the attention paid to the humanity of its characters, its insistence on treating them as three-dimensional people.

Case in point: Hereditary.

We open on an obituary, and a family getting ready to go to a funeral. This is the story of Annie Graham, an accomplished artist who creates painstakingly detailed diorama installations of scenes from her life. She is also a wife and mother to two children: Her son Peter, and her younger daughter, Charlie. As it transpires, Annie’s mother has just passed away after a long illness - declining health, dementia, home care - and today is the day of her funeral. Annie gives a eulogy, in which she enumerates the many ways in which she was estranged from her mother, the effect her mother had on her relationship with her own children, and it’s immediately clear that this is not a happy family.

This is a family with a lot of secrets.

The backbone of the film is a story of intergenerational trauma - Annie’s childhood was punctuated by tragedy after tragedy, a long legacy of mental illness, a father and brother who both died too soon by their own hands, a manipulative, distant, disapproving mother for whom she was forced to care when dementia set in, a woman with “private rituals, private friends” who cultivated a relationship with Annie’s daughter that pushed Annie out. Annie’s passed this onto her own children - Peter’s distance from his mother gradually reveals itself as a profound sense of betrayal and abandonment, Charlie is deeply odd, awkward, looks…wizened, almost, as if she is growing old without actually growing up, as if she is withering. She seems profoundly upset by her grandmother’s passing and rejects her mother’s attempts at comfort because she wants grandma back. Their father is ineffectual to the point of becoming almost part of the wallpaper.

Annie’s entire sense of family was poisoned from the start, and the effects on her own family are palpable. They’re already damaged when we meet them - affection and communication are stunted, repressed, made clear through small, economic gestures that a lot goes unsaid, undiscussed, unaddressed, even before the ball really gets rolling, and so this is a film as much about familial disintegration as anything else. But it’s about so much more - the death of Annie’s mother is really just the beginning, and it’s hard to talk about it without giving away important points that lend the film much of its power, but it all starts small - all the new faces at the funeral, the unhappy details of Annie’s childhood, the way one mourner surreptitiously wipes some kind of oil across the deceased’s lips as she passes the casket, Charlie’s obsession with creating dolls out of found objects…

…the phone call from the cemetery, indicating that Annie’s mother has been removed from her grave.

This film, then, like so many excellent horror films, is essentially a tragedy - a story about characters in the grip of inevitable fate, of invisible machinations. And again, like so many excellent horror films, it isn’t about just one thing. There are multiple tragedies here - the one that opens the film, the one that ends the first act, and the conclusion, and they aren’t the same tragedy, but they’re all intertwined, in ways that do not begin to reveal themselves until it’s much too late to stop anything. More than almost any other film I’ve seen in recent memory, everything in this film is telling us something important about the awful thing that is coming, the terrible truth that is going to be revealed, but there’s no way for us to know how it all fits together until the end. In this, it’s different from something like Kill List, which has its power in leaving much hidden, leaving us with the sense that we’ve gotten a brief, limited glimpse into something much larger. Here, it’s all there for us to peruse, like the lives captured in the miniatures that punctuate the film, if only we could somehow put them together.

This attention to narrative detail is completely echoed in an attention to cinematic detail. This is probably the most beautifully, meticulously composed horror film I’ve ever seen. The first shot after the obituary card is a slow zoom into a room in a carefully designed miniature house, which upends into something else in a way that is deeply disorienting. It’s a statement of purpose. Its artificiality really works for it - it’s stylized in the best sense of the word, setting a consistent tone and mood of unease. The color palette reminds me of films from the 70s and 80s, which gives it strong The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby vibes. It feels dramatic, both in the sweep of its gestures and in the sense of being carefully staged and arranged, which isn’t the same as feeling contrived. It feels like we are watching something terrible happen to people who had lives before we stepped in, but at a slight remove, as if they are on display. (The juxtaposition between miniatures and the events of the film is very effective.)

This artificiality, this staginess, is contrasted with performances that are as emotionally raw as you’re going to find. These are very vulnerable people in a lot of pain - not necessarily physical pain, but the pain of buried resentment and distrust and abandonment. Annie’s mother has poisoned the way this family relates to each other, and that doesn’t go away when she dies. It lingers, her shadow cast long and cold over their lives. Events subsequent to the funeral bring a lot of very ugly stuff to the surface, driving everyone away into their own separate corners, and so when things get worse in ways nobody would ever expect, when they need each other the most, they utterly fail each other. Their raw grief and suffering are as horrifying as anything supernatural, and when the supernatural comes, when it creeps in from around the edges of the film, where it always was (if you only knew where to look), it takes what is already a deeply uncomfortable character study in how we process unimaginable loss and pushes it to a nightmare pitch, where we cannot process unimaginable danger. If it were just the one thing, it’d be an award-season drama. If it were just the other, it’d be another run-of-the-mill mid-tier filler in Netflix’s horror section. But in being so convincingly both, and so comprehensively of a piece in its story, its acting, and its cinematic craft, it becomes an example of the genre at its best.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon