Enys Men: Lost At Sea

I don’t know that I’d call myself a sucker for cryptic, enigmatic horror films, but if I were put under oath, I couldn’t really deny it either. I think this goes back to my contention that horror is, at the end of the day, not about thrills and chills and gore and jump-out-of-your-seat moments exclusively, like some (many) professional critics seem to think. There’s a whole palette of emotions that could be said to fall under the umbrella of horror, and to me, that’s the important bit: How does it make you feel? And you don’t need to be literal to evoke a feeling. Sometimes, watching something play out that sits just at the edge of comprehension, that may not make logical sense but fills you with unease…that’s the territory of nightmares, and what are horror movies if not our nightmares?

So yeah, I don’t think a film has to make strict “sense” to work. Cryptic, enigmatic, oblique, tone-poem movies can work and work well, but also risk falling apart into incoherence, and that’s unfortunately what I think happens to Enys Men. There’s a lot going for it, but it never really comes together and the result is something that is ultimately more confusing than haunting.

There isn’t really a story so much as there is a series of events and possibly recollections. There’s a woman (credited only as “The Volunteer”) who lives on the remote island of Enys Men, where her sole regular duty appears to be observing a small patch of flowers, noting soil temperature and the condition of the flowers on a daily basis and recording the results in a logbook. The records go back quite some time. She gets up, checks the flowers, checks an abandoned mineshaft by dropping a rock down into it and noting how long it takes to hit bottom, then she goes inside and makes her breakfast. It’s a rocky, wind-swept island, all rocks and moss and the crumbling stone ruins of what appears to have been a small mining village. She lives in the one intact structure on the island, a cottage that’s almost overtaken by the greenery creeping up its sides, as if the island is reclaiming any memory of human occupation. She has running water, but electricity is provided by a generator and rationed out for lights and some broadcast music in the evening. Her only contact with the mainland is a dodgy two-way radio and a supply boat that comes by on a regular basis. There’s a standing stone in her front yard, a monument to some long-ago tragedy.

Otherwise, she’s alone all the time, just her and all of the ghosts of this island.

Not to be too reductive, but it being a story of someone who’s ostensibly going mad from loneliness, told in largely disconnected static moments, results in something that is sort of like The Lighthouse as told through the lens of Skinamarink. It looks like something from a bygone era - scratchy, grainy film and a saturated color palette that nonetheless consists mostly of mossy greens, grays and browns, with striking patches of color - the sea, the sky, the woman’s bright blue eyes and brighter red coat, a bright red generator contrasted against a gray stone wall. The sense of isolation is effectively conveyed by the film being very quiet. There’s very little music  - the score is mostly ambience with some string and horn swells at especially fraught moments and there’s some diegetic music from her little radio, tinny and faint. There’s almost no dialogue as well (it’s about 10 minutes in before you even hear a voice), so you get these long stretches of silence punctuated by the rattle of a generator, the squawk and buzz of the radio. They aren’t jump scares per se, but the sudden cuts to them do have a startling, unnerving effect. This is probably the most effective thing about the film - the way it alternates long takes with sudden cuts keeps you off-balance. The camera spends as much time off of the woman as on, maybe more, which makes the island itself as much of a character as she is.

The quiet is unnerving, and so is the apparent monotony of the woman’s existence, described through repeated motifs of her daily routine which start to give way to what could be flashbacks or visions, and the way they combine and recombine starts to make everything stranger as the film goes on, in a fashion reminiscent of I Am A Ghost, another story of a woman all alone in an isolated location. What is at first innocuous becomes, over repetition, sinister, and for the first act at least, there’s a real eeriness to it all. But after the first act it starts to fizzle out, and I think it doesn’t work as well as it could for a couple of reasons. First, the pacing is very, very slow. This isn’t always a problem (in Skinamarink, for example, it works toward the dreamlike mood and a sense of constant tension), but here it serves to bog down the film in the second act, and any tension built up during the first dissipates. It starts to feel very repetitive, but not in a way where the repetition communicates anything. A film moving slowly isn’t a problem, but it does need to move. There’s less of a sense of disintegration or escalation than there needs to be as the film goes on. And this ties into the second problem, and that’s that ultimately it’s very difficult to make sense of what’s actually happening. There are what appear to be elements of the supernatural and even some body horror which have some kind of logic to them, but as everything moves away from routine and toward something more fragmentary and irrational, it seems less like the supernatural or a deteriorating mental state and more just a bunch of scenes that sort of relate to each other without committing to a particular through-line. The brief is mostly “person living in relative isolation starts to lose it,” or maybe “is she losing it or is she really being haunted” but the end result is mostly confusing - how much is memory and how much is losing grip on reality isn’t clear, and though there are some moments in isolation that are eerie and unsettling, the whole never really gels like it should and it just sort of ends without pointing toward any particular understanding. Which, again, isn’t necessarily a problem if you’re just going for pure mood, but there’s enough underlying story here that some kind of revelation is expected, and not enough structure for us to really grasp it. 

It's a shame, because the editing, cinematography and sound design are all really good - the aesthetics are there and very distinct, which is important for a visual medium. It definitely has a vision, which goes a long way with me, but the execution is messy enough that it feels like a missed opportunity.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon

Knock At The Cabin: Apocalypses Great And Small

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Resurrection: The Mother And Child Reunion

"No, I would not give you false hope
On this strange and mournful day
But the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away"

                    -“Mother And Child Reunion,” Paul Simon

There’s this old joke…

Q: Why did the Vietnam veteran cross the road?
A: You wouldn’t know! You weren’t there!

And as much as it might lean into the cliché of veterans of that war being especially vocal about how their plight was not really understood, there’s also truth to it. If you did not directly experience a trauma, there’s no way you can understand what it was like. It is something than can only be understood through the experience itself. And so from the outside, a lot of what trauma survivors do might not make a lot of sense. This extends to abuse as well, often a source of trauma. “Why didn’t you just leave?” is the question asked by someone who wasn’t there.

And it’s this truth that lies at the heart of Resurrection, which is a harrowing story of abuse, trauma, guilt, and the way none of it ever really goes away.

It opens on a conversation between two people. We only see one of them in the shot, and she’s relating to the other the way she is being treated by her partner, who devalues and belittles her on a regular basis. The voice of the person off-camera is calm, measured, asking her questions about how these things make her feel, contextualizing these behaviors, As she responds, her face cycles through uncertainty, shame, confusion, and anger. At first, you think this is our protagonist, and she’s at therapy.

But that’s not the case - the voice off-screen belongs to our protagonist. Her name is Margaret Ballion, and she isn’t a therapist, she works at a biotech company, and she’s talking to her co-worker Gwyn, who is beginning to realize that her relationship isn’t a healthy one. Margaret, as we learn following through her day, is efficient, motivated, and highly independent. She’s presenting data at work, she’s going for a run, she’s waking up her teenage daughter Abbie, she’s having sex with a married coworker. She loves her daughter, she runs, she’s insightful about abuse, and she keeps other close relationships at arm’s length. It’s not a life for everyone, but Margaret seems to thrive in it.

At least, she does until she spots a familiar face at a conference. His name is David, and she hasn’t seen him in a very, very long time. And that’s when the memories start. And the nightmares.

What this film does best is beautifully capture the feeling when someone reencounters their abuser and how all of the growth, all of the change, all of the progress just melts away and you’re back to being that small, helpless thing again. Margaret already seems like she’s keeping everyone (except her daughter) distant. So you sort of know that she’s been through some shit before you actually know any particulars. In some ways, she’s not that different from the protagonist to Matriarch, albeit finding much more adaptive ways to cope. There’s that sense of running, and running is part of her life. And when she reencounters David, all of that crisp efficiency in work, in sex, in life, it all starts to crumble almost immediately. Is the life she’s built for herself over the last couple of decades really that fragile, or was David just that awful? It’s kind of both, really. The spiral is quick and painful to watch, in no small part because Margaret immediately locks down and tries to deal with it all by herself. A lot of this is about control - abusers exert it, and their survivors spend years, maybe the rest of their life trying to reclaim it. For all of her good insight and advice to Gwyn, Margaret’s a classic example of someone who can’t see for themselves what they see for others and the results are tragic.

The setting and visuals are an important part of how the story gets told. It takes place mostly in modern structures, lots of glass, concrete, everything sleek and polished, with one example standing out as an exception, a place seedier and uglier amidst everything else. In that moment, it feels like you’re visiting the monster in its den. The score is dominated by urgent strings, suggesting something pulling tight enough to snap and the pull of a treacherous undercurrent. But even more important than the sights and sounds are the performances, which are uniformly strong - the opening scene, where Gwyn’s experience is written all over her face, sets the tone. David’s sadism is starkly apparent without an ounce of scenery-chewing. This is a man who knows the control he has, how complete it is, and how easily he can reassert it. He knows exactly where Margaret’s soft spots are, and he uses that leverage quietly, but directly and mercilessly. Abbie is a believable teenage girl, someone who has lived with a mother who’s maybe a touch too protective, but not so much that she can’t speak her mind. Margaret, who seems so self-possessed and self-assured at the beginning, disintegrates over the course of the film without it ever tipping over into melodrama. The wideness in her eyes, the nervousness in her voice, even something as simple as messy hair registers as something meaningful, and the first act ends with Margaret finally revealing everything in a monologue about her time with David. It’s a long unbroken shot that goes on and on and on and on, and at the end of it, a light has gone out in her eyes. You almost need to come up for air once it’s over.

It’s not an especially violent film (until it is, and then whoo boy), a lot is suggested or happens offscreen, and that’s for the good. It reinforces the idea that once you’re in someone’s head like David is, you don’t have to shout or beat someone to get them to do what you want. Just get them where they’re vulnerable, and you’ve got them forever. There’s research into classical conditioning that suggests that old responses aren’t ever totally extinguished, that they can reassert themselves, and that’s very much what happens here. All it takes is for that one person to reenter someone’s life, and they’re right back where they were. Everything Margaret’s built begins to disintegrate, and since we spend the whole film with her, it becomes sort of difficult to know how much of this we should trust. Not in a schlocky way, the film plays pretty fair and there are little blink-and-you-miss-it bits of ambiguity that the film doesn’t bother to resolve. Which is good, a little uncertainty helps films like these, and it never really lands on one side or another. Like, if you wanted to read this as a story of mistaken identity leading someone to spiral into delusion, you could. Or you could take it as face value, the film isn’t telling you what to think. Like last week’s film and so many before that, the idea that a mother will do anything for her child is not a new one or one that always goes happy places.

There is the fairly obvious idea that if Margaret had just come clean about her past when shit started going down, then none of this would have happened. And yes, that’s true. But it doesn’t take into consideration the shame, the need to take of it yourself, the need to prove that you aren’t that person anymore, that fear that nobody will believe you, all of which are pretty common consequences to abuse. It doesn’t go the obvious route for a conclusion, though I didn’t find the end quite as “bonkers” or “batshit insane” as some others did. To me, it seemed like a logical conclusion to what came before, given how David treated Margaret. Nor did I see the ending as “unrealistically happy” like another critic did. These are all the kinds of responses you would expect from someone who has never been subjected to what Margaret had to live with. You wouldn’t know - you weren’t there.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

From Black: Grief Endured

When you think about it, the death of a loved one fuels a lot of horror. Parents, children, spouses, all used as the catalyst for something much worse, whether it’s psychological or supernatural. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t work, I think it’s because the death is used as sort of a shorthand for “and then this person lost their marbles.” Or, sometimes, “and then the loved one came back, except now they’re evil.” These are shallow, reductive takes, not interested in actually looking at how grief actually plays out. And grief is messy, ugly, complicated, in and of itself. I think it deserves better than being relegated to a one-size-fits-all plot device.

And I don’t know that From Black completely undoes that relegation, but it definitely helps. It’s a taut, understated look at the lengths grief takes us to that may not avoid some of the usual stops, but goes past them as well.

It opens on a 911 call. Someone’s in danger, there’s someone in the house. They have to hide. This cuts to a house, standing silent with crime scene tape flapping in the breeze. A police officer is walking through it, taking in everything she sees. A line of salt across a hallway, smudged. A chalk circle full of symbols, a pile of bloody bones in the middle. A couch covered in blood. Something very bad happened here.

Back at the station, the officer sits down with the woman who made the 911 call. She’s shell-shocked, spattered with blood and wrapped in a blanket. Her name is Cora, and she has a story to tell. She hasn’t always been the best mother to her son Noah. She’s spent a lot of time on hard drugs, in unhealthy relationships. And one day, as she lay on a couch in a filthy trailer home, deep on the nod, Noah walked out the door and just vanished. And she didn’t even realize it until it was too late. That’s the sort of thing that gets some people to rethink their life choices, and Cora cleaned herself up, moved back into her mother’s old house, and started going to a support group for bereaved parents. But the guilt and the shame are still there. When she finally speaks up in group, it’s like a flood coming out of her. All of the things she wishes she’d done differently and how tired she was of empty platitudes. How so often other people’s sympathy seemed more about them than about her. After the meeting, she’s approached by the group leader, who tells her that there’s a way to fix it, to undo all of it, to get Noah back.

There is a ritual.

As I said above, the story of someone who goes to any lengths to get their loved one back is not an especially novel one, but that’s not the point - this film does, I think, a better job than most at highlighting the anger, the rage, the resentment that attends especially difficult losses, like the loss of a child. When well-meaning people say things like “we’re in this together” not only does it not help, it actually makes it worse, and it’s not all that often that I see horror films get that emotional balance right. It’s maybe more common in drama, but in horror the tendency is to just dip it in histrionics and call it good. And one of the best things about this movie is how Cora isn’t suffering in noble silence. She’s furious and she’s sorrowful and she doesn’t trust anyone because she’s been at the receiving end of so many empty promises and silent judgment. She’s very wounded, and it comes across vividly and gives the movie some depth it could easily have missed.

I’ve seen this film get comparisons to A Dark Song, which is also an excellent film, but I really think the similarities don’t go any deeper than both films being about a woman who undergoes a difficult, dangerous magical ritual with the hopes of repairing the loss of a child. Everything outside of that is different. This is much closer to a conventional horror film than A Dark Song was. It bounces back and forth in time between the present and the events that Cora is recounting, as the police try to make sense of what they’ve found and make sense of what they’re telling her. And it works well in that regard - the returns to the present are like little spaces to breathe and moments to move the investigative pieces forward, and bit by bit the pieces come together over the course of the film. It’s deliberate, but not slow, and understated, except when it isn’t to sharp effect.

Likewise, the writing is mostly very good - sometimes it verges on speeches, but pulls up short of feeling artificial or contrived, and the performances are solid (Cora’s ex-boyfriend is one of the most believably loathsome I’ve seen since Bug). Everything is pitched to a human scale, and it does a very good job of showing instead of telling throughout. A lot gets revealed in little things narratively, asides and small gestures and background details, and it relies a lot on suggestion, on leaving things unseen, punctuated with moments that are lyrical, startling, or both. It’s also a film that’s content to let things happen in the background without calling our attention to it, and that’s a big one for me. It’s a film that respects the audience’s intelligence without being clever or precious about it. The details of the ritual, while maybe not as textbook as those of A Dark Song, don’t feel hokey or lurid, and the last act of the movie is a slow and steady ramping up to the point where Cora realizes exactly what the cost of her decision is going to be. The imagery is largely effective, and though the creature effects don’t really hang around long enough to start looking cheap, they come close. Though, I have to say, I’m ready to call a moratorium on drone shots of roads and landscapes, it’s starting to get out of hand. 

No film is perfect, but honestly my complaints here are pretty small. There’s maybe one really obvious plot device (you pretty much know one character’s eventual fate as soon as they get some real screen time) but it doesn’t really hurt the story, and the score is maybe a little too much, all rattles and thumps and ominous synthesizer and scraping, squeaking strings. It doesn’t really let up, and a number of scenes could use a little more silence and room to breathe, but when it’s appropriate it contributes well to the tension and unease. 

Grief really is something endured - it’s there all the time whether you want it to be or not, and even if it lightens over time it never really goes away and just like Cora spends most of the movie trying to convince the people around her that what happened was real, it can be extremely difficult to get people who aren’t sharing your burden to understand that it is a burden. And the people, like Cora, who bear that burden, aren’t perfect by any stretch. They make mistakes, they lose their temper, they fall apart. The film ends on a nicely inconclusive note that avoids the obvious and keeps things up in the air enough to leave a feeling of slight unease as the credits roll. That’s the thing about grief - it’s never really, truly resolved.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

The Last Broadcast: Who Wore It Better?

I’m going to start talking about this movie by talking about a different movie. When The Blair Witch Project came out in 1999, it was something different. The use of the Internet to create a myth ahead of the movie and suggest that three people had actually gone missing was a big part of this, but ultimately it was the film’s conceit - that what the audience was seeing was the recovered raw footage shot by three film students in the days leading up to their disappearance. This was not what horror in the 1990s looked like, and it blew up big.

And, as is often the case, the success of The Blair Witch Project was attended by controversy, as people came out of the woodwork to claim that it plagiarized The Last Broadcast, which was, these critics would say, the real first found-footage horror film. So, as picky as I am about found-footage horror, I figured I should watch this at the very least as a historical artifact. And you know what? The claims are baseless. The Last Broadcast is barely a found-footage film. And even if it were first, The Blair Witch Project is significantly better. More to the point, The Last Broadcast is incoherent, amateurish to the point of ineptitude, and not so much poorly paced as not paced at all. 

On December 15th,1995, four men - Steven Avkast and Locus Wheeler, hosts of the cable-access show Fact or Fiction, Rein Clackin, expert in paranormal sound recording, and Jim Suerd, their guide, went into the Pine Barrens of New Jersey to investigate the legend of the Jersey Devil. Then, on December 19th, Jim Suerd comes staggering out of the woods, miles away from where they started, and calls 911 because the rest of them are missing. 

Two days later, the bodies of Wheeler and Clackin are found. Avkast is never seen again.

In the wake of these deaths, a documentary filmmaker named David Leigh has decided to make a film about the case and Suerd’s subsequent murder trial. The film is presented as that documentary, complete with talking-head interviews and examination of both archival footage and footage shot by the group in the Pine Barrens. Before getting into the film itself, I want to look at the idea that the filmmakers who made The Blair Witch Project plagiarized this film. It’s important to note that neither group of filmmakers ever dignified the idea - this seems, in retrospect, like a collective eruption of know-it-alls attempting to maybe gatekeep low-budget horror, I guess? Regardless of motivation, it’s a groundless assertion. The Blair Witch Project was already in pre-production by the time The Last Broadcast was released, The Last Broadcast isn’t really a found-footage film (arguably the first found-footage horror film is Cannibal Holocaust, made years earlier), and the only thing the two films have in common is “group of people who have no business being in the woods go into the woods and meet a bad end.” By that criterion, both films ripped off Deliverance. 

But again, the whole thing is irrelevant because as it stands, even if it were true, the people who made The Blair Witch Project made a far superior film by pretty much every metric. Or, to be less gentle about it, this is not a well-made film. It’s let down by its production design, its writing, and its pacing.

It's pretty clear that the entire production is a homebrew affair. That’s not an indictment in and of itself, I’ve seen any number of really good horror films made on a shoestring budget, and this was filmed for, like $900. That is, even by mid-90s standards, insanely cheap. But…it looks it, at every step. Part of doing something well on a small budget is knowing and working around your limitations. A film that is ostensibly the last footage of a bunch of dudes who go into the Pine Barrens to look for the Jersey Devil? That’s doable for not a lot of money. So it’s baffling as to why the filmmakers chose to make the film a mockumentary with only a smattering of found-footage set in the woods. None of the mockumentary stuff is believable. It works for the protagonists’ cable-access show, which is just as cheap and amateur hour as you’d expect, but when the whole film exists at that level, it looks like you’re just watching someone’s attempt to approximate something outside their grasp. Maybe two of the interior sets (that aren’t explicitly someone’s residence) are believable. A woman tasked with restoring some highly-damaged videotape has a “studio” in what appears to be a gutted or under-construction building, complete with plastic tarps everywhere. Jim Suerd’s “child psychologist” (who, against all ethical guidelines, is happy to talk about client sessions to a documentary film crew) is introduced…examining a dog in what appears to be a veterinarian’s office. Which suggests to me that he is, in fact, a veterinarian, not a child psychologist. This entire production is being directed by a former soap opera director (whose existence in the story is never really justified), and he appears to live in a single room with random post-it notes studding the wall behind him. Maybe he’s seriously down on his luck, but it kind of screams “wellness check.” A law enforcement officer from the county sheriff’s department wears an ATF shirt. Which is, well, a federal agency, and not a country sheriff’s department. Although he does have a hat with “Baroake County Sheriff’s Department” on it in what appear to be iron-on letters.

It’s not just that it looks cheap, it’s also that the filmmakers didn’t do the most basic due diligence on the elements of their story either. Forensic evidence is described as circumstantial evidence. IRC messages are apparently impossible to trace despite IP addresses being something even the most bottom-feeding script kiddie could access back then. On the other hand, their broadcast is described as being a “live Internet cable broadcast” in an era before livestreaming existed at all and video compression was still extremely primitive. All kinds of wireless Internet access tech that’s easily accessible today is handwaved into existence before the existence of commercial broadband or wireless Internet access. They’ve just got a bunch of desktop computers and video and audio gear set up in the middle of the woods under a plastic tarp without even a generator. Believability and realism are paramount for mockumentaries and found-footage films to work and nothing about this is believable or realistic in the slightest.

As poor as the attention to production detail is, the writing is even worse. Human beings simply do not talk like this. Some example dialogue:

“The magnifying glass of the prosecution’s microscope.” 

“We have found bodies. We don’t know who they are or how many we have found.” 

“I had heard of the Fact or Fiction murders. They were big news for a period of one year, and then like so many things in today’s fast-paced world, were forgotten.” 

“Our job is to eliminate suspects based on the evidence that we sift through and that we gather. And as we sifted through and gathered this evidence there was only one suspect left at the end.” 

“The tapes show a group of men going through a wide range of emotions.” 

This isn’t just stagey, artificially expository language. This is some Ed Wood shit. It makes sense for some of the characters to be inarticulate, but everyone talks this way. 

On top of all of this, the story and packing are clumsy and incoherent. The most violent thing that happens on screen (for most of the film) is a shove and someone half-yelling “I’ll see you at camp, man!” and this is treated as evidence that someone is a homicidal maniac. It’s barely a found-footage film, spending its entire first act in documentary mode setting up the whole situation and making a big deal about the footage they shot, only for us to be shown a few snatches of footage shot in the Pine Barrens, all of it too noisy and degraded to really be understandable (we get two people stumbling on a patch of blood, and some awkward conversation between the four of them, that’s about it) which is a fair amount of buildup for nothing. The third act bounces between the ostensible restoration of the rest of the footage (which even restored is too garbled to make sense of) and a rambling tangent about the nature of truth and how the real Jersey Devil is the media or something, climaxing in an utterly ridiculous non-sequitur of an ending that goes on far too long. There’s a reason this is consigned to historical curiosity.

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

Available on Amazon

The Black Phone: Escape Room

Maybe it makes me kind of a film snob (okay, it definitely makes me kind of a film snob), but I have general aversion to big-budget, mass-marketed horror films. Which isn’t to say that all indie horror is good (far from it) or that films with large budgets are all bad, but films with a certain level of star power, coming from certain directors or distributors, getting a certain amount of publicity push, tend to get my hackles up. In general, I don’t like franchising and I don’t like films that insult their audience’s intelligence. And since I think of horror as a valuable way to tell stories that can push buttons, take us places we wouldn’t otherwise go, I like those things even less in horror film. 

So I gotta say, I went into The Black Phone with reservations. It was produced by Blumhouse, who have, to my mind, a mixed track record - they’ve put out some reasonably good (or at least non-mainstream) stuff, but also a lot of the slick, glossy dreck that gets franchised and spun off to death. Multiplex thrill rides. The director made Sinister, a film that had a lot going for it right up to the point that it totally derailed in the name of franchisability. So it didn’t really look promising. The premise didn’t help either, though we’ll get to that.

But on top of my film snobbery, I have a perverse streak. And so the more I saw ads for this thing come up, the more I simultaneously though “ugh, no thanks” and “you know, I really should check this out to see if it’s bad as I think it’s going to be.” Like, I don’t especially like to shit on films, even though I recognize that’s some of my most animated writing, but sometimes I feel the urge to see if my prejudices bear out, or if they’re just prejudices.

And in this case, well, it’s a little of column A and a little of column B. There are things about it which I deeply dislike and I think drag it down, but there are also some real strengths that kept me from dismissing it entirely.

It’s 1978, and we’re in Denver, Colorado. We meet Finney, and his sister Gwen. They’re trying very hard not to make any noise around their dad. He works the night shift, and when he’s not working the night shift, he’s deep into his vodka and orange juice. So every day is walking on eggshells, and coordinating whose turn it is to take care of him. On top of that, Finney gets bullied a lot. Things aren’t easy for them, and haven’t been since their mother passed away. Things are tense at home, and things are tense at school, especially since kids started disappearing. Police have no leads, just black balloons at the site of some of the disappearances. And then one day, walking home, Finney stops to help a man who drops some groceries outside his van. 

One flourish of black balloons, and Finney wakes up in a soundproof basement.

So, the premise here is, well, kind of high-concept. There are a number of moving parts here. You’ve got this mysterious masked figure who’s been abducting adolescent boys from around north Denver, boys who vanish without a trace, never to be seen again. You’ve also got an old rotary phone in Finney’s basement prison, one that isn’t connected to anything, but rings anyway (and there are…voices…on the other end). And Gwen is…maybe psychic? That sort of feels like a lot to buy into all at once. This was another big part of my skepticism going in. But honestly, it ends up being less of a problem than I thought it would be. Oh, sure, when I stop to think closely about it, it all threatens to fall apart (police are not getting a warrant based on a little girl’s dreams), but in the moment it was only slightly distracting. 

I think, overall, the film’s biggest problem is probably the writing, especially with the kids, of which there are a number. As someone who was actually a kid in the period this movie takes place, I don’t remember anyone actually talking like this. It all sounds very much like dialogue,, and the actors playing the kids have trouble selling it, so it all feels very artificial. This is less of an issue with the adult dialogue, and it becomes less of a problem overall once Finney’s been abducted, but it’s still there and makes it harder to really get into the film. You’re being constantly reminded that this is just a movie. The performances range from adequate to excellent, and if they suffer it’s mostly from the aforementioned dialogue. But even apart from its artificiality, there’s also a tendency to cram in exposition or overexplain. Which is odd, because there are some places where it uses flashback effectively, so a scene where a character just says a whole bunch of stuff to another character that is clearly meant for the audience (because the person they’re talking to already knows all of it), it stands out even more. 

Again, it’s just a movie. If anything, it suggests that the filmmakers thought the audience wouldn’t be able to piece it together on their own. Oh, was that too hard to follow? Here, I’ll tell you what you just saw, and I’ll speak slowly and use small words. Fuck that. It’s also hard to get invested because in some ways, you have a pretty good idea of what the broad strokes are going to be (of course Finney’s going to get abducted, of course he’ll spend most of the movie trying to escape and failing) and the problem is that there aren’t really any surprises in that regard. There’s no attempt to twist or subvert our expectations, so at its worst, it sort of becomes an exercise in waiting for the climax (which itself throws in an unnecessarily convoluted twist that stops the momentum short). I kept waiting for the story to surprise me, and it didn’t, at least not until the climax. But it wasn’t really a jaw-dropper, more of a “oh, that’s kind of a cool way to handle it.”

So yes, it had a lot of weaknesses. But like I said at the start, I can’t dismiss it outright because it does some things very well. It gets the period details pretty right in ways that feel realistic and unfussy. It doesn’t go out of its way to call attention to it taking place in the 1970s. It looks right and feels right in that regard. I’d have to say that generally, the visuals are a real strength of this film. It takes place in a world that feels sort of brown and overcast (the 70s did have a lot of wood paneling), and there are some really nice moments of visual flair - abductions told in rapid fadeouts, well-placed flashbacks that sometimes turn into dream-logic insights, not dissimilar to moments in Audition, which is not a comparison I thought I’d be making. Lighting (especially in Finney’s interactions with the abductor) is on point, and Finney’s conversations on the titular phone are staged almost theatrically in a way that embodies the disembodied voices to good effect.  So it looks good and even if the writing and performance is obvious, the cinematic storytelling isn’t. And however ridiculous the things people say to each other, the characters don’t themselves feel ridiculous. This is especially important concerning the abductor, who doesn’t play like a monster or a villain so much as a deeply troubled, stunted man who is constantly reliving some awful psychodrama. And the climax has sort of a puzzle or escape room feel to it that wasn’t obvious to me at all ahead of time, so when it all came together it felt nice to see how all of these disparate things had a purpose that wasn’t obvious from jump. But then the end ran too long because the filmmakers threw in a totally superfluous twist right at the end, one that I suspect created the need for the scene that followed it, where a character literally explains what we just saw. 

And this is the problem with mass-market horror, I think. On the one hand, you want to make a good film, but  on the other hand, you need to make a film that’s going to put enough butts in seats to generate a profit, and that can mean making a film for people who don’t really appreciate nuance, or even pay attention. So everything becomes kind of loud, kind of obvious. I had the same problem with the director’s previous film - it started strong and then crashed in the third act with the introduction of elements that were clearly meant to make it into a franchise. And here, as then, we have what could have been a really good horror film undone by the need to make it justify its budget. I wish I were wrong sometimes, and this is one of those times.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

The Backrooms: Strange Terrain

A few months ago, I was made aware of a whole bunch of different creators doing unconventional short-form horror on YouTube. Which makes sense, really - the quality of what’s possible with consumer-grade video equipment and effects software has gotten so much better over the years, and YouTube is a platform where anyone can set up an account and upload stuff for whatever audience is out there. Horror runs the gamut from slick Hollywood productions to grungy shot-on-camcorder stuff as it is, so it makes sense that it’d find its way there too.

And I have to say, having just dipped my toes in, what I’ve noticed is that it runs the gamut - there’s the fairly conventional stuff produced on a budget, but then there’s the instances where things get, for lack of a better word, really fucking weird. This doesn’t mean it always clicks with me, but at the very least I have to applaud how far out there some of it is willing to go.

And so today I want to talk about a collection of short films I’m going to refer to collectively as The Backrooms. They represent a really impressive example of independent filmmaking, as well as a certain type and style of story that I hold close to my heart.

But before I dive in, first, a little context. The Backrooms is a product of Internet-based collective storytelling, where multiple contributors produce creative work (images, writing, video) around a central idea. It began as a single image on 4chan (which, if you aren’t familiar…don’t) and from there, it took off into organizing wikis and evolving narrative and lore, built and developed by multiple independent collaborators. In that sense (as well as others), it’s not that different from the SCP Foundation. It’s a bunch of people creating an emergent narrative around a set of central rules or principles or idea.

So, to be clear, I’m not going to be writing about the entire phenomenon, just a collection of 16 short films made by Kane Parsons, which stand as a single narrative within the larger fiction. Other people have written about or made films in the world of the Backrooms, though what little else I’ve seen hasn’t impressed me so far to the degree that  Parsons’ work has.

It all begins with some industrial test footage - an array of some sort, all pointed at a suspended metal ball. There’s a hum, and a crackle, and the ball vanishes. Call it a proof of concept. It demonstrates that something…we aren’t sure what…is possible. There are notes, diagrams, voices discussing something technical. It gives way to an impersonal concrete room full of equipment, cabling, and the low hum that comes with dangerous amounts of electricity. It’s all pointing at a rectangle of metal mounted on the wall, about the size of a doorway. This is the application of that proof of concept. And it doesn’t work right away, but eventually the equipment holds, the hum is replaced by a screeching, tearing sound, and where the metal rectangle was there is now a blindingly bright light. It all builds to a crescendo and then…stops.

Where there was a plate of metal, there is now a hallway. A hallway that stretches into someplace that shouldn’t exist.

What follows is a largely oblique account of the exploration of the space that’s been pried open in reality. If it were just an exercise in visual effects, it’d just be a impressive demo reel. Don’t get me wrong, it’d still be impressive - Parsons started making these at 16 years old, and when I think about the kind of shit I was writing at 16, it’s humbling, What I think makes this collection of short films work to the degree that it does is that it takes the time to build a story, largely told through inference but still there, out of individual, disparate sources of footage. It’s very much found footage, but avoids a lot of the obvious pitfalls that pull more “professional” efforts under. There’s very little exposition (until the last two entries, which are the most conventional and I think the weakest as a result), instead building the story in sequence out of a mix of internal research footage, business development presentations, as well as footage sourced from people outside the facility who stumbled on this space outside of space accidentally, to no good end. It’s not hard to follow, but it doesn’t hold your hand either. Installments range in length from about a minute and a half to about 14 minutes, and few overstay their welcome. There’s a pervasive feeling of uneasiness and uncertainty which at its best sharpens into dread, and there are a couple of jump-out-of-your-seat moments along the way. There’s the sense that the company responsible for this research is tampering with things they shouldn’t, that there were places we were never meant to see.

So it’s already a pretty smart application of the found-footage approach, which is nice to see. But on top of that, it’s a narrative in a style for which I have a huge weak spot - a secret history of the world told in the intersection of the anomalous and the mundane, the point where the unknown is breached by some human institution determined to understand or explore or contain it. In that sense it shares DNA with the SCP Foundation (the film adaptations of which I’m generally less impressed by), the video game Control, the film Annihilation, the miniseries The Lost Room, among others. I love stories like this, where the mysterious, the unexplainable, the possibly horrifying is attended to by scientists and engineers and bureaucrats. The SCP Foundation’s dry filing classifications and experimental logs, Control’s mid-century modern office stretching out to an impossible vastness, endless halls filled with mundane objects kept in secure observation rooms, personnel in Annihilation occupying a facility that overlooks a growing stretch of land that refuses to obey the laws of nature, The Lost Room’s story of an entire motel room vanishing and how its contents are finding their way back into the world, changed. All of this is absolute catnip to me. This collection works as well as it does in this mode because it never really tips its hand in that regard. The footage is often mundane in nature, as blandly institutional as the Backrooms themselves, and whatever dialogue we get is just the bored chitchat of people who’ve done this a dozen times before and radio communications about procedure and mission updates. At least, until things go wrong, which they do.

And the Backrooms themselves are wonderfully uncanny - endless expanses of drop ceilings, fluorescent lights, institutional carpeting and sickly bland yellowish walls to start, giving way to even more bizarre expressions of the mundane the deeper they go. The further in you go, the stranger the geometry becomes, the less sensical - it’s all familiar and not in and of itself scary, but there’s the strangeness of empty office buildings to start with, and then the doorways start being the wrong size or shape, or positioned strangely on the wall, hallways in the floor and the spaces that lie beyond them, and what inhabits them. Nothing is ever really explained, so the things that interrupt the monotony seem even worse somehow. It takes settings so commonplace that we take them for granted and recombines them until they feel alien and arbitrary, and the end result is this strange feeling of being…not exactly in another world, but more like this world has glitched out. Copying and pasting never seemed so alien or sinister before.

These sixteen shorts are just the thinnest slice of the world of the Backrooms committed to video, but what little I’ve seen so far outside of this collection hasn’t impressed me as much. A lot of it tends gets the form right, but misses the importance of atmosphere and storytelling. Like they know what to put on the screen, but not why. But if anyone ever decides to make a film adaptation of The Navidson Record, I’d put Kane Parsons in the mix immediately.

IMDB entry
YouTube playlist