Us: How The Other Half Lives

I’ve been having a conversation with a friend about the role of metaphor in horror films, around the degree to which the supernatural threats in a horror film are “real” within the context of the film. It’s kind of a complicated question, at least for me, and after some time trying to wrap my head around how I actually feel, what I’ve sort of landed on is that supernatural threats are almost always metaphor for real-world fears of one type or another, and the degree to which they’re diegetically “real” varies. If the narrator is unreliable, what we’re seeing may not actually be happening in the world of the film, but I also think that having supernatural threats that are diegetically real potentially adds another layer of fear, especially if we sympathize with the protagonists. If we’re rooting for them to die, I’d argue that’s not really horror. It’s bloodsport, and part of why I don’t really rate slasher films, for the most part. 

I bring all of this up because Us is one of those films that invests heavily in both aspects of its antagonists. And the result is an unnerving, inventive balance of the frightening and the comic made with verve and a unique, impressionistic vision.

The film opens with a title card stating that there are miles of tunnels underneath the continental U.S. - sewers, abandoned subway lines, and tunnels that seem to serve no known purpose. There is, this card seems to say, a world beneath us. Cut to Santa Cruz, California, in 1986, and Rayne, Russell, and their young daughter Adelaide. Things seem strained between Rayne and Russell as they take Adelaide down the Santa Cruz boardwalk, playing games of chance and eating candy apples. Rayne needs to find a restroom, but Adelaide doesn’t want to come with her, so Rayne asks Russell to watch Adelaide while she goes. Russell says he will, and then promptly returns to his game of Whac-A-Mole. Adelaide, of course, wanders off. She wanders off to a remote stretch of the beach, and a hall of mirrors attraction. “Find Yourself,” the sign says. Inside, she gets lost, turned around inside the hall of mirrors, surrounded by her reflections. 

One of the reflections doesn’t move as she does, and Adelaide notices.

Years later, in the present day, Adelaide is married to affable Gabe Wilson, and they have two children, Zora and Jason. They’re in the car, on their way to their summer home near Santa Cruz. Gabe embodies big dad energy, goofy and affable and just out of touch enough. The kids are appropriately surly and uninterested in the things their parents enjoy. It’s clear this trip wasn’t their idea. And Adelaide is uneasy, her mind still on those events of so long ago, her discovery after being lost, and the struggle to adjust. Gabe mentions meeting some friends of theirs at the beach in Santa Cruz, and she’s immediately resistant. She doesn’t want to go back there. It’s clear that whatever happened to her as a child was traumatic and she doesn’t want to revisit the place where it happened. But they go, and it’s fine, and they come back to the summer house that night.

And that night, they are visited by a family - mother, father, and two children - who stand wordlessly in their driveway. They’re wearing matching red jumpsuits, and they’re carrying big, shiny pairs of scissors. 

And they look just like the Wilsons.

Us begins as a siege film, as this mysterious family - led by an Adelaide look-alike who speaks in strained, halting English - terrorizes the Wilsons to an end that isn’t really apparent right away. But the Wilsons are surprisingly resourceful, and soon enough the scope of the film widens to describe something much larger than the typical siege scenario. The end product is probably best described as one of deep uneasiness. Even before things really pop off, there’s a sense of everything being slightly wrong- silences stretch out just a beat too long, there’s a stillness to everything, even where it seems like there should be energy and activity. Sudden sounds are a little too loud, there are a lot of shadows at the beach house at night, and the beach itself during the day is a little too bright. It’s no one thing you can put your finger on, but it’s all just slightly strange, and then the strangeness overwhelms us, engulfs us, surrounds us, and it’s all we can do to keep up.

Alongside the horror runs a strong vein of comedy - rooted mostly in family sitcoms at first (look at the crummy boat Dad bought! It has a cassette player in it! Kids don’t like to get off their phones!) but getting increasingly darker and sharper as the film moves on, without really getting any less funny. This is one of the few horror films that’s had me both on the edge of my seat and laughing out loud at the same time, without one undercutting the other (though the balance is tipped maybe a little too far toward comedy at points in the third act). Normally I don’t like horror comedies - often the comedy is at the expense of the horror, or typically horrific things are played for comedy - but by and large this film manages both in a way that makes the comedy punctuation for the horror, rather than undermining it. It felt like I was laughing as hard as I was as much to release the tension I was feeling as because the comedy was really well-done. And at points, the humor is almost acidic in how it contrasts to and underlines the protagonists’ situation. Some of the gags would be funny even if they didn’t accompany someone bleeding out, but that they do makes them the best kind of satire - astringent, a little painful. The best satire stings a little, because that’s how you know the wound is getting cleansed.

So there’s a strong diegetic threat, rendered in striking, singular imagery, and underneath, a metaphoric narrative arguably about the privilege of class. The Wilsons have a good life - we don’t get details, but they’re doing well enough to have a summer home in northern California, which ain’t nothing. You get the sense that most of them take their lives for granted to a degree, though Adelaide begins the film with an edge of wariness, as if her childhood experience means that she doesn’t. Gabe and Adelaide’s friends Josh and Kitty (and their twin daughters) are complacent to the point of near-inertia, so assured in their privilege that they don’t even see it. The antagonists come across like a dark mirror-world version of the Wilsons, alike in body but…broken somehow. Except for Adelaide’s double, they do not speak or communicate only in grunts and howls, and Adelaide can only manage broken, halting English, describing a nightmare life of extreme hardship. Adelaide’s double feels entitled to something, stating that it’s “their time now.” Even before all is made clear, you get the sense that these mysterious doubles feel that they have suffered a great injustice, and seek to redress it.

This is not a film that overburdens us with explanation or backstory, and that’s absolutely for the good - we’re handed just enough to let us observe what’s going on, and forsaking some complicated technical explanation in favor of letting haunting expressive imagery do the hard work - imagery that, however disparate and strange it might seem initially, actually tells us way more than we realize. I’m reminded of films like Hereditary or Asmodexia in that here, again, we have all the information we need almost from the beginning, we just don’t know it until the end. There are miles and miles of tunnels honeycombing the United States, the opening card tells us, many to no known purpose. Early on, when Adelaide asks their antagonists who they are, her double replies “we’re Americans.” There’s a lot we don’t know about what going on beneath us, the film seems to say, and we remain ignorant at our peril.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

In Fabric: The Fabric Of Our Lives

I try not to go into the films I watch with any specific expectations. I like to be surprised. But it’s tough not to develop expectations, even minimal ones, after watching, say, a trailer or reading a synopsis. A good synopsis is an exercise in understatement, a good trailer gives you a taste of the film’s vibe and premise without putting the whole story up on the screen. If nothing else, they give me an idea of whether or not I’m likely to like or dislike a film. So I rarely if ever go in completely blind, but every now and then, I’ll watch something that, for good or ill, manages to sidestep my expectations and deliver something I wasn’t expecting.

In Fabric is just such a film - what any of the press would lead you to believe is a campy story about a cursed dress ends up being something entirely other, an acid-etched portrait of English life in the mid-to-late 70s, drawn in stark caricature.

We open on a montage of still images, a technique that used to be common in television decades ago. But soon enough, shots of shoppers and crowds on city streets give way to more unsettling things - mannequins, a face frozen in a scream, a bound wrist. It’s not clear what any of it means, but a sense of unease lingers. And we then meet Sheila Woolchapel. She’s what once might have been called “a woman of a certain age,” with a mostly-grown, mostly-self-absorbed son. She’s a bank teller, separated from her husband for long enough that she’s taken to placing ads in what was then called the “lonely hearts” section of the local paper. Dating back then was no easier, nor any more forgiving, than it is today. You just have to wait a few days to get an envelope in the post to find out who the creeps are instead of a few minutes. It’s hard to watch Sheila navigate the world of being single and lonely. She doesn’t get a lot of respect from her son Vince, or from Vince’s girlfriend Gwen. Work is the kind of corporate-speak nightmare that Office Space illustrated so well, with the added frisson of sexism that makes the quality of your smile or the duration of your bathroom breaks a matter for evaluation. Sheila can’t catch a break for trying.

But it’s the winter sales season, when all of the major department stores mark down their remaining stock to make room for next year’s lines. And so Sheila - in preparation for a date that ends up being exactly as disastrous as you’d imagine - goes to Dentley & Soper’s Trusted Department Store to find a nice dress. Something to help her feel beautiful, and if she’s lucky, at a really good price. And she does exactly that - she finds a lovely red dress that fits her just right. Which is odd, because its listed size is much too small for her. And why does the clerk ask her for her address and phone number? And what about the embroidered writing on an inside seam, in another language? Not to mention the fate of the model who first wore the dress. That very same dress.

Only one of them was made, after all.

From the moment Sheila takes the dress home, things start to go wrong - the date doesn’t go well, she gets a strange rash, her washing machine breaks catastrophically, she starts to have strange dreams. But this is not a film exclusively concerned with a cursed dress. This is a film that looks at life in England at that point in time through a cracked lens, one that lets the light leak through and shifts everything askew. Dentley & Soper’s is a very, very strange department store, with employees who dress like something out of Edward Gorey and talk like language itself is their second language. And what happens in the store after hours, once all of the salespeople have been put away for the night, well, it’s never really explained, but it has a kind of internal logic, the way things make perfect sense in a dream, but when you try to explain them out loud upon waking crumble into utter nonsense. The store’s ads on television - no dialogue, just images - are a cryptic rush of gesticulating employees and mannequins, broken up and smeared by tracking errors and chromatic aberration into something almost entirely abstract. And nobody seems to think this is unusual. 

Likewise, as the film progresses, the initially stultifying business-speak of Sheila’s employers starts to become surreal, the narrative calcifies into repeated motifs - of dialogue, of imagery, broken up by more montage. And without giving away too much, the dress is the one constant throughout, as it becomes clear that it, not Sheila, is the protagonist, the one we’re following. It’s not clear (nor is it unclear, we feel what it is rather than know what it is) what the dress’s provenance really is, but wherever it is, there follows misery and ruin. Accidents happen, vegetables wither and rot, and attempts to destroy or return it fail. As someone from the department store says, the purpose of the seasonal sale is to…expunge.

It’s all shot very much as a period piece in terms of design and costuming, though not to the point that we’re meant to think it’s an artifact of that time. It’s more like the filmmakers recognized the inherent strangeness of that period and wanted to jack it up as loud as it would go. There’s something about brass and velvet and wood veneer that communicates…not luxury, but rather some approximation of luxury on the cheap, and it’s evocative. Mannequins figure heavily throughout, and their blank expressions and rictus posture, both human and utterly not, seem to serve as kind of a central thesis, along with the equally blank faces and poses of catalog models, staring off into space, looking at things we can’t see while wearing the latest in casual sportswear. The soundtrack leans heavily on dissonant electronics, and combined with the interstitial montages serves to reinforce this idea of a placid surface thinly papering over the madness underneath. All throughout, the people we follow and the world they inhabit disintegrate into chaos, the veneer of civility cracking to loose snarling animals underneath. Everything and everyone becomes stranger and less tethered to reality as the film goes on. And above it all, the dress flows and drifts and billows, inexorably red. Like blood from a syringe, blooming in water.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Color Out Of Space: Alienation

Just to address this right off the bat, this is an adaptation/re-imagining/call it what you want of the original story by H.P. Lovecraft, whose legacy is permanently tarnished by his abhorrent beliefs about race, gender, and class. But this adaptation - as is true of many adaptations of his work - makes it pretty clear that even though his stories are likely the product of a mind that was scared shitless of anything and everything different from itself, you can excise those elements without really losing what makes them good. Strip away the dehumanizing depictions of nonwhites and the rural poor, and the bones of his stories remain: There are things out there beyond our comprehension, impossibly ancient, and we are nothing to them, to be undone by them in a blink. That all kinds of authors and filmmakers are finding ways to preserve their strengths while discarding the unnecessary bigotry, and even go so far as to use his work as a way to actively critique the very notions of race and class that Lovecraft espoused seems to be both a testimony to the underlying power of what’s been dubbed “cosmic horror” and how much our culture has changed since his time. There’s still (obviously, obviously) a lot of work do and miles to go, as current events so vividly demonstrate, but at least on this front I’m encouraged.

So let’s talk about Color Out Of Space. This story of incomprehensible alien appetite takes its time to get where it’s going, but boy does it get there.

The film opens with a voiceover about the woods west of Arkham, and how the person speaking always knew they were supposed to be haunted, someplace you didn’t go, but only now does he really understand what that means, and this is accompanied by long, slow tracking shots of a forest, fitfully lit through haze and fog, the trees thin and gnarled, almost looking more like stalks or tentacles than anything else. The person speaking is a young man named Ward Phillips (I see what you did there), and he’s a hydrologist, sent to survey the water table in Arkham in advance of a new hydroelectric dam project. And it’s while he’s surveying this area that he meets the Gardner family.

The Gardner family - Nathan, Theresa, and their children Ben, Lavinia, and Jack - are…complicated. They’re former hippies now as up in arms over their children’s language and weed smoking as the previous generation was about theirs, and their kids are just as restless as they were in their youth. Ben mostly smokes weed and watches astronomical models on his computer, Lavinia practices witchcraft in the woods but yearns for fast food. Jack is mostly just a kid, too young to really know any other way of life. Nathan had a contentious relationship with his own father, but still ended up coming home to the family farm, where he now raises alpacas while Theresa is the breadwinner, working as some kind of financial consultant with clients all over the world. Their youthful rebellion has mellowed into complacent eccentricity.

At least, until a meteorite crashes into their yard in the middle of the night - a meteorite that gives off a strange light (specifically magenta - a color not produced by visible light). The next day, Lavinia feels sick, Nathan keeps smelling something and Jack starts talking to a “friend” in the well on their property.

And then strange flowers start to bloom. Magenta flowers. And things and people start to…change.

I guess if I were to try and pin a theme to this film, I’d say it’s about transformation. Some of this is physical - the odd magenta flowers sprouting everywhere, oversized magenta insects, strange contaminations in the water, electromagnetic interference, and soon enough, a sickly, poisonous light that corrupts everything it touches. But some of it is psychological. The events of the film as they unfold put the Gardner family under tremendous stress, and it affects each of them in very different ways, ways that seem to illustrate some kind of fundamental trait or impulse laid bare. Nathan’s fatherly calm warps into denial, Lavinia searches for increasingly more drastic ways to escape her surroundings, Ben, ever the gentle stoner, does his best to do what he needs to, but becomes increasingly forgetful, and Jack and Theresa…well, a mother has a bond with her youngest, doesn’t she? So everything and everyone is changing, and the only one who seems to have a handle on what’s happening is Ezra - an unreconstructed flower child squatting in a shack on the Gardner’s land, and of course nobody’s listening to him. Gradually, things and people start to change, whether they’re aware of it or not. They become, quite literally, alienated. From the world, and from each other.

And this change, this sense of things becoming alien, is strongly communicated in the look of the film. It’s shot in a vivid, almost hallucinatory style, most recently similar to Mandy and Annihilation - colors are highly saturated, and there’s a lot of haze and bloom on everything, so even before things start getting really strange there’s a strangeness to it, a sense of dreaminess. Scenes are transitioned or intercut with almost microphotographic shots of nature, observed so closely that trees and insects and even running water seem alien. And things get strange gradually, first in little details, then increasingly more dramatic ones, then chaos. This is a carefully paced film that runs a measured course from “hmmm, that’s odd” to “what the fuck was that” over an almost two-hour run time, with any sense of normalcy - physical, spatial, temporal, or psychological - disintegrating completely by the end. It takes numerous liberties with the source material, but little nods to Lovecraft are sprinkled throughout, in names of people and places (and the occasional visual Easter egg) and even in some ways to previous film treatments of his ideas and themes. Notably, as things come to a head there’s a shift to body horror that hearkens back to spiritually Lovecraftian stories like The Thing, as well as Stuart Gordon’s pulpy 1980s Lovecraft adaptations Re-Animator and From Beyond. The Gardner family comes apart in more ways than one, their essential natures stretched to grotesque extremes, and the film grows more histrionic as they do.

Were I to find any fault with this film (and it’s tough, this is really well-done), I’d say that I felt like it maybe didn’t quite stick the landing at the very end. I spent a decent chunk of the film thinking I knew how it was going to end, based on story beats signposted throughout, and when it didn’t, well, on the one hand I’m glad it wasn’t predictable, but a somewhat subdued epilogue after a pretty bonkers climax fell a little flat to me. But this is a nitpick, it made narrative sense, and the film as a whole is very well-executed. The director has stated he’d like to make two more Lovecraft adaptations. If this is the caliber of what we’re going to get, bring it on.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Public Service Announcement

Right now, as of May 28th, 2020, there are some damn good lesser-known horror movies on Amazon Prime Video, free to people with Prime membership. :These all range from "hey, better than I thought it'd be" to "this is one of my favorite horror films ever" and everything in between. So if that's a service you use, go watchlist the following...

Absentia
Afflicted
Open Grave
Possum
The Loved Ones
Triangle
Wake In Fright
Yellowbrickroad

GO GET THAT SHIT.

The Things We Tell The Ones We Love: If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Another

When it comes to scary movies, I am firmly of the opinion that the best films don’t try to do too much. They find a mood or aesthetic or narrative through-line (or some combination of these) and stick with it. Try to do too much - throw too many premises or ideas at the audience at once - and what you risk is something that does a lot, but does no one thing well.

A recent example of this for me was It Follows, which had a great central premise, but was set in a somewhat off-kilter world that (I think) was supposed to make the whole thing feel somewhat dreamlike, but instead just felt distracting. Maybe it’s reductive, but I think you can either tell a weird story in a normal world or a normal story in a weird world, and either can work. Absentia is an excellent example of the former, and Daybreakers is a pretty good example of the latter. But trying to tell a weird story in a weird world, I think, denies the audience any opportunity for connection, and without connection it’s hard to really engage with a film.

This is especially evident to me in The Things We Tell The Ones We Love, which tells a nominally weird story in a weird world while messing with the medium of film itself, and the result feels really confusing.

It’s the story of Billy and his baby daughter Shelly. Billy lives with his mother and sister in Davenport, Iowa. Both Davenport and Billy have seen better times. Billy’s estranged from his wife Sabrina, trying to support himself and his daughter while chasing his dream of being a successful MMA fighter. Davenport’s run down, what we see of it looks a lot like Rust Belt towns a little further east, towns where the factories closed down and all the jobs went away. Not long into the film, Billy’s sister sees from social media that Sabrina is on a tear again, talking about how she’s going to come over, kick Billy’s ass and take their daughter back. Which isn’t itself unusual - relationships go bad, and sometimes people get violent and irrational. Sometimes people say things they don’t mean in the heat of the moment.

So why is Billy’s mother loading a shotgun Why are they setting traps? Why are they boarding over the windows and hiding Billy and Shelly in the basement?

Now, if this film were telling a weird story in a normal world, this would be a good setup. Seems like a family drama, until we discover there’s something very…wrong…with Sabrina. But it doesn’t make that a reveal - instead, the film opens up with all the explanation we need. This film is set in a near-future America where some regions have been declared Freedom Zones. Nobody pays taxes, everything is deregulated, and all services are privatized, supplied on a pay-as-you-go basis. And into this world, someone has released a “designer virus” - a variant on the herpes virus that attacks the prefrontal cortex of the brain, a region implicated in higher-order cognition and impulse control. The virus flares up and goes into remission, but when it flares up, the host acts in violent, irrational ways. Sabrina has had it for awhile.

So we have a virus that makes people a danger to themselves or others, in a world where basic services are priced out of the reach of most people, and one man trying to make his way through the world with his little girl. That’s…a lot. We have a personal antagonist in Sabrina, and a situational antagonist in this dystopian version of the U.S.. A weird story in a weird world. But that’s not all - the film itself is an interactive story, meaning that it’s divided up into chapters, with the viewer making key decisions for one character or another at specific points. A link appears on the screen, and you click the one corresponding to the choice you want to make, and what happens next is the product of that choice.

So it’s a weird story in a weird world in a weird format. And it’s difficult to really engage with the film as a result. Billy is more or less relatable, but the interactive nature of the storytelling harms that to a degree, because you’re aware that what you see him do is something that emerges not from the character, but from your decision. For me, it lays bare a key difference between the medium of film and the medium of games - in an interactive narrative game like Detroit, you have a similar situation, but the characters are entirely under your control, all the way down to movement. In film, we’re used to watching events unfold in front of us without the ability to intervene, and in horror especially that can be really effective. I mean, why else do people yell at the screen? We are helpless to intervene, and when intervention becomes possible in a medium where it usually isn’t, I think it breaks the spell a little in a way that it doesn’t in games, because in games, that particular spell isn’t really there to start with. And the setting is alienating as well. It’s not totally unrecognizable - the locations all read as real and gritty, to their benefit - but it’s different enough that the bizarre behavior of people infected with the virus doesn’t really feel strange or disruptive. The whole world is weird, so what’s one more weird thing? The sense of dislocation that makes a lot of horror movies work needs some kind of connection to reality to highlight the ways in which reality has been violated. If everything’s strange, in some ways nothing is.

This isn’t strictly true - I’ve seen some films that were weird stem to stern, films that make Possession almost look like a quiet chamber drama, but it’s tough to pull off. You have to go so unapologetically maximalist and go all-in on the weird for it to work, and it’s as likely as not to fail. And this film doesn’t go big enough in that regard - the effects of the virus as we see them aren’t much different from an especially bad meth bender, and living someplace where everything is totally privatized only really comes into play at one point, mostly to delay police response to a break-in, and there’s all kinds of other ways that can be handled as well. That the virus was designed in a lab and released into the environment doesn’t seem to play a role at all in the story (I say “seem” because I’m basing this on a single viewing with one specific set of choices, and I don’t know how different the other versions are). It tells us there’s this weird virus, and it tells us there’s this weird world, but once it’s told us both of these things they end up being largely inessential to the story.

Which is another issue with the film: Maybe it’s that it doesn’t have a very big budget (which is not a problem  - plenty of stinkers out there that did, and good ones that didn’t), but this is a film that does a lot of telling instead of showing. Most of the dialogue is exposition, most character is revealed through dialogue instead of behavior. How do we know that Billy still loves Sabrina? Is it in how he talks to her, or his hesitancy to do the hard but necessary thing? No, it’s because one character tells another that he still loves her while he himself is offscreen. How do we know this country has totally privatized regions? Is it in signage or incidental behavior? No, it’s part of a title card that tells us how the world is, and a sequence where Shelly plays with the television remote and we can hear different programs explaining the whole system offscreen. I liked the changing-channel bit as a narrative device, but why would television news still be explaining the existence of this system to people after it had presumably been in place for years? It’s not an organic part of the world, it’s there for our benefit. Sabrina did some pretty horrible shit to get herself estranged from Billy, but we don’t get to see it - instead, Billy brings it up while talking to Sabrina. Telling, instead of showing. And from a horror standpoint, beginning with a title card telling us everything about the world and virus before the film even starts just sucks all the mystery and surprise out. Horror often lies in realization or discovery or recognition, and if you know what’s going on from the start, then there’s nothing to realize or discover, unless you go with an unreliable narrator.

This introduction of elements that end up not really contributing much to the story even extends, to a degree, to technical aspects of the film. The interactive choice mechanism only came up three times over the course of the film, and the resolution I got to the last one was really hamfisted - one of the characters even asks flat-out why the other character would do what they did, that it was a very bad choice. Which, when you give the audience the option of making the choice, feels a little unfair. Don’t punish your audience for making a choice you allowed them to make. The need to make a choice before the film continued made it feel disjointed - the cuts from choice to outcome felt a little clumsy - and robbed it of momentum. And for reasons that don’t seem to have a narrative rationale, the whole thing is shot in black and white with elements of spot color. At times, it’s effective -the startling blue of Sabrina’s eyes when in the grip of the virus was striking - but it doesn’t seem to be systematic or intended to communicate anything specific. It’s just sort of there, like the artificiality of the virus or the dystopian setting.

I’d never ding anyone for ambition or trying something that hasn’t been done before, but when you do all of them at once, I think the end product suffers. If this were a story about a guy with big dreams in a broken-down town whose estranged wife had turned into Something Else, that’d be a solid story. If this were a story about a guy trying to get custody of his daughter in a world where every aspect of life had a marked-up price tag attached, that’d be a solid story too. But doing both at once diluted it. And I’m not sure horror is a genre to make interactive, since so much of horror is the audience watching what’s happening and being powerless to stop it. Giving the audience power makes it less scary, and maybe underscores the artificiality of the exercise - if I go back and try a different path, consequences feel less meaningful, and I see what events would play out no matter what I did. It’s not the experience I come to movies for (and probably why I’ve never bothered to watch Bandersnatch), and throwing it into the mix on top of everything else when you’re working with just enough resources to tell a small-scale, straightforward story is a hard thing to make work. I think it’s cool to have all these ideas, but putting them all into a single movie doesn’t work so well.

IMDB entry
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Possession: That Escalated Quickly

I’ve watched a lot of scary movies. A lot. And one of the things I’ve noticed is that over time, I’ve noticed myself getting more…not jaded, exactly, but harder to surprise. Watch enough average horror films, you start to notice formulas. The more obvious the formulas are, the harder it is to engage with the film or really be affected by it. Luckily, they aren’t all average, but after awhile the ones that really make an impression get farther and farther apart.

Possession was very much a surprise, start to finish. It’s singular in its vision, and one of those rare horror films that actually captures the feeling of a nightmare.

It’s the story of Mark and Anna, a married couple living in 1980s West Berlin with their son Bob. Mark is away from home a lot for work, and when the film opens, Mark has come home after an extended stretch elsewhere, and things are…strained.

So the film starts off like a sort of European take on relationship dramas like Kramer Vs. Kramer, where most of the action revolves around a couple’s dissection of their own relationship as it falls apart, and the emotional aftermath of that. Mark spends a lot of time away from home for work, and Anna’s dissatisfied with the marriage. Maybe it’s that he’s never around, maybe it’s that she finds that she doesn’t mind him not being around, maybe she’s realizing how little identity of her own she has. Mark doesn’t take it well, Anna’s sort of all over the place emotionally. None of this is new, in that respect. But almost immediately, bits of strangeness start creeping in around the edges.

The weirdness begins in the film’s tone. It’s melodramatic almost to the point of comedy, especially in the first act. The dialogue is loaded with quasi-philosophical musings about identity and being, emotions are played one way - loud - and the characters regularly faint or collapse, sometimes for apparent reasons, sometimes not. It starts off playing almost like a parody of European art films, or at least what a mass audience might imagine those films to be like. We go from “polite conversation about ending the marriage” to “screaming match and throwing furniture in a café” to “four days into a bender, curled up filthy and sobbing on the floor of a trashed hotel room” in the span of the first five minutes or so. And this movie is a little over two hours long. It’s like “well, that escalated quickly.”

And so at first it plays as funny, but soon enough, the skin of an end-of-the-marriage story splits to reveal the much, much stranger bones underneath. Anna isn’t just unhappy with the marriage, she doesn’t just have a lover (Heinrich, who’s exactly as creepy and loathsome as he needs to be, and as much of a cartoon as everyone else in the film), she’s also vanishing for days at a time with no notice. Mark doesn’t know where she’s going. Heinrich doesn’t know either. And every time she comes back, she comes back more unbalanced. She comes back stranger. And Mark isn’t doing any better either. The abrupt cuts from one scene to the next that originally felt funny start to feel jagged and dislocating, like we’re witnessing the moments of lucidity between blackouts or fugue states. And then when we find out where Anna’s been going, at the end of the first act, shit starts getting really weird in a direction I don’t think you could predict from what came before. And it’s just the beginning.

As things begin to get stranger and stranger, it all starts to feel like we’re the audience to a nightmare. The literal and metaphoric are all mashed up, like internal emotional states are being played out externally, but it’s all played up front - nothing is presented as dreams or hallucinations. The result is something that almost feels a little like opera in how over-the-top and stylized it is, and the full-throttle approach gives it a lunatic verve. This is not a movie that moves from scene to scene as much as it careens from scene to scene, and if you think you know what’s coming next, you really don’t. Shifts in time, space, perspective, all played to the rafters, but even if the details are sometimes a little murky, the feeling is clear through out - profound alienation, estrangement, and derangement from the self as well as others.

As events progress, the film pulls equally from psychological and body horror as we watch Mark and Anna’s deepest fears, insecurities and obsessions play out in a world that feels shifted just to the left of one we might recognize. Why is Bob’s teacher a dead ringer for Anna? What exactly does Mark do for a living? What happened to Anna in the subway that night? The film is filled with little odd details - the view of the Berlin Wall from their apartment provides a menacing backdrop to everything that occurs. Conversations about custody and visitation are accompanied by the chopping of raw meat. Mark, in the throes of a loud public argument is tackled by chefs in toques and full whites. On the surface there’s nothing that unusual about any of it, but in juxtaposition it all feels off - slightly to start, and then more and more over time.

It shouldn’t work, this fever-pitched fever dream, but it largely does (things do start to get a little muddled in the third act), and it’s because everyone completely commits and just fucking goes for it, without a single wink or bit of ironic distancing. I can’t really directly compare this to anything else I’ve seen, but it does fall along a thematic line that also contains The Brood before it, and Hellraiser and Antichrist after it, in that it’s a film about desire stretched into bizarre forms and making internal emotional violence and personal disintegration horrifyingly external. If it seems like I’ve thrown it in with other films that bear no resemblance to each other, well, trust me - you’ve probably never seen anything like this before, and if you’re up for the cask-strength weird shit, it’s one to seek out.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

XX: This One’s For The Ladies

Hot take incoming: Horror film is capable of communicating genuinely unsettling and uncomfortable experiences and points of view. On the other hand, the horror film industry is - like so many profit-driven industries - deeply conservative, if not downright reactionary. Horror fandom isn’t much better, for that matter. Scratch the surface even a little and you get some pretty shitty ideas about women and other marginalized groups. It’s part of a larger insistence on a status quo. Scare me, but don’t make me genuinely uncomfortable. Give me thrill rides filled with blood and tits, but don’t make me examine myself.

I think this is part of why I’m coming into this post about the anthology XX with kind of a bad taste in my mouth.  The whole marketing angle, down to the title, is that these are four films made from a female point of view - all four directed by women, three written by women. That it’s a marketing angle at all says a lot to me - this anthology is different! It’s special! Why? Because women made these films! Isn’t that wacky?

The rest of it? Well, that’s all on me. As the film began, my first thought was that these films should be especially subversive, they should Say Something about gender and being a woman in a patriarchal society. And you know what? No they shouldn’t. That isn’t any fairer than treating horror films made by women like a sideshow curiosity. That’s tokenism, plain and simple. They don’t need to make some big statement - the existence of the work is statement enough, and everything else follows from that. Any film is at least in part a product of the director and writers’ worldview, so if a woman wrote it and directed it, then by its very nature, it is saying something.

So with that out of the way, I’m going to talk about each entry as, well, horror films.

The film is bookended by stop-motion animation that reminds me of the Brothers Quay, and additional segments in the same style serve as interstitials between the films. It’s reasonably creepy and impressionistic, evoking a mood rather than serving as a conventional framing narrative. Which is fine with me, since framing stories in anthology films suck as often as not.

The Box

We open on Susan, traveling with her son Danny and daughter Jenny on the subway. It’s Christmastime, and there’s a voiceover from a woman (presumably Susan) about how she doesn’t remember whether they’d gotten presents or not at that point. So she’s recalling this from sometime in the future. Danny asks the man sitting next to him what’s in the box he’s carrying. It’s a red gift-wrapped box with a bow on top. The man says it’s a present, and Danny asks if he can look. The man obliges, and Danny looks puzzled as he stares into the box, his smile fading. Come dinnertime at home, he says he isn’t hungry. He doesn’t eat his dinner that night.

Or the next night, or the next night, or the next night.

It’s a terse, economically told story about a little boy who just won’t eat, and won’t say why. The acting is a little stiff in places, but it’s nicely restrained and makes good use of a repeated motif of the family sitting at the dinner table, with overhead shots of the food. It creates a rhythm which it then begins to disrupt as things get worse and worse. Susan doesn’t know why this is happening, she and her husband start to fight about it, and then things get much, much worse. At every turn, it doesn’t overexplain, letting the little details do the work along with the judicious use of some shocking imagery. It does a good job of being really unsettling without falling back into melodrama.

The Birthday Party

Mary is a well-to-do housewife in a fancy suburb full of other well-to-do housewives. She’s wound up tight about her daughter’s birthday party going exactly right, as one tends to be when one has the time and privilege to become obsessed with one’s social standing. In Mary’s case, however, this is complicated by the fact of her husband sitting in his study, very dead, with the party starting very, very soon.

It’s an odd, off-kilter domestic drama that takes upper-middle-class keeping-up-with-the-Joneses anxiety and turns it up to absurd levels, treating a dead husband like a profound inconvenience rather than a source of grief, playing the whole thing for slapstick and scoring it with the sort of minor key synths and sharp music stabs you’d associate with a horror film. The end result feels like we’re watching Mary’s worst nightmare play out, but it’s a worst nightmare that is, in the vast scheme of things, pretty low-stakes. But that seems like it’s kind of the point. It’s well-shot and composed, with a vividly colorful palette, but it’s not really that scary, and the ending title card reveals it for the black comedy it is.

Don’t Fall

Four friends - Jay, Paul, Gretchen, and Jess - are out for a hike in the desert, and as it transpires, they’re probably in a nature preserve area that’s off-limits to the public. The other three get some mileage out of messing with Gretchen, who is afraid of heights and scorpions. Soon enough, they find some mysterious paintings on a rock face, and Gretchen gets bitten by something which causes her to...change.

This is probably the only real dud of the bunch. The Birthday Party wasn’t horror, but it was cohesive and evoked a mood (and the ending made me laugh loudly). This is…just sort of an inconsequential monster story that doesn’t really take time to set things up or really establish a mood. At first it feels like it’s going to be an exercise in tension where a bunch of potential threats get set up, only for us to be blindsided by something that comes out of nowhere (which isn’t a bad thing) or maybe a survival story about a bunch of young adults out of their element, but it isn’t. The four friends hang out for a bit, one of them turns into a monster and kills the others. That’s it. It all just sort of happens, without a lot of tension, and the practical effects let the whole thing down a little bit more. The best thing I can really say about it is that it’s short.

Her Only Living Son

This one opens cryptically, with a fraught conversation between a woman and a doctor, shot in close-ups, with talk of how people have agendas and how she’ll run away, someplace far away where nobody will find her or “little Andy and Jenny.” The doctor gives her some money, says “Godspeed, Mrs. -“and the woman interrupts him to say “no, she’s gone.” Then there is the buzzing of an alarm clock, the woman (now called Cora) waking up, and the caption “18 Years Later.”

“Little Andy” appears to be Cora’s son, it’s coming up on his 18th birthday, and there’s something not quite right about him. It’s in how he treats the dog, the way he tastes the blood from an egg yolk.

The squirrel nailed to the tree.

This one shares a lot of the strengths of The Box, in its restraint and willingness to let suggestion do a lot of the heavy lifting. At its heart, it’s the story of a mother who doesn’t really recognize her son anymore as he’s passing through adolescence, but  this is shot through with echoes of We Need To Talk About Kevin, in Cora’s struggling with the knowledge that she has a son who has done something awful, as well as Rosemary’s Baby - it’s not just that Cora can see there’s something terribly wrong, it’s also that nobody around her seems to acknowledge it. In fact, some of them seem to be enabling it. According to them, her son is very, very special.

The end result is a little richer in texture than The Box, and just as uneasy, forsaking easy shocks for a constant simmering dread as Cora’s situation becomes clearer to us. It does get a little ham-handed and obvious in a couple of spots, but it ends well, tying the universal horror of not knowing your own child anymore to the more specific horror of who Andy’s father really was, bringing them together in a reckoning that ends up being both unsettling and touching at the same time. It’s a powerful piece of work and ends the anthology on a strong note.

So, what do horror films made by women look like? Mostly they look like horror films made by men, for good and ill alike. At their best, there’s some good subtext and imagery in here around motherhood and family, the sacrifices women make, and the pressures they live under without really being didactic about it. I’d love to see more from most of the directors, not just because I like the idea of more different voice in horror (though that’s true), but also because The Box and Her Only Living Son are examples of the kind of horror I like - reliant more on detail, mood, and suggestion than full-on gore, tying together the fears we face every day and fears borne of far stranger things. Life is already full of nightmares, and pairing them with fictional nightmares makes for good horror in my book.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon