Hammer Time

In the mostly silent opening of André Øvredal's latest film, Mortal (2020), there is a huge sense of landscape. Even once the film moves out of its initial wilderness about ten minutes in, the landscape is ever-present. Filmed on location near a couple of Norway's more scenic fjords, it acts as a tourist promo to a point that I said to my long-suffering partner--who was folding laundry in the other room at the time--"What do you think about moving to Norway?" "What's in Norway?" she asked. "Fjords! This movie is gorgeous!" She waited two beats before answering: "So you're pining for the fjords?" She has excellent timing.

Read more below the fold >>

Doing the Islands

Sweetheart (2019, directed by J. D. Dillard) is a model contemporary low budget genre film. It's efficient, it provides all the genre thrills a horror movie requires, and it even makes a stab at psychological depth, all inside a compact eighty two minute running time. Its first act is laconic. There's barely any dialogue. Its storytelling is conveyed entirely through the actions of its heroine, who must carry the weight of the narrative for the duration of the film. Depending on the actor, this kind of gamble can fail spectacularly. The filmmakers have chosen wisely in Kiersey Clemons who is more than up to the challenge, but anyone who has seen her in other films knows that already.

Read more below the fold >>

An Unwanted Heirloom

There's an old interview with director David Cronenberg that has stayed with me in which the interviewer asked Cronenberg what scared him. Cronenberg said, "When I go to pick up my kids at school and they're not there waiting for me." That something so mundane would scare a man whose business was scaring people is telling. Most of the things people fear are in the everyday of their lives, not big sweeping things like zombie apocalypses or robot uprisings or mutagenic television signals. Most really good horror movies connect with something that real people actually fear from day to day. Sometimes, they do it in abstract ways. Sometimes they do it pointedly and on the nose. The challenge is in finding something that enough people fear to pull it off and in making that fear real for an audience. A surprising number of horror movies fail at this, either from a failure to face that fear head on or by burying it too deeply under the tropes of genre. This isn't a problem for Relic (2020, directed by Natalie Erika James). It puts its finger on a set of existential terrors that real people face every day that are close to universal, then follows them to their logical conclusion. It's an unsettling movie.

Read more below the fold >>

I Could a Tale Unfold...

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:

--William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V.

---

I wish I could have seen The Mortuary Collection (2019, directed by Ryan Spindell) in a movie theater with a big crowd of teenagers. Alas, the Covid-19 pandemic put the kibosh on that even if the realities of contemporary distribution wouldn't have accomplished the same thing. I am green with envy for the Fantastic Fest audience that saw the film in September of 2019, but that seems like another world from this distance. In any event, The Mortuary Collection is an audience film if ever there was one, and I feel like the world is all the poorer for having to view it on Shudder in the solitude of our living rooms, however nice our home systems might be. It's a fun film, with set pieces designed to goose an audience but good.

Read more below the fold >>

True/False 2020: Tales of Two Cities

The annual True/False Film Festival went on as scheduled this weekend in my fair city. There was a whistling-past-the-graveyard feeling to this year's proceedings, given the spectre of a global pandemic that hung over almost every conversation I had with other attendees, particularly once the news hit that South by Southwest had canceled their festival and it was increasingly likely that True/False would be the end of the road for this year's festival season. Here in Columbia, Missouri, currently untouched by the pandemic, the show went on. Even lacking the pandemic, though, many of this year's films were grim, reflective of a world out of balance to an even greater degree than usual. I know that the selections at this festival aren't intentionally picked so that they rhyme each other, but it happens often enough. And so it was this year.

Read more below the fold >>

Now You See Him

One of the enduring challenges facing horror movies is finding things that really scare an audience. Most horror movies fail at this, or abstract it in a way that an audience can sidestep their fears and take them out for a walk without any risk. A horror movie that can lay those fears bare and weaponize them against an audience is a rare thing and is likely to alienate a mass audience. The things that scare people are so personal that it's hard to find something that will reliably scare a large audience. Better to offer a thrill ride. I say all of this because the new version of The Invisible Man (2020, directed by Leigh Whannell), is legitimately scary and not in a fun, thrill-ride sort of way. It finds a raw nerve and it exploits it without mercy. What this film plays as a fantasy is all too real for so, so many women who are the victims of abuse. The varieties of abuse are all there on the screen: physical, mental, financial, institutional; the whole of a society geared to dismiss the suffering of women comes under scrutiny of this film's clinical examination. It's like a slap in the face.

Read more below the fold >>

Island Reveries

I suppose it was too much to hope that a new version of Fantasy Island (2020, directed by Jeff Wadlow) would be something other than a bunch of moralizing twaddle. Moralizing twaddle was baked into the DNA of the old TV series. It's what made the show popular with the old ladies who were its primary audience. My grandmother loved the show, although that might also reflect her crush on Ricardo Montalban. There's a certain poetry in the original show's position as the follow-up to The Love Boat, given that it takes the privileged bourgeois characters of THAT show and holds up a mirror to their moral failings. That could work even today. It's not too surprising to see it re-imagined as a horror movie, either. The original 1977 pilot for the show had more than a little horror woven into it, particularly that weird Gothic ambience unique to 1970s tv movies. Horror tropes abounded throughout the series original run from the outset. The pilot featured a riff on The Most Dangerous Game and another story about a woman who wants to attend her own funeral, after all. It was a sunlit variation of The Twilight Zone at Rod Serling's most didactic. So the new movie, which includes both the moralizing and the tired horror tropes, is at least recognizable as descended from the original show.

Read more below the fold >>

Screwed

"But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped." --Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

---

If you fall down the rabbit hole of genre taxonomy,* you'll find Henry James's famous ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, waiting at the bottom to eat you. What you'll discover is just how fuzzy and indistinct the borders between genres really are. Nowhere is that more evident than in trying to draw an outline around what constitutes the horror story. If you look too hard at horror as a genre, it evaporates before your very eyes with its component parts ordering themselves either as dark fantasy or psychological suspense. Horror, as has been said by sharper horror scholars than I, isn't really a genre at all, but is rather an emotion. An emotion can come from anything. The things that scare and disturb us are protean and idiosyncratic and cannot be contained within the boundaries of a literary genre. It seems to me, though, that there is a horror genre composed of a common pool of archetypes and narrative tropes and that you can't fractionate those generic elements based on whether or not something is supernatural or naturalistic or however you want to order things. The corpus colossum that unites the various lobes of the horror genre is The Turn of the Screw with its famously ambiguous unreliable narrator. Is it a supernatural ghost story or a tale of ordinary madness? The story is cryptic on this matter. This is a challenge to later interpreters, particularly to filmmakers. Jack Clayton's The Innocents is more or less successful at straddling this divide, but not every version has the kind of blue-blooded cinematic bona fides that that film has. The latest version in the cinema (as opposed to the one that's coming as a series to Netflix) has no such pedigree. The Turning (2020, directed by Floria Sigismondi) attempts to split the difference. Literally.

Spoilers, I guess.

Read more below the fold >>

The Darkest Part of the Forest

“Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?” -- Kenneth Patchen.

---

Many horror movies take place in what I call "Horror Movie Land", which is some non-specific time in the past, usually in middle or eastern Europe but sometimes in France or the UK or even early America. The time period can vary from the late middle ages all the way up to the early 20th Century (the automobile in Hammer's Kiss of the Vampire is a giveaway, for one example). What they have in common is that these settings are nowhere real. They are, rather, archetypal landscapes, the land of dreams and nightmares conjured up by the Gothic imagination of the Romantics. Think of the bleak landscapes painted by artists like Caspar David Friedrich or Otto Runge, or the Europe of Melmoth the Wanderer or The Castle of Otranto. Almost all horror movies that are set in Horror Movie Land abstract their settings for effect. There's a level of theatricality in all such movies, whether they're shot on a soundstage, as Corman's Poe movies were, or in the landscapes favored by Hammer and Amicus. Osgood Perkins's new film, Gretel & Hansel is set in a more abstract version of Horror Movie Land than usual. The locale is doggedly non-specific (the Hansel and Gretel story is German, but this film doesn't seem particularly Germanic), and the time period seems to exist outside of a historical context. Given the film's origins in a fairy tale, it's entirely appropriate that it exists inside an archetype rather than in a specific time and space. It makes for a strange mood.

Read more below the fold >>

Oceanic Dread

Underwater (2020, directed by William Eubank) is a relentless horror movie that puts its foot on the gas at the outset and never lets it up. In this regard its a throwback to movies like The Terminator or The Hidden, films in which anything that doesn't immediately serve the narrative on screen is cheerfully thrown over the side. It's built for speed. It has a visceral immediacy. It's a film whose plot can be summed up as, "Oh shit oh shit oh shit." It has the pop vitality of really good pulp fiction. Somehow, it manages to be more than that. Underwater is the best kind of genre film, in so far as it uses genre as a crucible for its characters. Its characters do not reveal themselves in exposition or in heartfelt scenes of dialogue. They reveal themselves in their actions. In turn, their circumstances test them to destruction in ways that would elude more naturalistic filmmaking. In doing so, it quietly undermines the expectations of genre. It uses the tropes, sure, but it also subverts them.

Read more below the fold >>