My irregular podcast returns with conversations with friends of the blog, Kevin Matthews and Anna Maurya about two historical international horror movies from last year, Rita (2024, directed by Jayro Bustamente) and The Devil's Bath (2024, directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala). Among the best horror movies of the last few years, sez I.
The prologue of Sting (2024, directed by Kiah Roche-Turner) is a concise and entirely satisfying little short story in which a woman suffering from dementia hears alarming things from her air vents and calls an exterminator. When the exterminator arrives, he's pissed to discover another exterminator's truck parked in front of the woman's building. He reads the woman the riot act when she answers the door. Then he gets to work, only to discover that he's not at all prepared for what he finds in her vents. The end of the story has a wicked whip of the tale. It reminds me a bit of short stories by Robert Bloch or John Collier or Ray Bradbury, or of E. C. Comics (who tended to loot their stories from writers like Bloch or Collier or Bradbury). It's a poisoned bon bon, a cookie full of cyanide. A tasty warm-up act, if you will. The rest of Sting isn't up to the level of its prologue, alas, but the prologue provides enough good will to carry an audience through the film. Or, at least, it carried me through to the end.
The Damned (2024, directed by Thordur Palsson) is a film that shows the widening influence of Robert Eggers on cinema. Elements of all of Eggers's films can be spotted in this film, including the visual design of his recent version of Nosferatu. This is a film that dwells in cold and shadow, making extensive use of its bleak Iceland-in-winter location. One could see Anya Taylor-Joy in the lead in this film rather than Odessa Young, but Young is fine in the part of a woman running a remote fishing station in the 19th century. The screenplay is less disciplined than Eggers, though, including an ending that leaves the audience with questions. The rest? Claustrophobic and chilly, a crucible where close company in isolation fails to prevent anyone from going mad. Superstition runs roughshod over otherwise rational people.
The Girl with the Needle (2024, directed by Magnus von Horn) is a film so relentlessly grim that a home viewer might opt out of it before it is too far done. Indeed, the crux of its true crime origins doesn't even come into the picture until the film is half over. An interested audience should seek it out in theaters if it opens nearby, if only to concentrate their attention. I had no such luck. Given the state of the world at this moment in time, I considered whether or not I wanted to see things through to the bitter end. I stuck it out. The film has a point. It has several, in fact. It's a meditation on the precarious lot of women in societies past and present. True. And as such it is very much a film for this moment in time. It's also an interrogation into what true monstrosity entails. It could be mistaken for social realism in its early going before it veers into a full blown Gothic. But then an alert viewer may remember that it gives the audience a warning of its true intentions before the credits even appear, when it projects faces on top of faces in shifting distortions that make monsters of ordinary humans.
One of the least heralded tropes in the horror toolbox is the idea of wrong geometry, the idea that the shape of the world is just a little off. It's a trope that finds expression in that meme that presents people with obsessive compulsive disorder with an 89 degree angle. The idea of wrong geometry gets a work out in stories like The Haunting of Hill House, where walls are upright and doors are sensibly shut, or At the Mountains of Madness, where the city of the Great Race of Yith defies Euclidean notions of dimension and sanity. It's an effective trope because when it's done well, it's profoundly disorienting. Wrong geometry--specifically wrong geography--is at the heart of Lovely, Dark, and Deep (2023, directed by Teresa Sutherland), in which being lost in the woods is a gateway to more cosmic horrors.
I don't think more than five minutes had elapsed at the start of Immaculate (2024, directed by Michael Mohan) before I started thinking about the Magdalene laundries and residential schools. What goes on in the convent depicted in this film is not so far outside the actions of the actual Roman Catholic Church that the film can be dismissed as mere exploitation. Don't get me wrong, it IS exploitation, but that's beside the point. It has such theological and ideological axes to grind that it was bound to find Evangelical Christians and devout Catholics and right wing trolls of all sorts squawking when the film reached its end. This film hasn't got time for their bullshit. It has a particular shape of reality it wants to express and it uses bludgeons to present it. It's crude, but it's brutally effective.
Note: there are spoilers here.
It never occurred to me that Jerusalem's Lot was a sundown town until two of the central characters in the story were racebent. If you don't know what a sundown town is, it's a town where it was illegal to be out on the streets after sundown if one belonged to a despised minority. This was traditionally directed at African Americans, but other not-white peoples have fallen prey to this as well. It is perhaps too much to ask that the new version of Salem's Lot (2024, directed by Gary Dauberman) actually do something with this idea. They almost get it. So close. But, alas, no. The way race is completely ignored in a film set in Maine in 1975 is conspicuous. There aren't a lot of black people in Maine. But this is off in the woods. 'Salem's Lot is a different kind of sundown town, a fact elided by Gordon Lightfoot's "Sundown" on the soundtrack. A little on the nose maybe, but not wrong.
I'm kicking off this year's October Horror Movie Challenge with a conversation with my friend, Donna K, about The Substance (2024, directed by Coralie Fargeat).
30 films (or more) to go.
My total progress:
New to me films: 1
Total films: 1
"Love is familiar. Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but Love."--William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost, Act I, Scene II
Oz Perkins's new film, Longlegs (2024) is on brand for the director. It's a film that's chock full of enigmatic and alarming images and an airless and oppressive mood. It finds the director moving away from the kinds of aimless but atmospheric films of his early career and toward more conventional idioms. Part of this is the structure of the serial killer procedural, which imposes on Perkins an actual plot whether he likes it or not (I rather think he does not). Part of it might be maturity. In any event, it's the first of the director's movies that invites comparisons to other films. You may hear it compared to The Silence of the Lambs or Seven, but Perkins has too singular a vision to allow any such comparisons to gain any traction. Whatever his influences may be, he has completely subsumed them into his own cinematic anima.
You don't have to squint very hard to see the provenance of Cold Blows the Wind (2023, directed by Eric Williford). It's part Shock Suspense Stories from the old E. C. Comics, part Pet Sematary, part H. P. Lovecraft, and part Creepshow II (thanks for the ride, lady!). Mix well. Pour. I don't mean any of this as criticism. Genres tend to remix a common pool of elements and horror movies are particularly prone to this. That's how genres form in the first place. Some filmmakers do it better. Some do it worse. Sometimes, the swipes show. Sometimes they don't. In the case of Cold Blows the Wind, whenever this film borrows something, the filmmakers leave the knife.
An audience's response to The Vourdalak (2023, directed by Adrien Beau) will hinge entirely on how it reacts to the title character, presented in the film as an elaborate puppet. Perhaps it's better to call it a puppeted practical effect? I don't know. Its closest cinematic relatives are The Crypt Keeper from the old Tales from the Crypt series, and Death in Jim Henson's The Storyteller, the episode that combines the soldier and the devils story with "Godfather Death" from Grimm's Fairy Tales. This effect isn't necessarily a deal breaker. It's a good puppet, and creepy as hell, but it might break the movie's spell if an audience doesn't believe it. Other films have overcome similar effects, even some well-known ones. Otherwise, this is an art house horror movie that's more related to Eastern European horror movies like Viy or Valerie and Her Week of Wonders than it is to a western special effects-driven horror movie. It has a touch of Jean Rollin's Gothic sensibility, too. It is a far cry from this century's extreme horror movies from France, though it's not shy about the cruelty and blood in its source text.
Lisa Frankenstein (2024, directed by Zelda Williams). I'm sure the name came first. Surely screenwriter Diablo Cody thought of the play on "Lisa Frank" and tailored a Lisa Frank-inflected Gothic to suit the name? I can't imagine it started with the story. The title is too big a cultural allusion. There are plenty of films where this was the order of operations in their creation, including at least one great one. Cody denies that this is the case. She says that this is just a coincidence, that the genesis of the film is as a distaff reworking of Weird Science. Maybe that's true. I have a suspicious nature. Cody is certainly capable of writing stories of great sophistication. Juno and Young Adult are both layered, complex character studies underneath the hipster dialogue that made their screenwriter famous. That's not this film, alas. This is a ramble-y nostalgia piece. It's so savvy about its time and influences that one can't help but be suspicious about its provenance. It has its pleasures, sure. It's just...if you're not a specific kind of viewer, one raised at the right time and in the right place, one steeped in a specific kind of culture from the late 1980s, then this film is kind of a mess.
It takes real effort to make a movie as breathtakingly awful as Madame Web (2024, directed by S. J. Clarkson), a film that can stand with the likes of Catwoman, Batman and Robin, and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace as the nadir of superhero cinema. Given the disjointed nature of its plot, I'm going to assume that what ended up on screen is the product of studio notes rather than any incompetence on the part of its main contributors. Certainly, the actors here are left hanging in the wind, actors being at the mercy of other departments. A bad performance isn't always the fault of the actor. Performances are created and sometimes undermined in the editing room. There's a failure to trust the audience in this film that is striking and conspicuous. You can't miss it. So probably the studio. I'm trying to be generous, here.