Three Films Make A Post: Three generations Strode strong

Halloween Kills (2021): Just no.

Don’t Let Her In (2021): By the standards of a contemporary Full Moon production, this Ted Nicolaou sexy demon subtenant sixty minute movie is practically a masterpiece. By more exacting standards, it does at least parse as an actual movie with a plot, half-way professional acting, sensible camera setups and production design somebody apparently thought about for more than ten seconds. Watching it, I found myself vaguely entertained, which is much more than I can say for most of what Charles Band’s cohorts have crapped out in the last decade or so. Let’s hope it’s the beginning of a trend.

The Deep House (2021): I found this to be a movie much closer to my tastes than Alexandre Bustillo’s and Julien Maury’s other effort of this year, Kandisha. At the very least, monster and story here intrinsically belong to one another. It’s a rather minimalist film when it comes to plot and character development, though, and mostly relies on its underwater photography and its creepy setting, never really going beyond what you’d expect a film about a haunted house underwater to do.  One could easily argue this one could have been done more fruitfully as a sixty minute film, cutting out a couple of sequences of our protagonists slowly swimming through the creepy house; one would not be wrong.

On the other hand, the film oozes an atmosphere of decay and a bit of dread, and has at least a handful of unforgettable shots, particularly in its final third, so if you’re going in more for the film’s mood and the way its visuals create said mood, you might very well leave completely satisfied, like me.

Three Films Make A Post: Killing for Two

Blood Born (2021): While this is a thing that has gotten better outside of the big blockbuster business (where the problem is probably caused by an audience that expects quantity for the not inconsiderable sums cinemas and Disney+ VIP ask for a ticket), there are still quite a few films that feel the need to blow forty-five minutes of material up to ninety elsewhere, too. An example is this sometimes somewhat satirical horror movie by Reed Shusterman about the horrors of childbirth and childlessness as exemplified via a childless couple turning to a weird sorcerer company for a last chance at breeding. There are a couple of fun, even poignant ideas in here, but everything feels too drawn out, the film repeating ideas much too often, losing the kick it could and should have because it needs to fill out one of those ninety minute cinema slots that don’t actually exist for films of this type anymore.

Kandisha (2020): I never got as much out of French directing and writing duo Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s much-loved first film Inside but absolutely loved their second one, the supernatural giallo fairy tale Livide. Their newest effort, Kandisha, doesn’t quite work for me, alas. I really like their portrayal of their three urban poor (and therefore two-thirds brown and black) teenage protagonists and the world they inhabit, their avoidance of poverty porn without denying the pain of poverty, and the quick and sure creation of the world their characters people. The supernatural element, on the other hand, despite being based on actual folklore, is curiously bland. The titular entity’s activities are as generic as possible, never connecting with the characters on anything but the level of physical threat. Disconnected as it is from the rest of the film, it might as well be a leprechaun.

Prevenge (2016): Returning to the horrors of pregnancy, writer/director/star Alice Lowe’s movie about a woman driven to murder the people she holds responsible for the death of her husband by the voice of her unborn child, does a rather more effective job at pregnancy horror than Blood Born. In part, that’s “simply” because of Lowe’s sharp, macabre and very funny writing (and her perfectly fitting lead performance). Yet it is also because her film expresses so many of the negative things about pregnancy, children and guilt we as a society dislike very much to talk about in such a brutally efficient yet compassionate manner. At the same time, the film finds quite a bit of unexpected genre resonance beyond macabre comedy and vengeance movie, effortlessly suggesting fairy lore and folklore and their dark undergrowth of the human spirit without ever making grand gestures towards these things.

Past Misdeeds: Livide (2011)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Lucie Klavel (the fantastic Chloé Coulloud) starts a practicum with mobile geriatric nurse Catherine Wilson (Catherine Jacob) as part of her training. One of the patients the rather cynical Wilson visits once a day is former famous ballet teacher Madame Jessel (Marie-Claude Pietragalla). Madame is very very old, and not much more than a husk of a woman hovering forever between life and death in a coma in her large, increasingly creepy, home. She is also supposed to be very rich; if Lucie believes what Wilson tells her, there's said to be some sort of treasure hidden away in the house, but Wilson has never found it, even though she tried.

When Lucie tells the story to her boyfriend Will (Félix Moati), he can't help but see himself, his brother Ben (Jérémy Kapone) and Lucie breaking into the house and finding Jessel's treasure. Thus, they could leave their certain futures of dead-end jobs and loveless families behind. At first, Lucie is less than thrilled by Will's idea but some family trouble with her father and a visit by/hallucination of her dead mother (Béatrice Dalle) change her mind. It would, after all be a dream to just have enough money to flee and leave all troubles behind (that's how money works, right?). If Lucie knew what the audience knows about Wilson and her connection to a series of local child disappearances, she probably would have second thoughts about her new life of crime, but she doesn't.

When the trio break into Jessel's house - on Halloween night, no less - they find rather more than they would have wished for; finding the taxidermied body of Jessel's daughter Anna (Chloé Marcq) in a ballerina outfit in a room set up as a grotesque, life-sized music box is just the beginning of an ordeal that becomes increasingly surreal.

I wasn't much of a fan of Alexandre Bustillo's and Julien Maury's first film, Inside/À l'intérieur. That film's overdose of shocking violence was so thick, and its grotesqueness so at odds with the narrative tone I ended up not shocked but provoked to laughter, some fine acting and the directors' irreproachable technical abilities notwithstanding.

Livide still contains its share of physically improbable (and rather awesome) gore, but where Inside’s sense of the grotesque and its hyper-realist mood collided in a bad way, Livide haunts a place between the supernatural movies of Dario Argento (whose Suspiria gets a shout-out that suggests this as an alternative version of Mother of Tears perhaps more fit for those disappointed by the Argento movie's closeness to the Demoni films and other movies of that style rather than Suspiria and Inferno; I'm one of the crazy-people who actually liked Mother of Tears, so don't ask me, please), Fulci in his brilliant phase, and European fairy tales in their pre-bourgeois form before the Brothers Grimm tamed them for a more uptight audience. In that context, the film's sense of the grotesque and the grotesquely violent is particularly effective, for a film that does not strive to be a copy of reality can quite pleasurably creep along paths its naturalistic brethren should eschew.

In its narrative structure Livide is a rather fascinating example of a movie which fulfils everything that could be asked for from a very generic horror movie while still having a mind completely of its own. Every viewer even slightly in tune with the horror genre will of course know the comatose ballet teacher to be anything but the mild type of living dead her permanent sleeping habits would suggest her to be, and will expect her to do rather nasty things to our protagonists when they break into her realm; we all know tune and words to this particular song by heart.

However, at the same time it sings this tune, Livide isn't at all willing to accept its simple plot set-up as an excuse to only tell us a story we already know too well in exactly the way we expect. At first slowly, then with increasing intensity, the film's subtext about young women living in more or less terrible situations trying to free themselves takes control of Livide's more generic elements; the more fantastic the film's surface becomes, the more its symbolic level becomes an indistinguishable part of this surface, until the film ends in a scene that's perfectly in keeping with the fairy tales it uses for its own ends, and also completely divorced from reality as most people see it, or expect to see in their modern horror movies. Unexpectedly, Livide also allows itself to end on a hopeful note it can only reach because it dares to humanize (at least one of) its monsters; freedom - such as it is (the film seems neither painfully optimistic nor cynical about freedom's nature) - is won from recognizing a shared humanity between monster and human, of their outward differences, even their identities, dissolving by way of the grotesque. Like in the literary horrors of Caitlin R. Kiernan, of whose books Livide's treatment of the grotesque and the monstrous, reminds me quite a bit, there's not only danger and horror to be found in facing monsters but also beauty and (at least some kind of) truth.


In this context, it seems nearly irrelevant that Livide at the same time also just works very well as a surreal and moody horror film, but work well it does; it's not impossible that exactly its grounding in safe genre formulas is what gives Livide its power.

On Exploder Button: Livide (2011)

From time to time, one encounters a movie one expects to be good, but not quite as good as what one actually gets to see.

Case in point is the French Livide, a film so beautifully standing in the tradition of Weird European supernatural horror, fairy tales, and complicated treatments of the monstrous that this week's column on Exploder Button makes noises very much like a movie blogger in love.

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