A Howling in the Woods (1971)

Having had enough of what must have been the endless bullshit of her fashion photographer husband Eddie (Larry Hagman), young and beautiful (as the film will never stop saying, so I’ll just do as I’m told here) Liza Crocker (Barbara Eden) returns to the home of her father in the very rural small town she hasn’t visited for half a decade, to lick her wounds, planning to stay there long enough to establish residence and be able to put in for a divorce.

But Liza’s father isn’t there at all. Apparently, he has already embarked on his yearly archaeological – or is is anthropological - expedition into parts remote where no telephone can reach. At least her stepmother Rose (Vera Miles) provides our heroine a warm welcome, as does the Rose’s son Justin (John Rubinstein) whom Liza meets for the first time. One might even suggest that Justin’s a little too warm, though Liza seems charmed.

These two are pretty much the only ones greeting out heroine with open arms, however. The rest of the town’s population treats her with disregard to outright rudeness Liza can’t explain to herself, as if she were some kind of pariah everyone she once knew was just all too happy to see go. Or is it jealousy for her big city success?

There is, indeed the kind of dark secret hanging over the town you’d expect to encounter in a modern Nordic noir rather than an innocent little NBC TV movie like this. It all has to do with the drowning murder of a little girl some months ago, and with what the town’s people, once properly riled, proceeded to do afterwards.

I know very little about the career of A Howling in the Woods’ director Daniel Petrie beyond his humungous filmography (much of it in TV and family movies), but this thriller is certainly not an achievement to sneeze at, whatever I think about the rest of the guy’s work whenever I may encounter it. Petrie has a firm grip on his film’s not uncomplicated plot, timing his reveals well and turning the town this takes place in into the sort of community that’d only need one good werewolf or vampire to turn into a complete American rural gothic nightmarescape. Though, as it turns out, humans do pretty well in the monster business too.

The film creates an effective sense of Liza’s increasing paranoia, very efficiently suggesting how much her new experience in her old home diverges from what she remembers, using the inexplicability of this change to ratchet up the tension. If you’re not Liza, the film is also suggesting that there always has been something darker under the surfaces she knew, the kind of violence and darkness that needs another act of violence as a catalyst to come to the surface, but which only ever seems to be just waiting for that kind of excuse.

There’s some great acting on display, too, Eden (while about ten years older than her character is probably meant to be) making a likeable and often rather tough heroine, Hagman – who of course pops in during the course of the movie to convince his wife of taking him back via the power of being obnoxious - making pretty clear the difference between meaning well and knowing how to express it, and Rubinstein showing himself as really rather good at being a creep.

It’s a satisfying little movie that uses a complicated and not completely probable plot as an excellent excuse for a thriller that’s also interested in the dark heart of communal life.

The Atticus Institute (2015)

What we have here is a fine little horror movie that uses the fake documentary format (the kind with talking heads, suggestive music, archival footage yet no commentary) to tell the tale of the horrible end of its titular little institute for paranormal research in the 70s.

After a string of failures and worse, the institute’s lead parapsychologist, Henry West (William Mapother) strikes what looks at first like gold with mental patient Judith Winstead (Rya Kihlstedt), whose various paranormal powers are ridiculously huge, particularly compared with the relatively small statistical changes most of the work of West and his people has been about before. However, apart from her abilities in telekinesis and such, something else isn’t right with Judith at all. She seems more than just disturbed, and the longer her stay at the institute takes, the more bad things begin to happen around her, her paranormal feats taking on a malevolent quality, as if she were trying to get into the researchers’ minds in the most threatening ways.

It becomes so bad, West’s colleague Marcus Wheeler (whom we mostly see in later interviews and played by John Rubinstein) decides to call in the government. Not surprisingly, from then on, bad things happen even more frequently, and not necessarily only at the lab anymore, with everyone involved getting closer and closer to some kind of breakdown. Soon, it’s quite clear to everyone that Judith isn’t some kind of super mutant but possessed by a demon. Of course, this being 1976 and this kind of movie, our government friends decide to attempt to weaponize her/it. Which turns out to be a very bad idea.

As I said, Chris Sparling’s film is a very fine movie. It tells an in principle utterly preposterous tale with great earnestness and conviction, using practically no jump scares (hooray), instead working with more advanced techniques like foreshadowing of doom, an escalating atmosphere of dread built from suggestions and suppositions, and demonstrates a fine sense for the ways to present an agency that’s actually Evil with a capital e. As the film tells it, there’s an inevitability to its story that doesn’t weaken its impact like it sometimes does in films that confuse the inevitable and the obvious but strengthens it, playing with the audience’s imagination in just the right ways, using the subtle shifts in the apparent film stocks it uses and generally believable original footage to make the whole story plausible. Even the reaction of the government to an actual proof for demonic possession seems plausible in the context it is presented here – the film is actually speaking about the hubris of power more than just reproducing a cliché, incorporating exactly the sort of phrases people in power have excused their unethical and irresponsible behaviour for quite some time now and using audience knowledge about the mood of the time The Atticus Institute takes place in.

It’s all very convincing – also thanks to a quality of unshowy acting in the talking heads sequences you get when you hire experienced character players of one kind or another for these kind of parts - and adds a further frisson to the film. This again demonstrates quite a sense for telling details and an ability to use clichés in productive and effective ways to create an oppressive and deservedly creepy mood. And I say that as somebody who generally finds religious possession movies rather yawn-inducing. My reaction might of course have something to do with the film’s decision to underplay the theological tones of its central horror – you don’t need to be a Christian to get freaked out by conscious malevolence after all. And hey, easy to please as I sometimes am, I’m also pretty happy with Sparling’s decision to not have his possessed float in a ceiling corner like a particularly inconvenient insect.

In hindsight, it’s also quietly impressive how effectively the movie draws you into its world despite using so many techniques – the talking heads, the “original” footage that mostly consists of non-private moments and therefore can only do its character work via the body language and positioning of the characters - that could/should distance the audience from what’s going on. In fact, the calm, after-the-fact way The Atticus Institute tells its story seems to make it more effective to me, turning its events into something feeling closer to the factual and real. Of course an effect many fake documentaries and POV horror films strive for, but also one that is often quite elusive.

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