Three Films Make A Post: If you can't breathe, then you can't scream.

Reeker (2005): From time to time, Dave Payne’s low budget supernatural slasher hits on the set-up for a good scene or two. Invariably, said scene never is quite as good as it could be because it is shot and/or staged as the most clichéd bit of early 00s horror imaginable. The pacing is off as well, characters are the usual annoying clichés, and the ending goes for the worst plot twist. And yes, it’s exactly the twist a curiously large number of desert set horror movies use, and towards which I feel a particular dislike. It’s a pretty desert, at least.

What movie those among the film’s contemporary critics saw to speak of interesting characters and a smart script, I don’t know.

Black Wood (2022): This contemporary indie horror western directed and written by Chris Canfield, does actually feature rather better character writing than you’d expect, as well as a script that understands how to use elements of the – somewhat revisionist – western and horror genres well together. The acting’s a little off sometimes (in a way typical of very indie films), but the central performances by Tanajsia Slaughter and Bates Wilder are very strong. Plus, the film does manage to work as a western as well as a horror film, which isn’t actually that easy a thing to achieve.

Moloch (2022): There are a lot of things to like about this piece of folk horror from the Netherlands: peat bogs and bog bodies are sadly underused elements in horror at the best of times, and director Nico van den Brink does milk the locations for quite a bit of foggy mood building. The script (by van den Brink and Daan Bakker) has some fun ideas about how to include the central folk legend; I haven’t seen this sort of thing done in a sort of screwed-up child nativity version before, and it certainly works well with the way actual folk traditions radiate outwards from their sources.

The more typical horror moments are a bit too generic and jump scare-heavy for my tastes, but the film’s use of folklore and its attempts at speaking about family trauma via horror are more than enough to make up for that.

Zwart water (2010)

aka Two Eyes Staring

After the death of her grandmother, whom she never met, her parents Christine (Hadewych Minis) and Paul (Barry Atsma) move with their daughter Lisa (Isabelle Stokkel) from Holland to the mansion Christine inherited in neighbouring Belgium.

Christine herself isn’t completely happy with the move, not just because she had been estranged from her mother since she was a child but on account of some terrible secret in her past concerning a twin sister she never even mentioned to Paul. On the other hand, the move enables her to finally make the career step she always wanted to take (though it means pretending she doesn’t have a daughter). Nott having to pay rent anymore sure is quite attractive too, so facing old wounds perhaps just might be worth it.

For Lisa, through whose eyes we see most of what occurs during the film, the move is the worst possible thing that could have happened. Not only is she losing the only friend she had and bounces off painfully off the expected cruelty of her new peers, but she also becomes convinced there’s something/someone living in the house with them: a little, talking dead girl inhabiting the cellar that just might have something to do with her mother’s sister. A talking dead girl that becomes rather interested in Lisa.

Historically the Netherlands (at least after World War II, I don’t know about the silent era) have had an even less exciting output when it comes to horror movies than my native Germany, resulting in such a tiny number of horror films, you could probably count them on your fingers. So it is already a praiseworthy achievement of Zwart water’s director Elbert van Strien to actually have made one at all. Seen from this angle it’s just a bonus achievement van Strien managed to make a film this accomplished on many levels.

Not surprisingly in this context, there’s a degree of derivativeness in the film’s approach to horror, following in the footsteps of Spanish ghostly horror movies made after 2000, with The Orphanage and del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone obvious stepping stones in tone and perspective. It’s also no surprise that the film at hand isn’t quite as good at what it does as these two films are, lacking a certain freshness, or the feeling it is putting the elements of the Spanish (language) films in a truly different perspective.

However, a certain lack in originality does not necessarily kill a horror movie. At the very least, Zwart water is derivative of films whose techniques seem very much worth copying and learning from, slow burn horror films that draw large parts of their effect from a basis in human psychology, their ghosts not so much beside the point as tools to tell stories about human beings while still being atmospheric and – sometimes – frightening.

The frightening part is Zwart water’s other problem, in so far that none of the directly scary scenes are all that effective. Fortunately, the film doesn’t really put a lot of emphasis on them, with van Strien preferring to effectively create a dark and threatening mood that sometimes – particular in light of the plot twists and ambiguities of the film – even reaches the level of creeping dread.

The script is a rather fine one, treating the complexities of a seemingly happy family under pressure of the past with subtlety and the needed ambiguity and generally not falling into the trap of making anyone the bad guy of the piece. Consequently, there’s the feeling of witnessing a terrible tragedy taking its course, the sort of thing that nobody involved seems to “deserve” and that still happens to them. In this regard I do particularly like how matter of factly and without judgement the film treats certain elements of Christine’s past once we learn about them, without raising the pointy finger of a moral message too highly nor opting for sleazy wallowing. Sometimes guilt, it turns out, is a rather difficult to pin down thing, even in cases where the responsibilities are quite clear.

In this sense, Zwart water has learned the right lessons from the 2000+ wave of Spanish horror, things these films themselves of course learned from Japanese films, ending up as maybe not a perfect horror film yet as one very much worth watching and thinking about.

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In short: Frankenstein's Army (2013)

At the tail-end of World War II, a small squad of Russian soldiers is traipsing through Eastern Germany, all the while filmed by Dimitri (Alexander Mercury), a man in the process of making a propaganda movie that'll make Stalin happy, and that, of course, is providing the footage we are watching. The soldiers catch an emergency broadcast of other Russian troops and make their way to a small village seeking to help their comrades out.

Unexpectedly, the village is mad science central, and soon enough, the soldiers have to fight off rather lively and aggressive dead people with various metal parts screwed onto them. The situation doesn't improve when it turns out that one of them has kept some rather crucial information from them, and they can't just do what any sane person confronted with the kinds of grotesque nightmares they encounter would do and just run. And that's even before they meet the creatures' creator (Karel Roden), who comes from a long line of mad scientists.

Said grotesque nightmares really are the core joy of Richard Raaphorst's fine piece of low budget horror. Frankenstein's soldiers are created with such an obvious joy and love of detail, as well as a demonstrating such a good working idea of craziness, that I'm perfectly okay with how simple Frankenstein's Army's plot and characters are, and how "no shit, Sherlock" - though perfectly fitting the material - its theme (humanity is a horrible, self-destructive species; totalitarianism is the highest and most horrible expression of these urges, and look how horrible we truly are) is. We are, after all, here to watch bloody violence and improbable creatures (personal favourite: slug guy or the poor creature with an airplane propeller for a head), as long as the film gives us a tiny reason to watch them. For once, talking about "grand guignol" style filmmaking seems like absolutely correct terminology for a movie.

The film's POV stylings aren't truly believable but are realized with a love for detail comparable to that of the creature designs. While I don't buy the whole set-up at all - even after the mandatory plot twist - Raaphorst puts a lot of actual effort in to add visual artefacts appropriate to the era without ever going so overboard with them they become annoying. When it comes to the staging of scenes, the director generally prefers the effective or atmospheric shot to the believably in character, something which may annoy people who want their POV films to be "realistic" but which is an approach I prefer when used as it is here - to make the movie a more effective horror film. This also leads to Frankenstein's Army being one of the increasing number of POV horror movies where you get a good look at everything you'd care to see (and some things you rather didn't).

The film's final joy is veteran actor (seldom seemed that phrase more fitting) Karel Roden's absolutely unhinged performance as the film's big name mad scientist. It's not just a perfect bit of scenery chewing but really the only way the man who created the things we see throughout the film could have been played - not as a realistic mentally ill man, but a raving lunatic with tendencies to mock politeness.

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