VHS Week Day 13: THE ATTIC (1980)

A suicidal, depressed librarian. An abusive curmudgeon in a wheelchair. A chimpanzee in a sailor suit. YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT!

Ugh, stupid Final Girl...clickbait goes in the headline, not in the post itself. This will never go viral now!

Meet Louise (Carrie Snodgress), our suicidal, depressed librarian. She spends her days kind of hating her job–the books...they look at her sometimes and so she tries to burn the place down. She spends her nights crying over the man who left her at the altar years before and taking care of her father, Wendel (Ray Milland), our abusive curmudgeon in a wheelchair. Louise's life is a big, drab, sad mess, but that doesn't mean it's without some bright spots: alcohol, one night stands, and her coworker Emily. The women strike up a friendship that's equal parts support and pity; Emily feels sorry for Louise and tries to nudge her out of her drudgery, while Louise tries to save Emily from falling into the same. Louise buys Emily a one-way ticket to California so she can escape her domineering mother and marry her love, Emily buys Louise a chimpanzee. You know. Friendship!

Wendel loathes pretty much everything, but he loathes his daughter and her chimp most of all. Horror fans know this is all gonna come to a head at some point, right? Like, maybe Dickie the Chimp will attack Wendel and then, having acquired a taste for human flesh, he will totally flip out and eat everyone in Wichita, Kansas?

Look, I'm not going to spoil the end of this movie, even though it's like 70 years old, but I will let you know that Dickie the Chimp does not flip out, so don't get your hopes up. But don't worry! The ending still packs a serious wallop. A seriously depressing wallop. We've all seen some depressing endings before (even during this never-ending VHS Week!), but lawd-a-mighty, The Attic might just take the cake. And then it throws the cake into the void of existential despair, and then you jump in after it not only because you can't bear to see a cake go to waste, but also because everything is terrible and life is cruel and what does anything even matter.

Don't get me wrong–it's not just the ending. The entire GD movie is depressing! Loneliness, alienation, lives spent lost and adrift...this is by no means a light watch, even if the film's incongruous musical cues and bizarre jokes sometimes give it the feel of one. A better life for Louise seems to be just out of reach, and you desperately hope she'll get there, but this is a horror film, not a life-affirming yogurt love journey movie.

From time to time, though, you might find yourself wondering if The Attic really is a horror movie. It's not so much a "slow burn" as it is a "slow drama/character piece with some horror elements crammed into the last seven minutes." Those seven minutes are worth it, mind, I just want you to know what you're in store for if you're fixin' to check this one out. Then again, The Attic boasts a scene where a showercap-wearing Ray Milland sits in a bathtub with a Reader's Digest propped in front of him and a bowl of spiced gum drops at his side. That's what really makes watching it worth your time as far as I'm concerned.

Day 7: MANIAC (2012)

It's been 35 years since Maniac was released, but the film's notorious reputation clings to it still. Its explicit, hateful violence continues to shock even the most jaded horror fans; it's a wholly repellent movie that–while undoubtedly deserving of its place in the genre's hallowed halls–is perhaps more appreciated than enjoyed. I can't say I was surprised when the remake was announced, as every movie in the history of ever is up for grabs as far as that goes. But, with a finger on my chin and a faraway look in my eye, I certainly wondered: would it be as hardcore as the original? And what of the casting of this so called "Elijah" "Wood"–could he sweat and mumble enough to make an adequate replacement for Joe Spinell, or would his Frank be something else entirely?

Well, let's get this out of the way: Maniac '12 is French, so yeah, it's pretty hardcore. If you're looking for gore and violence, it's as typically stomach-churning as most other horror films hailing from that country. As for the rest of it...

Frank is a part-time restorer of antique mannequins and a part-time maniac. He stalks women he sees on the street, or women he picks up through an online dating service...just basically any woman who catches his eye. It's not long before Frank's copious mommy issues rise to the surface and he moves from stalking the women to butchering, taking their scalps and clothing as a prize. Back home, he puts the matted, bloodied scalps on clothes on the mannequins and talks to them as if they were real women. Soon he meets Anna (Nora Arnezeder), a pretty photographer who wants to use Frank's mannequins–the ones in the front of the shop, natch–in a gallery project. They strike up a friendship, but how long can Frank keep his serial killer urges in check?

Make no mistake: this isn't some dopey slasher flick where a masked psycho offs teenagers for regressions real or imagined. Maniac is about the violence perpetrated against women on the regular. It's a cautionary tale that plays on the fears nearly every woman accepts as a part of life: don't go home with that nice guy you met on the dating site. Don't walk home alone, especially after dark. It reinforces every "don't" that women are taught ("I warned you not to go out tonight.") if they want to stay safe. There are maniacs out there, and they often seem harmless, like Frank does. Maybe you'll have dinner with him first. Maybe he'll stare at you on the subway and then follow you home. Maybe he's hiding under your car. Maybe he's your friend. Beware, ladies! The danger is real.

As I noted in my review of 1980's Maniac, I don't think that a movie about misogyny is always misogynist in and of itself. It's the approach to the subject matter employed by the remake and not necessarily the subject matter itself that I found severely lacking. In both versions, Frank is a victim of abuse at the hands of his mother, which renders him unable to relate to women on a level of basic humanity. It's a horror tale as old as Psycho, and I don't know, I guess I'm a bit over the "castrating mother" trope...or, again, the way it's used in Maniac '12, which is shot in the first-person view for most of its runtime. We're forced to see the world through Frank's eyes, to somehow identify with him, which...well, why force the audience to do that? Is it just to make us uncomfortable? That's a thing, I guess. Was it simply a "Hey, let's do the opposite of what they did in the original version!"? That's a thing, too. In 1980, first-person perspective was also used, but generally in order to see through the eyes of the victims. We saw tables turn as this unremarkable man suddenly became a maniac, and not only was it was a more terrifying technique from a "horror movie" perspective, but it made us empathize with the women, not the killer.

Although we did empathize with Frank in 1980, too. He sickened himself with his behavior and was tortured by his demons. They hint at this in the remake, going so far as to give us a literal vomit scene after Frank kills his date, but again...the first-person P.O.V. gets in the way. We never see Frank as a normal, average guy the way Anna does because we're relegated to glimpses of him every once in a while in a mirror, only seeing Frank staring blankly at himself. Sure, he hems and haws and gets headaches which make the camera go blurry, but ultimately it doesn't come across as anything more than a gimmick.

While the film didn't work for me overall, I would like to give a shoutout to the hardest working extras in Maniac '12: the green Bath and Body Works-looking hand soap and lotion who showed up in nearly every apartment in Los Angeles.

Horror Without People: THE CHANGELING

Spoiler alert: you are gonna need some industrial-strength oven mitts to handle the extremely hot take I'm about to lay down. And that is: for my money ($0.36), the very best haunted house movies establish a real sense of place. Crazy, right? It should go without saying. But I'm saying it anyway, because saying things that people should already know is one of my favorite pastimes. In related news, pizza: so good!

But look, sure, you can have a successfully interesting and/or frightening supernatural horror film wherein you say a place is haunted and then you just plop some characters any-ol'-where and throw in some ghosts or whatever. (I don't want to brag, but I'm obviously pretty good at pitching stories.) But this is not the case with, say, The Shining or The Haunting, where the Overlook Hotel and Hill House are essential characters in the stories. Would the Torrance family have been as terrorized had they spent the winter at your local Motel 6? Yes, obviously, but for very different reasons: the rotting lady in the bathtub would have been high on krokodil, etc. It's just not the same!

The Changeling (1980) features a grand old haunted house that's rather reminiscent of Hill House. Why, it even comes with a warning, given by a Mrs. Dudley-esque dour, stern-faced matron.

That house is not fit to live in. No one's been able to live in it. It doesn't want people.

But no one ever listens to dour, stern-faced matrons–even though they always know what's up–and so John Russell stays in the sprawling manse. The exterior looms menacingly while inside there are seemingly endless hallways and staircases. Rooms are boarded up and hidden away, and the house is full of secrets. The visual cues in The Changeling are so abundant and the setting is so well-established that the tale is all but told without the need for dialogue.

awesome movie poster friday - the 1980 edition!

I gave The Changeling a peep for the first time in a long while last night and man, it's still so good. Good enough, in fact, to warrant its very own Awesome Movie Poster Friday. What an honor! But here's the thing...The Changeling hails from 1980 and 1980 was a great year for horror. It's no 1981, of course, but it gave us a veritable embarrassment of genre riches for sure and that is also good enough to warrant an Awesome Movie Poster Friday. Can you feel the love tonight?

Some other movies 1980 blessed us with have been featured with an AMPF before: Terror Train, The Fog, and Prom Night; City of the Living Dead; Inferno; Friday the 13th. There's also The Shining, but look, there are so many minimalist and modern posters for that movie that I honestly can't be bothered. It feels like it was an assignment for a graduating class of budding graphic designers or something, there are so many. But hey, the film itself is another reason why 1980 makes most other years look like total suckers for being so lame.