Jeff Kuykendall

With our tax refund this year we bought a new TV, a 50″ Samsung plasma television and a significant upgrade from our previous television, an early HD-ready set, much smaller but not flat-screen, that weighed about a thousand pounds.  This, in conjunction with recently inheriting my parents’ cast-off surround-sound speakers, has resulted in a “home theater,” I believe the kids these days are calling it.  It was fortuitous that Amazon shipped our television the very day of Winter Olympics opening ceremonies, so we can see HD programming in all its splendor.  My last TV was set up to receive HD through a receiver in our Tivo, so the image we used to have wasn’t bad at all; however the colors were not as vivid as a plasma TV can provide, and the smaller monitor meant less detail.  Significantly, I can now more easily detect a difference between a standard DVD and a Blu-Ray…and now I am rapidly becoming a Blu-Ray advocate.  The difference is stunning.  Any curmudgeon who rails against having to adopt a new format I can only presume has not upgraded his system.  If you have a smaller TV, DVDs are fine.  At 50 inches (he said, sucking in his chest), wowza but that’s a nice picture.

Now, I am painfully aware that my personal library of DVDs has grown out of control.  It fills two giant bookshelves in our living room, and has stretched to a shelf in my den.  There are two reasons it’s grown so large over the last ten years: (1) the many opportunities to buy a cheap DVD, and (2) my borderline-absurd habit of purchasing a film simply because I like it and want to display it on my shelf as some sort of “evidence” of this otherwise abstract affection.  Now that I’ve gone broke splurging on this television, it gives me an opportunity to start revisiting this collection, to make good on my ten-year-long investment and actually watch the films in my library.

I had planned on making the Inglourious Basterds Blu-Ray the inaugural film for my new TV, but alas, I’ve yet to get around to it (though of course I’ve seen the film, and love it).  At a friend’s request we watched Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder first.  Prior to calibrating the TV, the brightness and contrast was cranked high, and the color was especially vivid, or vivider than vivid.  Naturally it looked gorgeous, if eye-straining.  Some research online and my wife and I calibrated the TV on our own, hoping to prolong the TV’s life.  It still looks fantastic, but animation looks especially grand.  I had previously been skeptical that an animated film would be worth releasing in Blu-Ray, thinking that there were limits to the detail that could be seen; however, after watching first the Futurama film and then Ralph Bakshi’s Fire & Ice on the HD format, I now believe that animation in Blu-Ray can look even better than live action film.  Simply put, the colors in animation are not meant to mimic reality, not even in a rotoscoped film like Fire & Ice.  Bakshi’s film, with its designs by acclaimed pulp illustrator Frank Frazetta and background paintings by James Gurney (later of the Dinotopia books) and a then-unknown Thomas Kincaid*, on this presentation really capture the quality of a vividly backlit painter’s canvas.  I doubt this film could ever look better – the impression was of seeing an image exactly as the director intended, with an accurate and subtle color range.  I also did notice details I hadn’t seen before, most likely because of the size of the set, such as the bite marks on a “beast-man”’s arm after he removes a slug-like creature; even a humorously smutty nipple slip which some animator snuck in while illustrating the scantily-clad princess.  Although a superior presentation will never turn the pulpy and pleasingly-adolescent Fire & Ice into a great film, the new factors at play here (including the 5.1 remix) did engage me in a way which the film never had before.  I recommend it, in particular to fans of fantasy illustration.

After this, it was spending a weekend doing the obligatory sampling of modern Hollywood blockbusters – I chose to rewatch the X-Men trilogy in BD.  As opposed to the animation I’d screened, the colors now were of a more subdued quality (partly a choice of the directors), and obviously the flesh tones were more subtle and realistic.  At this point, I was more accustomed to the presentation and found nothing earth-shattering, although I did become more emotionally involved in the action–in particular the series’ high point, the second film–in a way which I had not experienced since watching them in the theater, where the size of a screen creates a certain subjective impact during the viewing experience.  Later in the week, I watched the 2009 indie horror film House of the Devil and found that, despite the film’s self-conscious use of grain (it is set in the early 80’s, and in many ways imitates the style of genre films from that period), the film’s use of black shadows and long subjective shots of wandering through an “old dark house” had a visceral impact heightened by the presentation.  This is a film which relies upon putting the viewer in the protagonist’s shoes, seeing a threatening world through her eyes: the larger the screen, the more powerful is this effect, which heightens the suspense.

But if I was going to work through my library of titles, that meant watching those DVDs–many of which will likely never get a BD upgrade.  Thanks to the “upconverting” effect of watching a DVD on a Blu-Ray player connected via an HDMI cable, even the 80’s TV show “Cheers” looks just great, or as good as it ever will.  (At this point in any article of this kind, the reader will begin to judge the writer’s viewing habits.  You are perfectly welcome to do so.)  But my Blu-Ray player is not region-free, and unless I care to laboriously rearrange my cables each time I want to watch a non-Region 1 disc, the upconverting effect, as well as the 5.1 surround, is not present for that circumstance.  Nevertheless, I wanted to see how the French film Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra looked on a bigger monitor.  This wonderful live action comic book adaptation–never released in the States, since the Asterix comics here are known to few–actually looked quite good, even when connected by “mere” component cables.  The colors were especially good, particularly in shots of sunsets or bright blue skies over the desert.  However, although faces looked just fine, technology failed when it came to representing the desert sand.  The grains were a pixelized mess, something which BluRay would be especially adept at rendering.  (It was a marked contrast with watching so much Olympics coverage in HD, where I felt that I could reach out and sink my hand into the snow.)  Despite this shortcoming, I doubt I’ll be seeing this film released in a Region 1 Blu-Ray anytime soon, so I’ll keep my U.K. DVD of this very entertaining film.

Back to high definition, I decided to test an older film by watching Criterion’s The Third Man, which went out-of-print almost as soon as it was released on BD.  At first, spoiled, perhaps, by Olympics coverage and more modern films, the grain was distracting.  (This, from a film enthusiast!)  I had read, on websites such as dvdbeaver.com as well as in Video Watchdog, that Blu-Ray makes film grain more pronounced, one of the potential downsides of HD.  High definition is meant to capture tiny details, and when it comes to a film made in the 1940’s, grain as part of the negative will make up much of those “tiny details.”  But I quickly grew accustomed to what I was seeing: those swimming particles on the image actually brought me closer to when I first saw this film, on the big screen during its revival circa 1999.  I found that it brought a curious warmth to the film, perhaps of nostalgia, but also for the nature of film.  There is a different quality to watching an older film in high definition – it evokes not the details of “reality,” or even the heightened colors of artificial reality, but rather the intimacy of cinema, as well as the tangible quality of the medium (being film).

As I continue to explore my library, I promise my next entries on this subject will be more about the films themselves.  Watching these movies again, they come alive in new ways.  When it comes to cinema, bigger really is better.

*Painter of Light (TM).

Susana (Mexico, 1951)
D: Luis Bunuel

Criterion’s relatively-new Eclipse series releases box sets of overlooked films, free of special features but cheaper than a Criterion Collection “special edition” equivalent. My wish list of what Eclipse should cover is growing. I would still like them to do a Jacques Rivette set, but oh, how I would relish a survey of Luis Bunuel’s Mexican period – that decades-long period of exile in which the famous Surrealist produced low-budget, crowd-pleasing melodramas with delicious touches of fetishism, black comedy, and subversion. Many of these films are still unavailable on DVD, but I take what I can find: like a screening of Bunuel’s Hitchcockian comedy The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz at the University of Wisconsin’s Cinematheque in the fall of this year (paired deliriously with Pedro Almodovar’s Live Flesh, which quotes the film); or a StudioCanal box set, imported from the U.K., which rigorously covers Bunuel’s late period but also includes his Mexican (and English-language) film The Young One. Then there’s Susana, which I just watched on a DVD from Cinemateca, with a crude menu, no special features, and subtitles so small they’d be more effectively used for an eye exam. So entertaining is this bizarre little B-picture that you soon forget your complaints; or maybe that’s because you’re not reading the subtitles at all, but admiring the visual storytelling that renders the subtitles irrelevant. Or perhaps you’re simply gazing at Susana’s enticing legs.  During his Mexican-studio years, Bunuel would occasionally let slip a personal work, a masterpiece (Los Olvidados, Nazarin, The Executing Angel), but more commonly he would need to settle with contorting the conventional into a slightly odd new shape, but in such a subtle fashion that many wouldn’t notice. He wasn’t making movies for the editors of Film Comment – he had no reassurances his films would ever be seen outside of Mexico. But there is a personal touch to these pictures which is unmistakable once you’ve seen enough Bunuel; he is always present in his films, winking at you, as though his whole filmography is sustained on the back of one very strange private joke.

Blonde bombshell Susana (Rosita Quintana) is introduced inhabiting, by all appearances, a Universal monster movie: imprisoned in a cell filled with straw, surrounded by unwholesome creatures to which she immediately likens herself (improbably, a tarantula, rats, and a very large bat that hangs from the ceiling), she pleads to God to be set loose in nature, at which point, immediately, the cell bars come free in her hands, and she climbs to freedom by flashing lightning and rolling thunder, screaming madly with joy, crawling upon her belly in the mud to escape razor wire – she is wild, man-destroying lust, a monster on par with Frankenstein’s, Dracula, or The Wolf Man.  Soon she discovers an idyllic Mexican ranch, overseen by the stern Don Guadalupe (Fernando Soler), his scholarly son Alberto (Luis López Somoza), and the matriarch Dona Carmen (Matilde Palou).  Guadalupe is upset because his prize mare has given birth to a stillborn, and is now herself on death’s door – and will remain so while the story unfolds, for the ranch has fallen under an unspeakable curse.  Little do they know that the ill omens are warning them of Susana, who arrives with the terrible storm, and is glimpsed staring at the frightened household through the window, a ghostly apparition straight out of Turn of the Screw.  Integrated into the family as a servant, she soon begins behaving diabolically, first enflaming the eager, studly ranch-hand Jesus (Víctor Manuel Mendoza), then working her wiles on the virginal Alberto.  (She pretends to be shocked at the sight of male nudity in one of his books, before he explains that it’s a classical depiction of Apollo, god of poetry and the arts; within the minute she is covering him with passionate kisses.)  She’s climbing a ladder, with her eyes ultimately set upon Don Guadalupe, although this simple storyline is never actually stated, and is delivered rather incoherently.  In Bunuel’s hands, Susana is the story of a succubus set loose, acting as an agent of chaotic lust in the farm, setting one against the other to no apparent strategy until we finally see Guadalupe prepared to throw his wife out, and then we have to intuit, okay, this must be what she was after.  Yet one event does not follow the other through ordinary cinematic logic.  Bunuel is simply not interested.  He is interested in Susana, in particular her body, in particular her legs.  Those inclined to track his personal fetishism will be greatly amused at the amount of screen time given to Susana’s lower limbs: here draped in mud, there splattered with egg yolk.  Given that the film is ostensibly moralizing (the evils of temptation, and the dangers of Woman in particular), it’s nothing but delightful that Bunuel clearly doesn’t buy any of it, nor does he particularly care if you do.  The film, of course, is no more a straight-up drama than Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.  It shows its true colors in that opening scene in the cell, and most particularly in the repetition of Susana, each time she wants to make an impression, lowering her blouse off her shoulders with great fuss.  It’s a costume change akin to Clark Kent stepping into a phone booth.  Eventually the men in the white coats do show up, at just the right moment, and we get a wonderfully phony resolution – Dona Carmen forgives her husband and son, Jesus is welcomed back, the mare recovers - which is so perfect that it is utterly insincere.  As the years progressed, Bunuel would refine his skill in creating subversive “happy” endings, such as sneaking a menage-a-trois reference into the last line of Viridiana, or strongly implying that Belle de Jour has not been forgiven by her husband, but slipped back into a dream (or insanity).  A modern viewer of Susana can relish the sophisticated camp, and the fact that Bunuel, temporarily beholden to commercial interests, never lost his bite.

October 31
#28 House of Dracula (1945)
#29 God Told Me To (1975)
#30 Madhouse (1974)
#31 Bedlam (1946)
#32 Feast (2006)
#33 Halloween (2007)

It’s all a blur to me now, as I stagger out of bed to set all the clocks back one hour, and notice the plastic cauldron stuffed with candy still sitting on the coffee table, and the dining room table crammed with more bags of unused candy; and there are horror DVDs scattered about the living room.  What happened?  I must piece it together.  I do recall waking and then refraining from films for Halloween morning – I believe I accomplished the act of laundry.  But after breakfast and a shower, it began around 11:30 – I decided to watch a Universal horror, I remember that now, because I hadn’t seen any of the classic monsters all month long.  So I watched House of Dracula, one of the last Universal monster mashes, and a movie I should have seen before, since it was sitting on my shelf, but although the idea of Dracula (John Carradine) seeking out a doctor (Onslow Stevens) to cure his vampirism certainly rang a bell, the majority of this film felt new to me.  Not fresh, mind you.  Interesting timing that Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.) should arrive at the doctor’s castle seeking a cure for his own problem – becoming the Wolf Man – at the exact same time as Dracula; curious, too, that the doctor has a hunchbacked assistant, albeit a beautiful female one (disappointingly, her name is not Igora).  Later the doctor discovers Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange) and seeks to revive it, although his stated reason – to discover the secret of immortality – makes no sense, since Dracula has just turned him into a vampire (secret discovered!).  But with so many monsters, and so much fun, who has time for plot?  Then I watched an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, to further the holiday mood, and this too involved a vampire, one working as a call girl in Los Angeles.  If I recall, this was extemely funny.  I – couldn’t have watched another movie right away, could I? – no, I walked the dogs.  I did some house chores.  I watched God Told Me To, an early Larry Cohen (Q: The Winged Serpent) film about a number of bizarre mass murders, all of them committed spontaneously and with no apparent motive, except that the perpetrators claim, “God told me to.”  A cop (Tony Lo Bianco), religious to the core but with a troubled personal life, is the first to see the connection between the crimes, and pursues the cause until he receives a very bizarre supernatural answer.  They recently remade Cohen’s It’s Alive, but should have tackled this one instead.  Cohen reveals a big twist far too early, could have spent a bit more time exploring the theological question in the film – which dates back, as the film reminds us, to Abraham being asked by God to sacrifice his son Isaac – and certainly lets the plot get muddled by the time the climax arrives; still, fans of 70’s grindhouse should watch, as it’s weird as all get-out.  As for the Amicus picture Grindhouse, starring Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, and Robert Quarry, I would suggest giving a pass.  Oh, it was amicable (sorry) entertainment while making dinner and not paying a great deal of attention, but this late-period Price exploiter, in which he plays an aging horror star whose alter ego, Dr. Death, appears to be murdering cast and crew members of his new TV show, is padded out far too much by clips from older Price AIP films.  I did enjoy an appearance by Brit hottie Linda Hayden (Taste the Blood of Dracula), even if she is murdered almost as soon as she arrives. 

After dinner, we walked from the Madhouse into Bedlam, as the Val Lewtonathon concluded.  Boris Karloff plays the warden of the notorious mental institution, the Bethlehem Royal Hospital in London, in the 18th century; the inimitable Anna Lee (King Solomon’s Mines) plays Nell Bowen, society girl whose proud defiance and insults toward Karloff and her benefactor, Lord Mortimer (Billy House), find her admitted against her will to the hospital.  By far the classiest of all the Lewton films, it’s a riveting social drama, with appropriate eerie touches (including a memorably grim comeuppance for Karloff), and a script which, in its best moments, is worthy of Oscar Wilde.  But enough of class.  Feast is Project Greenlight’s only horror film, and although it’s said to be the best film the reality-TV series produced, this is pretty disposable stuff.  It’s yet another monster movie utilizing the “siege” scenario which was so effective in the hands of George A. Romero and John Carpenter, but is pretty standard-issue by now; in fact, the lower-profile Splinter, which I reviewed earlier this month, is actually more compelling than this, even though some could argue it’s less inventive.  Splinter had fun with its concept while playing the action with a straight face.  Sometimes, that’s all I ask for.  Feast, on the other hand, is a “horror comedy” which is far too smug to provide real laughs.  There’s nothing less funny than a guy who thinks he’s the funniest guy in the room.  Feast certainly offers the most repulsive monsters I’ve ever seen in a motion picture, but I’ll take The Return of the Living Dead over this, thanks; that one is funny. 

The current genre trend in Hollywood is to stop with the countless sequels and “reboot” the franchise instead (that, and to remake every horror film made between 1975 and 1985).  Think for a moment that there was once a sequel to Halloween called Halloween: H20.  Yes, there is nothing more frightening than Halloween Water.  That was not actually the twentieth Halloween film, but it might as well have been: John Carpenter’s original is now considered a horror classic, and it served as a template for all slashers which arrived in its wake, but its strength was efficiency.  It was short, it was simple, and there was no explanation for the boogey man (known in the credits as “The Shape,” but better known to all as Michael Myers); he escaped from the asylum, he slaughtered some teens, and then he disappeared.  So understandably many were upset when Rob Zombie signed on to direct the inevitable “reboot.”  The 1978 Halloween is not, they would argue, House of 1000 Corpses, and Zombie’s white-trash, film-junkie aesthetic always splits fans right down the middle.  Further, there is always the apprehension that an inferior remake might overshadow the original, somehow replace it, or at the least be viewed by younger folks who would never then seek out the source.  I only read negative fan reaction to Zombie’s Halloween, but maybe that says more about the message boards I read than what people thought on the whole; after all, Zombie did just release a sequel.  But of all the remakes, reboots, and reiterations, this one serves as an interesting study in honoring the original while opening it up and, in a strange way, defying it.  Consider that the original Halloween is here, almost in its entirety, with some shots recreated with great specificity (such as Myers cocking his head curiously at the victim he’s just pinned to the wall with a knife).  But this storyline does not begin until a full hour into the film.  The first hour is, essentially, an expansion of the opening few minutes of Carpenter’s film.  The prologue of the original Halloween famously featured a subjective tracking shot from a very young Michael as he invades a house, puts on a mask and fetches a kitchen knife, spies upon a young woman and then slaughters her.  Zombie includes this minus the POV shot, but expands not only the body count but everything else: his film actually opens with the young Michael being taunted by his mother’s boyfriend and his older sister, and bullied by the kids at school.  We learn that he has a history of killing small animals.  Then we see his first murder, when he isolates one of those bullies in the woods and clubs him to death with a tree branch.  Perhaps emboldened by the crime, he turns his retribution upon his own household.  A child psychiatrist, Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance in the original, ably replaced by Malcolm McDowell here), was already looking into Michael’s case before the crimes were committed, and so, for the next fifteen years, he studies Michael and authors a book about him.  He’s fascinated by Michael’s obsession with wearing masks, and also by his complete absence of emotion – the “void” that seems to be lurking behind all those masks.  As we expect, eventually a grown-up Michael (now played by wrestler Tyler Mane, Troy’s Ajax) escapes from imprisonment and journeys to Haddonfield, where he terrorizes teenager Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) and her two girlfriends, with Loomis in pursuit.  Although Carpenter opened his film with a POV shot, it was a cheat: he never actually asked us to empathize with Michael Myers or to understand him in any way whatsoever.  For the rest of Carpenter’s Halloween, Michael Myers was, in fact, “The Shape,” a figure glimpsed out of a classroom window or down the sidewalk, always a distant watcher until he finally began his relentless attack, with that painted-white, nondescript face mask and its shadowy eye-holes.  Zombie’s remake drew ire partly because he substituted the POV trick-shot with real perspective on Michael Myers’ childhood.  Many simply did not want to know where Michael came from, the promiscuity which surrounded him (his bullies tease him because his mother is a stripper; his sister has sex while her mother’s boyfriend dozes in front of the TV downstairs), or the fact that he liked to kill rats.  But it should be noted that despite all of this “explanation,” Michael is still, as Dr. Loomis tells us, unknowable.  He is still The Shape, even without his mask.  In fact, he is the mask, which is why Michael is only comfortable when he’s wearing it.  The first hour of the film might just be set-up, but it’s still compelling, and when we suddenly switch to Haddonfield and the familiar Laurie Strode, we smile, because Zombie suddenly announces what he’s doing: now let’s watch the original film and see how it plays.  Here he becomes almost rigidly faithful to Carpenter, although, being Rob Zombie, he ramps up the sex and nudity.  As for the violence, in this portion of the film it doesn’t seem to me that much more grisly than Carpenter’s (almost bloodless) original, though at least one of the killings reminded me of The Devil’s Rejects in how it emphasizes the desperation and agony of its victim.  One thing I’ve always liked about Rob Zombie’s films is that he doesn’t let us forget that dying is a horrible thing.  He’s not interested in the makeup effects and the gimmick-kills of, say, the Friday the 13th franchise.  He’s more invested in the horror generated by a realistic portrayal of murder.  I watched the uncut version of Zombie’s film, which runs 121 minutes and feels it.  Now, the real question should be: is Carpenter’s Halloween even worthy of this kind of epic treatment?  The plot is still threadbare.  Carpenter’s film was lean and mean; Zombie’s is not just sprawling, but self-conscious in its schematic construction.  His is almost a shrine to the original, like the tombstone which Myers lugs around; but, critically, in the second half Zombie undercuts Carpenter’s intentions deliberately, and it’s a decision that will make or break the film to horror fans.  In Zombie’s vision, Laurie is an adopted daughter of the Strodes, and in reality she is Michael’s baby sister, whom he refused to harm when he went on his first massacre.  The whole reason he returns to Haddonfield – 100 miles away – is to find her again.  This would be the other reason this film drew so much ire.  But after my initial surprise, I found myself enjoying the twist, simply because he needed something to justify the length of the film.  When watching the original, I’m terrified by Myers’ unstoppable assault on Laurie and her friends; in the remake, I’m just exhausted.  But drawing some kind of connection between the two of them adds just enough emotional resonance to spark this corpse back to life (and just when rigor mortis was settling in).  Is Rob Zombie’s Halloween a great film?  No, certainly not.  Does it replace or overshadow the original?  Far from it.  But Rob Zombie’s films are always worth watching, because despite his occasional puerile impulses, he also has the instincts of a natural filmmaker.  Most importantly, he’s always interested in the story he’s telling and the characters who inhabit it.  There are scenes in this film of Laurie babysitting, joking around with her young charge, which are far more believable and realistic (and warm) than anything in Carpenter’s film.  I would also point out a brief moment right after Michael stabs his older sister.  While she looks at him in shock, Zombie cuts to a close-up of Michael’s eyes peering through the mask’s holes, looking at her curiously, almost introspectively, as though he’s trying to figure out how he feels about this – and discovering that he doesn’t feel anything.  Carpenter was content to stare out from those eye-holes for a horrifying effect; but Zombie, looking through from the other side, gives us a brief glimpse of the amorality behind Michael Myers, and it’s at least as horrifying, because he’s still The Shape intact.

Halloween is over.  I stagger away from the TV, I type these words, I vow never to do it again.  I meant to do thirty-one, I did thirty-three!  But give me a few days, and I’ll probably change my mind.

October 30
#26 The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
#27 Isle of the Dead (1945)

Today on NPR’s Science Friday, Ira Flatow was interviewing Steven Schlozman, Co-Director of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, professional child psychiatrist, and author of a new paper on the science of zombies.  Inevitably a caller asked why some zombies move slowly (George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead) while others can run (the remake of Dawn of the Dead).  Schlozman patiently answered, “Neurobiologically speaking, [zombies who run] gotta be different, they gotta have better cerebellar function than the Romero-type zombies because they move too fluidly…and they also kind of use pack behavior, hunting behavior, which suggests higher cortical involvement than you would see in Romero zombies, which literally stumble around and get stuck in windows and can’t figure out how to open them.” 

Naturally, this study deserved further research, and so I pushed forward into 1985’s The Return of the Living Dead.

Here, we have an early example of the running zombie, and this zombie also demonstrates the pack-hunting behavior which Schlozman noted.  They run after paramedics screaming, “Brains!  Brains!” and then chew upon the paramedics’ skulls.  But even more impressive, and which Schlozman should certainly look into, is their ability to adapt and learn.  For example, when a dispatcher calls into the ambulance’s radio, a zombie picks it up and responds with, “Bring more paramedics.”  Not very much later we see more ambulances arrive, and these paramedics are immediately ambushed by a horde of brains-hungry zombies.  Later in the film, the exact same tactic works in fetching delicious policemen.  Schlozman also mentioned the theory that zombie-ism spreads like influenza.  In The Return of the Living Dead, writer/director Dan O’Bannon demonstrates a more ecological variant of that theory.  At an army surplus store, the virus is unleashed by a chemical developed by the government and stored in a vat dating from 1969, which was when, according to a testimonial in the film, the events which inspired Night of the Living Dead originally took place.  (This seems odd seeing as Night was released in 1968, but perhaps the unreliability of the testimony’s source should be taken into account.)  This major discovery – that there was in fact an incident involving re-animated corpses in the 1960’s - at last settles the decades-old question as to what caused the outbreak in Romero’s film: it was, in reality if not in Romero’s fictional version, a gas developed by the government for purposes unknown, but most likely military.  When the gas is accidentally released again, it brings to life a corpse, which, when a pickaxe to the brain proves ineffective, is subsequently chopped into pieces by the brave men stationed at the warehouse.  Even these pieces still throb and wiggle with life.  With the coroner’s help, all the pieces of the corpse are incinerated, and the fumes caused by the cremation device drift up into the clouds, causing a toxic rain to fall upon the local cemetery.  Here, an army of corpses rise from the tainted soil, attacking a group of teenagers who had been merely enjoying simple pleasures such as drinking, dancing naked upon a sarcophagus, and moaning soulfully, “I just want to party.”  Later, after a group of survivors take shelter in the morgue, one zombie, severed at the waist and with a spinal cord that thrashes about, is tied to a table and interrogated.  The zombie explains that devouring brains eases the pain of death, the agony of rotting.  So it appears there is some kind of narcotic effect in brains-consumption.

Isle of the Dead, the latest entry in my ongoing Val Lewtonathon, unfortunately does not bring to light any useful information into a scientific inquiry of the zombie’s biology, although quite a few corpses turn up.  Boris Karloff plays Pherides, a general in Greece during the First Balkan War.  A rigid and sometimes callous leader of men, during a break in fighting he wishes to visit his wife’s tomb, so he takes a boat to a local island guarded by a statue of the three-headed gatekeeper of Hades, Cerberus (Pherides is himself called the “Watchdog” by his men).  Enraged upon finding that the tomb has been violated and his wife’s body is missing, he visits what appears to be the only habitation on the island to question everyone inside.  The house is owned by an archaeologist who was studying the ruins on the isle, and there are enough guests staying with him to warrant an Agatha Christie novel.  Sure enough, soon someone dies, and when a doctor declares it’s the plague, the general assists in quarantining the lot of them on the island.  But the weird, raving woman in black–a requisite of every household–is convinced the escalating deaths are being caused by a vorvolaka, a sort of vampire, taking the form of the beautiful young Thea (Ellen Drew).  Although Isle of the Dead does not concern itself with zombies, it does dwell, as so many Lewton films do, almost obsessively on the subject of death.  Here, on this island which might as well by the Underworld, one woman is mistakenly buried alive, and the result upon her psyche turns her into a sort of zombie, staggering, inarticulate, and murderous.  Director Mark Robson takes his time developing the plot, withholding the supernatural to the extent that one is quite sure, early on, that nothing supernatural will happen at all.  But slowly a spooky atmosphere settles in, fittingly claustrophobic, and at last we get some very satisfyingly eerie moments indeed, and even a pair of brutal murders with a trident.  If Ingmar Bergman ever adapted an Edgar Allan Poe story, it might have come out like this.

October 28
#25 Orphan (2009)

One has to begrudgingly admire Dark Castle Films, which, since 1999, has been consistently producing moderately-budgeted, slickly-produced, perfectly respectable horror films, none of them all that great by any means.  The original purpose of the company was to remake the films of William Castle, the legendary gimmickeer of 1950’s horror (The Tingler); but after 1999’s House on Haunted Hill and 2001’s Thirteen Ghosts, the company wisely decided to seek out more original material.  Orphan, mind you, is hardly original.  The idea of killer kids has been around since at least 1956’s The Bad Seed, which featured a murderous child played by Patty McCormack, and which spawned a number of imitators over the decades.  (I remember suffering through 1993’s The Good Son, with Macaulay Culkin, on a plane flight to Orlando, and being not terribly bothered that the plane’s rumble drowned out most of the dialogue.)  The Omen, The Children (1980 and now 2008), Children of the Corn (1984 and 2009)…I could give or take these movies, although I have a soft spot for the glowing-eyed, blond-haired tots of the original Village of the Damned.   The taboo appeal is obvious: see little kids commit horrible acts!  But the better entries usually offer something a little more to sustain interest: the occult mystery in The Omen, the sci-fi elements of Damned.  Or, perhaps, the acting and an aura of class, which is really what sets Orphan apart, although most will remember it for a late-act, “I can’t believe they just went there” twist.

Vera Farmiga (The Departed) and Peter Sarsgaard (Kinsey) play Kate and John Coleman, parents of two children, one a young girl who is mostly deaf, the other a preteen boy; a third, Jessica, was killed in a tragic accident, the details of which are unveiled over the course of the film, and a rose-decorated shrine to her memory sits outside their home. The opening scenes are the best in the film, as we see a believable portrait of family life, from casual warmth to ordinary tensions; there’s a simple and perfectly lovely sequence in which Kate signs to her daughter from a children’s book designed to help children cope with death. All of this is carefully set to a natural domestic rhythm, and it’s refreshing that genre elements don’t kick in until three-quarters of an hour have passed; undoubtedly this is why the gory shocker prologue (a silly dream sequence which has nothing to do with the tone of the rest of the film) was added. Kate and John decide to adopt, and find a Russian girl who is remarkably intelligent and creative. Their first impression is that they’ll have a gifted child – though with this comes, at first, seemingly minor signs of defiance or precociousness: she insists on wearing her antiquated, doll-like dresses, and wishes to violate a Coleman family rule by locking the door when she goes into the bathroom (the mother is nothing if not overprotective of her children, following the accidental death of Jessica). And slowly she begins to confront and manipulate the family in bizarre ways, for a purpose that is not at first clear, except that perhaps she, too, has seen The Bad Seed.

When Orphan gets going, it settles so securely into those well-worn subgenre ruts that one merely looks to see how well the vehicle drives.  In that respect, Orphan passes muster, just barely, and mainly thanks to young Isabelle Fuhrman, who gives a jarringly mature performance as Esther, one that can sell her steely-menace lines.  When she prepares to squash her brother’s head under a rock in the same manner that she earlier flattened a pigeon, you can believe that she doesn’t see much of a difference.  It’s both thrilling and gloriously absurd how decisively and openly Esther acts without getting caught; if this film were another half-hour longer, I expect she would be marching through town square with a flamethrower torching kids while the police and her parents just happen to be looking the other way.

Ever since The Sixth Sense, it seems all Hollywood genre films require a twist ending, no matter how much M. Night has devalued the idea in the intervening years. Nobody likes a twist that betrays the viewer’s trust. Ideally, a twist ending should enrich what one has previously seen, not trash it. Thankfully, Orphan’s twist–and it’s a biggie–allows you to reevaluate everything you’ve seen without necessarily voiding any established emotional connections or through-lines. But it also threatens to move the whole enterprise into the realm of camp (which fans of this subgenre usually embrace anyway). The twist does make sense, in a cracked sort of way, and it genuinely earns the “horror” label for what it manages to imply. (Or maybe just the “ick” label?) In that respect, I would almost recommend Orphan–almost. The climax is so rote that it’s dull: a chase, a little bit of gruesomeness, all vanilla-flavored. Just when the imagination seems to be kicking in, we get a sleepwalking screenwriter. How much more interesting it might have been if the film used the twist to finally tell us a completely different story than the one we were expecting going in? But then, this is a Dark Castle film, and that was a buzzer under your seat, my friend, not the Tingler.

October 27
#24 The Body Snatcher (1945)

In our Val Lewtonathon, we now enter phase 2, or Phase Karloff.  The Body Snatcher in a strange way feels like a more complete film, or a more fleshed-out story, than the previous Lewton entries; based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, it’s sharply focused, and delivers more of the expected ghoulish thrills (notably in the climax), while retaining the classiness of the earlier films.  What it loses in the bargain, perhaps, is the elusive and haunting quality of the earlier, more psychoanalytical pictures such as Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Seventh Victim.  Nevertheless, it’s a fine horror film, and the script, acting, and directing (by Robert Wise) are all at a level which the genre would not regain until Hammer Studios gave us Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

Karloff here shines in his best role since inhabiting the monster of Frankenstein, playing the “body snatcher” Gray, who provides fresh corpses for medical instructor MacFarlane (Henry Daniell, excellent). It’s easy to understand why the horror icon would turn down offers to appear in the glut of Universal Studios monster mash pictures that were increasingly aimed at children, in favor of joining the company of actors in the employ of Lewton. Indeed, The Body Snatcher is most definitely for adults: it begins with the killing of a dog, and progresses to the murder of a child and finally an adult or two; it also has a subtle, at times deliberately ambiguous character in MacFarlane (the real protagonist of the film), who somehow manages to invoke our sympathy even after he’s condoned some of Gray’s most despicable acts. But he and Gray are doomed to be forever entwined, each mutually exploiting the other – he needs the bodies, Gray needs the money. As Gray turns to killing to keep the business afloat, MacFarlane’s morals begin a fast downward slide. Is he sanctioning these crimes, or just making the best out of a bad situation? He’s unable to extricate himself. Gray relishes the power he holds over MacFarlane; it gives him a kind of status, and The Body Snatcher is as much about issues of class as med-school ethics. MacFarlane can excuse the violation of graves if the deceased were low-class; he can excuse the murder of a young girl because she was a vagrant. (Her murder, depicted only through the sudden absence of sound – her singing cut short at the end of a dark street – is the film’s most shocking moment.)

The conscience of the film, MacFarlane’s assistant Fettes (Russell Wade), provides the obvious counter-arguments. One suspects the film would be stronger without his angelic presence, but critically, he too is morally compromised: he’s indirectly responsible for the young girl’s death, since it’s his visit to Gray which prompted it, and almost inexplicably he tags along for one final graveyard visit at film’s end. But the central moral conundrum is presented in the case of a little girl who cannot walk because of a growth near her spine. MacFarlane speculates he can cure her through an operation, but more research would be needed, which means more bodies. Fettes goes to Gray, who then, to provide a quick corpse, commits the murder of the vagrant girl. Essentially, the life of a lower-class child has been taken for the benefit of a higher-class one. However, when the operation is performed and still the patient cannot walk, MacFarlane gives himself over to his dark side, first by confronting Gray more violently. Their struggle is depicted from the perspective of Gray’s ubiquitous cat. We see, in shadows cast on the wall, one figure break a chair over the other’s head, and then pummel him savagely with the broken chair-leg. It’s startling to learn that this is MacFarlane, but then, that’s the point. Now he has become Gray.

I would be remiss to not mention the presence of the other major horror icon of the day, Bela Lugosi, who plays the MacFarlane household servant, a withered man who makes a feeble and doomed attempt to blackmail Gray. For horror fans, seeing these two actors share screen time is akin to watching Pacino and DeNiro face one another in Heat.  (Karloff and Lugosi had previously shared a bill in 1934’s The Black Cat.) Yet Lugosi’s stock had fallen considerably by 1945, and on the poster it’s Karloff who gets his name above the title. Indeed, in seeing them together, Karloff acts circles around Lugosi, though it’s a bit unfair to point this out given the imbalance of roles: Karloff has the juicier part. Lugosi, however, is nonetheless well cast here, and although his character is deliberately pathetic, he’s also moving. He’s so outmatched by Gray that you watch in anxious anticipation; as Karloff moves about the frame, dominating the huddled Lugosi, refilling his glass with liquor, promising him the world while the shadows seem to darken, the dread deepens. Horror, as a friend once pointed out to me, is all about anticipating the inevitable. In this case, it’s about waiting for Karloff to strike–and oh, that poor cat, who always has to watch.

October 25
#23 Ghostbusters (1984)

When I was eight years old, my father took me to see a movie called Ghostbusters.  I knew nothing about it, but I was eight, and we were going to a movie, so I was easily pleased.  What I witnessed sautéed my brain.  Terrifying librarian ghost!  Weird-cute green slimy ghost!  Jokes that were funny!  Jokes I did not understand!  Dan Aykroyd getting his fly unzipped by that lady ghost for dirty reasons!  Scary dog monsters!  A refrigerator that’s a gateway to an evil dimension!  A marshmallow man!  I didn’t understand, I didn’t understand!

But what I remember most vividly was the laughter, the delight of the audience.  And so even though I found much of the movie confusing and scary, something clicked: this is all good fun, say the people around me.  In a snap, instant social conditioning.  The environment affected how I came to process the experience.  My first viewing was one of confusion, my second–and third, and fourth, and God knows how many–was of comfort in familiarity.  I watched the cartoon, I probably had a lunchbox.  I ain’t afraid of no ghosts, busting makes me feel good.

I hadn’t watched Ghostbusters in ages, not since the early 90’s at least, so I plugged it into my marathon out of curiosity.  After all, a Ghostbusters video game recently reunited the cast, and a second film sequel is reportedly in the works; perhaps it was time to reacquaint myself with the franchise.  To my surprise, that was completely and utterly unnecessary.  I still have the film memorized.  I had even memorized lines I hadn’t realized were double entendres.  What I really wanted to discover were little moments–character nuances, subtext, insignificant plot details–that would enrich the viewing experience to any degree.  Great films can change their shapes and reveal new facets with each viewing.  Good films, too.  But watching Ghostbusters now is a curious thing.  I cannot speak to how it plays for a modern viewer–God help me, I could not view this film ”fresh,” as hard as I tried.  For me, it’s disconcertingly the same.  I had the same reaction going to the Milwaukee Public Museum last year: there is the Tyrannosaurus Rex hovering over its Triceratops kill, gore dripping from its teeth–something that so excited my imagination as a kid–but the dinosaurs haven’t moved.  The teeth are still red, the flesh still torn, the soundtrack still chirping through the speakers.  It’s just a static exhibit and offers nothing more.  This is how Ghostbusters now seems to me: a museum piece.  Watching it now, nothing new is revealed.  Director Ivan Reitman cuts the film efficiently, but so quickly that he truncates scenes just to keep the pace moving; how disappointing that few moments get a chance to breathe.  The players say their wisecracks, and there is nothing more.  The funniest scenes are, to me, two moments in which Reitman does give his actors a chance to find some natural comic rhythm: the opening, in which Bill Murray issues an electro-shock-driven ESP test; and the infamous scene in which the Ghostbusters are asked to “choose the form of the Destroyer,” and Aykroyd reluctantly admits he’s summoned the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.  I suppose you could argue that the whole film is chock-full of classic 80’s comedy, but it no longer plays that way to me.  It is strangely arid.  Actually, anyone who wishes to study 80’s cinema would best start here, a film in which surface is everything, and a franchise is confidently established: here’s the theme song, here are the toys, love it, love it, buy it.

I have no resentment here: it’s still a well-made, well-acted, and very entertaining film.  But when I noticed Richard Edlund’s name pop up in the credits, I couldn’t help but think: Edlund did the special effects for Fright Night, released a year later (and which I reviewed earlier in this month’s marathon)–why is it that Fright Night, for all its 80’s trappings, has aged so much better than Ghostbusters?  It’s because Fright Night retains a resonance: it’s rich with character moments, and it sells its coming-of-age theme with a very strong script.  

But what’s Ghostbusters about?  A lunchbox?

October 24
#22 The Seventh Victim (1943)

This is my favorite of the Val Lewton-produced films, a very curious mixture of horror and film noir that fans of either genre should embrace with equal zeal.  Mark Robson was not as naturally gifted a director as Jacques Tourneur, and he even steals from Tourneur’s Cat People for a scene late in this film (a Lewton trademark: a girl walking alone down a shadowy street)–but, as I noted with my review of The Leopard Man, even Tourneur stole from Cat People, and it cannot be denied that The Seventh Victim is so strange that ultimately it’s a complete original.  In fact, it’s a wonder that the film ever got made.

The plot, on the face of it, is a very simple mystery.  Mary (Kim Hunter of A Matter of Life and Death) ventures forth from the Catholic school she attends to find her older, sophisticated and worldly sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks, with a Bettie Page haircut and a sultry pout).  Jacqueline’s gone missing, but it seems that everyone is after her, including her husband Gregory Ward (Leave it to Beaver’s Ward Cleaver, Hugh Beaumont) and some menacing types who urge a detective hired by Mary to mind his own business.  More characters than are absolutely necessary are added to the mix: Dr. Judd (Lewton mainstay Tom Conway), who claims to be Jacqueline’s new lover; Jason Hoag  (Erford Gage), a poet and acquaintance of Judd’s who tries to help Mary out; the proprietors of a cafe called, significantly, The Dante; the terse Miss Redi (Mary Newton), owner of a perfume business of which Jacqueline was once co-owner; and a mysterious, exclusive society to which Jacqueline belongs.  It is revealed, after a fairly long wait, that this society worships the Devil.  Jacqueline betrayed their trust, and now they want her to die.

On certain matters–those not related to a major theme which I’ll get to in a moment–the film feels just slightly undercooked, and one suspects that either significant scenes of exposition were cut, or the script was rushed too hurriedly into production.  The presence of many male characters suggests an attempt to develop a love triangle a la Cat People or I Walked with a Zombie; but little time is spent developing the relationships, and more often we’re told who is in love with whom rather than feeling it.  And why does Dr. Judd know telepathy (used in only one scene)?  And who is that mysterious woman next door who claims to be dying?  And isn’t it odd that the secret society claims to worship the Devil, yet we see them do nothing of the sort?  (I assume the Hays Code has something to do with that last point.)  It might take multiple viewings to see how seemingly random elements connect.  For example, late in the film Dr. Judd tells Jason, “That girl you loved, that other patient of mine.  She didn’t disappear.  She’s in an asylum, a horrible, raving thing.”  It’s very easy to forget that much, much earlier in the film, a brief exchange between these two revealed that this was their connection: Jason loved one of his patients.  That this character arc should be introduced and concluded in two curt dialogue scenes strikes me as bizarre.  They could just as easily have been discarded altogether, except that Dr. Judd’s last words on the subject are so callous and so valuably haunting. 

All of Lewton’s films seem to toss their characters into a whirlpool.  They’re swimming around an abyss that’s about to swallow them, and it’s this existential despair, so unfaked, that sets his string of horror films apart from your Universals and your Hammers and your giallos.  The Seventh Victim has its weaknesses, including the strangely underdeveloped script, but those weaknesses are also its strengths.  The random, isolated scenes become like moments in a fever dream.  Subsequently, The Seventh Victim, of all the Lewtons, feels the most unhinged.  It’s ”a horrible, raving thing.”  That Mary leaves a holy place to find her sister, and almost immediately heads for a cafe called The Dante, explicitly outlines that she is on a journey into the Inferno.  (In the cafe she finds the poet Jason lurking below a painting of another poet, Dante Alighieri–right under his feet.)  The proprietors of The Dante rented a room to Jacqueline, Room Number Seven, and it’s here that Mary sees the most horrifying image in the film: there is nothing in the room but a stool and a noose hanging above it.  Later, Gregory Ward explains that Jacqueline rented the room without the intention of using it.  She wanted to know that she could die, that it was an option she was not choosing.  He seems to find it harmless.  But a glance at Dante’s Inferno reveals that those who commit suicide, a mortal sin, are destined for the Seventh Circle, where they are transformed into thorny trees and torn at by Harpies.  Here, then, is The Seventh Victim’s true subject: suicide.  Jacqueline, hounded by the devil-worshippers, feels that she has nowhere to run.  In her panic, she kills the detective hired by Mary when he discovers her hiding place.  This is one of the film’s most memorable scenes, as Mary and the detective gaze down a pitch-black hallway, the Abyss Itself.  Mary cannot bring herself to walk down it, even if her sister is lurking at the other end, so she urges the detective to go alone.  He emerges from the darkness a moment later, staggering, before collapsing dead.  Significantly, the film opens and closes with a quote by John Donne, first glimpsed written upon a stained-glass window: “I run to death, and death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterday.”  Just as Mary directly confronts death in that black hallway, and sends the detective as her surrogate to meet it, death pursues her: a few moments later she is riding a train through the city, and sees two men pretending to hold up a drunken third–but as she stares, she realizes it’s the detective, and the two men are moving the body so they can dispose of it.  Yet the dance with death is primarily Jacqueline’s: when she is finally brought back into the posh sanctuary of the cult, they urge her to drink a cup of poison placed before her.  This has been their voted-upon compromise: their society has a strict rule against violence, yet, in a seeming contradiction, any who defy them must die.  Now if only Jacqueline would drink the poison, it would be suicide, not murder.  Jacqueline, her hands extended upon the arms of the chair and tapping one finger anxiously, says “No, no, no,” like a child refusing to eat her vegetables.  Nevertheless, she doesn’t run, panic, or scream.  As we’ve been told, as the film has driven home determinedly, she has a longing for death.  This longing, and her weak resistance to it, is the central conflict of the film.  Only hours later, when her young friend breaks down in tears and begs her to drink does Jacqueline finally relent and pick up the cup, placing it to her lips, before that same friend knocks it out of her hand–she doesn’t want to be the one responsible for her friend’s death.  Jacqueline is sent away, and told by the leader of the group that there will be another vote, and this time there might be violence.  She leaves the tenement building and begins to walk down those familiar Val Lewton nighttime streets, waiting for a murderer to appear–and so he does, as though she had wished him into existence, and there follows a deadly chase.

What makes The Seventh Victim so shattering are its last scenes.  Jacqueline fatalistically approaches Apartment #7.  Another woman emerges from Apartment #8 in a bathrobe.  She says, “I’m Mimi.  I’m dying.  I’ve been quiet, oh ever so quiet.  I hardly move.  And yet it keeps coming all the time, closer and closer.  And I rest and I rest, and still I’m dying.” 

JACQUELINE:  And you don’t want to die.  I’ve always wanted to die.  Always. 

MIMI: I’m afraid, and I’m tired of being afraid–of waiting.

JACQUELINE: Why wait?

MIMI: I’m not going to wait!  I’m going out.  I’m going to laugh and dance, and do all the things I used to do.

JACQUELINE: And then?

MIMI: I don’t know.  (She goes back into her apartment.)

JACQUELINE: You will die.

In a way, this mirrors a minor moment earlier in the film when Jason is asked by The Dante’s proprietor to go and cheer up Mary and Gregory, to tell them jokes and make them happy.  As soon as he arrives at their table, he apologizes that their very presence and demeanor has made him sad again.  There seems to be no escape from despair.  In the very last moment of the film, we see Mimi a second time, emerging from #8 dressed in her finest, ready to have a good time and to cast aside her worries.  As she passes the closed door of #7, we hear the thumping sound of a stool toppling against the floor.

October 22
#18 Spirit Trap (2005)
#19 Theater of Blood (1973)
October 23
#20 Trick ‘r Treat (2007)
#21 REC (2007)

Running a marathon like this, aiming for 31 horror “programs” to watch during October, I have the advantage of making up my own rules, but nonetheless I struggle to decide whether I should include, say, all the episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker I’ve been watching, which are certainly horror: do I count each episode toward my goal, or lump them together, or not count them at all?  I have no hesitation including a Masters of Horror episode, so why not a show like Kolchak?  Eventually I decided that I’m keeping pace fairly well without including it in this list, and at the current rate should have no trouble reaching 31.  Halloween, after all, falls on a Saturday this year–wonderfully–so I plan on spending all day watching horror films while handing out candy.  Only 7 days left, and more and more I’m focusing on making this about 31 films, not just “programs.”

Four in two days, so quickly then – one trick and three treats:

I streamed 2005’s Spirit Trap through Netflix-on-Tivo, not knowing what to expect, other than spirits probably getting trapped at some point.  I was happy to discover it stars the wonderful Billie Piper, Doctor Who’s beloved Rose, but otherwise it’s a very colorless and forgettable film.  Piper plays Jenny, who moves into a very cheap–and abandoned and decaying–building in London with four others: a bullying drug-dealer and his girlfriend (Luke Mably and Emma Catherwood), a keeps-to-herself girl (Alsou), and the nerdy, sensitive guy (Sam Troughton) who’s going to help her sort out just why this building is a “spirit trap” and what needs to be done to ends its curse.  You see, there’s a clock, which Jenny–whose mother was a psychic, and who has latent abilities of her own–helpfully explains acts as a portal between this world and that of the spirits.  Eventually Tom goes round the bend, chasing everyone with a hammer, and other ostensibly exciting things happen, and there are some imaginative ideas at play late in the game, but it all just hangs there, style-free, like unambitious television, or maybe an R-rated and below-average episode of Doctor Who.  In fact, I ask you, would you rather be watching this, or the episode in which the Doctor and Rose help Charles Dickens battle ghosts living in the gaslights of a funeral home?  Against that, Spirit Trap is no substitute. 

Much better is Theater of Blood, which has renewed my faith in Vincent Price after beginning this month’s marathon with the utterly terrible Cry of the Banshee.  Clearly inspired by his success in The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), Theater of Blood, produced two years later, has much the same premise: Price, with his inimitable nasal purr, dispatching one old man after the next in ingenious and diabolical ways.  But it’s the how and the why which is what makes this film so marvellous.  Price plays Edward Lionheart, a theater actor who specializes in Shakespeare, and with his carefully-groomed self-importance, he clearly aligns himself with Olivier and the long line of Shakespearean greats who preceded him on the stage.  When he is nominated for Best Actor in the 1970 Critics Circle Awards following a season consisting entirely of Shakespeare productions–what he considers the greatest season his career–he fully expects to win, to the point of actually standing up when the name is called at the ceremony, before he realizes, to his abject humiliation, that the name is not his own.  Unfortunately, this scene is not depicted in the film, only described–probably due to the film’s low budget; it’s a shame.  But what is depicted is the dramatic aftermath: Lionheart marches into the private suite where the judges–the theater critics themselves–are enjoying some drinks before their annual dinner.  The awards are set upon a table, and Lionheart snatches one up, declaring it’s his by right, before launching into a wonderfully, deliriously egomaniacal speech and an excorciating attack upon the critics, then breaks into tears when his daughter Edwina (Diana Rigg) tells him he’s gone too far, and gives one final speech before plummeting off the balcony into the Thames, award still clutched in his hand. 

Vincent Price, once the dashing young star of Laura, has finally found his rightful place in cinema history, and you have to applaud. 

But this exposition only comes midway through the film, so that you have to find your way to this moment after a string of sadistic and elaborate murders arranged by Lionheart.  The first scene in the film is positively disorienting.  George Maxwell (Michael Hordern, who in 1988 actually won the Critics Circle award himself) is not just a critic but the chairman of a housing and redevelopment committee, and he’s called in to help clear out some homeless people from an old tenement building.  After he arrives, the squatters pull out hatchets, clubs, and knives, and start chasing him.  Brutally assaulted, covered in blood, he desperately turns to the constable for help, who is Lionheart in disguise.  Lionheart says to him: “O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, that I am meek and gentle with these butchers.”  Maxwell dies.  If you understand the quote and the scene, you can determine right away that the murder was a staging out of Julius Caesar, and that the line was Mark Antony’s, delivered not long after Caesar was stabbed by the senators.  We will also soon learn that Maxwell was killed on the Ides of March.  But you’d probably have to view the film a second time to then realize that the seemingly superfluous scene which preceded this, in which Maxwell’s wife tries to warn him against leaving the flat that day because of a nightmare she’d had, is actually also straight out of the play, for Caesar, too, was warned by his wife’s dreams–the rare Shakespearean parallel not staged by the sinister Lionheart.

And so Lionheart begins his murder spree, assisted by his daughter Edwina as well as a motley crew of deranged homeless people, killing each theater critic who denied him his award, and each death is a Shakespearean reenactment, as he works his way sequentially through his would-be triumphant season.  Because Theater of Blood is structured around these killings, the fun is not in unravelling the mystery but in seeing what he’s going to do next.  You begin searching your memory for the most violent scenes in the Bard’s plays; and no, Macbeth is not included–too easy, perhaps.  That Diana Rigg (Emma Peel and Mrs. James Bond) is involved at all speaks to how enticing this gruesome project must have been: it’s an actor’s horror film, sharply written and extremely funny in the black-humored vein of E.C. Comics.

Back to modern horror.  Trick ‘r Treat is a delicious celebration of Halloween, and a lovingly-designed anthology reminiscent of the funny and stylish 80’s genre films of Joe Dante, John Landis, and George A. Romero.  It’s written and directed by Michael Dougherty, co-author of the screenplays of Bryan Singer’s X2: X-Men United and Superman Returns (Singer is the producer of Trick ‘r Treat), and his writing here is a lot of fun: unlike most anthology films, which neatly separate the segments, Dougherty wisely takes the Tarantino path of linking up all of his characters and storylines, weaving them tightly together while granting them equal weight.  All of the mayhem which unfolds takes place on one long Halloween night in the same small town, while a Mexican Day of the Dead-style Halloween parade marches through, and trick ‘r treaters venture from one spooky house to the next, smashing jack-o-lanterns, telling each other ghost stories, dodging real-life ghouls.  I hesitate to say anthing, since most of what you see proves to be untrue: in one scene after another, Dougherty pulls the rug out from under the audience, even in a minor moment such as a character looking apprehensively at a spooky masked persona watching from the other side of the street, who soon harmlessly hops into a car with some friends and drives off, proving not to be Michael Meyers after all.  Better just to indicate the elements at play: a school principal (Happiness‘ Dylan Baker) with a very big secret–or a lot of them; his Halloween-hating neighbor Mr. Kreeg (Zodiac’s Brian Cox); Laurie (X-Men’s Anna Paquin), a shy girl dressed as Red Riding Hood experiencing some heavy peer pressure from her two best friends; and a group of trick ‘r treating kids who dare each other to visit the site of a terrible school bus accident from decades prior.  Surprisingly for an anthology film, there isn’t a weak story in the bunch (well, maybe the prologue, but that’s also the shortest), and the final tale, which finally focuses upon that strange-looking ubiquitous kid in the burlap-sack mask, is a monster-mash blast; by all rights this should be regarded as a modern spookshow classic.  Yet the film, produced in 2007, sat on the shelf for two years before finally receiving a direct-to-DVD-and-BluRay release.  When I found this at the video store yesterday it shared the shelf with countless new-release, straight-to-video horror films, all of them either rip-offs, sequels (Wrong Turn 3), or remakes (I had no idea there was a new Children of the Corn, or that someone had even remade Larry Cohen’s exceptionally silly baby-on-the-rampage flick It’s Alive).  Given the fact that there’s yet another Saw film in theaters this month, I would think something as original, polished, and downright enjoyable as Trick ‘r Treat could have received a theatrical release to distinguish itself from the mob.  Regardless, it can now become a perennial favorite in the home of the discerning horror fan.

The Spanish film REC is not just a significant part of the new wave of Spanish horror cinema, but also a key picture in two current genre fads: zombies, of course, and POV, “captured on video” horror in the style popularized (but not originated) by The Blair Witch Project.  I have a deteriorating interest in both of these trends, which are growing as tired as angsty vampire movies, but as this blog has attested, I’m a defender of Paranormal Activity’s virtues, and REC is equally effective in immersing you in the action with the video camera; most important, it delivers on the scares.  The host of a TV show called ”While You’re Asleep” (sort of a straight-laced version of Dave Attell’s “Insomniac” series for Comedy Central) is spending the evening at a fire station, hoping desperately that something exciting happens–at one point, she’s simply filming an empty hallway and pointing at the rooms where the firemen are dozing.  Naturally, she gets more than she’d wanted: she rides out on a call to an apartment building, which turns out to be ground zero for a zombie outbreak.  Shortly after a zombie granny attacks the firemen and policemen assembled at the site, the building is quarantined.  Trapped inside, the plague quickly spreads, as the TV host and her cameraman try to bear witness while desperately trying to find a means of escape. 

If this sounds familiar, you might have seen the American remake, Quarantine, which–judging from the trailer included on the DVD–appears to be virtually a shot-for-shot remake.  Then again, perhaps it sounds familiar because you’ve seen Night of the Living Dead, Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, or any of the dozens of films which lie upon the same roads that cross here.  Yet REC holds its own in such an overcrowded field.    For one thing, it’s twice as effective for maintaining its reserve until the last ten minutes of the film (at which point all Hell breaks loose).  I’d argue that one of the reasons it’s better than many of its brethren is that it’s so focused on versimilitude that you don’t feel you’re being led from one plot point or horror setpiece to another.  It might seem slow-paced at first, but it pays in dividends: when a zombie attack is followed by a series of interviews with several of the characters, asking for their reaction and probing their personalities, it’s easy to forget that you’re not just watching an episode of a reality-TV show.  You would expect the first attack to result in an ever-escalating chaos, which is one of the newer rules of the genre; most directors are eager to get to the carnage.  Instead, director Jaume Balagueró relies upon a lesson which Romero taught and many have forgotten about: you’re more invested in the story when a shock is followed by long scenes of nothing but waiting.  This allows for the unease to build, but also, more practically, to develop the characters beyond mere stereotypes.  That said, when Balagueró does let loose, it’s horror at its finest.  The final minutes of the film, shot entirely in night-vision in a dark room, at one point merely become green, flickering images, almost avant-garde, and much more nightmarish because they are simply impressions of what is happening.  Some spare CG effects work is buried in these murky moments, and because of that it’s twice as frightening.  There’s a lesson to be learned here, too.

October 20
#17 Masters of Horror: Imprint (2005)

Showtime’s Masters of Horror was, on paper, my favorite idea for a television series ever.  It would be a one-hour anthology series, with each installment directed by a recognized name in the genre of the horror film.  Since this was not Tales from the Crypt, they would not be constrained by script or tone; since this was Showtime, they’d have free reign to present R-rated horror.  Plus it would be an ideal comeback medium for many talented directors of the 70’s and 80’s who had since seen fallen off the radar, as well displaying the skills of a new generation of “masters.”  The execution, however, was a mixed bag.  The misfires could be genuinely embarrassing, and there were too many of them, especially in the second and last season of the series.  You could guess how bad Dario Argento’s eagerly-awaited Mother of Tears was going to be based upon his risible and tone-deaf work here.  Tobe Hooper still could not live up to the promise of his earliest films, and creator Mick Garris (Stephen King’s The Stand), overseeing the whole project, should have applied a stronger hand in quality control.  But most often it was the script that let the director down: for instance, I blame Drew McWeeny, not John Carpenter, for how astonishingly awful their episode “Pro-Life” is.  There were standouts, so good that one could only see what a missed opportunity the whole series was: Joe Dante, Stuart Gordon, and John Landis all delivered six fine episodes, Dante in particular proving that he deserved more chances like this (his “The Screwfly Solution” is one of the very best hours of television fantastique ever produced).  After a mostly limp second season, Showtime cancelled the series, and Mick Garris took the same concept to network television, which gave us one season of a series called Fear Itself, which was on the whole much worse, actually.

Masters of Horror nonetheless provided just enough interesting hours of television to justify its existence.  One of the most memorable didn’t even air: Showtime pulled Takashi Miike’s Imprint from the schedule when he delivered the most startling and disturbing episode of the series–which is a shame, since it would have made for one stunning season finale.  It’s also the most cinematically striking of all the episodes, with Miike, gaspingly prolific but still best known for the film Audition, channeling Francis Ford Coppola by way of Asian horror grotesquerie.  A true merging of East and West, the hour-long film follows an American (Billy Drago) journeying down a fog-enshrouded river to a brothel that seems to exist in the limbo between this world and Hell.  He’s searching for Komomo, a prostitute whom he knew years prior, and with whom he fell in love; instead, he finds a geisha with a malformed face (with one elongated eye and the end of her mouth reaching up the left side of her cheek, it looks as though she’s perpetually pulled by the wind, which makes the always-windswept Drago a fitting physical match).  She tells him his lover is dead, and, with a “bedtime story,” relates her story as well as Komomo’s, a grand guignol history replete with graphic torture, rape, and lots and lots of abortions (the trade of the deformed woman’s mother). 

This is a film which seeks to prove the thesis that the grotesque can be made very beautiful, and for years to come, I suspect, anyone wishing to write a paper on the topic will draw from “Imprint”’s catalogue: Komomo suspended, nude and bound, upside-down with hairpins jutting from her fingernails and gums; the fetuses, dropped from a bucket into a river, floating downstream like fish; the pinwheels that are set upon the shore, one for every dead child, which come alive suddenly when the wind picks up.  As Drago pushes the mysterious woman to tell him the whole truth, she retells her story twice, each version somehow more horrible than the last, until at last he arrives at the truth he did not truly wish to confront.  Yet what is that truth, and what does it mean?  By this point the film has become so bizarre that it seems to have lost all coherency.  It must also be pointed out that Drago’s performance is dreadful in almost epic ways; he appears to have been chosen for his withered face and skeletal body rather than for his acting, which has always been, in a long journeyman’s career, rather eccentric, to put it politely.  He almost singlehandedly sinks this entry, but Miike, who is always determined to push his craft well past the taboo and into a heightened and pain-desensitized realm, nevertheless delivers an hour which leaves its mark.  I previously outlined two strains of horror, the Frankenstein (focusing on the morbid and taboo) and the Dracula (seeking shocks); others have divided them more simply into “horror” and “terror.”  Either argument is problematic because any given horror film, novel, or story will have elements of both.  “Imprint”, however, aligns itself pretty firmly in the “horror”/Frankenstein category.  As in that strain of the genre, it dares to gaze at the forbidden, and to dwell at great lengths upon it.  I don’t want to say that it gazes unflinchingly, because close analysis will show that Miike does flinch…sometimes.  The abortion imagery is horrible, but the operations themselves are not depicted as graphically as they might have been.  We only see one hairpin penetrating under a fingernail; although, frankly, that’s enough, and it’s somehow worse when we’re focusing instead upon a foot twisting helplessly in the air, or the rooster-hat of an ugly dwarfen crone bobbing while she makes a clucking noise.  Miike, like all great horror directors, is focused on the cumulative effect of a montage of images and sounds, with the purpose of driving deep into your psyche and the source of your nightmares.  He wants you to stand beside him and look upon what you most fear.  Some directors use this technique for cathartic effect: you emerge somehow unscathed, and stronger for it.  Not Takashi Miike.  ”Imprint”’s final moments have more in common with the work of David Lynch.  This far into your unconscious mind, the place where your nightmares are made, all reason and logic depart.  He leaves you with an image that only makes the vaguest sort of sense, given all you’ve seen; it’s fittingly macabre, but it’s also quite mad.