Author: swampflix

Mohawk (2018)

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Two Indigenous people and a British solider, all in a polyamorous relationship, flee American militia in the wooded battlefields of the War of 1812. Nothing about that premise particularly signals that Mohawk functions as a horror picture, but as soon as the menacing synths and flickering projection bulb of the film’s opening credits set the grindhouse-reminiscent tone, its choice of genre is undeniable. Directed by We Are Still Here’s Ted Geoghegan, Mohawk creates a kind of reverse-engineered version of a creature feature where white American men are the monsters hunting down its protagonists, emerging from behind trees as a kind of supernatural intrusion on an environment where they don’t belong. On a formal, financial level, the film lacks the attention to craft that elevates similar-in-tone projects like Ravenous, The Revenant, Bone Tomahawk, and The Hateful 8, but its choice of an Indigenous POV in both a historical and a horror genre context affords the film distinction as a cheaply produced curio. Mohawk’s recurring nightmare imagery, synthy crescendos, and washes of impossibly bright red acrylic blood all feel familiar to horror cheapie territory, but its historical narrative told through the perspective of the Mohawk tribe is a different matter entirely.

Although its three central characters’ polyamory might stick out as a peculiar detail in the historical context of the War of 1812, Mohawk treats it with a casual, matter of fact dismissal. The much more pressing issue is how the throuple’s Mohawk tribe is caught between two warring white man governments, the Americans & The Brits. While most other Native peoples have chosen sides in the conflict, the Mohawk tribe remains deliberately neutral, leaving themselves vulnerable to violence from both ends. The presence of the British soldier disrupts this balance and invites even more violence, especially once our three leads find themselves surrounded by a small band of seethingly racist American combatants. The two sides bitterly fight out the conflict of the war at large in a wooded microcosm, trading vicious blows to each other’s already dwindled, wounded ranks. As the violence and stress-induced nightmares escalate in the days leading up to the inevitable bloodshed of the climax, the film drops the pretense of its function as a war movie entirely. The cheap synths, woodland sets, and bright red stage blood of its tension-building violence feel distinctly tied to the rhythms & tropes of horror cinema, which is an interesting lens for telling this kind of wartime story.

Unfortunately, Mohawk’s sense of craft can’t quite match the interest it generates as a corrective in POV from what’s usually depicted in clashes between American settlers & their Indigenous victims. The film finds a tone & perspective far preferable to the ones of superficial correlatives like The Revenant, but its flat digital cinematography is far from Emmanuel Lubezki quality. As confidently casual as Mohawk can be about its themes of polyamory, it drives home other topics with awkward tactlessness in lines like “From my experience, it’s the white man who does the scalping.” I suspect the film’s shortcomings are mostly on the shoulders of Geoghegan, whose previous haunted house picture was similarly frustrating in its stubbornness to live up to its full potential. I greatly respect his choice of perspective & casting in Mohawk. Besides the inclusion of always-welcome genre film character actor Robert Longstreet & wide-eyed beardo pro wrestler Luke Harper among the American monsters, the film also commits to casting actual Native actors Kaniehtiio Horn & Justin Rain in its central roles. That casting reinforces the fascinating specificity of the film’s choice in POV, but it’s a little disappointing that Geoghegan couldn’t do better by the opportunity for greatness created in that collaboration.

I’m always down for a horror cheapie with a killer premise set in the creepy (and affordable) world of the woods, but I can’t help but wish that Mohawk had done just slightly more with its visual language & sound design within that genre context. Its novelty as a historical horror film with an Indigenous, polyamorous POV puts a lot of pressure on the final product to deliver something memorable & impactful. It seems unlikely that we’ll ever see this exact set of circumstances & qualifiers coexist onscreen again. Mohawk is easy to recommend for the specificity of that context alone and can be forgiven for many of its sins against objective quality in consideration of its exceedingly modest budget. I would much rather report that it was a knockout masterpiece that fully fulfilled the promise of its premise, but the truth is that it’s a fairly standard woodland-set indie horror with a killer hook. There’s obviously value to that kind of minor pleasure, even if the temptation is to wish for better.

-Brandon Ledet

The Phantasm’s Looming Shadow Over All Animated Batmen

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We’ve been singing the praises of the 2010 animated Batman feature Under The Red Hood this month for giving viewers something they’re not used to from most Caped Crusader cinema. Forgoing the obligatory origin story opening that weighs down every other Batman reboot and skipping far enough ahead into the lore that it can support two! Robins the Boys Wonder, Under the Red Hood feels remarkably unique in the modern comic book adaptation zeitgeist for its confidence in viewers’ familiarity with its central characters, allowing it a larger freedom in storytelling. The film feels much less unique, however, when you consider the obvious debt it owes to Batman: The Animated Series, particularly the show’s feature film debut Mask of the Phantasm. I’ve written previously about how Kevin Conroy’s voice work as the Caped Crusader on The Animated Series has been the defining standard for all animated Batmen, leaving Under the Red Hood/Gotham By Gaslight voice actor Bruce Greenwood very little room to leave a distinct mark. (The same could probably be said for Mark Hamill’s deranged voice work for The Joker as well). That’s not where The Animated Series’ looming influence stops, though. For all of Under the Red Hood’s narrative details that feel unique to cinematic Batman storytelling, the broader picture of what it accomplishes more than vaguely resembles Mask of the Phantasm. In fact, it follows Phantasm’s template so closely that you wouldn’t have to change many character details around for it to function as a remake.

To be fair, Under the Red Hood’s story about superhero vigilantism gone too far is a fairly common one within comic book lore. In our initial conversation on Under the Red Hood, I wrote, “Now that there are roughly a dozen major superhero releases annually, the stories are more varied, but for a while it felt as if the majority of them were hinged on the moral conflict of what, exactly, separates the masked vigilantes from the masked criminals.” However, the details of how that story is told onscreen in these two films are similar enough to push Under the Red Hood’s parallels to Mask of the Phantasm beyond general adherence to storytelling cliché. Both the titular Red Hood & Phantasm vigilantes challenge Batman’s moral code by pushing their dedication to crimefighting too far, specifically by assassinating mob bosses that control Gotham’s crime rings. The identities of the mysterious people from Batman’s past who mask as these vigilante personae in both films are also presented as impossibilities, as they are both dead. In Under the Red Hood, we see (the second, younger) Robin murdered brutally at the hands of the Joker in the first scene, but presume that The Red Hood could only be him in disguise, somehow resurrected. Similarly, recognizable voice actor Stacy Keach is obviously voicing The Phantasm in the earlier film, but the character he plays is shown to be dead long before The Phantasm arrives, making it an impossibility. The strange circumstances that make these transformations possible are doled out in staggered flashbacks in both films, one to a story of an early romance and one to Robin’s pre-crimefighting youth. The stories also reach their respective climaxes by deploying The Joker as an outside element of chaos in a last-ditch effort to save mobsters’ lives, creating total chaos that reveals the mysteries of the two vigilantes’ secret identities. Some of the individual characters have been swapped out and the animation style of these productions has changed drastically from the 90s to the 2010s, but in narrative terms The Mask of the Phantasm & Under the Red Hood are practically the same movie.

What’s left to distinguish them, then, is a question of aesthetic, for which I’ll always be biased to affording Mask of the Phantasm the upper hand. The action sequences of Under the Red Hood are an impressively complex mix of traditional and computer animation, but they have nothing on the tactile mat painting backdrops and Art Deco designs of The Animated Series, which is about as gorgeous as crime detective noir ever got. Mask of the Phantasm also drives to a much more distinctive climax than Under the Red Hood, staging the final showdown between Batman and The Joker in a sprawling miniature of Gotham at an abandoned, Atomic Age World’s Fair exhibit. The play with scale in that climactic battle makes the two forever-foes appear to be kaiju-size, which is an absurd effect unmatched by anything mustered in Under the Red Hood (or most live-action Batman flicks for that matter). Mask of the Phantasm is the definitive animated Batman move, its influence looming over every one of its successors. Story-wise, the only notable improvement Under the Red Hood holds over it is in skipping the origin story plotlines for Batman & The Joker, which are told uniquely in Mask of the Phantasm, but likely don’t need to be told at all. Otherwise, it follows a very faithful pattern established by that Animated Series offshoot, which becomes blatantly apparent if you ever watch the two films back to back. I don’t intend to point out these similarities to diminish Under the Red Hood’s significance; I was impressed by the film in a way that’s exceedingly rare for DC animated features. I just continually marvel at how influential The Animated Series and, by extension, Mask of the Phantasm were on the entirety of the animated Batman canon. Even one of the most uniquely independent entries into the franchise is still very closely tied to that series, both structurally and tonally, speaking to its staying power as a foundational work.

For more on May’s Movie of the Month, the animated superhero thriller Batman: Under the Red Hood, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, this profile of its Caped Crusader voice actor, Bruce Greenwood, and last week’s look at how it uses the voice talents of Neil Patrick Harris.

-Brandon Ledet

Deadpool 2 (2018)

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Although they’re clearly not made for me, I’m starting to become fascinated by Deadpool movies as a cultural curio. There usually isn’t any fun to be had from sitting through a comedy you find thoroughly unfunny and the reference-heavy Family Guy irreverence of Deadpool seems custom-built to create a laughter-free vacuum of punishing bro humor around me. What’s fascinating about these movies to me is watching them in the theater anyway, where laughter is a constant, thundering flood. To watch a Deadpool movie in public is to feel as if I am from a different planet than the rest of the room. Edgy hack jokes about suicide & child rape, lazy references to vintage pop culture ephemera, and mater-of-fact namedrops of unrelated comic book characters all land as if they’re carving out previously undiscovered, revolutionary forms of comedy the world has never seen before. Audiences gasp, involuntarily muttering “Wow” and “Oh My god” after every supposedly transgressive gag in total disbelief of the films’ comedic brilliance. Jokes that have been run into the ground though months of being repeated in advertisements somehow earn belly laughs so deep it’s a wonder no one vomits. Just as I was with the first Deadpool movie, I was befuddled throughout Deadpool 2 by why everyone around me though it was hi-larious that this “annoying prick” of a lead character (the movie’s words, not mine) broke kayfabe by saying “Patrick Stewart” instead of “Professor X” or suffered sub-Rickles insult comedy routines from real-life shitbag TJ Miller or celebrated a weapon’s forcible insertion up his enemy’s ass. I felt partly like a land mammal attempting to swim with the fish, partly like the only person in Jonestown with concerns about the Kool-Aid. I was surrounded by creatures I didn’t understand: true nerds.

Although my outsider’s discomfort watching Deadpool in public continued into this sequel, it was a marginal improvement on the first film, which barely feigned a superhero origin story around its bro-friendly meta humor. Directed by Atomic Blonde/John Wick vet David Leitch and afforded a more legitimate big studio budget, Deadpool 2 feels a little more authentic to the action genre it’s spoofing. When Deadpool himself isn’t sucking all the oxygen out of the room with his constant flood of “Ain’t I a stinker?” metacommentary, the movie manages to stage a few halfway decent gags, such as an early yakuza-themed sword-fighting montage set to Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” (even though that exact song was already similarly employed in Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, of all lowly places). Romantic tragedy, conversion therapy anxiety, and existential self-loathing are all taken more seriously here than they probably even need to be as the movie builds a time-travelling revenge plot around Deadpool’s sudden desire to have a family and the threat of X-Men antihero Cable. Genuinely entertaining performances from James Brolin (as Cable), Hunt for the Wilderpeople’s Julian Dennison (as Deadpool’s troubled, unwanted ward), and Atlanta’s Zazie Beetz (as Domino, a superhero character who much better deserves her own franchise) all helpfully distract from the Ryan Reynolds/Deadpool-shaped hole at the film’s self-corrupted center. The comedic payoff to a team-building montage spoof was lifted directly from a better-executed bit in MacGruber, but comes awfully close to achieving legitimately well-crafted humor. The film even finds ways to make Deadpool himself occasionally funny, against all odds, by pausing his dialogue to focus on the physical horrors of his superpower: a body that stubbornly refuses to die. If you generously squint at Deadpool 2 from a flattering angle in just the right light, it almost resembles a mildly amusing, ZAZ-style action spoof. Deadpool himself is always on hand to deflate that balloon, though, ruining any and all good will he can with as many child molestation quips or referrals to Cable as Thanos as necessary to spoil the mood (or bust a gut, depending on your POV).

I should probably be grateful for the minor details that break up Deadpool 2’s oppressive stench of Gen-X comic book bro humor, like the years-late inclusion of a (barely onscreen) same-sex couple in a major Marvel release or the fact that is a macho superhero who isn’t afraid of high heels or pegging. Fixating on those touches or the welcome presence of Domino & Super Ricky Baker feel like sifting though the scraps for momentary joys, however, an exercise that’s only occasionally rewarding in the few blissful moments when Deadpool himself is not cracking wise. The most the Deadpool franchise offers me, personally, is the experience of sitting in a room full of people from an entirely different planet, cowering from the deafening horror of their baffling laughter. Deadpool 2 is a slight improvement on its predecessor, but I almost wish it were much, much worse, so I could get as much out of that alienating experience as possible. The movie isn’t quite decent enough to earn genuine enthusiasm, so I’d almost prefer if I didn’t see anything of value in it at all. That way the absurdity of sitting quietly in a cinema packed with guffawing space aliens might hold more novelty for me as a cultural experience. A worse Deadpool 2 might even deter me from tuning back in for the inevitable Deadpool 3, where I’m sure to relive this comedic alienation all over again—confused, scared, and alone in a crowd.

-Brandon Ledet

Death Spa (1989)

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Within the opening two minutes of Death Spa I was already aware that I was in the presence of trash cinema greatness. The only other film I had previously seen from director Michael Fischer was the uninspired Teen Wolf knockoff My Mom’s a Werewolf (one of three releases he completed in ’89, along with something titled Crack House), so I didn’t expect to fall in love here so easily. Everything there is to love about this deranged supernatural horror is succinctly represented in the opening credits, though, immediately setting a very high expectation for over-the-top schlock being married to intense attention to craft, a dynamic I was delighted to discover the film lives up to. Death Spa is essentially what would happen if Chopping Mall were given the full arthouse, Suspiria treatment, the exact low premise/high execution dichotomy I look for in all my genre cinema. The film opens with an exterior shot of a Los Angeles gym with a lit neon sign that reads “Starbody Health Spa.” Lightning strikes the sign, leaving only the title “d ea th Spa” lit as the camera travels into the cursed building in an ominous tracking shot. Spooky synths & neon lights overwhelm the senses as the camera finds the only soul alive in the gym, a woman dancing alone to rhythmic music that we cannot hear. One gratuitous nudity scene later and she’s being cooked alive by a sauna gone haywire, activated by an off-screen killer. It’s immediately apparent in this opening sequence that Death Spa is exploitative sleaze. It’s also just as apparent that it’s fine art worthy of any pop culture museum that would house it.

The gym is a creepy place, presumably doubly so for women who’re working out alone after hours. Early in its runtime, Death Spa appears to be a shrewd exploration of that common fear, exploiting the vulnerability of publicly navigating a space designed to intensively focus on the human body among a wealth of potentially dangerous strangers. The camera takes on the first-person POV of a slasher film or a giallo, stalking vulnerable women in its neon & spandex health club setting. It even teases potential personal & financial reasons why several suspects would be committing the rampant murders (framed as accidental deaths) that start plaguing the gym. I was totally onboard with the grounded killer-on-the-loose horror teased in Death Spa’s earliest motions, but even more pleased by the deranged absurdity that unfolded instead. It turns out Death Spa isn’t about a psychopathic killer at all, but rather one of my very favorite genre film subjects: Evil Technology. In the film, a vengeful ghost hacks the computer systems of automated gym equipment as a means of real-world vengeance. This is more of a haunted house movie than a slasher, except that the house in question is a health spa with very specific methods for causing lethal damage: rogue weightlifting machines, loose diving boards, flying shower tiles, the aforementioned sauna steam, etc. It even telegraphs a Chekov’s blender gag at the gym’s smoothie bar later echoed in one of my most beloved Evil Technology horrors: Unfriended. There’s very little thought given to the inherent vulnerability of gymnasiums & voyeurism, something that plays like an afterthought at best in the movie’s true mission statement of staging a supernatural horror at a novelty fad location specific to its era. Instead of playing off real-world dread or having its characters at least figure out that a gym with lethally faulty equipment might not be worth their patronage, the movie instead gradually intensifies its computer-ghost mayhem as it builds to a climactic event where many patrons can be locked inside & slaughtered at once: a “Mardi Gras” costume party. In Los Angeles. At a health spa. At night. Insane, but adorably so.

In addition to the lunacy of a ghost hacking automated gym equipment, Death Spa also chooses to reveal the identity of the undead spirit/real world terror through a recurring nightmare of a disabled woman on fire, adding to the film’s menacingly surreal vibe. That nightmare logic is matched by overactive camera work that puts much more care into its movement, angles, and lighting than what’s typically afforded trash cinema of this caliber. That high art cinematography clashes harshly with the bargain bin quality of acting on-hand, with cult cinema vet Ken Foree standing out as the only notable performer. The spooky synth soundtrack also occasionally gives way to an incredibly misguided mouth harp sound effect, turning potentially effective scare scenes into total jokes. While the cast & the soundtrack occasionally show the seams of Death Spa’s budget, though, the film’s commitment to practical gore effects & the sheer lunacy of its plot is more than enough to carry it through. When the ghost hacks a shower head or a blender or romantically whispers to their victim, “Come with me into the inferno. Let’s die together and live forever in Hell,” it’s all but impossible to resist Death Spa’s delirious, over-the-top charms. It didn’t take much for the movie to win me over as an instant fan. Its swirling mix of synths, neon, and self-amused gore was more than enough to steal my trash-gobbling heart at first sight. The true joy of Death Spa, though, is that its cheap thrills don’t stop there. The movie pushes its evil health spa premise to the most ridiculous extreme it can manage on a straight-to-VHS 80s budget, a dedication in effort & craft I wish Fischer had also poured into My Mom’s a Werewolf. In fact, all movies in all genres could stand to be a little more like the heightened absurdity achieved in Death Spa, not just the ones about health craze fads & pissed-off computer-ghosts.

-Brandon Ledet

My Mom’s a Werewolf (1989)

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The way I Was a Teenage Werewolf’s influence has trickled down throughout genre cinema is a fascinating thing to track. Both the teen horror genre and the term “teenager” itself were relatively new concepts when that landmark feature arrived in 1957 and it was the first film to truly make something substantial of that cultural shift. In most teen-marketed sci-fi & horror films of the drive-in era, young audiences watched their peers flee in terror from adult or alien monsters. I Was a Teenage Werewolf changed the game by making the teenagers themselves the monsters. It was the first film to metaphorically connect creature feature transformations into heinous, violent monstrosities to the hormonal powder keg of puberty, something that’s been exhaustively explored by countless horror pictures in the decades since. The most common descendant of that device is the modern teen-girl transformation horror, where young women transform into uncanny beasts immediately following their first menstruation: Ginger Snaps, Teeth, Raw, Blue My Mind, etc. Other examples of the film’s descendants don’t even bother to gender-swap or shift the context of the film at all, functioning almost as straight-up remakes: Teen Wolf, Cursed, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, etc. My Mom’s a Werewolf is a wrung even lower on the I Was a Teenage Werewolf devotee ladder. Not only does the film ruin the puberty metaphor by reverting the premise back to the monstrous adults of the 1950s, it’s also a blatant knockoff of the 1980s Teen Wolf franchise—essentially a copy of a copy. The same could also be said of the other notable, femme Teen Wolf knockoff Teen Witch, but that film had a delirious sense of Reagan Era absurdity & a sugary onslaught of MTV-inspired musical numbers. My Mom’s a Werewolf can’t compete with that, nor does it even try to.

As fascinated as I am with I Was a Teenage Werewolf’s influence on the horror genre, My Mom’s a Werewolf would have been much better served by dropping the teenager pretense entirely. The teen daughter indicated by the title is mostly present as an audience surrogate, spying in on a parent’s storyline that doesn’t particularly need her POV. The film does find an interesting angle by making the brat & her cash-starved bestie out to be horror nerds who pour over every detail of Fangoria magazine & attend dingy genre film conventions for weekend fun. It’s cool to see female characters occupying that archetype, as the 1980s (if not the 2010s, really) considered that kind of fandom to be strictly boys’ stuff, but they’re mostly present as observers & a distraction. The true center of the story is an overworked suburban mother with an emotionally distant husband & a pain-the-the ass kid. Ignored & taken for granted by her own family, she finds herself being wooed by a creepy pet shop owner who lavishes her with praise & kisses on the hand, when all she wanted was to purchase a flea collar for the family dog. Coerced partly through hypnotism and partly through her unaccommodated housewife libido, she flirts with the idea of having an affair with this creep while her daughter covertly spies on her from a distance. This is abruptly halted when the pet shop creep bites her on the toe (which, in a visual gag, is employed as a euphemism for cunnilingus), beginning her transition into a shapeshifting momwolf. It’s a very long journey until she’s a full-blown lycanthrope, though. Most of her symptoms surface as increased horniness, half-hearted nightmares, and a frequent need to shave her now-hirsute (hersute?) legs, making it a very long road to her werewolf form’s appearance at the climax. Just as much as it’s a letdown that her transformation is framed through her teen brat daughter’s POV, her werewolf form also can’t help but be a letdown when it’s finally revealed, as it’s a no-effort rubber mask Halloween costume with some mom clothes draped on top.

If My Mom’s a Werewolf holds any fascination on its own merits outside its novelty as a knockoff of a more popular I Was a Teenage Werewolf knockoff, it’s in its depiction of a middle-aged woman’s sexual awakening. A modern remake of this premise would have rich metaphorical material to work with as an exploration of an overworked, overlooked suburban wife rediscovering her body & her libido through a werewolf transformation, an entirely different angle on the conceit than the teen puberty horror we’re used to seeing. As is, the film can be frequently amusing in the way it mixes blatant sex jokes & pantomimed cunnilingus (both in the toe-biting scene & in a separate hand-licking exchange) in what otherwise feels like a kids’ movie. When the husband affectionately refers to his wife as his “little bran muffin,” she retorts, “Your little bran muffin misses your big cucumber.” When she later visits a dentist to file down her new werewolf fangs, he asks in heavy breaths, “Are you here for a drilling or a filling?” The film is not subtle. Everyone in My Mom’s a Werewolf is horny as heck except the one person who’s supposed to be fucking the momwolf (her husband) and their sex-neg daughter who disapproves of her newfound libido from the shadows.

This isn’t supposed to be a comedic softcore picture about a lonely, adulterous, housewife, though. The title promises some werewolf action the budget can’t convincingly muster, leaving My Mom’s a Werewolf a terrible movie with a great concept/poster. Sometimes the film’s cheapness can be adorable, including absolute garbage titles like Galaxina & Deathrow Gameshow in its teen nerds’ horror fandom & achieving a bargain bin bastardization of Sirk in its blatantly artificial suburban exteriors. Mostly, though, the absence of a legitimate budget is huge hindrance. A psychic’s palm-reading business is staged as a loose collection of scarves in an otherwise empty room. The only performers of note are last-second afterthought cameos from Kimmy Robertson & Marcia Wallace (who also had a small role in Teen Witch that same year). The 60s AM radio gem “Li’l Red Riding Hood” must’ve been the most expensive thing they sprung for, given how many times it repeats on the soundtrack. Most damning, though, is the rubber mask Halloween costume effects for the titular werewolf, which are just as cheap as they are lazy. To be more than a Teen Wolf knockoff curio, the film really needed to do a better job by its titular momwolf—by design, by POV, by everything really. Momwolves deserve a better movie. Teen-wolf daughters (and sons) have already had theirs many times over.

-Brandon Ledet

Kill, Baby, Kill (1966)

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I got a fair amount of enjoyment out of the recent Helen Mirren haunted house Gothic horror Winchester that most audiences did not seem to share. It’s a critical reaction that did not really surprise me, as the best example of the Gothic horror in recent memory, Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, was also met with an unenthused shrug. I suppose it’s a subgenre that’s grown long out of fashion in the decades since its heyday in the Hammer horror & the Corman-Poe Cycle era of the 1960s, but I’m glad there are at least a few minor modern attempts to keep its undead spirit ”alive.” It’s foolish to maintain a tradition without looking back to the heights that make its practice worthwhile, though, which is partly why I felt compelled to seek out Mario Bava’s Gothic horror classic Kill, Baby, Kill for the first time. Like Roger Corman’s intensely colorful nightmare The Masque of the Read Death, Kill, Baby, Kill is an over-the-top stylistic indulgence that plays beautifully into the heightened atmosphere of the Gothic horror template, making the genre appear as ripe for directorial experimentation as any slasher, space horror, or psychedelic subgenre you could name. Bava brings to the Gothic horror the same aesthetic obsessions that helped define the giallo as a medium in films like Blood & Black Lace and carved out the atmospheric space horror vibes later perfected in Alien with Planet of the Vampires. Kill, Baby, Kill is not his first or best-known experiment in the genre; Black Sunday might be the premiere example there. It is likely his most intensely colorful & idiosyncratically personal, though. It also stands as proof that the Gothic horror can be done exceptionally well on a miniscule budget, further encouragement for keeping the tradition alive.

Kill, Baby, Kill was afforded a much smaller production budget than Bava was used to working with by the mid-60s. A critically acclaimed director with most of his best works already behind him, Bava found himself in the unusual position of running short on funding & working with an incomplete script mid-shoot, making it a miracle that Kill, Baby, Kill was ever completed at all. Reportedly, the director’s crew completed the shoot partially unpaid for their efforts, out of respect for his art. You’d never be able to tell anything was out of the ordinary, though, as the Gothic horror template is very forgiving to low-budget enterprises. All you really need to pull one off convincingly is an old, spooky set and creative imagination for how to achieve a ghostly atmosphere. Bava worked around his limited resources through inventive, practical techniques: setting most of the story in an accessible European castle; creating distorted imagery in-camera via panes of glass; employing a seesaw where he couldn’t afford a camera crane, etc. A lesser director on the same time & budgetary constraints would’ve delivered an incomprehensible, glaringly incomplete mess (see: the infamous Roger Corman cheapie The Terror), but Bava pulls through by sheer will. Some of the most violent, jarring details of the film are his intense giallo lighting choices and the rapid zoom-ins & whip-pans to character’s stone-cold faces. He even fudged his ability to properly cast the ghost girl central to the movie’s plot on time & on budget by dressing the son of an employee in femme clothing. You’d never notice that production detail if you were never told—partly because young children are essentially genderless, but also because Bava finds a way to make it work. Kill, Baby, Kill is a kind of low-budget alchemy that turns shitty production conditions into horror classic gold.

Like most Gothic horror tales, Kill, Baby, Kill is a traditional ghost story about a haunted manor. In this case, the ghost of a little girl terrorizes an 18th century European village that’s deeply rooted in Old World superstitions. In a Dracula-style plot, an outsider doctor is called into town to perform an autopsy on the ghost’s latest victim, disregarding the locals’ warnings that the practice will only exacerbate the ghost’s curse. Of course, his rational view of the world is proven to be ineffective as the ghost’s attacks on the townspeople only get increasingly worse and he starts seeing her spooky visage himself. It’s not an especially novel plot and its mysterious twists aren’t nearly as compelling as its aesthetic interests—something the Gothic horror shares with the giallo genre that Bava helped pioneer. Kill, Baby, Kill is less interested in the ghost story’s potential metaphor as an expression of unresolved trauma or even its own premise of New World logic bucking against Old World wisdom than it is in crafting a beautiful image. Delicate child shoes & white lace dangle from a tree swing outside a graveyard to the sound of playful laughter. Creepy doll faces superimpose over twisting spiral staircases. The doctor erotically peers in on a witch’s homeopathic flogging ritual. A silver coin is pulled from a dead woman’s heart. (Is that last one already a giallo title?) Kill, Baby, Kill leaves an impression through intensely artificial lighting & imagery and then rapidly zooms in to single out an isolated detail as a kind of unconventional jump scare. I never fully bought the significance of the ghost girl’s vengeance on her townspeople victims. I did, however, get a huge kick out of watching her play with her creepy dolls and menacingly peer into the villagers’ windows, freaking everybody out. I imagine Bava’s own interests were on a similar wavelength.

The remarkable thing about Kill, Baby Kill’s scrappy resilience as a seemingly doomed project is that it isn’t even a cult classic that was reevaluated after the fact. Critics were willing to gush about Bava’s directorial touch in the film immediately upon its release. You can feel its influence trickling down through projects as varied as FearDotCom (which also features a white lace-dressed ghost girl playing with a white rubber ball) and The Love Witch (which boasts very similar witch costuming, just with better eye makeup). Kill, Baby, Kill is Mario Bava at his best, intensifying the effect of every creepy doll, ghost girl jump scare, and witchcraft ritual as best he can in any given frame. The only things holding the movie back from perfection are a slashed budget and a lackadaisical sense of pacing. It’s genre heights like these that make the efforts of a Winchester or a Marrowbone worthwhile in keeping the Gothic horror tradition alive, even if they aren’t as well appreciated in their time. Any director hoping to visually experiment within an extremely limited budget can look to this film as inspiration for how to establish a memorable atmosphere on the cheap. All you need is an interesting location, a vague story about a ghost, and strong personal aesthetic. Having a crew that’s willing to starve for you is likely also a plus.

-Brandon Ledet

I Kill Giants (2018)

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The 1980s saw a wealth of children’s fantasy films that were incredibly dark in theme & tone, considering their target audience. Titles like Return to Oz, The Never-Ending Story, The Dark Crystal, and Paperhosue seemed custom designed to bore parents out of the room just so they could scare children shitless as soon as they were alone with the VCR. These tonally hazy fantasy films are a little too traumatic for most kids and a little too precious for most adults, but they can generate a fascinating tension through that divide. There are plenty of modern entries into that canon keeping the tradition alive too; they just tend to be minor indie releases too few people get to see: MirrorMask, American Fable, The Hole, etc. Let’s go ahead and add I Kill Giants to the traumatic children’s fantasy movie pantheon. Remarkably similar to the recent dark fantasy drama A Monster Calls in both themes & tone, it might be tempting to pass off I Kill Giants as a lesser echo of that more accomplished work. The truth is, though, that both films are part of a larger tradition and work exceptionally well as companion pieces, especially since I Kill Giants offers a version of A Monster Calls’s dark fantasy template through a more femme POV.

Like A Wrinkle in Time, I Kill Giants is the perfect fantasy piece for gloomy middle schoolers who believe they’re fundamentally different from all the “other girls.” Truthfully, all middle school girls would probably self-identity as being Not Like Other Girls, but the giant-killing anti-hero of this film pushes that personality trait to the extreme. Dressed like a feral Louise Belcher left to run wild & dingy in the New England wilderness (bunny ears & all), our troubled protagonist finds herself at the center of a mythical battle everyone else in her small town seems to willingly ignore. Deploying homemade steampunk contraptions of her own invention (straight out of The Book of Henry), and casting spells & potions like an amateur woodland witch, she serves as a self-elected protector of her town against the impending threat of murderous giants. Since she’s an avid D&D player and a fantasy illustrator with a vivid imagination, it’s unclear if these giant CGI threats at the edge of the woods & ocean are “real.” Her obsession with their looming danger makes her hopelessly socially awkward around peers and her hexes are often interpreted by authority figures to be frivolous vandalism, but she very well may be saving those lives from the towering brutes they rationalize as “tornadoes and earthquakes and crap.” What is clear, however, is that she is using her pursuit of the giants as an excuse to avoid dealing with a mysterious trauma in her own home, the reveal of which serves as the film’s cathartic release.

Ultimately, I don’t believe I Kill Giants uses its killer-giants metaphor as a way of dealing with Death & bullying through a childhood lens quite as well as the thematically similar A Monster Calls; it certainly doesn’t have as sharply specific of a point to make about processing trauma through that device, at least. However, it does work well enough on its own terms to survive the comparison, especially once it finds its narrative grooves in the relationships our emotionally-battered protagonist establishes with her best friend, her school psychologist, and her older sister (the latter of whom are played by Zoe Saldana & Imogen Poots, respectively). If the movie needs to separate itself from J.A. Bayona’s similarly gloomy children’s literature adaptation (I Kill Giants was adapted from a 2008 graphic novel, while A Monster Calls’s own illustrated source material was published in 2011, so who cares), its existence is more than justified by reframing the story with a femme perspective and finding its emotional core in a wide range of female bonds. It’s an unnecessary distinction to have to make, though, since both films are part of a much larger dark children’s fantasy tradition. If you normally fall in love with films that hover between child’s imagination sensibilities & traumatically adult themes, you’re likely to find worthwhile qualities in either picture. If that tension is not usually your cup of genre movie tea, though, I doubt I Kill Giants will be the one to finally win you over.

-Brandon Ledet

The Ritual (2018)

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It’s no mystery why a dirt-cheap horror indie would obscure the look of its killer creature for most of its runtime. If a smaller movie is careful enough with its location & casting choices, it can pour most of its financial resources into the look of its monstrous threat, leaving an outsized impact through limited means. That tactic is a huge gamble, though. The longer you keep your monsters off-screen, the more pressure there is for them to deliver the goods. After a significant enough wait, an underwhelming creature design can cause an entire picture to fall apart & fade away, only to be remembered vaguely as a disappointment. The recent indie creature feature The Ritual, a British production Netflix picked up at last year’s TIFF, boldly goes all in on obscuring the monster at its center. Staged in the cheapo horror-favorite location of The Woods and featuring Thomas from Downton Abbey (Robert James-Collier) as its most recognizable performer, the movie puts a massive amount of pressure on its mostly off-screen monster to a leave significant impact once it steps into the light. Thankfully, the movie pulls through with a deeply chilling nightmare beast, fully satisfying the demands it put on its own mysterious force of Evil.

Four British bros hike into the forests of Northern Sweden as one of the most bizarrely ill-advised college reunion festivities imaginable. The trip gradually takes on a distinctly black metal-flavored tone of ominous terror as they stray further from hiking trails into thickly wooded wilderness, but their macho sense of comradery leaves little social grace for smartly bailing on the experience. No one would blame them for backing out of their dangerous, over-confident choice recreation, except themselves as they tease each other with questions like “What’s wrong? Are you scared of the woods?” It turns out, of course, that a healthy fear of the woods may have been beneficial on this particular venture, as they become increasingly lost & surrounded by mysterious, menacing forces. Besides the aforementioned creature that patiently hunts them one at a time and the encroaching vestiges of a witchcraft culture who worship the damned beast, the men are also supernaturally tortured by visions of their own worst fears & regrets. Sometimes even more harrowing than the ritualistically arranged animal corpses, the creepy altars, and the flashes of an unfathomable beast appearing in the creases of the trees is the mental invasions of their own guilty, grief-stricken memories. Their doom is entirely inescapable, as it encroaches from the outside and from within.

The Ritual is a debut feature for American director David Bruckner, who has so far cut his teeth helming standout segments of horror anthologies like Southbound & V/H/S. Sticking to the narrative economy demanded by anthology vignettes, he relies on a number of well-worn genre tropes that burden the film with a consistent sense of familiarity. The discovery of abandoned cabins in the woods and ominous pagan symbols (which in themselves suggest a black metal Wicker Man aesthetic) recall other classic lost-in-the-wilderness horrors like The Blair Witch Project. Its story of old friends being tormented by their toxic memories & friendship dynamics (not to mention bloodthirsty monsters) feels like The Descent for British bros, except in the woods instead of a cave. Its individualized visions of internal torment recall films like Event Horizon, except in the woods instead of a spaceship. There’s no doubt that this is a straightforward genre film, even if it pulls its disparate influences from varied extremes within that genre. That familiarity puts just as much strain on the film’s creature design as its decision to delay the monster’s reveal for as long as possible. Everything that distinguishes The Ritual as a modern, indie creature feature is the look, design, and lore around that monster. What’s incredible about the film, then, is that it really pulls off the trick of making that monster count. This is a great creature feature because, and only because, its creature is great. It would have been a forgettable letdown otherwise.

-Brandon Ledet

Ghost Stories (2018)

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It can be amazing how much an ambitious, go-for-broke ending can raise a horror film out of genre-faithful tedium. Every now and then a potentially so-so horror film like The Boy, Marrowbone, or The House on Sorority Row will go so deliriously off the rails in its final stretch that its conclusion will elevate the entire middling picture that unfolded before it to a retroactive artistic high. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film pull that trick off as well as the cheapo British horror anthology Ghost Stories. For most of its runtime, Ghost Stories pretends to be a very well-behaved, Are You Afraid of the Dark?-level horror anthology with open-ended, unsatisfying conclusions to its three mildly spooky vignettes. It turns out that dissatisfaction is deliberate, as it sets the film up for a supernaturally menacing prank on an unsuspecting audience. As its individual pieces start lining up into a clear, distinct gestalt, the film devolves into a playfully bizarre, sinister mindfuck. Ghost Stories had me shrugging off its minor charms as a cheekily funny horror anthology for nearly 2/3rds of its runtime, and then somehow turned the experience around in its final half hour to make me reconsider it as one of the more cleverly conceived genre films I’ve seen all year.

Adapted from a stage play by the same name, Ghost Stories is about an “arrogant & disrespectful” celebrity skeptic with “modern disregard for the spiritual life,” who’s achieved minor fame as the host of the (fictional) television show Psychic Cheats. His life’s work is called into question when his aging hero, another famous skeptic who he’s been worshiping since he was a child, reveals himself to now be a true believer in the paranormal. The older skeptic offers a challenge to the younger one in the form of three unsolved case files he could not himself prove to be hoaxes. Anchored by recognizable Brits Martin Freeman, Paul Whitehouse, and The End of the Fucking World’s Alex Lawther, these three case files are laid out in rigidly segmented vignettes that slowly chip away at the younger skeptic’s sense of reality. Their stories of psych ward hauntings, ghostly apparitions, and woodland demons are a little too toothless in their shocks & gore to leave much of an impression individually. However, as strange, menacing details build up & recur around the skeptic as he investigates the cases, a cold undercurrent beneath the film’s deceptively well-behaved horror anthology surface begins to pick up strength & speed. By the end of the film, the individual case stories cease to matter as a much more sinister narrative builds around the details lurking at the edge of the frame.

As a genre, horror is built on the foundation of disruption. Whether supernaturally or via a real-world force, there must be a break in the daily routine of reality for a film to qualify as horror in the first place. Following titles like Trick ‘r Treat & Southbound that have been playing with the structure of the horror anthology as medium in recent years, Ghost Stories presents its own disruption of reality by way of disguise. The film boldly masks itself as a middling, decent enough supernatural picture for most of its runtime, exploiting audience familiarity with the horror anthology structure to lure viewers into a false, unearned comfort. I’ve never had a film border so close to outright boredom, then pull the rug out from under me so confidently that I felt both genuinely unnerved & foolish for losing faith. That kind of patience is not going to work for everyone. Without the distraction-free environment of a movie theater, I can see many VOD viewers walking away from Ghost Stories mid-film or scrolling through social media throughout, feeling like they’ve already seen everything it has to offer before. The ending only works if you stick with the film’s minor visual details and moments of unexplained pause, affording it patience & attention. It’s a glorious, surprisingly heady prank of a conclusion, though, one of the best horror film turnarounds I’ve ever seen.

-Brandon Ledet

Marrowbone (2018)

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It’s difficult to gauge how wide of an appeal the straight-to-VOD sleeper Marrowbone might hold for a contemporary audience. As an obedient participation in the tropes of the Gothic horror genre as a cinematic tradition, the film starts off with a slight disadvantage in its aesthetic’s commercial appeal. As demonstrated by del Toro’s Crimson Peak, the modern Gothic horror is often dismissed & unacknowledged even when it’s done exactly right, so a much cheaper, small-scale production like Marrowbone doesn’t have much of a chance to make an impression. To make things harder on itself, the film also adopts a distinctly literary, romantic tone that invites more cynical audiences to not take its emotional core seriously, the exact same way the tragically undervalued Never Let Me Go undercut its own potential commercial appeal as a sci-fi genre picture. For fans of the Gothic horror as an onscreen tradition, Marrowbone offers a wonderful corrective to the year’s other major offering in that genre, Winchester (which I’m saying as the only person in the world who got a kick out of Winchester). It’s an oddly romantic, admirably deranged entry into the modern ghost story canon. It’s frustrating for the already-converted to know that the film’s unhinged charms will be met with more shrugs than enthusiasm on the contemporary pop culture landscape, but its choice of genre at least lends it to feeling somewhat timeless, even if not an instant modern hit.

Although it’s set in 1960s small-town America, it’d be understandable to mistake much of Marrowbone for 19th Century Europe. Its haunted house narrative and feral children aesthetic feels like the lore of 1800s peasants, which makes the occasional intrusion of recognizable modernity almost surreal. The most frequent representation of this modernity is a girl-next-door sweetheart played by Anya Taylor-Joy. In her introduction she’s teased to be a kind of woodland witch (appropriately enough), but it turns out she’s just a darling small-town librarian with an A+ 1960s wardrobe. Her calm provincial life is upturned by the arrival of a small English emigrant family (including familiar faces Charlie Heaton, George MacKay, and Mia Goth) who are obviously in the process of escaping a troubled past. This is one of those immigrant stories where American is framed as a cure-all reset button meant to heals old wounds in a battered family’s identity. The past continues to haunt them, though—at first figuratively, then literally in the form of a ghost that stalks the attic of their new home. As the hauntings worsen, the family becomes more reclusive, never leaving the house to venture into town. Only the sweetheart librarian and her petty, jealous suitor have any interest in the goings-on of the cursed home, the family’s mysterious past, and the well-being of the four children who’re left to face their demons alone within that insular space. It does not go well.

Because Marrowbone is so obedient to the tropes & rhythms of a long-familiar genre, most audiences will clue into the answers to its central mysteries long before they’re revealed. However, the details of those mysteries’ circumstances and the effect of their in-the-moment dread carry the movie through a consistently compelling continuation of a Gothic horror tradition. Creepy dolls, cursed money, miniatures, bricked-over doorways, a covered mirror, a menacing ghost, a pet raccoon named Scoundrel: Marrowbone excels in the odd specificity of its individual details and the deranged paths its story pushes to once the protective bubble of its central mystery is loudly popped. There’s also a delicately tragic sense of romance that guides the picture’s overall tone, both in the librarian’s love life and in the children-fending-for-themselves literary imagination. If you’re not especially in love with the atmospheric feel of the Gothic horror genre, these aesthetic details and the film’s bonkers third act might not be enough to carry you beyond the sense that we’ve seen this story told onscreen many times before. The tempered response to both Crimson Peak & Winchester suggest that will be the case for many viewers. More forgiving Gothic horror fans should find plenty of admirable specificity to this particular story, though, the kind of tangible detailing that allows the best ghost stories to stick to the memory despite their decades (if not centuries) of cultural familiarity. It’s a shame that tradition isn’t currently profitable, but we’ll eventually come back around to it as a culture and Marrowbone will still be oddly, wonderfully unhinged in its menacing details.

-Brandon Ledet