alli hobbs

Movie of the Month: Paperhouse (1988)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Boomer made Brandon, Alli, and Britnee watch Paperhouse (1988).

Boomer: Paperhouse is an odd little film. Helmed by Brit director Bernard Rose, the film follows the frenzied dreams of an artistic young girl, Anna (Charlotte Burke), as she finds herself flipping back and forth between the real world (where she is suffering from a glandular fever) and the fantasy world that is home to the titular paper house of her design. The lines between reality and unreality start to blur as she strikes up a friendship with Marc (Elliott Spiers), a disabled boy living in the otherworldly house and with no memory of life outside of it; when she learns from her physician (Gemma Jones) that Marc is real, things start to get more surreal and bizarre.

This wasn’t Rose’s directorial debut; he had previously worked in various roles on the last season of The Muppet Show and on The Dark Crystal before a short stint making music videos, most notably for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax.” After two smaller films that are largely forgotten, Rose directed Paperhouse, which was a perennial favorite on IFC in the early 2000s, before moving on to direct cult classic (and his only other truly great film) Candyman, released in 1992. Candyman is undeniably a horror film, and Paperhouse was largely lumped in with the horror genre upon home video release as well, despite not strictly deserving that distinction. It’s much more of a mood piece, with a relatively simple story elevated by striking visuals and a moodily beautiful score by Stanley Myers and Hans Zimmer (Rose certainly knows how to choose composers; Candyman’s Philip Glass soundtrack is so haunting that Glass apparently still makes royalties from it each year, no doubt helped by the fact that “Helen’s Theme” continues to appear in other genre works, most recently American Horror Story).

I love this film, and have seen it at least a half dozen times, but there is always enough time between each viewing that I forget that the film has a longer ending than I expect. For me, the film reaches its narrative conclusion when [spoiler alert] Anna learns that Marc has died. Although I’m not opposed to the resolution of Anna and her family (including her father, whose notable absence informs much of the psychological underpinnings of the film) returning to the seaside and revisiting a happier time, there is something about the ending that seems as little too pat, especially in light of the mildly silly scene in which Marc reappears to Anna. What do you think, Brandon? Did the ending seem out of place to you, or am I being too critical? Would you suggest a different conclusion?

Brandon: If I had to fault Paperhouse for anything it’d be the muddled nature of its central metaphor. The film operates in a spooky 80s kids’ movie headspace that I’m always a huge sucker for and the dream logic of both its set design & its eerie score is wonderfully chilling. There’s just something a little off in its dreamworld narrative that makes it difficult for me to track its overriding metaphor (not that I mind the ambiguity). Two sick children meet in the shared dreamworld set of a hand-drawn house and their recovery in the real world is dependent upon their progress in that fantasy space. Marc, who is unaware of this dichotomy despite Anna’s frequent explanations, suffers a fairly straightforward narrative where he slowly dies due to complications that arise through his muscular dystrophy. As Boomer points out, his death in the real world seems like a logical place for the story to end, but I do believe that the seaside resort epilogue was a necessary addition to the story, because Anna’s own struggle was at that point still largely unresolved.

Anna’s near-death experience with a glandular fever is what puts her in contact with the paperhouse fantasy where she meets Marc, but her true conflict is a mental health struggle related to her anxieties over an absent, alcoholic father. When Marc dies he rides a helicopter to heaven that relieves the real world pains of his body. In the seaside epilogue Anna tempted to leave behind her own pain by joining Marc in the helicopter, a moment that’s coded as a suicide attempt at the edge of a cliff. This last minute crisis might not make much sense in a typical three act story structure, but I do think Anna flirting with the relief of death is a powerful idea that Paperhouse would be lacking without, especially in its indication that her mental health struggle wasn’t instantly wiped away upon her father’s return.

Where I stumble a little in my reading of this conflict is in understanding the exact relationship between Anna & her father. Paperhouse explains the father figure to be a drunk & an abandoner in the real world, which is meant to explain Anna’s anxiety, lashing-out rebelliousness, and eventual disinterest in continuing to live. In the dreamworld, however, her father is far more abusive than that. Blinded by rage (both Anna’s & his own), Dream Dad strikes a terrifying nightmare of an image, destroying the physical objects Anna created & cherished with a hammer and physically beating her in the chest nearly to the point of death. No mention is ever made in the real world of Anna being physically abused by her father, but the brutality & specificity of the hammer & the chest-beating in the dreamworld at least makes it plausible that Anna was afraid that such abuse was a possibility. Coming back to Boomer’s original question, if there’s anything lacking in the ending for me it’s how easy Anna & her father’s seaside reconciliation feels after the brutality of their altercation in the dreamworld. Anna gets in the cathartic zinger, “You don’t have to be invisible to disappear, Dad,” but she does eventually forgive him after the helicopter/suicide crisis and the family is again made whole, which might be a little too neat & tidy of a conclusion given Anna’s near-fatal parental anxieties.

Britnee, how literal did you take the physical abuse in the dreamworld to be? Do you think it was intended as a reflection of something that happened in the real world or simply an amplification of Anna’s anxieties over her father’s alcoholism?

Britnee: One of the many mysteries in Paperhouse is the relationship between Anna and her father. Part of me feels as though the abuse in the dreamworld was more of a reflection of something Anna witnessed rather than something she experienced herself. If her father did indeed abuse her, I feel as though she would have been much more fearful of him in her dreams, but she wasn’t very scared of him considering how creepy the whole situation was. I really think she witnessed her father abusing her mother. Anna’s dreams allowed her to see the potential of her father’s alcoholism, and it really seemed like a big eye opener for her in the real world. There was something about the mannerisms of her mother that makes me believe she had a traumatizing experience with her husband. She seemed a bit shaky when she would light up her cigarettes, and she seemed to be in an entirely different world herself (perhaps Anna’s real world was her paperhouse?). I do agree with Brandon’s frustration with the very simple reunion at the end of the film. It actually made me a little nervous for Anna’s well-being; however, I’ve also been watching a lot of Dr. Phil lately, so that may have something to do with my uneasy thoughts about Anna and Drunk Dad.

What I found most interesting about Paperhouse was the confusing soundtrack. Brilliant, but so confusing. During the film’s opening credits, I was waiting for a dead body to fall out into the school hallway. I kept waiting for a gruesome, terrifying scene, but by the latter half of the film, I just gave up. There were a handful of scenes that were spooky, especially when Drunk Dad captures Anna in her dreamworld, but nothing was half as scary as the tunes in the background. Needless to say, I was surprised to find that the film fell way more on the drama side than on the horror.

Alli, did you feel as though the film’s score was out of place? Did the music add to the creepiness of Anna’s dreamworld? Did you get more horror vibes or fantasy vibes from that world?

Alli: Initially the score felt very spooky and out of place to me and definitely made me feel like more bad things were going to happen; but once in the dreamworld, it felt really appropriate. The low ominous synth sounds seem to enhance the vast emptiness you see around the house. What especially made the score work in the dreamworld was that at some points it became diegetic with the talking radio. While the idea of a talking mumbling radio seems reminiscent of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, here it was very creepy, as the nightmare dad seemed to be talking through it a little bit.

The dreamworld to me was very much a fantasy and an escape from the fact that she’s lonely at school and at home. While it starts off as something she can control very quickly it functions on it’s own bizarre logic, where some of the things she draws turn up very realistically and other things just are crooked and funny. It’s not until the faceless dad that it gets into nightmare zone, and even then he feels more like an intruder than an aspect of the dreamworld. In Anna’s life he is sort of an intruder, showing up whenever he feels like it both emotionally and physically.

But as much as the dad seems like a dark figure in Anna’s life, her mom is really not better at all. It’s no wonder she acts out with a mother who is as unsupportive as we see on screen. She criticizes Anna’s drawings very rudely and isn’t really nurturing at all until Anna is extremely ill, in a sort of trying to make it up to her way. Both parents seem to just make up for the lack of love with material things like riding lessons and manufactured happy trips to the seashore, which I think makes the ending more depressing and bitter.

Boomer, what did you think of the mom’s role? Is she just as bad as the dad or is she just a single mother at the end of her leash?

Boomer: I feel like we’re being more critical of both parents here than is called for, at least based on my reading of the film. Multiple times, we see how the dreamworld of the paperhouse is influenced by things that Anna sees or vaguely recalls, or by her physical circumstances in the real world. The reason that Anna feels like she is being beaten in the dreamworld is because, in the waking world, the paramedics are giving her compressions to keep her alive. The reason that her father appears as a backlit creepy shadow is because she encouraged her mother to let the photo of him at the beach develop for too long, until he becomes a dark figure in the image, and thus in her mind. The father doesn’t seem abusive to me, either to his wife or to Anna, so much as he is an unknowable being, his absence making him a figure that is half-remembered and half-imagined, larger than life but imposing.

The mother, for her part, reads more as a woman who’s been run ragged by holding down a household with a misbehaving young girl, suddenly stricken with illness. She has artistic pursuits of her own, as evidenced by her home dark room, and likely has had to sublimate her interest into being both breadwinner and full time caretaker to Anna due to her husband’s chronic and prolonged absence.

One of the things I like most about the film is the fact that no character is a paragon. As a heroine, Anna is a surprisingly postmodern. She’s a girl, but not feminized. She’s not stereotyped as drawing a dream house that’s reminiscent of the kind of future home girls are encouraged to imagine, but a strikingly dull building instead. She tries on make-up, but not to impress a boy; she just wants to try it for herself. Usually, female protagonists can only avoid being sexualized if they are infantilized (and, unfortunately, not even then), and although Anna is young, she’s not treated as an idealized perfect child. She lies, she throws tantrums, she skips school, and, most importantly, she’s not demonized for this either. These are just aspects of her character, not flaws that need to be corrected with external discipline, but that make up the gestalt that is Anna. Her mother, though her screentime is shorter than Anna’s, makes her seem fully-fleshed in her own way as well. She even seems genuinely loving, going so far as to dig through the whole building’s trash to placate what she must assume is some feverish madness.

Am I giving the film too much credit, Brandon? Am I making excuses for the movie because I like it, or have I convinced you that there’s more going on at the character level than there first appears?

Brandon: Please forgive me for the banality of this answer, but I think a lot of that ambiguity falls under the umbrella of personal interpretation. Paperhouse is in the most basic sense a story about lucid dreaming. Dream logic always comes with a certain level of impenetrable surrealism to it and there’s been an entire industry full of psychologist “experts” built around the therapeutic benefits of dream interpretation. Then there’s the film’s art therapy element, in which Anna creates a personal space for herself where she can exude total control as an omnipotent (and highly fallible) god. Both the weird dream logic & the art therapy surrealism of the film’s basic plot leave Paperhouse with a lot of room for personal interpretation in its symbolism, especially once Anna’s drawings start affecting real world change in Marc’s medical condition. Personally, I see a drunk dad who scares Anna (who points out his alcoholism in the darkroom scene) and a mother who may be frazzled, but is not at all abusive (as evidenced in the manic trash-digging scene). I also read a third act suicide attempt at the edge of the cliff, but I’ll willingly admit that I’m reaching for a solid explanation for an intentionally lyrical moment there, which may be the wrong way to go about things in this movie.

So much of this movie is literally in Anna’s head that it’s near impossible to tell what’s “really” happening from minute to minute. How much of our darker interpretations of the parents’ behavior is being influenced by the horror film dread of Myers & Zimmer’s score? How much of the dreamworld content is merely, as Boomer suggests, reflections of images Anna encounters throughout the day, as many dreams tend to be? There’s no “true” answers to these questions, as the film intentionally deals in ambiguity. There’s evidence that Anna’s dreamworld surrogate was truly communicating with Marc’s, a boy she never met in a physical space, but everything else is left open-ended. The film kind of works like a coloring book: it provides a basic outline of how its world works and invites its audience to color in the details. Maybe we’ve been coloring a little outside the lines in our personal interpretations here, but I think the movie invites that kind misbehavior. I also don’t believe that misbehavior is a detriment to either of the central characters, though, as I never felt like I lost track of Marc or Anna as complex, multifaceted human beings. It’s their own personal interpretations of the adults in their lives that throw off our perception as an audience & complicate some of the film’s intent & metaphor.

Britnee, I’m getting some flashbacks to our Movie of the Month conversation about Black Moon here, particularly in our attempts to parse out what the film specifically “means.” Instead of picking apart an intentionally inscrutable art film, though, we’re discussing a movie that was ostensibly made with a very young audience in mind. Do you think the darkness & ambiguity helps the film in this case, considering the flexible imaginations of the children intended to see it? As adults, are we reading more solid, static interpretations of the film’s metaphor than we might have as kids, when Paperhouse could possibly have survived purely on mood instead of concrete symbolism?

Britnee:  While I was in college, I took a history class that focused on the 1960s, and most of that course involved watching films, such as Go Tell the Spartans and Easy Rider, and writing about them. Before viewing each film, my professor would say, “Remember, every detail, whether major or minor, in a film means something. There is symbolism everywhere.” That really stuck with me, and since then I always feel somewhat guilty if I don’t search for meaning behind every little detail in a movie. I’m glad that Brandon brought up the point that this is a film intended for a younger audience. I need to remind myself every now and then that sometimes (maybe even most of the time), films are created solely for the purpose of pleasure and entertainment.

Ignoring the interpretations we made of Anna’s dreamworld as well as her relationship with her parents (Drunk Dad in particular) and viewing the film through the eyes of a child, Paperhouse seems a bit more whimsical. A film about drawings that come to life in dreams and a magical friendship that only exists in the dreamworld seems a lot better than a film about a girl with neglectful and abusive parents. Paperhouse becomes another film entirely. Even the darker elements of the film take on a new meaning. Anna’s scary dream father becomes a product of a mistake in her magical drawing instead of an abusive parent turned villain. As for the darkness and ambiguity of the film, I think it actually contributes to the film’s fantasy elements and makes it much more exciting for the intended adolescent audience. If I was eight years old watching Paperhouse for the first time, my imagination would be running wild during those scenes in Anna’s dreamworld.

Alli, I was really irritated by the mystery between Anna and Marc’s friendship. If only we were able to know if Marc was having his own recurring dream with Anna. What if they were possibly sharing the same dream? The fact that we will never know just kills me. What are your thoughts on the telepathic connection between Anna and Marc? Would you have enjoyed seeing Marc’s side of things?

Alli: I think the interesting thing about Anna and Marc’s friendship is that he has no knowledge of the world outside the dream, which leads me to believe that he was kind of subconsciously called there. Not to try to make too much technical sense of dream logic, it seems like they are sharing a dream, but since he’s less in control of it he is much more wrapped up in the dream state. Like Brandon said Paperhouse seems to be about lucid dreaming. It would be a lot harder for Marc’s dream-self to be aware what’s going on. For him, this is probably just a really crappy dream where instead of being a fantastic escape he’s still sick and unable to walk and there’s this girl urging him to be happy. As we’ve already said, we’re very sympathetic with Anna though and it’s hard to fault a girl for accidentally summoning a sick boy into her dream. I think not knowing Marc’s side of things gives us an opportunity to watch Anna grow more from her perspective. Not seeing Marc’s side, we’re figuring him out as she is. By doing that this film really captures the vulnerability of making friends as kids with kid emotions. They’re so tumultuous and dramatic, because kids are still figuring out themselves and their own boundaries.

I’m going to dare to interpret the dream logic more and say that a lot of these volatile, underdeveloped emotions are mirrored in the dreams. Her dream house is bare. The dreams themselves go from just having a conversation to terrifying faceless dream dad pretty quickly.  As traumatic as they were, the dream conflicts help Anna find more of herself. These dreams are so hard and scary because figuring out yourself is hard and scary. She learns more how to honestly interact with people and to take responsibility for her actions. She learns empathy, which is really hard for kids to learn, by talking to Marc. As she learns more about herself and matures, the dreams become more fleshed out and less bleak. 

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Brandon: Paperhouse reminds me of a very specific time in 80s children media where stories were allowed to be dark & ambiguous in a way that a lot of the more sanitized kids’ movies of late wouldn’t dare. Titles like The NeverEnding Story, Lady in White, and Return to Oz all specifically came to mind while watching the film, but I have to admit I think it’s closest comparison point was released in 2005. The Dave McKean & Neil Gaiman collaboration MirrorMask is a children’s fantasy film in which a young girl feels immense guilt over fighting with her mother before they’re separated by a sudden illness. She wrestles with this anxiety during an extended dream in which she enters & explores a world she drew by hand in her own bedroom. Sound familiar? MirrorMask is a little more obvious & blunt in its central metaphor & a lot more expansive in its dream space, but otherwise the pair make interesting companion pieces.I think if you really enjoyed one, it’d be more than worthwhile to seek out the other.

Alli: I also thought of MirrorMask, and its terrifying dreamworld, but another Neil Gaiman creation came to mind as well, Coraline, which is another story about a girl upset at her parents entering a dreamworld with duplicate parents. The terrifying Other Mother is reminiscent of faceless dad. But there’s another similarity for me. One disappointing thing the Coraline movie did that deviated from the book was to add in the male character, Wybie, that besides being a sidekick also seems to have an unnecessary crush on Coraline. And that kind of touches on my one gripe with Paperhouse. I kind of wished that Anna and Marc hadn’t become crushes and just remained friends. You so rarely see male-female friendships in movies.

Britnee: I feel really bad for being so rough on Anna’s father. He was probably just a really nice, hardworking man that has to sacrifice spending time with his family to make a decent living. Instead of seeing that initially, I jumped to conclusions and labeled him as an alcoholic and abusive father. Shame on me.

Boomer: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with reading the father as an alcoholic, as there is certainly reference to his drinking in the text. That having been said, the mind of our main character (and perhaps all children) has a tendency to exaggerate the real world, as evidenced in the way that things become larger than life in the dreaming, and that’s how I interpret that particular nuance. Still, although that’s my reading of the text, the other readings are certainly valid as well.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
December: Alli presents Last Night (1999)

January: The Top Films of 2016

-The Swampflix Crew

Watching The Dark Crystal (1982) with Toby Froud

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I’ve been a huge Jim Henson fan basically my entire life. I grew up with The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, and all of the Muppet movies. Given all of that, The Dark Crystal was a movie I watched a lot as a kid, but at that time, I don’t think any of the important detail stuck. It wasn’t until watching it last year as an adult I finally really appreciated it. The Dark Crystal functions in such a dense, beautiful world. It’s got new cultures, strange creatures, and symbols on top of symbols. I recently got the chance to see it with a Q&A by Toby Froud that expanded upon the time and love it took to create this masterpiece.

The Dark Crystal is an epic. It was Jim Henson’s passion project. He wanted to be known as a filmmaker and not just The Muppet Guy. It took Henson five years to make along with a team of highly dedicated creatives with a wide range of talents (jewelry making, costume designers, puppeteers, writers). Among them were Brain Froud who was the designer for The Dark Crystal and Wendy Midener who sculpted and created the Gelflings. They met working on the film. Toby Froud is their son and, following in the footsteps of his parents, a puppet fabricator for Laika. (He also was the baby in  Labyrinth.) Although The Dark Crystal was before he was born, he grew up with goblins and Gelflings all around, and has a unique perspective. It obviously was extremely influential for him.

Toby showed a slideshow of original concept art, screen tests, behind the scenes messing around, and supplied anecdotes to go along with each one. The Dark Crystal is one of the only movies in the world that is all puppetry. So many of the pictures showed just how much work and ingenuity these creatures took: men being stuck into Garthim suits, faces being sculpted, strange contraptions to figure out exactly how things would realistically move. Everything was crafted from the ground up. There was no story even to begin with. Jim Henson just started with images of creatures and ideas about the world; everything else just came as they started making things. People dedicated their time. Some people even risked their lives walking on stilts in Landstrider costumes on top of raised sets.

Given the dense nature of the world a lot of material has been written to expand it. There are the Creation Myths graphic novels and an upcoming full length novelization of events that occur after the original story. There have been rumors of a sequel coming for years, some sounding more serious than others. Toby Froud even said not to count the possibility out. That got me wishful thinking. A Laika-made Dark Crystal sequel is something that I would line up to see.

-Alli Hobbs

The Maries of Daisies (1966) vs The Merrye Girls of Spider Baby (1964)

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Daisies is a well-respected surrealistic art film from the Czech New Wave. It’s been discussed at length for its important status as a feminist film. Spider Baby, on the other hand, is a cult favorite, an oddball movie that, sadly, has mostly been forgotten. Despite those pretty major differences, there’s a key similarity that deserves discussion: the main pairs of characters in both films are almost the same people, right down to one being a brunette and the other a blonde. Both pairs are immature, mischievous, and have very little concept of real life consequences.

Spider Baby focuses on the Merrye family, which is so inbred that they suffer from a terrible condition which causes individual members to mentally regress as they age until they become savages. The Merrye clan lives in seclusion, and once a member of the family has fully regressed they get isolated further until they become such a threat to everyone that they get moved to their own section of the basement. Virginia and Elizabeth are two of the three remaining family members of their dying line, not yet old enough to be shoved into the basement. Being isolated from society gives them a dark, sprite-like quality. Due to their regression they have no knowledge of circumstances for their actions. Together they wantonly romp about the house, taking in pet spiders, eating bugs and suspicious fungi from their yard, and bickering almost constantly. Elizabeth is as volatile as a three year old on a bad day. Virginia regularly “plays spider,” which is a handy euphemism for murder. In their isolation, they act outside of society, with unkempt hair and make-believe games gone too far.

Daisies is a critique of Czechoslovakia under communist rule and the laws and regulations within. Marie and Marie are bored and disgusted with society. They decide one day to “go bad”. They turn into savages in flower crowns. The Maries of Daisies act stuntedly, but rather than being isolated, they’re wanton and disrespectful in public. They rip through the town, taking advantage of men, getting drunk, stealing, and eating to excess every time they get the chance. Despite their quirky destruction ultimately being intolerable, they never quite progress to murder, (though in their lawless chaos, killing doesn’t seem that far away). It is actually because of that chaos and anarchy the film was banned in its own country and from export at the time of it’s release, which resulted in Věra Chytilová being prohibited from filmmaking for 7 years.

Daisies is pointed to as a landmark of feminist cinema. Part of that distinction is that it’s an arthouse film directed by woman, but the other part comes from its idea of agency. The two Maries of Daisies are immature, “unladylike”, and savage by choice. They relish in the idea of bucking society, no matter how despicable they become. It’s no real surprise that Spider Baby would be neglected in a conversation of feminist films (or really any critical conversation about cinema), even though it features two distinct, disturbed women presented pretty sympathetically. One thing that discounts it from being a feminist film is that Elizabeth and Virginia are not given agency. They inherit their savagery via a family curse. They can’t help how wretched and impulsive they are. This makes them an object of pity and even demotes them to a damsel status resulting in them needing to be saved from society. Also, Spider Baby is directed by a man, so there’s that.

From a filmmaking standpoint, Daisies in an arthouse masterpiece and Spider Baby is a low budget horror-comedy that brings to mind the best moments of any Ed Wood film. From a character standpoint, they’re surprisingly similar. Marie and Marie don’t have a demented family in the basement, but that doesn’t stop them from being regressively chaotic like Elizabeth and Virginia. There’s a similar theme of chaos in both films that comes from presenting women who actively and violently don’t conform. Especially when, in the end, nonconformity is both sets’ downfall.

-Alli Hobbs

The Vampire’s Coffin (1958)

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I think I partially didn’t enjoy this one because I wasn’t aware that it’s a sequel to El Vampiro, which is supposed to an extremely influential classic horror. The Vampire’s Coffin probably would have made more sense and I’m sure a lot of the questions I had about the plot would have been cleared up had I seen the original. I’m going to assume this was a case of the uninspired sequel money-grab. Given all of that, the plot is still a little bit of a convoluted mess, most of which is gleaned through vague dialogue.

Dr. Saldivar breaks into a grave yard. The doctor is there on a scientific mission: to steal the corpse of a vampire, Count Karl de Lavud, and study it. Dr. Mendoza has already experienced the vampire’s wrath along with Marta, a nurse at the hospital. Marta previously was the object of the vampire’s undead desire.  When the coffin is brought to the hospital, Mendoza is outraged and makes Saldivar swear not to let Marta know that Count Lavud is back. It gets more needlessly convoluted than that and works in a wax museum, cabaret dancing, and confused police officers.

A lot of problems in The Vampire’s Coffin can be boiled down to budget and bad writing. The movie is obviously a low budget production, or at least by the standards of Hollywood in that era. There are only four settings. The soundstage sets are obvious and under-dressed. The vampire’s bat form is very clearly on a wire and there are no other attempts at fantastical effects. Instead of a true horror, it comes across more as a Mexican drama with a vampire thrown in. The romantic subplot seems to have more focus than the consequences of having a revived vampire running amok.

While it’s pretty cool to see the vampire myth happen somewhere other than Europe or America, I think the cheap movie cheese outweighs that. Between the ineffectual vampire, fake bats on strings, and obvious bare sets, The Vampire’s Coffin is just another bad sequel.

-Alli Hobbs

Movie of the Month: The Funhouse (1981)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Brandon, Alli, and Boomer  watch The Funhouse (1981).

Britnee: Carnivals are hell on earth. The image of crusty old rides, greasy funnel cakes, animal droppings, and dirt mixed together to create a nasty sludge is enough to send shivers down my spine, but the most terrifying part of carnivals is the crew. Unfortunately, carnival folk don’t have the most welcoming image in popular culture (killer clowns, evil magicians, etc.), and this is definitely apparent in horror films. Of all the carnival-themed horror film’s I’ve seen, Tobe Hooper’s extremely underrated horror flick, The Funhouse, is by far the scariest.

The Funhouse comes across as a run-of-the-mill B-movie because it follows the generic B-horror movie storyline; a group of teens get high and decide to get crazy & spend the night in their local carnival’s funhouse. It really doesn’t get cheesier than that, but somehow The Funhouse manages to be seriously scary. Of course, it has a handful of humorous moments, like when the carnival’s fortune teller, Madame Zena, gives a quick handjob to a deformed human-like monster in a Frankenstein costume or when the funhouse barker says in an absolutely ridiculous tone, “You will scream with terror, you will beg for release, but there will be no escaping, for there is no release, from the funhouse.” But honestly, the majority of the film is straight up disturbing. The gruesome murders that take place in the funhouse filled with horrifying animatronic clowns and evil dolls will haunt your dreams forever, or at least for a day or two.

Boomer, did you find The Funhouse to be a legitimately scary movie? Or do you think it falls more into the B-movie category?

Boomer: That’s an interesting thing to ask, because it begs the question of what exactly a B-Movie is, especially with regards to the Tobe Hooper oeuvre. Is Texas Chainsaw Massacre a B-Movie? Is Poltergeist? What’s the real difference between Funhouse and those two films that makes film scholarship so dismissive of it? Chainsaw is definitely a B-Movie by every objective measure: budget (a mere $300K), cast (all virtual unknowns, with the Edwin Neal having the largest pre-Chainsaw filmography, consisting entirely of dubbing voices for the American import of Gatchaman), and overall feeling of cheapness. Instead of B-Movie fodder that is remembered for its campiness, however, Chainsaw is generally regarded as a landmark horror movie for bringing terror out of the night and into the light of day, and its legacy holds up despite seven follow up films of various quality and dubious chronology (there are three sequels, then a reboot, a prequel to the reboot, then a sequel just to the original skipping all others, and an upcoming film about Leatherface’s teenage years). It’s easier to single out Poltergeist as a more traditional “prestige” horror film; having Steven Spielberg as producer lent the movie an air of credibility that neither Chainsaw nor Funhouse before it had had (and that Lifeforce,which followed in 1985, was certainly missing; even a script by Dan “I wrote Alien” O’Bannon wasn’t enough to cover the Cannon Films stench on that one, but I digress). I think the reason that Chainsaw is so widely praised is simply that it transcended the barriers of the conventional B-horror fillm to become something more fascinating and terrifying altogether. Chainsaw and Poltergeist are very Gothic at their core, with the latter heavily focusing on the brutishness of the wilderness outside of society and the uber-Gothic imagery of decaying homesteads with trapdoors and hidden rooms, and the latter focusing on pairing the very old-school Gothic concepts of hauntings and beings beyond human comprehension and pairing those ideas with the aesthetic of contemporary suburbanism.

Although I think that Funhouse is a B-Movie overall, just like the Hooper films that it is sandwiched between (minus the not-very-good Eaten Alive and the telefilm adaptation of Salem’s Lot), it certainly transcends the mold of similarly budgeted and marketed contemporaries. Often, the hallmarks of these films are that they were obviously churned out by a pulp writer with an idea that had not quite had time to mature, full of barely-realized characters and driven more by the need to reach certain scenes than weaving an organic story to get the viewer there. Funhouse can’t be described this way (in fact, if the Wikipedia page for the Dean Koontz [!] novelization based on Larry Block’s original screenplay is anything to go by, the original story idea may have verged on being overproduced); the progression of events is logical and cohesive, and although not every character could be considered three dimensional, they do all have different voices and motivations. More than that, Funhouse is also legitimately freaky at various points, and there’s an artfulness to the direction that elevates the film over other films of the same type and of the same era. Specific scenes that come to mind include the playfulness of the light coming through the fan vent in the scene where Liz meets her end at the hands of the monster, the recurring image of the Hammer Frankenstein monster that is first seen on a poster in Joey’s room before reappearing on the television downstairs and as the monster’s disguise, and the blowing wind that billows Amy’s hair in the final scenes, lending a surrealist element to the proceedings. It’s not Hooper’s finest or most memorable work, but it does show how Hooper’s eye can find something novel in even the most tired mises en scène. 

So why is the visually intriguing and memorable Funhouse, which was a moderately well-received success at the time of its release, so largely forgotten? What do you think, Brandon?

Brandon: I think that’s a fair question to ask of Hooper’s career at large, honestly. Before catching glimpses of Lifeforce & the completely insane-looking horror comedy sequel Texas Chainsaw Massacre II in the recent Golan-Globus doc Electric Boogaloo, I personally had no idea who Hooper even was. I’ve seen & enjoyed his original Chainsaw movie & the loving 50s sci-fi homage Invaders from Mars by happenstance, but he was never familiar to me as a household name, despite the fact I that I’m an obvious sucker for the genre film territory he usually treads in. The Funhouse‘s forgotten place in the cult movie canon seems to be indicative of Hooper’s often overlooked career at large. I don’t know if it was the Canon Films documentary’s doing or just slowly spreading reports of how batshit Lifeforce (a movie I’ve been dying to catch up with myself) appears to be, but his name recognition seems to be growing in certain film geek circles over the past year. I was stoked when Hooper’s name appeared in the opening credits of The Funhouse (along with special effects master Rick Baker, who absolutely kills on the creature design here) so I’d have an excuse to dive further into his work. Six months ago I would have had no idea who he was or that Texas Chainsaw Massacre & Poltergeist were even directed by the same person.

Hooper’s general lack of recognition as a household name aside, The Funhouse‘s particular forgotten state might be somewhat attributable to its mode of instant familiarity. Like Britnee & Boomer both said, the film has a visually striking, memorably discomforting way of terrorizing its audience with its creepy dolls & its murderous carnie psychopaths, but there’s something oddly warm & nostalgic at its center that cuts through its overriding nastiness. The homages to old line monster movies (in the form of the aforementioned posters, television broadcasts, and Halloween masks as well as an early-in-the-runtime spoof of the shower scene from Psycho) nest the film in a long history of horror cinema tradition that somewhat eases the shock of its early 80s nastiness (the likes of which we recently saw in former MotM Alligator). You easily can see this adherence to horror tradition in the film’s basic plot. The idea of teens sleeping in a carnival funhouse overnight and being confronted by real-life monsters within feels as old as time to me. It might be that I’ve grown up in a post-The Funhouse era where that basic plot seeps into familiar-to-me properties like Goosebumps novels & Ghoulies II, but I suspect that its fundamental narrative scenario goes back even further than those titles. The traveling carnival setting of The Funhouse feels anachronistic for even the early 1980s. This movie feels like a live-action adaptation of an urban legend dating back to a time when the arrival of traveling carnivals & funhouses were the highlight of the year for little kids, especially in small towns, even those understandably freaked out by the carnies who ran them. I could see how drive-in era horror audiences would initially take delight in watching that urban legend play out onscreen, but then gradually forget that the movie ever existed because its basic premise had already been a familiar part of the greater cultural landscape for so long.

Where do you think The Funhouse fits into the arena of urban legends & oldschool horror titles, Alli? Is it more at home with its slasher genre contemporaries, seeing how our teens in peril are hunted down by real life human creeps after indulging in *gasp* marijuana & premarital sex, or does it call back to an older, more nostalgic tone overall?

Alli: Let me start this off by saying that I feel a little unqualified to talk about the slasher genre, since I haven’t seen that many. When the term “slasher genre” comes to mind, I think about earlier ones, Psycho and Peeping Tom, and also I guess some giallo fits in there somehow. But I don’t think of them in the “true slasher” sense, somehow.

So now that I’ve gotten that disclaimer out of the way, The Funhouse seems to fit pretty well in the slasher genre right down to the idea of the final girl, though it subverts it a little. Of course, all slashers share influences which definitely creates a sense of nostalgia. Very early on, there’s a play on the Psycho shower scene and as you guys all mentioned there’s Frankenstein references throughout. Also, I think the idea of a carnival based horror goes way, way back to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (which I think there are strong arguments to be made for it being a very early example of the genre). So what I’m trying to say is that I think since the slasher genre itself is pretty timeless, nostalgia is inevitable. Then The Funhouse has the added whammy of a carnival background since as long as there have been carnivals and freak shows there have been urban legends about the horrors therein.

I mentioned about the idea of the final girl above and I want to expand that a bit more. Slasher movies traditionally have a girl as the survivor. She is usually the chaste one, who avoids drugs and alcohol. Amy at the beginning is the good girl. She is a virgin. She’s against going to the carnival and breaking the rules. But somewhere along the line, I feel like she drops the good girl act. In the bathroom during a conversation with Liz, she mentions that maybe she’s not saving her virginity. A little later on, she’s smoking marijuana. I guess I just feel like maybe she’s not quite pure, virginal, final girl material, unless it’s being comparatively chaste and drug free that gets you out of horror movies alive.

Britnee, what do you think of Amy as our protagonist? Do you think she meets the criteria for the Final Girl? Are there any other interesting plays on traditional horror tropes you noticed?

Britnee: When comparing Amy to the others in the group, I think that she’s an angel. She does give in to the ganja and isn’t the poster girl for virginity, but she’s still the most level-headed of the bunch. Buzz, Liz, and Richie (especially Richie) were all horrible people. Buzz is this ignorant macho-man that comes off as a total creep when he’s alone with Amy, Liz is a straight up bad friend, and Richie is an obnoxious, greedy little bastard. Needless to say, I wasn’t surprised to see them each meet their gruesome deaths in the funhouse. Now that I’m thinking of it, the dumb teenager that gets violently killed is definitely a horror trope that is present in The Funhouse. Buzz, Liz, and Richie each meet have their one-on-one time with the killer, which is the most popular way for a bad teenager to die in slasher flicks.

Now as for Amy being the final girl, I do think that she meets the criteria. She’s got a good head on her shoulders (at least when compared to her friends), and when she comes face to face with the funhouse monster at the end of the film, she does everything in her power to defeat him. Amy is far from being a damsel in distress and she defeats the film’s male antagonist, so I would consider her to be final girl material. She really does have one of the most interesting final girl exits that I’ve ever seen. After she survives the hell of the funhouse, she walks silently into the carnival grounds and doesn’t utter a peep to the few people hanging around. Something about her exit from the funhouse just makes me think of her as badass heroine. It’s probably because she doesn’t crawl out of the building crying and screaming for help, as one would expect anyone to do when under those circumstances.

Boomer, I can’t figure out the importance of the creepy witchy woman that lingers in the background of the film. Her most notable scene was when she was in the bathroom with Liz and Amy, and she approaches them with her famous words, “God is watching you!” Do you think that the Bathroom Witch (Brandon gave her this name during the viewing) was underused in this film? Or do you think her presence was completely unnecessary?

Boomer: In my previous section, I mentioned the novel adaptation the film written by Dean Koontz; that book has its own separate Wikipedia page that outlines a more in-depth (and, honestly, needlessly complicated) plot that features a back story that involves a previous relationship between the carnival barker and Ellen, the religious alcoholic mother of Amy and Joey. I guess I spoiled myself on this question, because the issues of faith and evil seem to be more present in the book (and thus the original screenplay): Ellen and the barker were married and had an evil son, whom Ellen killed; she then had Amy and Joey, whom she religiously oppresses. The barker had Gunther with Madame Zena (yeah, think about that for a second), and believes that Gunther’s evil nature is Satan giving him an assist to exact vengeance on Ellen.

The religious overtones of the original story lead me to infer that this woman played a more significant role in the first draft and was largely cut. Part of Amy’s internal struggle in the novel is that her mother accuses of her of being evil, like a Margaret White who never really commits to a full-on closet-locking; being confronted by a Bathroom Witch who reminds Amy of her repressed doubt would have probably been a single moment in a larger appearance, although having all of that back story omitted from the final screen product does make this scene seem a bit inexplicable. Still, if this had been a story that was more grandiose in its treatment of generational evil, I think it would have traded the sleazy charm that it does possess for a bathetic melodrama; it’s better this way.

Brandon, if you could add a different back story for the film or otherwise weave in additional plot elements, what would you add to make the film better?

Brandon: If there’s anything missing or underutilized in the film I think it’s somewhere in the titular funhouse setting itself. The Funhouse does well enough in establishing a surreal, nightmarish tone without relying on any explicitly supernatural element. Even Gunther’s monstrous, Rick Baker-created appearance is explained to be a natural occurrence, one mirrored by the real life two-headed cows & mutated specimens in the carnival’s freak show. The audience sees the carnival from Final Girl Amy’s perspective, which establishes the otherworldly nightmare tone as she seems to be the only one among her gang of idiot teens who seems to notice how grotesque & off everything feels before the shit inevitably hits the fan in the funhouse. I appreciate that the movie keeps its terrors anchored in the real world. It’s a choice that helps maintain the film’s tangible danger & menace. However, I think a little more play with the laws of nature inside the funhouse might’ve benefited the film’s longterm legacy.

Horror films & funhouses were made for each other for obvious reasons: spooky atmosphere, ambiguity for “real” scary monsters to hide among the fake ones, ample opportunity for jump scares, etc. The Funhouse makes the most out of these obvious set-specific opportunities that it can, but I think it might’ve missed out on bending the rules of reality a bit within its funhouse setting. The bright colors, spooky lighting, and playful ambience of a funhouse already aims for a supernatural subversion of reality, one that could have justified some reality-bending trickery on-camera once the teens are being hunted down. I think The Funhouse works perfectly well as a straightforward slasher at a specific, bizarre setting and it does make good use of set-specific props in its final act, but I wouldn’t have minded a little supernatural surreality mixed in with its real world horrors.

Alli, do you think The Funhouse could have benefited from some supernatural horror once it reaches its titular setting, or did it benefit by keeping its horror explicitly “real”?

Alli: I was kind of relieved that it took it in a more real direction. It was really interesting to me that a lot of the scariest parts were the behind-the-scenes inner-workings of the carnival. Funhouses are generally not as exciting or as fun as the name implies. They’re generally cheap smoke and mirrors, but it’s that cut-throat cheapness that makes them actually terrifying. (Or maybe I spend too much time looking at rideaccidents.com) The inside is creepy for sure, but the final scene takes place underneath it all. The clanking of chains and whirling of fans are disorienting and disconcerting. The ghouls and ghosts that jump out while the thing is running are not as deadly or threatening as an angry fortune teller or carnival lackey. Even the monster wears a mask of another monster because the reality is more hideous.  I think the real world horror grounds this in a way that makes it fairly believable. Weirdos are scary: bathroom preachers, sideshow barkers, fetuses in jars. The Funhouse does a good job at preying on that.

I’m not trying to rule out the idea of a demon-possessed funhouse completely, but any time the supernatural is involved a movie really starts pushing it towards cheesy. What could have worked in the supernatural direction is more rumors in the set-up, like kids talking about real skeletons of past victims being used or ghosts of dead carnies cursed to wander forever from town to town waiting to spook unsuspecting teens. That sort of ambiguity added to the real life fright could have upped the ambience.

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Lagniappe

Boomer: I’d love to go back to Alli’s question about whether Amy is the Final Girl or just a final girl. Amy is an interesting candidate for this title, given that she’s very unlike the women who served to canonize this archetype. She’s neither chaste nor sober, and, minus the early draft inclusion of Ellen’s relationship with the barker, she has no connection to the killer. Still, there does seem to be an ineffable Final Girlness to her that belies her nonstandard status.

Britnee: Joey is the absolute worst. He is one of the most disturbingly creepy little brothers in the history of film. There’s a mysterious scene where Joey almost gets killed by a truck driver with a shotgun, and it’s the only time I slightly felt worried for his well-being. Well, that and the fact that he lives with an alcoholic mother.

Brandon:  Like Britnee, I mostly found Joey to be an insufferable little shit. After he scares his sister in the shower with the opening scene’s giallo/Psycho homage it’s difficult to feel any empathy for the detestable little scamp. However, I will admit that my Joey-hatred did fade a little once I realized how much worse the adults of his world are. Before we even meet the Bathroom Witch or see the worst of the barker & Gunther, we get Madame Zena yelling at (admittedly disrespectful) stoner teens, “Don’t come back or I’ll break every bone in your fucking bodies!” Every on-screen adult pounds back hard liquor. A tent full of working class men make a grotesque display out of ogling strippers that’s somehow just as much of a nightmare as the last-act teen hunt. A random trucker pulls over on the highway to point a gun at Joey, a small child, just so he can laugh in his face. Joey never earns likeability, exactly, but it’s at least a lot easier to understand why he’s such a shit once you get the full picture of the hate-filled early 80s hellscape he was raised in.

Alli: To go back to Joey: at the end we never really know too much of what happened to him, just that he was in some carnie’s trailer knocked out with a fever. They chase him down, catch him and drag him off. What exactly did they do to him off-screen? He may have been the definition of obnoxious little brother, but whatever happened in the meantime to him he probably didn’t deserve. 

Upcoming Movies of the Month:
November: Boomer presents Paperhouse (1988)
December: Alli presents Last Night (1999)
January: The Top Films of 2016

-The Swampflix Crew

Halloween Report 2016: Best of the Swampflix Horror Tag

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Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means a lot of cinephiles & horror nerds out there are currently trying to cram in as many scary movies as they can before the best day of the year (except for Mardi Gras, of course) passes us by. We here at Swampflix watch a lot of horror films year round, so instead of overloading you with the full list of all the spooky movies we’ve covered since last year’s Halloween report, here’s a selection of the best of the best. We’ve tried to break it down into a few separate categories to help you find what cinematic scares you’re looking for. Hope this helps anyone looking to add some titles to their annual horror binge! Happy hauntings!

Art House Horror

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If you’re looking for an escape from the endless parade of trashy slasher movies & want a more formally refined style of horror film, this list might be a good place to start.

The Neon Demon (2016): “The Neon Demon is consistently uncomfortable, but also intensely beautiful & surprisingly humorous. Days later my eyeballs are still bleeding from its stark cinematography & my brain is still tearing itself in half trying to find somewhere to land on its thematic minefield of female exploitation, competition, narcissism, and mystic power. This film is going to make a lot of people very angry and I’m certain that’s exactly the reaction Refn is searching for, the cruel bastard. At the same time it’s my favorite thing I’ve seen all year. I’m caught transfixed by its wicked spell & its bottomless wealth of surface pleasures, even as I wrestle with their implications. This is where the stylized form of high art meets the juvenile id of low trash and that exact intersection is why I go to the movies in the first place. The Neon Demon may not be great social commentary, but it’s certainly great cinema.”

The Witch (2016): “A lot of times when you tell people that you really liked a horror movie the first question they ask is ‘Was it scary?’ Now, that’s not a requirement for me to enjoy myself at a horror showing. Horror can be funny or gruesome or just eccentric or interesting enough to make questions about whether or not it was scary to even be relevant. With The Witch, however, I can actually answer that question bluntly & with enthusiasm. The Witch is a scary movie. It’s a haunting, beautifully shot, impossibly well-researched witchcraft horror with an authenticity that’s unmatched in its genre going at least as far back as 1922’s Häxan, so it has many virtues outside the simple question of whether or not it was a scary movie, but yes, The Witch succeeds there as well. At times it can be downright terrifying.”

High-Rise (2016): “High-Rise is, at heart, a mass hysteria horror, a surreal exploration of a weird, unexplained menace lurking in our modern political & economic anxieties. Instead of simply leaving the titular building when things go horrifically sour, its inhabitants instead party harder and their drunken revelry devolves into a grotesque, months-long rager of deadly hedonism & de Sade levels of sexual depravity. The people of the high-rise are portrayed as just another amenity, one that can malfunction & fall apart just as easily & thoroughly as a blown circuit or a busted water pipe. It only takes weeks for the societal barriers that keep them in line to fully degenerate so that the entire high-rise society is partying violently in unison in their own filth & subhman cruelty. If this is a version of America’s future in consumerism & modern convenience, it’s a harshly damning one, a confounding nightmare I won’t soon forget.”

Tale of Tales (2016): “It’s beautiful, morbidly funny, brutally cold, everything you could ask for from a not-all-fairy-tales-are-for-children corrective. It’s sometimes necessary to remind yourself of the immense wonder & dreamlike stupor a great movie can immerse you in and Tale of Tales does so only to stab you in the back with a harsh life lesson (or three) once you let your guard down. This is ambitious filmmaking at its most concise & successful, never wavering from its sense of purpose or attention to craft. I’d be extremely lucky to catch a better-looking, more emotionally effective work of cinematic fantasy before 2016 comes to a close. Or ever, really.”

The Boy (2015): “Much like the empty, existential trudge through life at its desolate motel setting, The Boy brings its pace down to a slow crawl for most of its runtime. Most of the film plays like a lowkey indie drama that turns the idea of morbid fascination into a mood-defining aesthetic. It isn’t until the last half hour so that the film becomes recognizable as an 80s slasher version of Norman Bates: The Early Years. It takes a significant effort to get to the film’s horror genre payoffs, but allowing the film to lull you into a creepily hypnotic state makes that last minute tonal shift all the more satisfying.”

The Body Snatcher (1945): “The Body Snatcher is surely one of the best of Karloff & Lugosi’s collaborations and a fitting note for the pair to end their work together on. The film’s promotional material promises The Body Snatcher to be, ‘The screen’s last word in shock sensation!’ which might not be true for cinema at large, but is at least literally true in the context of Lugosi & Karloff’s appearances together on film. It was the final word.”

Goodnight Mommy (2015): “Goodnight Mommy is a smart, taut movie that is beautifully composed and cinematically crisp, full of beautiful exterior landscape shots that highlight the isolation of the two boys and contribute to the logic of their slowly building paranoia in a home that no longer feels safe and a caregiver they cannot recognize.”

Silent Horror

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If the above list of art-house horror titles is a little too modern for your tastes & you’re curious about the genre’s origins in the 20s & 30s, here are some particularly great examples of horror cinema’s early beginnings.

A Page of Madness (1926): “A whirlwind of rapid edits, bizarre imagery, and an oppressive absence of linear storytelling make A Page of Madness feel like a contemporary with, say, Eraserhead or Tetsuo: The Iron Man instead of a distant relic of horror cinema. It’s an early masterwork of disjointed, abstract filmmaking and it’s one that was nearly lost forever, considered unobtainable for nearly four decades before a salvageable (and significantly shortened) print was re-discovered.“

The Phantom Carriage (1921): “The Phantom Carriage is well worth a watch even outside its massive influence on the likes of Kubrick & Bergman. The film was noteworthy in its time for innovations in its ghostly camera trickery and its flashback-within-a-flashback narrative structure. Those aspects still feel strikingly anachronistic & forward-thinking today, especially the gnarly phantom imagery, but you don’t have to be a film historian to appreciate what’s essentially a timeless story of brutally cold selfishness & heartbreaking remorse.”

The Bat (1926): “The Bat is a must-see work of seminal art. It’s not some antiquated bore with an antagonist that was plucked from lowly ranks for a higher purpose. The film directly influenced the creation of Batman, but it also achieves its own, exquisite Art Deco horror aesthetic that recalls the immense wonders of the Hollywood classic The Black Cat, except with more of a creature feature lean.”

Destiny (1921): “Released in the wake of the seminal Swedish masterpiece The Phantom Carriage, Destiny (sometimes billed as Behind the Wall or Weary Death) offers yet another striking image of Death as he conducts his business of harvesting expired souls (this time depicted as a passenger in a carriage instead of the driver, oddly enough). The early German expressionism landmark expanded the limitations of film as a medium, even cited by legendary directors like Alfred Hitchcock & Luis Buñuel as proof that cinema had potential & merit as an artform. The film’s ambitious special effects, unconventional storytelling, and morbid mix of death & romance all amount to a one of a kind glimpse into modern art cinema’s humble silent era beginnings.”

The Lost World (1925): “The same way the blend of CGI & animatronics floored audiences with “realistic” dinos in Jurassic Park‘s 1994 release, the stop motion dinosaurs of 1925’s The Lost World were an unfathomable achievement at its time. When the source material’s author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle screened test footage for the press (at a magician’s conference of all places) The New York Times even excitedly reported ‘(Conan Doyle’s) monsters of the ancient world, or of the new world which he has discovered in the ether, were extraordinarily life like. If fakes, they were masterpieces.’ Imagine writing that ‘if fakes’ qualifier in earnest & how quickly that writer’s head would have exploded if they got a glimpse of Spielberg’s work 70 years later.”

The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920): “An ancient German Expressionism creature feature about Jewish mysticism, The Golem: How He Came Into the World bounces back & forth from being an incredible work that nearly rivals Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon in sheer beauty & ambition and the most standard issue silent horror you can conjure in your mind.”

Giallo

Dario Argento is one of the all-time horror movie greats, right up there with Mario Bava as one of the masters of the highly-influential giallo genre. His work is a perfect blend of art house cinema & trashy genre fare, the exact formula Swampflix treasures most. Boomer was in the midst of tirelessly covering all of Argento’s films at the time we posted our Halloween Report last year. He’s since finished the project and covered a few non-Argento giallo pictures in its wake. Here’s the best of what’s been posted since.

The Stendhal Syndrome (1996): “What separates art and sculpture from prose, film, drama, and music is that those media incorporate time as an element of the story, progressing in a more or less linear fashion from beginning to end. Paintings and sculptures do not have this luxury, and thus must evoke an emotional rapport and create a rhetorical space through a still image, implying motion with static visuals. The Stendhal Syndrome, in many ways, acts as a series of set pieces that are presented out of order, and must be ordered after viewing. You cannot read The Night Watch from left to right like a sentence; you first see the figures highlighted by chiaroscuro, and then focus on other faces, or the figures’ clothing. Syndrome is much the same, and the attempt to recreate this kind of experience on film is laudable in its audacity and its success. I simply wish that they appeared in a movie that was praiseworthy for the content of its story as well.”

The Church (La chiesa) (1989): “So much is left unexplained that La chiesa fails under minimal scrutiny. That having been said, this is still a very effective and scary film. The gore here is shocking because so much of the terror comes from slowly-building tension of watching possessed people act in eerie and creepy ways toward the unsuspecting innocents they have infiltrated. There are visuals here that I don’t think Argento would have been able to realize with his own skill sets, and there’s a writhing mass of dead bodies at the end that’s truly glorious in all its grotesque hideousness.”

Sleepless (2001): “Sleepless isn’t necessarily a return to form with regards to inventive cinematography, but it does feature several set pieces that effectively ramp up the tension while also being visually dynamic in a way that Argento hadn’t shown an aptitude for in the nineties–not even once. The first of such set pieces, the chase aboard the train, stands out as being particularly remarkable, and may be one of the best from the director’s entire career.”

Body Puzzle (1992): “Body Puzzle is a fun little giallo thriller, with delightful cinematography and a plot that works, for the most part. The tension builds slowly as it becomes apparent that there is no safe place for Tracy no matter where she goes, and the final reveal is foreshadowed in a manner that is utterly unexpected but fits all the clues that we have seen so far, minus a red herring that I am certain made most contemporary reviewers rather pissed, given the film’s overall low aggregate rating.”

The House with Laughing Windows (1976): “There’s a lot to unpack in The House with the Laughing Windows, and I like that the entire village is in on the murders, a la the original Wicker Man or the modern classic Hot Fuzz, although the reason for why the consent to be complicit in the murders requires inspection. As is the case with many gialli from this era, there is a larger cultural context that I am unfamiliar with, and that knowledge may lend itself to a clearer interpretation of the film’s themes.”

Confined Space Thrillers

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One of the more unexpected trends of 2016 is how many high quality confined space thrillers have terrorized filmgoers throughout the year. Here’s some of the best examples of claustrophobic horrors we’ve seen this year.

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016): “10 Cloverfield Lane is less of a ‘sister film’ sequel to the (shrill, annoying, insufferable) 2008 found-footage sci-fi horror Cloverfield & more of a tense, horror-minded thriller about the monstrous spirit lurking within doomsday prepper culture. I’m not sure that it’s the first film to depict the selfish nastiness & misanthropy at the heart of ‘survival’ types in the context of the horror genre, but it’s the first I’ve seen and it’s damn effective.”

The Invitation (2016): “The isolation of the main character’s skepticism makes The Invitation feel just as much like a psychological horror as it does a reverse home invasion thriller (where the victim is invited as a guest to the threatening stranger’s home). With the production value just as cheap as the fictional party’s wine looks expensive, The Invitation has a way of feeling like everything’s happening inside of its protagonist’s head as he works through painful memories in a storied space, as if he’s navigating a nightmare or a session of hypnotherapy. Thankfully, the film goes to a much more interesting & terrifying place than an it-was-all-just-a-dream reveal, but the psychological torment of the film’s nobody-believes-me terror adds a layer of meaning & emotional impact that would be absent without that single-character specificity.”

Don’t Breathe (2016): “Even with all of its flaws, Don’t Breathe is a delightfully wicked and taut horror thriller with great influences from other films in the same genre and outside of it. Beyond the ‘blind person fends off home invaders’ similarities to Wait Until Dark and the superficial similarities to The Edukators, there’s a lot of The People Under the Stairs in Don’t Breathe’s DNA (minus that film’s exploration of the race-related nature of economic disadvantage, which is lacking here).”

Green Room (2016): “Green Room‘s authenticity doesn’t stop at its depictions of D.I.Y. punk culture. The violence is some of the most horrifically brutal, gruesome gore I’ve seen in a long while, not least of all because it’s treated with the real life severity that’s often missing in the cheap horror films that misuse it. Each disgusting kill hits with full force, never feeling like a frivolous indulgence, and the resulting tone is an oppressive cloud of unending dread.”

Emelie (2016): “It’s rare that a thriller can get away with being this tense while showing so little onscreen violence. Emelie knows exactly what buttons to push to sell the discomfort of its children in peril scenario, especially when the kids are forced into exposure to above-their-age-range experiences like witnessing a python’s feeding habits or passionate fornication. If it had somehow worked those same provocations into its desperate-for-distinction conclusion I would’ve been much more enthusiastic about its value as a complete product. I really like Emelie, but with a better third act I could’ve fallen madly in love with it.”

Creature Features

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Do you want to see some weird/gross/creepy/goofy monsters? Check out these bad boys.

Alligator (1980): “Campy creature features were a hot commodity around the time Alligator was released (Piranha, Humanoids from the Deep, C.H.U.D., etc.), and usually the film gets thrown into that group. Yes, there are many campy moments in Alligator, but it’s actually an excellent, well-rounded film. I would go as far as to say it’s close to being on the same level as Jaws.”

I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957): “The main innovation I Was a Teenage Werewolf brings to the table is the very basic idea of a teenage monster. It’s difficult to imagine modern horror cinema without teenage monsters. Transforming into a heinous, bloodthirsty monstrosity is a perfect metaphor for the hormonal powder keg of puberty and has been put to effective use in countless horror pictures. Even the werewolf teenager picture has evolved into its own genre, including titles like Ginger Snaps, Cursed, and, duh, Teen Wolf. In 1957, however, this idea was entirely foreign & even somewhat controversial.”

Pulgasari (1985): “Even without its exceedingly surreal context as a document of unlawful imprisonment under Kim Jong-il’s thumb, Pulgasari would still be highly recommendable as a slice of over-the-top creature feature cinema. I’m far from an expert in the hallmarks of kaiju cinema, but the film felt wholly unique to me, an odd glimpse into the way the genre can lend itself to wide variety of metaphors the same way zombies, vampires, and X-Men have in American media over the years. The titular monster ranges from cute to terrifying, from friend to enemy over the course of the film, which is a lot more nuanced than what I’m used to from my kaiju.”

Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare (1968): “Perhaps the strangest detail about the ghost monsters in Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare is just how kid-friendly they look. I don’t use the comparison to the soon-to-follow work of Jim Henson and Sid & Marty Krofft lightly. Many of the creature designs are just aching for plushie doll or action figure merchandise, a sensation backed up by the film’s broad physical comedy & the fact that they befriend children in the film. What’s strange about this is that so much of the film would be a nightmare for certain young audiences. Ghosts take shape from magical, colored mists in spooky swamps. Buckets of giallo-crimson stage blood is spilled in the film’s many brawls. Adult language like ‘damn’, ‘bastard’, and ‘hell’ are liberally peppered throughout the script. This is all jarring at first, but when I think back to staging action figure battles on the living room carpet, that sort of violent crassness actually makes total sense. Children can often be goofy & violent in the same breath, so then it’s really no surprise that Spook Warfare was somewhat of a cultural hit upon its initial release. Even as an (admittedly goofy) adult, the mere sight of the film’s gang of monsters was enough to win me over as a fan, effectively bringing out my inner child enough to sidestep any concerns with plot or general purpose. Sometimes monsters brawling really can alone be enough to make a great film & Spook Warfare stands as a prime example of that maxim.”

Attack the Block (2011): “There are plenty of reasons for sci-fi & horror fans to give Attack the Block a solid chance. It’s a perfectly crafted little midnight monster movie, one with a charming cast of young’ns, a wicked sense of humor, and some top shelf creature feature mayhem. The film doesn’t need John Boyega’s teenage presence to be worthy of a retroactive recommendation & reappraisal, but that doesn’t hurt either.”

Clown (2016): “Without any intentional maneuvers in its fashion, music, or narrative, Clown effortlessly taps into a current trend of reflective 90s nostalgia by lovingly recreating the horror cheapies of that era. It does so by striking a very uncomfortable balance between horror comedy & gruesome misanthropy, forging a truly cruel sense of humor in a heartless, blood-soaked gore fest featuring a killer clown & his tiny tyke victims. You’d have to change very few details of Clown to convince me that it was actually a Full Moon Features release made twenty years ago. Besides small details like cell-phone usage and the inclusion of ‘That guy!’ character actor Peter Stormare, the only noticeable difference is that, unlike most Full Moon ‘classics’, it’s a genuinely great product.”

Daikaijû Gamera (1965): “Gamera is essentially a too-soon remake of Godzilla, but it’s a Godzilla remake that features a gigantic, fire-breathing turtle that can turn its shell into a flying saucer. I don’t think I need to explain any more than that to get the film’s basic appeal across. It’s a concept that pretty much sells itself.”

The Shallows (2016): “The film’s basic 1-shark-vs.-1-woman premise has a campy appeal to it. However, the shark attacks do have a real gravity to them as well. There’s intense gore in the film’s moments of self surgery & genuine heart-racing thriller beats when our hero & her friend the seagull have to stave off real-life dehydration & cabin fever. The Shallows is satisfied relegating itself to a 100% trashy surface pleasure ethos, but it doesn’t let up on the practical results of its central scenario’s violence & confinement and that dual goofy/scary balance is what makes this such effective summertime schlock.”

How to Make a Monster (1958): “Instead of staging a logical physical altercation of the Teenage Werewolf & Teenage Frankenstein from the previous pictures, How to Make a Monster instead depicts a movie production of that altercation. Set on the American International Pictures movie lot, the film centers on the make-up artist who created the look of the Teenage Werewolf & Teenage Frankenstein and his mental unraveling during the production of a film where the two monsters meet onscreen. It’s the exact kind of meta horror weirdness I was a huge sucker for in Wes Craven films like New Nightmare (except maybe a little cheaper & a little goofier) and it works like gangbusters.”

Weirdo Outliers

Halfway between high art & the depths of trash, these titles occupy a strange middle ground that defies expectations. They also are some of the scariest movies on the list in completely unexpected ways.

Tourist Trap (1979): “Tourist Trap instantly became one of my favorite horror films of all-time. I literally got goosebumps several times throughout the film, and I’m not one who gets scared easily. I highly recommend Tourist Trap for anyone remotely disturbed by mannequins or psychopaths.”

#horror (2015): “An explosion of emojis, group texts, cyber-bullying and, oddly enough, fine art, #horror is an entirely idiosyncratic film, a sort of modern take on the giallo style-over-substance horror/mystery formula, with its stylization firmly in line with the vibrant vapidity of life online in the 2010s. It’s such a strange, difficult to stomach experience that it somehow makes total sense that the film premiered as The Museum of Modern Art in NYC before promptly going straight to VOD with little to no critical fanfare.”

Hardware (1990): “The onslaught of roboviolence that dominates the final 2/3rds of Hardware is a chilling glimpse into Cronenberg’s America. Hardware‘s basics are very simple: a damsel in distress is trapped by a scary monster (robot) and any attempt to rescue her leads to more bloodshed. As trashy & campy as these genre films can be, however, Stanley manages to make them uniquely terrifying & unnerving. Hardware is both exactly just like every other creature feature I’ve ever seen before & not at all like any of them. I don’t know what to say about the film’s particular brand of horror other than it subliminally dialed into a part of my mind I prefer to leave locked up & hidden away. Stanley’s debut feature is both a schlocky horror trifle & an unholy incantation that puts the ugliest aspects of modernity to disturbing, downright evil use.”

The Nightmare (2015): “Ascher’s follow-up applies Room 237‘s judgement-free presentations of wild supposition to a different subject entirely: the phenomenon of sleep paralysis. Halfway between the late night paranormal radio broadcast Coast to Coast AM & the hyper-artificial dramatic re-enactments of Rescue 911, The Nightmare pushes the boundaries of what a documentary even is & what it possibly could be. Ascher’s approach has little concern for evidence or context, but instead builds narratives from the oral history end of anthropology.”

Trick ‘r Treat (2007): “Although Trick ‘r Treat is far from perfect in terms of consistency & tone, its reverence for Halloween as a social & spiritual institution makes it a perfect candidate for the annual revisits I usually reserve for The Monster Squad & The Worst Witch. As soon as one of the first characters introduced is brutally murdered for offense of griping, ‘I hate Halloween,’ and talking down their decorations a day early, the film establishes its mission statement: to protect the sanctity of dressing up in costumes & eating candy at all costs.”

Bone Tomahawk (2015): “Bone Tomahawk strikes a satisfying balance between living out a (possibly outdated) genre (or two)’s worst trappings & subverting them for previously unexplored freshness. Part of what makes it work as a whole is the deliciously over-written dialogue, like when David Arquette’s ruffian thief complains to the sheriff, ‘You’ve been squirting lemon juice in my eye since you walked in here,’ but mostly it’s just nice to see Kurt Russell back in the saddle participating in weird, affecting genre work.”

Southbound (2016): “As a modern horror anthology, Southbound mostly delivers both on its genre-specific surface pleasures & its interest in boundary-pushing narrative innovation, which is more than you can say for most modern horror films it resembles. Besides, it features David Yow wielding a shotgun like a raving lunatic. Where else are you going to find that? (Please don’t ever tell me there’s an answer to that question.)”

Horror Comedy

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Here’s some recommendations in case you’re looking to have some yucks along with your scares.

Goosebumps (2015): “I personally would’ve preferred if Goosebumps had been anchored more by practical effects rather than its somewhat tiresome CGI (although there were some genuinely effective visual cues like a beautiful funhouse mirror sequence & a sad little box labeled ‘Dad’s Stuff’ in the film) but the younger generation of kids in the audience are highly likely not to care about that distinction. For them, the film is more or less perfect as a primer for horror & horror comedy as a genre, CGI warts & all and, honestly, that’s all that really matters.”

Krampus (2015): “Other than it being a horror film about a murderous Christmas beast, one of the weirdest things about Krampus is that it made it to the big screen. Most Christmas horror movies go straight to DVD. I can’t even remember the last time a Christmas horror film was in theaters. It may have been the 2006 remake of Black Christmas, but I’m not quite sure. Anyway, it’s always a good sign when a campy movie makes it to theaters. Krampus brought in over $16,000,000 on its opening weekend, which is pretty impressive considering its campy reputation. Bad taste is alive and well!”

Ghostbusters (2016): “It’s subtle, but there’s a lot of love and respect for Ghostbusters as a franchise in this film, no matter what you’ve heard. Some of the more slapsticky moments went on a little long for me, but there’s too much fun to be had to stick your head in the sand and ignore this movie just because the ‘Busters aren’t the same ones that you grew up with. And, hey, if Dave Coulier replacing Lorenzo Music as the voice of Venkman in The Real Ghostbusters or the creation of the Slimer! shorts to pad out the Slimer and the Real Ghostbusters hour didn’t destroy the Ghostbusters legacy, this certainly won’t either.”

The Final Girls (2015): “If you happen to be a fan of 80s ‘camp site slasher films’ like Friday the 13th & Sleepaway Camp and you enjoy meta genre send-ups like Scream & The Last Action Hero, please check out The Final Girls as soon as you can. Save reading reviews (like this one, for instance) for after you give the film a chance. It’s best to go into this movie cold if you can manage it. I wish I had, anyway.”

Deathgasm (2015): “On the surface, Deathgasm has a lot more in common with the chaotic 1980s horror franchise Demons than it does with zombie fare like Dead Alive. It’s just that the films’ eye-gouging, throat-slitting, head-removing, blood-puking mayhem is played almost entirely for grossout humor instead of the discomforting terror inherent to films like Demons. This is especially apparent in the gore’s juxtaposition with rickroll gags & the goofy image of kids in corpse paint enjoying an ice cream cone. The horror comedy of Deathgasm is far from unique, though. What truly makes Deathgasm stand out is its intimate understanding of metal as a subculture. It’s easily the most knowledgeable movie in that respect that I’ve seen since the under-appreciated Tenacious D road trip comedy Pick of Destiny. I mean that as the highest of compliments. The difference there is that Pick of Destiny (besides being relatively violence free) got a lot of the attitude right, but didn’t have bands with names like Skull Fist, Axeslasher, and Beastwars on the soundtrack. Deathgasm not only looks & acts the part; it also sounds it, which is a rare treat.”

Campy Spectacles

If you’re looking for a little irony in your horror comedy yucks, these films tend more towards the so-bad-it’s-funny side of humor, sometimes intentionally and sometimes far from it. They’re the best we have to offer in terms of bad taste.

My Demon Lover (1987): “I honestly didn’t expect My Demon Lover to be much different than the other hundreds of campy 80s comedies out there, but it actually does a great job standing out on its own. At first, the film didn’t seem like it was going to be anything but a cheeseball comedy about a fruit burger-eating airhead that falls for a perverted homeless guy who may or may not be a killer demon. Thankfully, things become much more interesting as the film goes on. The monster movie and romcom elements of My Demon Lover come together to create a rare combination that makes for one hell of a memorable flick.”

Slumber Party Massacre 2 (1987): “The Slumber Party Massacre II gets everything right on its approach to slasher-driven mayhem. The origins & specifics of its killer rock n’ roll sex demon are just flat out ignored. All you know, really, is that he kinda looks like Andrew Dice Clay (although I’m sure they were aiming for Elvis) with a Dracula collar on his leather jacket & a gigantic power drill extending from the neck of his electric guitar (or ‘axe’ in 80s speak). He mercilessly disembowels & impales teen victims on his monstrously phallic weapon/musical instrument all while shredding hot licks & doling out generic rock ‘n roll phrases like ‘This is dedicated to the one I love’ & ‘C’mon baby, light my fire’ before each kill.”

The Flesh Eaters (1965): “The Flesh Eaters is horrifically violent for a mid-60s creature feature, paying great attention to the special effects of its blood & guts make-up. Many credit the film as being the very first example of gore horror & it’s difficult to argue otherwise. The anachronistic-feeling intrusion of extreme violence in what otherwise feels like a standard Corman-esque B-picture is beyond striking. Although I’ve seen far worse gore in films that followed in its wake, the out-of-place quality the violence has in The Flesh Eaters makes the film feel shocking & upsetting in a transgressive way.”

The Boy (2016): “I expected The Boy to play out more or less exactly like the last PG-13 evil doll movie to hit the theaters, the largely disappointing Rosemary’s Baby knockoff Annabelle, but the film sets its sights much higher than that light supernatural tomfoolery. It’s far from wholly original as a horror flick, but instead it pulls enough wacky ideas from a wide enough range of disparate horror movie sources that it ended up being an enjoyably kooky melting pot of repurposed ideas.”

Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? (2016): “It’s a well-informed balance between heady subject matter & campily melodramatic execution that makes Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? such a riot, a formula that holds true for all of Lifetime’s most memorable features whether they focus on co-ed call-girls, wife-mother-murderers or, in this case, lesbian vampires. This film has the gall to approach topics as powerful as grieving over familial loss, coming out to your parents, and the horrors of date rape, but does so only as a means to a tawdry end, namely inane mother-daughter shouting matches & young, lingerie-clad girls making out in spooky graveyards. It’s wonderfully trashy in that way, the best possible prospect for made-for-TV dreck.”

Cursed (2005): “I wouldn’t rank Cursed up there with Wes Craven’s best or anything like that, but I don’t think the director was aiming for that kind of accolade with this film anyway. Cursed finds Craven relaxed, having fun, and paying tribute to the monster movies he grew up loving. Throw in a time capsule cast & some classic werewolf puppetry/costuming from special effects master & John Landis collaborator Rick Baker (when the film isn’t indulging in ill-advised CGI) and you have a perfectly enjoyable midnight monster movie pastiche.”

Victor Frankenstein (2015): “Victor Frankenstein‘s latent homosexuality (which really does stretch just beyond the bounds of bromance), laughable atheism, and grotesque body humor all play like they were written in a late-night, whiskey-fuelled stupor, the same way the film’s monster was constructed by the titular mad scientist drunk & his perpetually terrified consort. I know I’m alone here, but my only complaint about this film is that it could’ve pushed its more ridiculous territory even further from Mary Shelly’s original vision, with Victor planting wet kisses on Igor’s cheeks & Rocky Horror’s ‘In just seven days, I can make you a man . . .’ blaring on the soundtrack.”

Death Ship (1980): “It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly it is that makes Death Ship engaging. It’s a disappointment in most regards. The acting is terrible, the characters are under-developed (to the point of wondering if anyone even tried at all), and the premise is never really fully explained. There are some shocks, but they’re too hokey to be convincing or effective. In fact, there’s almost nothing redeemable about this film at all. Yet, I still enjoyed it. Maybe not as a spooky Shining-esque boat horror I assume they intended, but as a campy masterpiece.”

Cooties (2015): “Cooties may be a dirt cheap horror comedy, but it finds a downright lyrical, disorienting visual language in the spread of its central epidemic. You feel like a little kid who just spun too fast while playing ring around the rosie watching the film’s violence unfold. It’s fun to watch as a horror fan, but it must’ve been even more fun to film for the little kids who got the chance, given how much of the film’s violence resembles typical playground activity.”

Rubber (2011): “A full-length feature film about a killer car tire might sound a little narratively thin to wholly succeed, but Rubber sidesteps that concern by adding a second plot line concerning meta audience participation to its formula. Rubber is not only an unnecessarily gritty/gory version of the classic short film The Red Balloon; its also a tongue-in-cheek indictment of the audience who would want to see such a gratuitous triviality in the first place.”

Special Features

Every link listed above is for a review we’ve posted on the site. If you’re looking for lists or articles from our horror tag instead, check out our look at the horror works of comedic director John Landis, our comparison of the vampire mafia in Landis’s Innocent Blood with the zombie mafia of Shrunken Heads, our guide to the onscreen collaborations between horror legends Bela Lugosi & Boris Karloff, and this list of five must-see, sharkless Jaws knockoffs.

And as if that weren’t enough already, we also have podcast episodes on Felt, #horror, Boxing Helena, evil doll movies, Alligator, A Page of Madness, Martyrs, The Flesh Eaters, The Fly, and Possession.

Happy Halloween!

-The Swampflix Crew

 

Death Ship (1980)

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A cruise liner is minding its own business when suddenly an empty, ghostly freighter rams it. The wreck leaves only a handful of survivors, including a hard-ass Captain Ashland played by George Kennedy. The survivors drift on a raft until the freighter appears again. Like every group of protagonists in every haunted location based movie, they willingly enter a situation despite the obvious red flags. They board the Death Ship. We learn that the boat is a “Nazi interrogation vessel,” still on its mission to kill. In fact, it needs blood to keep running. Eventually the Death Ship possesses captain Ashland, and generally terrorizes the lot, killing off a few of them.

It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly it is that makes Death Ship engaging. It’s a disappointment in most regards. The acting is terrible, the characters are under-developed (to the point of wondering if anyone even tried at all), and the premise is never really fully explained. There are some shocks, but they’re too hokey to be convincing or effective. In fact, there’s almost nothing redeemable about this film at all. Yet, I still enjoyed it. Maybe not as a spooky Shining-esque boat horror I assume they intended, but as a campy masterpiece.

One of Death Ship‘s many enjoyable flaws is the unexplained nature of, well, everything. A lot of strange things happen and have strange consequences. For example: a woman writhes around in a blood shower in one sequence and in the next we just get the information that she’s dead. How did she die? Why does a ship that needs blood waste so much blood on a shower? You don’t get answers, but do you really need them after watching someone squirm around under a shower head oozing fake blood? There are so many moments like this.

Death Ship is great, but it is also bad. Unlike cult films like Troll 2 — which is tone-wise the best movie to compare it to, where unknowns deliver the best performances they can muster under bizarre direction and bad writing — Death Ship manages to get a similar style of performance with actual actor, and actual Oscar winner, George Kennedy. The idea of a Nazi Interrogation vessel still sailing back and forth on the atlantic looking for victims isn’t developed much more than this one sentence. I think the strongest thing it’s got genuinely going is the ominous synth-y soundtrack.

-Alli Hobbs

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (2016)

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I love the Internet. I spend a lot of time here. I’m also a huge sci-fi nerd. I love looking towards the future, thinking about highly intelligent A.I., and I’m not afraid of the great robot uprising. On top of all of that, I’m a big Herzog fan. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World kind of seems like it was tailored specifically for me. All that considered, though, it’s ambitious subject matter to tackle. How would anyone make a film about the Internet and how it’s affected our society? Herzog’s solution to that problem is to separate it into vignettes.

The first vignette is about the very beginning at UCLA’s campus. Very early on we get Herzog’s dry sense of humor as he remarks about how hideous the corridors are in the building that houses the start of this massive cultural and technological revolution. Then, we get the basic good and bad sides of the Internet, learning about the widely released EteRNA game which helps researchers learn about new RNA molecules and also meeting a family who’s faced very real harm after a privacy invasion. As the film progresses, however, the ideas and themes sort of spiral out of control in a way that mirrors what the Internet has done.  At some points, the spiral seems less intentional than at others and often times it’s unsure whether or not Herzog — who admittedly didn’t even make his first phone call until age 17 and still doesn’t have a cell phone — really understands the information being passed to him.

The real strength of any Herzog documentary is in the interview subjects. He has a strength in finding the most interesting people to talk to. He also handles each subject with such neutral respect. Whether it’s talking to Elon Musk or students trying to program soccer robots in the attempt to beat the World Cup champions or people in technology rehab, he’s never combative and respects their boundaries.

One thing I really appreciated about this documentary was all the technology-positive viewpoints. So often in our age of smart phone and augmented reality games people are extremely and unfoundedly critical. It was truly refreshing to hear people say positively that the Internet has been a great equalizer and that the conveniences brought on by robots and self-driving cars will be helpful. Yes, Herzog still interviews people who think the Internet is the embodiment of the antichrist and others who believe that wireless radiation is ruining their lives and causing chronic pain, but they are in the minority. Everyone else looks towards the future inquisitively and optimistically.

Lo and Behold is sprawling and out of control and at some points it feels like Herzog was in over his head like someone’s misguided documentarian great uncle. There’s history to speculation, best case scenarios, and worries about an impending apocalypse included here. The film is out of control in the way the Internet has become.

-Alli Hobbs

Movie of the Month: The Box (2009)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made Britnee, Alli, and Boomer  watch The Box (2009).

Brandon: “Your home is a box. Your car is a box on wheels. You drive to work in it. You sit in your home staring at a box. It erodes your soul while the box that is your body inevitably withers, then dies, whereupon it is placed in the ultimate box to slowly decompose.”

No, that’s not lyrics to a Bright Eyes song or a page ripped from your 15 old self’s poetry-filled diary (or both if you’re Conor Oberst). It’s an explanation from The Box’s mysterious villain Arlington Sterward when he’s asked the simple question, “Why a box?” Steward’s rambly, heavy-handed response (delivered expertly by character actor Frank Langella) is a typifying example of writer-director Richard Kelly’s filmmaking style in that it’s both far outside any semblance of normal human communication and it represents a nonstop torrent of ideas that Kelly can’t help but spill onto the page all at once. His debut film, Donnie Darko, was a weird 80s throwback sci-fi horror that’s just bonkers enough to serve as art film training wheels for disgruntled teens (it worked for me, anyway), but also stylistically restrained in a way Kelly hasn’t been since. His follow-up, the sprawling & delightfully incomprehensible Southland Tales, is a punishing assault of strange ideas that plays like a big budget adaptation of a crackpot conspiracy theorist’s 4,000 page manifesto on the state of the modern & supernatural world. The Box, Kelly’s most recent film to date, splits the difference.

As Kelly put it himself, The Box was an attempt “to make a film that’s incredibly suspenseful and broadly commercial, while still retaining [his] artistic sensibility.” I’d say it’s almost successful in that way, tempering Kelly’s bottomless wealth of bizarre ideas with a familiar realm of cinematic tones that lands somewhere between Hitchcock suspense and the Spielbergian throwback horror of titles like Super 8 & Stranger Things. I honestly believe The Box is his best work to date. However, if Kelly thinks that this overwhelming tale of deadly ultimatums, alien invasions, mind control, interdimensional gateways, and spiritual ascension has “broad commercial appeal” he’s gotta be out of his fucking mind (and I’m sure there’s more than a little truth to that). Audiences hated The Box. It’s one of the few films to ever receive an “F” Cinemascore, which is typically a very forgiving grading system. It flopped financially in 2009 & has since been largely forgotten by time. General audiences have been known to hate a lot of great art, though, and I think that there’s an argument to be made that this film deserves to be recognized as such.

The first half hour or so of The Box might actually be the work of “broad commercial appeal” Kelly believed he was delivering. The film opens as a retelling of the classic Twilight Zone episode “Button Button” in which a young couple receives a mysterious box that prominently displays a giant button and comes with an even more mysterious offer: if the couple pushes the button someone they do not know, somewhere in the world, will die & they will receive $1million cash. Long story short, the couple pushes the button, receives the cash, and are informed that the box will now be passed onto a new couple, someone they do not know. Like the best of The Twilight Zone, “Button Button” is a tight, efficient story of supernatural dread that reinforces the value of The Golden Rule: treat others as you would wish to be treated. Kelly faithfully delivers that tight, controlled life lesson and then, leaving broad commercial appeal behind, explodes it into a galaxy of strange ideas that explore the identity of the man who delivers the box (or “the button unit” as Steward puts it”), the question of whether or not humanity is an enterprise worth preserving, and theories on what could possibly exist beyond our basic understandings of reality & mortality. All of these heady topics are interjected with whatever weird ideas pop into Richard Kelly’s head from moment to moment – say, lightning as a means of alien-to-human communication, motel pools as gateways to other worlds, entire armies of It Follows-style demons (“employees” of Steward), etc. etc. etc. It’s all perfectly overwhelming and I enjoy every frame of it, but I can’t fathom a world where it could’ve been a runaway commercial success.

Richard Kelly seems very much interested in trying to convey the vague menace of the unknown here, an overreaching ambition that leaves a lot of character development by the wayside in favor of otherworldly ideas & never-ending suspense. As a result, a lot of the film’s dialogue & character motivations can fall just on the campy side of eerie. It can also be a little difficult to care about any particular character’s fate, including the film’s central family, since they remain near-strangers for the entire runtime as they try to piece together exactly what’s happening to them. As unnerving as The Box can be, its lack of compassion for its characters & its subversively campy humor can play just as thick as Cameron Diaz’s godawful Virginian accent (she really is laughably bad in her lead role as the matriarch).

Britnee, how do the corny acting & unclear character motivations play into the film’s nonstop assault of spooky ideas for you? Are they a distraction or do they add to the film’s strange, off-putting appeal?

Britnee: First of all, when I found out that The Box was going to be the September Movie of the Month selection, I got it confused with the 2015 film The Gift. Jason Bateman graced the cover of The Gift, so I kept waiting for him to make an appearance in The Box, which, of course, he never did. It turns out that movies about mysterious boxes are more popular than I thought.

The insanity that is The Box should come with a warning label. Those with severely high blood pressure or epilepsy should never watch this movie because they will end up in the emergency room before the film is over. The constant twists and turns are just too much to handle, but I loved them all. The acting of just about every character, especially Cameron Diaz and James Marsden, really contributes to the movie’s wacky charm. Diaz’s performance as one of the film’s main characters, Norma Lewis, really sticks out for me. It’s really as bad as it gets, but her horrible accent, unconvincing attitude, and missing toes all come together to make The Box a hell of a good time. As Brandon mentioned previously, it’s difficult to give a damn about the fate of any of the film’s characters because viewers aren’t given the opportunity to really connect with them, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I enjoyed not worrying about whether or not Norma and Arthur would survive the terrors brought on by the box because I was able to focus my attention on the all the confusing supernatural happenings.

There were many times in the film where I thought the movie was concluding, such as when Arthur goes through his chosen portal in the library and ends up in his bedroom with Norma, but then the film continues and the story develops even more. Alli, did you find the constant twists in the film to be irritating or did you enjoy them? Was there any point in the film where you thought it should’ve ended?

Alli: It’s hard to say when a movie this in-over-its-head in a bizarre concept should have ended. I think maybe somewhere on the writer’s desk someone should have come in and asked about some plot holes and maybe talked Kelly out of some of them. But as you guys are saying, they’re all a part of this movie’s goofy charm. After a certain point of being jerked around I kind of gave up and just let it take me along for this strange little ride and part of me even felt like it could have kept going, honestly. There were so many more questions than answers. Not that I think I could have stood Diaz’s accent for another hour, but I really wanted to know more about these employers of Mr. Steward. I want to know more about this film’s philosophy as well.

A thing this movie brushed over and possibly unintentionally made a argument about was free will. In the end, did the new family being offered the box have a choice at all? He clearly knew that everyone he offered these options to were going to choose the easy way out, if you can call it that, otherwise some sort of transmitter would actually have to be in the box for him to know. I know there’s an argument to be made for supernatural surveillance, but it seems like he and his employers knew all along what human nature would lead these people to do. I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t a heavy-handed monologue about that.

But then again, this is a movie that only left me half satisfied. We’re vaguely introduced to aliens but we don’t learn much more about them other than they want to prove humans are unworthy. We’re given some suspense but nothing too bad, except for like Brandon said the occasional It Follows moment of a stranger being outside the window. We’re given an ideal suburban family in an ideal suburban town that’s slightly claustrophobic but not quite. Everything seems to fall just barely short of hitting whatever target he was aiming for. Boomer, is there anything you really wish had been expanded or clarified that wasn’t?

Boomer: Honestly, I had the opposite feeling. Although I definitely like the spookiness of the Steward hive mind followers and the general impenetrability of concept that is a hallmark of Richard Kelly’s work (like Brandon, Donnie Darko served as a kind of Baby’s First Jacob’s Ladder for me as well), there’s a certain simplicity to the existential dread of the original Richard Matheson short story that is absent here. In the short “Button, Button,” the story ends with the enigmatic Steward retrieving the button in a box from the protagonists, departing as he “reassures” the couple that they should not worry, as the next recipients of the box won’t be anyone that they know, with all the implications thereof. Does that mean that there is a direct link between the immediate recipients of the button and the previous button-pushers, or just a chilling reminder that their karmic comeuppance will come someday, without warning? It’s classic Matheson that way, and I adore the story (it’s adaptation in the eighties Twilight Zone revival has a different, more obvious ending, and I, like Matheson, don’t care for it; he went so far as to have the story idea credited to a pseudonym). There’s a quietness and intrigue to the original story that this film, which uses the original story less as a template and more of a jumping-off point for spiraling but utterly watchable madness, doesn’t possess.

That having been said, there were some things that I would have been interested to see more of. I was particularly intrigued by the use of realistic grounding in the life of the family before the box arrives, like the discussion of Norma’s foot injury and Arthur’s spacey aspirations. While it’s true that much of what makes the film captivating is the unexpected paths that it takes, I would have preferred to see the story retain that level of grounding throughout rather than grow exponentially more wild. It’s as if there are two films here, and I would have liked to see a Kelly flick that had the alien test plot and a second, different film that followed the mundane lives of the Lewises after the button is pushed, as they navigate the quandary of the immoral actions taken as a result of Steward’s visit. As it is within the film, everything that follows Norma’s impulsive push that affects them is an external force, not an exploration of the fallout of committing such an act, which would have been a more interesting film to me.

As far as other elements that I would have liked to see more of, Deborah Rush is criminally underutilized here as she was in her previous MotM appearance in Big Business, and every time I see her in any role I wish she had more to do. I also would have liked to know more about what Steward was like before he became the host for the alien entity that is sitting in judgment of humanity; was he chosen because of a similarity between his pre-possession personality and the ideas of the Hive? Was he the opposite? It could have been interesting to see the dichotomy between his former self and his new one, especially as a mirror of the change in personality between some of the button-pushers we saw pre- and post-button mashing; an objective correlative metaphor is never a bad idea, and could have illustrated the difference in the self that occur as a result of chance (Steward) versus those that follow deliberate action (the Lewises). What do you think, Brandon? You mentioned that the campiness and spectacle of the movie are its big draws for you; would you feel that you would enjoy it more, or at least as much, if it had been more of a character piece than a moderately coherent, not-quite-on-target, effects-heavy scifi fable?

Brandon: I’m a little amused by that question because I assume Kelly believes he was delivering a character piece, or at least his version of it. I don’t think stripping the film of its excess of The Day the Earth Stood Still-modeled sci-fi ideas on testing humanity’s worthiness through complex alien puzzles would necessarily improve its narrative in terms of entertainment value, but I do agree that the film starts weaving some interesting threads about the Lewises that might’ve lead to some truly powerful character-based moments had they been given enough room to breathe & develop. For instance, the family’s early financial troubles, born solely of their apparent disinterest in living within their means, is played merely as motivation for their activation of the button unit, but could’ve instead lead to genuine dramatic tension were Kelly interested in building it. He also suggests an interesting spousal dynamic when the couple negotiates the button unit’s terms & conditions and Marsden’s scientist-dolt husband asks, “What is it to really know someone? Do you know me?” I wouldn’t trade those lines of inquiry for the ludicrous sci-fi spectacle we’re gifted with instead, but I do think they would’ve been better received if they had been more fully developed, ideally without sacrificing the sci-fi backdrop that contrasts them.

The problem with fitting the character study elements and Kelly’s immense idea flood into a single vehicle might be a question of form. In some ways a two hour feature film isn’t nearly expansive enough to encompass everything The Box wants to contain. The film takes the idiom “biting off more than you can chew” as a direct challenge & a mission statement, an approach that doesn’t always sit well with a movie-going audience. I feel like the property’s ideal self would be as a prestige television series on AMC or HBO, a medium that would fix several immediate problems like allowing more room for grounded character study, giving each out-there sci-fi idea time to breathe instead of running through them all at once, forgiving a little bit of the television-grade acting choices made by Diaz & Marsden, etc. I’m imagining it like a Twin Peaks or a Welcome to Nightvale, where monster-of-the-week alien threats (or in this case, alien puzzles) would all inexplicably occur in a single town & follow a small family unit as they struggle to make sense of the phenomenon. The first episode of The Box: The Television Series would be the same “Button, Button” remake the movie uses for a launching point, except that it would end with the couple pushing the button in a cliffhanger, waiting for the story to be picked up at the beginning of episode 2. As I’ve said, though, a large part of the fun of The Box for me is in being overwhelmed by its wealth of ideas in such a short amount of time & I think there’s a value to experiencing all of that otherworldly absurdity in a tightly paced, cinematic punch that is somewhat lost when you’re, to risk referencing something so of-the-moment twice in one conversation, binge-watching all 8 hours of Stranger Things over the course of a week.

Speaking of the sprawl of sci-fi ideas included here, one of my favorite concepts in The Box didn’t come from Richard Kelly himself, but is instead a quote from sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke, conveniently read aloud for the viewers following along at home: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Unable to resist piling even more literary quotes onto the film’s DNA, Kelly also makes several allusions to Jean-Paul Satre’s play “No Exit,” both mining its title for easy existential dread & expanding its infamous line, “Hell is other people” to “Hell is other people seeing you for who you truly are,” in an offhand stab at literary analysis. Kelly’s pulled off this trick before in Donnie Darko as well, which includes an extensive classroom analysis of the Graham Greene short story “The Destructors.” Britnee, do you think these two literary references, Clarke & Satre, as cool as they are, provide any legitimate sort of insight into what kind of story Kelly was trying to tell in The Box or were they just easy modes of injecting profundity into what’s at heart a very pulpy sci-fi premise? Was their inclusion earned in the film’s content or did it come across as a little try-hard?

Britnee: Kelly’s use of the Clarke and Satre references you mentioned, Brandon, caused me to give a big eye-roll as I was thinking back to when they occurred in the movie. It’s difficult for me to take anything in this film seriously, so I would definitely have to say that the presence of these literary references is a little ridiculous. Obviously, Kelly didn’t throw them into the film to add to the campiness, but ultimately, that’s exactly what happened. I get what he was attempting to accomplish, but this movie was just too silly for anything profound to exist within it. Then again, my knowledge of anything by Clarke and Satre doesn’t go beyond Brandon’s previous statement, so maybe I’m the crazy one and Kelly’s got the right idea.

I feel like I’m being a little harsh on The Box. There were a few moments where I caught myself thinking about monumental life choices I’ve made and what motivated me in my decisions. The Lewis family painted a picture of how ugly being selfish and greedy really is, which is why I didn’t have much sympathy for them. The fact that they decided to take the life away from another human being so they could keep up with their suburban lifestyle made me sick to my stomach. Alli, do you think the film’s “protagonists” would have been more likeable if they were worse off (e.g. Their kid was dying, and they needed money for a lifesaving transplant)?

Alli: You know, I actually do think they would be more likeable if they were in more dire circumstances, but I think making them shallow suburbanites is either some sort of misguided attempt in a post-2008 financial crisis world to say, “This is you!” to the audience or to do the high and mighty, “Yes, you as the audience gets it. Look at the normies struggling with their mixed up priorities.” And if it was the second I’m not sure if they were ever supposed to be likeable at all and it’s just about the schadenfreude. Given the smug literary references and all of Donnie Darko, pretty much I’m leaning towards that interpretation, but it seems like there’s a lot of ways to read this movie.

Even though I never liked them and never sympathized as the movie progressed, I managed to like them even less as it went on, until finally it reached a point where I actually despised them. That point was at the end when they have to choose between having a deaf and blind son or Arthur shooting Norma. I hope I’m not spoiling too much by saying this, but what the hell? The idea of a disabled son being worse than a dead wife is really upsetting to me, especially when you have a million dollars and can afford to find ways to make your life more accessible. Not only is it a cheapness of life thing but just some casual ableism thrown in. And I just shudder to think that someone watching this somewhere probably thought that that was a reasonable choice to make.

Boomer, was there any point more “upsetting” (I’m not quite sure that’s the word I’m looking for) than others to you or did nothing really stand out to all?

Boomer: The most upsetting thing to me was seeing poor little Britta passing through the long hotel hallway while being met with the stares of various Steward acolytes. I know that a lot of people find hotels to be inherently creepy automatically (I’m not one of them) and so they probably found this even more unsettling than I did, but there was something about her apparent innocence and the way that she was bandied about by forces outside of her control. I don’t recall that we ever really get much of an explanation as to who she is or what she was doing; was she, like the man from the previous box cycle from whom Arthur learns about the nature of Steward, an escapee from the “plan” who was trying to make sense of her upturned world? Was she merely an unwilling accomplice in the larger goals of the mysterious entities? It is perhaps my fondness for Gillian Jacobs alone that led me to be so thrown off by this sequence, but it was generally disturbing.

I disagree with your reading of the final scene, however. Not that there are no ableist connotations in the scene (that interpretation is certainly valid), but I don’t feel that Kelly’s intent was to make it seem that having a blind/deaf child was worse than a dead wife/mother, but was more of a demonstration of Steward’s willingness to give Norma a second chance to prove that she could make the “right” decision, since it was her impulsive pushing of the button (despite Arthur’s hesitation and apparent ultimate refusal) that doomed the family in the first place. In response to your question, what was perhaps most disturbing was the fact that Steward and his overseers were testing “free will” in a way that influenced the participants; in fact, given that none of us can come to an agreement as to whether there is free will in this situation (given the way that deaths of previous users of the box rely upon the next user making the wrong decision), it’s unclear what, if anything, could be gleaned from these experiments.

Although I hesitate to sympathize with the Lewises because of their vapid engagement in consumerism (it’s important to note that the original story did, in fact, feature a family in a much worse economic situation than the Lewises), they were living within their means until Steward manipulated events in their life, like causing Arthur to lose his candidacy for promotion and taking away the tuition reduction plan that the family relied upon in order to send their son to the best possible school In a way, the film could be seen as a modern(ish) retelling of the story of Job, substituting mild setbacks for utter familial destruction and replacing faith in God with the willingness to perform acts which enact the greatest good for the largest number of people. Viewed through this lens, Norma and Arthur have their faith tested and Norma fails, but is given the opportunity to correct this wrong through self-sacrifice. I don’t necessarily think that this is the reasonable choice, but I feel like this was more likely to be Kelly’s intent. Regardless, just as with Job, none of the characters that we see would be in the situations in which they find themselves without divine (or unholy) intervention. Maybe this means that The Box is really an exploration of the philosophical conceit that if (a) the divine is all knowing and pre-ordains all actions and (b) humans are thus unable to exercise free will despite the appearance that they can, then (c) punishing mankind for acting in accordance with preordination is unreasonable and perhaps evil. Probably not, though.

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Lagniappe

Britnee: While The Box left me with loads of unanswered questions, what I want to know more than anything else is the current whereabouts of the prosthetic silicon foot that Arthur made for Norma (using materials from his workplace!). Did Diaz take it home as a souvenir from one of her most desperate roles? Does Kelly keep it in a curio cabinet in his family room?

Alli: Coming back to the disabilities/deformities thing. I just really think it’s super messed up that someone like Norma, who lives with a limp has some sort of hierarchy of disabilities. Like, Mr. Sterling’s face makes her feel better about herself instead of her being able to identify with him. I know she’s worried about the teasing and ridicule when it comes to her son, but it’s still terrible.

Brandon: There’s so much to cover in The Box that I feel like I could never touch on all of it even if this conversation went on for two more rounds. There’s the curious case of its Arcade Fire-provided score that never reached physical media release, the weirdly wonderful feeling of seeing a babyfaced Gillian Jacobs in an early dramatic role, the peculiarly detailed prop of that Human Resource Exploitation Manual Arlington Steward supplies to his employees, and a whole lot more I could never get to with all the time in the world. Instead of trying to gather all these details like so many Pokémon, I’d just like to follow up on a couple things Alli & Boomer mentioned that interested me.

I totally agree with their assessment that the film’s musings on free will are muddled at best. This is never more apparent to me than at the film’s climax when two couples are given an ultimatum by Steward and they make their decisions simultaneously, one directly affecting the other. Whose free will is being exercised there? It’s a question (among many) that the movie is far from interested in answering. A heavy handed Steward monologue on the subject would’ve been nice. However, I do want to buck Alli’s assertion that not enough suspense is earned through interactions with the It Follows “employees”. They’re creepy as all hell and, unlike most of the film, tastefully employed in small doses. The three big moments I’m thinking of are the aforementioned zombified man in the kitchen window; the babysitter’s long, troubling walk down a motel hallway; and that incredible sequence in the library where the employees threaten to form into an angry mob. I know I’ve poked fun at how ludicrous The Box can be from minute to minute, but I do believe the suspense it generates is genuine and a lot of it comes from those creepy, dead-eyed employees of Steward’s.

Boomer: When I was working at the Urban Outfitters in the French Quarter in grad school, James Marsden came in to shop (I think he was working on the remake of Straw Dogs at the time). I rang him up and I cannot tell a lie: he really is that pretty in real life. I’m not going to say that I got lost in his eyes or anything, but I’m also not going to pretend that I didn’t. The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life was the gradation of colors in the rings of Saturn through a refraction telescope at the top of the observatory in college; the viewer was the size of a dinner plate, and from ringtip to ringtip, the rings were six inches across, with nothing between me and this distant planet but glass and space. It was humbling, awe-inspiring, and absolutely stunning. The second most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen was James Marsden buying tank tops. Take from that what you will.

Upcoming Movies of the Month:
October: Britnee presents Funhouse (1981)
November: Boomer presents  The Paperhouse (1988)
December: Alli presents Last Night (1999)
January: The Top Films of 2016

-The Swampflix Crew

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

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The Night of the Hunter startlingly opens with heads floating against a starry sky. A few of them are children and one is an old woman. The old woman is giving a bible study lesson about Jesus. I’m not quite sure what I expected from this movie, but I don’t think I was anticipating anything this strange. But it’s actually a really perfect intro into what the movie is: a fairy tale- not the Disney kind, but the true dark kind of fairy tale where people die and children get eaten.

This movie has an otherworldly quality, which is not just from the floating heads. One part of that is the strong expressionistic influence. There’s a lot of monstrous shadows being cast on walls. Nosferatu-esque shots of creeping up stairs. There are sharp black and white angles. The nighttime of this world is strongly opposed to the daylight, which is idyllic and warm. The day feels safe and reassuring. The night is all around eerie.

In the middle of the Great Depression, two children John and Pearl are playing in the yard when their dad, Ben, rushes in with a gunshot wound. Fed up with his children having to live in squalor, he’s robbed a bank. Before the cops catch up with him, he hides the money inside of Pearl’s doll and makes both children swear not to tell anyone where the money is hidden. He gets arrested and sentenced to death. While in jail Ben meets the big bad wolf of this story, Reverend Harry Powell (played by Robert Mitchum). Harry Powell manages to marry the children’s widowed mother while in search of the money. John and Pearl soon after have to flee the murderous Reverend, as he gets increasingly violent towards John while asking about the money.

Reverend Powell is an iconic villain, right down to his knuckle tattoos, which read “LOVE” and “HATE,” that are referenced time and time again. When he displays these tattoos, his hands resemble terrifying, gnashing jaws as he makes them play wrestle each other. Perhaps most terrifying of all is his charisma. He summons up a whole town to his cult-like fire and brimstone sermons. He can flash a disarming smile and get his way almost every time. It’s terrifying to watch a villain with so much self righteous evil gain so much control.

I like the way this movie is scary. Yes, it feels like a fairy tale, but all the reasons to be afraid are very real. It’s scary because the town the kids live in is very judgmental and single minded while posing itself as idyllic. This town is susceptible to a charismatic stranger changing all of their views, and it’s scary because small towns often function this way. It’s scary because there’s no witchcraft or magic. This is just a regular man, which realistically there are few things scarier than a bad man. It’s scary because John is a kid isolated and no one believes him as he’s pursued and there’s few things more frightening than having bad things happen to you and having no one listen.

The Night of the Hunter tells the classic tale of good versus evil, love versus hate. The black and white cinematography drives home the point with it’s sharp dynamic lighting. It’s chilling, uncanny and even ruthless at times, but it also has so many makings of a good fairy tale: lost children, evil step parents, and even a fairy godmother in the end.

-Alli Hobbs