Like all corners of the creative arts, Universal Picture’s classic horror period was overrun with nepo babies. Carl Laemmle, Jr. kicked off the studio’s Famous Monsters brand by producing 1931’s Dracula after Carl Laemmle, Sr. passed down his studio-head executive position to his son instead of a more qualified protégée. Lon Chaney, Jr. changed his name from Creighton Chaney to cash in on the name recognition of his early-horror legend father, making him a more credible, marketable Wolf Man. Then, of course, there’s the case of Dracula’s children, who waltzed into power in Universal’s most prestigious sequels after their father’s untimely second death at the end of the first film in their franchise. While The Wolf Man fathered no cubs to take over his sequels, and Frankenstein’s Monster only made it thirty seconds into his own marriage before burning down the lab, Dracula’s progeny did a good job making the most of their family name. The Dracula kids don’t appear to have met or crossed paths, but their polygamous father did have multiple wives in the first film, so I suppose that doesn’t undermine the series’ narrative continuity.
Much like the goofier Frankensteinsequels from this early Universal period, 1936’s Dracula’s Daughter is an absurdly direct follow-up to the Tod Browning original. The film opens with Van Helsing being arrested for Dracula’s murder at the scene of the crime, and then spending the rest of the film convincing his jailers that actual, real-life vampires are afoot. Dracula’s immediate replacement is his angsty goth-girl daughter, who is reluctant to continue the family business of draining innocent civilians of their blood despite it being the only thing she’s trained to do. She’s rebelled by moving to the big city, where she stalks the streets as a bisexual vamp, picking up hungry artists’ models and lustful playboys to drain back at her spacious parlor. Foretelling a lot of the later Famous Monster sequels, she feels incredibly guilty about this blood-addiction vice and spends most of the film seeking a medical cure for the family legacy that has shunned her from polite society & daylight – ultimately to no avail. Inevitably, like all nepo babies, she ends up not being able to strike it out on her own after all and moves back to the family castle in Transylvania for some super traditional Dracula kills, meeting the same tragic end as her father.
Like the direct sequel to James Whale’s original Frankenstein movie, Dracula’s Daughter has earned more critical respect in recent decades than the film that precedes it. Its reputation has largely risen due to the sexual transgressions of its lesbian seduction scene, in which the titular vampire convinces a young woman to expose her bare neck for the sucking by telling her she’s going to pose for a nude portrait. Likewise, Bride of Frankenstein‘s gender politics have drawn a lot of attention with modern viewers for the concluding scene in which the titular monster takes one look at her assigned undead groom and decides she’d rather be dead (again) than mate with her “man.” Of the two films, Bride of Frankenstein is the better direct sequel overall, since Whale was given unprecedented creative freedom to play up the stranger, campier elements of his original text in an anything-goes horror comedy free-for-all that doesn’t even bother to deliver on its central premise until the final three minutes of runtime. By contrast, Dracula’s Daughter has the generosity of affording its titular villain plenty screentime & pathos, which is invaluable in the Boys Club of Universal’s Famous Monsters. Like the Monster’s bride, she effortlessly, tragically cool, so it’s nice that we actually get to spend time with her beyond a few quick frames of celluloid.
While Dracula’s Daughter exemplifies the Famous Monsters sequels’ penchant for direct, narrative continuations set seconds after their preceding films’ endings, 1943’s Son of Dracula exemplifies their penchant for wildly recasting the central villains from film to film. The most hilarious example I’ve seen is Bela Lugosi’s miscasting as the Monster in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, a performance so laughably unconvincing that studio executives decided to remove his heavily accented dialogue from the final cut, fearing audience mockery. Lon “Wolf Man” Chaney, Jr. made more visual sense as the Monster in the previous picture, Son of Frankenstein, but could not be tasked with sitting in the makeup chair for two separate monster performances in the same picture (not to mention the narrative contrivance of Lugosi/Igor’s brain being transplanted to the Monster’s body at the end of Son of Frankenstein). Appropriately enough, that film was made the same year Chaney got his own laughably bad Famous Monster miscasting as the mysterious “Count Aculard” in 1943’s Son of Dracula. The reason Chaney works so well in his tyepcast roles as The Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster, and Lennie from Of Mice and Men is that he looks like a sweet, lumbering oaf who doesn’t know his own strength. That image doesn’t translate especially well to playing a debonaire European vampire who seduces women to their doom.
Despite Count Aculard’s ridiculous appearance and name (which registers among the all-time goofiest horror pseudonyms, like Dr. Acula in Night of the Ghouls, Jack Rippner in Red Eye, and Louis Cyphre in Angel Heart), Son of Dracula is a surprisingly solid supernatural melodrama. Unlike his rebellious daughter, Dracula’s son has enthusiastically taken to the family business of seducing young women to death, moving to a Southern plantation to hypnotize & marry its recent heiress. Dracula’s daughter-in-law is a bit of a gloomy goth herself, and she attempts to manipulate the power of the Dracula dynasty for her own wicked profits, but the inevitable tragedy of the undead couple’s Southern Gothic surroundings makes a happy ending impossible. For his part, Count Aculard adjusts to the Southern atmosphere incredibly well, literally becoming a part of it by materializing as swamp gas in his nightly rises from the coffin. The movie carries over a lot of classic spooky set dressing of the original Dracula film despite this new locale, including a return to the flapping rubber bats that were missing from Dracula’s Daughter. Still, it’s visually accomplished in continually surprising ways, including an early version of the double-dolly shots from Spike Lee’s playbook as Count Aculard glides over the marshes to drain his victims.
Pumping out cheap-o sequels to Universal’s most successful horror films was obviously more about doing great business than it was about making great art. Through the tougher stretches of The Great Depression & WWII, the Famous Monsters that made Universal a major player in the first place were a near bottomless well for immediate cashflow. Frankenstein & The Wolf Man got stuck with the goofiest, trashiest end of that rushed-to-market schlock production, and by the time their many crossover sequels brought an off-brand version of Dracula into the fold (in John Carradine), the character was so far removed from Bela Lugosi’s performance in the original that it could do no real damage to the Dracula brand. Meanwhile, Dracula’s more direct sequels about his undead children are both very stately, handsome productions that hold up on their own among the best of Universal’s early horror run. Dracula’s Daughter is certainly the cooler of the pair and has rightfully been reappraised as a great work by modern critics. Son of Dracula would likely earn its own reappraisal too, if it weren’t for the goofy miscasting of Lon Chaney, Jr. as the titular vampire. Unsurprisingly, nepotism is a double-edged sword, one that can open opportunities you’re not always the best fit for.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the barebones, few-frills thriller The Royal Hotel is my favorite film of the year so far, given that I bought in early on director Kitty Green (Casting JonBenet) & actor Julia Garner (Electrick Children) back when stock prices were low. Still, it clicked with me as both collaborators’ finest work to date, following their much more muted workplace chiller The Assistant in 2020. The Royal Hotel explodes The Assistant‘s post-#MeToo themes of misogynist microaggressions & mundane labor exploitations into a much more immediate, visceral chokehold thriller – channeling 1990s psych thrillers like Dead Calm instead of the low-hum, methodical terror of Jeanne Dielman. If it were even slightly dumber or trashier, it could pull off a sensationalist title like You In Danger, Girl: The Movie or The Male Gaze: A Horror Story, while The Assistant was much more careful to not be boxed in by expectations of genre. It’s wildly entertaining as a result, while never losing sight of the political target in its crosshairs (a tactic also adopted by this year’s fellow sun-drenched indie drama How to Blow Up a Pipeline).
Garner costars besides Jessica Henwick as a pair of American tourists who find themselves flat broke while backpacking in Australia. In an act of financial desperation (or, depending on the character, an act of self-immolation), the 20-somethings take a government-assigned temp job working as barmaids in the Australian Outback, serving beers to the roughneck workers of a remote mining town. From there, the plot plays out like a slightly more grounded version of Alex Garland’s Men, with each of the blackout drunk brutes on the other side of the bar attempting slightly different angles on manufacturing sexual consent from the “fresh meat” working the register, whether with charm or with the threat of violence. Like in Men, the customers are all essentially the same threat disguised in slightly different presentations, except this time they swarm their victims like George Romero zombie hordes, overwhelming the humble little pub in waves of drunken chaos. The women are constantly told to smile & “take a joke” while struggling to interpret the thin line between flirting and bullying, like the difference between an Australian calling you “a cunt” vs. an Australian calling you “a sour cunt.” Meanwhile, every social signal from every direction is telling them to get so drunk they don’t care what happens to them, since they’re powerless to stop it anyway – whether as self-protection or as willful self-destruction, depending on who’s drinking.
The premise of two outsider tourists being shipped off to an isolated mining-town bar specifically to serve as eye-candy for the sexually frustrated workers sounds like a screenplay contrivance looking to justify a metaphor, but Green & co-writer Oscar Redding were inspired to write The Royal Hotel by real life events, relying on the 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie as shockingly direct source material. The young tourists profiled in Hotel Coolgardie may be Finnish instead of American, but their stories are followed closely in The Royal Hotel to the point of exact images & phrases of dialogue being photocopied in direct adaptation. Hotel Coolgardie is just as horrifying as Green’s movie, except it’s shot & presented more like a TLC reality show than a psychological thriller, which almost makes the women’s story more unnerving. In either case, the premise makes for wickedly effective Service Industry Horror that’s deeply relatable to anyone who’s ever worked a chaotic front-of-house job with rowdy, drunken customers, the same way The Assistant is relatable to anyone who’s ever worked a soul-draining office job for an evil corporate overlord (speaking as someone who’s done both). They’re not just single-use metaphors about the horrors of “male attention” (a phrase used in both the doc and the narrative feature), since the generalized exploitations of modern labor and the women’s personal levels of desire to survive the ordeal complicate the central theme at every turn.
The Royal Hotel is a great film about misogyny, labor, social pressure, and alcoholic stupor. And that’s not even getting into the racist power imbalance between the mostly white miners and the Indigenous workers who make up most of the service class (give or take a couple misplaced tourists). Its Australian-set psych thriller credentials are cemented both by the appearances of a majestic kangaroo and the appearance of a menacing Hugo Weaving, near unrecognizable behind thick layers of sunburn and beard hairs. It feels more immediate than nostalgic, though, distinctly a movie of its time. Conceptually, it’s presented as Kitty Green’s simplest, most widely accessible work to date, but the nuances beyond its surface tensions & metaphors get remarkably complex the second you start to scratch at them – which is exactly what makes it her best.
Welcome to Episode #197 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss four horror movies about werewolves, starting with Universal’s genre-defining classic The Wolf Man (1941).
00:00 Welcome
04:29 Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) 09:50 Saw X (2023) 11:52 They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) 18:02 The Royal Hotel (2023) 20:07 Hotel Coolgardie (2016)
22:06 The Wolf Man (1941) 40:05 An American Werewolf in London (1981) 56:03 Dog Soldiers (2002) 1:10:06 Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope (1975)
Most of my favorite art tends to get labeled as “Bad Movies” outright, as if “Bad Movies” were a legitimate, defined genre. Snarky mockery of low-budget genre films accounts for a lot of movie-nerd culture in a post-MST3k world, without much thought to what the “Bad Movie” label even means. Friends will gather for regular, celebratory Bad Movie Night rituals, and then log the films watched on Letterboxd with a half-star review that reads “I had the time of my life watching this! The most entertaining movie ever made.” It’s driven me to the conclusion that what most people label as “Bad Movies” is really just underfunded outsider art. There’s a discomfort in stepping outside the systemic quality controls of a professional production, but those same controls can also dampen the personalities & idiosyncrasies of the artists behind those productions. When someone says they love watching Bad Movies, there’s a cognitive dissonance between objective quality in craft and the subjective enjoyment of the audience. To me, nothing made with ecstatic passion and highly entertaining results could ever truly be “Bad”; it’s just art that requires you to readjust what you expect out of Movies in general. What good is consistency, coherence, and logic in a robust, mainstream production if the images feel limp & uninspired when compared to their no-budget equivalents?
Beyond Dream’s Door is A+ outsider art that I’m sure has made the rounds among the irony-poisoned Bad Movies crowd. It’s an easy target for that kind of mockery, inviting laughter as soon as you hear the first few sitcom-level line deliveries from its subprofessional actors. If you can stifle your snickering long enough to stick with it, though, Beyond Dream’s Door proves to be an ideal example of passion outweighing resources. It recreates the nightmare surrealism of the Elm Street series, restricted by the production values of a 16mm regional-horror cheapie but also much freer to disregard the boundary between its dream sequences and waking “reality.” The emotional & narrative logic behind its nightmare imagery isn’t especially deep or nuanced; it hinges its entire premise on the cryptic idiom “Beyond dream’s door is where horror lies,” and it contextualizes all of its action within a university’s Psychology program so it can make room for brief, vague lectures on “psychosis.” It also relies on frequent dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream rug pull surprises, making it clear that nothing in the characterizations or story matters as much as establishing a consistently fun, unnerving sense of dream logic in its low-budget aesthetics. At times, it’s transcendent in what it achieves within that seemingly limited frame, even recalling the headlights crime scene terror of a David Lynch nightmare (years before those exact images were echoed in Lynch’s Lost Highway). And yet, it’s the exact kind of sub-professional production that instantly gets slapped with the “Bad Movie” label, while more venerated, traditionally trained artists like Lynch are afforded the benefit of the doubt.
The story of a Psychology student’s stress dreams breaking out of his skull to infect the reality of (and physically attack) his classmates isn’t sketched out with much detail, give or take his dreams finding a demonic mascot in the movie’s special guest star The Suckling. Mostly, Beyond Dream’s Door follows its moment-to-moment whims to create movie magic on a college student budget. Beyond posing a few dreamworld images in a blacked-out sound stage void, most of its action is staged in generic, practical locales. The film attempts to make liminal spaces out of the mundane, Skinamarinking its suburban homes through confused geography and warping the empty halls of its academic institutions through video surveillance displays. It conjures a literal demon through a college sleep study gone awry, but most of its horror is established in the uncertainty of where its dreams begin & end. Lightbulbs explode in slow-motion close-up to punctuate the shock of being dunked back into a recurring nightmare. Clear glass skulls fill with running water to erase the physical humanity of the characters navigating the dreamworld. Disembodied arms rise from an open grave like time-elapsed flower growth, shot in psychedelic red & blue crosslighting. The narrative may be simple, but the visual language is constantly surprising, never lazy or needlessly repetitious. This is clearly the work of cinephiles striving to make the best possible movie they can with the resources they have within reach. It’s noticeably cheap, but it’s also thoroughly wonderful.
The main reason I love horror as a genre is because it makes this kind of dream-logic outsider art commercially viable in a way no other medium can. If a group of college students made an avant-garde art film about the thin veil between dreams & reality, it’s extremely liable to have been forgotten to time (unless it was an early project for a director who later earned a mainstream fanbase, like Lynch). By contrast, Beyond Dream’s Door has a kind of built-in, infinitely repopulated audience who will always be voracious for more nightmare-logic horror schlock, especially after they’ve run through the official Elm Street films a few dozen times. It seems conscious of its debt to the larger horror genre in that way, reaching beyond the visual touchstones of an obvious Freddy Kruger knockoff to instead make allusions to Hitchcock’s Psycho and Steven King’s novel IT. The need for scares & gore to attract an audience serves the film well structurally, giving it momentary goals to achieve beyond crafting artsy images with literal arts & crafts supplies. The would’ve been just as great without its more overt horror elements, though; it would just also have far fewer eyes on it. A lot of my favorite filmmakers fit into that same category: underfunded visionaries like Ed Wood, Roger Corman, and William Castle, who managed to make & sell wildly entertaining pictures on shoestring budgets by working on the B-horror margins. They’re the exact kind of names that end up on lists titled “The Best of the Bad” instead of earning the label they truly deserve, “The Best Outsider American Filmmakers.” I haven’t seen enough of Jay Woelful’s directorial work to say he belongs in that same conversation, but I can confirm Beyond Dream’s Door admirably continues the tradition.
Without question, the strangest moviegoing experience I’ve had all year was attending a repertory screening of the 2002 supernatural thriller The Mothman Prophecies, presented by a formerly incarcerated member of the West Memphis Three in a series about ceremonial magick. There was just something intensely odd about seeing such a flavorless, anonymous PG-13 Studio Horror presented as a deeply spiritual text. And just a few months later, I am once again confronted with a bizarrely idiosyncratic presentation of director Mark Pellington’s workman-for-hire artistry. Pellington’s filmmaking career peaked in the Y2k era with The Mothman Prophecies & Arlington Road, two serviceable thrillers with mainstream appeal. His most recent feature, The Severing, is borderline avant-garde in contrast, enduring a slow-trickle rollout from smaller festivals like Slamdance to the public library-supported streaming service Hoopla. It’s an abstract interpretive dance horror film made in collaboration between Pellington (whose involvement doesn’t make much sense) and Nina McNeely, the choreographer of Climax (whose involvement makes all the sense). Like The Broad’s recent screening of The Mothman Prophecies, this really was one of the stranger viewing experiences I’ve enjoyed all year, and although neither were especially great films, they were at the very least memorable.
I guess this film makes sense within Pellington’s larger catalog if you know him primarily as a music video director, which is the side hustle that’s been paying his bills since well before his feature-length breakout in Arlington Road. Shot with a small dance crew in a single, crumbling warehouse locale, The Severing is essentially a feature-length music video without much actual music to speak of. Composer Peter Adams mostly works in light piano twinkles and long, droning tones, so that the interpretive dance artistry on display never convincingly builds to any kind of crescendo or catharsis. However, if you hit the mute button and throw on your favorite Nine Inch Nails record as soundtrack replacement, it’s easy to see the spooky mood Pellington & crew were aiming for. The dancers craft some gorgeous, upsetting images throughout, painted in full-body bruising that makes them look like rhythmically decomposing corpses. Their movements are pained & frustrated, often stuck in repetitive, throbbing movements like looping .GIFs. The warehouse locale is lit with the sickly fluorescent washes of vintage torture porn, recalling the haunted house your dirtbag cousin worked at on the weekends more than a professional movie set. It’s eerie, it’s uncanny, but it’s mostly hung off the shoulders of the contorted dancers and their avant-garde choreographer. Pellington’s generic-horror touches mostly just get in their way.
Replacing the soundtrack with your industrial rock album of choice would help cover up some of the ill-advised dialogue snippets that distract from the dancers’ onscreen movements, but the film’s high school goth poetry is still inescapable as constant, on-screen text. Title cards & incoherent ramblings about how we shallow humans “move like lemmings” or how “sleep is a doorway to the 4th dimension” detract from the inherent tension & beauty of the dance choreography. In a year when horror has been shaken up by slow-cinema abstractions like Skinamarink, The Outwaters, and Enys Men, it’s frustrating to see a formal experiment like this repeatedly ground itself instead of fully giving into its true, alienating self. Since my familiarity with Pellington is as an openly, thoroughly commercial director, I’m assuming a lot of that normalized framing is his doing. As such, this is more of a balletic echo of the Michael Jackson “Thriller” video than it is some jarring breakthrough in cinematic form. It makes for great spooky background imagery for the Halloween season, but it’s frustrating that it couldn’t amount to more than that, since there’s some truly powerful artistry expressed through these tortured, writhing bodies. A more daring, adventurous director would’ve matched the dancers’ artistic boldness in their own visual medium, but there’s something to be said for Pellington’s workman spirit getting this project completed & distributed at all.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer and Brandon discuss the supernatural horror sequel The Exorcist III (1990), written & directed by the author of the original Exorcist‘s source novel.
Scandinavian cinema has a distinctly fucked up sense of humor to it, so it’s not surprising that two of the year’s best black comedies have been released out of Norway. Kristoffer Borgli’s debut feature Sick of Myself (in which an art-world narcissist medically self-harms for media attention) is the higher profile of the two, already landing the director a buzzy follow-up starring Nic Cage (in Dream Scenario). By contrast, the darkly comic Tinder thriller Good Boy is a much smaller, limited production – restricted to just four characters shooting in four sparse locales. Despite earning a few key critical accolades on the festival circuit (including a coveted spot-on John Waters’s Best Films of the Year list), Sick of Myself is hardly an MCU-scale cultural behemoth worth rooting against in favor of its underfunded underdog. Still, running only 75 minutes and released to zero fanfare, Good Boy is a fucked up little Norwegian romance drama worth championing for its minor, muted victories, at least so director Viljar Bøe might be able to torture audiences on a much bigger scale in his next production. There’s plenty of dark Norwegian humor to go around.
Good Boy might not have a professional-level budget, but it does have a killer hook. It’s a story of unethical puppy play, pulling some uneasy laughs and genuine chills out of the basic discomfort of stumbling into someone else’s elaborate kink scene without context or warning. After scoring a successful Tinder date with a legitimate millionaire, an unsuspecting Psychology student is introduced to her new beau’s unconventional pet: a human man who spends 24/7 in a dog costume. Any cautious probing about the weirdness of keeping a human being as a house pet is outright dismissed by the Norwegian Psycho; he responds to reasonable questions like “What’s his deal?” with “He’s a dog.” Of course, because this is a movie, it turns out the dog’s deal is much sicker than that, and his loving captivity within the millionaire’s household turns out to be less voluntary & consensual than initially let on. Much less. The story gradually devolves into full-on torture porn from there, but much in the way that the equivalent American dating-app thriller Fresh did last year: maintaining a wicked sense of humor throughout. It’s all one big joke about dating a total control freak; he just happens to be a very specific kind of freak.
For all of its kink-scene iconography, Good Boy is less about the degenerate amorality of real-life puppy players than it is about the violent amorality of stubbornly Conservative thinkers, recalling the sickly domesticity of recent titles like Swallow & Hatching. It dodges a lot of the kink-shaming implications of its premise by doubling down on something we can all agree on: the ultra-wealthy are the world’s true degenerate freaks. It undeniably banks on the viewer’s kneejerk discomfort with other people’s private kink play scenarios, though, drawing just as much terror out of the human-dog’s elaborate furry costuming (his mask has a hinged jaw!) as it does out of the violence that keeps him living the fantasy. Speaking personally, the movie didn’t change the way I think about narcissist millionaires, trad homesteaders, or proudly kinky puppy players. However, it did change how I interacted with my dog for the next couple days, causing me to pause while feeding her, pilling her, and getting her ready for bed to consider just how strange of a relationship we have on either side of the pet-owner divide. It may not be an especially deep movie, thematically, but it still made something familiar & routine feel totally alien & horrific in its immediate afterglow, which is all I can really ask for out of a prankish, low-budget horror movie.
I’ve watched a few disparate adaptations & reinterpretations of Beauty and the Beast in recent years, each with their own unique window into the dark magic of the fairy tale: the intensely sensual surrealism of the French version from 1946, the tactile storybook atmospherics of the Czech version from 1979, the Internet Age psychedelia of the animated Japanese version from 2021. All of these retellings of the “tale as old as time” have, of course, touched on the hesitant attraction of an innocent young woman to a wounded, mysterious brute, but they also all ultimately focus more on the brute’s troubled past & cursed homelife than the inner life of the vulnerable beauty who loves him. That’s where Walerian Borowczyk’s take on Beauty and the Beast finds new, forbidden territory worthy to explore (as a French adaptation from a Polish director, as long as we’re tracking geography). A profane masterpiece of erotic menace & goofball social satire, Borowczyk’s perversion of the Beauty of the Beast template delves deeper into the monstrous extremes of women’s desire & pleasure than any other retelling I can name, to the point where the titular beast is merely a prop, a piece of furniture. And wait until you see what the women do to the furniture! The Beast is also singular its smutty eagerness to roll around in its own filth, an instinct that eventually pushes past the absurd into the sublime. It’s the only version of this story I’ve seen that reasonably compares to the 1940s Cocteau film that defines so many adaptations’ basic visual language, mostly because both works were clearly made for abject perverts.
Technically, The Beast is not an adaptation of the 18th century fairy tale at all, at least not in terms of plot. Like the recent anime version in Belle, Borowczyk’s film assumes the audience’s overfamiliarity with the source material, using its basic iconography for shorthand to push & warp its broader themes to new extremes. This is still a story where a young, naive woman is married off to a cursed, wretched beast as a desperate financial ploy, with the deep sadness of their newly shared castle’s faded glory haunting their tentative romance. And just in case you don’t catch his allusions to the fairy tale, Borowczyk hands the beast’s would-be bride a single red rose as a symbol of their delicate union. It’s just that this is the kind of film where the young beauty mashes that rose into her clitoris as an unconventional masturbation tool, destroying it in lustful mania while entertaining a zoological ravishment fantasy that would make even the most jaded cinephile blush. You’d think there’s nothing left that a Beauty and the Beast tale could do to surprise an audience, considering how many times it’s been retold & reshaped over the past few centuries. The Beast dropped my jaw in shock in its very first frame, which zooms in on the textbook veterinary details of equine genital arousal. The movie opens with relentless, repetitive images of erect horse cocks, fairly warning the audience that if you stick around long enough you will watch beasts fuck in intense biological detail. You won’t find that kind of novelty in either of Disney’s retellings of the tale, but Borowczyk’s version has a way of distilling it down to its most essential, throbbing parts.
The beastly beau in this picture is the poorly socialized nephew of a decrepit French baron, living in a Grey Gardens style faded estate in the rot of long-lost wealth. Hoping that a traditional Christian marriage will bring the mysteriously disgraced family back into the royal fold, they arrange for the ancient nobleman’s brother, a highly reputable Cardinal, to ordain his weirdo nephew’s union with a spritely British heiress. Only, the heir to the estate is a hopeless loser, spending every waking moment in the stables overseeing an intensive horse-breeding program with a fervor that pushes beyond the practical to the disturbed. Luckily, his wife-to-be is just as much of a shameless pervert, immediately matching the unholy, decadent vibe of the chateau with her own morbid sexual curiosity. Since her beau is too socially obtuse to understand or reciprocate her enthusiasm, he leaves her sexually frustrated in the absurdly long wait for the Cardinal’s arrival, dead time that she fills with wet dreams of the estate’s sordid history. There are superstitious rumors that a former lady of the house had mated with a cryptid beast who cyclically haunts the grounds every couple centuries, which is supposedly how the family was excommunicated from the Church in the first place. The beauty sweatily reimagines this human-bestial coupling in extensive, graphic detail while furiously masturbating in her bridal nightgown until the poor cloth is ripped to shreds. The horny, mythical beast of the past and the shy, grotesque beast of the present are eventually linked in a last-minute twist, but their connection is far less important than the perverted pleasures of the women who desire their touch (and thrusts).
Before The Beast devolves into full-on cryptid erotica, its value as a unique work gets lost among its many literary parallels, which extend far beyond the fairy tale it most overtly alludes to. The long, pointless wait for the Cardinal’s arrival at the castle plays out as an existential joke, recalling surrealist works like The Exterminating Angel & Waiting for Godot. There are also overt Buñuel parallels in its blasphemous mockery of the wealthy & religious ruling class as degenerate brutes, pushing its satire to de Sadist extremes but never fully matching the heightened Buñuelian humor at hand. The centerpiece of the work really is the pornographic depictions of bestial fucking, then – starting with the horses, working up to more traditional onscreen heterosexual couplings, and then climaxing with the historical ravishment fantasy that swallows up most of the third act. “Climax” is the only word you could really use to describe that payoff, too, since the humanoid wolverine who couples with an actual human being spurts semen by the bucketload for minutes on end as their tryst pushes beyond taste & reason. A faux-classy harpsichord soundtrack keeps the mood lightly comical throughout this absurd display, and it concludes with a punchline in which the Cardinal, finally arrived, performs a grand, fingerwagging speech about the evils of bestiality & women’s libidos as if he were reading from a pre-prepared pamphlet. In the end, it’s the women’s arousal & search for pleasure that registers as the film’s most blasphemous acts, even more so than its extensive depictions of their monstrous ravishment fantasies. They’re greatly enjoying themselves, much to everyone else’s disgust & confusion, which remains a global movie censorship taboo to this day.
Borowczyk finds his own fairy tale visual language here with images that have no obvious connection to the Beauty and the Beast tale: a snail sliming its way across a lady’s sky-blue shoe; lurid flashes of red paint through hallway doors that slyly recall aroused genitals: pornographic close-ups on actual aroused genitals; etc. As soon as his equivalent of Belle arrives on the estate taking dozens of dirty Polaroids of every perverted detail she can collect, it’s clear that he’s taking the story to new, distinct places. Most Belles cower in fear of the erotic menace lurking in their new home castles, gradually warming up to the beast who stalks the grounds. In this version, she’s so immediately fired up by the ugly erotic charge of the central pairing that it freaks out everyone around her, including the audience. A half-century later, it remains a bold, hilarious, intensely alienating take on a story that’s continued to be told countless times since, but rarely with such gleeful prurience.
Welcome to Episode #196 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss four horror films directed by auteurs who only dabbled in the genre once, starting with Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968).
00:00 Welcome
03:07 The Beast (1975) 08:31 No One Will Save You (2023) 10:22 Death of a Cheerleader (2019) 12:18 Night Tide (1961) 16:12 Anchorman (2004) 22:08 Good Boy (2023) 24:19 The Severing (2023)
28:47 Hour of the Wolf (1968) 50:54 Peeping Tom (1960) 1:10:25 Near Dark (1987) 1:27:22 Willow Creek (2013)
Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means many cinephiles & genre nerds out there are currently planning to cram in as many scary movies as we can over the next month. In that spirit, here’s a horror movie recommendation for every day in October from the Swampflix crew. Each title was positively reviewed on the blog or podcast in the past year and is currently available on a substantial streaming service. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to add some titles to their annual horror binge. Happy hauntings!
“Sunshine, wine, swimming, antiquing, ambient acoustic strumming … If it weren’t for all of the violent hallucinations & vampiric ghouls this would be a pleasant little getaway” Currently streaming on Paramount+, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and for free (with ads) on PlutoTV.
“I braced myself for it to be far more needlessly vicious than it was, given the New French Extremity’s fetish for grisly details. Calvaire does a good job of implying instead of dwelling and, more importantly, of cutting its unbearable tension with gallows humor so it’s not all misery & pain. Part of my amusement might have been enhanced by the two main characters being assigned names I associate with comedy: Marc Stevens (who shares a name with John Early’s grifter villain on Los Espookys) and Paul Bartel (who shares a name with one of the greatest comedic directors to ever do it). Regardless, director Fabrice du Welz also amuses himself by framing this grim & grueling torture session as ‘the best Christmas ever’ in its sicko villain’s mind, contrasting the hyperviolent hostage crisis the audience is watching with the delusional family reunion of his imagination in a bleakly hilarious clash of realities. I don’t mean to imply that Calvaire‘s not also a nonstop misery parade, though. It’s that too.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“A very cool, loose hangout dramedy about truck stop sex workers that gradually turns into a rigidly formulaic grindhouse slasher to pay the bills. Not everyone gets to be Sean Baker; sometimes you gotta cosplay as Rob Zombie to land your funding.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“What I mean when I say ‘kids are scary’ is that being around other people’s children naturally makes people anxious and nervous, or at least that’s my experience. What if they trip and fall while running past my table at a cafe? Do I suddenly become responsible for their wellbeing? What if the parent thinks I tripped them? What if the kid thinks I tripped them and blames me? Kids are tiny, vulnerable people, but they also have a capability for pure, unfiltered malice that can be creepy as well, and since they’re only just learning how to regulate their emotions and communicate their thoughts, interaction with them can be a minefield. There’s Something Wrong with the Children is probably the first film that I’ve ever seen that captures that particular unease.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and MGM+.
“In which a pair of drunkard ghosts coach a child who’s been scared bald on how to grow his hair back, only for their advice to work way too well for his own good. Little-kid nightmare logic that you can only find in German fairy tales and Canadian B-movies, pinpointing the middle ground between Hansel & Gretel and The Pit. Wonderfully deranged.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“I was starving for a genuinely over-the-top animal attack movie after being let down by Cocaine Bear, and this hit the spot. It’s basically the same faintly sketched-out story, but its tactility & sincerity go a long way in making its attack scenes much worthier of the ambling journey. There’s something especially unnerving about the way the animals appear to leap out of stock footage, as if they’re crossing a forbidden barrier into reality to tear into the character actors (and, more often, the stunt doubles). Incredible that it wasn’t directed by Larry Cohen.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“As trippy as it can be in its Skinamarinkian disorientation, it’s anchored to a concise, recognizable premise that could neatly be categorized as The Blair Witch Project Part IV: Blair Witch Goes to Hanging Rock. It strikes a nice balance between the slow-moving quiet of its bedroom art brethren and mainstream horror’s return to big, bold, bloody haunted house scares. Maybe that makes it a less artistically daring film than World’s Fair or Skinamarink, but it also makes it a more overtly entertaining one.”. Currently streamingon Screambox, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“Seeing a lot of grossed-out responses from unsuspecting audiences wishing this was more of a straightforward road trip love story. I’m coming from the opposite direction, wishing it weren’t so tenderly underplayed & remorseful about its hunger pangs for gore. It’s kinda nice to have something that drifts between those two magnetic pulls, though, especially since it’s so unusual to see a Near Dark-style genre blender positioned as a prestigious Awards Contender.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and MGM+.
“Feels like Lynch twisting himself in knots to make the James from Twin Peaks archetype genuinely compelling … and he eventually gets there. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how noir antiheroes are mostly just sad sack losers who make their own shit luck by feeling sorry for themselves, and this one turns their mopey interchangeability into a kind of existential horror.” Currently streamingon The Criterion Channel.
“In The Lawnmower Man, director Brett Leonard justifies testing the limitations of stage-of-the-art 90s CG animation by inventing convoluted science lab experiments that create a VR cyberworld. Here, he takes a bold step forward by suggesting that exact CG cyberworld is where our souls go when our bodies die, treating his Windows 95 screensaver graphics as if they were the most typical, durable approach to visual effects available. Stunning, even if extraordinarily goofy.” Currently streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“Brandon Cronenberg’s deeply unnerving debut is a sickly TMZ geek show. I need to stop hanging out online, because I keep reading flippant dismissals about how unimpressive he is as body horror’s premier nepo baby, then still really enjoying each of his movies when I get to see them for myself.” Currently streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“In which a madman plastic surgeon transforms an injured go-to dancer into his missing daughter’s doppelganger, in order to claim her inheritance in her absence. Technically, this is a PG-rated comedy, but it feels like it should have been bumped to the top of the video nasties list. Delicious, deep-fried Southern sleaze.” Currently streaming on Screambox.
“Hideous gore, gratuitous male & female nudity, and a babyfaced Udo Kier soaring miles over the top as a camped-up villainous lead. What more could you want?” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel and AMC+.
“Like all other Amicus anthology horrors I’ve seen, this is consistently entertaining throughout but never exactly surprising nor even thrilling. It’s horror comfort viewing, best enjoyed under a blanket with a humongous mug of tea.” Currently streaming on Screambox, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The greatest British portmanteau horror of all time, trading in the rigid stage-play traditionalism of classic Amicus anthologies for a more fluid, music video era dream logic.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy.
“A pure psychedelic meltdown of id at the bottom of a deep well of communal grief. Restructures the seaside ghost story of Carpenter’s The Fog through the methodical unraveling of Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, dredging up something that’s at once eerily familiar & wholly unique.” Currently streaming on Hulu.
“A pensive motherhood horror about the pain of trading in youthful passion & rebellion for familial comfort & ease. Lots of thematic overlap with The Five Devils in that way, even if they’re nothing alike aesthetically. Besides landing every one of its scares and dramatic beats, this just has some truly world-class hand acting. Cracking knuckles and spatchcocking chickens will never feel the same again.” Currently streamingon Shudder and AMC+.
“Without question, the greatest evil-stepparent horror of all time, a superlative indicated by its definitive title. Terry O’Quinn is the stepfather, a sociopathic serial killer who cycles through families like he’s updating his wardrobe, killing the old batch in cold blood instead of dropping it off at Goodwill. O’Quinn is an explosive volcano of white-man rage, barely suppressing his violent outbursts under a thin facade of Ward Cleaver, Father Knows Best-style suburban Family Values. It is one of the all-time great villain performances, regardless of genre. There was already a bland, forgettable remake in the aughts, but the only other actor who could maybe pull this performance off is Will Forte, whose comedic version of bottled-up fury is a direct echo of the terror in O’Quinn’s piercing, hateful eyes.” Currently streamingon Peacock, Screambox, for free (with ads) on Tubi, and for free (with a librarby card) on Kanopy & Hoopla.
“A tense domestic thriller about a pushy, macho plumber who walks all over a married couple of uptight academics; directed for television by a young Peter Weir. Cuts to the core of liberal urbanites’ fear of the working-class brutes they invite into their home for routine repairs; a home invasion thriller where the menace is politely welcomed inside.” Currently streamingon The Criterion Channel.
“As absurd as this prototypical slasher can be tonally, it feels true to how I remember high school: a conformity cult led by fascist jocks, lording over poorly socialized losers who would’ve been just as awful if we were given the opportunity. Our jocks never offered to take us hang-gliding, though, so now I feel like I missed out on something.” Currently streamingon The Criterion Channel.
“A strong sequel in a very strong franchise, possibly the horror franchise with the best hit to miss ration (5:1, in my book, and even the dud has Parker Posey to liven it up, so that’s something). Even though there are moments that are questionable (some of the people we see attacked should not have survived what happened to them), there are more than enough great sequences, character beats, and thrills to make up for them.” Currently streaming on Paramount+.
“It wasn’t until after the viewing that I realized the director, Gerard Johnstone, was also the man behind Housebound, a film we loved so much that we made it into content for Swampflix twice: first with a very positive 2015 review and again five years later as the topic on one of our earliest episodes of the Lagniappe podcast. That actually explains the comedic sensibility; it’s not omnipresent, but it’s almost funnier that the jokes are paced with some distance between them, allowing them to break the tension when they reappear, and the emotional whiplash of it all is part of the fun. ” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
“A young, baby-faced Clint Howard stars as a military academy misfit who summons Satan to smite his bullies using the Latin translation software on the school computer. It’s a dual-novelty horror that cashes in on the personal desktop computer & Satanic Panic trends of its era, combining badass practical gore spectacles with proto-Lawnmower Man computer graphics. It isn’t long before the prematurely bald Baby Clint graduates from translating Latin phrases from a Satanic priest’s diary to asking the computer dangerous questions like ‘“’What elements do I need for a Black Mass?’”’ and ‘“’What are the keys to Satan’s magic?’”’, stoking parents’ technological and religious fears with full aggression. And the third-act gore spectacle he unleashes with those questions is gorgeously disgusting.” Currently streamingon Shudder.
“Some fun, fucked-up Discomfort Horror that Malignantizes the post-torture porn cruelty of titles like Don’t Breathe into something new & exciting. It also has the best end-credits needle drop since You Were Never Really Here, leaving the audience in a perversely upbeat mood despite the Hell we just squirmed through.” Currently streaming on Hulu and Max.
“Simultaneously a familiar experience and an alien one, mixing generic horror tropes with an experimental sensibility – like a Poltergeist remake guided by the spirit of Un Chien Andalou. It’s the kind of loosely plotted, bad-vibes-only, liminal-space horror that requires the audience to meet it halfway both in emotional impact and in logical interpretation. In the best-case scenario, audiences will find traces of their own childhood nightmares in its darkened hallways & Lego-piece art instillations. Personally, I was more hung up on the way it evokes two entirely separate eras of my youth: my alone-time online as a sleep-starved teen and my alone-time in front of cathode TVs as a sleep-starved tyke a decade earlier.” Currently streaming on Hulu and Shudder.
“Before pressing play I was skeptical this would be enough of a Horror Film to work as proper Halloween season viewing. One of the first shots is a newspaper headline that reads ‘STRANGLER STILL AT LARGE!'” Currently streamingon Amazon Prime and The Criterion Channel.
“Super scary, both as a traditional Gothic ghost story and as a worst-case-scenario vision of Daniel Radcliffe’s career path as a bland leading man instead of an eccentric weirdo millionaire.” Currently streamingon Paramount+ and for free (with a library card) on Hoopla.
“The surprisingly goofy midway point between Poltergeist and Jacob’s Ladder. Can’t quite match the euphoric highs of either comparison, but it’s still a fun dark-ride attraction of its own merit. The rubber-mask monsters are adorably grotesque, and they pop out of the most surprising places.” Currently streaming on Shudder, Amazon Prime, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“A deliciously trashy VHS slasher where every single kill comes with its own punny quip. You hardly have time to question why they call him Dr. Giggles before he’s performing involuntary open-heart surgery while giggling like a madman and proclaiming ‘”‘Laughter is the best medicine.'”‘ It has no idea how to fill the time between the kill gags, but it really delivers the goods where it counts.” Currently streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“A kind of anti-choice, pro-environmentalist creature feature where an aborted, toxically mutated fetus gets its revenge on the brothel-clinic that brought it into this sick, sad world. It’s not a perfect movie but it’s a perfect This Kind Of Movie, delivering everything you could possibly want to see out schlock of its ilk: a wide range of rubber monster puppets, over-the-top character work, stop-motion buffoonery, and multiple opportunities to feel greatly offended while never being able to exactly pinpoint its politics. Wonderfully fucked up stuff.” Currently streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“I always assumed we didn’t have basements in Louisiana because we’re built on mushy swampland. Turns out it’s because we’re built on seven gateways to Hell. Honestly makes a lot more sense.” Currently streamingon Shudder, Peacock, andfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
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