How do we continue to seek & experience pleasure while the world is actively ending all around us? I have no idea if that question was on director Oliver Laxe’s while he was making the new apocalyptic rave-scene drama Sirāt, but it was certainly on mine while watching it. In fact, it’s getting increasingly difficult to think about anything else these days, when simple, for their-own-sake pleasures are feeling less attainable and more amoral by the minute. The transient partiers of Sirāt have to selectively tune out constant news reportage about the start of World War III in order to enjoy their daily travels & pleasure hunts, stubbornly continuing their journey to the next big party on the horizon despite what the audience can only assume is an impending nuclear holocaust. From a distance, it may seem excessively selfish or hedonistic for them to continue raving on while the world is ending just outside their periphery, but it’s also difficult to imagine what a small crew of recreational drug users & dance music enthusiasts could possibly do to stop that apocalyptic momentum anyway, even if they were more politically engaged with the world outside their vans. The only two options they have, really, are to either helplessly fret their final hours away or to fill those hours with as many small, for-their-own sake pleasures as they can manage. In the immortal words of Andrew W.K., “When it’s time to party [i.e, to distract ourselves from impending doom and the ever-present desire to cry until we puke], we will always party hard.” Words to live by, I guess.
I do not want to imply that Sirāt‘s entire cast of characters is evaporated into a mushroom cloud at the story’s climax. WWIII is more of a background hum beneath their constant soundtrack of techno beats than it is a direct threat on their lives. If they are in any mortal danger, it’s due to their personal choices, not global circumstances. The film opens in the vastness of the Moroccan desert, with unnamed party promoters erecting enormous speaker towers in the sand like Kubrick’s monolith. When thunderous bass starts pumping through those speakers, a crowd of ravers materialize to party the hours away, dancing up a dust cloud to a nonstop techno track. The only interlopers among them are a middle aged, working-class dad (Sergi López) and his young son, who pass out “Missing Person” flyers in an attempt to track down a member of their family who hasn’t returned home in a half-year’s time. When military troops breaks up the party, the out-of-place father & son duo decide to follow the biggest risk-taker ravers to a second rave even deeper in the desert, risking their lives for the possibility of staging a family reunion. Meanwhile, the more hardcore ravers are risking their lives for the pure thrill of the risk. As the makeshift convoy journeys towards the Promised Land rave deeper in the desert, the film starts hitting thriller genre beats more reminiscent of a Sorcerer or a Fury Road than the small character drama beats it hits in the opening stretch. Shit gets real. People get hurt. And yet, their lives still feel small & inconsequential within the context of the larger global catastrophe being set in motion just outside the frame.
Despite the lethal stakes of Sirāt‘s scene-to-scene drama and apocalyptic setting, the movie can be oddly sweet. It’s a character drama at heart, one populated by real, believable people with real-life faces of interest — as opposed to the perfectly sculpted plastic faces of its Hollywood studio equivalents. The European ravers each speak multiple languages; they gradually assimilate the misguided father & son into their own found family; and they wax poetic about the simple joys of taking drugs to techno music, explaining to the befuddled, “It’s not for listening; it’s for dancing.” The fact that tragic things happen to them on the road (and that their world is doomed regardless) is an inevitability beyond their control. All they can do is party in the present and hope to survive long enough to party again in the future, often with open disdain for reminiscing about the past. The up-close details of their lifestyle are entirely alien to me, as I neither take the right drugs nor listen to the right music to fit into the raver scene they inhabit. Their collective impulse to seek small sensory pleasures in a world that’s actively collapsing around them should resonate with anyone who’s had the misfortune of being alive & aware this century, though, regardless of the futility in their pursuit. Not for nothing, their search for the next big party in the Moroccan wilderness is also strangely reminiscent of how I dream, when my unconscious mind is constantly sorting through a chaotic assemblage of fictional, self-generated obstacles while I’m trying to make my way to a dreamworld concert, party, or film screening that doesn’t actually exist.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss two different films that share the same title and director: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and its loose remake The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).
There is a fight for authorship at the center of the mental-crisis drama Die My Love that drives most of its scene-to-scene tension. The project was initiated by its star, Jennifer Lawrence, after Martin Scorsese forwarded the source-material novel to her as a potential showcase for her acting talents. Indeed, Lawrence gets to run wild in the resulting movie adaptation of that book, the most violently expressive she’s been on screen since 2017’s mother! — no small feat. Somewhere in the process of adapting the book, however, Lawrence hired an equally ferocious authorial voice in Lynne Ramsay to direct. Instead of adapting a novel about postpartum depression, it appears Ramsay has pulled a fast one and adapted those Britney Spears knife-dancing videos to feature length instead, doing as much as she can to abstract & rattle the text until it is no longer recognizable as anything other than a Lynne Ramsay picture. Die My Love touches on all of Ramsay’s greatest hits—the feral playground brutality of Ratcatcher, the illustrated-mixtape rhythms of Morvern Callar, the mother-in-crisis chills of We Need to Talk About Kevin, the curdled social isolation of You Were Never Really Here—but it has to contend with a new disruption to the way she normally does things: an unrestrained Jennifer Lawrence. Typically, Ramsay’s filmmaking style is overtly intense while her protagonists convey a calm, quiet surface to onlookers, with their inner turmoil saved for the audience’s horror. Here, Lawrence is the loudest, brashest, most chaotic presence in every room, matching Ramsay’s firepower with her own histrionic arsenal, so that all eyes are constantly on her. It’s difficult to say whether either of those two voices overpower the other here, but the tension between them is undeniably compelling.
That tense creative partnership between actor & director is echoed in the onscreen marriage between Die My Love‘s two leads: JLaw & RPats. The young couple start off well enough in the early stretch when they’re nesting in their new rural Montana home, routinely getting wasted and fucking on every possible surface. That ferocious animal attraction fades once Lawrence is nursing the inevitable baby they make together, with Robert Pattinson’s husband figure finding an increasing number of excuses to spend time outside of the house “for work.” Lawrence’s mental health rapidly plummets as she raises their baby in extreme isolation, due partly to postpartum depression but due largely to the soul-crushing boredom of being left alone in the house. The barking dogs, buzzing flies, and baby-appropriate novelty songs that fill that house’s void are enough to drive anyone insane after a few months of solitude, and that’s before you consider the wild hormonal swings the human body suffers after giving birth. For Ramsay’s part, she mimics the “chopped up” mental state of postpartum mothers in her trademark dissociative editing style, which helps abstract a fairly typical romantic-drift-apart story into the more experiential nightmare of a woman on the verge. Meanwhile, Lawrence lashes out at how “fucking boring” the universe is by literally clawing at the walls of her new prison/home and begging her husband to fuck her like he used to, proving that she’s still a person to him and not just a baby-making appliance. She follows through on every intrusive thought that might break her out of the domestic pattern she’s doomed to repeat, including jumping through sliding glass doors just to feel something. If Die My Love were made by any other director you’d expect those violent shocks to be momentary fantasies (see: last year’s Nightbitch), but since it’s Lynne Ramsay we know to accept the worst at face value and brace for the fallout.
Not every moment in Die My Love is tension & strife. Lawrence’s mother-in-crisis finds a surprise source of patience & grace in her neighboring mother-in-law, played by Sissy Spacek. While the younger mother is suffering through the maddening isolation that follows bringing a new life into this world, the older mother is suffering the maddening isolation of watching a loved one leave this world. As she grieves the recent loss of her own husband (Nick Nolte), Spacek slips into a similar self-destructive trance as Lawrence, and the two women only find moments of peace in the monochrome moonlight while the rest of the world is asleep — unlikely common ground. Sissy is an inspired casting choice for the part, since her historic woman-on-the-verge performance in Carrie is just as core to the driven-mad-by-the-patriarchy canon as the more often-cited works of Gena Rowlands & Isabelle Adjani. Even within that looming context, Lawrence admirably holds her own here, even steamrolling the dependably off-putting Pattinson in her own unpredictable, unhinged antics. Ramsay is somewhat accommodating in her role behind the camera, allowing for a little more storytelling conventionality than is typical to her work (imagine, for instance, if Morvern Callar was hospitalized for depression instead of fucking off to a rave). There are a few harmonic moments when the star and director are working perfectly in collaboration to illustrate a young mother’s frazzled mental state. It’s arguable, though, that the movie is at its most compelling when those two creative voices are fighting for dominance, with both the acting and the filmmaking reaching such top-volume kettle whistles that it’s difficult to parse out any specific grace notes from one or the other. They’re both screaming for your attention, and the result is effectively maddening.
The Sundance Film Festival is soon to move locations to Boulder, Colorado within the next couple years, after decades of staying put in the smaller town of Park City, Utah. The move has been announced as a major shakeup for the festival, but from where I’m sitting halfway across the country, it’s at best the second biggest move the fest has made this decade. The biggest culture shift for Sundance in the 2020s has been moving a significant portion of its program online, launching a Virtual Cinema component in 2021 to compensate for the social distancing restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. The shift from a purely in-person festival to a semi-virtual one has had some hiccups, especially since it’s invited opportunistic piracy among fanatics who’ve leaked steamier scenes of their favorite actors out of context to social media for momentary clout, jeopardizing this new resource. It has also opened the festival up to a wider range of audiences & critics who can’t afford (either fiscally or physically) to attend in-person, calling into question the value of film-festival exclusivity. I have not yet personally “attended” Virtual Sundance in any direct way, but the experience does sound like a more condensed version of how I interact with the festival anyway. Staged in January, months before the previous year’s awards cycle concludes at The Oscars, Sundance is always the first major event on the annual cinematic calendar. Intentionally or not, I spend my entire year catching up with the buzzier titles that premiere there, as they trickle down the distribution tributaries until they find their way to Louisiana. Let’s take this year for example. Swampflix has already covered ten feature films that premiered at Sundance this January — some great, some so-so: Twinless, Lurker, Dead Lover, Predators, The Ugly Stepsister, Zodiac Killer Project, Move Ya Body, Mad Bills to Pay, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and The Legend of Ochi. This was not an intentional project, just something that happened naturally by keeping up with the more significant releases of the year. And we’re still anticipating a few 2025 Sundance titles that won’t hit wide distribution until after Sundance 2026 has concluded: Obex, By Design, and Endless Cookie, to name a few. In that way, most film-nerd audiences who aren’t firmly established in The Industry are constantly attending some form of Virtual Sundance just by going to the movies week to week, so it’s been exciting to see the festival condense that slow rollout process a little bit by offering some more immediate access to their program online during the festival proper.
My unintentional Virtual Sundance experience has continued into the 11th month of the year with the recent addition of the festival standout Sorry, Baby to the streaming platform HBO Max. The positive critical reception of the film at the festival (along with a jury prize for screenwriting) positioned Sorry, Baby as one of the first Great, Must-See movies of the year, months before it would be available for wide-audience exhibition. I mention all of this not to claim the film has become overhyped or outdated in the months since, but to register my surprise at how Sundance-typical it is in practice. There are a lot of ways that Sorry, Baby‘s tone & tenor are specific to the creative voice of its writer-director-lead Eva Victor, but its storytelling structure is also unmistakably Sundancy. Here we have a story about a smart twentysomething academic navigating their way through a personally traumatic event with the help of quirky side characters played by widely respected indie-scene actors (most notably in this case, Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges, and John Carroll Lynch). The themes are heavy but the overall mood is defiantly light, with constant self-deprecating character humor undercutting the soul-crushing facts of modern life. Also, there’s a kitten hanging around, providing the homely comfort of the obligatory cat that lounges in every decent used bookstore. With the exception of a couple showy framing choices that consciously distance us from the protagonist’s trauma (one in physical distance, one in chronology), the filmmaking side of Sorry, Baby is secondary to the writing and the performances, which are as smartly crafted as they are grounded to reality. Victor shines brightest as a writer and a screen presence rather than as a director, with the darkness & fearlessness of the dialogue often cutting through the more restrictive, routine form of the images. They land some tricky laughs and the real-life hurt of the drama weighs heavy on the heart, but there’s not much to the film that can linger past the end credits beyond recognition that it was written by a smart person. In fact, Victor seems intent to constantly establish their mouthpiece character as the smartest person in every room, often as a way to vent about the institutional failures that compound personal trauma. Legal, medical, and academic bureaucrats play strawman to the mightier-than-the-sword screenwriter’s pen, while only the protagonist’s inner circle of supportive friends are afforded any humanistic grace notes. It’s a writer’s project first & foremost, to the point where it’s literally about the writing of a master’s thesis.
I suppose I should be more specific here and note that this is a film about the personal & professional fallout following a sexual assault. Victor plays a master’s student who is assaulted in her advising professor’s home, derailing any personal or professional development past the most traumatic event of her life. This assault is revealed to the audience indirectly. It is obscured from view behind the closed door of the professor’s home, which is framed in an extreme wide shot of rapid time elapse, chilling the audience instead of inviting us into the violence of the act. We are also kept at a distance from this violent act by the screenplay’s scrambling of the dramatic timeline, with chapter titles like “The Year with the Baby,” “The Year with the Bad Thing,” “The Year with the Questions,” and “The Year with the Good Sandwich” confusing the chronology of her trauma & recovery. At first, all we know is that she’s been stuck in time since “The Bad Thing” happened, living in the same grad-school house and working in the same dusty university offices for an eternal limbo as she puzzles her way through how to move past that moment without allowing her entire life to be defined by it. Quietly hostile interactions with doctors, lawyers, colleagues, and clueless neighbors offer Victor an opportunity to vent about how ill-equipped institutions are to address personal trauma with any empathy or humanity. The most striking thing about the movie is when Victor cuts through those broader observations about the culture of rape to rattle the audience with more personal observations. After the assault is obscured from an extreme wide-shot distance, Victor is then shown recounting minor details from the event to a roommate in intimate close-up, crouched in her bathtub. That intimacy is later echoed in a second bathtub scene in which she attempts to physically connect with her sex-buddy neighbor, who spoils the moment in much subtler, underplayed ways than the doctors & lawyers who press her for invasive details about the worst moment of her life. Whether broad or intimate, it’s all smartly observed and it’s all couched within a deadpan-humorist writing style that lessens the miserabilist potential of the topic. The question is whether having something smart to say fully justifies making a movie—as opposed to writing an essay or a stage play—beyond the form’s ability to get Victor’s words in front of as many people as possible. Sorry, Baby‘s chosen form is a useful delivery system for Victor’s writing, but I don’t know that it ever fully registers as cinematic beyond its recognizability as routine Sundance fare, to be slowly doled to the masses throughout the year.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the erotic alien-invasion horror Species (1995), starring Natasha Henstridge.
The J-horror classic Battle Royale is one those high-concept movies with such a clear, concise premise that it’s a convenient cultural reference point even if you’ve never seen the full picture yourself. Like Gaslight, Catfish, and The Bucket List, it’s the kind of clarifying text that defines a simple idea that’s since been extrapolated & mutated beyond the point of attribution. I had never seen Battle Royale before this year, but I’ve long-known its logline premise thanks to its lineage of dystopian YA descendants in major studio titles like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner and, most recently, The Long Walk, each of which have been likened to it. Any movie wherein a group of teenagers in a fascistic near-future are pitted against each other in a lethal game of survival is going to be reflexively likened to Battle Royale, and it was starting to get embarrassing that I had not seen that film myself despite it being such a consistent reference point in that genre. Sometimes, though, procrastination pays off. This year’s 25th anniversary of the film inspired a theatrical re-release, where I got to see it for the first time big & loud, in all its gory, sadistic glory.
Having only known this film as a point of inspiration for the Hollywood YA thrillers to follow, I wasn’t especially shocked by its preference for melodrama over bloodshed – only spraying the screen with teen blood as dramatic punctuation between long scenes of heart-to-heart confessions & betrayals. As a species, teens tend to have Big Feelings about anything & everything, so it makes sense that they’d spend more time getting teary eyed about having to tear each other apart for survival than actually doing the tearing. Even the recent Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk reads more like the teen-boy melodrama Stand by Me that it does a bodycount horror flick, and it’s got a reputation for being the more brutal version of The Hunger Games series (with which it shares a director in Francis Lawrence). Where Battle Royale gets more vicious than its Hollywood derivatives is not so much in its escalated gore, but in its prologue’s establishment that these kids already know & love each other before they’re forced to kill. Like The Long Walk, it’s an unlikely story about the value of true friendship instead of the expected story about selfish teenage violence. However, the young men of The Long Walk become fast friends after they’ve already been locked into their own respective survival game, starting off as strangers. In Battle Royale, the friendships & alliances go back for years before the story starts, which makes each lethal betrayal all the more sickening.
A class of Japanese high schoolers are mysteriously gassed while riding a school bus, waking on a small island wearing identical metal collars. Disoriented, they receive a crash-course orientation from a former aggrieved teacher (genre cinema heavyweight Beat Takeshi) and a kawaii pop idol, who appears only on a rolling AV Cart. The ultimate goal of the game is simple; the high schoolers must kill each other within 72 hours until only one survivor is left. The rules of how to accomplish that goal get a little trickier, involving explosive collars to punish conscientious objectors, volunteer players who appear to be violent gangsters from outside the class, rotating areas of the map that are temporarily forbidden to discourage stationary hiding, etc. The singular weapon that each student is provided varies wildly in effectiveness, ranging from knife to gun to binoculars to pot lid. That arbitrarily assigned hierarchy and the rules of combat appear designed entirely to keep the game moving & entertaining, as if the film were being broadcast on national Japanese television instead of closed-circuit security monitors. Every kill is even punctuated with an onscreen rolling body count that feels as if it were made for a live-feed audience, not the dweebs in the theater. That one change in broadcast scope might be the only place that later works like The Hunger Games might’ve improved on the Battle Royale premise, even if they pulled that detail from Stephen King novels like The Long Walk &The Running Man. The most Battle Royale touches on the entertainment media of its time is during the AV-cart orientation scene, in which a cutesy pop idol directs her audience to log onto http://www.br.com.
As with all films in this genre, this is primarily a story about a younger generation suffering the violent fallout of mistakes made before they were born. Beat Takeshi’s failed, disgruntled teacher is a pitch-perfect villain, seething with resentment for his young, captive victims while also reaching out to them for his one chance at genuine human connection. His hard exterior crumbles in a spectacularly pathetic display when the kids storm his compound to find his amateur, Henry Darger-esque painting of his favorite student winning the games – a nauseating tribute to her childish innocence, to which he no longer relates. Meanwhile, most of the kids in the game do their best to get by sharing resources and scheming a way off the island. They pass around food, medicine, and hacking skills when they’re supposed to be passing around bullets & live grenades. The rules of the game are unfairly stacked against them, though, and all it takes is a few trigger-happy outliers to set the mass murder in motion. The kills in Battle Royale are frequent and comically graphic, setting a dizzying rhythm in its Grand Guignol grotesqueries that propels the scene-to-scene momentum well after the rules & players are fully established. A few off-island flashbacks distract from the gore & drama at hand, but the biggest break in format is saved for the finale, when the surviving teens escape to the streets of modern Tokyo and have to live in the larger world adults have made for them, which feels equally as bleak as the game it parallels. Given how frequently this same story template has been repeated in the 25 years since Battle Royale was first released, it’s likely fair to say the generation that followed didn’t leave the world much better off for their own children either. Take care of each other out there, while you still have a choice.
A late-70s Japanese folk horror about a demonic dragon that lurks underwater, threatening to drown a nearby village that won’t do its bidding, sounds like film bro catnip — the kind of zany, go-for-broke genre freak-out that the smelliest twentysomething in your life makes their entire personality for a couple years before moving on (see: 1977’s House). In practice, 1979’s Demon Pond is much more delicate than that. Its titular demon is a whispered-about, metaphorical presence that never graces the screen. Its vintage Moog score lilts and swells instead of hammering the audience with analog synth coolness. Its heroic fights against the otherworldly spirits that haunt the human world are staged as the ceremonial ringing of a bell. It yearns more than it burns, getting more wrapped up in doomed romance than doomed society. If you want the zany, go-for-broke genre freakout version of Demon Pond, check out something like Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare. Here, the yokai are quiet observers of human longing & misery, their supernatural antics held at bay by calm waters & a ringing bell. The film gingerly holds the audience in its palm like a flower petal, until it crushes us in the vengeful fist of its climax.
Although adapted from a traditionalist kabuki stage play, Demon Pond structurally mimics the basic story template of folk horror cinema like The Wicker Man, The Wailing, and The Last Wave. These are stories in which a Big City outsider stumbles into a rural town with its own mysterious, supernatural traditions that ultimately leads to his demise (and often to the wide-scale destruction of everyone around him). In this case, a schoolteacher on vacation pretends to be studying the small village he’s visiting as a casual tourist, when he’s in fact searching for a dear friend who disappeared from his life three years prior. He finds that friend married to an alarmingly delicate, ethereal woman who’s so childlike in her innocence that she seems alien to the human world. Indeed, her earthly presence is reflected in a magic-realm doppelganger that only the audience can see: a spiritual priestess who lords over the local yokai, bound to an ancient agreement that they will not flood the nearby village as long as the humans on-site ring the temple’s ceremonial bell three times a day. An academic collector of local folk tales, the teacher’s lost friend has taken up the lifelong duty of ringing said bell to save the thousands of villagers who would drown if the area floods. Meanwhile, the villagers have long dismissed the bell business as ancient superstition, but they’re starting to suspect that the strangers at the edge of town are the reason they’re suffering the unreasonably long drought that’s threatening their livelihoods. The race to see which superstition will win out (i.e., whether continuing to ring the bell or slaughtering the outsiders will fix the village’s water woes) is a one-track race to doom, inevitably leading to the village being sunk to the bottom of the titular pond.
Part of Demond Pond‘s delicate nature is due to its queer angle on gender & romance, resulting from the casting of stage actor Bandō Tamasaburō in the dual role of Yuri/Yuki, bell-tender/princess. Tamasaburō was specifically trained in the kabuki art of onnagata: male actors who play overly dramatic female roles. He performs the fragile softness of Yuri and the all-powerful romantic fury of Yuki with a heightened, drag-like attention to gender cues that adds to the stagecraft artifice of the film’s fantasy realm. It also adds a subversive texture to the central romance between the ringers of the temple bell, something the movie leans into heaviest when it draws out the couple’s intimate mouth-to-mouth kiss into elaborate choreography & blocking worthy of an early-MTV music video. Meanwhile the aquatic-yokai princess Yuki is most pained by her bell-bound agreement to not flood the village because it keeps her apart from a neighboring prince she yearns to marry. She eventually comes to welcome the flood, as it would free her to love as she pleases, making poetic proclamations like, “How blissful to dissolve in the stream of affection. Let my body be crushed to pieces. Still my spirit will yearn for him.” That’s some high-quality yearning right there, especially since its cinematic adoption of kabuki theatricality drags it into the realm of tragic queer love.
For most of its runtime, Demon Pond floats somewhere between the isolationist folk-tradition dread of The Wicker Man and the garish high-artifice spectacle of The Wizard of Oz. Then, it’ll swerve into a special effects showcase sequence here or there unlike anything you’ve seen anywhere else. When the yokai “creatures of mud” (humanoid catfish, crabs, frogs, etc.) emerge from the pond grounds to summon the fabled flood, they’re represented in costuming befitting of community theatre or a well-attended Halloween soiree. When their bell-bound princess emerges, however, her otherworldly magic is represented in purely cinematic double-exposure techniques truly befitting of an underwater spirit. When the village inevitably fails to ring her bell and floods in the consequences of its own inaction, director Masahiro Shinoda (and special effects wizard Nobuo Yajima) go full tokusatsu spectacle, crushing the village under a heavy flow of water with the same might & scale of a Godzilla rampage. Whereas most later Godzillapictures would indulge in kid-friendly pro wrestling drama, however, Demon Pond‘s spectacle is instead a tragic expression of nuanced, adult conflicts. Its superstitious villagers are paradoxically desperate for water but afraid of a pond. Its doomed-lover outsiders are paradoxically resentful of those villagers but feel responsible for keeping them alive, undrowned. The entire local structure at the edge of the Demon Pond hangs on a precarious balance, one so delicate it can be thrown off by a single bell tone. When it all comes crashing down, you feel the weight of that tragedy pressing directly on your heart. It hurts.
Without question, the local MVP this Halloween season has been the original uptown location of The Prytania, which has provided the bulk of local repertory horror programming in the lead-up to today’s spooky holiday. Not only was the single-screen theater’s regular Classic Movie Sunday slot repurposed to feature Halloween fare this month (Dial M for Murder, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Haunting, 13 Ghosts, The Bride of Frankenstein, and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein — all Swampflix favorites), but The Prytania also doubled down on its Spooky Season Content by staging a week-long film festival of classic horror titles. In collaboration with local MVP horror fest The Overlook, The Prytania launched a “Kill-O-Rama” lineup midway through the month, making up for the relatively anemic output of exciting new horror releases currently making the rounds. This year’s Kill-O-Rama lineup included perennial Spooky Season classics The Exorcist & Halloween, a 30th anniversary screening of George Romero’s Day of the Dead, multiple alternate-ending variants of the murder-mystery crowdpleaser Clue, and a victory-lap rerun of their 70mm print of Sinners (which they’ve been heroically exhibiting all year). It was the exact kind of Halloween-season programming I’m on the hunt for every October, conveniently gathered in one neighborhood theater. Although I was unable to give this year’s Kill-O-Rama the full mind-melting marathon treatment I tend to give other festivals, I was able to catch a few screenings from the program, reviewed below. Here’s hoping that this festival format returns to The Prytania next Halloween season, when I can plan ahead to live in the theater for a week solid — ignoring all non-scary-movie obligations in my schedule until All Hallows’ Eve has passed.
Interview with the Vampire (1994)
Sometimes, procrastination pays off. It’s likely shameful that I hadn’t seen the 1994 adaptation of Anne Rice’s vampire saga Interview with the Vampire until this year, especially since I lived here through the 90s era when the French Quarter was overrun with gothy vampire cosplay inspired by Rice’s local cachet. It was especially fun to watch with a New Orleans audience, though, so I’m glad I didn’t spoil the experience by diluting it with ad breaks on cable. There’s a moment late in the runtime when Brad Pitt’s woe-is-me vampire Louis announces that he is traveling to reunite with his jilted master (Tom Cruise, as the dastardly Lestat) on Prytania Street, and the crowd erupted into titters. It’s the most firmly I’ve felt rooted in The Prytania’s geographical location since catching an early screening of Happy Death Day there (which was filmed on a college campus a few blocks away, with students filling out most of the audience). Interview with the Vampire is not entirely anchored to New Orleans, but instead globetrots between three international cities: New Orleans, Paris, and San Francisco — great company to be in. Still, its locality is undeniable in that New Orleans is the chosen home of its most infamous vampire, Lestat, who attempts to break away from the restrictions of his European coven to establish a new afterlife on American soil, starting his new family by turning the sad-eyed Louis into one of his own. There’s only trouble once that family becomes nuclear, when Louis gives into vampiric temptation by feeding on a small child, damning her to an eternal adolescence as her new two dads’ doll-like daughter. After about thirty years of faux-domestic stasis, she rebels in spectacularly violent fashion, burning their shared home to the ground in a righteous rage.
For all of the A-lister hunks in the cast (Cruise, Pitt, Christian Slater, Antonio Banderas), I was most impressed with Interview with the Vampire as The First Great Kirsten Dunst Movie. Dunst has been a wonderfully talented screen actor for as long as I can remember watching the screen, but it’s still incredible to watch her out-perform her more famous, better-paid adult co-stars in a role filmed when she was only 10 years old. Dunst’s embodiment of Claudia, the eternally dollish vampire, conveys a world-weariness and vengeful fury far beyond the age of the actor behind it. Part of the reason she stands out so much is that all of the male leads are such sad sack yearners, all fitting neatly into the somber tone typical of director Neil Jordan’s work. Jordan’s interpretation of Rice’s text is more melancholy than it is sensual, finding its hunky, mutually obsessed vampire men jaded beyond repair long after they’ve lost their lust for sex & blood. As the latest addition to that damned clan, Claudia is the only character who’s going through a major emotional upheaval, so that the story’s most violent, extravagant turns rest on her little shoulders. Given the specificity of locale and the name-brand talent elsewhere in the cast, it’s likely the movie would remain undead in annual Halloween-season circulation with or without Dunst’s involvement, but it’s her performance that actually earns that cultural longevity. She’s eternally great.
Corpse Bride (2005)
I was drawn to Kill-O-Rama’s 20th-anniversary screenings of Tim Burton’s stop-motion musical Corpse Bride for a few reasons, not least of all because it felt like a rarer anomaly in the schedule than more frequent go-tos like The Exorcist & Bride of Frankenstein. That’s assumedly because it’s a lesser loved title among the rest of the heavy hitters on the schedule, despite it being a perfectly charming seasonal novelty. When it was first released, Corpse Bride was treated like the microwaved leftovers from earlier Tim Burton/Henry Selick productions like The Nightmare Before Christmas & James and the Giant Peach, but 20 years later it now plays like a precursor for later Laika productions like ParaNorman & Coraline, which have since become the go-to primers for lifelong horror nerd obsession among youngsters. Time has mostly been kind to it, give or take the biggest star in its voice cast (the wine-tasting spit bucket Johnny Depp), but I’ve personally always had a soft spot for it. It’s hard not to adore a movie that fantasy-casts Peter Lorre as a talking brain maggot with kissable lips and takes breaks from advancing its plot to animate a band of stop-motion skeletons playing saxobones against Mario Bava crosslighting. I missed the film during its initial theatrical run, though, so I had only ever seen it on a 2nd-hand DVD copy, which made this repertory screening a must-attend event.
In short, Corpse Bride looks great. All of the visual artistry that distinguishes The Nightmare Before Christmas as a holiday classic is echoed here without any lost integrity. The worst you could say about it is that Burton borrows a little too freely from former collaborator Henry Selick in the production design, to the point where the underworld afterlife setting appears to be pulled from the live-action sets of Selick’s Monkeybone, entirely separate from the film’s production overlap with Nightmare. If I were Selick, I might be complaining, but as an audience member, I’m more than happy to spend time with the cartoon gals & ghouls in that underground otherworld where every day is Halloween. Much like in earlier auteurist works like Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, and Ed Wood, Burton conveys a yearning desire to party with the undead freaks of the underworld instead of being stuck with the drab drips of the living flesh. Johnny Depp & Emily Watson voice a soon-to-be-married couple of awkward strangers who’ve had all the joy of life strangled out of them by their uptight, aristocratic parents. They seem to be instantly, genuinely fond of one another despite the grim-grey world they sulk in together, but tragedy strikes when the groom accidentally marries an animated corpse instead while practicing his vows in the spooky woods outside town. The titular undead bride (Helena Bonham Carter, duh) drags the poor, nervous lad down to her Halloweentown underworld where he’s forced to party with the lively dead instead of moping among the dead-eyed living. Song & dance and comedic antics ensue, ultimately resulting in a tender-hearted reunion for the rightful bride & groom and a cosmic comeuppance for the dastardly cad who sent the Corpse Bride underground in the first place. It’s wonderful kids-horror fare, especially if your particular kid has already re-run Coraline & ParaNorman so many times that you’ve become numb to their Laika-proper charms.
Frankenstein (2025)
The concluding event on the Kill-O-Rama schedule was a double feature presentation of James Whale’s iconic 1931 adaptation of Frankensteinand the latest interpretation of that text, directed by Guillermo del Toro. Besides the double-feature format of that programming, the most exciting aspect of the new Frankenstein film’s presentation during Kill-O-Rama is that The Prytania continued to run it weeks after the fest concluded on a 35mm print, the only venue in town to see the film on celluloid before it is shuffled off into the digital void of Netflix. After similar runs for titles like Sinners, Tenet, and One Battle After Another, The Prytania is making a reputation for themselves as the premiere film venue in town by default, since they’re the only place that can actually project film. Given the massive crowds that have been swarming The Prytania every night in the past week to catch Frankenstein in that format, it’s clear that the public yearns for tangible, physical cinema and are willing to pay extra for it. My screening even started with an audience member loudly booing the Netflix logo in the opening credits, to the rest of the crowd’s delight. Netflix’s omnipresence in urban & suburban homes indicates that most of these crowds could’ve waited a couple weeks to see Frankenstein at home for “free,” but they instead chose to attend a big-screen presentation with richer, deeper colors in projection and visible scratches on the print. It was a classic theatrical experience befitting such a classic literary adaptation.
As for the movie itself, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a Guillermo del Toro adaptation of the Mary Shelley source text. It’s pretty, it’s moody, and it’s got a surprisingly sensitive heart for a movie in which a mad scientist stitches together leftover corpse parts to create a monster and then proceeds to abuse that monster. The biggest surprises in Frankenstein lurk in the intensity of the performances, given that the actors could have easily gone through the motions and let the exquisite sets & costumes do all of the work. Mia Goth conveys a defiant ferocity as Dr. Frankenstein’s uninterested love interest, matching his creative intensity but swatting down his god-scale ego in what feels like an onscreen avatar for Mary Shelley’s literary jam sessions with Percy Shelley & Lord Byron. Jacob Elordi plays Dr. Frankenstein’s monstrous creation as a big scary baby who’s convincingly dangerous when provoked but angelic when properly nurtured. Oscar Isaac is feverishly manic as Dr. Frankenstein himself, so fixated on his mission to bring dead flesh back to life that he doesn’t consider what kind of father he’ll be once he succeeds (having only Charles Dance’s physically abusive patriarch as a default example to follow once the creature is in his care). It’s in that cautionary tale of what happens when you single-mindedly dedicate yourself to a passion project at the expense of your own humanity that del Toro’s Frankenstein starts to feel personal to the director beyond its surface aesthetics. This is a project he’s been fighting to complete for decades and, thus, it has partially mutated into a story about the madness of its director’s own grand-scale, solitary ambition. The result is not one of del Toro’s best works, but it’s at least a more heartfelt, refined, accomplished version of what Kenneth Branagh failed to fully give life when he adapted Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1994. After three or so decades of book-faithful Frankenstein adaptations, I’m excited that we’re approaching the point when Jack Pierce’s creature design will enter the public domain (in 2027) so that every new repetition of this story isn’t so fussy & literary, but del Toro’s version still feels like an exceptional specimen of its ilk. I appreciated seeing it big & loud with a full horror nerd crowd, instead of alone on my couch the way Netflix intended.
Swampflix 