ghosts

The Canal (2014)

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Horror is not a genre where individual films need to be narratively or stylistically idiosyncratic to work. Scary movies borrow so freely from each other that each of their subsets (“slashers”, “creature features”, “bodily horrors”, etc.) has its own lists of genre-trappings & clichés common to nearly every film under its umbrella. 2014’s stylish Irish ghost story The Canal is smart to acknowledge its heritage openly. The common images & themes it shares with films as varied as 2000s horror like The Ring or Blair Witch, early 20th century black & white scares like The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari, and 70s giallo classics like pretty much any title in Dario Argento’s catalog are so unashamedly open it plays like a knowing homage rather than an unfortunate side-effect of making a genre film. The Canal is so self-aware of the impressive range of horror it manages to cover in its 90min that its protagonist is a film archivist by occupation.

The story begins in a cinema, with the aforementioned film archivist David (played by Rupert Evans) addressing an unruly audience of children. He tells them that since the films about ghosts they are about to watch were filmed long ago and the people featured in them are most likely dead, it’s as if the images themselves are real-life ghosts. It’s a chilling thought that silences the room and it’s one I’ve pondered often, at least since I first read Hervé Guibert’s brilliant collection of photography essays Ghost Image or heard Daniel Johnston’s “It’s Spooky” in high school. The ghosts of The Canal are the believable kind, the kind that actually haunt us: images from the past, spaces that have been tainted by horrific acts, jealousy, regret, etc. The film shares a lot with last year’s The Babadook in that way: there’s a physical, violent threat that stalks its confined world, but it’s a threat that is based in more intangible elements like unhinged emotions and toxic personal relationships. It’s a testament to the film’s success that it can scare on a realistic level while still managing to run wild with obsessing over cinema as a medium, particularly the horror genre.

In addition to tipping its hat to a wide range of horror classics and setting several scenes in a movie theater, The Canal also prominently features images of cameras & projectors doing what they do: recording & displaying film. Giallo films, the most significant influence referenced in The Canal, generally have a particular theme or setting that guide their images, almost like a gimmick. For instance Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace is set in a fashion house and is littered with dressing mannequins; Dario Argento’s Opera is, well you get the picture. The Canal’s theme is film itself. Close-up shots of cameras & projectors are paired with loud clicks & whirs of the machines running and quick, disturbing flashes of violence & gore, seemingly from a wide range of different eras in scary filmmaking. The deep red of theater seats in the opening cinema scene plays into the giallo influence as well, as the genre is no stranger to saturated colors. Nor is it a stranger to the overwhelming sounds, lights, and masked killer that follow. The Canal’s intense focus on light & sound design boils cinema down to its most basic elements. The mystery of its mostly off-screen killer pays tribute to the Italian genre films that came before it, putting those elements to use in a genre context.

As film archivist David becomes more frayed in his search for the identity of the killer, the film gradually grows more erratic along with him. As a companion to last year’s similarly giallo-influenced The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears, The Canal is a much calmer telling of a very similar story. It chooses not to reach Strange Color’s kaleidoscopic fever pitch until the climax, which is in some ways more true to the genre they’re both referencing. Strange Color pushes the cinematic elements of giallo to new, psychedelic extremes. The Canal uses them to bridge the gap between a seemingly endless list of horror narratives that came before it, to the point where its ghost-in-the-walls story has just as much to do with Strange Color as it does with The Grudge or Nosferatu or the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Normally, it would feel like a kind of insult to review a film only through means of comparisons like this, but the nature of The Canal calls for it. It’s the story of film & horror as a genre just as much as it is the story of a man trying to solve the supernatural mystery of his wife’s murder. The impressive part is how it balances both narratives so well, one never overpowering the other. It works just as well as a reflection on film as a medium as it does a telling of an original, terrifying, albeit familiar ghost story.

-Brandon Ledet

Maps to the Stars (2015)

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David Cronenberg’s newest film is a cold, unforgiving puzzle that’s difficult to wrap your head around. It’s a familiar feeling. The Canadian auteur is responsible for some of the most disturbingly ambiguous horror films this side of David Lynch: Videodrome, The Fly, The Brood, etc. On the surface, Maps to the Stars is Cronenberg at his most clear-cut & candid. The film is deceivingly costumed as a straight-forward satirical indictment of Hollywood types’ various neuroses, a story we’ve seen told many times before. It wears the clothes of a bitter, navel-gazing comedy, but it’s so much stranger & more unsettling than that.

Much like with the recent entertainment industry caricature Birdman, the nasty humor in Maps to the Stars falls flat on its face. Rarely inspiring a chuckle, it’s downright embarrassing as wealthy Hollywood narcissists toss out bottomlessly cruel jokes that rarely land. With Birdman, the failure of the humor leaves a disappointing void that the beautiful cinematography struggles to fill & distract the audience from. In Maps to the Stars, there’s no such relief. The film boasts such a relentlessly negative worldview & such a matter-of-fact, uncaring visual style that it feels intentional that the humor falls flat. Characters are way less amusing than they think they are. Each cruel, unfunny joke posits them as increasingly monstrous and film revels in their vapid, self-absorbed callousness.

It’s difficult to appreciate the film as a comedy, but it does have legs as an off-putting ghost story. In Cronenberg’s Hollywood everyone’s interconnected in the usual ensemble cast ways, but they’re also linked by the ways they are haunted both by the past and by the rancorous decay of their inner selves. Tenuous personal & professional relationships are inconsequential compared to the way Maps’ characters are connected by less concrete elements like fire, incest, dead children, strange mantras, and weeping in bathtubs. In public the characters feign glamorous lifestyles; limo drivers, beautiful homes, baby-faced teens enjoying cocktails, and movie set pampering are all part of their M.O. In intimate company they become a little bleaker; they have sex with producers, joke about selling fans their feces, and celebrate the deaths of children. When they’re entirely alone they’re faced with the literal ghosts of their past and the self-hatred that their bravado barely conceals.

Maps to the Stars is a difficult film to recommend, because it’s near impossible to tell who will be able to get on the film’s wavelength. The film’s cast is phenomenal (Julianne Moore, John Cusack, Olivia Williams, Robert Pattinson, etc.), but they’re used for such an unpleasant effect that it’s difficult to sell their presence as a draw. As nasty as the film is it also has a strangely campy undertone that reveals itself in strikingly cheap details like CGI flames & Julianne Moore’s exaggerated California accent. It’s a ghost story, but it’s one that requires the patience to sit through bitterly unfunny comedy before the ball starts rolling. Self-contradiction aside, the movie unmistakably finds Cronenberg on a mean streak, seemingly uninterested in winning an audience over or earning accolades (although he does find a somewhat unconventional use for award statues here). Maps to the Stars is bound to be divisive in both its nastiness & its flat, uninviting tone, but it’s a film I found both curiously engaging & surprisingly haunting.

-Brandon Ledet

Lovely Molly (2011)

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I recently had a goofy good time with Blair Witch director Eduardo Sánchez’s found footage Sasquatch movie Exists. I had so much fun with it in fact, that after reviewing the movie I wrote a second article detailing how to play the Exists drinking game. Exists isn’t exactly a laugh riot, but it was the kind of goofy, straight-forward horror flick that’s best served after midnight with a few game friends & a couple cocktails. Knowing nothing of the film’s plot or tone, I foolishly expected a similar experience with Sánchez’s gritty ghost story Lovely Molly. I was way, way off. Exists did nothing to prepare me for the emotional brutality of Lovely Molly. It turns out the cycles of child & substance abuse make for much more disturbing & much less campy horror movie fodder than Bigfoot. Go figure.

Similar to the way Possession turns the real life-horrors of divorce & romantic separation into dangerous, supernatural forces, Lovely Molly makes a monster out of child abuse & heroin addiction. When the titular protagonist and her newlywed husband move into her childhood home, demons of her past rise to the surface and begin to affect the physical world. Molly’s personal confrontations with her history of substance abuse & the hideous details of her youth start small. At first she’s getting stoned with her equally traumatized sister, the two adult women giggling, “I can’t believe we’re smoking weed in Mom’s kitchen.” The drug use escalates from there, as does Molly’s frantic mood as she’s left alone in a space where she used to suffer hellish acts of cruelty. Her husband becomes frustrated, the way loved ones of victims & addicts often do, confessing “I love her. I just don’t know how to help her.” Family, religion, and modern medicine all fail to slow the horror of Molly’s descent into the brutal cycles of abuse. Her sister desperately asks her, “Why did you have to move back into this goddamn house, Molly?” but it’s as if she had no choice. The house has an overwhelming draw for her, which eventually leads to a body-count, supernatural occurrences, and the unconventional use of a screwdriver.

Instead of telling the story entirely in a found footage style (à la Exists or The Blair Witch Project), Sánchez employs a mixture of professional cameras & camcorder footage here. The camcorder footage is mostly used for a chilling atmospheric effect, but still manages to serve the film’s central theme. Molly is compelled to record the horrors of the houses’ ghosts in fear that no one will believe her, which is a terrifying thought, considering her past. The film also uses an intense, roaring sound design to represent threats that cannot be seen, but this isn’t the completely obscured horror of Blair Witch either. Violence, gore, and the like are used sparingly, but effectively as the situation in the house deteriorates. Despite the lackluster acting (Molly’s boss is particularly awful) & limited scope inherent to Sanchez’s low-budget productions, Lovely Molly is a hauntingly disturbing picture. This is far from the goofy midnight movie of Exists, if not only because it portrays a horrifying threat that actually exists.

-Brandon Ledet