horror anthology

Tales of Terror (1962)

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As I now find myself approaching the tipping point of having seen more than half of Roger Corman’s adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe, at which point it only makes sense to see them all, right? And since I’m already watching them completely out of order (having watched the third, the seventh, the first, and now the fourth), why not just hack away at them in whatever order I happen to be able to get my hands on them? The next logical step after House of Usher would be to move on to The Pit and the Pendulum, but the video store didn’t have that one in stock when I swung by, so instead I picked up Tales of Terror, which is at some points quite good and at others fairly mediocre, averaging out fairly positively. The film comprises three segments that adapt four Poe short stories, opening with an adaptation of “Morella” and ending with an adaptation of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” with a mash-up of “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado” in the middle. 

Tales of Terror opens on a beating heart, the camera’s eye approaching it as Vincent Price intones an introduction. A pastel image of a seaside manse fades into a matte painting of the same, with waves crashing upon the shore. It is to this place that the heroine of the piece arrives. Her name is Leonora (Maggie Field), and she has come to the home of her estranged father (Price) after spending her whole life, virtually since birth, not knowing him. At first her expressed desire to visit him once before she’s “out of [his] life forever” seems to mean that she’s tying up loose ends before marrying, but it eventually comes to light that she’s dying. Her father, who had sent his daughter away because of the dying wish of his wife Morella (Leona Gage), who died in the middle of a party that she attended by her own demand despite being too weak following a difficult childbirth. Leonora and her father bond over the fact that they are both fading away, and when she is murdered by her mother’s spectral spirit, Morella takes over her bodily, while Lenora appears in place of her mother’s corpse. Morella then strangles her terrified husband as the mansion catches fire (reusing footage from the destruction of the house in Usher) and the body swap reverses, with Leonora smiling peacefully in death knowing that her mother has been vanquished. 

Skipping ahead to the final segment, the adaptation of “Valdemar,” Price appears as the title character, who has invited family friend Dr. James (David Frankham) to visit the Valdemar home. Valdemar has a strong relationship with his wife Helene (Debra Paget), but his recent interest in the growing “science” of mesmerism has led him to invite a hypnotist named Carmichael (Basil Rathbone) as well. Valdemar expresses his wish to be placed under hypnosis at the moment of his death, so that some manner of “scientific” inquiry can be made about the potential of life within a lifeless man. His wish is fulfilled, and some months later, he’s now begging for Carmichael to release him from his undeath by ending the trance, but Carmichael’s designs on Helene mean that he refuses to do so unless she marries him. Dr. James attempts to force Carmichael to free Valdemar and Helene enters the fracas. When Carmichael attacks her as well, Valdemar’s corpse rises from his deathbed and kills the villain. Upon the moment of doing so, the hypnosis is released, and Valdemar instantly putrefies upon Carmichael’s prone body.

Both of these segments are fine. As noted in past reviews of other Corman/Poe ventures, Corman’s modus operandi was to pick a Poe story and then treat that as the third act of a screenplay, then craft the first two acts to lead into the adaptation of the original text. There’s a lot less room for that when you’re making an anthology of three short films with a total runtime of roughly ninety minutes. As such, there’s much less room for deviation here. Of the shorts, the adaptation of “Morella” strays the furthest from the original text; there, the primary focus of the story is on the unnamed narrator’s relationship with his wife, an infirm woman who teaches her husband all about her study of the philosophy of the mind, and that her hyperfixation on this was unsettling. She dies in childbirth and bears a daughter that the narrator never names, and whom he raises with a loving affection that he never had for his wife. She’s a strange child, however, preternaturally gifted and wise beyond her years in a way that discomfits the narrator. He never gives her a name, but upon the day of her christening, some compulsion drives him to speak the name “Morella” to the priest, causing the daughter to cry out “I am here” and then die in his arms. It’s not a story that readily lends itself to adaptation, and screenwriter Richard Matheson took the bare bones of it—mother died in childbirth, may possess said child in the moment of their death—and make it something that works better on the screen. That Price’s character has kept his dead wife’s corpse in a bedroom in the manor gives it a touch of the macabre, and having Leonora raised away from her father creates an opportunity for some character exploration between the two, and it works, even if it feels so “of a piece” with both Usher and Premature Burial as to feel derivative. It’s also helped by its brevity. 

The segment based upon “Valdemar” hews fairly closely to the source material, adding only a couple of characters to give the piece some breathing room. The original short story was narrated in the first person by the mesmerist, who is Valdemar’s friend, rather than the villainous Carmichael. In fact, the very format of the title “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and the way that names are redacted within it have led most critics to believe the piece to be a bit of a hoax on Poe’s part mocking the gullibility of the public. Matheson adds a wife and the family friend who is to be her suitor in her incoming widowhood (at Valdemar’s direction before he dies, mind you) so that there is some manner of conflict that the story’s epistolary “dispatch from the frontiers of science” form lacked. The make-up work done on Price to turn him into a corpse that’s failing to rot properly is very good, and it’s a moment of genuine shock when he rises and attacks the man who is forcing him to remain in an unpleasant state of undeath. The instant deterioration of the corpse as seven months of decomposition catch up to it is also a gruesomely fun image, as it appears that Rathbone has been covered in skeletal bones and peanut butter slime. 

Where this one really shines is in its “Black Cat” segment. A drunken character played by Peter Lorre comes home and harasses his wife, Annabel (Joyce Jameson), for some money that he can drink away at the tavern, in between berating her, calling her a liar, and complaining about her beloved cat. She claims there is no more and calls her husband Montresor, which will automatically sound familiar to anyone who has read “The Cask of Amontillado,” but which might be chalked up to being one of those Poe adaptation easter eggs. After all, the narrator of “The Black Cat” and his wife are both unnamed, yet here she is called Annabel, and when Dario Argento had to give the narrator a name in his adaptation, he came up with “Rod Usher.” (Perhaps in reference to Tales of Terror, the wife in Argento’s “Black Cat” adaptation was likewise given the name Annabel.) Unable to come up with a penny to get back to drinking, Montresor takes to the streets and begs for change, until he comes upon a meeting of wine retailers and sneaks in. The guest of honor at the little convention is Fortunato (Price), sealing that this will be a combination of the explicitly named source material and “Amontillado.” Fortunato’s claim to fame is that he is a perfect palate and can name any vintage, which Montresor mocks as he claims to be able to do the same, without any airs. This leads to a drinking contest in which Montresor, surprisingly, is able to go toe to toe with Fortunato when identifying estates, vineyards, and vintages (he can even tell when one bottle came from “the better slope”). 

Of course, as his ultimate goal is to get sloshed rather than prove himself, he succeeds, and Fortunato reluctantly escorts/supports him home. Annabel and Fortunato immediately hit it off, and he begins to see her while Montresor is out drinking, with him little realizing that the reason his wife suddenly has money to give him to go out drinking is because Fortunato is paying to get him out of the house. When this is made clear to him, he returns home and sees Fortunato departing, then he enters the house, where he confronts and kills his wife, then chains her body in an alcove in the crypts below the house. Later, he lures Fortunato there and likewise chains him up, then bricks up a wall to conceal their bodies (in “Cat,” the narrator cites as inspiration “the monks of the middle ages [who] are recorded to have walled up their victims,” while the narrator of “Amontillado” just gets to work). From there, the story plays out just as in “The Black Cat,” with Montresor content that no one will ever find his wife or Fortunato, whom he claims ran off together, until, while allowing the police to inspect the place, he arrogantly slaps the wall that he built and is greeted by the growl of the cat he errantly bricked up inside, causing the police to discover the makeshift tomb. 

This one is a pure delight from beginning to end. Price is playing stoic men in both of the other segments, but here he gets to fop it up real good, and it’s pure magic. The scene in which he dandily polishes a small silver cup that he wears around a chain on his neck and makes a great show of tasting the wines, complete with swishing and hammy fish faces, is priceless. Lorre is no slouch, either, as he plays Montresor with a hapless impotence that makes him pitiable despite his role as the villain of the piece. The two on screen together make for an immediately comedic pairing, as the short and stout Lorre next to the tall and lean Price (Lorre was 5’3” and Price 6’4”) look like they’re two cartoon characters drawn in distinctively different styles. The film does still manage to include the spooky dream sequence that appears to have been all but contractually obligated to be in these films, and instead of using a distinctive color saturation, the film’s image is just “squashed” from the top and the bottom, such that the already vaguely turtle-walking-upright stature and body language of Montresor becomes even more pronounced and humorous. Although it’s bracketed by two other stories that I would label as decent but forgettable, this one makes the price of the whole worthwhile. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Flesh and Fantasy (1943)

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Most scholars cite the 1945 British “portmanteau” film Dead of Night as popularizing the horror anthology genre.  No one would claim it was the first horror anthology film, since the storytelling format is almost as old as the cinematic medium itself, but it is credited for establishing the rules & tones of the genre that would eventually be codified in anthologies from Amicus, EC Comics adaptations, and the like.  That horror-history milestone puts the 1943 anthology film Flesh and Fantasy in a unique position.  Since the Universal Horror production precedes Dead of Night by a couple years, it avoids a lot of the typical trappings of a by-the-numbers portmanteau, delivering something so far outside the expectations of the horror anthology format that it almost doesn’t qualify as horror at all.  It’s a lot more handsomely staged and a lot less macabre than what most anthologies would become in its wake, often transforming its characters through supernatural phenomena instead of punishing them for their moral transgressions.  More genre-faithful titles like Asylum, Creepshow, and Tales from the Crypt introduce selfish, amoral assholes who get their cosmic comeuppance at the hands of otherworldly ghouls, while Flesh and Fantasy plays its horror with a softer touch.  We have immense sympathy for each of its hopeless protagonists, rooting for them to make it out of their darkly fantastic crises alive & improved.  The movie is not vicious enough to be chilling, but it is beautifully eerie throughout, and its three tales of “dreams and fortune tellers” each land with genuine dramatic impact (which is then somewhat undercut by a racist punchline in the final seconds because, again, it was the 1940s).

The first tale (read from a spooky short story collection over a nightcap between businessmen in the hotel-lobby wraparound) immediately sidesteps genre expectations in its chosen setting.  While there are countless horror stories set on the thin-veil-between-worlds holidays of Halloween, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve, Flesh and Fantasy finds its own thin-veil fantasy realm in the final few hours of Mardi Gras night, just before the Christian calendar transitions from hedonism to Lent.  The story starts with the discovery of a dead body pulled from the banks of the Mississippi River, a victim of suicide by drowning.  Drunken, costumed revelers briefly sober up while gathering around the unidentified corpse, but then quickly return to partying the last few hours of Carnival away before midnight ends the fun.  Only one woman stays behind, sympathizing with the suicide victim a little too intimately and considering joining him in death.  She sees herself as too ugly to be loved or to even party with the rest of her community, as represented by harsh low-angle lighting that accentuates strange, scowling curves on actor Betty Field’s otherwise pretty face.  Just before she drowns herself, a mysterious mask shop owner offers her an It’s a Wonderful Life-style perspective shift on her miserable life, allowing her to be beautiful for the last few hours of Mardi Gras thanks to a yassified plaster mask.  She, of course, subsequently learns a Twilight Zone-style lesson about how beauty comes from within, but the enchantment of the mask and the magical costume shop that provides it still hangs over her all-in-one-night journey like a heavy, eerie fog.  The only death in the segment happens before the story even starts, and all of its supernatural imagery is derived from the Mardi Gras floats & costumes parading in the background.

Legendary noir actor Edward G. Robinson has a much rougher time in his segment, in which he plays a wealthy lawyer who’s told by a palm reader that he’s going to become a murderer in the near future, to his shock.  This, of course becomes a story about self-fulfilling prophecies, as Robinson’s obsession over his fate to become a murderer against his will is the exact catalyst that drives him to becoming a murderer.  It’s like a noir variation on The Hands of Orlac in that way, with Robinson having heated debates with his own reflection & shadow about who in his life would be most ethical to kill, just to get the weight of the prophecy off his shoulders.  The argument is rendered in creepy, hushed whispers, which are echoed in the clouds of urban steam that pour in from every corner of the frame.  Likewise, the third & final segment of the film involves a self-fulfilling prophecy about a tightrope walker (Charles Boyer, of Gaslight fame) who envisions his own death in a nightmare featuring a cameo from (Robinson’s Double Indemnity co-star) Barbara Stanwyck.  Only, he doesn’t actually meet Stanwyck’s noir-archetype femme fatale until after he sees her in his dream, and he ignores the déjà vu feeling in pursuit of romance, ensuring that the dream will eventually come true.  It’s the most surreal segment of the trio, featuring psychedelic double-exposure compositions in its multiple dream sequences that provide the only true effects shots in the film, give or take the rear projection of Tarnished Angels-style Mardi Gras parade float footage in the opening vignette or Robinson’s onscreen doubling in the second.  It’s also the gentlest in its horror elements, though, offering a much kinder fate to Boyer’s helplessly smitten tightrope walker than what Robinson suffers after his own doom & gloom vision of the future.

In one of the stranger deviations from typical horror anthology formatting, there’s no wraparound buffer between the second and third segments, which bleed right into each other.  Edward G. Robinson reaches the end of his rope outside the very circus where Charles Boyer is walking his rope, so that the two stories are daisy-chained together.  That narrative conjunction feels excitingly ahead of its time, but it also leaves the opening Mardi Gras segment feeling isolated & insular in comparison.  The thematic & narrative connections between the tightrope & palm reading segments are crystal clear, which leaves a haze over how they relate to the opener.  What’s really important, though, is that all three segments are solidly satisfying and entertaining on their own terms, so that even if the audience might walk away with a personal favorite, it’s unlikely that one would stand out as the stinker of the bunch.  That might be the biggest deviation from horror anthology tradition, since even the best examples of the genre usually include a throwaway story that provides convenient bathroom-break time between the bangers.  The only throwaway segments of Flesh and Fantasy are its wraparound story which, again, concludes on a casually racist quip about superstitious “gypsies”.  If a horror anthology is going to whiff on any of its individual segments, the wraparound is the ideal place to do so, since it doesn’t tend to linger in the memory as much as the stories it scaffolds.  As a result, Flesh and Fantasy does register as one of the all-time greats of its genre, often by virtue of not falling victim to that genre’s worst, yet-to-be-established tropes.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The House That Dripped Blood (1971)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Amicus anthology horror The House that Dripped Blood (1971), written by Psycho author Robert Bloch.

0:00 Welcome

03:16 Don’t Worry Darling (2022)
12:00 The Princess Bride (1987)
14:30 Burn After Reading (2008)
18:17 Beavis and Butthead Do the Universe (2022)
21:38 The Hidden (1987)
24:23 Vesper (2022)
27:27 Smile (2022)
30:14 Hellraiser (2022)

33:51 The House that Dripped Blood (1971)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

The House (2022)

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Netflix has a habit of quietly dropping substantial, worthwhile art onto its streaming platform without any promotion or fanfare, but I’m not sure I’ve ever been as surprised by one of its dead quiet in-house releases as I was by The House.  The only reason this stop-motion anthology caught my eye is that one of its three segments was directed by the animators of This Magnificent Cake! (Emma De Swaef & Marc James Roels), and I recognized the visual trademarks of their work on the thumbnail poster.  Otherwise, I haven’t seen much official promotion or social media hoopla signaling the film’s uneventful release this month, at least not without looking for it directly.  And when I search for reviews & press releases covering The House, different sites appear to be in conflict about what it even is.  Netflix lists it as a one-time “special”.  IMDb & Rotten Tomatoes list it as a three-episode season of a supposedly ongoing “series” (likely because its three segments are credited to three different sets of animators).  Meanwhile, review sites like AV Club & RogerEbert.com are treating it as a standalone feature film.  That’s the category that registers as correct to me, given that it’s contained in one 97min presentation with no rigid episode breaks.  Still, I do think the general confusion about its format is indicative of Netflix’s constant, apathetic flood of #content with no attention paid to the promotion or artistic value of anything that’s not going to earn the company Oscars or Emmys.

A large part of the reason The House holds together as a standalone feature film is that all three of its segments were penned by a single screenwriter, Enda Walsh.  As the tones & visual styles shift between each segment’s separate animation teams (De Swaef & Roels, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, Paloma Baeza), Walsh maintains a strong narrative core throughout as the central authorial voice.  The House is a darkly funny stop-motion anthology about a cursed house’s journey through different eras of doomed owners.  Divided between the past, the present, and the future of the ornate structure, each set of its owners are working class rubes who are mesmerized by its opulence & grandeur, convinced that it will bring wealth & social status into their lives with just a little hard work & determination.  Each segment ends with the lesson-learned punchline of a centuries-old ghost story or fairy tale, with the owners’ obsession with the house inevitably absorbing them into its walls & bones.  It all amounts to a pretty relatable horror story about how “owning” a house basically means a house owns you – something that debt-saddled Millennials should be able to recognize as a real-world truth, anyway. 

As with all horror anthologies, The House varies in quality from segment to segment.  De Swaef & Roels open the film on its strongest, eeriest footing, while the hopeful note Baeza concludes with feels like its weakest step.  Between those bookends, there’s a great wealth of gorgeous animation, dark humor, and melancholy.  De Swaef & Roels have the most distinct visual style of the batch (working with the same textured felts & beading that distinguished This Magnificent Cake!), while von Bahr & Baeza both play with the taxidermy-in-motion style of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox.  Overall, it’s Walsh’s consistency in theme & tone that holds the film’s structure together as a convincing, satisfying whole.  I found this film just as visually & narratively impressive as any animation project I’ve seen in the past couple years, and yet its release has been so barebones that professional media critics can’t even decide whether it’s a Film at all.  Maybe I’ll be embarrassed next year when a Season 2 of The House is released on Netflix and my miscategorization is confirmed, but in all likelihood I wouldn’t even be aware a follow-up exists at all.

-Brandon Ledet

The Mortuary Collection (2020)

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One of the more uniquely charming aspects of horror nerdom is its consistent enthusiasm for the genre. Whereas superfans of pop culture behemoths like Star Wars or the MCU tend to relentlessly complain about the very thing they supposedly love, horror nerds are almost enthusiastic to a fault. There’s no morally repugnant, shittily slapped together frivolity of a horror film that won’t attract some lone weirdo to defend its honor as a highlight of the genre, which is the exact kind of rehabilitative positivity I like to see in online film discourse – even when I personally dislike the movie in question. Unfortunately, that communal enthusiasm does come at a cost. Once you start following enough horror media types from online publications like Fangoria, Bloody Disgusting, and Dread Central it becomes near impossible to determine which hype cycle to believe and which to ignore. Every week, there’s a fresh slice of direct-to-streaming horror #content that’s met with drooling enthusiasm from online horror geeks, most of it terminally bland at best. The community’s exuberance is infectious, which is how you end up watching hours of serviceable, 3-star titles like Satanic Panic, Porno, The Beach House, and Riot Girls on the promise that they will Totally Blow Your Mind, bro. Puzzling through that persistent enthusiasm to pick out the titles actually worth your time can be exhausting, and it’s a code I’ve been working on cracking for years.

The Mortuary Collection might be one of the few Horror Media-hyped titles from this year that actually meets the expectations set by its rabid enthusiasm online – even if just barely. A by-the-books, straight-to-Shudder anthology film, there shouldn’t be much for this seasonal Halloween programming to live up to. This isn’t a situation like the recent Books of Blood anthology on Hulu, which “adapted” horror legend Clive Barker’s iconic short story collection by draining it of all its intelligence & discomforting sexuality for a flavorless TV show pilot. The Mortuary Collection is an entirely original set of horror vignettes directed by a first-time no-namer (Ryan Spindell) for a streaming service that specializes in churning out mediocre low-budget productions in this exact milieu. Still, it was met with instant online hyperpraise attempting to canonize it as the best horror anthology since Trick ‘r Treat, a guaranteed future cult classic that will be streamed on loop for infinite Halloweens to come. That’s difficult to believe, not only because most direct-to-streaming movies have the cultural longevity of a fart in the wind, but also because I’ve so recently seen a masterful film that pulled off its exact tone & structure to much greater success: 1995’s Tales from the Hood. In both films, an eccentric mortician leads a visiting stranger through a series of vignettes involving the deceased clients in his morbid place of business, while his captive audience reacts to each story incredulously until their own tale is told in due time. Both films are well made. Both mix broad humor, excessive violence, and moralistic social commentary in with their traditional scares. Only one achieves that mixture with a distinctive political or storytelling POV, however, and the other is likely to be forgotten among the dozens of other routine, decently told productions just like it.

If there’s any one thing that distinguishes The Mortuary Collection within the grander horror anthology tradition, it’s Clancy Brown’s performance as the horror-host mortician in the wraparound. Brown has had plenty of memorable, meaty roles as a character actor over the decades (most notably as the creepy preacher from Carnivàle), but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him have this much fun. He is living his full Vincent Price fantasy in the wraparound story (with some hints of Angus Scrimm in his costuming), making a full meal out of every line he’s afforded. His foil is a smartass, jaded teen who’s seen way too many horror movies to be fully won over by his Spooky Mortician schtick, a line of post-Kevin Williamson meta-humor that only underlines how familiar & routine everything surrounding Brown’s performance can feel. And even the novelty of that performance is reminiscent of Clarence Williams III’s over-the-top antics as the kooky mortician in the Tales from the Hood wraparound. Which is fine. The truth is that horror movies don’t have to be wholly original or The Greatest Thing Ever to be worthwhile. I don’t believe The Mortuary Collection earns its initial hype as the next great horror anthology we’re going to be collectively rewatching & discussing every Halloween into perpetuity. It doesn’t meet that metric, but it also shouldn’t have to. It’s worth at least one spooky-season watch as a well-behaved, over-the-plate horror anthology, which is a much more reasonable expectation for productions on its level of budget & prestige – one that many other Horror Nerd Darlings don’t come anywhere near satisfying.

-Brandon Ledet

The World is Full of Secrets (2019)

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I often hear cinephile intellectuals on podcasts like Film Comment & The Important Cinema Club evangelize for the merits of #slowcinema, which is typified by long, lingering shots where little to nothing happens onscreen for minutes on end. I don’t know that I’ve ever fully bought their galaxy-brain explanations of how the medium artfully explores the textures of boredom or how the absence of action makes even the tiniest of movement or change mean everything. At least, I haven’t yet reached the point in my amateur cinephilia where I’m actively seeking out these experiments in artful boredom myself. However, this critical exaltation of #slowcinema was very much on my mind throughout the recent New Orleans Film Fest screening of The World is Full of Secrets, despite the film being too dialogue-heavy & eventful to fully qualify for the distinction. This is very much a writer’s movie, composed largely of single-take performances of monologues in intense close-up, deliberately boring its audience and luring us into a trance so that any minor action or change onscreen feels vitally significant. I genuinely can’t believe how much it worked for me as pop entertainment.

Set during a slumber party in 1996 suburbia, The World is Full of Secrets is structured like a horror anthology wherein teen girls take turns answering the prompt “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever heard?” They encourage each other to be as disgusting, terrifying, and brutal as possible. The stories they tell are almost universally about young women who’ve been cruelly battered & torn down by a society that’s been misogynist since the dawn of time. Meanwhile, an offscreen narrator warns that the night will conclude with an act of violence in that very house. This clash between innocence & violence and this eerie undermining of the assumed invincibility of privileged, suburban life aren’t especially novel in a thematic sense, but the way they’re couched in lengthy, meandering monologues instead of proper anthology vignettes feels like a major stylistic gamble (as well as a blatant budgetary choice). The film plays like Are You Afraid of the Dark? reimagined as a traumatizing stage play or audio book – with long takes of sub-professional teen actors struggling to conquer unnecessarily complex monologues. What’s amazing about this set-up is that the film not only finds room to establish a genuinely creepy mood, but it’s often prankishly hilarious and light on its feet despite its potential for academic pretention.

There’s a wry sense of humor on display throughout this chatty horror anthology. It opens with an old-fashioned intro to a 1950s sci-fi horror, as if it were hosted by an Elvira-type TV ghoul. An elderly narrator voice then cuts through to intone “It was the summer of 1996 . . .” as if that date were a hundred years in the past (or maybe this film is a dispatch from a #slowcinema future?). What I loved most, though, is that the film openly acknowledges in its dialogue when it’s boring us, as its lengthy stories of misogynist violence take the non-linear, detail-distracted paths of teens gabbing on a landline. As often happens with #slowcinema—or so I’m told—this absurdly patient approach to narrative leaves the audience in a loopy state where tiny, hallucinatory details that break through the spooky atmosphere register as major events. Did I imagine a skull or the Devil’s talons entering the frame between these lengthy tales of woman-hating cruelty or did those images actually appear onscreen? It’s hard to remember for sure as floods of details from the monologues overwhelm the slumber party drama, but I never lost the sense that the movie was fucking with me and having a great time doing so. I admire that.

This prankish experiment in traditional storytelling, cheeky atmosphere, and artful boredom is obviously not going to be for everyone. About half our audience walked out midway through the screening once they realized the full scope of what we were getting into. I was personally tickled by it. There’s enough layered, soft-focus imagery crammed into its cramped Academy Ratio framing to keep your mind busy as the stories being told lull you into a #slowcinema daze. Once you’re hypnotized in that state, it’s up to the movie whether it wants to creep you out or laugh in your face, depending on its minute-to-minute whims. If nothing else, I greatly enjoyed the tension of not knowing which of those effects it was going to choose next at any given moment.

-Brandon Ledet

The Field Guide to Evil (2019)

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In theory, I understand the thinking behind programming a horror anthology like The Field Guide to Evil in the late-night slot at an arthouse theater or on the festival circuit. This is a format typically populated by 80-minute creature feature showcases, where a few like-minded directors put in wildly different short films only tied together by a flimsy wraparound. They’re an excuse to sample different tones & onscreen monsters in bite-sized horror morsels. The classic horror anthology in a genre film nerd party in that way, so it makes sense to relegate them to the late-night slot when those freaks (us) tend to come out. The Field Guide to Evil is a different beast entirely, though. At nearly two hours and often academic in tone, this is a film that would benefit from the sober light of the afternoon rather than the rowdy eeriness of a midnight screening. It’s too long, too dry, and too tonally consistent to satisfy the usual criteria of a fun, breezy horror anthology – which means a lot of festival goers & late night partiers are going to fight the urge to doze off midway through the picture, through no fault of the film’s. It’s just an experience that requires a little alertness in a proper atmosphere.

Whereas most horror anthologies are harshly criticized for being wildly inconsistent in quality & tone from segment to segment, it’s that very variation that gives the format an inherent sense of excitement. Featuring nine filmmakers from eight different countries, you’d think that The Filed Guide to Evil would traffic in that traditional inconsistency, but it’s a very cohesive, evenly curated piece – almost to a fault. The central, unifying conceit of the collection is clear in a way few anthologies are: some of the most exciting new filmmakers in the horror genre (all veterans of Fantastic Film Fest) are gathered to adapt folklore tales from their home countries in any way they see fit. Cautionary tales about djinns, goblins, demons, and witches vary only slightly across national borders, establishing a kind of Brothers Grimm collection for the “elevated horror” era. As an international horror folklore omnibus, the entirety of Field Guide recalls recent genre outliers like The Witch, November, and Tale of Tales, titles that look back to the fantasies & moralistic norms of the past to terrify audiences & diagnose societal ills of the present. The atmosphere, imagery, and academic discussion that arise from that end of the horror filmmaking spectrum can fascinate in the way they stir up an old-world sense of dread. However, it’s also a storytelling mode that requires a little patience & a lot of forgiveness for abrupt, obscured conclusions – which can be very trying at this length with this overwhelming wealth of contributors, especially at a late hour.

As a voracious horror nerd who feels absolutely spoiled by the wealth of talent & #content out there in the current landscape, I found plenty to be excited by in this picture’s impressive lineup of filmmakers. Any anthology that manages to feature contributions from Peter Strickland (The Duke of Burgundy), Agnieszka Smoczynska (The Lure), Veronika Franz, and Severin Fiala (Goodnight Mommy) is automatically going to have my attention. I suspect my biases there determined most of my preferences for individual vignettes. Those specific contributors’ segments were all clear favorites for me, while filmmakers I knew nothing about or whose work I don’t appreciate as much (Baskin’s Can Evrenol, to name names) left me a little cold . . and very sleepy. Strickland’s concluding segment was a particular must-see standout, one that reimagines German Expressionist horror filmmaking in a new, vibrantly psychedelic light I felt lucky to catch on the big screen. I was so deliriously exhausted by the time that conclusion arrived, however, that I feel like I owe it a bright-eyed sober rewatch over a morning coffee to fully soak it in. It’s a dark blessing that this anthology was released on VOD the same weekend as it hit arthouse theaters; most venues are going to be tempted to screen it in a late-hour cult movie slot that does its slow, peculiar rhythms a disservice. As is, I was thrilled by individual images & ideas on display in this horror folklore collection, but too exhausted by its late-night time slot to recall it vividly; it lingers in my mind only as a half-remembered nightmare. I’m hoping I can remedy that dilemma soon with an early morning revisit on my couch.

-Brandon Ledet

Ghost Stories (2018)

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

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

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

-Brandon Ledet

XX (2017)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

Traditional horror anthologies are difficult to critique as an artform since they often leave a lot of room for error in experimentation. Recent films like Trick ‘r Treat & Southbound have modernized the horror anthology format into a familiar everything-is-connected structure that used to be a go-to for indie dramas in the mid 00s. This allows characters & storylines to cross paths & blend borders so that each short story segment coagulates into one all-encompassing gestalt. A more traditional horror anthology format would keep each of these segments rigidly separated, connected only through a wraparound buffer. Isolating each segment usually means that the film’s overall value as a collection is often ignored in favor of critiquing each individual story on their own terms. I don’t, for instance, knock Creepshow as a whole just because I despise the segment where Stephen King plays a hick farmer or dismiss Twilight Zone: The Movie because of John Landis or Stephen Spielberg’s duds of contributions. Instead, I tend to forget to even recall those segments and focus entirely on the short form experiments that did work for me: the Howard Hughes archetype who’s terrorized by roaches, that ludicrous Joe Dante segment with the cartoon demons, etc. Horror anthologies, like sketch or improv comedy, allow directors to take big chances in small doses. When these short form experiments pay off, they can be seared in your brain forever. When they fall flat, it’s easy to forget they even exist, which leaves little impact on the overall quality of the anthologies that contain them.

XX is the rare kind of horror anthology where each individual experiment pays off. Four concise, slickly directed, but stylistically varied horror shorts each take a chance on a premise rich enough to justify an 80 minute feature’s leg room, but is instead boiled down to a digestible, bite-sized morsel. The stories are connected only by a delicately beautiful stop-motion wraparound (seemingly inspired by the stop motion animation classic Alice) and the gender of their directors, but together form a solid unit of efficient, effective horror filmmaking where every moving part manages to pull its own weight. The four female filmmakers involved in the project (five if you include the wraparound’s animator Sofia Carrillo) worked independently of each other, unaware of the ways their own contributions might visually or thematically overlap. This goes against recent pushes to homogenize anthology segments into a single everything-is-connected unit (a style at least partly pioneered by one of XX‘s contributors, Southbound producer/co-director Roxanne Benjamin), but feels very much in line with horror anthology classics, not to mention the horror comics like Tales from the Crypt & Tales from the Darkside that inspired them. As a contribution to the horror anthology as a medium & a tradition, XX is a winning success in two significant ways: each individual segment stands on its own as a worthwhile sketch of a larger idea & the collection as a whole functions only to provide breathing room for those short-form experiments. On top of all that, XX also boasts the added bonus of employing five women in directorial roles, something that’s sadly rare in any cinematic tradition, not just horror anthologies.

Although their connections are entirely incidental, three of the four stories told in XX touch on motherhood and the anxiety of raising children in their respective segments. Karyn Kusama’s “Her Only Living Son” makes a parent’s fear of their own child a literal threat. Kusama shows her chops as the most accomplished director of the batch (last year’s The Invitation is a must-see) by expertly building tension between a single mother in hiding and her increasingly beastly teenage son. The opening segment, “The Box” is a lot less literal with this anxiety, ruminating on the ways raising children can suck the life out you in a spiritual, philosophical sense reminiscent of a classic Twilight Zone episode or the music video for Radiohead’s “Just.“ Annie Clark (of St. Vincent, guitar-shredding fame) directs the always-welcome Melanie Lynskey in the segment “The Birthday Party,” which lightens the mood of the motherhood anxiety by ending on its own music video style comedic punchline involving a death at a child’s birthday/costume party. The only outlier of the bunch is “Don’t Fall,” a motherless creature feature set on a camping trip that goes horrifically wrong when a young group of cityfolk desecrate sacred ground in the wild. It’d be understandable to argue that having one outlier in an otherwise thematically​ cohesive collection somewhat dampens XX‘s overall value as an anthology. I just see it as a natural part of horror anthology tradition, where uneven, off-kilter variance in themes & mode of expression is a highlight & an asset, not a drawback. One (competently made) outlier like “Don’t Fall” is just as much of a necessary feature for XX to feel like an old-school horror anthology as its rigid, animated wraparound buffers or its individualized title cards. It’s perfect in the way it invites imperfection into what shouldn’t be a tightly controlled environment in the first place.

I can’t objectively say exactly why XX struck such a chord with me while it’s left a lot of critics lukewarm or even bitterly cold. Some of my personal resonation might be linked to the way certain titles or themes echo the accomplishments of movies I already dearly love without retreading any of the same ground. “The Box” & “The Birthday Party” in particular share names with two of my all-time favorite features (directed by Richard Kelly & William Friedkin, respectively) and Karyn Kusama’s contribution functions as a semi-sequel to another one of my personal favorites (in print and onscreen) so well that even speaking its name might be a kind of spoiler. This sense of tradition obviously also extends into the way XX follows the rigidly segmented format of horror anthology past, recalling some all-time greats like Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath and (a recent discovery for me) Necronomicon: Book of the Dead. My appreciation of this feature-length collection might be even more simple than that, though. From the way food is dreamily framed in “The Box” to the way sound design is playfully jarring in “The Birthday Party” to the way the whole world crumbles around us in “Her Only Living Son” to the basic creature feature surface pleasures of “Don’t Fall,” there’s something worth latching onto in each segment of XX, some feature that can never outwear its welcome or play itself too thin thanks to the temporal limitations of its format. I find great, long-lasting pleasure in that, especially in the way each experiment becomes more sketched out as I mull them over in my mind long after the credits roll. It’s a damn good horror anthology in that way.

-Brandon Ledet