horror

Companion (2025)

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It’s no surprise that Companion is advertised by association with producer Zach Creggers’s previous film Barbarian, as there’s a lot of fun being had by mixing an inconsistent light tone with a genuinely tense horror atmosphere, bending what could otherwise be pretty straightforward genre fare into something novel. Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is the sweetly innocent girlfriend of Josh (Jack Quaid), with whom she had a cute first meeting at a supermarket. The film opens on them making their way to the lakehouse of Sergey (Rupert Friend), who is the boyfriend of Josh’s friend Kat (Megan Suri). Also joining for the weekend are Kat and Josh’s old friend Eli (Harvey Guillén), and Eli’s partner Patrick (Lucas Gage). After an awkward interaction between Kat and Iris that establishes Iris’s belief that Kat hates her isn’t all in her head, the group has a little dance party and Iris’s reaction to the story of Patrick and Eli’s own meet cute implies she may be overinvested in her relationship. Things go completely awry the next morning when Sergey attempts to assault Iris while the two are alone at the lake shore, with deadly results. 

I’m going to go into BIG SPOILERS here, even though I’m not sure we can even call them that, since the marketing for this film has largely given it away. In fact, one of the friends that I invited to the screening I attended spoiled herself from the trailer so much that she decided she didn’t even want to see it. It’s almost impossible to talk about this movie without getting into it. Still here? Okay. The title “Companion” isn’t just about Iris being Josh’s girlfriend; it relates to the fact that she is a gynoid girlfriend. If you manage to avoid being spoiled for this, as I was, this is foreshadowed several times. First, Iris awakens in the car when Josh says “Iris, wake up,” which doesn’t seem unusual at that time but later turns out to be her activation phrase (with its inverse being her sleep mode instruction). She’s also extremely polite to Josh’s self-driving car, which seems to bemuse him, and Kat later tells Iris that the latter’s existence makes her feel replaceable. The hints get thicker as the revelation approaches, like when Iris responds with precise temperature and forecast information when Josh asks her what the weather will be like that day. 

Iris herself is a model from the Empathix company, and although the companionship droids that they provide have safeguards built in—the same strength as a human of the same build, programming that prevents the droids from harming people or other living things, and an inability to lie—Josh has “jailbroken” her so that she responded with lethal force to Sergey. This is part of an elaborate plan between Josh and Kat to steal Sergey’s money, with Patrick and Eli in attendance to unwittingly provide corroborating testimony that Sergey was killed by Iris. When Josh reactivates Iris in order to “say goodbye,” he sets up his own downfall, as she is able to escape from the lakehouse and flee into the wilderness nearby, and Josh et al must track her down and reboot her before the police arrive in order to disguise his complicity in her reprogramming and ensure their impunity in Sergey’s death. 

Like Barbarian before it, this is an exciting ride with twists and turns beyond the initial reveal that Iris isn’t the girl she seems to be that propel the action along. Jack Quaid plays a variation on his 5cream character, the seemingly nice, perfect boyfriend who turns out to be a pathetic manchild whose motivations are driven by a sense of entitlement. In that slasher, it was that he was a superfan with a grudge (“How can fandom be toxic?”). Here, he’s a seemingly unambitious man who rants about nice guys finishing last and demonstrates other such personality flaws. That’s two-for-two for movies getting a lot of mileage out of Quaid’s cute face and presumed innocence, but I hope we don’t go to that well too often (this screening featured a trailer for his upcoming action-hero-who-can’t-feel-pain flick Novocaine, and it’s nice to see him doing something different). I praised Sophie Thatcher up and down for her work in Heretic, and she carries this movie with aplomb. Iris is both Sarah Connor and the Terminator (a comparison that the film makes textual through both recreating the metal endoskeletal hand scene and putting a killer android in a police uniform à la T2), determined but not unstoppable. I’m sure a lot of this may seem derivative to some: yes, we also saw sliders for personality traits for robotic humans on Westworld; yes, this is in some ways another take on The Stepford Wives. But all writing is rewriting and all creation is remixing, and Companion is clever and novel in its approach. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Presence (2025)

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There’s a playfulness in the basic tech and form of every Steven Soderbergh picture that invites us to wonder what new toy the director is going to be most excited to play with. However, there isn’t much time to wonder in his new haunted house picture, where his playful tech-tinkering is at its most immediately conspicuous. Shot in a single house over the course of eleven days, Presence is a ghost story told from the 1st-person point of view of the ghost. It’s a clever premise that frees Soderbergh to be as playful with the camera as ever, handling the equipment himself as he follows around his small haunted-family cast and constantly directs the audience’s attention to the act of observation through his wandering lens. The resulting image is a kind of supernatural found footage horror that leans into the improbability of the genre by strapping its GoPro to a ghost, so we don’t question why the camera continues rolling once the violence starts; we only question why that camera operator is choosing to observe what we see (and to ignore what we don’t). The last-minute answer to that question gave me a shock of goosebumps and made me want to immediately rewatch in the way that the best ghost stories do. It’s in the asking of the question where Soderbergh gets to have his fun, though, and it’s delightful to see a filmmaker this many decades into their career still excited by the opportunity to play with the basic tools of their craft.

Lucy Liu stars as the high-strung, wine-guzzling matriarch of a nuclear suburban family. She’s poured all of her hopes and self-worth into the athletic achievements of her jock teen son Tyler (Eddy Maday), whose burgeoning persona as an egotistical bully is directly correlated with the effort she puts into supporting his swim-team dreams. Meanwhile, her daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) is treated as the mother’s genetic leftovers, molding in the back of the fridge while the father (Chris Sullivan) solemnly shakes his head in exasperation. It’s not an especially complicated family dynamic, but it’s one that becomes increasingly eerie & foreboding as it’s filtered through the security-camera eyes of a ghost. At the start of the film, the ghost is trapped in an empty, echoey suburban house, and what fills that void once its tenants arrive (with the help of a comically unprofessional real estate agent played by Julia Fox) are the typical horrors that haunt the modern American family: loneliness, mental illness, drugs, alcohol, the violent radicalization of young men, etc. As the most isolated member of the family, Chloe is the most vulnerable to those horrors, and so the ghost (and, by extension, the audience) spends the most time watching over her, eventually stepping in to protect her from whatever harm can be prevented by a noncorporeal force . . . since no one alive seems especially motivated to actively help.

Since it’s a formal experiment more concerned with what’s implied by every subtle movement of the camera than it is a mechanism for delivering routine scare gags, most audiences are going to be reluctant to engage with Presence as a horror film, likely likening it to titles like A Ghost Story, Nickel Boys, and Here. Personally, I found its icy, distancing approach to form to be effectively chilling, and the movie I most thought about during its runtime was the creepypasta novelty Skinamarink. Both films repurpose the filmic language of the found footage horror genre to coldly observe the isolation & cruelty of modern domestic life from an impossible supernatural vantage point, dwelling on an eerie mood that most people only feel when we’re alone in an empty home. Presence ultimately forms a more traditional narrative than Skinamarink thanks to the mainstream professionalism of screenwriter David Koepp, choosing to answer the question of its ghost’s mysterious identity in a final explanatory reveal instead of letting it hang in the air. I appreciate Soderbergh’s eagerness to bring distancing, arthouse abstraction into mainstream venues in that way, along with implied political commentary that reaches beyond the boundaries of his increasingly small, generic stories. Like other recent Soderbergh successes Unsane & Kimi, Presence is high-style genre pulp that only becomes complex & nuanced when you poke at the decisions behind its creation – most importantly, in this case, the decisions on where to point the camera and when to look away.

-Brandon Ledet

Tomie (1998)

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A few months ago, we talked about the 2000 live action Junji Ito adaptation of Uzumaki on the podcast. This month, my most frequent arthouse viewing companion wanted to take over calendar duties for our outings, and he expressed immediate interest in Tomie, based on a particular line in the blurb calling it a “peculiar tale of an evil high school femme fatale whose kiss drives men to madness.” The “kiss” element is perhaps overstated there, but this is nonetheless a creepy little feature that I enjoyed quite a lot, and is a much more accessible film than Uzumaki was. 

Tsukiko Izumisawa (Mami Nakamura) is a young photography student living with her boyfriend Yuuichi (Kouta Kusano), a chef at a local restaurant. She’s also undergoing regressive hypnotherapy under the care of Dr. Hosono (Yoriko Douguchi) to uncover what really happened to her during a recent period of total amnesia. She gets an update from her landlord that there’s a new tenant in the apartment beneath hers, a recent high school graduate named Kenichi (Kenji Mizuhashi). Although she does not meet her new neighbor, we get to see that he is raising a decapitated head as a baby, which very quickly transforms into a child, then a teenager under his care. This is Tomie Kawakami (Miho Kanno), who is not so much a young woman as she is some kind of evil entity, as we learn from Detective Harada (Tomorowo Taguchi), who comes to Dr. Hosono with a seemingly impossible story. As it turns out, he’s looking for Tsukiko, as she and another young girl named Tomie were classmates and best friends, before their entire class broke out in a rash of murders and suicides, with Tomie ultimately being decapitated. However, upon further investigation, he has found a series of such events that have been happening for over a century, all centering around a woman with the name Tomie Kawakami, her seduction of a man with a wife or girlfriend, and an outbreak of madness and violence that ends with Tomie’s death. He has come to believe that there is a supernatural element at play, and that learning the truth about what happened during the period that Tsukiko cannot remember holds the key to solving the mystery. 

As we watched Uzumaki so recently, it’s difficult not to view this film in conversation with that one, especially as they were also released in such close proximity to one another. Uzumaki is an artifact of early digital filmmaking, with sickly green color correction, Further, that film’s narrative demand for repeated spiral imagery also required the use of computer-generated imagery which was not up to the task at hand. Although Tomie also centers around people being driven mad and acting out violently, the impetus is merely the presence of a wraithlike woman, which makes for a much easier transition into live action presentation. We don’t see Tomie’s face until long after the film’s midpoint. Instead, we see her from the back, her face completely hidden by her hair, or in silhouette. There are no distractingly bad CGI tornadoes or hair spirals here to detract from the horror that the film is trying to convey, and Tomie remains a frightening presence throughout as a result. She lingers in doorways, she glides down the street in pursuit of a victim, and our lack of an impression of her makes this all the more interesting. She enters (or re-enters, rather) Tsukiko’s life through her extended circle, first by having her caretaker move into the downstairs apartment sight unseen, then by getting a job at the restaurant where Yuuichi works, where her (still invisible to the audience) beauty causes the manager and Yuuichi’s co-workers to start to compete for her affection, with disastrous results. Even Tsukiko’s landlord eventually falls under Tomie’s spell, attacking her when she enters the flat below hers and discovers the dead body of one of her friends. Eventually, the two are reunited, and their true history is revealed. 

Apparently, this film kicked off a franchise that includes eight more movies about Tomie, continuing the story from where it ends here (Tomie: Replay, was even released on a double bill with Uzumaki). This was fairly common practice for J-Horror of the time; just take a look at how many sequels there were to Ju-on and Ringu, both of which were released in the same year as Tomie. There’s not much information about those films online, certainly not enough for me to make a judgment about whether they’re worth checking out. I’m sure that there’s value in continuing to adapt the rest of the manga on which they are based, but this is a perfect example of an understated horror film that, despite being an adaptation of a longer, serialized work, functions as a singular text unto itself. Nakamura’s Tsukiko is a character who should be more widely recognized as an archetypical, textbook-perfect final girl. I appreciated the attention to detail that a woman with amnesia might find herself drawn to photography, perhaps the most documentarian method of artistic expression, as an art form, even if she’s not very good at it. We learn in the backstory that Tsukiko spread pictures of Tomie around school with “monster girl” written on them, and she has recurring dreams about this photograph that portend a dark reunion between the two girls in the near future, as well as a connection that’s more consequential than it initially appears. 

When it comes to effective screen boogeymen, Tomie herself is a standout as well. For much of the film, we see very little of her. In the first scene of the film, she’s just a head in a plastic bag, a singular eye peering out of it (which became the film’s iconic poster image), and then we see nothing of her face for a long time. Even in the scene where Detective Harada visits Dr. Hosono, he shows her a picture of the class of students that Tsukiko, Tenichi, and Tomie were in, but Tomie’s face is scratched out, as if the precise nature of her evil prevents her image from being recreated. When she gets work at the restaurant where Tsukiko’s boyfriend works, there’s a distinct contrast between the malice the audience feels radiating from her and the effect that her face, which remains in shadow, has on the men around her. It’s effective, and the reveal that she looks like a normal girl—a pretty girl, certainly, but no more so than any of the other women cast in the film—but one with an otherworldly oddness. This did start to come apart a little at the end, however, as I prefer her unassuming soft-spokenness over whatever was happening at the end when she was trying to feed Tsukiko live roaches. It moves from deft and subtle to a little too vibey, and the shift moves too quickly to fully work. 

Still, this is a perfectly fun late-90s J-horror movie. It reminded me of others from about this same time. In particular, the hypnotherapy plot reminded me a lot of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure released just the year prior. The conversation between the two films was further solidified by this movie’s violence largely emerging from people being mesmerized (although this time it’s by a demon). There’s also something very The Thing about the way that Tomie is an unslayable enemy who, even when reduced to nothing more than a head, will regrow like a starfish to restart a cycle of violence. Definitely worth the watch if you can find it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ghost Ship (2002)

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A friend and I were recently in our local video store (boy, I sure do seem to be mentioning them a lot lately) this past Thursday night, having decided to have a nostalgic movie-and-pizza night. We checked out the director wall, and we had already pulled Dressed to Kill as a maybe before we sauntered over to the horror section, where we alighted almost immediately on Ghost Ship, which my buddy pulled out of the stacks while referencing the number of times that he had seen the film’s lenticular cover on the shelves at the Blockbusters (et al) of our youth. He assumed I had seen it and I admitted that I hadn’t, and the pact was sealed. 

The film opens on a 1960s transatlantic sea voyage aboard the Antonia Graza, U.S.-bound from Italy. It’s the night of the captain’s ball, and a lounge singer is performing. A young girl named Katie Harwood (Emily Browning) shares a dance with the captain before a metal cable snaps and tears through the entire dance floor, slicing people as it goes and sparing only Katie, owing to her short stature. Forty years later, we get a look into the lives of a ragtag team of salvagers, with Maureen Epps (Julianna Margulies) clearly taking center stage as the film’s protagonist as we see her perform a down-to-the-wire patch job on a sinking salvage job that manages to save their haul. Also part of the salvage crew are soon-to-be-married Greer (Isaiah Washington), religious mechanic Santos (Alex Dimitriades), and also Dodge and Munder (Ron Eldard and Karl Urban), who don’t even have a one-to-two-word character trait for me to cite. Their ship, the Arctic Warrior, is captained by Murphy (Gabriel Byrne), who has a parent-child relationship with Epps. While celebrating their latest haul, they are approached by a man named Ferriman (Desmond Harrington), a weather service pilot who offers them the location of an apparently derelict cruise liner, which could end up being a huge score, if they cut him in. He negotiates his way aboard for the expedition, and when they arrive at the vessel, they realize that it’s the notorious lost ship Antonia Graza, which is treated as a kind of sea legend like the Queen Mary. As the crew begins salvage preparations, Murphy insists that they not inform the Coast Guard despite maritime laws, and Epps is the first to witness something spooky aboard: the ghost of Katie Harwood. 

This is … not a very good movie, but there are things to praise about it. Never having really given the film much thought beyond picking it up at a video store twenty years ago, reading the back of the DVD, and then putting it back on the shelf, I was surprised that this had a more complex storyline than expected. One would assume that the people killed at the beginning of the film would be the ghosts haunting the ship, and that the rest of the plot would play out as yet another pale imitation of The Haunting, but on a ship. Surprisingly, this one goes the route of having more of a mystery; the resolution is very goofy, but at least it doesn’t play all of the cards in its hand by the end of the first half hour. The salvage crew finds evidence that there have been other people aboard since the ship was originally lost, as they discover a digital watch and encounter a few corpses that are too fresh to be the original crew. Not every member of the crew was at the ball, so shouldn’t someone have survived? Why is Katie’s ghost a child if she was spared from the horrible accident in the prologue? How long did she survive aboard? Other crew members beside Epps start to experience hauntings as well, with Greer finding himself being seduced by the specter of the lounge singer, but things only get further complicated when they discover crates full of gold bars in the cargo hold. 

Apparently, this began life as more of a psychological thriller, with Murphy as the lead instead of acting as (not very convincing) decoy protagonist to Epps. Instead, it became more of a supernatural slasher, with a twist that almost, but doesn’t quite work. Ferriman’s name ends up being a clue, as it turns out that he’s a kind of demonic soul reaper who specializes in damning maritime crews through appealing to their sinful instincts. The gold is cursed, so that vessels with it aboard are ultimately destroyed because of the intense greed it afflicts upon the crew(s), with it having been transferred aboard the Antonia Graza the same day that it first went missing. The accident in the prologue was intentional sabotage, and the ship has been pulling in new crews to find it, fight over it, and ultimately die while aboard so that Ferriman can add new ghosts to his hellbound coterie. This ends up becoming needlessly complicated by some half-baked additions to the lore, including that some of the souls are “marked” by Ferriman and as such are under his control, while other innocent souls are also trapped on the ship and thus able to act against him. The only ones we ever see are Katie and the ghostly captain, and his intentions are less clear, as he induces the long-sober Murphy to have a drink with him. You can see the underpinnings of a stronger narrative here in scenes like the one that the two captains—living and dead—share, which reduces a plot that was clearly meant to echo The Shining into a single sequence of resurgent alcoholism. The overly complicated haunting plot and the slapdash characterization end up making the film feel both overstuffed and incomplete, like there’s a cut of this film that’s 10 minutes longer and more coherent, but not necessarily better. 

Still, there are some campy laughs to be had here. I found myself thinking back to our podcast discussion of Wishmaster, and how the excessive, imaginative violence of that film’s opening scene overshadowed the rest of the film, as this one also put its best scene right at the beginning. The metal line cutting through the crowd at the ball isn’t a quick scene, as the film instead revels in exploring all the ways that this would be truly horrifying. A man cut completely in half at the navel first has all of the clothes from his midsection fall to a pile around his ankles, leaving him in only his underwear and formalwear from the midriff up; it would be surprisingly chic if it weren’t for his body falling apart seconds later. The captain is sliced open at the mouth, leaving him with a grisly Gaslow grin before the top half of his head slides off. It’s a remarkable bit of gore, and we watch it all happen through the eyes of Katie, which makes it all the worse. From here, however, none of the deaths are as creative, and none of the characters are sufficiently grounded for them to matter to us emotionally, either. Murphy is placed in an empty aquarium after he attacks one of the others, and Epps later finds him having drowned when the aquarium flooded. Santos is killed off early on in an engine room explosion, and Dodge is killed offscreen via methods unknown. The most comical death is Greer’s, as he justifies hooking up with the ghost of the lounge singer by saying that it’s not really cheating since she probably doesn’t really exist, right before she lures him into falling down an elevator shaft. Greer just falls right through her when attempting to cop a feel, and it’s terribly undignified. 

This is the only other film ever directed by Steve Beck following the release of his Thirteen Ghosts remake the previous year. That didn’t come as a surprise to me when looking up the production history. There are similarities between the two insofar as shallow characterization, inconsistently entertaining violence, and general preference for spectacle over insight. This is an artifact of a lost time, when a movie that could just as easily have premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel would sometimes get a theatrical release, when Dark Castle was barely putting out original content between pumping out remakes like the aforementioned Thirteen Ghosts, the 1999 House on Haunted Hill, and the Paris Hilton House of Wax in 2005. The DVD box even suggests you learn more about the movie using an AOL keyword search and half the film’s special features require you to put it in a DVD-ROM drive (good luck). Ghost Ship’s minimal swearing and nudity seem tailor-made to be chopped out so that this could air right in the middle of a Saturday afternoon block with Epoch and Bugs, the kind of movie that you can really take a nap to. Come for the holographic cover, enjoy the opening gore, and then drift off to sleep. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Quick Takes: Ghosts of Yule

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This hazy dead space between Christmas and the New Year finds the boundaries between this world and the next at its thinnest, even thinner than on All Hallows’ Eve.  That’s why Yule season is the perfect time to read, watch, and share ghost stories.  It’s a tradition most faithfully observed in annual retellings of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and in annual British television broadcasts that never fully cross over to the US.  While most households are streaming Hallmark & Lifetime Christmas schlock in their pajamas, we Yuleheads light a few candles and invite ghosts into our home through short story collections and the television set.  It’s become my favorite Yuletide tradition in recent years, and it’s one more traditionally Christmasy than a lot of people realize.  So, in order to help spread the undead Yule spirit before the holiday passes, here are a few short-form reviews of the ghost stories I’ve been chilling myself with this week.

The Uninvited (1944)

1944’s The Uninvited is the least Christmas-related film of this batch, but it’s ghostly & cozy enough to justify a Yule-season viewing.  More of a cutesy radio play than a tale of the macabre, it tells the story of a weirdly chummy brother & sister who purchase a dilapidated seaside home that’s been left empty for years because it’s very obviously haunted.  One local woman (a sheltered twentysomething who acts like a pouty teen) is especially distraught by the purchase, since her mother died there under mysterious circumstances that her new adoptive family must uncover before the ghost tosses her off the backyard cliff.  The answer to that mystery mostly plays out like a dinner-theatre staging of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, but it’s worth sticking it out to see the film’s gorgeous, ethereal visualization of its cursed-real-estate ghost.  While its Criterion Collection packaging presents it as a kindred spirit of much chillier, statelier 1960s ghost stories like The Haunting or The Innocents, The Uninvited is much gentler & sillier than that.  It’s a mildly spooky amusement, which is perfect for this time of year.

Beyond Tomorrow (1940)

1940’s Beyond Tomorrow is even gentler & sillier than The Uninvited, with more overt ties to Christmastime besides its seasonal apparitions.  Often retitled as Beyond Christmas, this public domain B-movie is a cozy, zero-conflict ghost story about how there are still a few sweetie pies left in The Big City: some living, some dead but lingering.  It starts with a trio of Scrooges of varying grumpiness who are working late hours on Christmas Eve, when one decides to play a Christmas game.  They each toss a leather wallet onto the New York City sidewalk with their address and a $10 bill inside to see if there’s anyone left in the city honest enough to return them.  Two adorably naive youngsters return the wallets they find on the snowy pavement and the old-fogey roommates/business partners treat them to a Christmas meal as thanks.  Then they collectively play matchmaker for the young couple, mostly from beyond the grave.  The improbable trio of businessmen die in a plane crash at the end of the first act, then spend the rest of the movie acting as a ghostly Greek chorus.  They do everything together in life, in death, and beyond.

Nothing especially dramatic happens in Beyond Tomorrow until the last-minute appearance of a sultry Big City temptress who threatens to break the couple up with her hedonistic ways.  From there, it’s a minutes-long morality play that ends in gunshots and emergency surgery, but by then we’ve already seen three grumpy but kindly old men pass on to the next world without much of a fuss.  Dying is just not that big of a deal.  Mostly, the film is an excuse to hang around a Christmas-decorated luxury apartment with a small collection of ghosts in hopes that one of them might remind you of your own grandfather; or maybe one will remind you of a wealthy benefactor who baited you off the street with a prop wallet, whichever speaks closer to the life you’ve lived.

All of Us Strangers (2023)

2023’s All of Us Strangers is a much more dramatic Christmastime ghost story, although even its own sense of melancholy settles into an overall cozy mood.  Andrew “Hot Priest” Scott stars as a lonely Londoner who’s living in a brand-new apartment building that otherwise appears to be entirely empty . . . except for the tempting presence of Paul Mescal as his more outwardly social but equally depressive downstairs neighbor.  He staves off some of his loneliness by fucking that younger, livelier neighbor, but he mostly suppresses it by visiting his childhood home outside of the city, where he finds domestic comfort with the ghosts of his parents who died in a car crash when he was 12.  Being older than the ghostly couple who raised him is already a surreal enough experience, but things get even more complicated when he comes out to them as a gay man, having to explain that it’s not really such a big deal anymore to Conservative suburbanites who died at the height of the AIDS epidemic.  Then, the whole thing falls apart when he attempts to introduce them to his new situationship boyfriend, throwing his entire home/romantic afterlife balance into chaos.

Andrew Haigh’s low-key supernatural melodrama delicately touches on a lot of traditional ghost story beats in its grace notes, but it also loudly echoes how the isolation of modern urban living is a kind of ghost story that we’re all living every day.  Our protagonist is a quiet, reserved bloke with no chance of making meaningful human connection from the voluntary prison cell of his one-bedroom apartment.  All he can do is spin vintage New Romantics records and reminisce about the last few warm memories of his childhood, unable to fully enjoy the ways the world has gotten easier for gay men like him in the decades since.  As a prestige drama for adults, it’s a little too Subtle, Restrained, and Nuanced for my personal tastes, but I still felt swept up in its melancholy Yuletide mood.

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

1996’s The Long Kiss Goodnight is much louder, flashier Christmas fare than All of Us Strangers or any other title on this list.  It’s also not strictly a ghost story, so its inclusion here is kind of a cheat.  Geena Davis stars as a small-town middle school teacher who suffers from amnesia, unable to recall her life before her cookie-cutter Norman Rockwell thirties in the suburbs.  Her past comes back to haunt her, literally, after she appears in local TV news coverage of her town’s Christmas parade, where she’s featured waving from a float in an adorable Mrs. Claus outfit.  A subsequent head injury in a boozy Christmas Eve car accident shakes her past self loose in her mind, prompting it to appear to her in a dream, cliffside, with her red curls cut & dyed into an icy Basic Instinct blonde bob.  That eerie green-screen dream is a confrontation with the ghost of her former life – a supernatural showdown reflected in a magic dressing mirror that allows the two versions of herself to negotiate for control of her body.  While they fight it out, snarling supercriminals from her violent past—having seen her on television—invade her suburban home, and she goes on an emergency road trip with a sleazy private detective (Samuel L. Jackson, in a Shaft-era blacksploitation wardrobe) to retake control of her life.

It turns out that the blonde-bob Geena Davis of the past was a lethally trained CIA agent whose murderous skills come back to the red-curls Geena Davis of the present one at a time, scaring her but also arming her to fight back against her attackers.  During her road trip with her private dick, her trained-assassin ghost fully takes possession of her body, reclaims her preferred hairstyle, and sets up a precarious either/or decision where the Geena Davis of the future will either emerge a tough badass or an adoring mom.  The Long Kiss Goodnight was written by Shane Black, who is very likely the pinnacle of Tarantino-era post-modern edgelords, which means it’s overflowing with sarcastic quips and emptied gun clips.  It’s also very likely the pinnacle of Black’s work as a screenwriter, right down to his “written by” credit appearing over a pile of Christmas ornaments, celebrating his tendency to set hyperviolent scripts during the holiday. 90s action-schlock director Renny Harlan doesn’t entirely know what to do with Black’s excess of overwritten, flippant dialogue, but he’s at least smart enough to fill the screen with enough explosions that you hardly have time to notice.  As a result, the movie is most recommendable to audiences who are frustrated that Die Hard isn’t as Christmasy of Christmastime action-movie programming as annually advertised, more so than it is recognizable to audiences looking for a Yuletide ghost story.  There is a ghost story lurking in its DNA, though, because a Christmas traditionalist like Shane Black can’t help but acknowledge that essential but overlooked aspect of the holiday.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #228: Frankie Freako (2024) & Gremlinsploitation

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Welcome to Episode #228 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss the retro horror comedy Frankie Freako (2024) and the late-80s wave of Gremlins knockoffs that inspired it.

00:00 Welcome

06:50 Frankie Freako

26:06 Ghoulies
48:25 Critters
56:45 Trolls
1:09:18 Munchies
1:23:14 Beasties
1:28:22 Hobgoblins

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

– The Podcast Crew

Nosferatu (2024)

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Wouldst thou like to live maliciously?

I attended my first live ballet performance this October, when the New Orleans Ballet Company staged its modern-dance interpretation of Dracula.  It was an easy entry point into the medium, not only because it fit in so well with all of the horror movies I was binge-watching at the time anyway, but also because the Dracula story in particular is something I’ve seen repeated onscreen dozens of times before.  From the more faithful early adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel by Browning & Murnau to its weirdo outlier mutations in titles like Shadow of the Vampire & Dracula 3D, the Dracula story is well familiar to anyone who’s seen a horror movie or two.  It’s even been staged onscreen as a ballet before in Guy Madden’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.  So, when the New Orleans Ballet Company had to cut some narrative & financial corners in depicting Jonathan Harker’s cross-sea travels to score a real estate deal with Count Dracula in Transylvania or in depicting the infamous vampire’s subsequent travels back to Harker’s home turf to seduce & destroy everything he holds dear, I never felt lost in the progression of the story – no matter how abstractly represented.  That trust in the audience’s familiarity with the source material plays no part in Dracula‘s most recent big-screen adaptation, since director Robert Eggers is more of a history-obsessed purist than a Guy Madden-style prankster of poetic license.  Eggers is as faithful to the original story structure of Stoker’s novel as the F.W. Murnau film from which he borrows his title, which itself was faithful enough to nearly get sued out of existence for copyright infringement by the Stoker estate.  Audiences can expect to see every progressive step of the Dracula story dramatized onscreen—including the all-important legal signing of real estate documents—with full reverence for the Murnau classic as a foundational cinematic text.  What they might not have seen before, however, is the intensity of the violence & beauty in the Dracula story cranked up to their furthest extremes, which accounts for Eggers’s other directorial specialty besides his kink for historical research.

Ever since he jumped ship from A24 to the major studios, Eggers has softened the more alienating, unconventional touches of his first couple films so that he can stage his exquisite, traditionalist images on a larger studio-budget scale.  As a result, his version of Nosferatu does not add much to the ongoing ritual of reinterpreting Dracula, except in its attention to the period details of its 19th Century Germany setting (and in accidentally making a contrast-and-compare argument that Coppola’s version is the best adaptation to date).  He dutifully, earnestly goes through the motions of a traditional Dracula movie plot with what his Van Helsing stand-in (Willem Dafoe) would describe as a sense of “grotesque tediousness.”  The film makes for a great Yuletide ghost-story moodsetter, offering a Christmas Carol alternative for bloodthirsty freaks, but you can clearly hear some thematic preoccupations with the source text screaming for him to break from that literary tradition to deliver something new.  If there’s any new angle in Eggers’s version of this familiar story, it’s his interest in the internal struggles of his Mina figure (Lily-Rose Depp) as she finds herself undeniably drawn to the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, the copyright-infringing Dracula) despite her recent marriage to a doomed dupe of a real estate agent (Nicolas Hoult).  There’s a dark, soul-deep lust in her attraction to Orlok that affords the film a genuine sense of Evil at its core, with Depp pleading to anyone who’ll listen to answer the one question that haunts her, “Does evil come from within us or from beyond?”  Since she starts the film as a young girl possessed, years before she meets Orlok or his dopey real estate agent in the flesh, the answer is clear from the outset, but her personal journey to accepting that answer gives the movie a fresh, personalized take on the material.  So, it’s a little disappointing to spend so much time retracing the standard Dracula movie plot beats outside that central struggle.  Following Hoult on his journey to sign the legal documents that seal his life-ruining real estate deal is a little like watching Bruce Wayne’s mother’s pearls hit the pavement in yet another Batman origin story.  We’ve seen it before; you can stray your focus elsewhere without losing us.

No matter where Eggers’s Nosferatu may be a little straightlaced as a literary adaptation, it’s still a gorgeous, heinous nightmare in pure visual terms, which obviously goes a long way.  Anyone who was frustrated with the director’s looser, atmospheric approach to horror in The Lighthouse & The Witch will find much more traditional genre pleasures here, delivered through a series of jump scares and horny gasps.  If Eggers had fully drilled down into Depp’s acceptance of the darkness within herself and never left her sweaty bedside, the movie would lose Orlok’s absurd introduction of his What We Do in the Shadows voice & domesticity and Dafoe’s maniacal prancing among the vampire’s army of plague-carrying rats, which together account for most of its deviant levity.  When Eggers fully settles into the supernatural cuckoldry of the central trio in the third act, things get thematically exciting in a way that makes you wonder why he bothered depicting anything else, but Skarsgård’s Orlok is a spooky enough image in itself to keep the tension up until that payoff arrives.  Eggers’s longtime cinematographer Jarin Blashke puts in typically astounding work as a visual stylist, finding a terrible beauty in natural on-set lighting and the immense darkness it barely keeps at bay.  It’s a ghoulish ghost story told over candlelight on a blistering winter night, which keeps it from feeling like the most daring onscreen interpretation of Dracula to date but still manages to scare & chill despite its narrative familiarity.  I would’ve loved to have seen what the gonzo Robert Eggers who made The Lighthouse would’ve done with the erotic Mina-Dracula tensions of this film at feature length, but the more restrained, traditionalist Robert Eggers who made The Northman is almost just as good.  If it sounds like I’m complaining more than praising here, it’s only because I’m holding the director to the impossibly high standard that he set for himself early on.  It’s a very good, traditionally satisfying horror picture by any other metric.

-Brandon Ledet

Heretic (2024)

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The premise of Heretic is a good one. Two teenage girl missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (you know, Mormons) are invited into the home of a potential convert, only to realize he may have a better knowledge of their faith than they do and that his intentions are sinister. As a result, the first act of the film is very strong, as the dyed-in-the-wool believer Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and the more worldly convert Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher, of Yellowjackets) bond over the divergent ways that they see the world before becoming trapped in the home of the seemingly harmless Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant). From there, as he starts to ask questions about their beliefs that reveal that he has a strong knowledge of Mormonism and which pokes at the outer edges of their own familiarity with doctrine, the girls become more and more uncomfortable with his familiarity and apparent deception. Where is the wife that he claims is in the house, and upon whose supposed existence the missionaries’ willingness to enter the home is predicated? And why, when they attempt to leave while he is out of the room, do they discover that the door is locked and all of the windows are impossible to open? 

I was already familiar with what a strong performer Thatcher was from her excellent portrayal of the younger version of Juliette Lewis’s character in Yellowjackets, and she’s marvelous here in the role of a young woman who was initially raised in a home with no religious affiliation and who became a member of her faith later in childhood. A more obvious route to go with this character would be to make her an overt zealot like many later-life converts often are, or to have Sister Barnes be a non-believer who’s been conscripted into doing mission work because that’s what’s expected of her simply because her mother fell into a faith in the wake of a failed marriage. Instead, she’s an earnest believer, albeit a modern one, and that makes her genuine friendship with lifelong church devotee Sister Paxton feel all the more earnest and sincere. Paxton comes from a large family in which she is one of eight children (gotta keep that quiver full, am I right, elders?), and she’s written with an incredibly accurate understanding of what kind of girl emerges from these families and their religious traditions. She’s sweetly innocent and undersocialized, but she’s also strong under pressure. I spent many unfortunate years in my youth attending a Christian school that was part of an evangelical megachurch, and which also served as the host for at least one annual fundamentalist homeschooling convention. I’ve met many Sister Paxtons in my life, and there’s something very knowing about the way that she’s written on the page here that hints at a similar familiarity with fundamentalist kids on the part of the screenwriters. That they manage to communicate this so well in the film’s opening scene, in which Paxton talks about having seen an amateur hardcore video (which she endearingly refers to as “porno-nography,” which is very fundie-coded) while also showing that she, like Barnes, is finding her way in a modern world as she claims that she saw the truth of God in the porn, even if only for a moment. Both characters are remarkably well-conceived and performed. It’s unfortunate that the film devolves so quickly after the opening minutes of the second act. 

I went into this one with little knowledge beyond the basic logline, and I was on the edge of my seat throughout the first thirty minutes. After an incident in which Paxton is humiliated by some secular girls, she’s already slightly ill at ease, and Mr. Reed’s apparent warm, chummy openness to receiving their evangelizing comes right on the heels of it, so it’s easy to understand how getting back into the routine of sharing her faith feels comforting enough that the first signs that his intentions are sinister might fly under the radar. Once it becomes clear that he’s been deceptive about everything and has locked them inside, he lures the girls into a fake chapel behind his living room where he proceeds to give them a lecture about how, as a student, he studied the beliefs of several different faiths, only to come to the conclusion that all of them were false, and thus set out to determine which was the one true faith. There are some great bits in this sequence as well, like how he compares the major Abrahamic religions to various iterations of the same ideology by using versions of the board game Monopoly (and its predecessor, the anti-capitalist Landlord’s Game) and also doing a terrible, terrible impression of Jar Jar Binks. As it turns out, the girls have fallen into his spiderweb where he now seeks to convert them to his faith, and he offers them the choice to pass through one of two doors, one labeled “Belief,” and the other “Disbelief.” Ironically, it’s the convert Sister Barnes who chooses “Belief,” and she attempts to convince Paxton to join her, while Paxton chooses “Disbelief,” based on her understanding of Mr. Reed’s serpentine logic. Ultimately, both doors lead down a set of stairs into the same dungeon, and it’s here that the film starts to fall apart. 

Spoilers ahead. There was a portion of this film that I spent believing that this might be one of those plots where a seemingly irrational belief on the part of someone with authority might turn out to be true, with the possibility that Reed was spreading a sincerely-believed gospel that he had somehow received through true divine revelation. The fact that the victims were members of the LDS church, a denomination that traced its existence to a verifiably historical person and whose faith is based on a supposed divine revelation to that person laid some groundwork for this to be the case. I’m thinking of something like 10 Cloverfield Lane, where we see everything through the eyes of a protagonist who has no real reason to believe that the supposed apocalypse above ground is real and not merely the lies of a kidnapper, or the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Howling Man,” in which a lost traveller appears at a monastery and is told that an apparently innocently imprisoned man is a captured devil, only to release the man out of kindness and learn that the monks were telling the truth. I think this would have been a much more interesting place for the narrative to go. Instead, what we get is a Saw variation in which Reed manipulates events to try and convert the girls to the concept of the only true god being “control.” Ironically, it’s his lack of control over all of the circumstances in the dungeon (as well as an oversimplification of certain religious precepts to make them appear more common across multiple belief systems, which doesn’t hold up under scrutiny) that allow for the girls to see through his deception. Instead, this becomes a cut-rate Barbarian that completely fails to stick the landing. Ultimately, the pontification about religion and what that means to Reed’s motivation is a lot of window dressing for some gross-out scenes. 

I don’t know how to explain it other than to say this: Heretic feels like it was written by a really, really smart college freshman. Someone who has seen a lot of horror movies and comes from a religious background that they’re now grappling with in their art, creating a film that’s full of Intro to Religious Studies intersections that are ultimately a little shallow. Where it functions best is in its work as a character study of Barnes and Paxton, and one of my viewing companions and I had the same thought about the film when coming out of the screening: this would make for a strong stage play, with the story remaining confined in Reed’s parlor as he plays mind games on the girls to break their faith. As it is, once we go down the stairs into the basement where Reed has supposedly managed to confine his “prophet,” this completely stops working for me. Beyond the stellar performances from both Thatcher and East, there are some notably cinematic moments that deserve to be called out. I love the final moment before the credits roll, when the final girl manages to escape into the snow and a Monarch butterfly alights on her hand, calling back to a prior conversation in which Paxton reveals that if she wanted to let her loved ones know that she was safe on the other side, a butterfly would be the sign. There’s also a really fun transition near the end of the film when one of the girls is fleeing from the depths of Reed’s murder basement and we see her progress through this via an overhead shot of a miniature of the house, which Reed has been using to keep track of all of his moving pieces; the missionary escapes the miniature maze via breaking into the room where the miniature is, so we see her break out in both micro and macro forms. It’s just too bad that this movie’s hard turn into early aughts torture porn aesthetics and late night freshman dormitory religious discussion ruins the overall text.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Phantom of the Opera (1989)

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I know it’s gauche to discuss a movie’s marketing instead of its content, but the 1989 adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera is an especially peculiar case.  Clearly, the best way to sell the film would be to piggyback off star Robert Englund’s success in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, especially since Freddy Kreuger’s make-up designer Kevin Yagher tagged along to apply the exact same make-up to this public-domain franchise.  The video store poster for The Phantom of the Opera tiptoes as close as it can to declaring “Freddy Kreuger is the Phantom of the Opera” without getting sued by New Line.  It’s not exactly false advertising, either.  The entire Phantom story is told as one long dream-sequence journey into the past, where a wisecracking Englund in the gooey Freddy makeup slashes down every fool who gets in the way of the young ingenue he wants to transform into an opera star.  What that premise doesn’t convey is that the film also adopts a romantic stage-theatre tone, playing like a throwback to classic Hammer Horror (or, at times, Masterpiece Theatre) that offers a classier, more literary take on the genre.  That’s the version of Phantom of the Opera you were sold if you happen to catch the film’s trailer, which shows you all of the period-piece tragic romance of the plot with none of the flayed-alive gorehound grue that frequently interrupts it. 

Setting up a modern-day sequel that never came to be (The Phantom of the Opera 2: Terror in Manhattan), our story starts in 1980s New York City, where The Stepfather‘s Jill Schoelen is auditioning to become a professional opera singer.  There’s a stage prop accident during her audition that smashes her into a mirror realm so, naturally, she travels back in time to a past life in 19th Century London, again working as a hopeful opera singer.  Only, the past version of herself is supported by a mysterious benefactor who skulks around the rafters and dungeons of the theatre, acting as her “angel” (through mentorship and murder) but carefully staying out of the spotlight.  According to the title, Englund is strictly playing the Phantom of the Opera here, but his character details are a hodgepodge amalgamation of the Phantom, Faust, Jack the Ripper and, of course, Freddy Kreuger.  The theatrical setting offers the film a classy surface aesthetic, like a straight-to-video version of Argento’s Opera.  The Phantom’s quipping & mugging in the extreme-gore kill scenes drags it back down to the base pleasures of a by-the-numbers slasher, though, which is a fun contrast to the stately background setting.  Then, when the story eventually smashes back through the looking glass to modern-day New York, bringing along Phantom Freddy with it, it’s even more fun to briefly see that dynamic flipped.

I always got the sense that Robert Englund never wanted to be fully pigeonholed as a Horror Guy, much less as Freddy Kreuger.  If nothing else, he commiserates with fellow reluctant-horror-icon Wes Craven over that professional disappointment in A New Nightmare, where the actor & director find a way to flex their more erudite offscreen personae under the Freddy Kreuger brand.  In The Phantom of the Opera, he’s clearly attempting to stray from the Freddy Krueger schtick into something more literary, but the furthest away he was allowed to get was emulating Vincent Price in The Abominable Dr. Phibes.  It doesn’t help that he’s wearing the Freddy makeup beneath his Phantom mask, which is stitched together from harvested patches of discolored human flesh.  That dual make-up layering is mirrored in the film’s double-exposure imagery during more surreal moments where the story travels time, echoes Faust, or underlines the Phantom’s extraordinary powers as a supernatural killer.  So much of the Phantom plays like a standard BBC adaptation of a literary classic that it’s shocking when an especially beautiful or grotesque image punches through: a vibrant shock of red fabric, a flayed man transformed into a human puppet, the Phantom posed in Mario Bava color-gel artifice, etc.  It may not be the career turn that Englund was hoping for, but it does offer a lovely, volatile contrast between the career he wished he had and the career he actually had, violently juxtaposed in real time.

-Brandon Ledet

Gamera’s 90s Makeover

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All you really need to earn respectability in the entertainment industry is to stick around long enough for the bad reviews to fade away and your presence is undeniable. It worked for Keanu Reeves, it worked for Adam Sandler, and it also worked for the fire-breathing turtle monster Gamera.  When Gamera first premiered in the 1960s, the giant turtle beast was essentially a goofy knockoff of Godzilla, and he was treated as such.  As a result, he quickly pivoted to become a “hero to children everywhere” in a long string of kiddie sequels (before Godzilla also got into that game), so that the original Daikaijū Gamera film was never treated with the same critical or historical respect as the original Gojira.  We all love Earth’s hard-shelled protector anyway, though, so it’s good to know that Gamera did eventually get his deserved victory lap in the 1990s, when he was given a slick, big-budget makeover to help boost his reputation as one of the kaiju greats.  I haven’t yet seen all of Gamera’s kid-friendly sequels from the 1960s & 70s, but I can’t imagine any could compare with his action-blockbuster spectacles from the 1990s.  Gamera’s Heisei-era trilogy is a glorious run of high-style, high-energy kaiju pictures that for once genuinely compete with the best of the Godzilla series, instead of registering as a court jester pretender to the King of Monsters’ throne.

The debut of that 90s makeover, 1995’s Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, is both the best and the most faithful of the trilogy.  Gamera is re-introduced to the world as a living relic of Atlantis, not a newly arrived extraterrestrial protector.  He battles the Giant Claw-like bird creatures the Gyaos from his 1960s days, who are theorized to have been activated by Climate Change, and his ability to fight them off is powered by a child’s love.  Just in case audiences weren’t sure that this straightforward Gamera revival was inspired by the success of Jurassic Park, Guardian of the Universe almost immediately includes an archeological dig and a scene where the scientist studying the Gyaos shoves an entire arm into their droppings like Laura Dern going shoulder deep in triceratops poop.  It’s the Jurassic Park style mixed-media approach to the visual effects that really makes this one stand out, since the plot and the monster-of-the-week enemies are such classic Gamera fare.  There’s something gorgeous about the film’s 90s green screen magic, surveillance video inserts, and rudimentary CGI mixing with the rubber monster suit tactility of classic kaiju pictures that inspires awe in this reputation-rehabilitator.  We are all Sam Neill gazing upwards, slack-jawed at our giant reptile friend and, then, begging the Japanese military to stop shooting at him so he can save the day.  Every time Gamera bleeds green ooze in his fight to save us, we too ooze a tear in solidarity.

Things turn more horrific in the 1996 sequel Gamera 2: Attack of Legion, shifting from Jurassic Park to Mimic in Hollywood comparison terms.  Instead of fighting off the Gyaos sky-beasts, Gamera has to face underground bug creatures collectively called Legion.  As a threat, Legion can be genuinely unnerving in their Phase IV-style insectoid organization skills, at one point carpeting Gamera’s entire body in a collective swarm.  In individual design, they’re a touch creepier than the Arachnids from Starship Troopers, adding a gross little cyclops eyeball to the center of each bug’s frame.  All we can do in the face of such horrors is to thank Gamera for sticking around to protect us . . . unless you happen to be one of the poor children orphaned by the large-scale destruction of his skyscraper heroism.  Gamera’s enemy in the third installment, 1999’s Revenge of Iris, is the titular parasitic monster that has been orphaned by the turtle’s heroic violence, birthed from a loan surviving egg seemingly borrowed from the set of an Alien sequel.  Really, though, Gamera has to contend with the disaffected child psychically linked to that monster, who lost her parents when Gamera crushed their apartment during a Legion attack in the previous picture.  It’s a plot that questions whether the widespread collateral damage of Gamera’s heroism is worth having him around to fight off lesser monsters, to the point where he has to fight a personified version of the Trauma he’s caused in past battles. We all still love the big guy, but accountability is important.

Of the two sequels, Revenge of Iris is the only true contender for possibly besting Guardian of the Universe as the best of Gamera’s 90s run.  By that point in the series, Gamera’s reputation as something too goofy to take seriously had been fully overcome, so there was only one goal left to achieve: make Gamera scary.  It’s an incredible accomplishment, achieved by filming the giant turtle beast from inside the homes he’s supposedly protecting with his righteous, vengeful violence.  There’s a somber, funereal tone to Revenge of Iris, as if it were clear to the filmmakers that Gamera’s 90s revival was a special moment in time that had already reached its natural conclusion.  Images of dead Gyaos covered in flies and a sea floor carpeted in dead Gameras from Atlantis’s ancient past convey a sad finality to the series echoed in Gamera’s “What have I done?” moment self-reflection when he realizes he has traumatized the very children he sought to protect.  Personally, I was much more impressed & delighted by the spectacle of Gamera’s official makeover in Guardian of the Universe, but the tonal & thematic accomplishments in Revenge of Iris are just as remarkable, considering the monster’s humble origins three decades earlier.  Attack of Legion is a worthy bridge between those two franchise pillars as well, especially on the strength of its creepy creature designs.  Gamera may not have emerged from his 90s run as a hero to all children everywhere, but he carved out an even bigger place for himself in this overgrown child’s heart.  I love my giant turtle friend, and I’m happy that he eventually found the respect he’s always deserved.

-Brandon Ledet