horror

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

Zombi Holocaust (1980)

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There is no horror subgenre more hideously racist than the Italian cannibal film, and yet I keep tricking myself into watching them every time they appear in the wild on thrift-store DVDs.  The 1980 Fulci knockoff Zombi Holocaust was at least more memorably entertaining than the last time I picked up one of these cursed objects about five years ago, when I reviewed Slave of the Cannibal God.  I was hoping Zombi Holocaust would be Zombi-style gonzo Italo mayhem while fearing it might be Cannibal Holocaust-style racist Italo bullshit instead.  The results were just as evenly mixed as the title suggests.  Opening in a New York City med school where cadavers are being ransacked for lunchmeat behind professors’ backs, it at least promises a novel, urban angle on the Italo cannibal movie.  Soon enough, though, those unsanctioned organ harvests are revealed to be the work of “primitive savages” from a small Indonesian island, and the white academics set sail to see what’s causing those “Asiatic” brutes to go so violently mad.  Once on the island, the movie becomes more traditionally racist in the Mondo Italo style, except that the usual cannibal-tribesmen threat is made worse by the locals worshiping a small gang of rotting zombies who stalk the jungle and occasionally pop by for a human snack.  It’s a wild genre mashup between the kind of shameless schlock I love and the kind of shameless shlock I loathe, erratically alternating between them from minute to minute.

What’s fascinating about Zombi Holocaust‘s xenophobia is that the film actively attempts to convey an anti-racist sentiment; it’s just too tone-deaf to pull it off. In a laughable line of faux-profundity, a college professor asks if New York City is really all that different from a society of “primitive savages,” undercutting whatever point they think they’re making with their own racist terminology.  There is something to the juxtaposition of the university’s nighttime cannibal raids and its daytime surgery lectures, though, calling into question how medical study is functionally different from mad-scientist butchery.  That parallel is confirmed later when it turns out that the reason the islanders have been regressing to crazed cannibal savagery is that they’re being experimented on by the professors’ white academic colleague who has gone mad and gone rogue.  It’s a plot wrinkle spoiled by the film’s alternate American title Dr. Butcher M.D., which is a little less descriptive than Zombi Holocaust but a lot less embarrassing to say out loud when someone asks what movie you’re watching.  The messaging behind that white villainy reveal is somewhat commendable, even if it is driven by an impulse to shock & entertain rather than an impulse to discourse.  It’s also completely undone by the way every single Indonesian character is presented onscreen, since it still gets its thrills by depicting them as cannibalistic humanoids regardless of the reasoning.

It’s foolish to look for any coherent messaging in this vintage zombie cheapie, of course, so it’s ultimately a movie that lives & dies (and comes back to life) by the frequency & brutality of its violence.  There are a few mundane stretches wherein characters drive around NYC, change clothes in real time, and struggle to read a map, but for the most part it’s a volatilely entertaining picture.  When the island cannibals eat, they disembowel and chow down in swarms while their victims squirm & scream in protest.  When the mad doctor performs surgery, he cracks open his nonconsenting patients’ skulls to dig around the goop inside in full view of the camera.  There’s even an early giallo-style sequence in the hospital morgue where a gloved maniac meticulously removes a corpse’s hand with a bone saw and then runs off with it, presumably for a midnight snack.  For all of my wincing at Zombi Holocaust‘s racial stereotypes and willingness to dawdle, it did make me yell “WHAT?!” at the screen several times, which is invaluable for second-hand horror schlock.  I’m still not convinced that the Italo cannibal genre at large has anything of value to offer to cinema or to humanity, but this one example is just crazed enough in its practical-effects hyperviolence that for once I didn’t regret watching it.  I’m just a lot more likely to rewatch Burial Ground instead next time I get the itch, since it delivers the same Italo zombie goods without miring them in cannibal muck.

-Brandon Ledet

Audition (1999)

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Between all the tradwife influencers, anti-feminist slanderers, anti-Choice Evangelicals, and pro-Trump merchandise bots that flood your doomscrolling app of choice, you don’t need me to tell you that old-fashioned Conservatism is back in a big way.  President-elect Donald Trump’s popular-vote victory this week was a sharp reminder that, in majority, we are a nation that yearns to turn the clock back to a made-up Leave It to Beaver 1950s at the expense of minor, inconvenient details like personal freedom & autonomy – especially for women.  There is no victory to be had over the ghouls who’ve funded & bulldozed our path to this new Conservative hellscape, since the election results indicate that they’re supplying exactly what the people demand: political & moral regression.  That’s why it can be such a relief to fantasize about victory & retribution through art, the only place left where the bad guys lose and our stories can be understood through lenses like progress, meaning, and justice.  At least, that’s what’s on my mind as I think back to watching Takashi Miike’s 1999 cult thriller Audition the week before the election.

If I can dial my own mental clock back a couple decades to when I first saw Audition in the mid-2000s (during a previous popular-vote-sanctioned Conservative hellscape), I believe my thoughts were less political.  They were more like, “Wow, this is boring,” followed by “Whoa, this is fucking sick.”  Audition is the kind of slow-burn horror that tests the patience of twentysomethings who are overeager to get to the gore, with much of its first hour playing more as a domestic drama than a serial killer thriller.  We follow a single-father widower (Ryo Ishibashi) who hopes to bring home a fresh new wife to help maintain a traditional domestic life for his teenage son, since, “A man needs a woman to support him, or he will exhaust himself.”  After sneering at a group of women who dare to have fun in public at an audible volume, he starts to doubt whether there are any demure, mindful women left worth wifing in all of Japan.  That’s when his gross filmmaker business partner steps in to introduce the titular conceit of The Audition, wherein they will host a casting call for young women to play the role of a traditional, submissive wife.  The women think it’s a fictional role for a movie, but the men know it’s for real life.

A Japanese production made to cash in on the popularity of Ring, Audition was obviously not speaking to the American political landscape.  The men who hope to entrap an unsuspecting actress in domestic servitude pine for an older, more conservative Japan.  When they overhear boisterous women daring to enjoy themselves in a public bar, they complain, “Japan in finished.”  The way the movie calls them out for indulging in the Japanese filmmaking industry’s casting couch culture obviously has its own echoes in Hollywood sexual abuse scandals, though, to the point where it’s amazing that the film wasn’t remade as a Good-For-Her Horror revenger in the #metoo era.  The widower is, of course, cosmically punished for his moral crimes by targeting the exact wrong actress from the casting call (Eihi Shiina): a torture-happy serial killer who poses as a wispy loner who’s too shy to make eye contact, when she’s really just waiting for the right time to pounce on her prey.  Men are her prey.  Yes, all men, as she explains, “All men are the same,” even if they’re using the casting couch to find a loving wife instead of a one-time hookup.

It’s easy to forget all of this patient set-up to Audition‘s hyperviolent conclusion.  The bone-sawing, needle-plunging imagery of the final act is so unnervingly grotesque that it obliterates most of what comes before it, at least as the movie lingers in memory.  That effect unfortunately influenced a lot of mainstream American horror filmmaking throughout the torture porn phase of the Bush era, but movies like Saw & Hostel did not echo the more nuanced touches of what Miike accomplished.  I was particularly struck during this rewatch by how the basic perspective and reality of the ending doesn’t fit into any one tidy interpretation.  When the killer reveals herself as a violent avenger of all abused women against the men who sexually exploit them, she doesn’t do so in a direct, declarative monologue like a Bond villain.  She speaks softly, mostly to herself, while the dipshit widower drifts in & out of consciousness (from both paralyzing drugs and unbearable pain), witnessing detailed reveals of her past experiences that he could not possibly know about, mixed with his own warped dreams & memories.  Meanwhile, she’s not treated as the moral hero of the story so much as a tragic figure who’s dangerous to those who happen to waltz into her trap, and there’s little relief or catharsis to be found for either combatant in her little self-waged war of the sexes.

Audition does not aim to make you feel better about modern culture’s longing for an over-idealized, unjust Conservative past.  It mostly aims to upset & disturb, leaving behind stabs of horrific imagery that you’ll clearly recall even as the plot details fade: pornographic camcorder footage, a ringing telephone, a smirk, a writhing burlap sack, etc.  Still, it can be comforting to know that there are other people out there who find our great cultural Conservative yearning to be grotesque, alienating, and worthy of violent retribution.  The only problem is they apparently do not represent the majority, who’d rather oppress than evolve.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Uzumaki (2000)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the live-action adaptation of Junji Ito’s cosmic horror manga Uzumaki (Spiral, 2000).

00:00 Welcome

01:03 Ju-On – The Grudge (2002)
06:56 The Substance (2024)
10:30 Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
16:25 DC Showcase Original Shorts Collection (2010)
19:51 Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
21:17 Ghostwatch (1992)
25:25 The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall (2011)
29:49 Gothic (1986)
36:26 Rumours (2024)
43:23 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
48:21 Audition (1999)
54:00 Smile 2 (2024)
1:00:46 Memoir of a Snail (2024)

1:06:16 Uzumaki (2000)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Steel and Lace (1991)

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Do you remember that scene in RoboCop where RoboCop shoots a rapist in the dick?  RoboCop nails the guy perfectly through the thighs and skirt of a would-be victim, doubly traumatizing her before ineffectively referring her to a rape-crisis center so he can swiftly move on to enacting more police-state violence elsewhere on the streets of Detroit.  The straight-to-video sci-fi slasher Steel and Lace is essentially a feature-length remake of that scene, except with both the rape victim and the avenging cyborg embodied by one character.  Curiously, it plays that violent rape-revenge scenario with the softer, melodramatic tones of a Lifetime movie instead of the tongue-in-cheek humor of Verhoeven’s classic satire.  It’s no less violent than RoboCop, though.  Directed by special-effects artist Ernest D. Farino—who cut his teeth staging kill gags for the likes of Charles Band, Roger Corman, and Fred Olen Ray—its revenge robot’s body-destroying gadgets vary from scene to scene, depending on the momentary whims of the gore department.  As the title suggests, it’s a wild mix of hard & soft tones, a volatile sentiment that’s echoed by its original tagline: “She’s tough. She’s tender. She’s all woman. And all machine.”

Originally scripted under the title Lady Lazarus, Steel and Lace stars New Orleans local Clare Wren as a victim of sexual assault who loses her court case against her gang of business-bro attackers.  While the ponytailed yuppie scum celebrate their legal victory, she leaps from the courthouse roof to her death, becoming a victim of suicide as well as rape.  Devastated, her techie brother (Bruce Davison) brings her back to life as a rape-revenge Terminator that hunts down each of her Reaganite attackers one-by-one.  She bores holes in chests, she sets men aflame, she decapitates; she even sucks one deserving “victim” dry during penetrative sex, using his dick like a plastic straw.  She’s also a master of disguise, often appearing as single-scene characters before removing her face Mission Impossible-style to reveal the robo-woman beneath.  That shapeshifting ability lends a fun air of mystery to the film, as the audience is never fully sure which minor character is going to be revealed to be the Lady Lazarus robot next: the hot secretary, the hot lady at the bar, the male FBI agent who’s supposedly investigating the murders, etc.  The cops on her trail actually solving that mystery don’t add much to the movie (least of all David Naughton as Detective “Clippy”), but the inventiveness of the robo-murders more than make up for their bland asides.

Much like the dick-shooting scene in RoboCop, there’s an unshakeable sadness that settles on Steel and Lace once the novelty of its over-the-top violence wears off.  Wren recites the mantra “Pretty, very pretty” to each of the investor-bro villains before disposing of them, righteously spitting their own words from her attack back at them.  It’s a cathartic reversal of violence during the first couple of kills, but it gets increasingly sad the longer she’s forced to dwell on it, especially when her brother makes her replay each act of revenge on video so he can obsessively salivate over them like homemade pornography.  Worse yet, she doesn’t really seem to know who she was when she was alive and attacked, asking haunting questions like, “Who was I? Did I have friends? Was I happy?”  The only other woman of the note is the courtroom reporter who sketched her throughout her trial (Stacy Haiduk), whom she frequently locks robo-eyes with in an attempt to make a genuine social connection that has nothing to do with her former self’s rape or her brother’s revenge.  It’s likely silly to seek genuine pathos in this straight-to-video rape revenge RoboCop knockoff, but the fine folks at Vinegar Syndrome did such a wonderful job restoring it to a Fine Art quality that I can’t help myself.  It’s just as visually crisp & thematically meaningful to me as the time RoboCop shot that dude in the dick.

-Brandon Ledet

The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999)

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It was recently announced that self-appointed Stephen King adapter Mike Flanagan (usurping Mick Garris’s throne) will soon be adapting the horror author’s debut novel Carrie into a five-part miniseries.  If you’re not already onboard for Flanagan’s melodramatic, literary take on horror storytelling, it’s not an especially promising proposition.  On the page, Carrie is King at his most direct & succinct, barely breaking through the page count of a novella to tell a simple story of a bullied teenager who violently strikes back at her religious-zealot mother & high school tormentors with newfound telekinetic powers.  It’s a tragic tale without much room to expand, especially not over five hours of serialized television.  Brian De Palma already staged a book-faithful adaptation of Carrie in under 100 minutes nearly half a century ago, while also finding plenty room to bulk up the work with his showy directorial style – the opposite of Flanagan’s grounded interpersonal drama.  If anyone is going to expand the Carrie story without dragging out what’s already on the page with endless expositional filler, they’d have to deviate from the source text entirely and just make up their own thing . . . which is exactly what happened when Carrie was given a late-90s nu-metal makeover in The Rage: Carrie 2.

Written as an original screenplay titled The Curse, The Rage was only reworked as a Carrie sequel several drafts into its rocky production.  Its only tangible narrative connection to the original film is the return of Carrie White’s well-meaning classmate Sue Snell (Amy Irving, reprising her role from the De Palma film), who now works as a guidance counselor at the high school where she once watched all her friends get telekinetically slaughtered.  This disconnection from the original Carrie was a major red flag to director Katt Shea, who only reluctantly signed onto the project (filling in for another director who bailed at the last minute) once she secured permission to include clips of Sue & Carrie in flashback to make it a more credible sequel.  I’m not sure those clips would’ve meant much to the teens of 1999, since De Palma’s Carrie was released before they were born and only lived on through cable broadcasts & Blockbuster Video rentals.  If anything, The Rage‘s horror cinema callback that spoke loudest to that generation was a spoof of the “Do you like scary movies?” phone call from Scream, delivered in a mocking Donald Duck voice by the leader of a new crop of high school bullies.  The moody teenagers of the era were likely showing up to The Rage looking for something contemporary, not to check in on how Sue Snell was doing 20 years later.  To Shea’s credit, she mostly delivered it to them.

Emily Bergl stars as Rachel Lang, the de facto Carrie White in this somewhat-sorta sequel.  She’s a goth-girl loner who’s already grieving the loss of her single mother (Succession‘s J. Smith-Cameron) to institutionalization for schizophrenia when she’s hit with another loss: the sudden suicide of her only good friend (Mena Suvari).  That friend’s death is quickly linked to a small gang of football players who’ve made a point-system game of sleeping with and then immediately dumping as many virginal classmates as they can in a ripped-from-the-headlines plot befitting a Law & Order episode.  Unfortunately for those meathead degenerates, the school goth at the bottom of the social ladder happens to have immense telekinetic powers that could crush them at any time.  This all comes to a head at a homecoming game afterparty at a local rich boy’s house, when Rachel goes full Carrie and burns the entire senior class to the ground.  I hadn’t wanted to see shitheel teens die in a horror movie that badly since, well, since I rewatched Carrie a few weeks ago.  The difference is that the bullies’ deaths felt like an actual victory this time instead of just small & sad, like in the De Palma film.  Rachel unleashes Hell at that party, killing her tormentors with everything from harpoons to flare guns to eyeglasses to Compact Discs.  It’s the kind of payback that makes you stand up & cheer instead of feeling sorry for everyone involved.

The Rage repeats many beats from the original Carrie but transforms the story into such a blatant goth-girl power fantasy that it’s much more closely aligned with films of its own time like Ginger Snaps & The Craft.  There are some very sweaty script-rewrite maneuvers that directly link the source of Rachel Lang’s telekinetic powers to the source of Carrie White’s, but for the most part Katt Shea does her best to distinguish The Rage as its own thing.  The harsh flashbacks to the original Carrie are highlighted in a blood-red color filter, echoed in the black & white, choppy frame-rate textures of Rachel’s telekinetic episodes.  Shea’s background directing erotic thrillers also leaks through, especially in a tender Cinemax-style sequence where Rachel sheds her virginity with one of the popular boys.  I just don’t expect to see that kind of source-text deviation or personal auteurism in a made-for-streaming take on Carrie.  If studios are only going to greenlight (or, in The Rage‘s case, complete) projects with built-in name recognition, the only path forward is for filmmakers to deliver in-name-only sequels that transform their source material into something entirely new.  It’s unlikely that a modern, five-hour version of Carrie will add much to the novel’s cinematic legacy besides digging into its individual character’s motivations & backstories, which means more dutiful homage to forgotten-to-time characters like Sue Snell and fewer novelty modernizations like the flying, throat-slicing CDs of The Rage – reminding you to buy a copy of the official tie-in soundtrack on your way out.  In other words, Mike Flanagan could never; Katt Shea forever ❤

-Brandon Ledet

Smile 2 (2024)

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I wanted to see a new-release horror on the big screen in the lead-up to Halloween, and the offerings are desperately thin.  There are no original horror films in wide release this week (give or take the last few remaining screenings of The Substance, which premiered over a month ago).  Everything on offer is reboots & sequels, continuing this summer’s trend of name-brand horror properties filling in the gaps left by the usual action/superhero fare that’s nowhere to be seen this year.  Among the few horror franchise extenders that did make it to theaters in time for Halloween, it was difficult to find one worth leaving the house to see. Besides being a novelty-Christmas slasher, Terrifier 3 simply looks too mean.  By contrast, Beetlejuice 2 & Venom 3 both look too goofy, to the point where they barely converge with horror at all.  Smile 2 was the obvious choice, then, since it falls somewhere between those tonal extremes.  I remember the first Smile movie being cruel in its messaging that the suicidally depressed should self-isolate to avoid scarring or infecting loved ones with their mental illness, but at least it wasn’t as violently, grotesquely misogynistic as the first Terrifier film.  I also remember Smile being silly in concept, never overcoming the initial cheese of building its horror around an evil Snapchat filter, but at least its sequel isn’t going to indulge in the self-aware schtick of a Beetlejuice or Venom sequel: echoes of you-had-to-be-there comedic properties that would’ve been better off abandoned as one-off novelties.  So, Smile 2 reigns supreme this Halloween, entirely by default.

I suppose Smile 2 is also superior to the first Smile film entirely by default, given that it finally comes up with a reason for The Smile gimmick besides it looking off-putting.  In the first film, the titular Smile is a body-hopping demonic curse that possesses the minds of the mentally unwell, driving them to suicide within a week, then transferring to a new host through the miracle of Trauma. It’s represented onscreen as the hallucinated smiling face of everyone the possessed victim meets, creeping the doomed soul out with a harsh face-altering digital filter that exaggerates their features (a gimmick borrowed from Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare, from which Smile 2 also borrows its ending).  You could meet Smile halfway by mentally reaching for some thematic connection in how it’s isolating to suffer a mental episode while everyone around you is seemingly, sinisterly cheery, but there really isn’t much to it beyond it looking creepy.  However, Smile 2 does justify The Smile visual gimmick in its narrative, this time following demonically possessed popstar Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) as she prepares for a career-comeback tour after rock-bottoming as a drug addict.  Skye is outfitted to look like Lady Gaga in her onstage costuming, but her offstage struggle to please fans, staff, press, record label execs, and her micro-momager while maintaining a cutesy smile read as Chappell Roan.  Being grinned at by strangers & sycophants all day really does seem like a tough part of the popstar gig.  Usually, the millions of dollars in monetary compensation help make that discomfort worthwhile, but I can see how being stalked by a suicide-encouraging demon might tip that scale in the wrong direction.

Not that it’s easy to know exactly what poor Skye Riley is going through.  The demon’s main method of attack is to cause its hosts to hallucinate, confirming their fears that nobody cares about them, and they deserve to die alone (soon!).  As a result, roughly 90% of Skye’s onscreen journey happens entirely in her head, and the movie constantly pulls the rug from under her to reveal that she’s imagining things, often while humiliating herself in public.  It’s the kind of social cringe that makes you cover your eyes in embarrassment while watching a hack sitcom more often that it is the kind of unnerving horror that makes you cover your eyes in dread.  There are plenty of genuine scares, though.  This being a mainstream studio horror means that things get real quiet every time Skye is alone, only for a loud soundtrack stinger to startle the audience with an out-of-nowhere jump scare (punctuated by a creepy smile, of course).  Her luxury apartment is also invaded by a hallucination of her backup dancers doing a body contortionist routine straight out of Climax, revealing anxieties around how she’s passed around like a doll during her stage act.  Thankfully, no one stops the plot dead to recite search engine results for the word “trauma” like in the first Smile film, but there’s still plenty of brooding over topics like addiction, survivor’s guilt, and suicidal ideation, establishing a visual device where Skye chugs bottled water every time she’s triggered.  Just when you think all of this could be solved by the popstar-in-crisis admitting herself to a “health clinic” for “exhaustion,” though, the film reminds the audience that, yes, there is an actual, physical demon at work here – not just a metaphorical one.

In popstar-crisis terms, Smile 2 is about on par with Trap but oceans behind Vox Lux.  It makes good use of the inherently exaggerated music-video aesthetics of its setting but just as often strays from that world to dwell in the same drab, grey spaces most mainstream horrors occupy.  It’s clear that writer-director Parker Finn was funded for more creative freedom to play around as a visual stylist here than in the first film, and he uses the opportunity to make a name for himself as a formidable auteur before tackling his next ill-advised project: a modern remake of Żuławski’s Possession.  The results are mixed.  The high-gloss pop music aesthetic and sprawling 127min runtime suggest an ambitious filmmaker who’s eager to leave his mark on the modern-horror landscape, but by the third or fifth time he frames that landscape through an upside-down drone shot you have to wonder if he has enough original ideas in his playbook to pull off a name-brand career.  I’m not yet fully invested in Parker Finn as an artist, but I am grateful that he delivered a moderately stylish mainstream horror with a few effective jump scares during such an otherwise abysmal Halloween Season drought.  Smile 2 might not have meant much to me as cinema, but as a commercial product it supplied exactly what I demanded.

-Brandon Ledet