For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli celebrate Angela Lansbury’s career by looking back to her big-screen debut in the psychological thriller Gaslight (1944).
I was a few minutes late to my screening of the dystopian sci-fi cheapie Vesper, so I missed the opening scroll that explained exactly which doomsday scenario its few scattered characters had survived. According to Wikipedia, the film is set in “The New Dark Ages,” triggered by bio-engineered plants & viruses that escaped from the lab and into the wild, mutating the Natural world that scientists were attempting to save from Climate Change. Basically, in the near future we take the “Hack the planet!” messaging from Hackers a little too literally. Whatever table-setting paragraph I missed at the start of the film didn’t end up mattering too much, though, since its interest in old-fashioned sci-fi worldbuilding does not stop there. Vesper is essentially a feature-length worldbuilding exercise, one that invests all of its energy in exploring the lush, biohacked landscapes of its Apocalyptic Vegetation futureworld, with little attention left for the characters who have to hack their way through it. And for a certain type of hardline sci-fi nerd, that escape to an intricately detailed otherworld is going to be immensely satisfying no matter what happens there.
Plot-wise, this is a Young Women in STEM story. The titular Vesper is a plucky teen who’s incredibly gifted at biochemistry, stubbornly determined to biohack her way out of the Biohack Apocalypse. Camping in the woods between a petty-dictatorship barter town run by her creepy uncle and an aristocratic “citadel” with a “No Poors Allowed” sign posted to its gates, Vesper is a fairly typical YA heroine: the only freethinker who’s ruggedly independent & smart enough to rescue her dystopian world from its downward spiral. She’s more of a video game avatar than a fully formed character, since her main function is to lead us through the overgrown vegetation and crumbling urban infrastructure of the “world of shit” she calls home. There are plenty of contemporaries to Vesper‘s style of low-key, lived-in sci-fi, from the surreal vegetative mutations of Annihilation to the violent Natural reclamation of urban spaces in The Girl with all the Gifts to the analog sci-fi throwback of Prospect. Only this movie exists in this specific world, though, so it’s more important that Vesper give us the full guided tour of her far-out greenhouse creations than it is for her to stir up meaningful drama with her dying father, her creepy uncle, or her fellow scrappy rebels.
Vesper can feel a little humorless and drawn out at times, but it’s shrewd about inspiring awe & disgust with limited resources. This French-Lithuanian production was shot in an uncanny English dialect as a bid for wide international appeal, but I’m not sure that it ever had a chance to make it beyond a few festival raves & VOD streaming deals. Its detailed worldbuilding impulses are tied to such a literary sci-fi tradition that it was never going to fully break out of its nerdy niche, at least not without giving its Wilson volleyball drone sidekick a bunch of James Corden-voiced one-liners (as opposed to the defeated wheezings of Vesper’s dying father). Its ambitions are super admirable, though, and it accomplishes a lot creatively even if its distribution has been limited. Shot without artificial green screen environments, Vesper explores a lived-in, tactile dystopian world that should be a major draw for anyone who’s at all nerdy about world-building and practical effects. It feels vibrantly alive – brimming with mutated plant tendrils, radioactive glow worms, and A.I. creatures made of vintage medical equipment. You just won’t find much of that vibrant life in the drama or dialogue.
Every October, I sit on the sidelines while more dedicated movie nerds cram in 31 new-to-them horror films, one for every day of the month. I’m usually too busy with New Orleans Film Fest screenings, podcast homework, NOCAZ prep, and other personal movie-watching rituals to keep up with that schedule. A lot of those priorities have shifted in recent years, though. NOCAZ, for instance, doesn’t even exist anymore. So, in the past couple years I’ve gotten the closest I ever have to properly celebrating Spooktober alongside my buddies, watching 32 horror films in October 2021 and 30 in October 2022. These numbers are puny when you realize they’re boosted by rewatches. They’re even punier when you compare them to the triple-digit anomalies more voracious viewers like the hosts of We Love to Watch are racking up, but it’s at least a stride in the right direction. When I grow up, I want to be a proper Spooktoberer. One day, one day.
This Spooktober, my pen could not keep up with my eyes, and I didn’t find time to write or podcast about all of the horror movies I watched before Halloween Night. I’m willing to write proper reviews of this year’s new horror releases that I watched last month, but I’m a less eager to let the older titles clog up my Drafts box. So, here are a few quick mini-reviews of new-to-me, old-to-the-world horror movies I watched in the lead up to Halloween.
Evilspeak (1981)
After watching Clint Howard slum it in the all-around lazy kindertrauma slasher Ice Cream Man earlier this month, it was wonderful to see him shine as the lead in a Great horror movie for a change – although one with an equally goofy premise. In Evilspeak, a young, baby-faced Howard stars as a military academy misfit who summons Satan to smite his bullies using the Latin translation software on the school computer. It’s a dual-novelty horror that cashes in on the personal desktop computer & Satanic Panic trends of its era, combining badass practical gore spectacles with proto-Lawnmower Man computer graphics. It isn’t long before the prematurely-bald Baby Clint graduates from translating Latin phrases from a Satanic priest’s diary to asking the computer dangerous questions like “What elements do I need for a Black Mass?” and “What are the keys to Satan’s magic?”, stoking parents’ technological and religious fears with full aggression. And the third-act gore spectacle he unleashes with those questions is gorgeously disgusting.
There are two notable endorsements of Evilspeak‘s quality from infamously disreputable sources: Anton LaVey publicly praised the film’s Satanic powers, and British censors listed it among the initial Video Nasties list of banned home video titles. Evilspeak starts off goofy & unassuming enough for audiences to expect a safe & subdued resolution to Clint’s schoolday woes. Once he gets his cathartic Carrie payback scene in the school chapel, though, it quickly devolves into a gruesome gore fest, with Clint soaring above his tormenters while wielding a gigantic sword and an army of feral, flesh-starved hogs. The only thing you can really fault the movie for is casting someone who was already bald to play a picked-on high school student (hiding under a thin, combed-over toupee), but hey, I had a very good friend at that age who started balding before we graduated, and it’s a pretty convincing reason why he was such a target for bullying.
Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dracula and the Wolf Man (1973)
The title pretty much says it all. Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dracula and the Wolf Man is one of the 53 lucha libre films starring masked pro wrestler El Santo, nine of which featured him teaming up with his in-ring rival Demonio Azul. From what I can tell, a significant portion of that filmography is horror-related too. At least, the only other Santo movie I’ve seen to date, Santo vs. The Vampire Women, is essentially a Hammer horror film that happens to include some wrestling. There’s no reason to be intimidated by the seemingly daunting number of Santo films that are out there, though. Watching these two out of order—released a decade apart—I can confirm that they work a lot like real-life pro wrestling in that you can jump in at any time and still get into the drama of the match at hand pretty quickly: Santo good, Dracula bad, etc.
What really took me aback about this particular Santo horror was its pristine presentation on the free-with-ads streamer Tubi, which I’m forever struggling to wrap my mind around. Tubi has this tag-team lucha horror presented in the pristine HD condition you’d expect from a Powell & Pressburger restoration on The Criterion Channel . . . give or take a few Geico ads and a goofball English dub. The Eastman Color palette is shockingly vivid, to the point where watching Santo & The Blue Demon blow off steam with a friendly game of chess is just as gorgeous to behold as the film’s haunted-house bats, gargoyles, and cobwebbed torture dungeons. The simplicity of Dracula’s plan to “turn the world into vampires & werewolves” makes this a relatively predictable novelty, but some truly wonderful Dracula & luchador imagery results from that set-up (as long as you can push past the embarrassingly lazy vocal dub).
Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)
It’s a shame Bela Lugosi didn’t live long enough to play Dr. Acula in Ed Wood’s Night of the Ghouls, but at least his first mad scientist role was as Dr. Mirakle in the Universal picture Murders in the Rue Morgue. Dr. Mirakle is a carnival sideshow murderer who experiments mixing women’s blood with his pet ape Eric’s in a disastrous attempt to prove the theory of Evolution. When he’s frustrated with the results of “experimenting on” (i.e., murdering) prostitutes, he moves onto the women of Proper Society, so Parisians take notice and drive him to his doom. The movie was heavily edited before release to downplay its shocks of violence, sexuality, and Evolutionary theory, leaving behind a short, chopped-to-pieces mess. Lugosi looks great in his unibrow & tuxedo combo, though, and it’s easy to tell why they expanded his role as the central villain to the point where the story held very little—if any—resemblance to its Edgar Allen Poe source material.
Lugosi’s Dracula film has been slipping out of public favor in recent years for being “boring” (something I think a musical score easily fixes), while the Poverty Row slapstick comedy Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla has gradually been building a cult – to the point where it was screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival as a horror “classic.” Murders in the Rue Morgue is far from Lugosi’s best, but it’s amusing as unlikely middle ground between the Universal Horror prestige and ape-on-the-loose goofballery of those two pictures. His performance is fully committed, there are some shocking moments of pre-Code violence, and the gorgeous Expressionist photography smooths over a lot of the scatterbrained plotting. You can find all of those elements put to much, much better use in other Poe-adjacent Lugosi pictures of the era like The Black Cat& The Raven, but they’re still charming here.
House (1986)
House II: The Second Story (1987)
It’s a shame that the 80s haunted house horror comedy House has to share its title with the 70s Nobuhiko Obayashi masterpiece of the same name & sub-genre, since being compared against one of the greatest films of all time doesn’t do it any favors. This isn’t a Cronenberg vs 2006-Best-Picture-Winner Crash situation, though. The 80s House is too endearing to be an embarrassment, even if it struggles to stand out on its own. Not only does it share its title with a far superior haunted house horror comedy with similar war-atrocity themes; it also lands as a goofy midpoint between the better-funded special effects showcase of Poltergeist and the eerie Vietnam PTSD horror of Jacob’s Ladder. House has no chance to match the euphoric highs of either comparison point, but it’s still a fun dark-ride attraction of its own merit. Its story of a Vietnam veteran facing his inner demons while writing a memoir in a haunted house is restrictively straightforward & contained, but its rubber-mask monsters are adorably grotesque, and they pop out of the most surprising places – which is sometimes all you need from a Halloween-season spookfest.
Despite its all-timer of a title, House II: The Second Storyis an embarrassment. I enjoyed the goofball humor that underlines the carnival-ride scares & Vietnam flashbacks of the first House, but The Second Story tips a little too far into Porky’s era frat boy comedy and the whole thing kinda unravels. The monsters are deliberately cute instead of scary, which means that the most frightening moment is when Bill Maher shows up as a Reaganite record exec. And since the jokes aren’t funny, there really isn’t much to do except appreciate the occasional bursts stop-motion animation and rubber-suited monsters – things that were much more plentiful & satisfying in the original. The best I can say about The Second Story is that its title is great, and that I appreciated it as my last new-to-me watch of the month, since it’s the only title in this batch that features a Halloween dance party.
Party Line (1988)
If you’re only going to watch one 1988 sleazoid slasher about the phone sex hotline craze, you might as well watch the one where Divine appears out of drag as a police detective alongside Lust in the Dust co-stars Tab Hunter, Lainie Kazan, and Paul Bartel – Out of the Dark. If you’re going to watch two, I guess there’s also Party Line, ya freak.
In Party Line, a pair of wealthy, mutually obsessed siblings use a phone-sex party line as a recruitment tool for vulnerably horny victims. Leif Garret stars as the requisite Norman Bates crossdresser killer in this watered-down De Palma knockoff, joined by Miss Universe beauty queen Shawn Weatherly as his honeytrap partner and Richard “Shaft” Roundtree as the police chief who busts their (barely covert) schemes. Without question, the movie is a hotbed for terrible politics, especially in its overt suggestion that rape victims & crossdressers are predisposed to become homicidal maniacs. It’s an amusing relic of its era, though, especially in its exploitation of the party line dirty talk fad and its stylistic combination of MTV & Skinemax aesthetics. As long as you’re prepared to feel queasy about the story it’s telling, the only major drawback, really, is that its novelty is undercut by Out of the Dark doing a slightly better job with the same fad the very same year.
There’s nothing punks and metalheads love to debate more than authenticity and scene cred, so that’s the only critical lens I could think to apply to the no-budget slasher Blood Sick Psychosis. Set in Philadelphia’s D.I.Y. metal scene, Blood Sick Psychosis is a dual throwback to SOV camcorder horrors and the earlier metalsploitation trend of the Satanic Panic era. So, I’d argue it loses a few punk authenticity points for indulging in retro genre pastiche instead of being true to its era. It clearly admires no-budget horror “classics” like the Canuxploitation slasher Things, Tina Krause’s surrealist headscratcher Limbo, and the Paloma Brothers’ home video gross-out Hallucinations, only modernizing its feature-length homage to that era with an updated crust-metal soundtrack and a few stray shots of cellphones. It’s a loving copy of a pre-set SOV slasher template, presented in the exact way most of the movies it emulates are seen by modern audiences: frequently interrupted by ad breaks on subscription-free streamers like Plex. Whether you find that style of pastiche charming is a question of taste, but the movie opens with its villainous lead having a Crispin Glover-sized emotional breakdown while wearing a River’s Edge promotional t-shirt, so you can’t say you were not warned.
Where Blood Sick Psychosis racks up its punk-cred authenticity points is in the way it continues the true mission of retro SOV slashers: documentation of its filmmakers having a good, wholesome time. Like all great regional, no-budget horrors, it’s basically community theatre. Blood Sick Psychosis drags its audience through a guided tour of the drive-in movie theaters, squat basement music venues, and cheesesteak shops of modern Philadelphia, all presented through the prism of VHS tape warp. No detail in its plot about a depressed metalhead loner who goes on a senseless killing spree with his acid dealer matters as much as its survey of a local D.I.Y. show starring the Philly-based black metal band Spiter, who encourage their audience “to kill yourself for Satan” before serenading them with the mantra “Suicidal bloodfucker, vampiric bloodsucker”. This is an on-the-ground document of a scene and, even though I’ve never been, I’ve always gotten the impression that Philly is the exact performatively cold & cruel D.I.Y. subculture captured in this gnarly self-portrait. Even when the camera cuts away from reality to indulge in LSD vampirism, paranoid rants about bodily mutations, and the ritualistic slaughter of animals, it still plays like a charming little caricature of the City of Brotherly Love.
Punk infighting about posers & stolen valor has always been incredibly tedious, and I don’t mean to participate in it with any sincerity. I just thought it would be fun to pick at this movie from that angle, since it’s about the exact scene-obsessed dipshits who would care about that kind of thing. In its most telling scene, our two LSD-crazed serial killers chat outside the Spiter show about how annoying it is that punk screenings of Extreme Cinema are all tagged with trigger warnings now, both voicing a genuine frustration with modern punk culture sensitivity and, by the time the conversation reaches its punchline, mocking the reprobates who would oppose that sensitivity. Its playdough claymation credits, Jackass-style “creepy crawl” home invasion pranks, and spectacularly lazy Dave “The Rock” Nelson cameo (seemingly a direct homage to legendary pornstar Amber Lynn’s half-hearted participation in Things) are all overt signals to the audience that it’s just having a laugh, often at its own expense. That willingness to self-satirize really helps smooth over the overtly retro genre nostalgia and slasher-standard misogyny that creeps in at its weakest points. Personally, I’d be more interested in a version of this movie that actually reflects the tools & textures of its digital-video times, but this movie wasn’t made for me. It was made for the cold-hearted metalhead brutes of Philly, who appear to be having a lot of fun.
Welcome to the Swampflix Podcast Halloween Special. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of horror movies about evil surgeons, starting with the major studio body horror Body Parts (1991).
0:00 Welcome
01:51 Fascination (1979) 04:20 See for Me (2022) 09:05 Blood Sick Psychosis (2022) 12:40 The Night Porter (1974)
16:44 Body Parts (1991) 33:45 The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959) 46:33 Scalpel (1977) 59:25 The Skin I Live In (2011)
Just like all other major entries in decades-running horror franchises, David Gordon Green’s Halloween was sharply divisive among genre fans as soon as it hit theaters in 2018. Even so, its reputation has only declined in the five years since, especially as it has become the go-to, defining example of mainstream horror’s current “legacy sequel” trend. Not only does the Halloween reboot have to answer for its own revisions of Laurie Strode & Michael Myers lore, but it also now carries the weight of horror nerd complaints against more recent offenses like 2019’s Child’s Play, 2021’s Candyman, and this year’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s also been reduced to a scapegoat trendsetter for the Trauma Metaphor Horror wave that has followed in its wake, while artsier, standalone titles like Hereditary & The Babadook have maintained much steadier, more prestigious reputations in the same context. It doesn’t help, of course, that Green has diluted his Halloween legacyquel with two follow-up films that have only alienated the Michael Myers purists even further as the series stumbled along. I opted out of the David Gordon Ween discourse when Halloween Kills opened to white-hot angry reviews last year, but now that his theatrical mini-series is over and the online vitriol has been directed elsewhere (mostly at Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, which is practically a legacy sequel to Stepford Wives), it finally felt safe to return to Haddonfield to see how his take on Halloween has evolved.
Personally, I was really impressed with Green’s “original” Halloween in 2018, and I still think it holds up well when considered in isolation. Regardless of its role as a harbinger for the next five years of mainstream horror trends, it still a really scary movie about self-fulfilling prophecies and obsessive thought spirals. Okay, yes, Laurie Strode is haunted by the same metaphorical Trauma Monster that stalks most modern horror heroines (this time in a road-worn William Shatner mask), but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any dramatic complexity to how that internal battle with trauma plays out. We’re told that in the 40 years since Laurie was hunted by the infamous killer Michael Myers in the John Carpenter original, she’s been mentally stuck in the events of that one night in a way that has defined & limited every other minute of her life. Faced with senseless violence from a heartless, near-catatonic killer, Laurie has attempted to make sense of her life’s story by convincing herself it’s fate that she will have a final showdown with Michael once he inevitably escapes captivity. It’s the same way that doomsday preppers always appear to be looking forward to the apocalypse they supposedly fear. So, when Michael does escape, Laurie (along with other Michael-obsessed weirdos like “The New Dr. Loomis”) does everything in her power to make sure she & Michael have their “final” showdown in her D.I.Y. death-trap compound at the outskirts of Haddonfield, even though that’s exactly what she’s been dreading for decades. Michael just mindlessly kills whatever’s in striking distance; Laurie is the one that makes the confrontation happen, totally unaware that she’s willing the fight into existence. It’s chilling.
Green’s Halloween trilogy loses its way in the 2021 sequel Halloween Kills, which zooms out the scope of Michael’s function as a Trauma Monster from his effect on Laurie to his effect on Haddonfield as a community. I choose to interpret the word “kills” as a noun here, since this second entry is a feature-length montage of Michael slashing his way through the streets, homes, and pubs of Haddonfield while Laurie recovers from their “final” showdown on a hospital bed, listening in from the sidelines. Michael proves the point of the 2018 film’s self-fulfilling prophecy arc by making no effort to visit Laurie’s hospital room; he just lumbers from kill to kill in the most mindless fashion ever seen from a slasher villain. If Halloween Kills is “about” anything outside the monotonous rhythm of those murders, it’s in how the community of Haddonfield tries to make sense of Michael’s senseless violence by making themselves the collective hero of the “story.” I very much appreciate Halloween Kills‘s disgust with small-town America’s fetish for gun-toting vigilantism, given how many ordinary, ill-equipped Haddonfieldians approach Michael with deadly weapons—the same way real-life gun freaks dream of personally intervening in active-shooter crises—and are immediately destroyed for their trouble, either by Michael’s knife or their own petard. It’s just a shame the movie is spread too thin across Michael’s hometown to ever truly feel scary. Its larger scope means that it keeps intercutting between the tension of individual scenes so that we’re never properly immersed in any one of them. It doesn’t really matter that its political assessments of small-town America are goofily unsubtle; it could have easily gotten away with that if it weren’t so scatterbrained.
After the frantic scrambling of Kills, the more sincere, dramatic approach of Halloween Ends can’t help but feel like a relief. With his final entry in the series, Green returns to the low-key indie dramas that first earned him name recognition before he started making major studio slasher sequels & stoner comedies. Halloween Ends may not be as Great as the first film in its trilogy, but it’s at least coherently structured and (mostly) functions as its own standalone movie, which is an embarrassingly low bar that Halloween Kills does not clear. It’s also custom-designed to alienate & infuriate die-hard horror fans the same way that Halloween III: Season of the Witch was when Carpenter was still actively involved in the franchise, since it also does not focus on the senseless killings of Michael “The Shape” Myers. Instead, we follow an equally iconic horror villain: Cory, the lonely mechanic with a troubled past. Cory is dubbed “the new Michael” by the surviving citizens of Haddonfield, who essentially radicalize him into becoming a mass murderer in their continued attempts to make a clear, sensical narrative out of Michael’s mindless violence. Meanwhile, Cory keeps The Old Michael as a pet in the sewers below Haddonfield and “feeds” his bullies to the hibernating killer the same way little Jamie feeds his bullies to the “tra-la-logs” of The Pit. I’m sure there are plenty of people who are frustrated by the tonal & narrative inconsistencies between each of Green’s Halloweens, but I do love that there’s still room in a post-MCU world for individual movies in a big-budget franchise to take unique directions from each other – even if it’s strange to get that from a series with a consistent creative team at its core. Cory’s story isn’t nearly as compelling nor as scary as Laurie’s, but at least Green & company found a way to make Halloween intimately personable again after the aimlessness of Kills.
The bigger problem is not the inconsistency across this series; it’s that it didn’t need to be a series at all. Laurie Strode’s story is so neatly contained & emotionally impactful in the 2018 Halloween that there’s no reason for her to return for two more entries. Kills feels lost by comparison, aimlessly wandering the streets of Haddonfield in search of a new emotional hook. To its credit, Ends finds that new hook (by conjuring a new central character out of thin air), but it has no chance of fully standing on its own, since Laurie is still hanging around Haddonfield, distracting from its new sense of purpose. After Cory’s own storyline is neatly wrapped up, Laurie steps back in for another “final” showdown with Michael, as if they’re ultimate fight to the death was meant to be, undoing all the good work of Green’s “original” Halloween. After two entire films of Laurie hanging around a hospital room (Kills) and absentmindedly narrating her memoir (Ends), that last minute return to her vendetta with Michael can’t help but feel like an afterthought that dilutes the impact of both her story and Cory’s. That’s largely what makes Halloween ’18 a great film and Halloween Ends an okay one. And the purposeless ambling of Kills only makes them both look stronger by comparison.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Lucio Fulci’s surrealist horror whatsit The Beyond (1981), set at the gates of Hell just outside New Orleans.
0:00 Welcome
02:22 Halloween Ends (2022) 09:14 Halloween II (1981) 14:10 Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) 16:22 Hellraiser (2022) 19:10 Bride of the Re-Animator (1989) 24:38 Smile (2022) 29:09 The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) 33:20 Dark Glasses (2022)
Something finally clicked in my brain during the opening 20 minutes of Climaxwhere I’m now on-board with everything Gaspar Noé is putting out. It’s not the most dignified position to be in, I know, but I like to think it’s because Noé is hitting a new visual & emotional maturity in his recent work – not that I’m backsliding into a juvenile edgelordism that would make his usually flashy, trashy ways appealing. This year, Noé has released a pair of cursed sister films that stretch out De Palma’s signature split-screen sequences into feature length. In Vortex, that side-by-side framing is used as a somber visual metaphor for the ways an aging couple can live separate, isolated lives in a shared, intimate space. In Lux Æterna, Noé drops the thematic pretense and instead simply deploys the split-screen format to actively attempt to melt the audience’s minds. It’s the most authentically “psychotronic” movie I’ve experienced in a while, a signal that Noé still has a little Enter the Void pranksterism left in his bones even if time has softened his sharpest edges.
Lux Æterna opens with arthouse actresses Charlotte Gainsbourg & Beatrice Dalle casually chatting about the cultural misogyny that overlaps between the modern film industry & Old World witch trials. We then see that misogyny in action. Dalle struggles to exert directorial control over a chaotic film shoot of a ritualistic witch burning – featuring other film fest regulars Abby Lee, Karl Glusman, and Félix Maritaud as self-parodic caricatures. As Dalle’s authority is constantly undermined by her cast & crew, all semblance of a functional workplace falls apart horrifically and spectacularly, recalling other recent feature-length stress-outs like Black Bear, Birdman, andHer Smell. Only, Noé uses that familiar set-up to conjure a vivid vision of Hell, likening the scenario to Häxan more than to other behind-the-scenes film set dramas. This culminates in a stunning technical breakdown of the set’s LED screen backdrop, which flashes alternating strobes of red, green, and blue in a blinding finale designed to be suffered more than enjoyed. In LuxÆterna, filmmaking is witchcraft, in that pure-evil supernatural forces can be summoned from the most mundane rituals, and women are always the ones who are burned.
In Vortex, Noé reckons with the pains & limitations of his body, particularly the ways his heart & brain will inevitably fail him after years of hedonistic drug abuse. Here, he reckons with the pains & limitations of his profession. Lux Æterna is a horror film about the stress of behind-the-scenes film set squabbling, a nightmare about a bad shift on the clock. Since it was sponsored by the Yves Saint Laurent fashion house, though, it still has to make those shifts from Hell seem cool, and it ends up being just as much an aesthetic celebration of strobe lights, leather jackets, and sunglasses worn indoors as it is a workplace nightmare. It never returns to the laidback mood of its opening, where two badass women chat about movies & witchcraft, but even its eye-scorching conclusion is beautiful & hip in its own vicious way. It’s an all-around stunning experience, one that mercifully lasts less than an hour to spare the audience unneeded suffering. It also helpfully opens with a warning for anyone vulnerable to epileptic fits, so make sure to consult your doctor before subjecting your brain.
2022 has gradually shaped into Dario Argento’s comeback year, something I never dared to expect from the 82-year-old Italo horror legend. The low-key giallo revival Dark Glasses is Argento’s first directorial credit in a decade and easily his best in twice as long. He was also shockingly great as the lead performer in Gaspar Noé’s Vortex, his first acting credit outside cameo roles & narration tracks. Of all the various ways Argento’s comeback year has taken shape, though, the least surprising has got to be his in-name-only producer credit on She Will, cosigning a younger artist’s work. Not only is Argento making movies again; apparently, he’s also entering his “Wes Craven Presents” era.
That stamp of approval goes a long way in Charlotte Colbert’s debut feature, especially since it’s an indictment of the macho, abusive brutes who occupied every director’s seat when Argento first started making artsy horror pictures in the 1970s. Is Malcolm McDowell’s pretentious, villainous abuser-auteur supposed to be a stand-in for Jodorowsky, for Polanski, for one of Dario’s fellow giallo greats? It doesn’t matter much, since the film is less about his behind-the-scenes crimes than it is about his victim’s delayed revenge. Alice Krige headlines as an ice-queen film actress whose star has faded; she channels her lingering resentments from that child-actor abuse on McDowell’s sets into a witchy, supernatural revenge. The mechanism of public #MeToo callouts simply isn’t enough; only black magic evisceration will do.
I very much vibe with She Will‘s burn-it-all-down political anger, so it’s a shame I couldn’t also vibe with its filmmaking aesthetics. Between its ominous shots of the woods and Krige’s mutually destructive relationship with her young nurse (helping her recover from a double mastectomy), it just ends up playing like a watered-down, VVitch-ed up version of Saint Maud. It’s well considered thematically, like in how the soil at Krige’s Scottish health retreat is enriched by the ashes of locally burned witches, strengthening both her skin and her witchy powers. Its most exciting ideas are just presented in the limpest nightmare-sequences around, with time-elapse nature footage edited together in the Elevated Horror equivalent of an Ed Wood montage. I almost want to say the film is worth it for Krige’s performance as the icy lead, but truth is she had a lot more to do in this same register as the mentorial witch in Gretel & Hansel. There just isn’t much to see here that hasn’t been covered by its sharper, more vivid contemporaries.
Regardless, I still think a “Dario Argento Presents” project is, by default, a more exciting turn for the actor-director-producer’s late career phase than an actual Dario Argento film. Dark Glasses is only interesting within the context of his larger catalog and can only feel like a faint echo of former glories. By contrast, throwing his name by newcomers like Colbert helps them get platformed at film festivals like Overlook and streaming services like Shudder, where She Will has earned a lot more sincere praise than I’m giving it here. It’s an investment in the future of horror filmmaking instead of a victory lap for its faded past, which according to this film was a lot more spiritually & morally bankrupt than we’ve ever fully reckoned with.
Welcome to Episode #171 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of horror films banned by British censors on the infamous “Video Nasties” list, starting with the racial-tensions home invasion thriller Fight for Your Life (1977)
00:00 Welcome
01:15 Twister (1996) 07:15 The Other Side of the Underneath (1972) 12:45 Sissy (2022) 14:45 Deadstream (2022) 17:00 Medusa (2022) 19:40 Evilspeak (1981)
23:21 Video nasties 34:45 Fight for Your Life (1977) 49:45 Don’t Look in the Basement (1973) 1:15:20 Flesh for Frankenstein (1974) 1:28:50 The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)
Swampflix 