horror

Black Christmas (1974)

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When discussing films that established the standard structure & tropes of the slasher genre, Black Christmas is the one that most often slips through the cracks. Arriving more than a decade after proto-slashers like Psycho & Peeping Tom and just a few years before full-blown American slashers like Halloween & Friday the 13th, the Canuxploitation classic is somewhat of an island as a genre pioneer, disconnected from the movement that followed in its wake. That’s not for lack of cultural clout or stylistic specificity either. If nothing else, the cast of Black Christmas is incredibly stacked for a low-budget horror movie, especially considering Margot Kidder & Olivia Hussey’s central roles as sorority-girl victims. The film is also significant as an early adaptation of the “The call is coming from inside the house!” babysitter-murder urban legend, which would prove to be a significant influence on the genre. All the standard tropes & techniques of the typical slasher are already present too, especially in the first person POV shots of the killer stalking his sexually active teen-girl victims. Black Christmas is as much of a foundational text of the slasher’s DNA as any other that you can cite, yet its status is considered more “cult classic” than household name.

Because this is a genre template that’s since been set in stone, there isn’t going to be much in Black Christmas’s basic premise that surprises anyone who’s seen a horror movie or two since the 1980s. A mysterious killer makes threatening phone calls to a sorority house & methodically offs a series of victims therein. The killer’s identity remains hidden and we often see victims through his weaponized gaze while heavy breathing overpowers the soundtrack. Like with most genre films, Black Christmas’s premise is only interesting in where it deviates from the norm. The Christmastime setting might have been repeated in subsequent slasher franchises like Santa’s Slay & Silent Night Deadly Night, but I’m sure it was a novelty at the time. Black Christmas also deviates from what would eventually become the traditional slasher by resisting devolving into a bodycount film, spending most of its runtime investigating the murder of one sorority house victim instead of letting the corpses pile. Our de facto Final Girl protagonist (Hussey, laying on her posh British accent as thickly as possible) is also far from the naïve virginal cliché that would soon become standard; she spends most of the film refusing to be swayed from her decision to have an abortion. She also cedes a lot of screentime to Kidder’s mean-drunk sorority sister, who would normally be a two-scene archetypal annoyance before being killed off. In as many ways as Black Christmas resembles a typical slasher, it’s also freer than most to defy that genre’s conventions, since they had not yet been fully established.

As interesting as the film’s cultural context might be as an early pioneer of its genre, Black Christmas is just as notable for its in-the-moment effect. The urban legend of the murdered babysitter that ends in the punchline “The calls are coming from inside the house!” may seem too overly familiar to scare horror audiences without subversion or embellishment, but its in-the-moment tension is still horrifically unnerving as told here. The lewd phone calls the college-girl victims receive in Black Christmas are grotesquely unnerving. The killer gargles, shrieks, and moans in sexually explicit menace over the phone while the girls cower in disgust around the receiver. The effect is anguished & inhuman, an unholy assault of aural discomfort. The kills, although infrequent, have an unseemly nastiness to them as well. The killer has no known motivation or weakness, like a Michael Myers prototype. He strangles victims with dry-cleaning bags & phone cords with a cold, uncaring brutality, leaving corpses to rot without purpose or emotion. He hides in closets, attics, and basements – the exact nightmare environments that are relatable enough to feel genuinely threatening but are also oddly otherworldly. The film’s camera work is also off-puttingly crass, stumbling through the sorority house in search of victims as if it were in a blind drunken rage. Its unconformable angles & up-close split diopter framing are nearly as unnerving as the lewd phone calls from the killer – a high bar to clear.

It’s difficult to make sense of Black Christmas’s place in the cultural zeitgeist. Horror nerds hold it in high regard as a foundational text for the slasher genre, but it’s unclear whether that status has amounted to wider recognition & respect. Director Bob Clark’s larger catalog is no help, as attempting to make sense of any career that includes this film, A Christmas Story, Baby Geniuses, and Porky’s only results in pulling out your own hair. Regardless of its larger cultural context, however, Black Christmas remains perfectly potent as an isolated work. The kills are brutal, the soundtrack & camera work even moreso. The characters are more complex than what we’ve been conditioned to expect in this low-budget end of genre fare, resulting in more than just a skyrocketing bodycount. The drive-in era tagline warns “If this picture doesn’t make your skin crawl . . . t’s on TOO TIGHT,” and it’s one of the few films that lives up to that kind of carnival-barker grandstanding. You could likely find a better example of an early slasher pic that colors within the lines set by its genre and there are certainly ones that are more willing to exploit the novelty of their Yuletide setting. There’s just very little chance they’ll offer anything as eerie or as unnerving as a single phone call made in this proto-slasher gem.

-Brandon Ledet

Imitation Girl (2018)

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I knew I was in trouble with Imitation Girl just a few minutes in, when an alien species crash-lands on Earth through a hole in the atmosphere. I’m usually very forgiving when it comes to effects work in small budget independent films, but there was just something clumsy & unsatisfying about the CGI space hole that opens in that moment. A movie about a shapeshifting space alien that takes the form of an actress it discovers on a magazine cover, Imitation Girl should be an eerie sci-fi creep-out, but the functional flatness of the way its crash-landing is rendered has all the atmospheric dread of a Sharknado sequel. Given that the actress the alien mirrors is a porn star, the film also suggests that it might have something substantial to say about identity & sex work, but it shies away from that topic in an almost bashful manner. In fact, Imitation Girl comes across super squeamish about depicting sex at all, almost to the point where it seems sex-negative about mainstream pornography as an industry. It’s a sci-fi horror film that’s reluctant to horrify, a movie about sex that’s afraid of eroticism. A more tonally intense, better crafted film could get away with those withholding impulses, but this one’s student-film flatness is too lacking in sensory pleasures to also lack those genre-specific payoffs.

What imitation Girl lacks in sexual courage & tonal intensity, it somewhat makes up for in the unpredictability of its storytelling. Not being in tune with the typical payoffs of the sci-fi horror genre allows for some surprising turns in the narrative. The doppelganger space alien does not immediately seek a confrontation with the woman whose image it cloned. It instead stumbles through the desert like an intergalactic Nell until it’s rescued by an Iranian family, who attempt to communicate with it in both Persian & English until it learns enough social skills to be able to navigate the world on its own. Meanwhile, the porn star struggles with her own confidence in independence – unsure of her profession, her choice in lovers, and her under-the-table involvement in low-level drug deals. As the audience alternates between the porn star & her space alien doppelganger, there’s sometimes a few seconds’ lag in being able to tell which version of actress ­­ we’re currently watching. It establishes a calm, unrushed rhythm in fluctuating between these two identities that’s sometimes broken by a jolting shift in reality – whether though a mirror functioning as a window or a kaleidoscopic return to the alien’s outer space roots. That’s a unique approach to genre filmmaking, although one that invites the mind to wander.

There are a couple stray elements of pure-horror at play that suggest Imitation Girl is attempting to function as an eerie sci-fi creep-out – especially in its arrhythmic strings score & early scenes of the alien doppelganger stumbling through the desert in jerky, inhuman contortions. Mostly, though, it’s a film about an identity crisis that’s having an identity crisis of its own. It wants to generate terror in the mysterious arrival of its space-alien double, but mostly leaves that journey on the backburner as the porn star goes about her daily business – stalling the alien’s story with the Iranian family for an overwhelming portion of the movie. The film wants to evoke the specificity of the mainstream porn industry to provide its central identity crisis some texture, but it’s too timid to evoke the eroticism (or terror) monetized by that trade. Its engagement with pornography as a topic comes across as remarkably old-fashioned as a result – both in its assumption that the audience finds it inherently demeaning & evil and, on a more practical level, in how it resembles a version of porno production that’s mostly faded from practice in the latest two decades. Most of the reason Imitation Girl is open for the occasional jarring surprise (Lewis Black appears in a single-scene cameo as a drug kingpin?!) is that it’s too delicately handled in its central topics for the audience to not be distracted by stray, incongruous details.

The most damming thing about Imitation Girl’s ineffectiveness is how much better its basic themes are covered in other recent sci-fi horror films. Its femme space alien identity crisis recalls the gorgeous, bone-deep creep-out of Under the Skin. Its sex worker doppelganger crisis recalls the sexed-up cyberthriller vibes of Cam. All Imitation Girl can do is surprise in its deviations from the expectations set by those contemporaries. Unfortunately, those deviations mostly arrive in its tonal & sexual timidity and its deployment of SyFy Channel-level CGI.

-Brandon Ledet

Cold Skin (2018)

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2017 was a great year for fish-fucking movies, considering the American distribution of the horned-up Polish mermaid musical The Lure and the surprise Best Picture Oscar win for del Toro’s Creature from the Black Lagoon slashfic The Shape of Water. It was during this fish-people pornography frenzy that I first heard of the Xavier Gans creature feature Cold Skin, so I’ve been anticipating its arrival here for a solid year, hoping our new national fetish could continue into pervy perpetuity. Given its French Horror pedigree & its provocative title, I expected Cold Skin to be the most extreme of the 2017 fish-fucking titles – especially considering the grotesque sexual menace of recent French titles like Raw, We Are the Flesh, and The Untamed (which does feature some alien space-squid fucking, which, close enough). I felt a little letdown, then, that Cold Skin is merely a serviceable creature feature that keeps most of its human-fish sexual behavior muted, off-screen, and de-eroticized. It’s like the movie’s scared to fully commit to the implications of its fish-people fucking, which is a huge hindrance in a year where more head-on explicit engagements with the same topic are out there winning Oscars.

In 1914, a depressive academic eagerly takes a year-long gig studying Antarctica weather patterns in solitary isolation. With his only assigned task being to measure the strength & direction of Antarctic winds and his only company being a stack of literary texts, he looks forward to being left alone with his brooding thoughts in a frozen wilderness. Of course, this plan of “seeking peace through nothingness” doesn’t last long and our protagonist soon finds himself living in “a monster-plagued inferno” (his love for Great Works of Literature often inspires him to describe his plight in verbose prose). Instead of living in total isolation as planned, he finds himself contending with two unexpected threats: a species of nocturnal fish-beasts that attack his cabin nightly and a near-feral man who’s made a life out of fighting these creatures off with a gun from the vantage point of his nearby lighthouse. The bearded brute has also taken in one of the anthropomorphic fish monsters as a house pet & sex slave, which bothers the bookish weather observer at first on the grounds of human decency, then later romantic jealousy. This unlikely trio—the brute, the scholar, and the fish slave—form a bizarre domestic routine in the Antarctic wilderness, fighting off encroaching monsters nightly and struggling to make eye contact during the day.

As a horror genre indictment of colonialism, in which two white men have the audacity to wage war on native creatures protecting their own territory, Cold Skin is a passably okay creature feature. Its cold digital photography & fanged-Delgo creature designs amount to an interesting enough visual aesthetic, and there’s plenty of monster-attack action to fill the time. The movie’s major flaw is that it’s deluded in thinking those nightly creature attacks are somehow more interesting than its implied fish-fucking – which it’s very wary about exploring in any direct way. It almost uses the colonialist rape & sexual subjugation of the fish-people as an excuse to avert its eyes when it comes to the more legitimate interspecies sparks of romance that later arise. The fish sex that does occur is nothing you’d want to see. I don’t know that explicit fish-person eroticism is a healthy desire for what I want depicted in modern cinema or if my brain has just been thoroughly wrecked by the cultural zeitgeist’s entertainment of that impulse in the last year. I do know that enough movies have more fully committed to engaging with that topic in recent memory that Cold Skin’s sexuality feels downright bashful in comparison – so that all that’s left are its minor creature feature payoffs.

-Brandon Ledet

The House That Jack Built (2018)

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I thought I had gotten confident enough in my distaste for Lars Von Trier’s audience & critics trolling that I no longer considered keeping up with his provocations du jour an obligatory exercise. During the entire hype & backlash cycle for Nymphomaniac, I largely abstained from engaging – neither reading reviews nor thinking about what he was trying to say with the film, much less actually watching all 325 (uncut) minutes of it. Honestly, it was freeing. However, von Trier’s follow-up to that massive, prurient temple of self-indulgence, The House that Jack Built, somehow lured me back into his orbit, like Wile E Coyote unable to walk away from the Road Runner even if it means repeatedly falling off the same cliff. There was a carnival sideshow aspect to The House that Jack Built that I was too weak to resist. Its initial reaction out of Cannes was polarized between mass, disgusted walkouts & glowing 5-star reviews. It was touted as both an inflammatory gore fest and the height of art film pretension – two modes of cinema I can’t help but love seeing smashed against each other. Even more enticingly, the film was being shown in select theaters in its “unrated” festival cut for one night only before making the theatrical rounds in a toned-down R-Rated edit (a move that really twisted the tighty-whities of the nerds at the MPAA), which only helped boost the attraction of its promised grindhouse sleaze. Perhaps the biggest disappointment of The House that Jack Built is that I didn’t have an especially strong reaction to its faults or merits, that I was neither especially tickled nor offended through most of its lengthy runtime. I had allowed the carnival barker promises of a highly divisive, hyperviolent art piece to lure me back into engaging with Von Trier’s edge-lord pranksterism, only to experience the one thing you never want to encounter at the movies: boredom.

I will credit The House That Jack Built for this: it does break the pattern that’s become so stubbornly, cruelly repetitious in the stories von Trier chooses to tell. The typical Lars von Trier film introduces the audience to a complex, lovable woman and then proceeds to torture her as harshly and unforgivingly as possible for the entire length of a feature. It was a tactic that worked on me in early-career titles like Breaking the Waves & Dancer in the Dark, but it has only become increasingly pointless as it’s repeated verbatim in each subsequent, cruelly grim work. The House that Jack Built disrupts this career-long pattern, but perhaps in the most boring way possible. It maintains the violent-destruction-of-women themes that are constant to his previous pictures, but this time switches the central POV to the man who’s destroying them, a serial killer played by Matt Dillon. Von Trier also deliberately strips his female characters of their depth & nuance, turning them into pathetic, braying dolts who practically beg to be murdered to save the world the trouble of their existence. Broken into five “incidents,” The House That Jack Built is practically an anthology horror; each victim is played broadly & without empathy so that there’s time to move onto the next. Matt Dillon punctuates each chapter with visual-collage art history lectures and psychiatric conversations with the poet Virgil (Bruno Ganz), contrasting the film’s dirt-cheap mid-2000s torture porn aesthetic with the literary grandeur of Dante’s Inferno. The kills themselves are gruesome, featuring unflinching depictions of mutilated women & children Dillon has claimed as trophies, but they’re also no more shocking than anything you’d see in an Eli Roth movie or a Saw sequel—flatly shot acts of pointless cruelty that are as boring now as they were when they were the Mainstream Horror standard a decade ago. Von Trier has devolved his torture of female characters to the most pedestrian, artless level of cinematic masturbation available. The annoying part is that he knows exactly what he’s doing; it’s all for a cheap joke.

Not only does von Trier change up his usual schtick by switching POVs to the man responsible for the women’s pain, he also chooses the most eyeroll-worthy subject possible for that new perspective: himself. In its best moments, The House That Jack Built functions like a buffoonish self-parody exaggerating how the director’s harshest critics see his work. The oversimplification & increased cruelty of his typical tones & methods are entirely the point – as he parodies media perception of his life’s work through the avatar of a serial killer who makes mediocre art out of violence. In a way, the mildly dopey Matt Dillon is perfectly cast in the role, recalling the empty-headed brutes of American Psycho & Killer Joe who think themselves superior to the mouth-breathers around them, but doesn’t actually have anything insightful, useful, or clever to say themselves. Dillon’s titular misogynist fancies himself to be the kind of hyper-intelligent serial killer sophisticate who turns mutilation & dismemberment into a fine art, like a 21st Century Hannibal Lector. He even autographs his evidence with the nom de plume “Mr. Sophistication” to taunt the police on his tail and compares the corpses he leaves behind to classic examples of paintings, piano compositions, and cathedral designs. He imagines himself to be a meticulous perfectionist in his violence/art, but is in fact a sloppy buffoon – more Paul Blart than Dexter. It’s initially a hilarious self-own, with von Trier expressing amazement that he keeps getting away with his woman-tormenting provocations despite the glowing flaws repeated throughout his work. The way Dillon’s ineptitude clashes with his illusions of grandeur and how he exploits MRA-type hurt-puppy tactics to weasel out of getting stopped from committing another crime (i.e. many making another movie) suggests a focused self-awareness of exactly how on Trier’s art is perceived by his harshest detractors. It’s a deliberate attack on his audience, then, when the cartoonish self-parody of the film’s earliest kills dissipates, and he begins to play the cruelty of the violence straight. After being shown how pointlessly cruel these empty provocations can be, it’s a lot to ask from the audience to sit through them again without the jokey remove. It’s also unforgivably boring in that straight-faced repetition, especially considering the extremity of the material.

There are some undeniably striking images & themes scattered throughout The House That Jack Built, but they’re overwhelmed by so much deliberately pedestrian genre filmmaking & self-trolling inside humor that it’s like searching for diamonds in dogshit. The way I can tell that the film doesn’t work as a whole in its own right is that it wouldn’t mean anything to someone who wasn’t already aware of Lars von Trier’s filmography & past PR debacles. Its horror genre payoffs are not extreme enough to justify the visceral reactions they elicited at Cannes or their banned by-by-the-MPAA outlaw status; anyone who survived the Hostel era of grimy torture porn grotesqueries has seen it all before, if not worse. The one time I was personally shocked & offended by this highfalutin troll job was in a Faces of Death-style sequence of real-life footage of dead bodies resulting from Nazi war atrocities. It’s not that I believe that thematic territory to be wholly off-limits (a very similar tactic worked for me with great impact in BlacKkKlansman earlier this year, for instance); it’s that it was evoked merely to poke fun at the blowback von Trier received for favorably comparing his artistry to Hitler’s at a press conference. It’s just so frustrating to sit through so much pitch-black misery for the sake of someone else’s self-amusement, especially when they demonstrate upfront that they know better. In The House that Jack Built’s earliest stretches, it feels as if von Tier is truly coming to terms with the follies of his own cruelty & pretensions; he appears willing to make a joke at his own expense, satirizing his worst impulses for cartoonishly broad humor. By the end of the film, however, he doubles down on being his own biggest fan, lashing out at his heretics with exaggerated, weaponized versions of his cruelest, most unlovable tactics. The House That Jack Built is only a self-critique for so long before it becomes a temple for von Trier’s own cinematic legacy; it’s a black hole of creative & receptive energy that only drags all of us further into the discussion of his art & his persona – whether or not we find him interesting to begin with. I’m embarrassed that I afforded him my attention here. I have spent too much of my life online to have been tricked into feeding this particular troll again. I should have known better.

-Brandon Ledet

Cam (2018)

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I’m not sure how useful an endorsement for the technophobic camgirl thriller Cam will be coming from me, but I’ll gladly gush over the film anyway. Between its Unfriended-style user interface horror about the Evils of the Internet and its smutty Brian De Palma modes of building tension through eerie sexual menace, the movie is so extremely weighted to things I personally love to see in cinema that my adoration for it was practically predestined. A neon-lit, feminist cyberthriller about modern sex work, Cam was custom-built to be one of my favorite films of the year just on the strengths of subject matter & visual aesthetics alone. It’s only lagniappe, then, that the film is excellently written, staged, and performed – offering a legitimacy in craft to support my default-mode appreciation of its chosen thematic territory. Even if you’re not a trash-gobbling Luddite like myself who rushes out to see highly-questionable titles like #horror, Friend Request, and Selfie from Hell with unbridled glee, Cam in still very much worth your time as one of the more surprisingly thoughtful, horrifically tense genre films of the year. It’s an exceptionally well-constructed specimen of a still-burgeoning genre I’d love to see evolve further in its direction, a perfect example of how the Internet Age horror could (and should) mutate into a new, beautiful beast.

Madeline Brewer stars as an ambitious camgirl clawing her way up the rankings on her host site, Free Girls Live, by putting special care into the production values of her online strip sessions. The opening minutes of Cam borrow a page from Wes Craven’s Scream, delivering a tightly-constructed short film version of what an effective Unfriended-style camgirl horror movie might look like. After that five-minute horror show meets its natural, nightmarish conclusion, the narrative spirals out from there to detail how the camgirl’s attention-gabbing stripshow stunts put her at risk from anonymous online attackers. In a Body Double-mode De Palma plot matched by no other thriller this year (except maybe Double Lover) and no cyberthriller ever (except maybe Perfect Blue), our camgirl protagonist finds herself locked out of her Free Girls Live account and replaced by an exact, menacing replica of herself who has taken over her show (and, by extension, her digital tip money). The mystery of who or what this doppelganger is and the Kafkaesque battle to reclaim her online identity from it push Cam into the realm of the supernatural, but each of its threats & scares remain firmly rooted in the real-word concerns of online sex work. Much like how Assassination Nation exploited the horrors of private data leaks to expose America’s (already barely concealed) misogyny, Cam does the same with hacked accounts & the vulnerabilities of stripping for cash, whether online or in the flesh.

Co-written by former camgirl Isa Mazzei, and with key sexualized scenes co-directed by Brewer herself, Cam seeks an authentic, collaborative depiction of the anxieties involved in online sex work. Being stalked by clients irl, suffering sex-shaming embarrassments from friends & family, being bombarded with abusive feedback (often in the form of low-grade .gifs) when all you’re offering is companionship & intimacy (for $$$): Cam covers a wide range of industry-specific anxieties that afford its thriller plot a very specific POV. Where that perspective really shines is in the protagonist’s up-font announcement of her don’ts & won’ts (recalling Melanie Griffith’s infamous monologue in Body Double): no public shows, no saying “I love you” to clients, no faked orgasms. Much of Cam’s horror is in watching her online doppelganger systematically violate each one of those ground rules without discretion, eroding the boundaries she had set for herself in the camgirl arena. This is not a cautionary tale about why you should not participate in online sex work, but it does play into anxieties & threats associated with the profession – both external ones form boundary-crossing clients and internal ones in watching those boundaries chip away.

As a cyberthriller about the Evil Internet, Cam excels as an exploitation of our fears of the digital Unknown just as well as any film I’ve ever seen—Unfriended included. The digital grain of the camgirl’s neon-pink broadcast set (a disturbing mixture of infantile stuffed-animals girls’ décor & professional kink gear) combines with an eerie assault of laptop-speaker message notifications to isolate our haunted protagonist in a physical chatroom that feels stuck between two realms – the online & the irl. It’s the most high-femme version of cyber-horror I’ve seen since Nerve (another thriller where an isolated young woman escalates the dangers of her online activity for money & attention), including even the Heathers-riffing vibe of Assassination Nation. Cam’s production design smartly toes the line between believable camgirl production values and a surreal, otherworldly realm where anything is possible. In this dreamy headspace, a hacked account feel like more than just a hacked account; it feels like someone reaching through the screen to steal an essential part of her being, like a digital curse in an Internet Age fairy tale. Part of the fun (and terror) of its central mystery is in knowing the possibilities are endless in that metaphysical realm, although with real-life ramifications echoed in the one we’re living in.

I can’t guarantee you’ll be as deeply smitten with Cam as I am. I’ve been known to praise lesser cyber-horrors like the Snapchat-hosted Blair Witch riff Sickhouse, while also complaining at length about more crowd-pleasing specimens like the cowardly cop-out Searching. The good news is that giving Cam a shot is relatively low-effort & low-risk; it’s a 90min watch acquired by Netflix from the festival circuit for online streaming perpetuity. The next time you’re looking for a lean, lewd, Luddite entertainment, I can’t recommend this film highly enough. In my mind, it’s clearly one of 2018’s most outstanding releases, regardless of my affinity for its genre.

-Brandon Ledet

Panos Cosmatos’s Overlooked Emotional Hellscapes

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My most immediate reaction to Mandy when sent stumbling from the theater this past September was that it was a kind of emotional & narrative breakthrough for director Panos Cosmtos. By comparison, I had remembered his debut feature, Beyond the Black Rainbow, to be less plotty & more emotionally detached. Upon revisiting that debut with the rest of the Swampflix crew for our most recent Movie of the Month discussion, I no longer believe that to be true. There’s plenty of deeply-felt emotion running throughout Beyond the Black Rainbow; it’s just something I had forgotten in retrospect while considering the film’s more immediate surface pleasures: its gorgeous washes of color, its overwhelming synth score, its eerie psychedelic mutation of early 80s genre pastiche, etc. Beyond the Black Rainbow is just as emotionally bleak as Cosmatos’s follow-up, and both films actively subvert any potential attempts to reduce them to bro-friendly 80s genre nostalgia by sinking into those painful emotional hellscapes at a gruelingly slow pace. The colorful, synthy textures of those hellscapes wouldn’t mean a thing without that deep hurt at these two films’ cores, which is something that’s easy to forget when praising more immediately rewarding images like The Sentinauts or The Cheddar Goblin.

You would think that Mandy would be the more difficult film to take seriously on an emotional level, given its pedigree as an over-the-top Nic Cage curio. It’s easy to lose sight of the film’s pathos when praising Cage’s chainsaw-wielding revenge mission against a demonic biker gang or the fake commercial for boxed mac & cheese created by the folks behind Too Many Cooks. Mandy dares you to not take its emotional core seriously, opening with a knock-knock joke in its first lines of dialogue and interrupting Cage’s Oscar-winning mode of sad restraint for his more meme-worthy freak-out mode in a lengthy bathroom-set meltdown. Even the central narrative conflict that drives that emotional meltdown and the concluding revenge rampage recalls macho genre tropes in the home invasion & rape revenge tradition that would indicate a detachment from raw emotion in its exploitative violence. However, the central overriding tone of Mandy is emotional pain. The demonic chainsaw rampage that concludes its narrative is not made to feel satisfactory or badass, but is rather a grotesquely macho expression of frustrated emotion, an unhealthy processing of loss. The film opens in a romantic nirvana shared between Cage & Andrea Riseborough, a peaceful domesticity that cannot be fully mourned once it’s lost to the “crazy Evil” of the world outside. For a movie that’s likely to be remembered most for its heavy metal brutality & Cheddar Goblin buffoonery, that frustrated mourning commands a surprising amount of Mandy’s screentime – whether in a lengthy monologue about a traumatic childhood memory or in an extensive shot of Nicolas Cage crying through a barb wire mask, as if he were paying homage to the messages-from-home scene from Interstellar in a Hellraiser sequel.

That same tactic of lingering on silent, distraught faces was already present in Cosmatos’s arsenal in his debut. Beyond the Black Rainbow risks losing its pathos to the same macho genre pastiche & sensory pleasure indulgences as Mandy, especially in its co-option of the woman-in-captivity thriller narrative. It also loses a lot of its potential for a potent emotional core to its deliberate lack of dialogue; there are seemingly more lines spoken in Mandy’s early scene of stoney-baloney pillow-talk about outer space than there are in the entirety of Beyond the Black Rainbow. The emotional textures of the two films are also drastically opposed: Mandy finds its pathos in a violently disrupted utopia of marital bliss, while the only romantic pairing in Beyond the Back Rainbow is defined by a seething, resentful anger. It’s in that quiet, jaw-clenched resentment that Beyond the Black Rainbow finds its own tones of emotional devastation, however, depicted through the same lengthy gazing at distraught facial expressions that we’re confronted with in Mandy. Although the emotional core of Cosmatos’s debut is largely calm & silent, it’s conveyed with such devastating conviction from its two central performers (Michael Rogers & Eva Bourne) that it lands with thunderous impact. Stuck on either side of the observation glass in a go-nowhere science research project—one as captive subject and the other as studious captor—the two central characters in Beyond the Black Rainbow are visibly, absurdly miserable. The captive’s misery manifests in deep, pensive sadness while the captor’s misery takes the form of seething, resentful anger; either way, they’re both feeling a lot, which is something that might not stand out in initial viewings of the film, given the flashier, plentiful sensory pleasures that threaten to drown it out.

Panos Cosmatos has explained in interviews that he thinks of both films as art therapy – using the subliminal tools & methods of cinematic expression to cope with the loss of his parents and to reflect on the domestic tones of his own romantic life. Yikes. I don’t know that I can see any direct, concrete allegories for what he’s saying about those topics through either of these works, nor do I believe the filmmaker is even attempting to achieve that kind of direct, concrete expression. The emotional extremes of Beyond the Black Rainbow & Mandy bleed through the two films’ visual intensity as an evocation of pain & mood. It’s a much more difficult effect to pinpoint or explain that the enormity of Johann Johannsson’s score or the hilarity of The Cheddar Goblin (an image that itself is even used to contrast a character’s misery); but once you pay attention to the emotional torment at the core of Cosmatos’s art, it becomes just as deafening as anything else at play.

For more on November’s Movie of the Month, Panos Cosmatos’s psychedelic debut Beyond the Black Rainbow, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, and our examinations of the influences it pulled from Phase IV (1974) & Dark Star (1974).

-Brandon Ledet

 

Summer of ’84 (2018)

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After the all-consuming cultural takeover Stranger Things staged a couple summers back, it’s near-impossible for an 80s kids-on-bikes genre throwback to escape limiting, direct comparisons to the Netflix TV series. For an eerie 80s nostalgia piece to stand out at this point, in an oversaturated market just brimming with the stuff, it has to have an angle: Beyond the Black Rainbow shines in its paranormal psychedelia; Super Dark Times de-mystifies the wholesomeness of the era’s memory to expose its true-life teen boy grotesqueries; Ready Player One foresees a grim near-future where 80s nostalgia eats us all alive. The filmmaking collective RKSS fulfilled this requirement wonderfully in their 2016 debut feature Turbo Kid, which turns nostalgia for half-remembered, comically exaggerated 80s runoff into a weirdly mutated, hyperviolent sugar rush. That’s why it’s disappointing that their follow-up sophomore feature, the kids-on-bikes mystery thriller Summer of ’84, plays its own material almost entirely straight, offering way-too-little-way-too-late in terms of finding a fresh angle on the 80s throwback craze to avoid redundancy. Turbo Kid feels like a 1980s throwback in its surface pleasures, but in practice goes too far over-the-top in its own whimsy to resemble anything specific from the decade in any direct, recognizable way. Summer of ’84, regrettably, finds RKSS delivering something that could easily be shrugged off as “just another Stranger Things,” waiting until its final few minutes to attempt anything novel or unexpected with the material – to muted results. The good news is that Stranger Things is pleasant, crowd-pleasing entertainment; the disappointment is in knowing RKSS can achieve more than that.

Summer of ’84 lays out the exact shameless 80s nostalgia tone it’s going for as thickly and as early as possible, ranging from sly Spielberg nods like kids riding around on bikes at sunset, armed with flashlights, to blunt Spielberg nods in lengthy discussions of Gremlins and declarations like “I’m going to become the next Spielberg!” The young boys in question are feeling restless in their Spielbergian suburb/prison, only able to fill up so much of their summer vacation ogling crusty porno magazines and spying on the Hot Girl Next Door with the Side Ponytail through binoculars & bedroom windows. It’s almost a blessing, then, when a local serial killer starts abducting boys their age in the nearby vicinity, bringing some supposedly needed “excitement” into the neighborhood. Taking full advantage of the opportunity for adventure, the boys launch their own vigilante investigation of the abductions, fixating on a beloved neighborhood cop/obvious creep played by Mad Men’s Rich Sommer. Summer of ’84 is a little too late to the table to offer much insight in its revelations that suburban life is more sinister than it appears on the surface, try as it might in lines like “Every serial killer lives next door to someone,” and “The suburbs are where the craziest shit happens.” Even if the Spielberg & Joe Dante territory the film is directly aping weren’t enough to cover it, David Lynch has just about run that topic into the ground all on his own. It does find a somewhat novel angle on the material by clashing its initial gee-walkers 80s boys’ adventure tone with a last-minute shift to pitch-black cruelty & brutality that feels anachronistic to its era (outside extreme examples like Cloak & Dagger). It’s a tonal shift sold exceptionally well by Sommer’s creepy neighbor-cop, but it’s one that arrives too late to have much effect on the overall picture.

There are a few early jump scares that might indicate the dark, novel places Summer of ’84 eventually goes in its concluding minutes, but for the most part what’s on the screen just resembles things we’ve already seen many times over as an audience. Beyond its resemblance to Stranger Things, the film also recalls the teenage Rear Window mutation Disturbia in its killer-next-door-neighbor binoculars investigations. I swear one of the scrawny teen-boy actors (Cory Grüter-Andrew) is styled to look exactly like Martha Plimpton in The Goonies and it’s cute, but super distracting. It’s tough to tell whether the casual Reagan Era misogyny & homophobia shared amongst its central teens is meant to be a critique of films from that era or just a reflection of the culture at the time, but either way it was a topic covered much more purposefully in Super Dark Times. Really, then, Summer of ‘84’s one standout angle on the material is the harsh clash of its teen-boy adventurism and the cold, brutal reality of its serial killer plot. If the tonal contrast of that juxtaposition has been featured front & center for the entire length of the picture, Summer of ’84 might have established a unique enough angle on the 80s nostalgia craze that it would invite deeper critical discourse than just comparisons to previous works. As is, everything before that final shift can be comfortably described as “just another Stranger Things;” that isn’t the worst critique to suffer, but it’s also well below the wilder, go-for-broke standard set by Turbo Kid.

-Brandon Ledet

Overlord (2018)

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There’s nothing especially nuanced or unique about the message “Nazis are evil & gross and must be destroyed,” but in the context of 2018’s political climate it still fees damn good to hear. This is especially true when said Nazis are shot, set aflame, and exploded in an over-the-top action spectacle that cares way more about cathartic fun than it cares about historical accuracy. Overlord opens as an immersive WWII battle demo; it operates like a dirt-cheap Dunkirk in its earliest stretch, where a group of American soldiers are deployed in France to take out a contingent of “rotten son of a bitch” Nazis occupying a local church. That introduction is just a coverup for an entirely different kind of well-budgeted schlock, however: a Nazi zombie movie with a distinct video game sensibility. Neither the WWII thriller nor the Nazi zombie action-horror descriptors fully capture how distinctly fun & cathartic Overlord can be as a middle finger to modern Nazi grotesqueries, which is always a good sign for a genre film repeating narrative patters we’ve already seen many times before. We may be living in a word where war thrillers & zombie pictures are all too plentiful, but there can never be enough condemnation of Nazi scumbaggery.

Two of the earliest introduced POV characters in Overlord are black & Jewish American soldiers preparing to parachute into German-occupied France, even more terrified of Nazis that their fellow troop members because of their ethnographic identities. They later join forces with a local French woman who has suffered Nazi tyranny in prolonged, horrific ways and skeptically aids the Americans’ mission to destroy a Nazi communication tower in her small town’s church. The demographics of those POV characters help distinguish Overlord from the doldrums of a generic war picture just as much as the supernatural phenomena they find in that church. Likewise, the church-lab’s experiments to reanimate corpses to create a “thousand-year army” for Hitler that they uncover is far from the Nazi zombie tedium of the Dead Snow series. This is partly because they’re not the typical Romero-style zombies who stumble around craving “braiiiiins,” but are instead styled after the Re-Animator tradition of botched science experiments that play loosely with the boundaries of undead lore. Neither side of this war/zombie divide should play fresh in a modern genre picture, especially one so simply structured like a video game – where each challenge feels like a level to be defeated on the way to the Final Boss (a Nazi monster so jacked on Evil-Science serum that he resembles the version of Bane from Schumacher’s Batman & Robin). Overlord pulls it off spectacularly, though, if not only in its prioritizing of modern anti-Nazi sensibilities over all logic & responsibility to history.

It’s arguable that there’s no need to reinterpret Nazi history though genre film sensibilities, since sci-fi & horror require an exaggeration of something so inherently evil that a metaphor would only cheapen it. That might be why Overlord was so cautions about anchoring the war half of its narrative to real-life atrocities – including systemic genocide, “scientific” torture, and widespread sexual assault – before moving on to the paranormal grotesqueries of its zombie half. Its horror film impulses are often kept at bay, then, but when they are allowed to flood the screen they arrive full-force. This isn’t exactly a gore fest, but it is often incredibly gross – mixing CGI & practical effects to make sure Nazis look as vile & monstrous as possible through a B-movie lens. Once-human figures dangle in fleshy sacks from the church-lab’s ceiling, filtering jars of red & black goo through their barely functioning organs while breathing heavily in pain. Severed heads gasp for air and ask for immediate relief from their mortal coil. Flesh melts; faces cave in; bullet wounds gush untold gallons of hot, sticky blood. Real-life Nazis are gross & worthy enough of destruction without the help of schlocky exaggeration, but just in case you’re not fully convinced (as seems to be the case with young Alt-Right recruits online) Overlord takes giddy pleasure in spelling it out for you.

There may be a secondary theme in Overlord about knowing when not to follow orders if it prevents you from doing what’s right (as the mission of destroying the communication tower is meant to take priority over destroying the zombie-filled church lab) but there’s nothing about that message than can trump the simple pleasure of watching gross, “rotten son of a bitch” Nazis get blowed up real good by the people they hurt the most. Overlord is not the year’s most thoughtful or nuanced genre film take on real-world evil racist institutions that have recently made an alarming comeback (that would be BlacKkKlansman). However, it does easily achieve the Herculean task of making zombies interesting again in a post-Walking Dead cultural climate by relying on a simple truth: Nazis are evil & gross and must be destroyed. In 2018, there’s immensely satisfying entertainment value to be found in watching that destruction, especially in an over-the-top action horror context.

-Brandon Ledet

Zombie (1979)

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In what surely drives continuity & canon-obsessed nerds mad, Italian copyright laws allow any feature film to be marketed as a direct sequel to a previous work, regardless of intellectual property licensing. This is how Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 came to be marketed as a direct sequel to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (or, more accurately, the Italian edit of Dawn overseen by Dario Argento & scored by Goblin, retitled Zombi), despite having nothing to do with that cult classic outside their shared depiction of the undead. That positioning of Zombi 2 as a direct sequel to the Romero classic is notably more of a marketing decision than a creative one, as the shopping mall modernity of Dawn of the Dead is the exact opposite approach to zombie lore than the one Fulci takes in his own work. If anything, Zombie (as it was more accurately billed in the US.), is more of a return-to-basics, traditionalist throwback to the origins of zombie cinema – most notably the 1932 Bela Lugosi relic White Zombie. On the surface, the film appears to be Lucio Fulci’s transition into making colonialist, Cannibal Holocaust-type “video nasties” after his previous run of psychedelic gialli like The Psychic & A Woman in a Lizard’s Skin. In practice, it’s more of a return to early, Voodoo-themed zombie cinema updated with more state of the art, grotesque gore effects we’re not used to seeing in that context. If Zombie has any relationship with George Romero’s work, it’s in amplifying his fixation on practical effects gore, while rolling back his influence on the zombie genre to the era that came before. Zombie isn’t a sequel to Dawn of the Dead so much as a traditionalist renunciation of that text, coated in an excess of sleaze.

The brilliance of this return-to-basics zombie filmmaking is that its dialing-back from urban modernity to the old-ways’ culture gazing at Voodoo rituals is signified in its basic plot. A disheveled boat arrives in the NYC harbor with most of its crew missing – and the remaining members turned into flesh-eating zombies. The daughter of the boat’s owner and an investigative reporter track its course back to the (fictional) Caribbean Island of Matul, which superstitious natives believe to be cursed. There, they discover an age-old plot so cliché it belongs on the lower wrung of a 1950s double bill: a white-man researcher strives to scientifically rationalize the local phenomenon of a Voodoo curse that can bring the dead “back to life” (as mindless flesh-eating copses, at least). His research is going nowhere, of course, and only invites violence as the zombie hoards surround his lab and attempt to eradicate the intruders on their island by eating them alive. It’s in this last-act zombie invasion that Zombie most resembles a George Romero picture, with a small group of cornered city-folk firing guns at a mindless hoard that surrounds & eventually engulfs them. Most of that Romero aesthetic is left behind in NYC, however, where an off-screen modernist zombie crisis Fulci doesn’t have the budget to properly stage unfolds. On Matul, the movie mostly bridges the gap between the latent racism of the Civilized Man Vs. Savages narratives of zombie cinema past and the more active racism of then-current Italian cannibal nasties like Cannibal Holocaust and Slave of the Cannibal God. Outside some questionable vocal dubbing & characterization among the (infrequently shown) native locals, however, Zombie mostly avoids the worst trappings of the colonialist cannibal genre of its grindhouse heyday: sexual assault exploitation, cultural Othering, documentation of real-life animal abuse, etc. Its likeness to that despicable subgenre is mostly in its grimy visual aesthetic; it most often plays like pastiche nostalgia for the more quietly problematic Voodoo pictures of the White Zombie tradition.

The closest Zombie comes to indulging in the typical animal abuses of the Italo-cannibal pics it superficially resembles is in its breathtaking underwater stunt in which a zombie fights a real-life shark. It’s a scene so infamous the film might as well have included The One Where the Zombie Fights a Shark among its various “official” titles. Whether the local “shark trainer” who costumed as a zombie to stage that stunt is abusing the animal is a much murkier issue than the straight-up animal slaughter included in Cannibal Holocaust-type pictures, but what’s made clear in that sequence is that Zombie’s strengths lie entirely in the grotesque beauty & unflinching audacity of its individual gags, their importance to the plot be damned. As the characters are first making their way to Matul, the boat stops dead, along with the plot, so that a free-spirit passenger can strip nude to take underwater photographs of marine life, stumbling directly into a zombie-shark fight. It’s a sleazy stunt on so many levels it’s hard to keep count (the camera’s lingering on the photographer’s oxygen tank strap across her crotch is especially slimy) and it serves little-to-no thematic purpose for the task at hand. Still, it’s so elaborately staged that you can’t deny its appeal. While Zombie’s overall narrative is a barebones, back-to-basics zombie genre throwback, its individual stunts & images are complexly crafted, grotesque wonders: an eyeball impaled on a splintered door, tendrils ripped from a victim’s neck, a zombie’s POV approximated in first-person camera work as it rises from the grave, etc. The perfect symbiosis of this thoughtfully complex imagery & traditionalist genre throwback energy is best represented in a scene set in a Spanish Conquistadors’ graveyard; muddy hands reach from beneath the ground as the dead rise, hungry for flesh. The image of a lone hand reaching from beneath a gravesite is much more typical to the zombie genre than an underwater shark fight, but it’s rarely shot with as much giallo-level stylistic detail as what you’ll find here.

As questionable as I find the impulse of rolling back George Romero’s modernization of the zombie picture to its White Zombie roots and as much as I despise the Italo-cannibal pictures it occasionally resembles, I can’t help but appreciate Zombie for its grotesque visual majesty. Rewatching the film restored on its Blue Underground Blu-Ray release is especially illuminating, since I’m used to seeing it through the grainy haze of a VHS cassette. I don’t know that Fulci deserves the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the film’s racial politics or possible animal rights violations, but his imagery certainly deserves to be seen in crisp, Blu-ray quality detail. Most people aren’t going to seek out Zombie for its advancement of the genre or its thematic complexity (despite that being exactly what’s promised as a supposed follow-up to Dawn of the Dead). This is a film best enjoyed for its awesome brutality & the detailed beauty of its practical effects gore, two things Fulci is a master at delivering.

-Brandon Ledet

Further into the Inferno: The Follies of Deepening Suspiria’s Mythology

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I love Dario Argento’s Suspira. It’s very high among my favorite titles from the Italian genre film legend, matched only by the likes of Opera & Tenebre. At the same time, I could not care less about the story Suspiria tells if I tried. Like the murder mystery gialli Argento cut his teeth directing, this is explicitly a style-over-substance endeavor, one that pays much more careful attention to the lighting of a kill & the menace of the soundtrack than the logic or structure of its mythology. Suspiria is a gorgeous, gore-coated object that overwhelms in its sensual pleasures, but does little to develop its central story beyond the elevator-pitch premise of “A ballet school run by witches.” Argento doesn’t even save the revelation of that premise for a mysterious reveal; one of the earliest scenes features a track from prog band Goblin where whispers of “Witch, witch-witch-witch” overwhelm the soundtrack. It’s such a weird impulse, then, for each of Suspiria’s later follow-ups to lean so heavily into the witchy dance school’s background mythology as if that was something the original film was missing. No Suspriria descendent follows this trivial pursuit as thoroughly as Luca Gaudagnino’s 2018 eponymous remake. Guadagningo’s Suspriria sprawls into almost a full extra hour of runtime to make room for exploring the political struggles of the coven who run the dammed dance academy, the childhood background of their latest victim Susie Banion, the cultural climate of the country outside the academy’s walls, and any number of other lore concerns that were not on Argento’s mind as much as staging witchy, ballet-themed kills. The truth is, though, that Argento himself was just as guilty of needlessly fleshing out Suspiria’s mythology; he just saved that indulgence for his own sequels to the original film. It’s also true that no mythology-minded Suspiria follow-up—whether from Guadagningo or Argento—has been especially bad, even though every single one is remarkably goofy.

Argento himself wasted zero time diving into Suspiria’s unexplored mythology in his own sequels to the film. The second title in what would eventually be know as The Three Mothers Trilogy, 1980’s Inferno, opens with characters reading large blocks of text out of a fictional book titled The Three Mothers that details lore only casually referenced in the previous film. While Suspiria briefly mentions that its German setting is just one of three connected, international covens – the others located in Rome & NYC – it doesn’t waste much time wondering what’s going on with the witches who run those other houses. Inferno, by contrast, explains in plain academic dialogue how the Mother of Sighs, the Mother of Tears, and the Mother of Darkness divvy up their geographically disparate power structure—connecting its tale of NYC witchcraft to the German events of the previous film. Still, the actual narrative of Inferno has little to do with this suddenly complex lore until the final showdown staged with the Mother of Darkness witch who resides in New York. Mostly, Argento slips back into the sensory indulgences of complexly constructed kills that guided the overall trajectory of the first film, even joking with the supposed seriousness of its mythology when a character mistakes “The Three Sisters” for an R&B vocal group. It wasn’t until the much-delayed conclusion to the trilogy, 2007’s Mother of Tears: The Third Mother, that he really committed to pretending Suspiria’s lore actually meant something, now having spent decades fleshing out its legacy. In the film, his real-life daughter Asia Argento reopens the same The Three Mothers book to kickstart her fated path to confront the titular third Mother in Rome; only this time the pursuit of that mystery & confrontation are made to be the main thrust of the text, so that the brutal gore (and shoddy CGI scares) that interrupt the mythology are more a distraction than they are the entire point. It’s no coincidence that the most mythology-obsessed entry in the Three Mothers Trilogy is also the weakest picture, artistically. Its Roman Catholic mysticism & ancient texts mysteries approximate a mid-00s horror version of The Da Vinci Code, except its guidance under the Dimension Extreme label makes it way cheaper & meaner than that may sound.

As Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake is a shameless indulgence in pure excess, it can’t help but eat up all of the lore stretched out across the entire Three Mothers Trilogy in a single sitting. Gaudagnino goes beyond the establishment of there being a coven of witches in three major cities to ask who these witches are, what political climates they have to deal with, how they delegate power, and how they select their victims. He also picks up the idea of their being a book explaining the mechanics of these covens and their respective houses by filling entire notebooks with handwritten, geometrically diagrammed explanations of how witchcraft works in this universe on a practical, if not mathematical level. This elaboration of core mythology may seem philosophically opposed to the barebones, imagery-distracted lore of the original Suspiria, but it does touch on the most core aspect of Dario Argento’s work: excess. The giallo legend may have poured more of his excessive, obsessive detail into the lighting & staging of a kill than establishing a sense of logic in the witchcraft behind it, but Guadagnino’s overly-detailed attention to the lore is still in the same sprit of unbridled, maybe even ill-advised excess. Oddly, that over-commitment to mythology ultimately has the same effect on the audience that the disregard for it achieved in Argento’s original version. There’s so much going on in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria that it’s difficult to pay attention to or emotionally invest in any one narrative thread, so that what mostly remains is the film’s sense of style. Suspiria (’77) & Inferno recognize this effect outright and fully commit to Argento’s witchcraft giallo aesthetic once they establish the basic tenants of the lore that drives their conflict. Mother of Tears & Suspiria (’18) are much more frantic in their relationship with mythology, chasing a sense of meaning so desperately in their embellishment of witchcraft lore that an overindulgence in backstory & narrative itself becomes part of the filmmaking style.

Whether keeping the mythology as thinly sketched out as it was in the original film or over-explaining superfluous new wrinkles to the lore, the overall strength of a Suspiria follow-up still lies in the pleasures of its sense of style. Inferno may be the most underrated in this regard– mixing the neon witchcraft aesthetic from its predecessor with the gloved-hand giallo kills of other Argento works & Fulci-level shameless gags singular to its own vision (there are a couple cat & rat-themed eco-horror kills I find especially pleasurable) to achieve something truly special. Suspiria (2018) is similarly pleasurable in its stylistic deviations (ultimately landing somewhere between Possession & Society, but nowhere near Argento), even if its attention to lore often feels like wasted energy. Mother of Tears is the clear weak link in the chain, but even the cheap & cheesy violence of its large-scale horror mystery has a kind of charm to it, like an especially gory episode of Masters of Horror or an expired box of Easy Mac. There are no bad Suspiria movies, but there are certainly ones that try way too hard to pretend the series’ core mythology means something; it very much doesn’t.

-Brandon Ledet