psychics

Eve’s Bayou (1997)

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“All I know is, there must be a divine point to it all, and it’s just over my head. That when we die, it will all come clear. And then we’ll say, ‘So that was the damn point.’ And sometimes, I think there’s no point at all, and maybe that’s the point. All I know is most people’s lives are a great disappointment to them and no one leaves this earth without feeling terrible pain. And if there is no divine explanation at the end of it all, well … that’s sad.”

Debbi Morgan performs that speech in Eve’s Bayou while staring blank-eyed into the Louisiana nightscape. She then catches herself, realizing that she’s been talking to a small child instead of just pontificating into the night air. That intergenerational relationship is the core of this 1997 supernatural melodrama, in which a 10-year-old mystic-in-training (Full House‘s Jurnee Smollett) learns how to make sense of her psychic visions and magic intuitions under the guidance of her Aunt Mozelle (Morgan). Its plot synopsis sounds like it could belong to a Teen Witch-style coming-of-age comedy for kids, but Eve’s Bayou instead frames a decidedly adult world through a child’s eyes. Its witchcraft isn’t used to present playful wish fulfillment for youngsters, but to dredge up heaps of generational pain from the murky bottom of Louisiana swamps so it can finally rot in the sun. The film opens with an adult Eve Batiste recounting her small, Black community’s history as a slave plantation, then announcing that she’s going to tell the story about the summer she killed her father, in 1962. Naturally, most of the story that follows involves a young Eve observing & reacting to her father’s adult (and adulterous) behavior as the audience anticipates that foretold act of violence, but the heart of the story is more about her characterization as the next-generation mystic learning the ways of the world from her Aunt Mozelle.

Writer-director Kasi Lemmons describes her debut feature as autofictional, characterizing the young Eve as “a little bit me, a little bit Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird.” Although raised in St. Louis, Lemmons has vivid memories of visiting relatives in the Deep South (Alabama, not Louisiana) that she felt compelled to illustrate onscreen here, mixed with fictional stories of a philandering town doctor she created for a proof-of-concept short film titled “Dr. Hugo”. Lemmons’s biggest champion, Samuel L. Jackson, stars as that town doctor and town bicycle: little Eve’s doomed-to-die father. Lynn Whitfield plays the matriarch, frequently and credibly described as “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World,” suffering silently as her husband makes his professional & romantic rounds around town while she raises his three kids at home. Eve’s teenage sister Cicely (Meagan Good) takes after their mother’s practiced poise, but the younger Eve is much more resistant to being tamed and instead learns how to interact with the world from her Hoodoo-practicing aunt. The world is split in two between the sibling sets of both generations: a world of magic vs. a world of rational thought. It doesn’t matter which of those worldviews eventually wins out, though, since the end result is a foregone conclusion by the opening narration. Her father will die, and the painful familial secrets hidden by social niceties will eventually come to light.

The mysticism of Eve’s Bayou is more about subjective perception than about supernatural action. Eve and her aunt cannot change the world through supernatural means, but they can see parts of it that others are blind to. Their psychic visions are illustrated in surrealist black-and-white montage, with standalone images of spiders, clocks, and dirty needles superimposed onto the swamps just outside their homes. Lemmons positions the act of conjuring this imagery through cinema as a form of witchcraft, explaining in dialogue that memory is itself “a selection of images” and that the modern world is “haunted by the past.” In the Southern ghost story tradition of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, she invites the ghosts of the past to enter the story through the technological conduits of cameras, mirrors, and word processors. Every individual character’s memory, no matter how rationally minded, is positioned as a kind of supernatural realm in that context, and she does her best not to exclude any one version of the truth in her ambiguous telling of the circumstances behind the doctor’s death. The only character who doesn’t get their say is a disabled uncle who cannot speak due to his cerebral palsy symptoms, so his own memories and accounts of the truth are confined to his own mind. Like the audience, he can only observe, but he’s got a much more direct vantage point in seeing What Really Happened in the lead-up to the tragedy.

Speaking of memory, you might not remember that Eve had a disabled family member in her home, since a producer asked to have him removed from the original 1990s theatrical release, thinking that he would jeopardize the film’s commercial appeal by making audiences “uncomfortable.” The uncle’s place in the story was then later restored in a “Director’s Cut” released in the 2010s, also restoring the film’s core theme of the magical subjectivity of perception & memory. The initial choice to remove him is indicative of the many ways in which the film’s commercial appeal was misunderstood in its initial 90s release. Besides Samuel L. Jackson backing the film as a producer & star, critic Roger Ebert was likely its most vocal champion in the industry, concluding his 1997 review with the declaration that, “If it is not nominated for Academy Awards, then the academy is not paying attention. For the viewer, it is a reminder that sometimes films can venture into the realms of poetry and dreams.” Eve’s Bayou was not nominated for any Academy Awards. It made enough money to register as an indie-level hit, but it still didn’t lead to much of a professional windfall for Lemmons, who spent the most of her remaining career as a director-for-hire in the impersonal world of studio biopics. It’s easy to guess why this movie didn’t attract major studio backing, why Lemmons didn’t become a blank-check auteur, why Lynn “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” Whitfield didn’t become a Hollywood superstar, and why Ebert’s Oscars predictions went nowhere: in a word, racism. Still, it continues to shine as a reminder that sometimes films can venture into the realms of poetry and dreams without straying from mainstream filmmaking sensibilities, even when working outside mainstream filmmaking funding.

-Brandon Ledet

Psychic Damage at The Overlook Film Festival

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The term “horror” can apply to such a wide range of narrative, thematic, and aesthetic traditions that it’s almost too wide of an umbrella to be considered a single genre.  I’m always especially impressed with The Overlook Film Festival’s interpretation of what qualifies as horror in its programming, which makes room for films as disparate in tone & intent as a when-spiders-attack creature feature set in a French housing block and an internal identity crisis triggered by obsessive television watching in the American suburbs.  This breadth of curation was especially on my mind while attending a trio of films about psychic mediums at this year’s Overlook – three films that had little, if anything, in common beyond the shared subject of their premises.  Not all horror films are interested in scaring their audience; some are interested in making us laugh, some in making us ponder the incompressible phenomena of daily life.  It’s incredible that I saw all of that territory covered in three Overlook selections that all happened to feature spiritual mediums’ attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead.  Horror is everything; everything is horror.

Look into My Eyes

Documentarian Lana Wilson sounded surprised by Overlook’s flexible definition of horror as well, introducing her film Look into My Eyes by saying she was “tickled” by its selection for this year’s festival.  It totally makes sense in the context of the overall program, though, given its open-minded curiosity about spiritual mediums who claim to communicate with the dead.  Look into My Eyes is an intimate documentary about the therapeutic powers and performative artistry of New York City psychics & mediums.  It would be easy for a doc with that subject to find ironic amusement in the eccentric characters interviewed, but Wilson cares way more about the interpersonal communication & emotional healing of spiritual sessions than the legitimacy of the supposedly supernatural practice.  Neither skeptical nor defensive, she focuses on what the psychics themselves get out of the sessions (beyond the obvious monetary compensation) instead of what they do for their clients.  They’re real people seeking connection to realms of the unreal, which makes for a fascinating dissonance if you care to listen long enough to get to know them.

Within the context of a horror movie festival, it’s impossible not to notice the genre movie cinephilia of the psychics profiled here, something Wilson acknowledged in the post-screening Q&A.  One interviewee hangs a poster of Jack Torrance on their bathroom wall, as if he were about to break into the room with an axe; another is a John Waters obsessive who’s transformed her apartment into a shrine honoring Divine (a woman after my own filthy heart).  All seven of the psychics profiled are artistically creative, most of them having started as actors in the performing arts before settling into parapsychology as a side hustle.  Wilson does not use this revelation as a gotcha to expose them as frauds, because it’s not something that her subjects see as shameful or disqualifying.  They’re channeling the spirits of the dead the same way they’d channel a fictional character, and (most of the time) it feels real to them.  They’re often just as haunted by grief & loss as their clients and both sides of the transactional divide find the practice therapeutic (an intimacy that’s heightened by the movie being filmed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic).  It’s possible that out of the 150 or so NYC psychics Wilson contacted as potential subjects for this project, she subconsciously chose these particular 7 because they share her own interests in the creative act of filmmaking, so that it says less about the practice at large than it says about the director’s bias.  Even if so, the reason the movie works is because she is genuinely curious about their professional & private lives; any curiosity about the spiritual world beyond our own is secondary.

Sleep

Like with Look into My Eyes, it’s also ambiguous as to whether the Korean horror Sleep is actually a ghost story, or just a story about people who believe in ghosts.  Curiously, the answer to that open-ended question also hinges on whether a struggling actor is telling the truth when they appear to be communicating with the dead, or whether they’re performing for personal survival.  The actor in question is played by Lee Sun-kyun, the Parasite performer who unexpectedly died shortly after this film’s international premiere last year.  Lee’s real-life death is made even more acutely painful by how lovably charming he is in Sleep as a doting husband who feels immense guilt about his nightly sleepwalking episodes that torment his equally adorable but increasingly frazzled wife (Train to Busan’s Jung Yu-mi).  Scared that the out-of-character violence of her husband’s sleepwalking episodes will threaten the health of their newborn baby, the normally skeptical wife allows her mother to bring a psychic medium into the house to help exorcise the evil spirit that’s supposedly taken root in his body.  Whether the husband believes in the ghost himself is ultimately up for debate, since he may very well be play-acting with the superstition just long enough to be cured by modern medical science, hoping his wife doesn’t attempt to violently extract the “ghost” from inside him in the meantime.

Speaking of Parasite, Sleep is the debut feature of director Jason Yu, a young protegee of Bong Joon-ho (who recommended Lee take the lead role as the possibly-possessed husband).   That professional connection is worth noting because it informs Sleep’s oddly prankish tone.  Whether or not this is a legitimate ghost story, it certainly is an adorable romcom.  Lee & Jung are super cute together, which makes it all the more tragic when the sleepwalking-ghost turns them against each other.  It’s a romcom, sure, but it’s a romcom about how psychotically violent you can become if your partner disrupts your sleep for long enough, with the wife taking over most of the horror duties in the back half once she fully commits to believing in the presence of a ghost.  Thinking back to the ice-cold humor of Bong’s own debut Barking Dogs Never Bite, Sleep is also notable for its willingness to go there in its onscreen violence against innocents.  No one is safe here; pregnant women, newborn babies, and Pomeranians are all in genuine mortal danger.  Whether they will be saved by prescribed medication or old-world prayer relics is a fight between husband & wife – a fight with surprisingly, viciously funny results.

Oddity

Of course, not everybody goes into horror movies looking to have a laugh or to feel empathy.  Sometimes, audiences actually want to be scared.  The scariest movie about a spiritual medium I saw at this year’s Overlook was the Irish ghost story Oddity, in which violent spirits are weaponized for revenge amongst the living. The only movie I saw on the program that had me more on edge was the one that featured spiders crawling all over people’s faces & bodies, which by comparison feels like cheating.  Oddity has to take its time to build the reasoning & mythology behind its supernatural scares, which start when a blind psychic arrives uninvited to the home where her twin sister was allegedly murdered by an escaped mental patient.  Armed with a psychic ability to read hidden personal truths in physical possessions, she seeks answers about her sister’s death in the widower’s home, then sets about righting past wrongs with the help of present ghosts.  She also weaponizes the physical body of a gnarled wooden puppet she drags into that home, a consistently creepy prop that recalls the puppet reaction cutaways from the 80s horror oddity Pin.

Oddity is a consistent series of routine fright gags that follow a rigid pattern of getting super quiet right before cutting to a ghost with a loud soundtrack stinger, and yet it made me jump every single time.  After the credits rolled, I was startled again by the physical presence of the wooden puppet, which the festival programmers had quietly propped up at the exit door mid-screening.  Personally, I don’t always need horror films to be scary to be worthwhile.  I mostly cherish the genre for the freedom it gives filmmakers to ignore the limitations of real-world logic, and I’m usually onboard for whatever they choose to do with that permission to imagine.  I couldn’t have asked for a better ending to this year’s festival than Oddity, though, since it reminded me that the primary value most audiences seek in horror is its ability to scare, which is just as valid & rewarding as anything else the genre can achieve.  After seeing a documentary about real-world psychics’ emotional lives and a domestic comedy about psychics’ superstitious opposition to modern science, being genuinely scared by a movie on the same subject was a necessary, grounding experience.  That unlimited range in tone & purpose is exactly what makes the horror genre so rewarding, and it’s what makes Overlook Film Festival an unmissable yearly ritual on the New Orleans culture calendar.

-Brandon Ledet

When Faye Dunaway Fought Couture

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If there’s anything in particular that the 1970 mental breakdown drama Puzzle of a Downfall Child excels at, it’s in offering Oscar Winner & all-around Hollywood legged Faye Dunaway a free-range actor’s showcase. Resembling neither the restrained thrill-seeking-beauty of Bonnie & Clyde nor the detached-from-good-taste camp of Mommie Dearest, Dunaway’s lead role in Puzzle of a Downfall Child reaches for a more disorienting, heart-breaking knockout of performance. Much like Gena Rowland’s similar onscreen breakdown in A Woman Under the Influence, Dunaway’s mental unraveling in our Movie of the Month is purely a one-woman-show, fully immersing the audience in the heightened emotions & distorted perceptions of her character’s troubled psyche. One of the major factors in her mental decline are the Patriarchal pressures & abuses that arise naturally in the industry of high fashion, where she works as a model. Inspired by recorded oral history interviews with the mentally unwell fashion model Anne St. Marie (after she was used up & discarded by the fashion industry in real life), Puzzle of a Downfall Child is a scathing view of couture’s effect on the women who model its wares – especially once they need personal help or simply age out of their perceived usefulness. Dunaway’s heartbreaking performance at the center of the film would be a damning portrait of what the Patriarchy does to women’s psyches in any context, but the fashion industry setting in particular has a way of amplifying that effect to thunderous proportions.

When Dunaway returned to portraying a fashion industry artist later in the decade, her role was seemingly poised to exude more professional power & control over their own well-being. That sense of agency & solid mental health does not last long. In 1978’s The Eyes of Laura Mars, Faye Dunaway jumps the chain of command in the world of haute couture from fashion model to fashion photographer. There’s much more creative control & professional clout to be enjoyed on that side of the camera, especially in the fictional Laura Mars’s case, since she happens to be a very famous celebrity photographer at the start of promoting her first book of collected stills. In that position of power, it’s arguable that Dunaway’s protagonist even perpetuates some of the social ills that torment her character in Puzzle of a Downfall Child. Laura Mars is famous in her fictional art world for portraying misogynistic violence & extreme sexual kink in her photographs. Worse yet, a deranged serial killer has started to recreate the sordid displays in her work when killing her own fashion models, putting people like Dunaway’s Puzzle of a Downfall Child character in direct physical danger. Whereas the abuse & mania at the center of that earlier work was anchored to the recollections of a real-life artist & public figure, however, the crisis in The Eyes of Laura Mars is more of a supernatural fantasy. Dunaway’s tormented fashion photographer sees through the eyes of the killer during their slayings in uncontrollable psychic visions, directly linking the eyes of her camera to visions of real-life violence. This unreal occurrence shakes her belief that her photographs are enacting the social good of showing the world as it truly is for women by having her work directly inspire violence against women while she helplessly observes from the killer’s POV.

When initially discussing Puzzle of a Downfall Child, I mentioned that ”Between its thematic discomforts, its deliberately disorienting relationship with logic, and its gorgeous visual palette, it’s practically a couple brutal stabbings short of being a giallo film.” The Eyes of Laura Mars follows through on that train of thought, almost explicitly functioning as an American studio attempt at producing a Hollywood giallo picture. Boomer has even written about the film for this site before in reference to former Movie of the Month The Psychic, a Fulci-directed giallo thriller it shares so much DNA with they’re often accused of ripping each other off (depending on which one the audience happens to catch first). Director Irvin Kershner (of The Empire Strikes Back & RoboCop 2 notoriety) bolsters this supernatural murder mystery (originally penned by a young John Carpenter in its earliest drafts) with plenty familiar giallo touches – complete with a gloved hand protruding from offscreen to dispose of victims in Mars’s psychic visions. The fashion industry setting is a major factor in that aesthetic, as it was a world familiar to gialli at least as far back as Mario Bava’s Blood & Black Lace. What’s interesting here is the way these stylistic & hyperviolent giallo indulgences even the playing field between Dunaway’s two fashion-world archetypes. In The Eyes of Laura Mars she starts from a position of creative power far above her less protected status in Puzzle of a Downfall Child, but the violent & carelessly sexualized way women are framed (if not outright abused) in the industry eventually makes her just as vulnerable. Her own mental breakdown is more of the calm-surface panic of Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom than it is akin to Dunaway’s genuine soul-crushing illness in Puzzle of a Downfall Child (or her screeching madness in Mommie Dearest), but the misogynist ills of the couture industry had a way of breaking her protagonist down into a powerless distress in either case.

Almost inconceivably, The Eyes of Laura Mars was originally pitched as a starring vehicle for Barbara Streisand, who reportedly turned it down for the concept being “too kinky.” Having seen Babs pose in leather fetish gear for a Euro biker mag in her younger days, I’m a little baffled by that claim, but it’s probably for the best that she turned it down all the same. We still have evidence of Streisand’s involvement through the torch ballad “Prisoner” on the Laura Mars soundtrack, while also enjoying the fascinating double bill of these two Faye-Dunaway-loses-her-mind-in-giallo-adjacent-fashion-industry-narratives. Of the two pictures that cast her as a victim of fashion-industry misogyny’s strain on women’s mental health, Puzzle of a Downfall Child is both the better film and the better performance. Both titles are worthy of Dunaway’s time and energy, though, and together they conjure an imaginary crossover sequel where she plays both mad model & unhinged photographer – taking pictures of herself in an eternal loop of giallo-flavored mania.

For more on June’s Movie of the Month, the 1970 mental breakdown drama Puzzle of a Downfall Child, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, our exploration of The Neon Demon‘s subversion of its traditional power dynamics, and last week’s look at director Jerry Schatzberg’s relationship with reality in his early work.

-Brandon Ledet

Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)

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EPSON MFP image

fourstar

Picking a film to watch based solely on its title is sometimes the best way to have an exciting viewing experience. That’s exactly what I did when I decided to watch Séance on a Wet Afternoon. I knew nothing about the plot or cast, but the title seemed promising. What I expected to be an old supernatural horror film turned out to be a riveting psychological thriller about a deranged psychic, her anxious husband, and a kidnapping gone terribly wrong.

Kim Stanley puts on a flawless performance as Myra Savage, a psychic that is willing to do just about anything to publicize her talents. She is able to force her weak, docile husband, Billy Savage (Richard Attenborough) to kidnap the daughter of a high-profile couple so she can aid the police with finding the child’s whereabouts using her psychic powers. Myra is obviously mentally unstable and has one of the best mental breakdowns in cinema history at the very end of the film. One can’t help but feel sympathy for her husband because he’s so fragile and wants to please his wife so badly, but there’s definitely more than meets the eye with Billy. As the Savages get deeper into the kidnapping (or shall I say “borrowing”) of the child, they devise a plan to demand a ransom. While Billy may seem like a nervous mess, he does a great job of keeping calm while carrying out his plan to accept the ransom money, which leads to a very exciting cat-and-mouse chase through the streets of London.

This classic British film is full of top-notch acting and has one of the most unique storylines that I’ve ever seen in a movie. There are times when the film seems to be moving at a slow pace, but I can guarantee that there is never a dull moment. It’s really easy to dislike Myra, especially in the film’s opening scenes, but in her breakthrough moment at the end, there’s no doubt that those feelings will completely change. The development of her character from the beginning of the film to the end is really phenomenal. I really can’t get over how perfect Stanley’s acting is in this film. This is the only film that I’ve seen her in so far, but I plan on exploring some of her other work very soon.

Séance on a Wet Afternoon is currently streaming on Hulu Plus.

-Britnee Lombas