reviews

The Haunting (1963)

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The 1963 adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House is, in a word, a masterpiece. Even with its sterling reputation preceding it, I was shocked to immediately recognize it as such, as its genre and its source material are so overly familiar half a century later that I assumed I’d be numb to its wonders. Jackson’s novel has been both directly adapted and mined for indirect inspiration so many times over that I was skeptical there was anything left to discover in its pages. This MGM-distributed realization of that well-tread source material is also a by-the-books participation in the Old Dark House tradition that was intensely oversaturated in its own era even beyond adaptations of Jackson’s work. And yet I was impressed, captivated, and chilled from start to end – even more reenergized by this traditionalist approach to Jackson’s milieu than I was by Josephine Decker’s revisionist biopic Shirley earlier this year, something I did not at all expect.

It helps that former Val Lewton-collaborator Robert Wise directs the absolute shit out of this movie. The Haunting is shot in early Panavision on what had to be intimidatingly clunky equipment, but you wouldn’t know that judging by how incredibly active the camera is. Even in the opening sequence that explains the history of how the central haunted house “was born bad”, Wise pummels the audience with overachieving visuals. The camera swoops in ghostly, seemingly handheld maneuvers. It tumbles down the stairs in dizzying thuds. It emphasizes its format’s already drastically wide aspect ratio with fish-eye lenses out of a 1990s skateboarding video, drinking in as much ornate detail of the haunted house set as it can possibly cram down its gullet. Much of the in-the-moment action of The Haunting consists of people calmly talking in chilly, hollow rooms, but the film’s visual language is explosively alive throughout – matching the way the environment itself is quiet but teeming with ghosts.

I’m surprised this film isn’t brought up more often when people are heaping praise on classics like Psycho & Carnival of Souls in particular. It could be that its bulked-up budget scale obscures the common ground it shares with those leaner works, but it achieves a similarly eerie mood, especially in mapping out the inner life of its central, doomed protagonist, Eleanore. In a lot of ways, The Haunting is a seduction story. Eleanore is wooed by Hill House both in a romantic sense (its ghosts often play matchmaker between her and other visiting guests of various genders & vital stats) and in a residential sense. She begins the film haunted by her own mediocrity and her lack of a place in the world—dismissed by everyone around her (give or take her lesbian roommate) as a nervous, difficult woman—but the house accepts her flaws and all, beckoning for her to become a permanent fixture among the resident ghosts. It’s an unusually internal, intangible struggle for a genre built around haunted house scares – a delicate, elegant approach to horror that matches the care Wise takes with the film’s visual delights.

The Haunting is impressively smart, funny, and direct about even its touchiest themes (lesbian desire, generational depression, suicidal ideation) while remaining consistently gorgeous & creepy throughout. I’d be shocked to learn that there’s a more effectively scary G-rated horror film out there; and if there were, I doubt it’s this visually imaginative or exquisitely staged. This is clearly the pinnacle of the Old Dark House tradition. The only question is how many other Best Of __ horror lists it belongs at the top of.

-Brandon Ledet

The Corruption of Chris Miller (1973)

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If you want to be unnecessarily pedantic about what qualifies as a true giallo film, The Corruption of Chris Miller might not qualify. In the strictest sense, giallo is a schlocky, overstylized murder-mystery genre specifically made in Italy, mostly in the 1970s. Although clearly contemporary to that 70s Euro horror sensibility, The Corruption of Chris Miller is a Spanish production, performed in English, and stars a famous French chanteuse. However, even though it was staged on the wrong side of the Italian/Spanish divide, the film is a pure giallo experience by nearly every other metric. Its gorgeous visual palate (bolstered by Eastman color processing), needlessly complicated kills, acrylic paint stage blood, and consistently sleazy vibe all check off the exact tones & tropes expected from the genre. More convincingly yet, its slow-paced, convoluted mystery plot is incredibly confusing even after all the facts are presented in the final reveal, falling apart the second you think about it too long. That’s a giallo, bb.

Breathless-vet, pop star, and political subversive Jean Seberg stars as a young psychobiddy in training: a lonely, middle-aged woman who imprisons & psychologically torments her stepdaughter as revenge against the husband who left them both behind. She runs an explicitly man-hating household, teaching her step-daughter (the younger Spanish pop star Marisol) that “Men don’t love. They injure. They invade. It’s always cruelty and violence with them.” Meanwhile, she’s the sole source of the home’s cruelty & violence – gaslighting & sexually “seducing” her stepchild as a half-thought-out mode of revenge against a man who isn’t present and couldn’t care less. That is, until she expands her operations to a full-on bisexual harem by inviting a dangerous drifter into their home as a handyman: a British stud whom the audience suspects might be a thieving killer of local wealthy women. Is this drifter actually the killer, as all of the evidence suggests? Or is the killer one of the two central women-in-conflict? Or is it a throwaway side character the movie loses track of the minute after they’re introduced? The answer will only betray & confuse you, especially after you rewatch the kill scenes to review the evidence.

As always with gialli, the mystery itself is not as important here as the style & the mood. The tension in Seberg’s lavish home (i.e. lesbian torture dungeon) is wonderfully staged and feels entirely separate from the murders in the surrounding village. Even the kills themselves feel wholly distinct from one another, as the killer is wildly inconsistent in their choices of disguise, weapon, and victim. The closest the film comes to solidifying a recognizably iconic slasher villain visage (like a Jason or Michael Meyers mask) is a sequence where the killer dons a rain slicker, a scythe, and sunglasses while executing an entire family in their home. My personal favorite kill, however, is the opening scene in which they dress like a grotesque Charlie Chaplin pantomime to kill a woman they’ve just slept with. The way the killer continues to perform Silent Era schtick as The Tramp even after the murder had me howling, and I’m not sure the movie ever reached that level of upsetting amusement again. Attempting an entire proto-slasher about a killer in Chaplin drag might have been the film’s best chance as an all-timer in the giallo genre. It at least would have afforded it a sense of consistency, which it’s desperately lacking.

Unless you’re an Italian essentialist, The Corruption of Chris Miller lands squarely in the giallo pantheon – both in satisfying the requirements of the genre and in terms of quality. Replaying & picking apart the plot in your head is an exercise in futility that only gets more frustrating the further you drift away from it. At the same time, its sleazy atmosphere, over-the-top violence, and indulgences in gorgeous artifice reward that confusion with plenty in-the-moment pleasures.

-Brandon Ledet

Impetigore (2020)

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The Indonesian ghost story Impetigore shocked me, chilled me, and left me guessing where its story was headed until its very last minute. That’s an extremely rare quality to find in a modern horror film, especially one that sticks this close to the tones & conventions of its genre. In an ideal, perfectly-functioning movie industry, Impetigore would be the kind of well-funded horror flick that hits wide theatrical release regularly: handsomely staged, efficiently creepy beyond the traumatizing shock of its imagery, and complicated enough in its mythology that it’s not just a simple morality play. Instead, it’s an international export that premiered to mildly positive reviews at this year’s Sundance before quietly finding its way to streaming on Shudder with little fanfare. Impetigore should be an industry norm. Instead, it’s a minor miracle.

It starts with a concise, conceptually brilliant cold open in which a highway tollbooth employee is stalked and eventually hunted in her glass cuboid prison by a machete-wielding maniac. Before he raises his weapon for the deathblow, the crazed killer complains in a reasonable, weary tone, “We don’t want what your family left behind. Please take it away.” That short-story slasher intro then opens up to a much wider, richer tale of an intergenerational curse. A young, desperate woman treks back to her seemingly well-to-do family’s isolated village, hoping to reclaim any generational wealth she may have left behind when she was whisked away to the big city as a child. It turns out her family’s domineering presence in the village is represented by more than just a large house & a fear-inciting name. It also lingers in the form of a vicious curse that torments & disfigures each new generation of the community, so that whatever exploitative evils they committed in the past continue to haunt the present in an active, malicious cycle.

Reductively speaking, Impetigore offers an on-the-surface metaphor about the persistent evils of communal betrayal & inherited wealth. However, the rules & origins of its ghostly curse mutate & self-complicate often enough that it doesn’t feel lazily considered or over-simplified. That’s rare in a modern horror film, where each plot development is typically expected to hold some metaphorical Meaning in a 1:1 allegory. Impetigore’s relationship with Extreme Gore freak-outs is similarly distinctive in the modern horror landscape – walking a difficult balance of being gradually, severely fucked up without rubbing your face in the grotesque details of its cruelty. This is a film that weaponizes your imagination against you for maximum dread, then somehow exceeds the worst-case-scenario imagery you conjure instead of shying away from the discomfort (often by depicting horrific violence against children in particular, it should be said). It’s also a movie that features several traditional Indonesian puppet shows, just in case you’re not already thoroughly entertained.

I very much wish Impetigore weren’t exceptional, that its handsomely executed but appropriately bleak grotesqueries were just another shock-of-the-day horror. As is, it feels like a role model for how well-funded modern horror should look & operate – offering a glimpse of a better, more fucked-up cinematic landscape. It is exceptional, and it should be celebrated as such.

-Brandon Ledet

Season of the Witch (1973)

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In one of the more recent episodes of The Swampflix Podcast, Brandon, James, and I got together to virtually discuss what we categorized as “smart zombie movies.” During the recording, I mentioned that I’m not a fan of George Romero’s zombie films, such as Night of the Living Dead, Day of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, etc. I find them to be boring, and I just really don’t care to waste time watching them. I know that is a blasphemous thing to say since he is considered to be one of greatest horror filmmakers of all time, but I’m just speaking my truth. Then, a few nights ago, I stumbled across a film called Season of the Witch. At first, I thought it was my favorite entry in the Halloween series (Halloween III: Season of the Witch), but it actually turned out to be one of Romero’s earliest films. It also happened to be considered one of his worst. Of course, I ended up enjoying it.

Season of the Witch has an interesting backstory. It was written and directed by George Romero and produced by his first wife, Nancy Romero. It was originally marketed as a softcore porn film called Hungry Wives with a poster that featured drawings of a few sultry women and the tagline, “Caviar in the kitchen, nothing in the bedroom.” The film itself is far from being anything close to a softcore porn; well, minus one quick sex scene and a few nude moments. It was the distributor who pushed Romero in the softcore direction, wanting him to incorporate pornographic sex scenes between the film’s main character and her young lover, but Romero refused. He had a different vision.

Influenced by second-wave feminism, Romero made a fantastic film about a dissatisfied housewife who dabbles in the occult, and he did it all with a budget of about $100,000 (it was originally $250,000 before his funding dropped). The main character, Joan Mitchell, is played by actress Jan White. White is somehow only credited with acting in four films (many of them from the 1970s). I was shocked to find out that her acting career was so short, because she is phenomenal in Season of the Witch. She has such a naturally entrancing, striking look that I couldn’t take my eyes off of. Something about her is so delightfully haunting. To make things even better, she wears some of the most magnificent beehive wigs and late 1960s/early 1970s fashion. There’s also tons of cobalt blue carpet throughout the film that serves as an exquisite backdrop for her fabulous looks.

Season of the Witch starts off in a very exciting way. It opens up with a long dream sequence where Jan is walking in the woods while being ignored by her husband, and encountering all sorts of other bizarre dreamlike things (spooky music included). It gives off major The Feminine Mystique vibes. Jan is a housewife with an abusive husband and young-adult daughter, so she’s at the point in her life where she’s trying to figure out what her next step is. At a neighborhood party, she discovers that one of her neighbors is a witch. This sparks an interest in her, so she decides to explore the practice of witchcraft. There’s a great scene where she goes into town to shop for witchy supplies while Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” plays in the background. The first spell she casts is a love spell that results in her having a tryst with her daughter’s lover. It’s so scandalous! As she dives deeper into the occult, she has progressively intense dreams about someone in a rubber demon mask breaking into her home. The dream later becomes infused with her reality, leading to a shocking act that I won’t spoil in this review.

Season of the Witch is not a horror movie, so don’t go into it expecting anything of the sort. It’s also not the softcore porn it was marketed as initially. It’s simply a wonderful drama that explores the internal struggles of an unhappy suburban housewife through the use of witchcraft. I was so impressed with this film, and I have a newfound appreciation for George Romero. I can’t wait to explore more of his non-zombie movies from this era. Hopefully I’ll find more hidden gems like Season of the Witch.

-Britnee Lombas

The Rental (2020)

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When staying at an Airbnb, I always go through this period of unease in the beginning. Being in a stranger’s home/private room always feels a little strange at first, but I always get over it after about like 15 minutes. That’s of course after I check in the closets, under the beds, and behind all the corners to make sure there’s not a psycho waiting to slit my throat. Dave Franco’s directorial debut, The Rental, really taps into that 15 minutes of initial Airbnb fear to the point that it feels disturbingly personal.

The Rental is definitely one of the best horror/thriller films to come out this year. It follows a group of two couples and their short getaway in a fabulous Airbnb rental home. One couple is made up of Charlie (Dan Stevens) and his wife, Michelle (Alison Brie), and the other couple is made up of Charlie’s brother Josh (Jeremy Allen White) and his girlfriend, Mina (Sheila Vand). Once they arrive to the Airbnb, the owner, Taylor (Toby Huss) meets them to hand over the key and go over the house’s amenities. There’s something off about him that everyone seems to pick up on. Mina, who is Muslim, initially requested the booking, and her request was denied by Taylor. Charlie then requested the same rental and was accepted immediately. Mina’s suspicion of Taylor’s racism is confirmed when he makes some racially motivated comments towards her during their arrival. It’s more than obvious that he is not a good guy, but the group tries to ignore that fact since they won’t have to deal with him for too long as he won’t be at the rental for the weekend. As the couples enjoy some recreational drugs and cut loose at the rental, a horrible mistake is made that could ruin the relationships of both couples. It’s soon discovered that this incident was filmed by a camera hidden in a showerhead. This is the point in the film where things go downhill for the group and everything spirals out of control.

I love movies that make me feel like I have everything figured out until some wild plot twist at the very end throws me completely off track. That’s exactly what The Rental does. Who wants to watch a movie that is predictable anyway? There’s just something so unique about the film’s ending that really kept me thinking about it. It annoyed me at first because it left a lot of questions unanswered, but it also gave me the space to make my own assumptions. The ending both makes total sense and doesn’t make sense at all, so prepare yourself for that. Franco has mentioned that he left it intentionally ambiguous because he wants to eventually film a sequel, and I am so down for that.

We are officially in spooky season (and apparently still in an active hurricane season), so The Rental is definitely a good pick if you’re interested in exploring a new horror/thriller film to get yourself in the Halloween spirit.

-Britnee Lombas

Limbo (1999)

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The trash angels at the American Genre Film Archive recently restored & distributed a shot-on-video horror relic from the late 90s that both transcends & typifies its era in no-budget filmmaking. Limbo is a warped-VHS headtrip that’s all disoriented disgust with the world and nothing remotely resembling coherence. It’s more of a cursed object than a Movie, so that AGFA’s restoration feels less like a standard home video release than it does a black magic spell. The Blu-ray disc includes a feature-length commentary track with director Tina Krause, which I’m hesitant to listen to even though it might help make sense of the film’s eerie, disjointed imagery. I’m worried that any context or explanation would deflate its delirious 3a.m. mystique.

The IMDb logline for Limbo is “A woman makes a descent into Hell after she kills a man she brought home as a one-night stand.” That’s a relatively accurate way of describing the final third of the one-hour runtime, but as a whole the film is far too meandering & self-distracted to support any kind of one-sentence plot description, especially one so concrete. Most of Limbo finds Krause dicking around with camcorder effects & morbid ephemera in a spooky warehouse locale. Lynchian horror imagery—complete with a Laura Palmer surrogate wheeled around in a clear-plastic body bag—is filtered through a D.I.Y. video art aesthetic in a haunted, scatterbrained haze. The only unifying sensibility on a thematic level is a disgust with the nü-metal dirtbag men who ogle & harass our traumatized lead. Parsing out anything else feels like trying to make sense of a half-remembered nightmare.

It’s tempting to dismiss Limbo as something that would be best served as a background projection at a Halloween party or raw footage for a music video re-edit. Yet, there’s something potently angry & distraught about its mood that cuts through its lost, dizzied narrative to save it from being tedious (a quality that’s majorly helped by its succinct runtime). Judging by the bonus shorts included on the disc, Krause was mostly working in sleazy SOV softcore around the time she made Limbo, and her sole feature as a director feels like a defiant protest of that genre. This is a deliberately anti-sexy, impossible-to-pin-down video art nightmare with no patience or interest in the typical genre signifiers of its era. It may not satisfy the usual metrics for A Great Horror Film, but its off-kilter details linger with you longer than with more focused, technically proficient works of well-funded mediocrity. In fact, it’s practically spitting directly in those films’ faces.

-Brandon Ledet

Holy Virgin vs. The Evil Dead (1991)

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Given the title, you’d expect Holy Virgin vs. The Evil Dead to be a schlocky zombie movie. It turns out it’s more of a horror-tinged nudie cutie. This “erotic” martial arts fantasy horror stars Donnie Yen and a gaggle of Topless Babes (give or take one warrior princess) in a fight against a supernatural horndog Moon Monster. The monster is more of a moon-dwelling cannibal wizard with glowing eyes than a walking corpse, and he’s far more interested in ripping blouses off unsuspecting women than he is in eating brains. If it weren’t for the gore & the fight choreography, this film could pass as an old-fashioned nudist comedy along the lines of The Immoral Mr. Teas or Nude on the Moon. It’s incredibly sleazy late-night trash that’s so endlessly fascinated with bare breasts it’s also somehow adorably quaint.

If there’s any element in Holy Virgin that justifies the “Evil Dead” half of its title, it’s in the drastic comic book camera angles and low-to-the-ground tracking shots it lifts directly from Sam Raimi’s playbook. Those images only come in flashes during the Moon Monster attacks, though. The rest of the film is an oddly straight-forward police procedural in which a college professor (Yen) is suspected of stripping & murdering his female students. Meanwhile, the audience knows the truth: a cult that worships a mustachioed goddess has summoned a boobs-obsessed lunar ghoul to do the job. Duh! Thankfully, a badass virgin princess with a laser sword takes over the investigation halfway through to save the professor’s hide (and to put an end to the violent strippings, of course). Rapid-paced fight choreography & wuxia-style wire work ensues, until the whole thing concludes with a police shootout in a cave decorated with giallo-style crosslighting.

It’s impossible to describe Holy Virgin vs. The Evil Dead without overselling it. Even its own impatient opening credits sequence that previews the gore & nudity to come feels like hyperbolic hype the movie never lives up to. Still, it’s a delightful late-night curio that touches on an incredibly vast range of genre payoffs: dark fantasy, 80s splatter horror, police procedurals, martial arts epics, softcore porno, etc. The fact that its Skinemax-era sexuality and post-Raimi horror signifiers have become increasingly outdated in the decades since its release only make it more charming to the modern schlock-gobbling viewer. It’s a weirdly adorable film for something so gore-soaked & sexually violent, almost as if it were produced for an audience of perverse children. I wish I had first seen it when I was 10 years old, anyway.

-Brandon Ledet