witches

Scenes from a Screenwriter’s Marriage

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We try our best to cover both the highest and the lowest ends of cinema here, from the finest of fine art to the trashiest of genre trash. Occasionally, those two polar-opposite ends of the medium intersect in unexpected ways. Last week, I found myself watching two seemingly discordant movies that covered the exact same metatextual topic – one because it screened in The Prytania’s Classic Cinema series during New Orleans French Film Fest and one because the Blu-ray was heavily discounted during an online flash sale. Both 1963’s Contempt and 1989’s The Black Cat are movies about screenwriters who jeopardize their marriages by taking on doomed-from-the-start film projects that put their wives’ personal safety at risk. The former was directed by French New Wave innovator Jean-Luc Godard at the height of his professional career, while the latter was directed by Italo schlockteur Luigi Cozzi in a sly attempt to cash in on his tutelage under his much more famous mentor, Dario Argento. They also both happen to be literary adaptations, at least in theory. While Godard was relatively faithful to his source-material novel, Cozzi’s film is an adaptation in name only, daring to bill itself as “Edgar Allen Poe’s The Black Cat” in its opening-credits title card before immediately abandoning its source text to leech off Argento’s legacy instead of Poe’s. Godard does indulge in his own allusions to an earlier, foundational filmmaker’s work in Contempt, though, by casting Fritz Lang as himself and including discussions of Lang’s early artistic triumphs, like M. You’d never expect these two movies to have anything in common at first glance, but The Black Cat really is Contempt‘s trashy cousin, long estranged.

Typically, I don’t think of Jean-Luc Godard’s signature aesthetic to be all that distant from the low-budget, high-style genre filmmaking ethos that guided the Italo horror brats of the 70s & 80s. At the very least, both sides of that divide would have been passionately reverent of Alfred Hitchcock as a cinematic stylist. However, Contempt is so far removed from the handheld, D.I.Y. crime picture days of Breathless that it’s hardly Godardian at all, at least not visually. Shot on location at seaside Italian villas in Technicolor & Cinemascope, Contempt is often breathtaking in its visual grandeur, especially in its 2023 digital restoration that aggressively pops the intensity of its colors. Godard presents star Brigitte Bardot in several magazine glamour-shoot set-ups that accentuate the otherworldly beauty of her body, with particular attention paid to her buttcheeks. Of course, vacationing with a beautiful woman in an exotic locale doesn’t fundamentally change who you are, so the usual self-defeating macho bullshit that plagues Godard’s protagonists follow him there too. Michel Piccoli co-leads as a cash-strapped screenwriter who takes a well-paying job doing re-writes on an already-in-production Fritz Lang adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Lang is making a much more abstract, artsier picture than what his American producer had greenlit, so Piccoli ends up in a sickening position where he must undermine the work of a genius he respects to instead please a meathead cad from The States who values commerce over art (Jack Palance, playing a pitch-perfect dipshit). Worse yet, the American pig has the hots for Bardot, and Piccoli does nothing to get in his way or to protect his obviously uncomfortable wife. This leads to an endlessly vicious, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-style argument between the couple, so that they spend much of their time in an Italian paradise bickering about the purity of their love and the corruption of money. Meanwhile, Fritz Lang amusedly shakes his head, as if he’s seen this all before.

The marital crisis of The Black Cat is much more outlandish & abstract, but it also starts with a filmmaker taking on an ill-advised project. Our protagonist is a Luigi Cozzi-style horror director who decides to make good use of the Italian film industry’s loose copyright laws to make his own unsanctioned sequel to Suspiria. The project is in the early writing phase, where he is collaborating with a writing partner to sketch out the backstory of the Third Mother referenced in Argento’s Suspiria, believing there was room for another cash-grab witchcraft story in that lore (after the Second Mother was covered in Argento’s Inferno, and long before the Third Mother was covered in Argento’s Mother of Tears). They foolishly decide to pull inspiration from a “real”, powerful witch named Levana, who is awakened from her cosmic slumber by the project. Specifically, once the wart-faced Levana catches wind that she will be played onscreen by the director’s wife, she flips the fuck out and invades the real world through a mirror in the couple’s home, puking a chunky green goo in the actress’s face and then generally causing havoc. From there, The Black Cat is a supernatural horror free-for-all, following its scene-to-scene whims without any care or attention paid to the pre-existing work of Dario Argento, Edgar Allen Poe, or high school physics teachers. The movie is a jumbled mess of demonically possessed space fetuses, witchcraft-practicing house cats, 19th Century ghost children, telekinetic explosions, laser-shooting eyeballs, internal organ ruptures, creepy-crawly spiders, and whatever else amuses Levana as she tears apart this doomed marriage, all because she doesn’t want a movie made about her. What a diva.

You can assume a lot of what was on Godard’s mind while he was making Contempt just by watching the movie. Between the intensely bitter (and even more intensely gendered) marital argument that eats up most of the runtime and the art-vs-commerce argument that eats up the rest, you get a pretty clear picture of what was going on in his internal & professional life at the time. Even after watching the “Cat on the Brain” interview included on the Blu-ray disc, I cannot begin to tell you what Cozzi was attempting to communicate in The Black Cat. During the interview, he describes the picture as “science fiction,” likening it to his Star Wars knockoff Starcrash, with which it only shares a few extraneous insert shots of outer space. I’d say it’s much more spiritually in line with his supernatural slasher film Paganini Horror, which hooks the audience with the undead spirit of famous composer Niccolo Pagnini for a familiar starting point, then launches into a series of hair-metal music video vignettes where he just does whatever amuses him from scene to scene. Both of these vintage European relics might generally be about the artform of screenwriting, but only Contempt seems to put any sincere thought into that craft, while The Black Cat is much more about trying whatever looks cool in a scene, internal logic be damned. Something the two pictures do have in common, though, is the assertion that the basic labor & finance of filmmaking will ruin your marriage, whether through the intrusion of jackass Hollywood money men or the intrusion of evil mirror-dimension witches. If two movies so far apart in philosophy, tone, and intent happen to come to that same conclusion, I have to believe there’s some truth to it. Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be screenwriters.

-Brandon Ledet

Wicked (2024)

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In our recent podcast episode about Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds, Brandon mentioned having seen (and not enjoyed) Wicked. I had previously shared that, when this film was over, I turned to my viewing companion and said, “I have a confession to make. I thought I was going to hate this,” but admitted that I had, in fact, loved it. The Wizard of Oz is one of the first movies that I can ever remember seeing, and I had a secondhand walkman that the red cassette of Oz songs basically lived inside of for years. I loved the books, reading them repeatedly (my favorite characters were Tik Tok and The Hungry Tiger, whose tormented existence torn between desire and moral conviction probably spoke to me at a deeper level, even at that young age). We named one of our chickens Billina and I even spent an entire summer saving my chore money toward a layaway copy of the much-maligned SNES Wizard video game. (The only other person I have ever met with any memory of the game, my friend Eric, also admitted he had never been able to beat it. About five years ago, we got together to watch a playthrough of it on YouTube and were shocked to discover that, of about 110 minutes of gameplay, neither of us had ever gotten past the first 25 minutes, which is where we inevitably died. It was just that hard.) I read Gregory Maguire’s Wicked in the summer between undergrad and grad school, and while I didn’t love it, I didn’t think it was bad, just that I preferred to imagine Oz as I had when I was a child. But after so many bad Oz movies and series over the years (especially Oz the Great and Powerful), I didn’t expect that I would fall into the magic of a movie that had so much negative press surrounding its visual style, especially since a musical is already kind of a hard sell for me. I was mostly there for the Jonathan Bailey of it all (since Broadchurch, if you’re keeping score at home). 

Wicked (Part 1, as everyone suspected) is about Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo), a woman from Munchkinland who, as the result of some magical hanky-panky in the middle of some extramarital hanky-panky, was born with green skin. This makes her an ostracized outsider among the Munchkins and leaves her the less-favored daughter of her widowed father, who dotes upon her paraplegic younger sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode). Nessarose is accepted to attend Oz’s Shiz University, and although Elphaba is not a prospective student, her accidental use of real magic in the presence of Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) leads her to being invited to attend, under direct tutelage of Morrible, on the spot. As the result of a misunderstanding, Elphaba is set up to room with Galinda (Ariana Grande), the prettiest, most popular girl in all of Oz, although Elphaba ends up shoved into a small corner of their shared lodgings as a result of Galinda’s extensive pink wardrobe. Initial conflict between the two leads to Elphaba’s further isolation at school, and it is further exacerbated with the arrival of Prince Fiyero from Winkieland, whose devil-may-care attitude and carpe diem approach to academics, love, and life in general. Fiyero and Elphaba meet before he arrives at the school, and he is charmed by her lack of deference to either his royal title (of which she is ignorant) or his stunning good looks (which she cannot help but notice). However, upon arrival at the school, Galinda immediately gloms onto him and he accepts and reciprocates the attention, attempting to get the entire student body to reject the boredom of academia in favor of vice and fun, much to Elphaba’s annoyance. Meanwhile, there is an undercurrent of fascism and racism at Shiz U, as the once-diverse teaching body of the university has been whittled down to have only one remaining talking Animal instructor, the goat Dr. Dillamond (Peter Dinklage), who is the person willing to befriend Elphaba. Galinda and Elphaba eventually reconcile when, after a particularly cruel prank, Galinda learns that Elphaba has done something genuinely kind and meaningful in helping Galinda pursue her greatest ambitions; Galinda then makes it her project to rehabilitate Elphaba’s public image and make her, as the song says, popular. When Elphaba at last receives an invite to come to the Emerald City and meet The Wizard (Jeff Goldblum), she chooses instead to argue on behalf of the plight of the Animals rather than ask him to cure her of her green skin, setting events into motion that change the destinies of everyone involved. 

I’ve long been known to be a musical-averse person, but I’m coming around. After having seen recorded versions of Sweeney Todd (the one with Angela Lansbury) and Phantom of the Opera (the 25th anniversary production) this year, I’m more open to them than I once was, and it’s no secret that Wicked is one of the biggest and most widely acclaimed ones of all time. I can’t really speak to this one as an adaptation, but I really enjoyed it. I didn’t love every song (“Dancing Through Life” is acceptable as a bit of exposition/character development, but it’s very boring to me, and if it didn’t have Jonathan Bailey dancing through it, I wouldn’t work at all), but I thoroughly enjoyed most of them, and some are real standouts. Erivo’s voice is fantastic, and in some behind-the-scenes footage she’s singing live in several scenes that show that the magic is coming from her and not from any studio enhancements. She’s entrancing here as Elphaba, and I see so much of people I’ve known and loved in her performance that she completely won me over. I’ve also never been all that interested in Ariana Grande; she came along after I had already long graduated from the age group that she’s aimed at. I was of the generation whose adolescent-aimed-cable-channel-musical-industrial-complex products were Raven and Hillary Duff, so Grande’s rise from that same metaphorical farm league came long after I was among the target demographic. She’s quite fun here, and separates herself from the others on the same career path with a lot of genuine charm and a willingness to commit to the bit that’s quite admirable. 

As for most people’s complaints about the film and its visual style, I have to admit that I didn’t mind it. It would have been nice to have the film try to replicate the Technicolor-sais quoi of the MGM classic, but there’s still a lot to love here in the designs and the details. The costuming is fantastic, and at no point did I think that Oz looked boring or colorless, except in moments in which there’s an intentionality to the blandness that I find appropriate. This one left me feeling elevated and effervescent, and I loved that, even if what we’re watching is the real time character assassination of our protagonist at the hands of an evil government. What more could one really ask for?

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: House (1977)

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Boomer, Brandon, and Alli celebrate a Lagniappe Podcast milestone by discussing Nobuhiko Obayashi’s psychedelic cult classic House (1977).

00:00 Episode 100

07:00 No Country for Old Men (2007)
13:32 Challengers (2024)
20:55 The Beast (2024)
34:38 Dial M for Murder (1954)
45:33 The People’s Joker (2024)
49:06 Humane (2024)

55:48 House (1977)

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

– The Podcast Crew

Something Weird (1967)

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“When an electrical accident disfigures the face of Cronin Mitchell (Tony McCabe), he also acquires strange psychic powers.  He promptly makes a bargain with a witch who restores his looks if he will become her lover.  However, though the world sees her as a sexy cutie named Ellen (Elizabeth Lee), Mitchell’s new girlfriend is actually an ugly old crone.  After expelling a ghost from a funeral home, MItchell next tries to discover the identity of a small-town maniac.  However, the feds have also asked karate-chopping playboy Alex Jordan (William Brooker) to oversee the case, and Jordan schemes to have Ellen all for himself . . . but not before MItchell boosts his ESP with LSD, and Jordan is attacked by killer bed sheets.  Honest.”

Like every other Hershell Gordon Lewis cheapie I’ve had the mild misfortune of stumbling upon, Something Weird is impossible to describe without making it sound way more exciting than it actually is to watch.  I couldn’t personally craft a more accurate, concise summary of its plot events than the paragraph above, which I’ve copied from the back of the dusty DVD I recently picked up at my neighborhood Goodwill.  It’s the next paragraph where that ad copy goes off the rails, describing Something Weird as a “crackpot gem” and “one of the most bizarre and outrageous horror flicks ever made.”  If only it could live up to that hype.  Despite recalling genuinely mesmerizing vintage schlock of its ilk like Death Bed: The Bed that Eats and X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, there’s nothing especially exciting about Something Weird beyond the promise of its title, poster, and premise.  That’s been consistent with all of my previous run-ins with Lewis, who seems to have come from the David Friedman school of carnival-barker movie promotion, where it doesn’t matter if the finished film is any good; it just matters if it’s marketable enough to sell tickets.  Not every old school B-movie producer was as creatively savvy as Roger Corman, who could actually churn out a decent picture while chasing an easy dollar; some were just straight-up hucksters.

I hope it’s apparent to seasoned schlock enthusiasts why I would pick up a used copy of Something Weird even though I’m so dismissive of Hershell Wizard of Gordon Lewis.  I was, of course, enticed by the film’s significance to the video store days of cult cinema, when it inspired the namesake of the distribution label Something Weird Video.  It’s difficult to articulate right now just how essential Something Weird Video was to schlock gobblers in decades past, since there are now dozens of boutique genre film Blu-ray labels that distribute the exact kind of subterranean cinema they specialized in.  I may not be grateful to Something Weird Video for exposing me to so many disappointing Lewis & Friedman titles back then, but I am extremely grateful to their similar platforming of much more earnestly enjoyable genre freaks like Ed Wood, Doris Wishman, and whatever Tennessee weirdos made Bat Pussy.  The DVD jacket ad copy quoted above is not only in line with Lewis & Friedman’s drive-in era style of overhyping shoddy product, but it’s also typical to the home video label’s continuation of the practice decades later.  They had a fun, flippant approach to cult cinema marketing, as indicated by this DVD’s menu choices of “Start Weirdness,” “Weird Scene Index”, “Weird Audio”, and “Weird Special Features.” 

In all honesty, I’m a lot warmer to Hershell Gordon Lewis’s low-effort, low-energy charms now that I was when I first plucked titles like Blood Feast & Two Thousand Maniacs off the Cult Section shelves of Major Video in the aughts.  I’ve always been on the hook for Something Weird‘s making-it-up-as-we-go-along approach to story, wherein a witch’s reluctant gigolo boosts his own psychic powers by experimenting with LSD so he can bring a Free Love serial killer to justice.  A couple decades ago, I just would have found it unforgivable that a film with that premise didn’t live up to its full potential as a Grade-A hippiesploitation freak show.  Watching it now, I’m more open to its merits as adorably quaint community theatre, with the laughably unconvincing karate demos and gratingly annoying witch’s spells now registering as a document of weirdos with limited talents attempting to put on a show instead of an opportunistic producer attempting to sell a flashy poster without a finished movie attached.  Lewis’s half-assed, monochrome imitation of a Saul Bass acid trip lays limp on the screen, but there’s something almost accidentally psychedelic about his sloppy, unenthused editing style.  It’s also fun to ponder “What was he thinking?” as he points a dirty camera lens at a cloudy sky while playing a classroom lecture about the science behind ESP or as a swanky cocktail party devolves into an out-of-focus living room seance.  Still, I can’t hold back my frustrations that the basic components of a much better B-picture are on full display onscreen but nobody cared enough to arrange them in a satisfying configuration.

I’m sure there are plenty of old-school genre nerds who appreciate Something Weird as a Hershell Gordon Lewis experiment in combining social unease around The Sexual Revolution with traditional “The World of the Unearthly” horror tropes. I’m also sure that I’ll end up seeing its drive-in double bill partner The Gruesome Twosome sometime before I die, despite knowing I cannot match that enthusiasm.  I fully understand Something Weird‘s value in the Something Weird Video catalog, though, since it’s the exact kind of title & logline that moves units off the shelves.  Hell, I just picked it up off a DVD shelf myself, even though it’s currently streaming free on Tubi, the rightful home of many Something Weird Video castoffs.

-Brandon Ledet

The Craft (1996)

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Two of my childhood-favorite horror classics from the year of our Dark Lord 1996 screened at The Prytania Theatre this month: Wes Craven’s teen-slasher renaissance sparker Scream and Andrew Fleming’s teen-witchcraft charmer The Craft.  Of the two, I only made time to revisit the latter, where I had the pleasure of sitting behind a row of giggling college students who were enjoying it for the very first time.  Repertory screenings of The Craft are a much rarer treat than screenings of Scream (as evidenced by only one of those titles also playing at The Broad this month), which makes sense given the stature of Scream‘s director within horror nerdom and given that it is still being kept alive by endless discourse & rebootquels well into the 2020s.  Both movies meant a lot to me as a wannabe goth young’n who never earned his eyeliner wings, if not only because I was the perfect age to look up to their much cooler, slightly older teen protagonists when the movies were fresh arrivals on the shelves of my local Blockbuster Video.  My anecdotal research (scrolling through my Letterboxd follows’ flippant one-liner reviews) suggests that The Craft is considered the much lesser of the two works, especially in recent years, which is the exact opposite opinion that dawned on me while watching it on the big screen for the very first time.  As a kid, Scream was a great reference text for a laundry list of horror classics I needed to catch up with in future video store rentals, while The Craft was the full witchy power fantasy I desperately needed in my miserable Catholic school years – a substantial, self-contained work that required no extratextual viewing.  Among the two slick ’96 teen studio horrors currently enjoying victory laps around the city, my heart clearly belongs to coven; praise be to Manon.

Pitting these two enduring sleepover classics against each other is mostly a game of 1-on-1 performance match-ups.  Fairuza Balk is just as chaotically charismatic in The Craft as Matthew Lillard is in Scream, but she’s much better dressed – sporting mega-goth bondage gear instead of oversized sweaters from The Gap.  Neve Campbell is dependably lovely & solid in both, playing the genre’s most sensible Final Girl in Scream and the coven’s most vulnerable pushover in The Craft, where she cedes power to Balk, Rachel True, and Robin Tunney.  Skeet Ulrich is the deciding factor, then, putting in the performance of his career as a dopey puppy dog under a love spell in The Craft, which comes slightly ahead of his performance as a dirtbag psycho boyfriend with a horrid secret in Scream.  It’s unlikely that these names mean anything to anyone born outside the Millennial age range of 1981 – 1996, but I can confirm from first-hand observation that Skeet Ulrich’s performance in The Craft still kills with the modern teenage crowd.  The row ahead of me was explosive with giggles every time he showed up at Tunney’s feet, adorably perplexed over why he was so magnetically attracted to her despite his usual aloof bad-boy demeanor.  Of course, a lot of the film’s current entertainment value is rooted in nostalgia for 90s pop culture aesthetics, whether it’s the extremely dated teen cast or the tie-in CD soundtrack that includes artist like Jewell, Julianna Hatfield, Letters to Cleo, Portishead, Elastica, and Our Lady Peace.  Even on that end, I’d say The Craft has Scream beat, since it’s only invested in setting a traditional witchcraft story within that 90s pop arena instead of simultaneously cataloging & restaging tropes from previous missteps & triumphs in its genre.

When I say that The Craft doesn’t require extratextual viewing the way Scream does, that doesn’t mean I didn’t immediately go home to watch all of the Special Features on my ancient DVD copy as soon as I left The Prytania, so I could prolong the pleasure of the experience.  There were some fun insights in its promotional behind the scenes “interviews”, mostly in the cast’s recollections of Fairuza Balk’s contributions as a true-believer Wiccan bringing authenticity to the production (along with hired outside Wicca consultants) and in Rachel True’s observation that as the coven’s magical powers grow stronger & stronger, their skirts are hemmed shorter & shorter.  Mostly, my extratextual journey outside The Craft was a horrified scroll down Letterboxd lane, where I found a lot of complaints from cinephiles I usually trust about a movie I’ve always loved.  Most reviews among mutuals range from 1-to-3 star ratings, with a particular disdain for the third-act dissolution of the central teen coven.  It’s true that the “Fuck around” section of the movie is a lot more fun than its “Find out” counterpart, as that’s when we watch goth teen witches confidently strut down their Catholic high school hallways to 90s pop tunes in defiance of their school’s usual social power rankings.  Once all four witches have solved their very simplistic personal issues at home (racism, body dysmorphia, the powerlessness of poverty and, least significantly, crushing on a bully) through dabbling in dark magic, there’s nothing left for the movie to do than to show what happens when they take their magic powers too far.  It’s a political blow to idealists looking to The Craft for depictions of feminist solidarity (who would be best served skipping the ending entirely), but it at least opens the movie up to other themes besides the allure of power to teen-girl outsiders: addiction, fear of losing social stature, the willingness to cower behind an overly bossy leader for convenience, etc.

Speaking of extratextual viewing, what’s interesting to me about the complaints over The Craft‘s third act is that someone did attempt to correct its political issues in a modern revision of the film.  Zoe Lister-Jones’s recent soft reboot The Craft: New Legacy smooths out a lot of the original film’s rough spots in representation, feminist solidarity, and third-act resolution, mostly by giving its own coven an outside enemy to fight instead of each other (David Duchovny as an MRA warlock) and by putting their hunk-bully stand-in for Skeet Ulrich under a “woke” spell instead of a love spell.  It might be a more politically sound film, but it’s also a thoroughly dull one, mostly because its poorly lit, dialogue-heavy teen drama registers more like a backdoor pilot for a CW series than a legitimate Movie.  Say what you want about the original, but it at least has a sense of style, something the recent remake only approaches when copying the exact occultist-imagery graphics of the original’s opening credits as lazy homage.  The Craft‘s style happens to be tied to a very specific era in commercial filmmaking that I happen to be susceptible to nostalgia for, but it still looks fantastic.  It probably serves me right, then, to see this same story warped into an extremely dated generational touchstone for a different era of potential horror nerds, so I can see how generic one of my childhood favorites looks to people who it didn’t hit at the exact right time.  To me, The Craft: Legacy is cute but inconsequential, which is seemingly what most audiences also think of the original, even among my peers.  So, maybe I should shelve my argument that there’s more overt queer sexuality in the suggestive wagging of Fairuza Balk’s fingers during the original’s iconic light-as-a-feather-stiff-as-a-board scene than there is in the entirety of the deliberately inclusive Queer Representation remake.  I’m already risking sounding like an out-of-touch whiner about the good old days here, exalting the pop culture residue of my youth as if it were a sacred text.

-Brandon Ledet

Bell, Book and Candle (1958)

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This month’s Classic Movies and Late Night oddities line-up at The Prytania has been, without question, the best run of repertory programming I’ve ever seen in New Orleans.  Even with the caveat that I came of age during the AMC Palaces’ total decimation of the city’s indie cinema scene, the wealth of classic horror titles on their October docket feels like an all-time great moment in local theatrical exhibition: Psycho, The Shining, The Craft, The Wicker Man, Don’t Look Now, Scream, Halloween, Night of the Living Dead, Friday the 13th, Dracula’s Daughter, Beetlejuice, The Black Cat, The Exorcist, The Creeping Flesh, Theatre of Blood, Little Shop of Horrors, and their regular midnight reruns of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  It’s such a staggering assemblage that I had to be choosy about which screenings to make time for, especially since The Broad was screening some of my favorite oddball horror sequels on the other side of town: Halloween III, A Nightmare on Elm Street III, and Friday the 13th Part VIII, all choice selections.  What a time to be unalive! Maybe it’s a little silly, then, that I treated The Prytania’s Sunday morning screening of Bell, Book and Candle as high-priority, can’t-miss viewing while I skipped out on a few screenings of classics I already know & love.  Bell, Book and Candle is a fluffy major-studio romcom about a lovelorn witch, establishing the 1950s middle ground between its 40s equivalent I Married a Witch and its 60s equivalent Bewitched.  It’s not an electrifying watch, but it is a cozy one, providing the same witchy-but-not-scary seasonal viewing most modern audiences find in Hocus Pocus instead.  While it feels a little puny in comparison to some of the all-time classics it shared a marquee with this month, its exhibition was more of a special occasion in some ways, since it has weirdly spotty home-video distribution right now, available only on Tubi or on DVD through the New Orleans Public Library.  More importantly, it fit in nicely with the usual programming of The Prytania’s Classic Movies slot, due to its unlikely connection to Alfred Hitchcock.

Part of the reason this month’s classic horror line-up at The Prytania feels so refreshingly adventurous is because the single-screen landmark usually only has the space in their schedule for a couple well-worn, widely beloved classics – more TCM (Turner Classic Movies) than TCM (Texas Chainsaw Massacre).  It’s still the most dependable repertory venue in the city, though, and over the years I’ve come to associate it with Hitchcock’s catalog in particular, since the director seemed to be a personal favorite of late proprietor Rene Brunet, Jr.  I’ve seen a good handful of Hitchcock titles for the very first time by attending The Prytania on Sunday mornings: To Catch a Thief, Strangers on a Train, Saboteur, Rope, Suspicion, Stage Fright, and Frenzy, to name them all.  Unfortunately, Hitchcock did not direct his own witchy love-spell romcom for The Prytania to program this month (they opted for Psycho instead), but Bell, Book and Candle does share some incidental similarities to his most critically lauded work.  It’s essentially the cutesy, witchy B-side to Vertigo. Both films feature Kim Novak putting Jimmy Stewart under a spell while his jilted, more socially appropriate love interest works out her romantic frustration by furiously painting on canvas alone in her apartment.  Novak’s given more to do here than play Stewart’s object of desire, since she initially holds all the (magical) power in their relationship and the vulnerability of their romance puts her in danger instead of him.  In either case, she is treated as a kind of fetish object by the camera. Here, she’s so performatively feminine that she’s basically feline, as indicated by the onscreen credit for the costumer who provided her furs.  There’s also an intense, Tarantino-esque focus on her bare feet, which is presented as a witchy character quirk but becomes outrageously obsessive by the time we linger on them slipping in & out of high heels.  The difference is that in Bell, Book and Candle she’s an aspirational figure for a lovelorn audience, while in Vertigo she’s a collectible figurine for an obsessive Stewart (and his directorial counterpart).

Novak plays Gillian Holroyd—a powerful young witch making waves on the Manhattan occult scene—whose loneliness & boredom at the top fixates her on the unsuspecting, nonmagical book publisher Shepherd Henderson, played by Stewart.  She’s careful to only share her powers with those she trusts: a bumbling hipster brother who’s smoked one too many jazz cigarettes (Jack Lemon, auditioning for his career-making part in Some Like It Hot), a kooky upstairs aunt (Elsa “Bride of Frankenstein” Lanchester), and the fellow witches & warlocks who drown martinis and talk shop at the magical dive bar The Zodiac Club.  Falling for her new neighbor and enchanting him to ditch his uptight fiancée is what unravels her usually careful approach to witchcraft, both because he’s a publisher who’s threatening to expose her coven with an upcoming book titled Magic in Manhattan and because falling in love means that she’ll lose her magical powers, according to The Rules.  Outside a couple scenes in which Novak and her witchy family (including the actress’s real-life pet Siamese cat) cast spells in her lavish apartment, there isn’t much genuine horror imagery in Bell, Book and Candle.  It’s just as much a precursor to Sex and the City as it is a precursor to Bewitched, with most of the central drama resulting from the witch’s disastrous, Carrie Bradshaw style attempts to “have it all” while living in The Big City.  It’s all very light, cozy, and unrushed, with only a couple jokes about the coven’s “Un-American activities” and what possible insults “witch” might rhyme with registering as anything especially risqué.  Still, it was wonderful to see on the big screen for the first time with a giggling crowd, and it was a wonderful middle ground between this month’s run of classic-horror obscurities at The Prytania and their Classic Movies series’ usual TCM-friendly fare.

While I’m fixating on Bell, Book and Candle‘s appropriateness as seasonal programming, I do want to note that it resonated with me as more of a Christmas movie than a Halloween one, despite all of its thematic & aesthetic focus on witchcraft.  Much of the early stretch of the film is set during Christmas rituals, including a Christmas Eve get-together at The Zodiac Club and Novak trading presents with her family around a modernist “tree” sculpture.  Halloween and Christmas both have cultural significance as liminal stretches of the calendar when the veil between worlds is at its thinnest, so it makes just as much sense to me that this story about a young witch in love would be set during Yule as it would during Samhain.  It also makes sense to me that its Christmastime setting would be forgotten when choosing seasonal programming, especially as memories of the film get muddled with its better-remembered predecessor I Married a Witch.  Speaking personally, I’m grateful that I got to catch Bell, Book and Candle on the big screen for my first viewing, but I am mentally filing it away as a Christmas movie for future revisits.  As a life-long Scrooge, I’m always desperate for lightly spooky Yuletide movies that aren’t so saccharine they rot your teeth, while witchy Halloween movies are already more than plentiful. 

-Brandon Ledet

Hellbender (2022)

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What should be the ideal goal of no-budget backyard filmmaking?  Is it enough to just document an insular community’s collaboration on a fun, collective art project?  Should it also approximate the production values of a “legitimate”, professional production as much as its resources allow?  Or should backyard filmmakers reject the aesthetics of professionalism entirely and instead distinguish themselves as outsider artists?

Your response to those big-picture questions will likely determine your enthusiasm for the low-budget folk horror Hellbender, which recently premiered on Shudder after a buzzy festival run in 2021.  I was charmed by the film’s backstory as a fun art project shared between a real-life family of outsider filmmakers, named—no joke—The Adams Family.  Where I’m skeptical of the film’s enthusiastic reception among horror nerds, though, is that it feels like it’s specifically being praised for the near-professional quality of its production values.  The camera is shockingly active in Hellbender, while most backyard movies rely on static shots due to limited gear & crew.  It’s got enough drone shots, CG effects, and psychedelic flashes of double-exposure horror imagery to pass itself off as a “real” movie – or at least a standard-issue, straight-to-Shudder horror streamer.  I can’t help but question the value of that achievement, though, as impressive as it is.  Backyard movies are best when they’re a little scuzzy & chaotic, touching on volatile images & personalities you won’t find in a professional Hollywood picture.  By that metric, Hellbender is almost competent to a fault: a little too slick to be especially valuable as a backyard movie but not expensive enough to feel fully legit.

The most satisfying aspect of Hellbender is the way its peculiar off-camera production circumstances are echoed in its onscreen drama.  The real-life mother-daughter duo Toby Poser & Zelda Adams play the fictional mother-daughter duo “Mother” & Izzy in the film. Together, they write playful, Jucifer-style metal songs in the fictional band H6LLB6ND6R – a mirror reflection of their real-life familial collaborations as outsider filmmakers (along with additional family members John & Lulu Adams, who also appear on-camera in minor roles).  As adorable as it is that a family can work closely enough to make intergenerational art together, there is something insular & cult-like about their isolation from the outside world, which the Adams are smart to make an explicit part of the text.  The mother strictly quarantines her daughter in a remote woodland cabin as a safety measure, raising her to believe she is too sick to be around outsiders.  It turns out what she means is the daughter is sick as fuck.  They both descend from a bloodline of witches, sharing an inherited power that can be dangerously addictive & destructive when paired with a teenager’s erratic behavior.  The resulting chaos of the daughter-witch inevitably being unleashed into the world unsocialized (a familiar chaos for any overly sheltered child who finally breaks free of parental control) is often cute, often gnarly, and sometimes even genuinely magical.  It just also feels like a cheaper version of superior teen-girl-puberty horrors like Jennifer’s Body, Ginger Snaps, and Teeth, when its outsider-art status means it had the freedom to become something much wilder & less familiar.

If I’m underselling the achievement of these resourceful, self-taught filmmakers shooting a near-professional movie in the woods, it’s probably because I’m undersold on The Adams Family myself.  I’m assuming that a lot of the ecstatic praise from horror nerds is a result of that niche audience having already been familiar with the Adams’ work, watching their craft evolve over the past decade of increasingly competent movies.  Hell, if you’ve been following the family’s career, you’ve practically watched their kids grow up onscreen, which must come with its own inherent emotional investment in their lives & art.  As someone who’s happily over a dozen films deep into the Matt Farley catalog of no-budget horror comedies, I can attest to these long-term collaborations among insular communities improving the longer you spend with the weirdos involved.  I enjoyed Hellbender enough to want to look back to older Adams Family titles like The Deeper You Dig & Halfway to Zen, especially since I’m apparently craving something a little rougher around the edges from them.  I’m questioning the merit of working so hard to make a backyard movie feel professional instead of feeling dangerously unrestrained, but I also wasn’t around for the family’s journey to this milestone.  Luckily, it doesn’t matter if there are a few mild naysayers in the audience like myself anyway, since the film was pre-emptively canonized in the recent folk horror documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched before it even hit wide release, so it’s already guaranteed to be cited as a significant work in that subgenre for decades to come regardless of its priorities or ideals as low-budget outsider art.

-Brandon Ledet

Gretel & Hansel (2020)

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Of all the directors who contributed to the atmospheric moods & slow-building dread of the so-called “elevated horror” trend in the 2010s, Oz Perkins stands out to me as one of the most passionately dedicated to the cause. His mood-over-payoffs ethos worked better for me in The Blackcoat’s Daughter than it did in I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, but between those two features I’ve been impressed with his patience & subtlety as a filmmaker (and an obviously genuine horror nerd). Specifically, Perkins’s attention to sound design in establishing a spooky atmosphere is near unmatched in his industry – something that’s difficult to fully soak in as an audience who can usually only access his films on streaming platforms instead of proper theatrical environments. Until now, the best chance most audiences had to fully appreciate one of Perkins’s atmospheric creep-outs was with an expensive pair of headphones in a dim room with no smartphones in reach, a ginormous feat of self-control. Gretel & Hansel, the director’s third feature, was his first to offer most audiences a chance to see one of his spooky mood pieces on a proper big screen—in a multiplex, even—thanks to its wide theatrical distribution through mainstream channels. Hilariously, Perkins used that opportunity to deliver his version of a fun popcorn flick, which turns out to be just as impenetrable & challenging as his no-budget “elevated horror” indies.

Gretel & Hansel feels like Oz Perkins having fun with his toys – fully cutting loose, letting his hair down, kicking off his shoes. Most audiences are still likely to find it a confounding bore. Despite the rigid narrative structure offered by its fairy tale source material, most of the film feels like watching a bunch of horror nerds dick around with expensive camera equipment in the woods. Its squared-off aspect ratio, handheld cinematography, stained-glass lighting hues, and synth-scored shots of ominous trees are incredibly exciting on an aesthetic level, but I’m not convinced that’s what general audiences are looking for in wide-distribution horror releases. By the time Perkins remembers to pack in the jump scares, familiar narrative structure, and heavy metal album art imagery that mainstream audiences expect from Horror at the multiplex, he’s already lost their attention. As someone who’s already on the hook for the director’s signature style of slow-moving, atmospheric indulgences, these intrusions of conventional bombast in an otherwise minimalist screen space felt absolutely wild – explosive even. By “elevated horror” standards, Gretel & Hansel is an absolute hoot, a total riot. I still imagine it’s going to be met by most audiences with a shrug & a yawn. Perkins’s vision of what constitutes a mainstream horror film creates a fascinating tension with the quiet restraint of his natural filmmaking tendencies; you just have to appreciate both sides of that divide to fully dig it.

A pair of siblings wander into the woods in search of work & food at the insistence of their parents, only to be adopted by an obvious witch who plans to cook & eat them. You know the rest. Except, you don’t, since Perkins (and screenwriter Rob Hayes) reshape & repurpose so many foundational elements of their Brothers Grimm source material that they might have well abandoned it entirely if it weren’t for the name recognition on the marquee (and its availability in the public domain). Much emphasis is laid on the siblings’ initial journey in the spooky woods – even pausing for a recreational mushroom trip just for funsies, as if this were a hangout comedy instead of a horror flick. Further, only one of the children appears to be a future menu item in the witch’s diet, while the other (played by IT breakout star Sophia Lillis) is effectively adopted as a witch in training. There’s also an entirely different fairy tale about The Girl in the Pink Hat that precedes & overlaps with the traditional “Hansel & Gretel” template, completely disrupting expectations on where the story will go. Intrusions of huntsmen, wolves, and old-fashioned ghouls at the periphery of the frame suggest that this is less an adaptation of a specific Brothers Grimm bedtime story than it is the resulting dream when the listener falls asleep halfway through the tale. Perkins & Hayes seemingly jolt awake for the film’s third act and scramble to tie all their narrative loose ends together into a traditional linear narrative, but it’s mostly a fool’s errand. Any last-minute attempts to tidy up this spooky-goofy mess only make it more blatantly strange as a whole.

The most amusing false gesture toward conventionality in Gretel & Hansel is its initial presentation as “a story with a lesson.” The film introduces itself as a traditional fairy tale that warns children to beware of gifts, frequently chiding “Nothing is given without something else being taken away.” Over time, feminist themes about the social prison of domestic duties and the vulnerability of young women in a world stacked against them bubble to the surface, as if this were a modern update to Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves. Ultimately, the only clear message conveyed by the movie overall is “The woods are scary.” There isn’t time for much else as Perkins busies himself packing the screen with as many visual indulgences as possible: spooky triangles (truly the scariest shape), smoke machines clashing with colorful lights, a faceless witch figure who could only be described as Orville Heck, etc. Instead of a spooky mood piece where Nothing Happens (a complaint that could be ungenerously lobbed at Perkins’s earlier films), this is a goofy mood piece where so much happens that it’s impossible to make sense of it all. The tension between conventional genre payoffs & Oz Perkins’s “elevated horror” tendencies is absolutely thrilling throughout this self-conflicted novelty. I’m in love with how playful & unpredictable it feels from scene to scene while still maintaining the quiet atmosphere of Perkins’s earlier pictures at large. I don’t believe he has it in him to make a genuine opening-weekend crowd pleaser, and this delightfully weird attempt at such a prospect is downright adorable.

-Brandon Ledet

Viy (1967)

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There’s a tricky balance between patience & expectation in recommending the historical curio Viy (aka Spirit of Evil) to the uninitiated. This is a one-of-a-kind cinematic artifact that concludes with what has to be one of the most gorgeous scares in the history of its artform. I’m already getting ahead of myself in overhyping it, though, as that glorious delayed payoff is a mere five-minute stretch of the film’s (mercifully brief) 77min runtime. There’s an early sequence that promises witchcraft & devilry for audiences patient enough to await its arrival, but much of the film is a slow, lightly comedic build to that final spectacle. I can only report that the witchy, demonic climax is well worth the wait, and that the movie would still be worth your attention even if it weren’t – due to its cultural significance as an early Soviet horror.

Cited as the first horror film produced in the Soviet Union, Viy feels like it’s gleefully getting away with something even when it’s pretending to be well-behaved. In the same era when Serious Artists like Andrei Tarkovsky struggled to express their religious beliefs onscreen under Soviet censorship, Viy sidesteps those restrictions by passing itself off as “a folk tale.” Adapted from the eponymous Nikolai Gogol text (which also inspired Mario Bava’s cult classic Black Sunday), it follows the story of young priests in training who very much believe in God, witches, and The Devil – with forbidden Christian iconography often decorating the sets they occupy. The mood is kept exceedingly light, though, as the bumbling would-be priests are basically frat boy buffoons on Spring Break who meet their end at the hands of a powerful witch. Despite the severity of its political & religious transgressions, this is essentially a horror comedy – with a comedic score keeping the mood light throughout (except at it blissfully chaotic climax).

While drunkenly enjoying a rowdy break from his studies in town, a young priest-in-training catches the lustful eye of a horny old witch. Unamused by her sexual advances, he beats her to death with a stone – a grotesquely outsized reaction to her enchantment. As retribution, the witch poses as the beautiful corpse of a local townie, insisting before her “death” that the very priest who bludgeoned her be summoned to pray for her soul over three consecutive nights. In classic fairy tale fashion, her menacing revenge on the idiot priest gradually escalates over those three nights—eventually reaching an intense supernatural crescendo during the final prayer session. The priest continually tries to weasel his way out of his responsibility to pray over the corpse (and, more to the point, to pay for his crime of drunkenly assaulting a witch), but his doomed fate is sealed as soon as the request is made. He gets his just desserts on that third night in a spectacularly satisfying act of supernatural revenge.

Viy’s value as a Soviet Era artifact is not going to interest every horror nerd. It’s a niche territory that’s only made more challenging by its shoddy English vocal dub, which plays like a book-on-tape translation where a single performer voices every character. If its historical context interests you, though (and if you generally have the patience for delayed payoffs to moody, atmospheric builds) the film is well worth the effort to reach its delirious haunted-house climax. The five-minute stretch that makes good on its long-teased witchcraft & devilry—boosted by an importation of Silent Era special effects into a 1960s filmmaking aesthetic—will leave an intense impression on your psyche that overpowers any minor qualms with its build-up. This is a quick, oddly lighthearted folk-horror curio with a fascinating historical context and an eagerness to wow the audience in its tension-relieving climax. That’s more than enough to melt my own horror-hungry heart, but your own mileage may vary.

-Brandon Ledet

Hagazussa (2019)

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On a superficial level, Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse is doomed to forever be reductively understood as the German answer to The Witch. In a lot of ways, the comparisons are unavoidable. Hagazussa may be set centuries earlier than its American counterpart and in an entirely different region of the world, but both films share an academic pride in being thoroughly researched recreations of antique lore & superstitions surrounding witchcraft – so that they both separately function as 2010s updates to the silent horror classic Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages. Both films also center on fringe families who live ostracized in the isolating wilderness outside their nearby community. Both films focus on the coming-of-age struggles of the daughter in particular, and what tragedies superstitions dictate that transformation brings upon her family. If Hagazussa was looking to avoid these Witch comparisons entirely, it did itself no favors by making this exiled family goatherders by trade, so that dozens of goat closeups recall the VVitchy presence of Black Phillip. Also, not for nothing, the title Hagazussa supposedly translates to “Witch” in Old High German.

I’m not sure this 1:1 comparison could ever be favorable to Hagazussa, which is somehow much, much more difficulty quiet, brutal, and inscrutable than its American predecessor. I remember hearing a lot of grumbling in my opening-weekend screening of The Witch, where an unprepared audience registered vocal dissent against what they had assumed was going to be a more conventional horror film than the slow-burn familial drama that was delivered. I imagine that same crowd would have hurled literal rotten tomatoes at the screen during Hagazussa, which makes The Witch look like a bombastic Michael Bay action comedy by comparison. This is a mostly dialogue-free descent into misery as one lonely young woman gradually loses everything & everyone she has because she’s understood to be a witch. Hagazussa often borders on the avant-garde subgenre of Slow Cinema in which long, silent takes hold on a single image for relative eternities in an effort to break through to something more artistically substantial than traditional entertainment. As someone who doesn’t have the patience for Slow Cinema even in the best of circumstances, watching Hagazussa alone in my living room was an effective window into what it feels like for mainstream audiences who suffer through Elevated Horror™ slowburns when expecting a more traditional slasher or creature feature. It comes across as tedious instead of properly atmospheric.

Still, although the film tested my patience (which often failed), I admired so much of its witchy, metal-as-fuck imagery. Black cats, cauldrons, thrones of skulls, plague carts, and mushroom trips into the darkness of the human soul decorated the screen in a continually compelling way, even despite my personal issues with the pacing. As soon as I hit the drone metal title card, I knew I was in for a quietly spooky visual feast, one that recalled similar history-minded arthouse Euro horrors like Häxan, November, and The Juniper Tree. It’s not like nothing happens plot-wise either. There are plenty of heartbreaking betrayals, psychedelic freak-outs, shocking sexual transgressions, and tragic downfalls throughout to keep you mind occupied, even if they’re doled out at a glacial pace. I wonder if I would have been more on-board with the film in a proper theater, with no opportunities to be distracted from the black-magic tragedy on the screen. At least, I can see it going over well among a film fest crowd with the right temperament. As is, though, I mostly appreciated Hagazussa as a folk-metal mood board, not necessarily a feature film. It was most useful to me as a taste of my own medicine for rolling my eyes at the strangers around me who were audibly bored by The Witch.

-Brandon Ledet