The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[domino harvey]

I have the DVD (not that I think it’s a film that needs more than a YT-level encode), I should give it a listen as it presumably comes from that

EDIT : Or maybe not, based on that edit!

[Never Cursed]

The setup is as follows: the commentators are Wishman and cinematographer C. Davis Smith (with whom it is suggested Wishman had a romantic relationship). Smith is kinda old man-ish and doesn't really remember the movie all that well, and a lot of the commentary (or at least the half I listened to) is Smith remembering what's about to happen and Wishman saying variations of "shut up, stop spoiling the movie!" to him. They're also both very proud of their work and ultimately fairly happy with how the film turned out, which is... not really a position I think any of us are open to meeting (as an example, Wishman lavishes a lot of praise on the lead actress, but doesn't actually get into the specifics of why she liked her other than "she took direction really well"). It definitely wasn't for me, but maybe I'm off-base there

[Mr Sausage]

My Halloween viewings:


Night of the Living Dead (Tom Savini, 1990)

Gus Van Sant ought to’ve watched this shot-for-shot remake before embarking on his version of Psycho. He might’ve felt less of a perverse need to drain the effectiveness from a piece of classic horror for the sake of adding colour and modern special effects to it. Tho’ how the filmmakers managed to make this one less gory than the 1968 original is a mystery. And with Tom Savini helming it!

Halloween Kills (David Gordon Green, 2021)

Despite wishing to pump Michael Myers up to near mythological levels, the film doesn’t much understand what makes him scary. Confronted by a line of firefighters, if Michael had simply walked right past them as if they weren’t there, following some mysterious purpose we’ll never know—that’s creepy and in line with the first film. Having him tighten his grip on his weapon and then walk forward to massacre the group of them…silly, and not much like Michael Myers. More Jason from Freddy vs Jason. Much as the 2018 film, the sheer talent and pedigree make the flaws and dim spots more pronounced and aggravating. This is still a better slasher film and a better Halloween film than has been the case historically. But, still, it’s a less successful version of the only intermittently successful 2018 film. And yet, as with the 2018 film, there is one part of this that does live up to the original: the score. It’s terrific.

Dr. Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

Tho’ a poor writer, King early in his career had a talent for larger images of horror: a kid chased through a hotel by his murderous father; a small town infested with ancient vampires; a young girl murdering an auditorium of fellow students; a father bringing his family back from the dead; a clown dragging children into the sewers. But he doesn’t seem content with that; he wants to build large metaphysical structures that explain and explain and explain, if not the nature of evil, at least the endless workings of it. Kubrick’s film zeroed in on King’s strength, those images. Flanagan’s film is born of King’s weakness. The strongest part of The Shining wasn’t the ghosts and psychic phenomena, but the family unraveling into madness and murder. The metaphysical stuff helped amplify the horror. Here, in Dr. Sleep, those ghosts and psychics take centre stage. This is the story of The Shining’s less interesting pieces. What the ghosts are up to following their eviction from their haunted house. But for what it is, the film is put together with skill. Flanagan doesn’t have the same pedigree as Green and co., but he has a surer grasp of what’s creepy and unsettling. He can build on and amplify Kubrick’s imagery in a way Green couldn’t with Carpenter’s. Think: the footprints on the bathmat. If the film had had more small scale, personal terrors, it would’ve been something. But as a follow up to Kubrick’s film, this is no embarrassment.

The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears (Cattet & Forzani, 2013)

Controlling, obsessed men who know, or suspect, or imagine, or dream, or even fantasize that their women have succumbed to a sexual violence they may, in part or in whole, have enjoyed and welcomed. The film delights in a purely aesthetic, sensory, tactile expression of baldly Freudian ideas, the exact Freudian ideas that delighted directors of giallo cinema. Sex and death swirl around each other, fracturing time, place, identity, and the mind. Ideas are embodied in fetishism, but not the fetishism of the giallo killer; the fetishism of giallo cinema itself. The very perceptual resources of the cinema become an erotic object, a sadistic and masochistic erotic object. The elements of cinema are pulled apart, the film threatening to collapse under the strain of fetishistic worship as each part is separated, isolated, and luxuriated over; the pleasures of the style step constantly over into painful excess. Cattet and Forzani reach down to the very bones of exploitation cinema. In my limited judgement, theirs is as interesting and vital a creative project as you’ll find in cinema today.

[knives]

I really strongly disliked Halloween Kills. Which is a mess that as you say doesn’t understand what is interesting about the underlying material. Below’s what I wrote on letterboxd.

It’s shocking just how base level incompetent this is in every way. I suppose at least we get what we’re promised. This takes place on Halloween and there are (way too many gorey) kills. What makes me even more frustrated with the film is that it has two really good ideas that could have made for a genuinely great entertainment. At the start it looks like Green is returning to the Gialli roots of the franchise with a flashback structure to the first film focusing on the police search during the first film. It’s not a well written section, but it at least is interesting and has some tension. Alas that is quickly disposed of and we return to Green’s first movie in the most trite way possible (here’s a hint you can’t emphasize that Myers is only human while having grandpa do that).

Well after all hope for the movie is lost it does manage to come up with a second good idea which leads into the absolute best scenes of the film suggesting using series expectations for social commentary and humor. Spoiler though: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil did it better.

In short there’s another maniac running around and his basic premise gets the town into a Fury as they with all the stupidity in the world try to hunt down and kill Myers forming a lynch mob far more terrifying than the boogeyman. This is great and suggests a version of the film starring Curtis, which seems a contractual must, without getting bogged down in a boring murder every ten seconds. That leads into the films worst aspect which is pointless, boring cameos from whom I only assume are Green’s friends that go on way too long since we know they only exist to get murdered. It seriously bloats the film’s runtime, there’s only maybe 80 minutes of real film here, and is just not entertaining.

Returning to what I liked about the film, I am really annoyed at it, Green even ruins this because he has no clue what he wants. Is this a funny parody where we are supposed to laugh at death, is it a serious take on how we become monsters when fighting perceived threats, is he film in full agreement that mob justice could be good? What does this stupid movie want? If I had to hazard a guess it would be that it doesn’t know what it wants, but it’s makers need money for other things so they threw together what ideas they could muster and called it a day.

[therewillbeblus]

I don’t know if Doctor Sleep works so much as a conventional horror movie, or a follow up to Kubrick’s, but it’s implicitly connected to the themes of the books (the sequel I haven’t read, but regardless of the quality of writing, The Shining’s first third is still the most naked confession of an addict mind on the verge of bottoming out- reading that in early sobriety, without any substance to mask the guilt and shame, was like reading my own thoughts written down- far eerier than the ghosts!) - Doctor Sleep is more squarely focused on recovery through 12-step programs- it’s almost comical how frequently I’ve heard this book recommended over the better part of a decade in those halls. Anyways, I wrote more about it here but I think it’s a masterpiece in its own right.

I’m curious, Mr. Sausage, did you watch the widely-recommended Director’s Cut, or the original version half an hour shorter? I can’t comment on the original cut, but the DC breathes- and I have to wonder how much of the recovery themes, or Rebecca Ferguson’s own mirroring behavior of a addict gang leader in the dangerous throes of antisocial self-preservation, come through in a rushed version of what is an expansive spiritual journey superficially disguised as merely a supernatural horror blockbuster

[Mr Sausage]

I saw the director’s cut, as recommended by a friend of mine.

[Mr Sausage]

I really strongly disliked Halloween Kills. Which is a mess that as you say doesn’t understand what is interesting about the underlying material. Below’s what I wrote on letterboxd.

It’s shocking just how base level incompetent this is in every way. I suppose at least we get what we’re promised. This takes place on Halloween and there are (way too many gorey) kills. What makes me even more frustrated with the film is that it has two really good ideas that could have made for a genuinely great entertainment. At the start it looks like Green is returning to the Gialli roots of the franchise with a flashback structure to the first film focusing on the police search during the first film. It’s not a well written section, but it at least is interesting and has some tension. Alas that is quickly disposed of and we return to Green’s first movie in the most trite way possible (here’s a hint you can’t emphasize that Myers is only human while having grandpa do that).

Well after all hope for the movie is lost it does manage to come up with a second good idea which leads into the absolute best scenes of the film suggesting using series expectations for social commentary and humor. Spoiler though: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil did it better.

In short there’s another maniac running around and his basic premise gets the town into a Fury as they with all the stupidity in the world try to hunt down and kill Myers forming a lynch mob far more terrifying than the boogeyman. This is great and suggests a version of the film starring Curtis, which seems a contractual must, without getting bogged down in a boring murder every ten seconds. That leads into the films worst aspect which is pointless, boring cameos from whom I only assume are Green’s friends that go on way too long since we know they only exist to get murdered. It seriously bloats the film’s runtime, there’s only maybe 80 minutes of real film here, and is just not entertaining.

Returning to what I liked about the film, I am really annoyed at it, Green even ruins this because he has no clue what he wants. Is this a funny parody where we are supposed to laugh at death, is it a serious take on how we become monsters when fighting perceived threats, is he film in full agreement that mob justice could be good? What does this stupid movie want? If I had to hazard a guess it would be that it doesn’t know what it wants, but it’s makers need money for other things so they threw together what ideas they could muster and called it a day.

Can’t disagree. The film’s a mess, but it has some good ideas latent in it. I spent a lot of the run time imagining a better film using the same materials. There’s a good movie in there, it just needed someone to coax it out. Someone who understood that Michael Myers becomes pretty boring if he’s endlessly bursting out of places suddenly. Remember those beautiful tracking shots that used to follow him around as he watched people? Whatever happened to those? Green ought to rewatch the original, get a sense for how to craft a full suspense sequence instead of repeat Paul’s death scene endlessly.

[Mr Sausage]

I don’t know if Doctor Sleep works so much as a conventional horror movie, or a follow up to Kubrick’s, but it’s implicitly connected to the themes of the books (the sequel I haven’t read, but regardless of the quality of writing, The Shining’s first third is still the most naked confession of an addict mind on the verge of bottoming out- reading that in early sobriety, without any substance to mask the guilt and shame, was like reading my own thoughts written down- far eerier than the ghosts!) - Doctor Sleep is more squarely focused on recovery through 12-step programs- it’s almost comical how frequently I’ve heard this book recommended over the better part of a decade in those halls. Anyways, I wrote more about it here but I think it’s a masterpiece in its own right.

I’m curious, Mr. Sausage, did you watch the widely-recommended Director’s Cut, or the original version half an hour shorter? I can’t comment on the original cut, but the DC breathes- and I have to wonder how much of the recovery themes, or Rebecca Ferguson’s own mirroring behavior of a addict gang leader in the dangerous throes of antisocial self-preservation, come through in a rushed version of what is an expansive spiritual journey superficially disguised as merely a supernatural horror blockbuster

Looking back at my post, I gave a poor account of my opinion of the film. I don’t think you can tell that I actually liked it. It’s a handsomely mounted film, far more successful than one would ever think a sequel to The Shining could be. And that scene at the bar in The Overlook is genuinely moving, and all the more so because it comes with all the baggage of Kubrick’s film.

But the movie’s let down by its source material. However well executed, it’s still the story of a band of smoke-sucking hippy serial killers in RVs who get gunned down in the woods by a pair of day labourors. Who the hell thought that was a good idea. Oh, right, Stephen King did. Because who else would hang a story on something so goofy.

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah, I have very complicated feelings on King. I've admittedly only read core selective works of his (The Shining, The Stand, The Dark Tower series, half of It, all of which I more-or-less enjoyed) and seen a few miniseries/film adaptations of works I haven't read where he's been heavily involved, and disliked most of those. He's a cinematic writer (who can forget the lobstrosities in the second DT book?) but doesn't know how to end books- in The Stand it's almost funny how he literally blows up his own story with the most inane and anticlimactic device, though I thought The Dark Tower's ending was existentially perfect in its cynicism for the material. Maybe he isn't always a great writer or story designer, but when he touches first-person accounts of addiction, he involves you in the experience on a very raw, visceral level, and of course I appreciate him far more than perhaps his skill sets deserve because he was one of the few celebrity artists who served as a voice of inspiration that one could continue creative pursuits with success in sobriety -vs. Lars von Trier, who famously denied hope that he would be able to continue making art sober- during a turning point for me as the devil and angel on the shoulder, so to speak.

I won't argue that the story isn't silly, but- and I don't think I'm reaching here- Doctor Sleep's subtext (well, it's not exactly hidden in most parts!) is all about the innerworkings of active addiction and the power of recovery/spiritual mindsets to combat addiction. Whether or not the surface-story is silly feels secondary to the metaphors and literal action involving application of recovery principles that hit so many right notes, but again, I'm well aware that this is a film/story that is impossible for me to be subjective about. I also thought Rebecca Ferguson's group was a ridiculous superfluous set of villains (which, yeah, to some degree it is) until I realized what King was doing with it, and I'm curious if the source treats the antagonists with more complexity since the film keeps things on the surface level, even if there's clear depth to be mined there. The whole thing is so esoterically woven into 12-step culture that I've been tempted to write a book about it, but even I don't think the movie/story is good enough to warrant that much time and effort!

[colinr0380]

I'm really glad that you enjoyed The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears, Mr Sausage! I keep thinking that they made the kind of film that is worth going back and revisiting over and over, especially after seeing more and more classic giallo titles, as it rewards the viewer for getting deeper into its subgenre's preoccupations. It feels both supernatural and mundane simultaneously. About a strange world that temptingly feels both just about understandable and yet utterly inexplicable at the same time (especially strange seeming to the male characters, who need to interpret and often end up at the mercy of events, rather than the female ones who just appear to go with the flow and at least participate in their sequences more), because a lot of the wilder sequences feel as if they are taking place inside the heads of the characters as they ponder out the possible reasons for things being the way that they are, and not how they 'should' be.

[Mr Sausage]

Yeah, I have very complicated feelings on King. I've admittedly only read core selective works of his (The Shining, The Stand, The Dark Tower series, half of It, all of which I more-or-less enjoyed) and seen a few miniseries/film adaptations of works I haven't read where he's been heavily involved, and disliked most of those. He's a cinematic writer (who can forget the lobstrosities in the second DT book?) but doesn't know how to end books- in The Stand it's almost funny how he literally blows up his own story with the most inane and anticlimactic device, though I thought The Dark Tower's ending was existentially perfect in its cynicism for the material. Maybe he isn't always a great writer or story designer, but when he touches first-person accounts of addiction, he involves you in the experience on a very raw, visceral level, and of course I appreciate him far more than perhaps his skill sets deserve because he was one of the few celebrity artists who served as a voice of inspiration that one could continue creative pursuits with success in sobriety -vs. Lars von Trier, who famously denied hope that he would be able to continue making art sober- during a turning point for me as the devil and angel on the shoulder, so to speak.

I won't argue that the story isn't silly, but- and I don't think I'm reaching here- Doctor Sleep's subtext (well, it's not exactly hidden in most parts!) is all about the innerworkings of active addiction and the power of recovery/spiritual mindsets to combat addiction. Whether or not the surface-story is silly feels secondary to the metaphors and literal action involving application of recovery principles that hit so many right notes, but again, I'm well aware that this is a film/story that is impossible for me to be subjective about. I also thought Rebecca Ferguson's group was a ridiculous superfluous set of villains (which, yeah, to some degree it is) until I realized what King was doing with it, and I'm curious if the source treats the antagonists with more complexity since the film keeps things on the surface level, even if there's clear depth to be mined there. The whole thing is so esoterically woven into 12-step culture that I've been tempted to write a book about it, but even I don't think the movie/story is good enough to warrant that much time and effort!

Is it subtext? My impression was those things are outright text. Before taking him to the program, that one guy outright asks Dan: do you believe in a higher power, something you have no control over? If nothing else, that right there sets the real terms of the stakes. Addiction is a battle for the soul.

And you for sure should write that book. If it’s this personal for you and means this much to you, who cares if the object isn’t a Bernini sculpture or whatever. Go for it. I’d read it.

[colinr0380]

It might have been inadvisable to go through these videos at the current time given that we are supposed to be following the emergency reports on the media that are providing more than enough doom laden pronouncements, but in the wake of that I did find myself drawn to a few interesting YouTube videos that seem to be a new wrinkle in the found footage subgenre, which seems to be getting classed as "Analogue Horror". These take the form of American cable TV broadcasts that regularly get their signal hijacked for emergency messages in all sorts of forms, suggesting anything from wartime conditions to alien invasion to even more Lovecraftian things. I really like the stylistics and in their best moments it can feel like they are a somewhat updated take on the 1938 Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast.

With thanks to the Nexpo video for bringing it up, the source of all this appears to be the Local58 channel, which in just eight videos over just over two years has managed to hit all the beats of found footage horror films such as GPS devices in cars driving through the dark to pre-determined meet ups with loud jump scare aliens through to indoctrination videos and worrying exhortions to action (in Contingency which is perhaps the ultimate "oopsie" moment of accidentally broadcasting something to rival the War of the Worlds broadcast panic, only it might not be so easily apologised for after the fact!). It is all something to do with the Moon apparently. I particularly like the most recent video, Skywatching, for all of its sound work involving the wind against the microphone and the technological clatter of different pieces of equipment being swapped in and out.

I would argue that really the final section of that video is unnecessary (much as I did not really need the monster at the end of "You Are On The Fastest Available Route") because the quiet, more grounded part of the videos were the most enthralling parts about them. I'd love hours of slow pans across the surface of an alien planet, or a dispassionate GPS voice guiding through a driving thunderstorm without the payoff! But then again I love 'slow cinema' so I'm biased!

But that is probably the difficult balancing act that these videos (and all found footage films really) have to walk, because with their focus on trying to present a 'real event' it is so easy to tip over into absurdity with just one or two missteps. For example I quite like the other series that tried to do what Local58 was doing, Channel 7, but that is occasionally pushed over the edge by the inclusion of actual people and voices in its footage (really the strange disturbingly lonely power of "Analogue Horror" appears to be scrolling text boxes and on screen text interrupting late night unmanned TV broadcasts rather than the presence of actual announcers or news readers), especially when it seems that there is only one person doing all of the different voiced roles.

However the same people behind Channel 7 have started a new, Lovecraftian seeming, series of videos under the Eventide Media Center channel, which starts off relatively low key with a discussion of Penrose shapes before coming out with perhaps the best of all these Analogue Horrors to date with the slowly encroaching threat shown almost entirely through an oscillation between a weather update screen and radar view of the incoming storm front in Oceanview Forecast, a video that really seems to have learnt the lesson that the lack of a human voice to guide the action only adds an extra level of scariness to things! (It also with the lighthouse setting makes me think of John Carpenter's The Fog!)

EDIT: And Gemini Home Entertainment seems to be the other channel to keep an eye on.

Two years to the day from Skywatching Local58 is back with the most upsetting possible take on an analog to digital switchover!

And visiting the associated linked website? :





My pie in the sky interpretation of this is that after whatever malevolent forces coming from the Moon have been reaching out and/or brainwashing the population in Weather Service were countered by the remains of unaltered humanity (by governmental attempts to maybe defuse the brainwashing in Real Sleep?) that led to a reciprocal fight back in Contingency. And perhaps somehow the forces are at their most powerfully distributed through the Analogue signal, which is both why digital switchover of Local58 was artificially delayed until 2021, and we are seeing another fight back in turning the signal off now, leading to the angry message that they might have 'cut the throat' (of the man in the Moon?) but 'there are other receivers' (such as those seen in Skywatching and You Are On The Fastest Available Route?) that can be utilised for mind control and conversion instead?

I am not entirely sure how that idea would tie in with the jumping across the space of decades of time though! Maybe we are in X-Files territory of the threat being a epoch-spanning one and we are just seeing brief flashes of both a cosmic horror beyond our comprehension and a resistance counterinsurgency battling those forces on the fringes of the television broadcasts? As in They Live?

Either way its a fascinating and evocative series of little shorts (and the sound effect design on all of them is particularly good). Plus this latest short has tied the world together with Kris Straub's Candle Cove series by namechecking Ichor Falls.

[therewillbeblus]

I won't argue that the story isn't silly, but- and I don't think I'm reaching here- Doctor Sleep's subtext (well, it's not exactly hidden in most parts!) is all about the innerworkings of active addiction and the power of recovery/spiritual mindsets to combat addiction. Whether or not the surface-story is silly feels secondary to the metaphors and literal action involving application of recovery principles that hit so many right notes, but again, I'm well aware that this is a film/story that is impossible for me to be subjective about. I also thought Rebecca Ferguson's group was a ridiculous superfluous set of villains (which, yeah, to some degree it is) until I realized what King was doing with it, and I'm curious if the source treats the antagonists with more complexity since the film keeps things on the surface level, even if there's clear depth to be mined there. The whole thing is so esoterically woven into 12-step culture that I've been tempted to write a book about it, but even I don't think the movie/story is good enough to warrant that much time and effort!

Is it subtext? My impression was those things are outright text. Before taking him to the program, that one guy outright asks Dan: do you believe in a higher power, something you have no control over? If nothing else, that right there sets the real terms of the stakes. Addiction is a battle for the soul.

Yeah, well moments like those are the ones I backpedaled on, as they're obviously text. I'm thinking more about the intricate manner that specific steps within the 12-step fellowships are not outright stated but demonstrated in an apt progression mirroring Dan's movement through his program (without, say, showing him sitting down with a sponsor and working said steps, or making clearly-stated connections between the behaviors and programmatic work), as well as Ferguson's group's function, which isn't necessarily a dense allegory but still not pronounced along the lines of addiction. I'd bet most audiences read them as your typical power-hungry set of villains, and although there's not a ton of nuance that fulfills a more complex interpretation along the lines of addiction (i.e. if there was a bit more meditation on a tragic element regarding the impetus of the group being to avoid dysphoria a la the 'self-medication hypothesis', widely agreed upon in addiction research as the motivation for addicts to engage in substance use because of unbearable cognitive-emotional pain, vs. the stigmatized false assumption that addicts are selfishly seeking more pleasure/fun..), I still think it works with a soft undercurrent of tragedy in watching this group of thinly-veiled characters as only unidimensionally-goofy due to how active addicts do sacrifice their visible dignity and worth- to the public eye but also to themselves- by revolving all thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in a vacuum around the object of craving, demonstrating complete ignorance to others' utility, and exhibiting a "spiritual loss of values" signifying one's bottom in the process. This group can both resemble a cartoonish gang of power-seekers and also tacitly embody a delusional collective of active addicts who have committed so many atrocities that they continue to move further away from the potential of reaching a vulnerable space of looking at their behavior and owning it, and instead engage in rationalizing, harming, and enveloping into 'self' deeper and deeper. It's a pretty accurate depiction of that progression, and devastating to watch and relate to in its own right.

And you for sure should write that book. If it’s this personal for you and means this much to you, who cares if the object isn’t a Bernini sculpture or whatever. Go for it. I’d read it.

Thanks for the kind words, but to clarify, I meant that I'm not as personally invested in putting in all that effort, rather than the quality of the film/book impacting that decision. There are several films, TV shows, albums, etc. that I'm more enthusiastic about the idea of writing a book about, but Doctor Sleep would probably be a lot "easier" for me to do so. Maybe one day!

[Orlac]

My Halloween viewings:


Night of the Living Dead (Tom Savini, 1990)

Gus Van Sant ought to’ve watched this shot-for-shot remake before embarking on his version of Psycho. He might’ve felt less of a perverse need to drain the effectiveness from a piece of classic horror for the sake of adding colour and modern special effects to it. Tho’ how the filmmakers managed to make this one less gory than the 1968 original is a mystery. And with Tom Savini helming it!

MPAA cuts I believe.

[Boosmahn]

Anyone here a fan of Them (David Moreau and Xavier Palud, 2006)?

Spoiler

I just watched it. I found that the twist did add that generational fear, even if having the children's identities be known from the get-go would help with that specific theme more. (For the film as a whole, it works better at the end, of course.) The only issues I had were the occasional yet frustrating lapses in judgement and… the whooping in the forest. On one hand, that would be terrifying. On the other, it felt a little silly. Did nobody stop and think that during the production process?

I was not prepared for that final scene in the tunnel. The shot of Clémentine sticking her arms through the bars as cars drive by… crushingly downbeat. It becomes even more painful when you recall Clémentine is a schoolteacher!

…and that it is one of the key films in that 'hoodie horror' subgenre of the late 2000s, that covers things like Eden Lake…

Them reminded me so, so much of Eden Lake. The latter plays with the "hoodie horror" subgenre a bit, though, considering

Spoiler

the adults were suggested to be at least partly responsible for their children's behavior.

The only other "hoodie horror" movie I've seen is F, also known as Expelled. I remember it being decent (and also having a bleak ending), although I mainly recall the "hoodies" being professional acrobatics when it came to sneaking around!

[colinr0380]

Maybe that was an attempt to mix hoodie horror with the other short lived youth trend of the late 2000s and early 2010s of parkour antics, as shown in Die Hard 4 and the District 13 films!

I think that trend promoting people running around the urban environment somewhat fell by the wayside once there were actual real life incredibly dangerous videos of crazy Russian people free climbing tall buildings in manners that would make Tom Cruise quake at the knees! Jumping around a park in free flowing movements looked a bit passé after that!

[domino harvey]

Did the fact that Chris Eigeman wrote and directed a second film four years ago pass us all by? Perhaps because it was made… for Blumhouse… and it is a dreadful looking horror movie called Seven in Heaven? WTF?

[colinr0380]

This is quite a nifty 'liminal horror' short: The Backrooms.

Apparently it is part of a big internet project similar to the SCP Foundation.

[therewillbeblus]

À l'intérieur aka Inside (Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, 2007): This is a pretty affecting European Extremity horror flick, slight and terrifying- where the fantastical departures and elasticity in subjective ventures the camera dives into prevents a one-note sustaining rhythm of claustrophobia. There's a lot to admire here: the New Wave art-film applications blended into paint-by-numbers Home Invasion Horror, the aggressive alien sound design applied to violence, the dream sequences both literally and questionably inserted as to whose perspective we're aligning with- or why... Unfortunately, the back half lost some of the momentum the first half's novelty accentuated to the point of hitting a ceiling (a high one, at that!) in part because

Spoiler

the uncertainty towards who this mystery woman/home invader was crafted so well that resolving that provocative puzzle negated its power. In the first half hour- easily the film's greatest section- I wondered if she was a supernatural presence (the relentless photo-taking of her put the idea in my mind that maybe she'd come out invisible in the pictures), a satanic cult member with an ominous agenda, or whatever the fuck- but was so on-edge by her disturbing behavior (the smelling of the baby's clothes was arguably more unsettling than the stabbing of the belly!) that these musings were continually disrupted to heightened effectiveness. The setpieces spilling into one another in a messy stumbling trajectory mimics the bloody scarring of our heroine's face and body, and the filmmakers' ability to contain this slippage into a tight thriller was admirable, with precise and perfectly-timed editing aiding the pace eloquently.

A great example is the heroine stabbing her own mother in the neck, which would have been egregiously obnoxious had there been an overlong honing in on the devastation of this mistake, or if it was sidetracked with a quicker cut to ruminate on the pornographic theatrics of the gory interaction to exploit the terror. Instead, it's a balanced moment of hypervigilant awareness to the error equitably held with the fight/flight state of self-preservation that does not extinguish upon a tragedy when the threat is still looming within reach. The ultimate reveal of who the killer is in relation to the protagonist was a bit of a letdown, transforming such an intentionally-pronounced enigmatically menacing presence into corporeal form, and providing a clearcut, rational (yet obviously deranged) motive that leaves a wide-open window for audience identification.

Still, a relatively strong entry into this type of horror subgenre, which is admittedly not a favorite of mine.

[colinr0380]

I think (Martyrs aside, which towers above everything. And I do like Vinyan too, though I have not really heard it mentioned as part of the subgenre) Inside is my favourite of the extreme French horror subgenre of the 2000s. It is sort of the horror-themed version of Panic Room, and Inside feels especially overwhelming because all the action happens at a such a breakneck pace that there is barely time to get one's bearings in the story. If there hadn't been that (unfortunately tipping over a bit into being somewhat comical in its number, although the scene with the mother you mention is the most impactful of all of them) series of unexpected guests to the home in the mid-section to create a number of ten minute diversions (including one involving a pre-A Prophet Tahar Rahim!) then the heroine probably would not have been able to put up much of a fight in her condition (It was amazing that she managed to get to lock herself into the bathroom in the first place after the first attack!) Which is only emphasised by the final one-on-one section being rather one-sided, in a terrifyingly single-minded way.

Bustillo and Maury also re-teamed with Béatrice Dalle a few years later for a segment of The ABCs of Death 2 (NSFW), which could be a semi-sequel to Inside! Whether it is or not, it still suggests that Dalle would not exactly make for a good babysitter! (And I do wonder if they are cheekily homaging the end of the "Dawn of Man" sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey there!)

[domino harvey]

This is quite a nifty 'liminal horror' short: The Backrooms.

This seemed more indebted to the kind of indie horror video games Markiplier has made a good career out of playing online (no idea why these started showing up in my algorithm either), in that we’re in a weird 3D render of a quasi-liminal space, punctuated by jump scares and hidden details that constitute “lore” (plus a dash of the finale to Cube at the end). As such, I don’t really recognize this as a short film at all, just a demo for a game you can’t even play!

[Never Cursed]

Well, I never thought I'd see the word "Markiplier" in a domino harvey post...

[colinr0380]

domino does make a good point, as with its impossible spaces I had been thinking of it as a bit like Control (though that is definitely more riffing off the SCP Foundation, which itself has an official game with dedicated YouTubers to it) meets Cabin In The Woods! The Silent Hill series has had the biggest 'impossible space' influence in video games of them all, such that even the long deleted playable teaser demo for the cancelled Kojima SIlent Hill game, "P.T." has itself gone on to influence many, many recent horror games.

(I was thinking recently that whilst the ultimate YouTube-screamer bait series with jumpscares and a thin thread of lore to tie its (frankly utterly irritating) gameplay together, Five Nights At Freddy's, is in feature film development hell it probably has had a big influence behind the scenes of a number of film productions. Willy's Wonderland and The Banana Splits Movie particularly, but even the recent Child's Play reboot seemed curiously timed to fit in with the zeitgeist of out of control animatronic creations!)

But I also wonder if something like The Backrooms (and its associated videos) is tying in with that horror YouTube trend a bit too. When I get home from work I'll post up some links but I'm thinking of something like 2h32, which is a great series of disturbing imagery that I particularly like for giving me the 24-styled horror series that I had always secretly yearned for! (And I may be bringing too much to the imagery as it kind of strikes me as mining similar territory to the early avant-garde Clive Barker short films and stories in some ways) Although like a lot of the internet horror series it feels as if it is trading as much on arousing the excitement of viewers and commenters and getting them involved in creating lore to explicate the imagery rather than seemingly having much of a handle on where it is going itself as a story. Which like many of these internet horror series leaves them interestingly and creepily evocative yet potentially a little rudderless with regard to any overarching meaning to be gleaned. However that channel just posted a video a couple of weeks ago for the first time in something like a year, so they may finally have something in mind to aim towards!

(Something which does have a bit of a narrative thread to it is the one going on in the purgatorial POSTcontent channel, which itself felt like it prepared me a little for The House That Jack Built!)

[therewillbeblus]

Robert Eggers' three short films (writeups in reverse chronological order, which happens to also be ascending order of preference):

Brothers, Eggers' most recent short, is a slight series of temporally-jumping snapshots exhibiting the dynamic of two brothers separated by a significant age gap. There are jarring moments spliced in that don't reveal much by design, but in neglecting urgency of the material (partially vis an all-too-brief runtime stunting development), the gravitas of the punchline is unearned, uninvolving, and not particularly 'scary' either. It's well-shot and edited but that's about all it has going for it.

The Tell-Tale Heart is a more deliberately-paced twist on the Poe adaptation, seemingly made for the sake of experimentation with gorgeous candle-lighting. Despite using its momentum intentionally, the payoffs are not very effective, though this film 'looks' very much like Eggers' later works and was good practice for The Witch. There is one wonderful, unexpected bit, where

Spoiler

after a long austere buildup, the central principal offers the visiting constables brandy, and Eggers abruptly cuts to these previously-cold and self-serious figures drunkenly laughing.

I found that hysterical, and another example of Eggers demonstrating his skills at composition with editing, but outside of that winking destruction of established mood, I can't say I enjoyed this much.

Hansel and Gretel, his first short, is the best of the lot, and the biggest departure from his usual style. It plays like a Guy Maddin-inspired version of the classic Olde Tale, which was extremely effective once the children found themselves in a horrific predicament, since the experimentally intrusive camerawork lent deserved sensations of powerlessness to the surrogate experiences of these trapped children. Even those who don't like Maddin might enjoy this though, since it finds a balance between the basics of his technique and a forward-momentum that resists stewing in the drowning, at times disengaging chaos his aesthetic can yield. Recommended.

[colinr0380]

Our House (Anthony Scott Burns, 2018)

After finding out about the short films and music of Anthony Scott Burns a little while ago I tracked down his debut feature Our House and gave it a watch. This turns out to be more a film about coming to terms with loss and moving on (for everyone's sake) than a horror film particularly, although the final act does take a turn for the overtly scary and spooky.

The plot involves college kid Ethan doing experiments to try and discover a potentially groundbreaking source of harnessing and transmitting electrical signals but who finds his life upended when his parents die in an accident and he has to leave college (and his girlfriend/co-inventor) behind and take a customer service job in an electronics store to support his younger brother and sister and keep the house going. A lot of the first section of the film is about everyone in the family being trapped in stultifying routines of trying to continue life as it was in the 'before times' and prevent too much more upheaval for the youngsters. But despite the continuity of existing in the same space of the family home still it is a very strange situation of absent parental figures for everyone who remains, perhaps most pronounced for Ethan as he is both in a new situation of being the primary carer and struggling with it a bit, and of being the person whose beginning life as a separate being away from the family home was suddenly cut short to drag him back there.

There is a nicely sketched in opening scene of Ethan bringing his girlfriend (who his family get on well with) to dinner but getting into a bit of an argument (or rather disappointing his parents by letting them down, which is far worse!) over his wanting to leave early to do an illicit lab experiment after dark on the university campus with his machine. This is a scene which really nicely bookends with the final scene of the film, as the re-formed family in an all new home sit down to a similar happy family meal. But it is also there to act as the prompt for some guilt, as Ethan not being there the next morning to take his sister Becca to her swimming practice is what leads to his parents going to pick her up instead and ending up in their (thankfully not shown for easy drama) fatal truck accident. This leads to a bit of a conflict between Ethan and his younger brother Matt later on, when in his angry grief at seeing his brother getting obsessed all over again with tinkering with the machine that had led to him not being there when they needed him (which feels cathartic and a much needed explosion at the same time, just to get it out there rather than bottling it up), Matt throws the idea that if Ethan had just been there it would have changed the course of events entirely (and by implication have sent Ethan under that truck instead?), and that it was Ethan's selfishness that caused the death of their parents. Which is of course not really correct, and Ethan tries to explain that but gives up, but it shows the way that people often try and search in their minds for a way to find sense of events and make loss 'explainable' and 'understandable' in some fashion, because the idea that such horrible events can occur by random chance can be too upsetting to contemplate. Questions of "What if I had done it differently? Would there have been a different outcome?" can be the bane of the existence for those left behind trying to make sense of the senseless.

There is a sense in this early section of the film, and particularly in the argument scene, of ideas of fate and if there is some ability to avoid it. As well as the snowballing of minor actions into having major consequences. Although this is a story about people constantly looking backwards on things they have lost and seeing the moment that everything changed. So they can pinpoint where 'fate' intervened in their lives but, like all of us, only in retrospect (As an aside, this may actually be the primary appealing theme of the whole time traveling genre because in those stories people get to omnisciently control fate by holding all of the answers to a past situation. Although of course we know that many time traveling stories get more complicated than that with their butterfly effects of altering previous events often having unintended consequences! The moral lesson often being just to accept things the way they are and not tamper with the set course of events!). That argument between Matt and Ethan is really the climax of the first section of the film which has been showing the attempt to continue family routine being undermined by grief: being unable to get out of bed; doing things in the wrong order, or forgetting to pick the kids up from school because your mind is preoccupied; spacing out at work, etc.

Anyway Ethan gets his machine mysteriously delivered (by the girlfriend? :-k ) to the family home and begins tinkering with it in his spare time, maybe trying to recapture a sense of his stunted ambitions as much as anything else. I felt that the most interesting thing about the middle section of the film was that as the device begins to work and invoke ghostly apparitions within the house the two halves of the family go in different directions, but they are all trying to reclaim their past lives in some ways. Ethan is trying to get back to his experiments and ambitions that he had in college and his approach to the device is as a technical challenge of boosting the power (with the help of his electrician neighbour, more on whom a little later!) and he is oblivious and then dismissive of the ghosts at first; whilst Matt is retreating to their parent's untouched since the accident bedroom and along with Becca gets the chance (or assumes that they get the chance) to have their parents back. I do really like that sense in this section that there is the creator who is just interested in (and maybe blinded by) the challenge of whether they can do something; whilst you have the audience for the device who actually are impacted by and experience the effects (positive or negative) the most directly, and add the human dimension to the technological breakthrough, but who themselves may be interpreting things wrongly.

Then once the presence of the ghosts becomes undeniable Ethan himself gets caught up in turning his device from one which has was intended to have a wider practical purpose into joining his brother and sister in fully committing to figuring out how to make the device more powerful in order to bring their parents back from the other side. In some ways Ethan gets overwhelmed yet again by the family home and his responsibilities (to his siblings, and to his absent parents) that take priority over his more worldly ambitions.

But the twist here is that:

Spoiler

its not the parents that the device is bringing back. Or maybe not just the parents? The film leaves it a little ambiguous, but I more lean towards the idea that it was other ghosts 'playacting' as the parents for Becca all along. Especially because (giving the title extra meaning) it appears that the only ghosts who appear are those of people who had died violently in the radius of the machine's signal. The parents had died somewhere else in their car crash, so their spirits presumably could not have been inhabiting the family home. The subplot with the electrician neighbour is key to this, as the neighbour had mentioned to Ethan early in the film that he had also lost someone and it turns out in the final section that it was his wife to suicide in their home and that once boosted the radius of the machine's signal had been wide enough to have accidentally extended beyond Ethan's house into that of the neighbour and provided him his own encounter with his (unfortunately vengeful) wife.

Instead of their parents, the ghosts inhabiting the family home (playing with Becca) turn out to have been a previous occupant Alice who was a girl murdered by her stepfather Henry, with Alice seemingly being forced by Henry to play with Becca (and to a lesser extent Matt) and pretend to be their parents in order to get them to boost the signal of the machine to get back into the real world. The climax involves Becca being kidnapped and whilst Matt and Ethan's returned girlfriend try to reach her, Ethan himself has to get to the neighbour's house to try and retrieve the machine the neighbour stole to selfishly try and bring his wife back to him. Which interestingly undermines the neighbour's attempt to sympathise with Ethan early in the film about the pain of loss never entirely leaving but it changes into something that can at least be lived with, as he shows through his actions that as soon as there may be a chance to get a lost person back, he would go for it. I think that the neighbour is by far the most tragic figure in the film as whilst Ethan and his family move away Poltergeist-style for a fresh start at the end of the film the neighbour remains trapped in the house that his wife killed herself in, and that violent encounter with her spirit shows that even if he could bring her back there are anger issues on her part there towards him that had probably led to her actions of committing suicide in the first place! Sometimes it may be better to live on without the knowledge that your loved one that passed away probably hated you rather than conjuring them up again and confirming that theory for certain! And of all films I had the neighbour subplot in American Beauty come to mind the most in the characterisation of the neighbour here as seemingly having it all together when viewed from the outside, but hurting just as badly as Ethan and his family are behind closed doors.

This final section was really interesting and reminded me surprisingly (in addition to Lucio Fulci's The House By The Cemetery, especially in the way that a child is used as a conduit and placed in the most danger by the apparitions. Although this film is far less bleak - not to mention in no way as gorily violent - than the Fulci!) of that Nigel Kneale TV play The Stone Tape. In both The Stone Tape and Our House the main character is trying to research a new technology which accidentally bridges the gap between the spirit world and real world, then somewhat charmed by the notion of communication across that divide decides to fully commit to their new direction and see what results. And in a similar final twist The Stone Tape reveals that beyond the 'surface layer' of seemingly benign ghostly apparitions there is a much older, dangerous layer of vengeful spirits waiting to be uncovered. Because only evil, hatred and anger seem to be emotions that keep a spirit tied to a place rather than being able to move on.

And move on Ethan and his family do, as Ethan destroys his device, they sell the family home (giving up the last tangible connection with their parents) and all move with the girlfriend (whose character is actually utilised really well in this, as a sidelined figure for the majority of the action but probably the most sensible character, and her return to the story late in the film suggests that she is the final piece of the puzzle to enable the family to re-form itself into something new, and move on) to a new place that is both closer to Becca's swimming pool lessons and with the suggestion that Ethan might be returning to college himself.

I ended up really enjoying this film. It is dealing with a very heavy topic of grief and loss but in a really sensitive manner and seems to care for all of the characters involved. This also makes me curious about seeing the 2010 film Ghost From The Machine (or Phasma Ex Machina), which Our House is apparently a bigger budget remake of, especially as the Shout! Factory Blu-ray released in the US only has an eight minute featurette and the trailer, so there may be scope for a more comprehensive special edition of this which could include that earlier film for comparison. My assumption going by the footage in that trailer is that it appears that Ghost From The Machine may focus more on the Solaris-style relationship between the neighbour and his inexplicably returned suicidal wife rather than using that aspect as a background, albeit resonant, subplot as in Our House.

Come True (Anthony Scott Burns, 2020)

"I read that in one sitting. Couldn't put it down. It's really good. There was a kind of... a haunting sadness to it. You should definitely buy it. Have you read much Phillip K. Dick? He's completely paranoid. Genius concepts though. Stuff that will make you think."

A young woman plagued by disturbing nightmares and seemingly estranged from her mother and left sleeping on park benches and at friend's houses signs up for a sleep study both for a place to lay her head and a way of looking into her problem. But she finds the researchers become more and more shifty and evasive about their true intentions, whilst her nightmares become more intense and cause vivid bodily reactions.

This is a really difficult film to talk about without spoilers, as it is one of those stories where the situation becomes more inexplicable and enigmatic until the final moments put everything into context. But what a beautiful ride! Lots of films came to mind during this: the slowly emptying world of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse; the researchers experimenting on unwitting 'volunteers' made me think a little about the end of Martyrs, but also of course early Cronenberg; and especially that Ken Russell segment of Aria, mixed with a bit of Shinya Tsukamoto's Haze and Kore-eda's After Life ("You guys, I'm sorry but we have four more of these [interviews] to do until I get to go home and sleep"), although that may already have said too much! There also feels to be a big influence from the 'walking simulator' games (Dear Esther, What Remains of Edith Finch, Layers of Fear, etc) which are all about constant, linear, perpetual movement through bizarre worlds that gets contextualised here into nightmare sequences and wonderfully a literal climax involving sleepwalking. I like the dream sequences themselves but even better is the seamless way that they keep transitioning from the waking world into the dream one (my favourite is the second sequence of Sarah surreptitiously entering and leaving her house with her mother calling her name but only seeing the fluttering curtains at the open window (which itself its heartbreaking in retrospect) before going to sleep on the park slide again, with the stars above winking out before the dream begins), which only gets more complicated during the sleepwalking sequence as the two worlds are layered on top of each other.

It interestingly feels as if it is the mirror opposite from Our House. Where in that film we are looking from the outside in at ghostly apparitions, instead here the characters are inside the situation which seems more vivid than the increasingly empty and devoid of life outisde world. It is as if they are the ghosts walking through a dream of their lives. And the idea of a collective dream state is a fascinating one: that we all share a kind of a collective set of imagery that at a deep primordial level can be shared between dreamers. One of the things that I particularly loved about the film at the mid-point is that it goes from alluding to abusive families and exploitational researchers to a kind of love story as however scary the nightmares are, there is a kind of solace that can be taken from not feeling alone (In that sense I was reminded a little of Paperhouse too in the central relationship between two people who find solace in sharing, and shaping, the same dream world together, enjoying the ability to play at vampires together), before even that proves to be rather illusory and a deeper reckoning needs to occur.

The soundtrack of course is wonderful and really the film's entire reason for existing in the state that it does (incidentally if that particular song seems familiar, Electric Youth also did the song "A Real Hero" that featured prominently in Drive). Along with the beautifully moody original score I really loved that it uses the dreamy Coelacanth for its two sequences of looking at dreamers from an outsider's perspective, which previously appeared during the tiger stroking sequence in Michael Mann's Manhunter film.

Spoiler

So it turns out this is all about a person in a coma with everything in the film, not just the dream sequences, being a projection of her mind. Which would explain why the trip to see a cinema showing of Night of the Living Dead gets reduced to abstracted screaming, because that is perhaps just what stuck in Sarah's mind about the film.

It is a relatively simple, even obvious, story but I absolutely love that I have so many questions after that ending. Is her friend Zoe also briefly in the coma-world with her (did they get into an accident together?) and that is why she is briefly around for the first half before entirely disappearing? It makes that scene in the waiting room of the film suddenly become very moving ("I've been coming here since I was 5. Aaron and I go way back"; "I was 16 when I started coming here. I guess old Meyer just loves to see us sleep"), with the idea that for some (many?) being in a coma-world is a blessed relief from the pain and horror of reality, and that is why the figures constantly on the edges of perception and paring people rudely away are so irritating and upsetting, because they stand for the end of the reverie, for better or worse.

How come there are more guys in the study? Are men more prone to getting into comas?

We eventually get layers of dreamstates on top of each other without warning in the final section, as prompted by the shared confidences of witnessing Jeremy's own dreams the main couple make love but that causes Sarah to fall into a coma within a coma - a deeper level of consciousness - and prompts the final sleepwalking section as those who remain of the researchers (who themselves are trying to look for a way out through scientific and experimental by proxy means) are reduced to just following her through the woods until she reaches a doorway (presumably the doorway to death) that she is able to be 'woken up' from and turn away from at the very last moment. Then the return through the woods brings both her and her companions into contact with the shadow figures, who I presume are the abstract representation of waking life and the painful jolt into consciousness that Sarah and most of the rest of the characters have been recoiling from in terror in subconscious knowledge of what they represent.

Which makes Sarah 'saving' Jeremy from the figures at one point, and keeping him in the dream world both an unwittingly selfish move in preventing him from returning to terrifying consciousness but also a way to keep her connection with him and continue their burgeoning romance too. The implication in her 'killing' him once she comes out of the coma within a coma (in which she gets her phone, and thereby her communication with the outside world and her mother, back) is that she has helped him to leave his own coma, and the appearance of her vampire teeth from their shared dream is showing that Sarah is coming to an awareness of her waking world being an illusion itself - one that she can have a more conscious control over rather than just sleepwalking through or suffering the depredations of - and that Jeremy is still alive out there somewhere. It is kind of a more hopeful version of the relationship between DiCaprio and Marion Cottilard in Inception in that sense!

And I love that beyond Sarah's individual story that it doesn't negate the idea of a collective dreaming subconscious that everyone maybe shares and can be tapped into. She and Jeremy (as with the characters in Paperhouse) are able to connect across space and eventually form a relationship that provides a respite against everything else. And the technology is not a malign evil here, as it often is in many horror or sci-fi films, but is being put to a therapeutic use! I wonder if now that Sarah has come to the realisation about the nature of her world and that she has agency within it she will wake up, or spend some time in the coma still to enjoy her powers to shape the dreamworld and maybe help fellow coma suffers within it she may run into?

I love that it seems hopeful rather than despairing, and that for a film that starts out as a horror or dark sci-fi film (or an abstract film about dealing with familial abuse, or men taking advantage of women, which are all notions that are raised subliminally but eventually reveal themselves to be stand ins for other themes) it eventually feels to be much more about the love story. Certainly one of the most fascinating films of the decade so far, and another great example of ambitious psyche-exploring Canadian sci-fi to rank up there with Cube and Beyond The Black Rainbow.