The Twenty-Fifth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Three on a Meathook (1972), a no-budget exploitation slasher written and directed by William Girdler. 

Four young ladies in go-go shorts drive out to a lake for a day of skinny dipping. A young man named Billy watches them from his fishing boat. On their way home that night, the ladies’ car breaks down. Luckily, Billy happens to drive by and offers them a place to stay until they can call a garage in the morning. They hesitantly accept. Billy takes them back to the creepy old farm house where he lives with his pa. He serves the ladies dinner and sets them up in the guest rooms. All seems well. When pa learns of the guests, however, he starts berating Billy by ominously alluding to “what happens” whenever Billy is around women. Billy assures pa that this time, things will be different. Everyone goes to bed. Fifteen minutes later … cut to a killer POV shot. One by one, each of the guests is stabbed, chopped, or shot to death. In the morning, pa shows Billy the grisly scene in the guest rooms. He ruefully explains that Billy murdered the women while in a sleepwalking trance—just like he did before. Billy refuses to believe it and drives off. In town, he meets a young woman and invites her out to the farm house. This time, he’s sure things will be different.

This movie is awful. But it’s also pretty great. That’s not to say that it’s another obnoxious “good-bad” movie. Girdler was an accomplished and talented filmmaker with a really interesting career. He made all nine of his movies in six years, including a couple well-regarded works of supernatural horror, and he died in a car accident shortly after his 30th birthday. Three on a Meathook, his second picture, was self-financed and shot in his home town. 

What’s awful about it is that the entire middle 45 minutes (out of 85) consists of slow and pointless filler. There’s an extended sequence where we just watch Billy in a bar watching Gridler’s own funkadelic band perform (their music is actually pretty good, but it adds nothing to the story). 

What’s great about it is that the first thirty minutes and last ten deliver on the promise of a squirm-inducing, greasy slasher. It’s incredible that Three on a Meathook was made two years before that cinematic masterpiece often cited as the first slasher, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. All the hallmarks of late 70’s and even 80’s slashers are somehow already in place here. There is an extremely silly axe-decapitation moment that would fit seamlessly in any Friday the 13th knock-off.

What’s also great about it is that watching it feels like being at a sketchy 70’s drive-in. I can think of no better example of what the term “grindhouse” means to me than this movie. First, “Three on a Meathook” is a title whose sole purpose is to snag eyeballs. Second, its narrative is abrasively sensationalist in that it’s very loosely based on the legendary exploits of a real American serial killer, Ed Gein (thus forming a bridge between two of the best horror movies ever made, Psycho and (again) Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Third, its opening scenes offer plentiful cheesecake nudity. Fourth, it actually played in those multi-billed runs at cheap theaters and drive-ins from which the term “grindhouse” derives—a “grind” was a back-to-back continuous presentation of movies that started at a cut-rate price in the morning and increased in cost toward nightfall. Fifth, the only version of it that I was able to find anywhere (on Youtube and Internet Archive) is a worn-out and yellowing video transfer. So, it’s still not in any sense a premier work. Can you name another horror movie that nails all five of these grindhouse characteristics so well?

TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:

The easily-predicted twist of Three on a Meathook is that Billy is not actually murdering the women, in a sleepwalking trance or otherwise—pa is. Pa has suffered from a dissociative break as a result of his wife becoming a cannibal for health reasons (this insane revelation drops in the last five minutes with no further explanation), which necessitated him locking her up, telling Billy she died, killing whoever showed up at the farm, and secretly feeding her the bodies. Pa could not cope with being a mass murderer, so he projected this role onto his son. Then, in a folie à deux, his son came to accept the projection. 

So, here we have an identity caused by a stress-induced mental break, as in Black Swan. Then, that identity is imposed on another to manipulate that person’s behavior and self-image, as in Blacula. This is done so as to deflect responsibility for murders, as in giallos like Opera. And finally, Billy internalizes pa’s delusion to the extent of reproducing it, as in Hour of the Wolf. Furthermore, this narrative was inspired by Norman Bates’ dissociative roleplay as his mother’s doppelgänger in Psycho. The appearance of this amalgamated psychological version of a doppelgänger in even such a typical piece of grindhouse fare as Three on a Meathook should stand as strong evidence that the doppelgänger is a specter haunting all of horror cinema.

The Twenty-Fourth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE TWENTY-FOURTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Black Swan (2010), directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Natalie Portman. Portman’s tour-de-force lead performance here won her the 2010 Best Actress Oscar.

Nina is a ballerina at the New York Ballet company. She is in competition to play the dual role of the White Swan Queen and her wicked twin sister, the Black Swan, for a production of Swan Lake. According to the overly handsy director, Nina’s precise technique and innocent persona make her perfect for the White Swan. However, these same traits prevent her from embodying the more chaotically passionate Black Swan. So, the director initially casts another dancer. He changes his mind when Nina bites him in reply to an unwanted kiss in his office. Still, Nina struggles in rehearsals to perform adequately as the Black Swan. Then, a wild night out with a hard-partying rival dancer (played by Mila Kunis) breaks Nina’s immaculate shell. This in turn releases her doppelgänger, which appears with increasing frequency in a rising crescendo of hallucinogenic sequences.

Portman is perfectly cast, as she naturally has a ballerina’s poise, disposition, and physique. Her Oscar win was well-deserved. And I certainly enjoyed Black Swan’s propulsive emotional drama, accomplished cinematography and editing, and brief but effective bursts of phantasmal imagery. But the overtness of Aronofsky’s simple metaphors together with his sometimes absurdly high-key psychodrama tends to annoy me—which is why I have had this movie on my watch-list since it came out but put it off until our doppelgänger-horror marathon made it unavoidable. These signature Aronofsky traits are present in Black Swan, but I found them much less annoying than in, say, Pi and Requiem for a Dream. (Pi has the added annoyance of being a film about a mathematician’s descent into madness made by someone who clearly has only a rudimentary familiarity with the concerns of higher mathematics.) This is largely due to the fact that Portman and Kunis are so riveting in their respective roles, though.  

TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:

Black Swan contains lots of mirror imagery—mirrors mirroring mirrors when the dancers are in wardrobe together; walls of mirrors when they are dancing; mirrored movements in their synchronized dances; and dancers who from a distance look nearly identical, with the same clothes, hairstyles, and general physiques. Narratively, a number of dancers are competing to take on the same role and thus are intentionally striving to best serve as doppelgänger to a character ideal in the director’s mind. Added to this, Nina’s overbearing mother was herself a ballerina whose career was cut short. Thus, she wishes for Nina to become her duplicate so as to fulfill her ambition vicariously. No wonder, then, that Nina’s madness takes the form of an imaginary evil twin who originates in mirrors and migrates into the faces of the other dancers. A high pressure situation involving doublings and re-doublings of identity causes Nina’s reflection to come to life as the lustful and violently free spirit she has never let herself be. So, once again, we encounter a type of doppelgänger that actually exists in our reality, the doppelgänger created by a broken mind.

The Twenty-Third Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE TWENTY-THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Blacula (1972), directed by William Crain and starring the profoundly sonorous William Marshall.

In the 18th century, the African Prince Mamuwalde travels to Count Dracula’s castle on a mission to enlist Transylvania’s aid in ending the slave trade. Sadly, along with being a diabolical blood-sucking fiend, Dracula is racist. In retaliation for being called out on this, Dracula assaults Mamuwalde’s wife Luva, turns Mamuwalde into a vampire, whom he dubs “Blacula,” and imprisons him in a crypt so that he will hunger in agony for eternity. Blacula is released two hundred years later when a gay couple (who are portrayed sympathetically—though, regrettably, the f-slur is used a few times later) purchase the castle and ship its furniture, including Blacula’s coffin, to an antiques warehouse in America. Blacula at last sates his appetite by feasting on the peculiar new-fangled denizens of 70’s Harlem. Soon, however, he runs into Tina, a woman who is the living image of his long-dead Luva. His conviction that she is in fact his wife reborn forces him to reconsider his undead purpose.

Blacula’s plot is surprisingly faithful to Bram Stoker’s novel. Mamuwalde himself parallels Jonathan Harker in that he visits Dracula’s castle in a professional capacity and dines with him, only to be attacked by Dracula’s brides. After becoming Blacula, he travels to America aboard a Demeter-like cargo ship and takes up residence in a Harlem warehouse just as Dracula did in London. Tina obviously corresponds to Mina. The other main protagonist, a medical examiner, is a combination of Dr. Seward and Van Helsing. And the medical examiner’s cop friend and wife play the Quincy and Holmwood roles respectively. Their investigation follows the same beats as the novel’s: they uncover a vampire in a cemetery and slay it; launch an attack on the prince of darkness’ lair; and try and fail to protect their friend from the fiend’s romantic obsession.

With its playful portmanteau title and mix-and-match premise, one would expect Blacula to be a comedy—but no. Aside from a few wry moments of satire, Blacula plays it straight. Both the source material and the new social context are handled with grave respect (pardon the pun). This direct approach thoroughly succeeds, though, both because a well-executed rendition of Stoker’s classic tale will always be engaging and because good drama in blaxploitation Harlem will always be incredibly fun. The wild contrasts between the original material and the milieu it’s transplanted into go off in the viewer’s head like fireworks. Added comedic commentary would just get in the way at the fireworks show.

TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:

Since we’ve already discussed the vampire as doppelgänger and vice versa, we can instead use Blacula to examine another type of duplication: reincarnation. Of course, we can say that Blacula is a doppelgänger of Dracula in a metatextual sense, as a cinematic reinterpretation. However, the reincarnation of Blacula’s wife is actually not taken from previous versions of Dracula. Although the vampire soap opera Dark Shadows introduced this plot a decade earlier, as far as I am able to tell, Blacula is the first adaptation of Dracula specifically to have his attraction to the Mina character be explained in this way. The addition works so well at adding a doomed romantic dimension that it has been repeated ever since, most notably in Coppola’s Dracula. Tina, as well as subsequent iterations of Mina inspired by her, obviously is not aware that she is a reincarnation, though. Rather, her status as a double is something that the vampire lord imposes on her. As such, identification with the dead wife functions as a predatory tool for Blacula to control her response to his advances and to shape her self-image. Thus, the doppelgänger as reincarnation is not the monster of this story but the victim. To some extent, we all experience such doppelgänger-ization whenever we are compared unfavorably to our “original” versions, i.e. our precursors in some role.

The Twenty-Second Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE TWENTY-SECOND NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Cemetery of Terror (1985), a Mexican zombie-slasher romp written and directed by Rubén Galindo Jr. 

Three narratives converge around a reanimated devil-worshiping serial killer named Devlon. First, we see the living Devlon gunned down after murdering a woman in an elevator. The psychiatrist from whom Devlon escaped demands that Devlon’s corpse be incinerated immediately, but a skeptical police captain refuses. Cut to the second narrative. Three jackass med students trick their dates into partying with them on Halloween night at an abandoned house next to a cemetery. Here, one of the students discovers a necromantic grimoire with “Devlon” written in blood on its cover. The students decide that the best way to keep the girls entertained is to steal a body from the morgue and read one of the grimoire’s incantations over it at the cemetery. The body they steal just so happens to be Devlon’s. Reading the incantation causes a flash storm to soak everyone, so they abandon the body and return to the house. The students’ ploy pays off because their dates all start making out with them. Unfortunately, the good times do not last. The incantation causes Devlon to reanimate, track the students down, and start efficiently slaughtering them one by one. Cut to the third narrative. This concerns the police captain’s young son and his group of friends journeying to the cemetery, where they are besieged by a horde of zombies under Devlon’s command. 

I chose Cemetery of Terror not because it’s well-regarded or even well-known but because I liked the poster. Luckily, my gamble paid off—this movie is very entertaining! The first half shall we say borrows piano riffs, stalker pov shots, and a whole kill sequence from Carpenter’s Halloween. But it hardly matters, since the mash-up of Halloween-clone slasher with demented Fulci-influenced zombie horror, by way of distinctly Mexican cinematic flourishes, makes Cemetery of Terror feel original throughout. Dropping the entire third-act cast of imperiled children in favor of more likeable and longer-lived med student characters would definitely have made for a more coherent script, but the result might also have felt less idiosyncratic. 

TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:

This time our film provides us with an opportunity to compare the doppelgänger to that workhorse monster of 80’s and 2000’s creature cinema, the zombie. Both the doppelgänger and the zombie appropriate our bodies* and make them do things out of our control. The key difference is that for the zombie, control is exercised through an unintelligent set of instructions (which are sometimes commanded by a warlock like Devlon and sometimes dictated by the logic of a virus), such as “(1) seek brains; (2) if found, eat brains.” The body thereby becomes a simple meat robot. Whereas, for the doppelgänger, control is exercised directly by an intelligent mind; it’s just that that mind is alien. In both cases, what we fear is a loss of control over our own flesh. But whether in sleep, in sickness, or in death, this loss of control is something none of us can avoid.

*Note that while we commonly associate zombies with dead bodies, even our living bodies can become zombies if they are unconscious and controlled by something other than our wills. So, zombies are not necessarily distinguished from doppelgängers by vital status.

The Twenty-First Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE TWENTY-FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Dario Argento’s Opera (1987). This film reinvents Phantom of the Opera as a late-period giallo epic. 

Betty is an understudy for the lead role in a highly anticipated Parma Opera House production of Verdi’s Macbeth. When the starring diva is struck by a car, Betty achieves sudden fame by performing as Lady Macbeth in the diva’s stead on opening night. Unfortunately, she just as quickly attracts a lethally obsessed fan in the form of a serial-killing stalker. The hooded killer on two successive nights manages to break in, tie Betty up, and fasten pins under her eyes. The killer does the latter so as to force Betty to watch the grisly murders of whomever she is with. As the third night falls, her only clue as to the face lurking under the hood is locked in an image from a recurring childhood nightmare …

I think Argento intended Opera to serve as a baroque swan song for the giallo genre, which had passed its prime a decade earlier. The Italian horror subgenre of the giallo, as we know, marries murder mystery sleuthing with gory slasher kills. Argento is himself regarded as the definitive master of the genre, with his Deep Red (1975) perhaps being the best giallo ever made. Opera is a much more expensive and ambitious production than most classic giallos, though, which balance artfulness with cheap sleaziness. And I think Opera suffers a bit because of its higher budget and grander aims, as it’s neither as aesthetically focused nor as convincingly written as Deep Red. But when rather viewed in the context of other operatic (here literally) gothic revival works of 80’s horror, it fares better. For one, it establishes itself as a worthy successor to the monumental 1925 version of Phantom of the Opera, certainly far beyond any of its other thirteen remakes. Its standout features include the authenticity of its behind-the-curtain scenes (which derives from Argento’s own abortive attempt to direct a production of Verdi’s Macbeth); some fantastic raven photography, the best moment of which comes when two ravens spar over a human eyeball in a shot that couldn’t have been choreographed but plays out like it was; and its innovative camera work, such as in a bird’s eye view that spins high over the opera audience, then dives down and strafes them in closer and closer circles. 

TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:

Opera’s killer is a traditional giallo villain in that he (or possibly she) wears a mask and black leather gloves and wields a knife. The giallo villain is an iconic visualization of the murder mystery culprit. In turn, this unknown foe explodes the doppelgänger dynamic, in that, as long as the mystery remains unsolved, the killer maintains a presence as a faceless monster that could be hiding inside anyone. That is, while the doppelgänger is an alien identity wearing someone else’s face, a mystery killer is an unknown identity hiding among a number of faces. The two coincide when, in works like Carpenter’s The Thing, there is known to be a deadly imposter within a group, but which among them is unknown. This explains the frequency with which identical twins, actors (or opera performers), and disguises appear in murder mysteries. A killer can lead detectives (and the audience with them) down the wrong path by becoming a doppelgänger of an innocent party before committing bloody deeds. In this way, the fear that the doppelgänger inspires in us is Lovecraft’s “oldest and strongest kind of fear”—fear of the unknown.

The Twentieth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE TWENTIETH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched You Are Not My Mother (2021), written and directed by Kate Dolan. This is an Irish psychological horror film that examines familial struggles with mental illness through the lens of malicious fairy-changeling mischief. (Spoilers, natch, as this one’s only just been released to streaming.)

Char is a teenage girl whose mother is suffering from depression. One day, after driving Char to school, the mother disappears, leaving her car abandoned in a field. Char’s grandmother and uncle alert the police and conduct a fruitless search that night. In the morning, the mother turns up at the front door with no memory of where she has been. The professionals’ conclusion is that she had a manic-depressive episode and simply needs proper medication. The grandmother, however, who is something of a cunning-folk adherent to the old Gaelic ways, tells Char that her mother has been replaced by an aos sí, a supernatural race of fairy creatures who live beyond the veil. The grandmother believes that this has happened because she frustrated the fairies’ attempt to replace Char herself with a changeling when she was an infant. Now they have sent this false mother thing to recapture Char. At first, Char doesn’t know what to believe. But soon she catches her mother doing inexplicable things, like reaching down her own throat and pulling out misshapen bones.

Most of this film is a patient meditation on coping with a parent’s mental illness, both within one’s family and among one’s unsympathetic peers. But the ambience of ancient Irish legend is constantly present, in the form of the approaching celebration of Samhain, i.e. the Celtic festival coinciding with Halloween; a field trip to a druidic site marking a “liminal space” where “fairy folk could enter the human world”; and the various talismans of protection the grandmother has decorated Char’s home with. This folkloric context gradually moves from the subliminal background to the forefront of conscious terror, thereby entirely eclipsing the modern psychiatric framework. Still, this is definitely a film about mental illness, since the mother is already suffering under its cloud before she is swapped. It uses the symbols, creatures, and sorcerous dynamics of hoary ancestral paganism to do a kind of nightmare work of manifesting a child’s fear of alienation from her mother. The film is successful in this, as far as it goes. My only real criticism is that I think it could have delved much deeper into Char’s relationship with her mother, both on our side of the misty threshold and on the eldritch-fae’s side. The key confrontations between Char and her mother’s doppelgänger all seem to abruptly conclude just as they are getting interesting.   

TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:

This film gives us an occasion to look at the changeling more directly. In the folk traditions of the British Isles, Scandinavia, Germany, and Poland, a changeling (or “auf”) is an unnatural creature of some sort that fairies replace a human baby with. The fairies may do this out of a desire to raise a particular child as their own or because they wish to plant a spy in our world. The changeling initially looks identical to the substituted child. Soon after, though, it begins to manifest telltale characteristics of its inhumanity, which can include abnormal growths, preternatural abilities, and ravenous hunger. One particularly grim theory is that the changeling myth spread across Northern Europe because it facilitated survival among peasant families. If a new edition to a peasant household showed signs of being unproductive due to a physical or mental defect, it may have been easier to commit infanticide (thus eliminating a food cost that wouldn’t pay off) if the child was believed already lost through exchange with an evil imposter. Similarly, as explored in You Are Not My Mother, when a loved one is transformed by disease or insanity into something unrecognizable, the idea that that person has been replaced with a doppelgänger may arise as a coping mechanism. In such cases, the doppelgänger is not a monster invading our homes from without but a pernicious notion that spawns inside us and imposes itself on others so as to enable unpleasant thoughts and actions toward them.

The Nineteenth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE NINETEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched a vampire B-movie from 1973 called Lemora (alternatively known as Lemora: Lady Dracula, The Legendary Curse of Lemora, and Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural), written and directed by Richard Blackburn.

A golden-pigtailed teenage girl named Lila lives under the care of a Baptist pastor who seems obsessed with what he sees as Lila’s angelic purity. Lila receives a letter summoning her to a mysterious town so as to aid her dying father (who is apparently also a notorious gangster). Lila escapes the pastor’s house in the night and gains passage to the town aboard a sputtering bus driven by a grizzled creep. The bus is attacked by a hoard of bestial forest-dwelling cannibals with rotting flesh. Luckily, Lila is rescued by the servants of the woman who sent the letter, Lemora. They take her to Lemora’s gloomy manor house. Here, Lila at last meets the titular queen of the night herself, in all her hypnotically sepulchral glory. Lila demands to know where her father is, but Lemora is much more interested in introducing Lila to the delights of immortal darkness.

Given that Lemora has only ever had limited distribution, that it’s Blackburn’s only feature, and that it’s filled with bizarre and fascinating choices in scripting, editing, and acting, this is truly a cult film among cult films. It could not have been made other than as a passion project outside the studio system and in an era before straight-to-video (now -streaming) releases. First, there’s the fact that it thrusts its thirteen-year-old protagonist into a world of sexually predatory and violent men, each more unhinged than the last. Next, there’s its off-kilter pacing, where the first fifteen minutes cram in a gangland shooting, a fire-and-brimstone sermon, a stowaway’s road trip, a brutal zombie attack, and an abortive prison break—but the following half hour concerns a woman and a child having a vaguely philosophical conversation while preparing for bed. Finally, there’s its weirdly triumphant ending, where the protagonist succumbs to the vampiress’ wiles, but we are told that this is truly what both she and we want. The major standout of the film, though, is Lesley Gilb’s Lemora. The excellent makeup, wardrobe, and lighting for Lemora come together with Gilb’s striking features, poise, and delivery to create such an iconic mistress of evil that it’s unfortunate there were no further Lemora movies. Overall, despite the awkwardness of the dubbed-in dialog and other production cost-cutting measures, I really enjoyed the alluring nightmare logic of this strange piece of horror cinema. 

TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:

Let’s use Lemora as an occasion to compare the doppelgänger to the vampire. Over the past few decades, there has been a lot of discourse lamenting the domestication of the vampire into a heartthrob antihero, such that it is no longer a monster capable of inspiring fear. One remedy proposed for this is to introduce a more violent and inhuman type of vampire, like a more powerful and intelligent version of the zombie. This is also the wrong way to go, though, I think, because to me the most frightening vampire scenes involve victims who believe they are speaking to ordinary humans. In Lemora, the compellingly creepy moments all come when Lila is firmly in Lemora’s clutches, but Lila is only beginning to suspect that Lemora is anything other than an abnormally nice lady. In such scenes, the vampire’s next meal, or the target of her next enthrallment, doesn’t know she is a powerful and hungry killer, like a tiger wearing a human face. And this is what the vampire shares with the doppelgänger: the convincing external skin of humanity. An advantage the doppelgänger has over the vampire—or perhaps we should say the non-vampiric doppelgänger, if we count vampires as, in a sense, another subspecies of doppelgänger—is that we know much less about it than the vampire. We don’t know what it wants, what its weaknesses are, or what produced it. We only know that it isn’t what it seems.

The Eighteenth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE EIGHTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched The Mephisto Waltz (1971), directed by Paul Wendkos and based on Fred Mustard Stewart’s novel of the same name (which in turn derives from a Liszt piano piece). For the third night in a row, our movie’s plot is driven by ritual human sacrifice in exchange for the Devil’s supernatural favors.

A young Alan Alda plays a frustrated concert pianist turned journalist who interviews one of the world’s premier piano virtuosos. At first, the wealthy old virtuoso treats the journalist with austere contempt—until he notices his hands. The virtuoso deems the journalist’s hands ideal for piano playing. As a result, he instantly changes his demeanor toward the journalist, instead lavishing him with praise and inviting him to dinner parties. The virtuoso’s nubile daughter also abruptly turns her affections toward the journalist, to his wife’s chagrin. After we learn that the virtuoso is dying of cancer, it becomes clear that the uncomfortably close father-and-daughter pair have been grooming the journalist to serve as a corporeal host replacement. You see, the virtuoso and his daughter are in fact immortal Satanists who have mastered a black magic spell (involving a weird blue juice and plaster death masks) that allows them to move into other people’s brains.   

Despite being full of the hallmarks of witchy 70’s horror, including candlelit nude incantations and ominously symbolic occult décor, The Mephisto Waltz’s narrative defies convention in several major respects. First, its initially skeptical protagonist does not defeat the forces of darkness but instead herself devotes herself to Lucifer, in order to fight hellfire with hellfire. Second, refreshingly, there is no representative of Christianity at all to oppose diabolical debauchery with puritanical righteousness, however flimsily. And finally, the heroine is not punished for her sexuality; rather, her desire turns out to be her redeeming strength. Also, perhaps owing to its origin in a novel, the dialog is surprisingly clever, and the spell’s mechanics are unusually well-developed. So, although there’s nothing very indelibly disturbing here compared to the best works of 70’s demonic horror, it does offer some neat twists on the genre.

TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:

This film’s doppelgänger comes in the form of a dying man’s mind invading and possessing a healthy body. Through this process, the old virtuoso permanently steals the journalist’s face. Step by step, the virtuoso resumes his former habits by asserting his personality in ways that destroy what is left of the journalist’s life. One of these steps involves rekindling his romance with his own daughter, in his newly virile form. This strongly reminded me of H.P. Lovecraft’s classic short story, “The Thing on Doorstep,” wherein an aging sorcerer transfers his mind into his daughter’s head, much to the dismay of her husband. The incestuous implications of that earlier work are made explicit in The Mephisto Waltz (though the film doesn’t really know what to do with them, other than spell them out). In another interesting deviation from standard tropes, the spouse here isn’t immediately alienated by the changes to her husband’s behavior. Instead, she’s intrigued and even aroused by his new identity. Perhaps another fear behind the body-snatching subspecies of doppelgänger, then, is that our loved ones would actually prefer an alien soul over our own.

The Seventeenth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE SEVENTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched a second feature about demonic forces and Satanic rituals: City of the Dead (1960), directed by John Llewellyn Moxey. 

At the center of a Massachusetts village in 1692, a witch named Elizabeth Selwyn is burned at the stake (note that no actual accused witches were burned during the witch hysteria in the colonies—they were all hung). Cut to the present. A sinister professor of folklore who specializes in witchcraft (played by the one and only Christopher Lee) persuades an eager young grad student to travel to this same village for her dissertation research. She ignores the pleas of a local gas station attendant to steer clear of this village, which he says is cursed. After she arrives in the fog-shrouded community, she is booked into the inn by a woman who looks exactly like Elizabeth Selwyn. Soon, the student hears ritual chanting beneath her room’s floorboards. She finds a moldering tome called A Treatise on Devil Worship, which details the yearly sacrifices of young women such as herself made on Candlemas Eve and the Witches’ Sabbath. And she uncovers a network of catacombs beneath the village, which she unwisely ventures into alone.   

Perhaps owing to the fact that City of the Dead was an entirely British production with an American setting and characters, it’s fairly hammy and sometimes cartoonish, with a lot of shaky accents. This makes it rough in the early scenes but actually works in its favor once we get to the village in the modern day. The fog machines and extremely crooked wooden props are put to great use in creating an archetypically spooky, cemetery-dominated little community of secret witches. Every development is telegraphed, and every characterization is obvious. But this is surely what has made it such a stock work of Satanic cinema, with its dialog having been sampled by Iron Maiden, The Misfits, and Rob Zombie. Meanwhile, of course, as he always does, Christopher Lee steals the show.

TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:

City of the Dead’s doppelgänger is the head witch, in that her death in 1692 and her reappearance in the twentieth century makes her an identical reincarnation of herself. Her pact with Satan, wherein she offers annual blood sacrifices in exchange for immortality, has succeeded. The standard method by which the identical-ancestor trope is delivered is to have a character see a very old painting or photograph of the precursor and be shocked by the close resemblance to the modern iteration. Here, the viewer sees that the witch who is roasted in the seventeenth century and the current-day innkeeper are played by the same woman. But there is no reveal for the characters that the witch is her own doppelgänger across the centuries, which is a bit of a letdown. 

Another sense in which this film contains doppelgängers is that the members of its underground witch cult masquerade as ordinary citizens. The theory that such a cult has survived in secret for millennia, despite centuries of Christian persecution, was adopted by early British folk horror films like this from the anthropologist Margaret Murray’s notorious book, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Though this book’s claims were largely discredited, the idea that adherents to an ancient pagan religion of ritual magic hide among us, wearing the faces of the most respectably conventional members of our society, has left a powerful impression on our collective imagination.

The Sixteenth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE SIXTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), written and directed by Osgood Perkins.

Two girls are left behind at a Catholic boarding school after it closes for the winter, one by choice and one because her parents are mysteriously missing. In the night, a demon speaks to one of the girls on a pay phone and seems to take possession of her through her ear. This causes her to kill and decapitate the other girl and two nuns, so as to make use of their heads in a Satanic ritual in the basement.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a paradigmatic instance of a slow burn. Most of the drama in the first half occurs entirely in the subtext of superficially uneventful scenes of the girls going about their days. The music does a lot of work in building tension, even more than in most horror movies, since it doesn’t reflect anything we see on screen or otherwise understand to be happening. It’s as if the score knows what we don’t about the characters and their fates. This clues us into the fact that we are seeing things that will be important later in piecing together the film’s nonlinear narrative. The solution to the puzzle of how the three main timelines relate to each other succeeds in impactfully communicating the main character’s desperate isolation and fractured state of mind. The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a really artful work of horror cinema, if you have the patience for its creeping subtleties. 

Having saved the spoilers for our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme section (which probably would have been a good idea in some earlier entries), we can now reveal that the doppelgänger of this movie is actually more of a reverse doppelgänger. Throughout, the stories of the two girls at the school are interrupted by cutting to a woman who has escaped from a mental institution and is making her way to the same school. This woman is offered a ride at a bus stop by the parents of the girl whom we will see decapitated, several years after this gruesome event. The father decides to offer her a ride because she somehow reminds him of his murdered daughter. This is grimly ironic, since we soon learn that, unbeknownst to the parents, this woman is actually the girl who was possessed and killed their daughter. The woman goes on to murder and decapitate the parents as well in a bid to appease the demon and invite it back into her mind. She does this because the demon has become her only friend, of sorts, given her extreme loneliness following the death of her own parents and her incarceration for the murders. So, since this woman is traveling under an alias when we meet her and looks different from her fifteen year old self, to us she appears to be two different people while in fact being one and the same person—a reverse doppelgänger. Meanwhile, when she is possessed by the demon, years earlier, she becomes a different person who wears the same face, so in this sense a true doppelgänger. The novel twist here is that when an exorcist expels the demon from her, she tearfully says, “Don’t go,” as she actually prefers to be inhabited by another entity, to be not herself. This speaks to the secret desire we might sometimes have for a doppelgänger to come and replace us in our lives so that we can escape to some other, easier reality. For The Blackcoat’s Daughter’s main character, this desire is undoubtedly what initially attracted the demon.

The Fifteenth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE FIFTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Perfect Blue (1997) by Satoshi Kon. This is a psychological horror anime feature that unfolds like a labyrinth of distorted mirrors. 

Mima makes a career change from singing in a top 40 band to acting full time on a police procedural show called Double Bind. The show is about the pursuit of a serial killer who is obsessed with a pop star and murders people close to her as a result. Meanwhile, in Mima’s actual life, an obsessed fan of her singing stalks her and winds up killing her colleagues, who in the stalker’s mind have ruined her image. It soon becomes difficult for both Mima and the viewer to distinguish between scenes on the show and events in real life. To make matters worse, a double of Mima dressed in her former stage get-up starts appearing to her in visions and dreams. It seems that this doppelgänger is in league with the stalker in that she believes Mima’s reputation has been tarnished by her sexualized role on Double Bind. She wants to get rid of the new Mima and replace her in her former role as an undefiled idol. 

At one point, we are led to believe that Mima is being interrogated by an actual police psychologist, not a character on the show, such that her life as a singer and then an actress has all been invented to deal with the trauma of being raped in a night club—an event we had understood to be part of the show. In this version of events, Mima herself is the serial killer, and she’s been stabbing people who contradict her delusion. Then, the camera pulls back to reveal that this is taking place on a TV set—which could in turn only be another layer of Mima’s coping mechanism. 

Perfect Blue is an effectively dizzying mind-screw. Except for a few whirling dream-sequence transitions, however, it doesn’t really take advantage of Kon’s massive talent as an animator, as displayed in his later masterpiece Paprika. There’s no reason this couldn’t have been a live action movie, and it might have worked better as such.

“I’m scared that my other self will do something I don’t know about,” Mima declares, both as herself and as her TV character, which gets us to our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme. Perfect Blue strongly reminded me of David Lynch’s use of doppelgängers in Inland Empire (2006). Lynch is well-known for his insertion of doppelgängers as reality-disrupting ploys in such works as Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Twin Peaks. But Inland Empire’s central drama revolves around a character becoming her own doppelgänger, as a famous actress crosses over into the reality of the part she is playing. In Perfect Blue, similarly, we watch Mima transform from the naïve and bubbly pop singer of the opening to a distressed and paranoid actress in an erotic crime thriller—only for her earlier self to return as a spectral double—all of which is itself doubled by the possibility that this is merely the fantasy of psychotic killer. So, again, the appearance of a doppelgänger causes us to contemplate the malleability of our inner selves and the ghosts of our old lives, who may wish vengeance against us for what we have become.

The Fourteenth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE FOURTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Dead Ringer (1964), directed by Paul Henreid. 

Bette Davis plays a dual role as identical twin sisters Edith and Margaret. Margaret is lavishly wealthy as a result of marrying a man whom Edith was in love with, twenty years prior. Meanwhile, Edith is three months behind on rent for the dive bar she runs. When Margaret’s husband dies, the two meet again at his funeral. Edith grows jealous of Margaret’s extravagant life and becomes furious when she learns Margaret forced the man to marry her under false pretenses. Thus, Edith murders her sister, swaps clothes with her, and poses her body to make it look like it was Edith who committed suicide in her apartment. Edith then assumes Margaret’s identity and takes up residence in her mansion. Unfortunately, she fails to think through the details well enough to go undetected by Margaret’s staff. However, the sad thing is that it doesn’t matter, both because the staff hated Margaret and prefer Edith and because no one misses Edith enough to look into the incongruities of her supposed suicide. Things only go off the rails when a lothario whom Margaret was having an affair with appears and reveals that he and Margaret poisoned her husband. Ironically, Edith winds up sentenced to death for a murder committed by her sister. 

Dead Ringer is a tightly plotted picture full of gothic motifs and sly duplicity. Bette Davis adeptly distinguishes Edith from Margaret by maintaining a harshness to her face and a heaviness to her movements, evidencing the weight of her poverty, that Margaret lacks. The best scene is when Edith prepares to take her sister’s place after killing her. It’s chilling as we watch her undress her own sister’s corpse, one article of clothing at a time.

For our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme, I want to briefly discuss this film’s twin, David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988). Cronenberg clearly intended to echo Dead Ringer with both his film’s title and many of its plot details. Jeremy Irons stars as both of its twins, confident Eliot and nervous Beverly. The two pose as one another not for financial gain but to experience one another’s sexual partners. Then, due to a drug-induced psychosis, the twins permanently switch personalities. A gory fiasco ensues. So, the plots of both films are driven by one twin’s jealousy over what the other has and the mechanics by which they switch places and come to learn the “be careful what you wish for” lesson. There is a kind of dynamic of identity that both films subscribe to, where for two people with the same biology, pivotal decisions lead to divergent lives, which in turn produce divergent personalities-- but one can become internally similar to the other again by living as her. That is, according to twins horror mythos, since twins are identical in nature, only nurture can produce a difference in them. But nurture is subject to change, depending on life circumstances that are chosen or imposed, so no difference between twins is final. The idea that twins horror communicates, then, is that we are all ourselves capable of whatever evil might be perpetrated by our doppelgängers.

The THIRTEENTH Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE THIRTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … a special treat … I rewatched a sci fi horror film about alien doppelgängers that I love: Invaders from Mars. Actually, in a double feature, I rewatched both the 1953 original version by William Cameron Menzies and the 1986 remake by masters of horror Tobe Hooper and Dan O'Bannon.

In both, the main character is a young boy who witnesses an alien ship land over the hill outside his window. The remake reproduces the original’s spooky hill design exactly: a winding path bordered by a wooden fence leads to a high rounded crest that obscures everything beyond it. The boy’s parents leave to investigate this, and they return changed. They look the same, but their minds are Martian. The imposters begin leading others over the hill. The boy struggles to convince unconverted adults that he is not just telling a made-up story from a sci fi movie. His town is quickly overrun with fakes. Luckily, before it’s too late, he finds a nurse who believes him and helps him alert the military.

Well, kind of.

At the climactic moment when the final attack is about to destroy the Martian ship, the boy wakes up in his bed. He runs to his parents’ bedroom to find that they are back to normal. It was all nightmare, his father reassures him. However, back in bed, the boy hears the same strange thunder storm from the opening begin again. The boy goes to the window and watches the alien craft land behind the hill, just as before. What the boy had experienced was not a nightmare after all but a premonition. We are left to wonder if perhaps this time it won’t be so easy for the boy to find such competent, trusting adults.

A movie about aliens replacing people and a paranoid protagonist attempting to warn those who are still human may sound like a knock-off of the much better known Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In fact, Invaders from Mars preceded Body Snatchers by three years. (Albeit, Heinlein’s novel The Puppet Masters was published before both.) Although Body Snatchers, particularly in its 1978 iteration, is probably the superior work on the theme, I find Invaders from Mars’ eerie final twist, along with its depiction of the acute helplessness of a child whose parents have been replaced, to be more haunting.

Let’s compare the twin renditions. The original is starker. Its replica people act more brutally robotic; it has a more steely blue color palette; and it opens with narration not found in the remake about how “the heavens have kept a secret.” The remake, meanwhile, is more psychological. It shows more of the boy’s warm relationship with his parents in order to put them in sharper relief with the versions who return from over the hill. The Martian doubles are less robotic, instead displaying sinister quirks. The remake also adds a creepy scene where a teacher played by Louise Fletcher is discovered eating a frog intended for class dissection.

By the same point in the original, the boy has already found two adults in authority who believe him and remain his guardians until the end. Together the trio quickly glean what’s happening and manage to alert the Pentagon. This results in a massive military mobilization against the invaders, seemingly within the hour. Most of the second act involves the military troubleshooting how best to blow up the Martians. In contrast, the remake affords the one adult who listens to the boy, a nurse played by scream queen Karen Black, much less power. The pair spend the second act hunted by doppelgänger police. This leads to a tense scene in which the boy explores the tunnels dug by the Martians on his own. In the original, a team of soldiers are the first ones to enter the tunnels. So, overall, the remake is much less trusting in the protection of established American institutions. There’s even a delightfully cynical moment where a cop preparing to murder a child in cold blood says with a smile, “It’s okay, we’re the police. We’re here to help.”

In both, though, getting the military to act and save the day seems a little too easy, almost like a boy’s fantasy of what would happen. The boy’s hope for an easy solution could be taking over the narrative from the genuine premonitory content of his dream. The remake retains the same ending, with the boy seeing the same Martian landing event from his dream, confirming that it was a premonition and not merely a nightmare. But it adds a final shot where the boy opens the door to his parents’ bedroom and sees something that makes him scream in horror—cut to black.

The only other major difference is that the creature effects are much more primitive in the original. The remake has awesome shark-mawed drones on spindly legs (made by Stan Winston). There is an uncanniness to the simplicity of the original’s designs that’s a bit lost in all the veiny details of the remake’s monsters, though.

I also appreciate that the remake retains the Martian origin of the invaders. With increased interplanetary exploration and a constant robotic presence on the surface of Mars, audiences have become more skeptical that an alien species visiting Earth would originate from our own solar system. But it’s actually far more likely that any biological species with technology at all comparable to our own, not to mention one having the motivation of planetary conquest, would come from our system. The reason is that interstellar travel within the lifespan of an organic species is impossible without the god-like ability to bend time and space. Relative to this, creating our own Earth-like planets out of cosmic dust would be a trivial task—thereby taking away the motivation to conquer other species, as well as the need to resort to infiltration to accomplish said conquest. Consider, if we were to prove the existence of a civilization in a nearby star system, we would lack the means to inflict harm on them, even if for some insane reason we wanted to, within any of our lifetimes—and likely this will remain true far into the future. However, if we were to prove the existence of a subterranean civilization on one of the moons of Jupiter (something not outside the realm of possibility), we could launch a mission to infiltrate this civilization within the decade.

Anyway … how both the original Invaders from Mars and the remake relate to our theme, TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS, is fairly straightforward. These are the classic doppelgängers of myth reimagined as alien imposters, best known as “pod people” thanks to the aforementioned Body Snatchers. A real psychiatric disorder called Capgras delusion causes people to believe that a pod people scenario has in fact occurred, such that their family members or close friends have been replaced by identical duplicates. While no change is detected on the surface, according to those suffering from the delusion, something is “off” about the person. It’s believed that this delusion is caused by a failure in the brain to connect visual recognition of a face with emotional identification of the person behind the face. Moreover, this delusion can take on a political dimension in that paranoia about ideological infiltration, which was particularly rampant during the Cold War, can lead people to believe that apparently ordinary members of a community are secretly evil terrorists. On occasion, though, as we have seen with recent white supremacist massacres, this belief turns out to be true. Meanwhile, radical internal changes can sometimes actually result in a new identity overtaking someone. In these cases, the person’s closest loved one may be the only one who notices telltale signs. So, the horror of the alien imposter narrative lies how in difficult it is to tell the difference between delusion and real metamorphosis.

The Twelfth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE TWELFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Hour of the Wolf (1968), a surreal horror film by Ingmar Bergman. 

A painter and his wife (played by Bergman regulars Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann) move to a cottage on a small Scandinavian island. They are happy there, at first. Soon, though, the painter grows distraught. He shows his wife drawings that he’s made of various nightmarish creatures, which he says have actually appeared to him. These include insect people, an old woman who removes her face, and a bird-like humanoid. The wife is worried that the painter is losing his mind, but weird people then start manifesting to her as well. The couple is invited to a dinner party at a baron’s castle on the island. At the party, the baron and the group of relatives, in-laws, and functionaries that live with him turn out to be sinister characters who enjoy taunting and harassing the painter and his wife. Back in their cottage, the couple hold vigils every night until morning for fear that they will be attacked in their sleep. During one of these vigils, the painter confesses that he killed a child whom he believed to be a goblin that had attacked him many years prior. Eventually, the painter feels compelled to shoot at his wife and venture back to the castle in search of a former lover. At the castle, he finds that the Dracula-like baron and his family have become the creatures from his drawings. They pursue him through the castle and chase him into the woods. Eventually, they eat him alive while the wife looks on in terror. In the wife’s closing narration, she wonders if she also saw the creatures because she had been infected with her husband’s madness, in a folie à deux—or if it was because these “man-eaters” were already on the island, waiting for them.

Hour of the Wolf is the one Bergman piece that definitely qualifies as a horror movie, though much of his other work similarly features characters descending into madness and having terrifying visions. Also like much of this other work, this film is hauntingly beautiful to look at, richly poetic in dialog—and a bit too self-serious for its own good. Unlike his other work, however, Hour of the Wolf remains highly tense throughout, which it achieves largely due to how weirdly surprising each new development is.  

“Take a look in the mirror. Now you are yourself, and yet not yourself,” the malevolent baron says to the painter after dressing him up and applying makeup to his face—to bring us back to our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme. In Hour of the Wolf, the doubles are creatures from the painter’s imagination that are then duplicated in the real world for both the painter and his wife. Alternatively, according to the wife’s conjecture, the creatures were already there, meaning that they used their unnatural powers to duplicate themselves as visions that inspired the drawings of them. A third possibility is that there are no creatures at all. Rather, the painter projected his hallucinations of the hideous entities into his wife’s mind through a shared insanity engendered by living so closely together. Note that in all three interpretations, though, the artist’s drawings play a major role. Artists create doubles of the entities they depict. When their art is successful, these entities come alive in others’ minds and often transfer over into reality, through life-imitating-art. In this way, art can be viewed as an alchemical or sorcerous means of creating real doppelgängers.

The Eleventh Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE ELEVENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched another sci fi horror film, Coherence (2013) by James Ward Byrkit. Instead of time travel, this one fuses psychological horror thrills with parallel universe shenanigans.

A comet passes over a neighborhood in LA where a group of actors, lawyers, and other professionals are having a dinner party in a comfortably middle class home. Somehow, for some reason, the comet targets just this residence, along with a stretch of road in front of it, for a cosmic event. A dark field is created that encircles the area such that anyone passing through it travels to a parallel universe’s version of the same area. When the power goes out, members of the dinner party start venturing out and inadvertently walking through the field. The problem is that the other universes’ versions of the same people are so similar that they wind up in the wrong reality without knowing it. The characters discover this after it’s too late by noticing small deviations in each other’s memories of random incidents during the night. This causes them to react with horror toward people revealed to be in fact doppelgängers of their partners and friends. By the end of the night, deadly violence erupts between various cross-universal iterations. 

There is an attempt to explain all this at one point through an analogy to quantum decoherence. This occurs when a subatomic system of mutually exclusive states does not remain isolated. Here the characters crossing over into parallel universes are supposed to be causing stability in all the houses to collapse. But this is only an analogy, since what is happening here can only be described as space magic—this is not how anything actually works in quantum physics.

In any case, Coherence is surprisingly well-done given that it was filmed on a micro-budget over the course of five nights, using handheld cameras. Byrkit was able to achieve this by supplying the actors with character and scene notes instead of full scripts and having them improvise everything, such that the story reveals from other characters came as actual surprises. This makes every scene highly naturalistic and keeps the drama engaging throughout. Ultimately, though, the story is much less clever and impactful than Triangle’s. It loses steam as soon as we realize that the characters have no hope of setting things back to how they were, and that it doesn’t really matter anyway, since the parallel universes are so similar. One character’s decision to just stay put and relax until the comet passes turns out to be the best option.

“This whole night we’ve been worrying, what if there’s some dark version of us out there, somewhere. But what if we’re the dark version,” a character played by Nicholas Brendon (Xander on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) muses despairingly at one point, to segue to our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme. In both Triangle and Coherence, doppelgängers created through spooky physics inspire an existential panic that soon leads to murder. Coherence makes this conflict between unnatural twins material by having chaotic electromagnetic phenomena occur when a person comes into contact with her alternate self. Perhaps we can say this represents our fear and loathing of another person truly stealing our identity and place in the present. But our jealousy toward a version of us that is better off than us, due to a choice we could have made but didn’t, might just as easily inspire us to become the evil twin determined to take over the other’s life.

The Tenth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE TENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Triangle (2009), a neat sci fi horror film written and directed by Christopher Smith. It fuses taut slasher thrills with intricate time travel mind-screwing. 

Jess (played convincingly by Melissa George) agrees to go on a sailing trip with five friends. A freak storm capsizes their sloop, and the group crawls onto the upturned hull. Luckily (they think), a large ocean liner appears shortly after. Though no one answers their cries, the group is able to make their way onto the ship. It seems to be abandoned, until a mysterious stranger wearing a sackcloth mask starts killing them, one by one. 

Well, not really.

The mysterious stranger is actually Jess from the future. The ship is caught in some kind of temporal anomaly, perhaps related to what is purported to have sucked up vessels in the Bermuda Triangle (hence the title). Every half an hour or so, the ship travels back to the moment when it first appeared to the group on the upturned sloop. This means that duplicates of the characters board the ship while the versions of them we have been following are already there. Unfortunately, Jess will soon come to the conclusion that what causes the ship to reset is the deaths of all the other members of her group. The point in time that future Jess completes her bloody task, but herself gets thrown overboard, is when the group from the past appears. Present Jess mistakes this correlation for causation. She wants things to reset again so that she can warn the group not to board the ocean liner to begin with. This is how Jess decides to put on the mask and go on a murder spree. Sadly, she is not able to do this because she gets thrown overboard once again as she kills the last member of the group. And so on forever, in a hellish loop of reenacted carnage. 

Triangle is a cleverly put-together puzzle of a movie, with lots of enigmatic details planted as payoffs in light of later phases of the loop. It also achieves a brutal sense of Sisyphean futility by showing in increasingly grisly ways how many times Jess has already been through the loop. The one major criticism I have is that the otherwise brilliant plot only works because Jess is kind of an idiot. Not only does she leap to an irrational conclusion about what’s causing the ship to reset, a conclusion that winds up dooming everyone, but more annoyingly she fails again and again to act on opportunities to explain what’s happening to her past iterations. It’s not outside the realm of possibility, certainly, that someone finding herself in this situation would behave idiotically, but a much more crushing sense of infernal repetition could have been created if Smith had found a way to make this story work with a competent protagonist. 

The doppelgängers here, to get to our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme, are the past and future manifestations of the characters. When Jess’ understanding and resulting course of action changes, she becomes a villainous double to her former self, even though that self will eventually come to the same understanding. We often look back upon deeds perpetrated by old versions of ourselves with disgust or shame, such that if we could return to the past, we would try to make ourselves behave differently. Meanwhile, we would regard someone who looked identical to us and wanted to force us to change as a monstrous imposter. Perhaps the most terrifying thing about the doppelgänger, then, is that there is no objective way to determine who is fake and who is genuine when it’s only a matter of time before we all become our own doppelgängers.

The Ninth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE NINTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched another ‘80’s creature feature: Frank Henenlotter’s Brain Damage (1988).

Henenlotter also made one of the greatest works of twins horror cinema ever, Basket Case (1982). Basket Case is not about identical twins but rather about a man born with a highly deformed parasitic twin. This creature somehow survives being surgically removed from him. The man then spends his life carrying his little brother around in a picnic basket. Unfortunately, the brother turns out to be a wicked little goblin that thirsts for human blood. The dramatic horror of this exploitation classic is driven by the man’s unconditional love for his brother, despite his appearance and repeated misdeeds.

But back to Brain Damage: like Basket Case, this is a movie about a parasitic twin, of sorts. Here the parasite is a slug-like creature with human eyes and a big toothy mouth. It speaks in the incongruously velvety voice of a jazz station DJ. Its name is Elmer. We are introduced to Elmer when it escapes into an apartment building and attaches itself to a young man. Elmer excretes a highly addictive hallucinogenic drug that it hooks its hosts on to make them dependent on it, so that it can control their bodies and force them to help it find further victims. For, you see, Elmer only eats human brains. The young man soon finds himself in a lethal struggle between his debilitating addiction to Elmer’s juice and his moral abhorrence of what Elmer makes him do. 

While this struggle is interesting, and there are excellent moments of grotesque comedy and delightfully goopy gore, Brain Damage is awkwardly paced, with many shots that go on for far too long. I still enjoyed it, but I think it would have worked better as one chapter of a horror anthology film.

“He needs his brains, but I need his juice, it’s as simple as that,” the protagonist explains. As for how this fits in with our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme, we can say that Elmer is a doppelgänger in a different sense. Literally, the German word Doppelgänger means “double walker.” Elmer is a double walker in that it is a second personality that walks (or rides) with the young man and sometimes takes him over and controls his actions. Elmer clearly represents the alien self that comes to inhabit the addict, both when the addict is high and when the addict needs another fix. Thus, the addict self, personified here by a vicious slug creature, wears the sober self’s face and walks the streets as its double. In many lesser forms, we all carry with us such double personalities, in our compelling desires and fixations, and sometimes these doubles take on a life of their own and try to smooth-talk us into otherwise foreign behavior.

The Eighth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE EIGHTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Society (1989), directed by Brian Yunza. This is a wild horror satire featuring lots of gloriously gooey practical creature effects. 

It’s about how the rich really are different from you and me, on a physiological level. In fact, they belong to a distinct species of incestuous shapeshifting parasites. Similar to the collective alien organism in John Carpenter’s The Thing, members of this Society all share one flesh. This allows them to transform into and borrow body parts from one another. 

This is all revealed in the literally orgiastic final ten minutes. Over the course of the main character’s increasingly paranoid investigation into his community’s upper crust, we are offered only brief hints of the monstrosities to come, like peeks between seams of a carnival sideshow tent. The movie’s restraint in saving everything for the finale, after an hour of tense build up, pays off fantastically by plunging us headlong into the boundlessly grotesque nightmare of the Society’s fleshy delights. Society’s creatures are made all the more menacing by how self-consciously cartoonish they are and how giddily confident they feel in their apex-predator status. And like They Live (released the year prior)—and other classic ‘80’s horror movies that got away with making unsubtly leftist statements by working outside the Hollywood system—Society’s memorable reveals all serve its scathing condemnation of capitalist elitism. 

“You’re not one of us. You have to be born into the Society,” a judge who is also a human-flesh devouring monster explains to the protagonist—which gets us back to our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme. Society’s subspecies of skin-walking shapeshifters occupy a diametrically opposite position on the pecking order from Us’s subterranean mirror people. Here, ordinary humans are under the elongated, pulsing thumb of a group of creatures who can wear any face that suits them and who are so literally tight-knit that their distinct identities have been smeared away with conformity to the hive. Our suspicion that members of the upper class in control of business, government, law enforcement, and the media are not what they seem, are in reality wearing duplicate human faces over lustily writhing tentacles, has rarely been so boldly illustrated as in Society. But which is it? Are doppelgängers our miserable shadows lurking beneath us, waiting for their hour of vengeance—or are they triumphant bourgeois overlords, masquerading in the public eye as humans that look and act like us, but ghoulishly feasting upon us behind country club doors?

The Seventh Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE SEVENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Us (2019), written and directed by Jordan Peele.

The opening text reads, “There are thousands of miles of tunnels beneath the continental United States.” This is true. And much of this underground infrastructure is abandoned. For instance, Cincinnati constructed a vast tunnel network for a subway system in the 1920’s but deserted it when funding fell through during the Great Depression. Likewise, thousands of Cold War-era nuclear fallout shelters, some large enough to accommodate entire subterranean societies, have been left to decay beneath us. Furthermore, as demonstrated in Mark Singer’s documentary Dark Days, these places are often inhabited by tunnel dwellers known as “mole people.” 

What Us posits is that such tunnels are also inhabited by millions of doppelgängers, one for every American. The doppelgängers crudely mimic our daily actions in the derelict darkness below while we happily flourish on the surface. Adelaide (played by Lupita Nyong'o) discovers this as a child in the 1980’s when she wanders away from her parents to explore a funhouse mirror maze (which as we've seen is the doppelgänger’s native habitat). Inside she encounters her double, who has simultaneously wandered away from her own duplicate parents and up into the maze. Adelaide thus becomes a changeling. This incident eventually sets off a revolution, wherein all the doppelgängers emerge and murder their more fortunate twins with scissors. The second phase of their invasion then involves completing the human chain promised by Hands Across America in 1986. This actual charity campaign had the goal of “ending poverty” in the US, somehow ...

Us is Peele’s second film after his wildly successful debut Get Out, for which he received the Best Screenplay Oscar as well as Best Picture and Best Director nominations. So, naturally critics compared Us to Get Out upon release. Whereas Get Out uses horror to create a starkly explicit exploration of the dynamics of race in America (and is probably the best instance of such ever made), Us expands in focus to tackle inequality between all classes, through much more allegorical means. Us is a Twilight Zone-like parable in which people who are identical to us are forced to suffer in the netherworld while we enjoy the daylight in blissful ignorance of their plight (incidentally, Peele’s love of Rod Sterling’s classic series was confirmed when he produced and hosted a brief revival show in 2020). Thus, Us’s doppelgängers represent the working poor, undocumented migrants, and every other oppressed group that the middle and upper classes depend on for their lives but leave to die in miserable corners so they don’t have to look at. Us faced initial criticism for being “unrealistic,” which I think came from the expectation that like Get Out it was supposed to take place in a thoroughly grounded reality. It should have been clear, though, that the intention with Us was rather to have its strongly believable middle-class family cross over into a surreal territory where allegorical meaning holds as much sway as the laws of nature. And it accomplishes this masterfully, particularly in the first half, with beautifully crafted sequences of perfectly-timed eeriness that alternate with genuine moments of comedy. Viewed independently of both Peele’s own prior work and the standard molds of modern cinema, Us succeeds as an original and evocative work of weird fiction. 

“Too many twins!” Adelaide’s daughter exclaims at one point—to bring us back to our theme, TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS. Obviously, Us stands foremost among doppelgänger horror films in recent years. And many of the doppelgänger motifs we’ve already discussed make an appearance here, including the changeling plot, the appearance of real-life identical twins alongside artificially devised duplicates, the symbolic use of masks, and (again) the funhouse labyrinth. But with Us, we can at last introduce the idea that doppelgängers are not merely lone hunters but in fact derive from an entire subspecies of mirror entities, one for each of us—a subspecies that lives in the dismal darkness of the underworld, that blames us for its fallen state, and that thus plots to kill us and replace us in the light.

The Sixth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE SIXTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched The Tenant (1976), based on the novel of the same name by Roland Topor and directed by Roman Polanski. 

A man named Trelkovsky seems oddly insistent on renting a certain apartment in Paris where the former tenant, a female Egyptologist, tried to kill herself by jumping out the window. He goes so far as to visit the former tenant in the hospital to obtain permission to take her place. But he finds that she is bandaged from head to toe and will only scream in agony in response to Trelkovsky’s questions. She dies the next day. As a result, Trelkovsky is finally allowed to move in. The apartment still contains the former tenant’s belongings, which apparently are now Trelkovsky’s responsibility. The other tenants immediately start making bizarre attempts to manipulate Trelkovsky’s behavior. Likewise, the café owner across the street pressures Trelkovsky into drinking the same drink and smoking the same brand of cigarettes as the former tenant. A few days later, the apartment is broken into and everything that did not belong to the former tenant is taken. One morning, Trelkovsky wakes up to find that someone has made his face up with the former tenant’s lipstick and eyeshadow and put him in her dress. Trelkovsky becomes more and more paranoid that there is conspiracy to transform him into the former tenant. Eventually, he is compelled to dress as her again and jump out the window. 

The twist here is that he wakes up in a hospital bed bandaged from head to toe, just like the former tenant. His week-prior self then visits him and addresses him as the former tenant, to which he can only scream. Thus, we realize that Trelkovsky is caught in a time loop that forces him to transform into a strange woman and reenact her last days. 

Well, perhaps.

The Tenant partially builds up three mutually exclusive narratives without committing to any of them. First, there is plenty of evidence that Trelkovsky is simply suffering from a paranoid breakdown causing him to hallucinate instances of the other tenants plotting against him. Second, it could be that reality itself is unstable, such that the environment of the tenement building is best understood as a Kafkaesque nightmare region. Third, there is equally strong evidence that the tenants are enacting some sort of diabolical ritual intended to bring about a cyclic suicidal sacrifice.

But, on the one hand, there is truly evocative ambiguity, and on the other, there is noncommittal hedging between various narrative choices that ends up weakening all of them. At least on this first viewing, I felt The Tenant was guilty of the latter. Polanski’s own previous horror classic, Rosemary’s Baby, is a much stronger film about occupants of an apartment building comprising a secret cult that conspires against the new resident. Rosemary's Baby's commitment to the cult narrative allows it to flesh out the sinister characters of the other tenants and establish the nature and reason for their plot. Likewise, The Sentinel, which came out the same year as The Tenant and which was heavily influenced by Rosemary’s Baby, more boldly communicates how the tenants in its eldritch apartment building are grooming their new neighbor for a predestined role (I’d recommend The Sentinel over The Tenant, if you're in the market for '70's weird apartment horror). I’m just not sure what the possibility that it’s all in Trelkovsky’s head is supposed to accomplish, other than dilute the impact of the finale. Trelkovsky is not a particularly fascinating character on his own, since we learn nothing about his life before he became hell-bent on renting this particular apartment, so it’s not clear how extensive speculation about his mental state is supposed to contribute to our horror.

As far as our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme, The Tenant mirrors The Night House as a work of architectural horror where a labyrinth of duplicate locations traps and forces look-alike characters to reenact the same bloody fates. But again, I feel The Night House executes this idea much more strikingly-- though admittedly The Night House has the benefit of close to fifty additional years of horror cinema innovation.

The Fifth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE FIFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched The Night House (2020), directed by David Bruckner. Rebecca Hall stars as Beth, a woman grieving the loss of her husband by suicide. Her husband was an architect who designed and built their elegant lake house. While sorting through her husband’s things, Beth discovers a set of blueprints for not only this house but a mirror-image house where the rooms are identical but reversed. Through disturbing dreams in which she believes her husband is speaking to her, she is led to search an area directly opposite from her across the lake. Here she finds an unfinished version of the mirror-image house. Eventually, she stumbles upon the corpses of a number of women who look like her hidden under the floorboards. These women were bound and strangled by her husband.

Well, partly.

You see, in high school, Beth was in an accident that left her clinically dead for four minutes. Rather than a light at the end of the tunnel, what she experienced was only blackness, which she calls “Nothing.” This Nothing turns out to be an entity that wants her back. The entity tried to take possession of her husband and make him strangle Beth. But he was able to fool the Nothing by luring look-alikes of Beth into the mirror-image house and having the Nothing kill them instead. Over time, though, his resistance to the Nothing started to fail, so he killed himself. Now the Nothing begins appearing to Beth, seeking to reclaim her. The most creative way it appears is as a humanoid shape formed by the gaps between walls and objects when seen from certain perspectives, similar to Salvador Dalí’s illusory faces in paintings like “Apparition of a Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach.”

The Night House is an evocative, thoughtful, jarring, and extremely well-crafted work of new horror cinema. It's enriched further by Rebecca Hall’s powerful performance. I especially enjoyed it as a worthy entry in the subgenre of architectural horror, alongside classics like The Shining.

With regard to our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme, once again the appearance of a doppelgänger—in this case an entity that wears the husband’s face in an attempt to return Beth to its sepulchral embrace—leads to the construction of a labyrinth of mirrors. We all see our own doppelgängers every day, in the mirror. However, the mirror doubles not only our faces but our whole world. When this double world behind the mirror itself reflects a mirror, the result is a set of infinite false hallways inhabited by infinite false faces, i.e. a labyrinth. The Night House’s major innovation on the doppelgänger, though, is the idea that nothingness itself, the void between substantial surfaces, is the malevolent entity behind all duplicate pretenders. It’s also interesting that the film’s plot depends on the real-world phenomenon of doppelgängers, in the sense of people who closely resemble us on the surface, so much so that we can be mistaken for them. (Even Beth’s best friend mistakes her for a woman in a picture Beth finds on her husband’s phone.) If there really are other people out there who so closely reproduce our features that they can be mistaken for us, perhaps the distinctness of our identity is closer to Nothing, the helpmate of Death, than we would like to think.