Halloween Horror Reviews 2020, #13: A Page of Madness (1926)

On the THIRTEENTH night of Halloween ... a special treat: I re-watched one of my favorite horror films, A Page of Madness (1926), directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa and written (in whole or in part) by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata. 

This is one of the most chilling and memorably creepy films I've ever seen, not only in itself, with its cursed surrealistic imagery of ghostly and insane dreams in a remote island asylum-- which a family has become perversely entangled with in some obscure manner-- but also in the mysterious circumstances of its creation. 

First, the film was made by a cryptic pre-war Japanese avant-garde group called Shinkankakuha, or "The School of New Perceptions" (both Kinugasa and Kawabata were members), with the almost cult-like stated aim of seeking to inhabit "a subjectivity that peels away the naturalized exterior aspects and leaps into the thing itself." 

Second, it was a lost film for 45 years, until a print was discovered in a storehouse in 1971, and as such it is one of the few surviving silent-era Japanese films. Consequently, there is scant information about its production-- it seems to have been filmed in an actual asylum, perhaps with real inmates as background actors. 

Third, it never had title cards but instead the narrative was filled in at showings by live performers who either read from a script or came up with dialog improvisationally. For this reason, much of the literal narrative remains disturbingly ambiguous: we know that the main character is a janitor who works at an asylum where his wife is kept as an inmate, but are his children who visit him real or are they ghostly hallucinations, their deaths having precipitated his wife's madness? Or is he himself an inmate who is merely imaging one of the other inmates to be his wife? Or are the rare appearances by psychiatric staff the actual illusions, and the truth is that all of the characters are in hell, depicted here as an asylum run by its inmates and filled with acquaintances and relatives from one's former life? 

All of these mysteries surrounding the work's production and narrative, together with the film's phantasmagoric imagery, make it feel like a forbidden, otherworldly artifact. We may never fully understand its secrets or the ghosts that haunt it.

Halloween Horror Reviews 2020, #15: The Eyes of My Mother (2016)

On the fifteenth night of Halloween ... I watched The Eyes of My Mother (2016), written and directed by Nicolas Pesce. 

This film opens with a trucker playing a cassette recording of the 1930 murder ballad, "The Murder of the Lawson Family," which tells of the gruesome 1929 familicide of the Lawsons, a clan of North Carolina sharecroppers. And the film closes with Amália Rodrigues' 1970 recording of the soulful Portuguese ballad of love lost, "Com Que Voz," which the main character is earlier seen playing on a gramophone while dancing with her father's taxidermized corpse. These two songs underscore what Pesce wants to create: a rural gothic folk tale of a family's grisly deeds, hidden away on a farm that seems isolated in both space and time-- a folk tale that is in turn embedded in the haunting exploration of one woman's loneliness after her parents' deaths and the circumstances of her upbringing have left her with a twisted, almost inhuman, mind. Pesce largely succeeds in this aim through the stark beauty of his black and white compositions and through Kika Magalhães' empathetic performance as the deeply confused Francisca. 

Perhaps I was expecting something a bit more otherworldly, something leaning more into folk horror, and not quite as narratively frank-- but in any case this is definitely a strong, memorable work.

Halloween Horror Reviews 2020, #12: Ganja and Hess (1973)

On the twelfth night of Halloween … I watched Ganja and Hess (1973), written and directed by Bill Gunn. 

This wonderful gem of a film has many facets: it is an independently-made, experimental, gothic, erotic-romantic, African American, art-horror vampire film. The plot is pretty straight-forward, though: Dr. Hess (played by the excellent Duane Jones, who starred in the original Night of the Living Dead) is a wealthy anthropologist who has recently returned from Africa with a ceremonial dagger made by a mysterious vampire cult. When an unstable houseguest (played by Gunn himself) stabs Hess with the dagger in his sleep, Hess rises from the dead and begins thirsting for blood. After a series brief adventures that allow Hess to learn to control his powers and become comfortable in the role of a Dracula-like vampire lord, he meets the houseguest's wife, Ganja (played by the equally excellent Marlene Clark of Black Mamba, Switchblade Sisters, and Enter the Dragon fame), and falls in love with her. They soon marry. Out of fear of losing Ganja, Hess decides to turn her into a vampire too. I suppose Hess' sadness upon seeing his wife's horror at what she has become drives him to commit suicide by standing under the shadow of a cross (the only way to kill a vampire, according to this film's lore). Ganja, however, decides to go on as the new vampire lady of the estate and take a new lover.

This summary doesn't begin to do justice to the film's creativity, though. By turns, it uses impressionistic, psychedelic, and improvisational techniques to address many different themes and symbols-- including both timely and timeless questions of love, class, history, and African American identity. I can't pretend to understand everything this film has to say, particularly in the context of early 70's Black politics and culture, but it's definitely worthy of broader appreciation and study. I'd also say that it is a foundational forerunner to the current indie art-horror renaissance.

Halloween Horror Reviews 2020, #9: Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974)

On the ninth night of Halloween ... I watched Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974), an English-Spanish production directed by Jorge Grau. 

This is a very British zombie movie (although Grau was Spanish, it was shot in Manchester and Sheffield with British actors). Most of the runtime is spent investigating one suspicious murder, which we the viewers know was committed by a lone reanimated corpse, but which a hardnose inspector is certain was the work of our "long-hair" leads. The long-hairs do their own investigating and find that an experimental pest-control device that uses "ultra-sonic radiation" to make insects kill each other is also agitating the recently dead into homicidal undeath. As one long-hair puts it, while barricaded against the fiends in a church rectory, “When a person dies, perhaps the nervous system goes on living for a while, perhaps in some very basic, crude way, like an insect or a plant." This kind of detailed but ludicrous deduction is often found in British horror films of the 60's and 70's, such as Quatermass and the Pit (a 1967 remake by Hammer Films of a 1959 BBC TV movie) and The Creeping Flesh (1973). So, it's interesting to see it applied to 70's zombies. The patient, cerebral approach here is very different from American Romero-style zombie flics of the time. 

Nevertheless, the brutal orgy of zombie action in the last half hour really works as a payoff in contrast to the preceding bucolic serenity. Also, it has a good message: the police will always ignore the real problem, whether it's poverty or an outbreak of zombie-ism, and blame the victims instead--ACAB!

Halloween Horror Reviews 2020, #8: In My Skin (2002)

On the eighth night of Halloween ... I watched In My Skin (2002), written and directed by Marina de Van, who also plays the lead.

It's one of the earliest of the New French Extremity horror films, which involve intensely intimate body horror and naturalistic narratives and acting. This is the best of them I've seen. It's very uncomfortable to watch! But quite affecting. de Van plays a marketing executive who begins to experience body integrity dysphoria after an injury. She becomes a detached observer of her own pain, and she is soon racked with sexually-charged cravings to cut pieces out of her body. The alienation she feels from her body is an extension and reflection of her alienation from herself in her role as a salaried professional, embedded in complex capitalist marketing schemes and in the sexual politics of her workplace relationships. As a result, she finds satisfaction in negating this role by taking herself apart. 

This film is so focused and direct and minimal that it becomes quite painful for the viewer, which is exactly what New French Extremity horror films aim for. In My Skin manages to go further than the other, more elaborate entries in this genre that I've seen, though, with just the spare vérité of one woman's quest for psychological and physical self-disassembly.

Premonition of a Burning

She’d searched headstones, articles, hospitals, and tent cities

for the huddled figure in her dreams.

In the burnt-out husk of an old hotel,

she at last found that huddled figure, in a wheelchair, still breathing.

She’d been a practical woman once, of little vision or mysticism,

until the dreamt premonition of her accident.

After losing her daughter, 

she turned against her academic colleagues to study precognition.

Despite years of effort, she never experienced another premonition,

so she turned to drugs.

This huddled figure, here,

she’d often seen in her chemical-induced trances,

but she’d never seen its face.

Now it looked up at her.

Lullaby in Starlight

One night, as her husband slept,

something came through the window and took the young wife away.

When a detective came to question the husband,

an unidentified military man stood behind in silence.

Through a gauzy haze, a hand was reaching for the young wife’s bare skin.

At first she thought it was her husband.

This thought vanished as soon as the hand touched her.

It felt like a snake’s belly.

She cried out, Where am I?

A voice came to her in her mind.

It tried to sooth her with an odd lullaby.

When she looked down, she saw that she’d been vivisected by spidery digits.

She could only hoarsely laugh.

Weeks later, in an asylum,

after she’d been found naked in a field,

she spoke of her organs’ beauty in starlight.