The Twenty-Fifth Night of Halloween: May

ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched May (2002), by Lucky McKee. May is a disturbed young woman. As a child, her body-image obsessed mother gave her a creepy doll that she was forbidden to touch. A decade later, this doll is still May’s only friend. She lives alone and has never had a romantic partner. She decides to rectify her sad state by pursuing a young man with perfect hands. Many missteps later, she is rejected by him as well as two other love interests. The resulting spiral of desperation inspires her to embark on a new quest: slice off all the good parts of her would-be lovers and stitch them together to make herself a new doll friend.    

Can something be so awkward that it becomes horrifying? That’s the question this movie seems to be groping toward, consciously or unconsciously. Horror in the traditional sense doesn’t begin until over an hour into May. Instead, it's predominantly a character study about an extremely awkward individual's wrong turns in her search for love. For a character study, though, it's cartoonishly unnaturalistic, with either exaggerated or wildly incongruous dialog and behavior. A beautiful female coworker who is attracted to May has exactly one note: regardless of the situation, she is always horny and indiscriminately down for the “kinky” stuff. The handsome film student May is infatuated with from afar does not even notice her when she is preening for him two feet away, but when at last he does look up after physically colliding with her, he is instantly charmed. Blind students who are curious about the doll in May’s case accidentally break the glass and then excitedly reach for the doll as if they have no idea that glass can cut skin. Many other moments like this suggest that the movie itself has as poor a grasp on human psychology as May does—but this might be intentional. It could be that we are seeing the world as the socially clueless and mentally broken May sees it, and the awkwardness of the filmmaking is supposed to amplify May’s awkwardness. It certainly is excruciatingly awkward, and that very may well be a form of horror. Another possibility is that the film is operating under the punk ethos of making technical incompetence a virtue. That only works for me, though, when the filmmaker has an energetic lack of self-awareness, as in such gloriously inept works as Blood Feast (1963) or Alien Contamination (1980). May simply doesn’t make enough insane choices for the incompetence to become charming. But again, it is intensely awkward. And as a bonus, it features good use of music by one of my favorite 90’s bands, The Breeders.

The Twenty-Fourth Night of Halloween: The Plague of Zombies

ON THE TWENTY-FOURTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched The Plague of Zombies (1966), a Hammer House of Horror film directed by John Gilling. It was made in the golden age of Hammer, after the company had established itself by resurrecting the standard gothic monsters with The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957, The Horror of Dracula in 1958, and The Mummy in 1959 (all three starring Hammer’s premiere duo, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee). By this point Hammer had also done their own takes on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with 1960’s The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll and the wolfman with 1961’s The Curse of the Werewolf. Hammer managed to make the staple creatures of gothic horror sensational again-- with Universal's versions having gotten stale in the late 40’s-- by rendering them in a distinctly British house style that was much more lurid than earlier iterations. 

So, to make a zombie movie, Hammer followed the same recipe: cherry-pick elements from the American classics of the genre, namely White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and spice them up with more suggestive eroticism and graphic violence. This means, though, that Plague of Zombies’ narrative is squarely cast in an older, now widely forgotten zombie mold, one that more closely resembles the actual zombie legends appropriated (for better or worse) by white Hollywood from Haitian Vodou lore. Two years later, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) would introduce the species of zombie that has since completely overwritten the original in the popular imagination. Romero innovated on the myth by subtracting from it: he removed the Vodou magic responsible for creating zombies, thereby removing the purpose for their creation. Romero’s zombies just happen by accident, and no one controls them. That’s not how it works in Plague of Zombies, or in the earlier movies it's modeled on. Here, an evil sorcerer must deliberately target the dead with spells to make them rise from the grave, and the sorcerer does this so as to press them into undying slavery. 

The Plague of Zombies’ plot works like a paranormal detective story. A renowned Victorian-age doctor receives a letter from his former pupil telling of a mysterious illness afflicting the Cornish village where he now practices medicine. The doctor travels there with his daughter to investigate. We follow him as he proceeds to dig up graves and find the coffins empty, interrogate surly locals, examine the bloody corpse of his daughter’s school friend, consult the vicar’s convenient collection of occult tomes, and finally leap to the wild conclusion—which naturally turns out to be right on the money—that the town squire moonlights as a necromancer (having acquired his unholy powers during a recent holiday in Haiti). Near the end, we learn that the squire has murdered half the village and reanimated them so as to make them toil for him in his mine. I suppose he does this as a cost-cutting measure, which might seem quite drastic but is totally in character with 19th century mine owners (and 21st century capitalists). 

This film has been described as supplying the missing link between older quasi-authentic zombies and Romero zombies, but in fact its zombies follow all the rules of the former. Only a dream-sequence scene where the undead claw their way out of their graves and hungrily corner a man reminded me of Romero. However, this lack of innovation on the legacy zombie wasn’t a drawback for me. I quite like this type of zombie. The idea of a sorcerer or mad scientist (like Re-Animator’s Dr. West) deliberately creating walking corpses to serve as slaves, only to have them turn on their creator, is quite rich, so I enjoyed seeing Hammer’s take. Also, the unique cinematic atmosphere of peak Hammer horror—that technicolor swathed in fog and cobwebs look—is always a welcome treat.

The Twenty-Third Night of Halloween: The Nightmare

ON THE TWENTY-THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched The Nightmare (2015), a documentary by Rodney Ascher. Ascher interviews eight people who have been visited by “shadow people” that freeze them in their beds, such that they are unable to speak or move. This has happened many times to each of them, over a number of years. For two of them, the visitations began when they were still in the crib. Less than half of the interviewees accept the scientific medical diagnosis for their condition: sleep paralysis. That is, sleep paralysis attended by hypnopompic and hypnagogic hallucinations that can cause nightmare imagery to intrude into the waking world. The other interviewees, reluctant to accept this rational explanation, instead propose more idiosyncratic or paranormal etiologies, ranging from intruders from a parallel dimension to Biblical demons to the Zeta Reticulan gray aliens to (most interestingly) a psychically transmitted disease. 

There is no narration, only the interviews, which are intercut with dramatic reenactments illustrating the interviewees’ harrowing tales of nocturnal terror via low budget horror effects. There are also no expert talking heads, only the eight “experiencers.” So, all of the commentary from Ascher comes through the editing, in particular the crosscuts between interviews that are done to correlate similar (sometimes deceptively similar) elements from disparate accounts. There are some brief clips of horror movies, including the original Nightmare on Elm Street, Communion, and Jacob’s Ladder, but these are only shown when the interviewees themselves refer to these films and detail the similarities between certain scenes and their own encounters. Ostensibly, the reason we are given nothing more than these accounts and their accompanying illustrations, without any explanation or opining from an external source, is so that we may keep an open mind as to the true nature of shadow people. Really though, the possibility is left open that shadow people are more than psychological figments only so that Ascher may scare his audience. For, The Nightmare is as much a horror movie as it is a documentary. And I have no problem with that, particularly because there does not appear to be any fudging here, no fabricated evidence, such as we see in more exploitative “true horror” like Faces of Death (which are also great, in their own sideshow-flavored fashion). 

As a horror movie, The Nightmare succeeds best at conveying the bleak hell of being paralyzed and tormented by malevolent entities night after night, helpless to prevent these circadian ordeals. Also, one interviewee’s account of having his first episode after his girlfriend told him about her sleep paralysis, and how he passed it on to another friend after telling of his experience in turn, activates some Pleistocene-age alarm bell in the back of our brains—did we just catch this same nightmare affliction merely by learning about the shadow people??

The Twenty-Second Night of Halloween: The Strangers

ON THE TWENTY-SECOND NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched The Strangers (2008), by Bryan Bertino. In this minimalist home invasion picture, Liv Tyler plays a young woman who is put in the awkward situation of having to spend the night at her boyfriend’s cabin after turning down his marriage proposal (presumably because, as we are deftly shown, he is a petulant and controlling jerk). Their make-up sex is interrupted by some rude visitors pounding on their door. These visitors are the kind that wear masks and like to play tricks, more and more alarming tricks.

This is an expertly stripped down work of terror cinema. Once the invasion kicks off at the twenty minute mark, the entire next hour—until the bloody concluding button—is occupied with an unrelenting cat-and-mouse ordeal. The trio of enigmatically masked cats here seem to have no purpose other than to provoke, sustain, and elevate the couple’s abject fear. These three make up a kind of family, consisting of a tall man, a mature woman, and a teenage girl. So, in addition to cats toying with trapped mice, we are put in mind of the three bears and Goldilocks, and the wolf pounding on the little pig's door as well. These allusions to children’s fairy tales of course contrast with The Strangers’ brutal horror, but they also reflect the deliberate simplicity of the characters. Like the filmmakers themselves, the masked invaders have fixed their focus completely on orchestrating scares for a captive audience. In this way, The Strangers is a better successor to Carpenter’s original Halloween than any of the actual Halloween sequels, reboots, or legacy retcons. The strangers resemble Michael Myers in that they are empty shapes serving a pure narrative function. Only one of the strangers speaks and then only in disaffected monosyllables; when the couple asks why they are doing this to them, the reply is, “You were home.”

Bertino has said that he based The Strangers in part on the Manson family murders. And it opens with a chyron explaining, “What you are about to see is inspired by true events.” I usually like this sort of prologue. Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s opening text works particularly well at supplying further verisimilitude to its palpably grimy realism. And my favorite instance pokes fun at itself: Return of the Living Dead, a movie in which a taxidermized dog comes to life and the US military nukes a midwestern town, begins with the lines, “The events portrayed in this film are all true. The names are real names of real people and real organizations.” (However, I totally bought this the first time I saw it at age eight with my uncle and cousin at the drive-in; for months afterward, I was convinced that every pedestrian over 60 was a brain-eating ghoul.) Here though, I think it’s a misstep, since the story as told has such mythic generality. Maybe it would have worked better if the chyron had been moved to the end or had been replaced with relevant true crime headlines running under the end credits. Regardless, like the original Halloween, we are left shaken by the sense that this sort of thing has happened and could happen again, anywhere, anytime—perhaps tonight, in your house.

The Twenty-First Night of Halloween: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

ON THE TWENTY-FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), an Iranian vampire film by Ana Lily Amirpour. A town on the edge of nowhere called Bad City harbors a handful of lonely outcasts, including a small boy whose parents are nowhere to be seen, a young man in a leather jacket and pompadour who longs to fly this coop, his miserable heroin-addicted father, their hapless cat, a middle-aged streetwalking sex worker, and the tyrannical pimp and drug dealer who terrorizes all of them. When a mysterious woman in a long black head scarf that looks like a death shroud appears, we are happy to see her bare her vampiric fangs and devour the drug dealer, thereby freeing the town from his evil. Bad City is not off the hook so easily, though, for this vampire has come to stay.

So, initially the film is a moody and poetic small town character drama disrupted by a vampire striking like a hungry panther. It’s shot in high contrast black and white, with lots of inky pools that connote blood and death. What soon comes to dominate the story, however, is the lyricism of doomed romance, when the vampire and the rockabilly-styling young man begin flirtatiously circling one another. She bumps into him on the street after he stumbles out of a party; she is tempted to bite him but resists; they dance to a gothy new wave song in her apartment; and later, in an inversion, he pierces her ears so she can wear the earrings he gives her (which he stole from a rich woman he does yard work for). Amirpour makes the usual parallels between drug use, sex, and vampirism, but she handles these cross-reflecting symbols with remarkable tenderness and originality. 

It’s interesting how much nostalgic Western iconography there is, from the music to the fashions to the 1957 Thunderbird convertible that the first act revolves around. The cinematography and editing are also clearly intended to pay homage to 1950’s drive-in horror flicks like I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and Blood of Dracula (1957). In fact, the vampire stands out because she is the only one who wears traditional Muslim garb, and even then, she strips this away in her more human moments, so as to look more like an American youth. I suppose there could be a meditation here on Persian history haunting Westernized Iranian communities, but I don’t have enough cultural context to say more.

In any case, the gothic romanticism of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is quite powerful, on par with the doomed vampiric post-punk love of Near Dark (maybe my favorite vampire movie).

The Twentieth Night of Halloween: Theatre of Blood

ON THE TWENTIETH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Theatre of Blood (1973), a horror comedy directed by Douglas Hickox. Vincent Price stars as a histrionic Shakespearean actor who is presumed to have leapt to his death after being snubbed for a critics’ choice award but who has now returned to exact bloody revenge on the critics responsible for his defamation, one by one. Price’s Edward Lionheart carries out each murder via an elaborate set-piece modeled on a death scene from the play that the given critic panned his performance in. So, one critic dies like Julius Caesar, stabbed twenty-three times on the Ides of March; another is dragged by a horse like Hector in Troilus and Cressida; another has a pound of flesh cut from him by Lionheart dressed as Shylock; another is provoked to strangle his wife out of a case of mistaken jealousy like Othello; and so on. The bumbling police inspector is always one step behind Lionheart, even though the savviest member of the critics circle immediately guesses what’s going on. As a result, Lionheart is allowed to carry off all but one of his expertly planned “return performances” without a hitch. 

It’s great to see the enthusiastically eloquent Vincent Price deliberately ham up a series of touchstone Shakespeare monologues. Price had always wanted to do Shakespeare on-screen but found he was typecast playing Edgar Allan Poe villains in Roger Corman movies. So, he was delighted to play this tailor-fit lead role, and this delight is visibly apparent throughout. Price made Theatre of Blood immediately after the two part saga of Dr. Phibes, The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) and Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972), which had given his career a second wind for British audiences. Like the Dr. Phibes movies, Theatre of Blood was a very British production that was filmed on location at a number of historic London sites. It closely resembles the Phibes duology in story and character as well. Like Lionheart, Phibes is a wicked mastermind who is presumed dead and returns to exact revenge on a circle of professionals (in his case, doctors), one by one. And like Lionheart, Phibes carries out his murders by elaborate means modeled on a literary source (in his case, the ten plagues from the book of Exodus), while the bumbling police are too flatfooted to stop him. Remarkably, I’m not aware of any further connection between the Phibes and the Theatre of Blood productions—the production companies, producers, screenwriters, and directors are all different. Since Price himself is the only carryover, I suppose Harbour Films just pitched Price on doing a third Phibes-like vehicle but with Shakespeare instead of medical horror-- and he was totally down. 

The humor here is both quite dry and quite broad. Wordplay is fairly sparse, mostly depending on Shakespeare references and standard theater puns. Instead, the real black comedy lies in relishing the various obnoxious posh snobs getting their comeuppances. The best instance is when a critic who moonlights as a slumlord tries to evict some squatters, realizes they will not come nicely, and turns to the police in a panic, only to find that the police are the squatters’ comrades in disguise.

But of course, this picture’s main attraction is Price’s glorious gothic campiness, so if you’re a fan of that, this is a must-see.

The Nineteenth Night of Halloween: We Are Still Here

ON THE NINETEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched We Are Still Here (2015), by Ted Geoghegan. This indie haunted house movie stars horror legend Barbara Crampton, best known for the H.P. Lovecraft adaptations Re-Animator and From Beyond, as a grieving middle-aged woman who moves into a mysterious isolated homestead with her husband after the loss of their son. As it turns out, their new place is cursed, such that entities in the basement demand periodic human sacrifice. 

Many of the standard tropes for modern haunted house cinema appear here, including the gradual escalation from little bumps and gusts to voices and rearranged furniture to full spectral manifestations; the enlistment of a spiritualist against the wishes of a skeptical spouse; and standoffish locals giving the new residents intense side-eye. Having the protagonists be grieving the recent loss of a family member is the one that usually aggravates me. I understand that it lets the screenwriter kill multiple birds with one stone: it quickly makes the heroes sympathetic; at the same time it believably causes them to dwell on death and the beyond, thus creating tension over whether or not the phenomena are merely psychological; and it makes the audience reflect on the theme of mortality as well. But for that reason, it usually feels clumsily inserted. Somehow it works here, though, through the subtle touches used to hint at the mother’s lost relationship with her son and the unusually restrained depiction of grief. The same goes for the other standard tropes. Their patient and skillful handling over the course of the first half reminds us why they became standard in the first place. When they work, they really work to instill terror like no other type of horror.

Then, in the second half, We Are Still Here makes a wild break from convention through an explosion of gore and surprisingly corporeal mayhem at the charred hands of the basement dwellers. It’s rare that a film is equally effective at both executing conventional narrative turns with nuance and wildly defying genre expectations, but Geoghegan pulls it off. And as usual Crampton is awesome.

The Eighteenth Night of Halloween: Long Weekend

ON THE EIGHTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Long Weekend (1978), directed by Colin Eggleston. This is another peculiar Ozploitation movie set in the Australian outback, but here the outback plays a much more active role, essentially becoming the main antagonist, at least in the heroes’ minds. A feuding married couple decides to go on a weekend outing to see if they can mend things, but the asshole husband only creates further strain by insisting they go camping at the beach, whereas the wife hates the outdoors. Along the way, the couple commit numerous crimes against mother nature, including tossing a lit cigarette into dry brush (this resonates as especially ominous today), running over a kangaroo on the highway, strewing wrappers and cans everywhere, smashing an eagle egg, and shooting a rare sea creature that looks like a manatee but that the husband says is a “bunyip” (the bunyip is actually an Australian cryptid). The camera dwells on all of these acts forebodingly and cuts to shots of swarming ants, diving birds, growling badgers, and so forth, implying that the collective spirit of the wildlife is becoming increasingly fed up with these two.

So, initially this movie seems like something Smoky the Bear and the Don’t Pollute Owl would make if they thought a horror movie would be a good way to spread their message. But as it goes on, we realize that the narrative never actually pulls the trigger on showing an undeniably motivated attack by nature, like in Hitchcock’s The Birds. Instead, the film continues to explore the breakdown of the couple’s marriage, as they subject one another to increasing psychological torment. At some point, the crimes against nature become more of a reflection of the husband’s inner nastiness than an impetus for nature’s revenge. We do see an eagle and a possum attack the husband, but in both instances he provokes them. We also hear plenty of weird howling in the night, and there are a series of equipment failures and other accidents—but objectively speaking, that just seems to be what ordinarily happens to people camping in Australia? In other words, despite how the film frames and builds up the story as a humanity-versus-nature conflict, we never actually see anything inexplicable on screen, such that it could all simply be due to the husband boomeranging his own antagonism back on himself, thereby bringing about the couple’s eventual self-destruction. The couple do at one point discover that another camper has killed herself, but it could be that this beach just attracts people who are unraveling and magnifies their mental struggles.

I appreciated that it was left ambiguous, though. There’s something weirdly amusing about juxtaposing a clumsy “give a hoot” environmental message with a couple’s harrowing descent into madness.

The Seventeenth Night of Halloween: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

ON THE SEVENTEETH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), directed by Robert Aldrich. This legendary work of psychological horror stars Bette Davis as a former child star, the titular Baby Jane, now in her sixties, who imprisons and torments her sister Blanche, played by Joan Crawford. Jane seems to have been driven mad by the adulation she received as a child, in Shirley Temple-esque song-and-dance revues, and by her jealousy over her sister’s rise to stardom as an adult, after Baby Jane was forgotten. One night, it appears that Jane cripples Blanche by running her down with her car. Decades later, the sisters live together in a gloomy Hollywood mansion as shut-ins. When Blanche decides to sell the mansion, Jane snaps and retreats into a delusional fugue in which she believes she can return to the stage with her old Baby Jane act. Cruel pranks like serving her dependent sister a dead rat for lunch soon escalate to grand larceny, battery, and eventually homicide, as Jane’s mind regresses further and further back in time.

A feud between two faded starlets might seem an unlikely premise for a horror classic, but there is something so indelibly creepy about Bette Davis’ sexagenarian (she was actually only 54 at the time but did her own makeup to age herself up—Davis should have won Oscars for both Best Actress and Best Makeup) dressing, talking, acting, and at one point singing like a six year old girl, utterly convinced she hasn't aged a day. The thought of being the helpless captive of such a person is chilling, so it’s no wonder this movie inspired a whole subgenre of horror, amusingly known as “psycho-biddies.” These include Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972), and Night Watch (1973). (And once again, let us mention Stephen King and note that he must have been inspired by this genre, and by this film in particular, in writing one of his best novels, Misery, where a lonely middle-aged woman driven to insanity by her obsession with the entertainment industry imprisons and torments a helpless individual.)

However, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? itself must have been inspired by Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), which I think is a great work of gothic horror, though it is usually categorized as film noir. There, a delusional old woman who was once a beloved silent era ingenue hires a screenwriter to write a script for her imaginary return to film. Similarly, a subplot in this film features Jane hiring a pianist for the imaginary rebirth of her musical act. Both the screenwriter and the pianist are down-at-heel showbiz hacks who cynically humor the old women because they are desperate for work—Faustian bargains that they both soon regret. So, both films shine an intense spotlight on the psychological abominations spawned by Hollywood, but What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? distinguishes itself with its thorough exploration of murderous jealousy and the acute nastiness of its manifestation in siblings. And Davis and Crawford are both spectacular. In fact, they seem to have taken their roles so seriously that they became bitter rivals in real life, to the point that they disrupted the film's press tour and sabotaged one another’s Oscar bids.

The Sixteenth Night of Halloween: Mother of Tears

ON THE SIXTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Mother of Tears (2007) by Dario Argento. This is the third entry in Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy, after Suspiria (1977), which is Argento’s masterpiece, and Inferno (1980). The Three Mothers are: the Mother of Sighs, or Mater Suspiriorum, who is the villain of Suspiria; the Mother of Darkness, or Mater Tenebrarum, who is the villain of Inferno; and the Mother of Tears, or Mater Lachrymarum, the villain here. Argento derived his three witch matriarchs from a brief passage in Thomas De Quincey’s "Suspiria de Profundis," in which the Mothers are imagined as consorts to the Roman goddess Levana. Even after three movies’ worth of protagonists fervently investigating and expositing on the Mothers and their millennia-spanning conspiracy, Argento’s witch mythology remains utterly impenetrable to me—which is what I love about it. We are told that the Mothers are thousands of years old and have the power to bring about an apocalypse through strange artefacts, and we finally see that apocalypse take place in this movie, through gleefully unhinged scenes of pedestrians driven by sorcerous hysteria to become sex-crazed homicidal maniacs who fling their own infants off bridges and smear their victims’ entrails on their naked bodies. We also learn that the Mothers already rule the world from three buildings that act as their centers of power. At times it seems that the Mothers can be killed by simply stabbing them while at other times it seems that they are deathless archetypes. Meanwhile, their globe-spanning coven seems to be both a sophisticated illuminati-like organization and a gang of drunken punks who spring up from the gutters at the behest of some irrepressible primeval call. That is, everything we learn about Argento’s witch mythos raises further questions and pushes us further into darkness, giving us only enough of a glimpse at each step to leave us more intimidated. Which is excellent. Many a lesser supernatural horror series has been spoiled by spelling out the black magic according to mundane mechanics.

But I suppose I should say something about this movie in particular. It’s by far the worst of the three, but that’s not to say it doesn’t offer a fun watch, owing pretty much entirely to Argento’s undiminished talent for making sharp turns into insanity. The problem is not that Argento has lost any of his chaotic magic in the decades since Inferno. It’s that unlike the first two entries, which are tightly focused on exploring a single building, this narrative takes us all over the place and never coheres around a strong dramatic through line. And this is clearly a problem that Argento was aware of and struggled with, since he had originally planned to conclude the trilogy in 1984 but was so unsatisfied with the script at the time that he scrapped the project. Many more rewrites and twenty years later, I suppose he decided to just shoot the best that he could come up with before it was too late. I think he must have wanted to expand the scope of the action to an apocalyptic scale for the series conclusion, but he was never able to find a way to do that while maintaining the claustrophobic occult atmosphere that defines the first two Mothers movies.

The Fifteenth Night of Halloween: The Skin I Live In

ON THE FIFTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched The Skin I Live In (2011) by Academy Award winner Pedro Almodóvar. It stars Antonio Banderas as a mad surgeon who is driven to kidnap a man, imprison him in his palatial mansion, and transform him into a woman. Over several years, he shapes this unwilling test subject’s body through experimental operations, until it looks identical to his dead wife. The surgeon does this as an elaborate act of revenge on the man who raped his daughter and drove her to suicide. Along the way are many more complex plot twists—probably too many.

This film is based on the 1984 novel Tarantula by Thierry Jonquet, which in turn I think must have been inspired by the 1960 French horror classic, Eyes Without a Face, one of my favorite movies (Almodóvar himself has admitted the debt). In Eyes Without a Face, a mad surgeon with a palatial mansion kidnaps a woman and removes her face so as to graft it onto his grievously disfigured daughter. The Skin I Live In borrows not just plot elements from Eyes Without a Face but its haunting white mask imagery as well (to much diminished effect, unfortunately).

The Skin I Live In’s major innovation to the mad surgeon tale is the injection of sex and gender dysphoria. It’s very stylishly made, with a bright and bold modernist color palette that contrasts with the dark subject matter. And Banderas and Elena Anaya in the lead roles are excellent. But there are so many convoluted plot developments that a good portion of the runtime is cluttered with awkward exposition and flashbacks, to the point that there is not enough room for the bizarre relationships to breathe. The daughter’s melancholy in Eyes Without a Face would not be so memorably disturbing if it weren’t made perfectly clear to us who she is early on. Here, we switch through three cases of mistaken identity before we can begin to grasp what these people are feeling, and by that point, they are as emotionally disoriented as we are. Additionally, Eyes Without a Face’s surgery scenes are still more viscerally shocking than most modern medical horror movies, including this one. These drawbacks make the sex and gender questions less interesting than they should have been. I think this film failed to have much of an impact on trans rights discourse over the past decade because its multiply backtracking plot doesn’t allow it to say much of anything for certain on the topic, progressive or regressive.

Despite all this, I did like it. Again, it’s quite excellently crafted, and it contains a number of stunning moments. I just think Almodóvar could have made something a lot more powerful by streamlining the script.

The Fourteenth Night of Halloween: Next of Kin

ON THE FOURTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Next of Kin (1982) by Tony Williams. After her mother's death, a young woman inherits a large estate that has served as a nursing home for many decades. She left this place and its surrounding rural township years ago. Her return evokes haunting memories and questions. Amid the quiet melancholy of caring for withered residents and the gloomy shadows of the Victorian building's long corridors, the woman begins to suspect that bloody deeds are being hidden from her.

Although this is an Australian movie that was made at the height of Ozploitation, shortly after The Road Warrior and shortly before Razorback, its narrative derives from very traditional gothic sources, harkening all the way back to the beginning of horror in tales of creaky old manors, dark family secrets, mistaken identity, and murders concealed in the walls, found in such novels as The Castle of Otranto (1764) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). With very little alteration, the same script could have been filmed in 1930’s Hollywood together with Hitchcock’s Rebecca and James Whale’s The Old Dark House. Far from being a detriment, however, the spookiness is enhanced by giving us such an unexpected encounter with gothic creaks and cobwebs in the sunny Australian outback. It’s slow and moody and well-shot, and I recommend it for a smoothly chilling watch.

The Thirteenth Night of Halloween: Xtro

ON THE THIRTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … a special treat! I rewatched one of my favorite sci fi horror movies, the woefully underappreciated Xtro (1982) by Harry Bromley Davenport. It was unfairly lumped in with Alien rip-offs at the time (as well as being condemned by marms for its unflinchingly gory scenes of body horror), and it still hasn’t achieved the full cult status it deserves. This is a grave injustice. First off, it isn’t an Alien rip-off at all. It imports some of the ideas behind Giger’s famous xenomorph, pushing them even further as symbols of psycho-sexual trauma, but its narrative, setting, and characters are totally unrelated to Alien. If anything, it’s more of a radical inversion of ET.

The absent father subtext in ET is both brought to the surface and flipped in Xtro, since its absent father character is also the alien visitor. Like ET, the young boy in Xtro gains new powers through the alien, but these powers uproot him from all human grounding instead of helping him develop his humanity. And Xtro’s ending mirrors ET’s transcendent return to the stars, but it’s a morally unsettling scene rather than an uplifting one.   

Straight away the film opens with the father being pulled up into a triangular light from his backyard as his son watches. Cut to three years later. The son now lives with his mother in a London apartment, and no one believes his story about his father being abducted. Instead, his mother and her new boyfriend want him to admit that his father simply walked out on them. Meanwhile in the countryside near the family’s old cottage, a creature arrives in another flash of light. It attacks and impregnates a woman and then crumples into a husk. Soon, the woman’s belly massively expands. She is split apart as she gives birth to a full-grown man. This man is the boy’s father. He tracks down and rejoins his son and wife, which creates an awkward situation for the boyfriend. The father looks and acts the same as he did three years prior, but we know that underneath he can’t be the same. He shares a strange psychic bond with his son, and he forms a more physical connection with him as well by injecting him with something like alien DNA. 

Interspersed in the unreal fusion of family drama and alien monster flick that follows are erotic interludes, reality-altering psychedelic trances involving living toys, and potent symbols of puberty. Somehow, all of these disparate elements work together perfectly. Each scene is taut and effective, supporting every other both thematically and logistically to create an uncanny, truly original story. One reason that I think it’s taken so long for this film to garner its due acclaim is that, unlike many other cult movies that were unfairly dismissed at the time for their violence and weirdness only to be later celebrated by horror fans, Xtro’s narrative is unusually morally challenging. It uses the tropes and gore effects of low-budget 80's horror, but it has the ethical complexity of an arthouse film. The monster is not merely pretending to be the boy’s father. He is the father. He really is solely motivated by his desire to be reunited with his son. The son is not tricked or coerced by the father into joining him. He desperately wishes to join him in his extra-human transformation before they even speak. And when they have both transformed into the mature form of the creature and ascend to the stars, hand-in-hand, it really is a triumphant moment for them. So, rather than giving us the typical pat answers of a good versus evil conflict, Xtro leaves us with only questions. Should we judge the creatures on their own terms, relative to their lifecycle and culture, or should we condemn them for the harm they cause to humans? And how is this question affected by the fact that the creatures were themselves once human? 

One more reason Xtro is great: it contains my all time favorite jump scare. It’s so good, a gif of the key shot made the rounds on paranormal sites in the 2000’s as photographic evidence of a supposedly real cryptid called a skinwalker. Check it out:

The Twelfth Night of Halloween: Wait Until Dark

ON THE TWELFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Wait Until Dark (1967), directed by Terence Young and based on a play Frederick Knott. Audrey Hepburn plays a blind woman who is conned, gaslit, and finally savagely attacked by three men in pursuit of a heroin-stuffed doll they believe she is in possession of. The woman has only recently lost her sight in an accident, so she is still learning how to navigate the world on her own, which makes her overly trusting of strangers.

Thus, throughout the first two acts, the film concerns the psychological horror of a person buying into a false reality created by a conspiracy of new voices around her. We know the people behind those voices are already responsible for another woman’s murder, but she believes they are the voices of well-wishers and civic authorities. In the last act, there is a more directly horrific stand-off between the woman and the true psychopath of the three, played by a surprisingly sinister young Alan Arkin. At one point, she has smashed out the lightbulbs, while the psychopath has doused everything in gasoline, and they start taunting one another by briefly illuminating the pitch blackness with lit matches. Hepburn is of course great (she was nominated for an Oscar for this performance)—creating a loveable character whose strength, uncertainty, pride, and growing terror are clearly legible all at once on her face.

This is definitely a Hitchcockian thriller, given its simple but ingenious premise that cranks up tension notch by notch in every scene. And that’s no fluke: Frederick Knott also wrote Dial M for Murder, one of Hitchcock’s signature films. Wait Until Dark bears a lot of similarities with Dial M for Murder, including the action being predominantly restricted to one city apartment, heavy reliance on the telephone as a plot device, and lots of dramatic irony arising from the characters’ various campaigns of subterfuge. So undoubtedly Warner Bros. was looking to reproduce Hitchcock’s success with this picture. For once, they absolutely nailed it, and in fact through the talent of Hepburn and Arkin, they produced something distinctive well beyond other Hitchcock clones.

The Eleventh Night of Halloween: Behind the Mask

ON THE ELEVENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) by Scott Glosserman. This is an extremely meta mocumentary in which a film crew follows an aspiring slasher villain as he plots out his first massacre. It takes place in a universe where Michael Myers’ homely endeavors in Haddonfield, Freddy Kruger’s dreamy spectaculars in Springwood, and Jason Voorhees’ woodsy romps at Camp Crystal Lake all really happened. We know this because all of these characters and places are emphatically namechecked (Chucky, the Black Christmas killer, the Sorority Row killer, and others are more briefly referred to), along with footage of the famous Haddonfield and Springwood murder houses. Not only are the original movies’ massacres real but all the sequels’ are as well. Moreover, a number of horror icons appear in bit roles, including Poltergeist’s Zelda Rubinstein, Freddy-himself Robert Englund (playing a character who is a carbon copy of Halloween’s Doctor Loomis), and Jason-himself Kane Hodder. 

By 2006, Wes Craven had already twice made a meta-slasher that upended the genre, first with New Nightmare and then with the wildly successful Scream. These are slashers where the characters have seen slasher movies, where the movies are namechecked, where actors from the movies make cameos (sometimes playing themselves), and where the heroes use their knowledge of slashers to survive against the villain. So, all the same stuff. The only thing that’s different here is the mocumentary angle, which seems inspired by what had come to replace the traditional slasher by the early 2000’s, found footage horror. 

But there’s a snag here too, because the film that actually invented the meta-slasher, arriving two years before Craven’s first attempt, was a mocumentary in which a film crew follows a serial killer around as he plots his kills and muses on his lifestyle. It’s called Man Bites Dog (1992), and it’s still the best of its kind, both the funniest and the most genuinely chilling. It isn’t concerned at all with Hollywood horror franchises but instead with the tropes that range over the whole history of horror and how these are both inspired by and go on to inform real world murder.

So, while Behind the Mask is dressed up as a loving homage with a twist, there is no actual twist—all of its morally surreal tension is borrowed from Man Bites Dog. Nevertheless, it continues to rank highly among horror fans and appear on many best horror films of the 2000’s lists (which is why I watched it). I think this is so, however, for a bad reason: it is a suffocating work of fan service. 

Obviously I am a huge horror fan, and there are horror movies about horror movies that I love, particularly Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and What We Do In the Shadows. But those two are classics because they succeed as comedies entirely apart from their references. Behind the Mask (and to some extent Scream as well) leans so heavily on its references that it barely qualifies as its own movie. And honestly, the references it leans on come from stuff I don’t like: franchise horror. All of the respective original films in these series are great, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and to a lesser extent Friday the Thirteenth (1980) are all classics (especially Texas Chainsaw), but none of the sequels are better than merely good-- most are terrible. And the reason for this is not the incompetence of amateur but passionate filmmakers. It’s because they are uninspired corporate products. There is some stuff there that is fun to laugh at, but I don’t think it’s deserving of loving homage? Unless you do, I’d say skip Behind the Mask.

The Tenth Night of Halloween: The Devils

ON THE TENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched The Devils (1971) by Ken Russell. Its narrative is based on real events in the life of Urbain Grandier, a 17th century priest who was persecuted, tortured, and burned at the stake after pissing off Cardinal Richelieu for supporting the independence of Loudun. Really though, the history here is just a pretext for Russell to stage an incredibly theatrical production, filled with nude nun orgies, forced enemas, mass graves for plague victims, and lots of overwrought period dialog. It’s no surprise that Russell would go on to direct psychedelic musicals, including an adaptation of The Who’s rock opera Tommy, since that’s essentially what this is (without the singing). It seems like Russell started out with a desire to fuse the profane and the sacred, and sex and death, as a collective experience of hysteria that would swallow up the audience, and he subsequently found something that would allow him to do that (that something being The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley, which Russell adapted for the screenplay). 

It does have some harrowing scenes of horror, but at least as many scenes are devoted to celebrations of erotic hedonism, wherein the pagan spirit breaks through and triumphs over Christian repression in the church’s own innermost sanctums. I suppose some people might find the latter horrific (scandalized audiences at the time certainly did), but I just found these scenes to be fun and happy. That’s about all I got out of it. My only complaint, or not so much a complaint as a point of bemusement, is that Grandier is played by Oliver Reed, i.e. the most ridiculously full-of-himself actor who ever lived. He makes William Shatner look understated and restrained.

The Ninth Night of Halloween: Raw

ON THE NINTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Raw (2016) by Julia Ducournau. A young woman enters a prestigious veterinary medicine school and is subjected to a week of intense hazing. At one point, she is forced to eat raw rabbit innards and thereby break with the strict vegan regimen her family has imposed on her. This first taste of flesh awakens an undeniable craving for fresh human meat. We soon learn this condition is genetic, since it’s shared by her mother and older sister. 

The script and the performances, with Garance Marillier (in her debut film role) and Ella Rumpf playing the ghoulish sisters, are razor-sharp. Together, they deliver plenty of incisive statements on sexual and social rites of passage within the frenzied rat-race for professional status under 21st century capitalism. 

These things by themselves would make for a decent indie horror film, but what really distinguishes Raw as something special for me has nothing to do with either its literal plot or its subtextual social commentary. Rather, the reason I will definitely be watching this again is that its world is deliberately incoherent. It’s dreamlike in a way that is never overt but rather is only apparent upon reflection. This makes the experience of watching it and then thinking about it more like the actual experience of having a dream than traditional attempts to portray dreams through blatantly irrational imagery. When we are in a dream, we are convinced it is reality, but as soon as we wake up and think about it, we see what an absurd mishmash of memories and obsessions it was. 

What I’m talking about is actually something that bad filmmakers create on accident all the time: plot holes. Say a particular movie version of Superman is supposed to be gritty and firmly grounded in reality. Okay, why then doesn’t the supposedly competent Lois Lane immediately recognize him as Clark Kent with his glasses off? The intended realism contradicts the cartoonish naiveté inherited from older iterations of the characters. It doesn’t add up. In cases like this, the writers either didn’t see the plot hole, or more likely, they thought the audience would be too dumb see it, and so didn’t do anything to fill it.

Instead of that, what Ducoumau does is purposefully plant plot holes in an otherwise highly consistent fictional world. Why is the college a school for veterinary medicine, given that veterinary doctorates are secondary degrees that usually require students to already have an undergraduate degree-- *and* given that the main character is clearly shown leaving her parents’ guardianship for the first time? If she has already been through four years of college, wouldn’t she have also already been to a rager and had her first sexual encounter, both of which are mind-blowingly new for her here? Not to mention that the hazing activities are cribbed from freshman fraternity and bootcamp initiation rituals and not the sort of pranks that jaded, possibly already married post-grads would pull. 

However, this isn’t an ordinary plot hole because it’s not actually important at all for the plot that it be a vet school. It’s only symbolically important. This is how dreams often work; they mash together real situations that don’t rationally fit because of the charged symbols they contain. Another example is the protagonist’s relationship with her parents. How could she have gone her whole life without noticing that her father’s body is covered with huge open wounds from her mother’s bites? Again, it’s not important to the plot that the bites be in places where she obviously would have seen them. If they had been hidden under wraps on his thighs, the significance for the plot would have been the same. The father has to bare his chest to show the wounds because that is the way a revelation like this would appear in a dream, regardless of its incompatibility with one’s actual life history. 

I noticed many other instances, and I’m sure there are many more I missed. These artfully placed plot holes create a sense of freefall into an unreal hell-world, which mirrors what the main character feels upon suddenly being dropped into the deep end of adult sexuality and cutthroat competition.

The Eighth Night of Halloween: I Saw the Devil

ON THE EIGHTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched I Saw the Devil (2010), a Korean ultraviolent crime thriller directed by Kim Jee-woon (who also made the excellent ghost movie, A Tale of Two Sisters). A serial killer (played by Choi Min-sik, the heavyweight lead from Old Boy) makes the mistake of butchering the pregnant fiancée of a superspy. What ensues is basically James Bond versus Hannibal Lector. It avoids all the clichés one might expect from that, however, by showing the faceoff through the lens of the surprising ironies of contemporary Korean filmmaking (as also exemplified by works like the demonic horror epic, The Wailing, and last year’s best picture winner, Parasite). Since this film understands that James Bond is himself a professional serial killer under government contract, it has its superspy quickly beat the mere hobbyist of a murderer at his own game. He smashes his way through the suspect list, leaving a trail of broken bodies, and nabs his man. He could kill him at this point, but that wouldn’t sate his appetite for revenge. Instead, he decides to play a brutal game of catch, torture, release, stalk, and catch again. Eventually, of course, he slips up and comes to regret not ending things earlier.

This all takes place in a somewhat heightened reality where, for example, legendary serial killers at large are old friends and have (cannibalistic) dinner together on the weekends. Moment to moment it seems quite grounded, though, since both the acting and the cinematography are so nuanced and naturalistic. I would have preferred for I Saw the Devil to say more about the parallels between state-sanctioned violence and violence for personal enjoyment, instead of dwelling on the simpler violence-begets-violence theme, but I really appreciated how well every scene was executed.

The Seventh Night of Halloween: Deathdream

ON THE SEVENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Deathdream (1974), a Vietnam War-era take on “The Monkey’s Paw.”

A young soldier is shot in the jungle. As he loses consciousness, he hears his mother’s voice calling out for him to honor his promise to return home. Back in the US, this mother falls into a fugue state of denial after learning of her son’s death. She repeats her prayer for his return over and over, like a necromantic incantation. Later that night, he does return, but all is not well. He must kill others and inject their blood into his arm to keep himself from rotting. For he did die in Vietnam, and according to him, others must pay for his sacrifice.

The symbolism of this movie is obvious but powerful: many parents prayed for their sons’ return from Vietnam, only to find that when they did, they were dead inside—or they were addicted to heroin. Unlike the original “Monkey’s Paw,” where the mangled condition of the resurrected son is what causes his parents to regret their wish for his return, here the parents’ regret is given plenty of time to set in. The son looks normal, if a little pale; it’s just that he acts so cold. But the parents are sure this will wear off with time. The dawning psychological horror of the impact of bringing a senseless war home, in the form of walking death that wears human flesh, is what makes this a worthwhile development of “Monkey’s Paw.” (Here, one can certainly draw comparisons to Stephen King’s later Pet Sematary, though King was able to add his own further brilliant development to the fable by making the act required for resurrection so involved and by not only not revoking it but repeating it, despite the horrific consequences that the grieving parent knows firsthand will come.) 

Bob Clark would go on to direct the seminal slasher Black Christmas the same year, before abandoning horror entirely for comedies, including Porky’s and A Christmas Story (as well as, regrettably, Baby Geniuses). He always manages to infuse a lot of charm into his movies through his bit characters, which here include a sassy diner waitress, a hungry mailman, and an obnoxious deputy. Also, I think it was pretty daring to make such a direct statement about the psychological fallout of the war before it had even ended. This kind of strong and clear leftwing message has only ever really made it through to large American audiences in low budget independent horror and sci fi flicks.

The Sixth Night of Halloween: Onibaba

ON THE SIXTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Onibaba (1964), by Kaneto Shindo. It’s a period piece about civil war in 14th century Japan, but none of the main characters are samurai. Instead, we see the fallout of war on ordinary farmers. A woman and her mother-in-law have been reduced to murdering hapless deserters and selling their valuable kit for food. The women then dump the bodies into an eerie pit. The story soon takes a surprisingly erotic turn, involving nightly friends-with-benefits trysts in the tall grass. Consequences finally catch up to the women in the form of a man wearing a cursed demon mask.

Onibaba is quite beautifully made, with excellent cinematography, editing, music, and performances all dovetailing into the filmic equivalent of a moody Muromachi-period landscape painting. What qualifies it as a horror film is its rendition of a spooky folk tale (adapted from a Shin Buddhist parable called “niku-zuki-no-men” (肉付きの面) or “the mask with flesh attached”) revolving around the aforementioned demon mask, and this only gets started two-thirds of the way in. So, it’s really more of a mixed genre picture, at first a historical drama about the miseries of war for regular people, then an erotic melodrama, and finally a traditional supernatural thriller. Somehow it never feels uneven or disjointed though, since Shindo, in addition to blending the technical aspects together so well, is able to make these diverse narrative and tonal currents flow into a unified story. It’s great—though, what this story is ultimately about remains somewhat mysterious to me.

The Fifth Night of Halloween: Mad Love

ON THE FIFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Mad Love (1935), starring Peter Lorre as a deranged surgeon whose obsession with a Grand Guignol actress drives him to frame her husband for murder. He decides to accomplish this by the rather circuitous route of transplanting a knife-throwing killer’s hands onto the husband’s wrists and then manipulating him through the power of hypnotic suggestion while wearing metal gauntlets and a sinister neck brace.

This is a wonderful piece of 30’s gothic horror that strings together a series of delicious nuggets. These include: the aforementioned Grand Guignol’s melodramatic staging of a medieval torture scene with a maiden tied to a wheel of fortune; a wax replica of the actress that the mad doctor smuggles into his study, hoping it will come to life like Pygmalion’s Galatea; lush dream sequences accomplished through match-cut dissolves; an execution by guillotine preceded by some gallows humor from the ambivalent convict; and German expressionist influenced interiors with jutting shadows. Of course, the main draw is the inimitably creepy Peter Lorre, who is allowed to let loose in monologues ranging from sorrowful longing to diabolical scheming to insane raving. Much more than the film noir roles he is better known for, Lorre here really earns his status as one of the top horror icons. 

The overall narrative is a little too reliant on coincidence, and it meanders in places, but the high quality of the sights along the way make up for the patchy road getting to them. The conceit of a pair of hands that belonged to a killer and take on a mind of their own once removed was adopted from the 1920 novel The Hands of Orlac, and it would go on to reappear as a trope in many other works, including The Beast with Five Fingers (1946, also starring Lorre),  Hands of a Stranger (1962), The Crawling Hand (1963), The Hand (1981), and Body Parts (1991). 

It might seem like kind of a silly idea, but it’s inspired at least in part by a real phenomenon called alien hand syndrome. This occurs when a neurological disorder causes a person to lose conscious control over her hand. The hand often needs to be restrained when she can no longer prevent it from attempting to harm herself or others.

The Fourth Night of Halloween: Inside

ON THE FOURTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Inside (2007), a French “new extremity” horror flick by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo. It’s about a stubborn woman’s quest to become a mother. She has decided the best way to do this is to extract an overdue baby from another woman’s belly with a pair of scissors. The story is based on a real phenomenon called fetal abduction. The first recorded case occurred in 1974 when an assailant hacked an at-term pregnant woman to death and performed a crude cesarean on the body with a butcher knife. The infant survived. Since then, there have been at least 23 more cases-- two in 2020. Many of them involved the mother being first lured by the kidnapper to the abduction site with promises of free baby supplies. 

So, fetal abduction would provide pretty rich material for an artful, serious work of horror, particularly if made in the excruciatingly intimate tradition of French cinema, right? Yes, but that’s not what this is. Despite rave reviews and continued high estimation alongside the other new extremity films, like the far superior Martyrs (2008) and In My Skin (2002), Inside is a fairly silly, predictable slasher. I enjoyed it, the over-the-top practical gore effects are really fun (and the terrible digital effects, including a particularly egregious womb’s-eye view of a CGI fetus, are hilarious), but it’s not the meditation on the trauma of childbirth I was expecting. 

Is sympathy for the protagonist elicited through the death of a spouse whom we never actually learn anything about? Naturally. Does the antagonist just so happen to be the mysterious person who was caused to miscarry in the opening scene's head-on collision? Of course. Most aggravating to me is that it’s glaringly obvious the cute moments spent introducing the bulging hero’s pet cat only exist to set up an impending cat murder scene, so as to demonstrate how bad the villain really is. This would be a great opportunity to subvert that trope and have the killer for once be a cat-lover-- which in this context would make sense as an interesting character beat, showing that she really is driven by maternal instinct, despite having ruthless disregard for mature human life. Nope! I was angered. 

But again, it is a fun slasher movie with some clever kills, and it’s worthwhile if you go into it with that expectation. Meanwhile, a great and resonant work of horror cinema remains to be made on the topic of fetal abduction.

The Third Night of Halloween: Häxan

ON THE THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Häxan (1922), the seminal Swedish quasi-disquisition on witchcraft by Benjamin Christensen. I’ve seen clips of it before, but this is the first time I’ve watched the whole thing. It’s incredible! I think that more than even Nosferatu or The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Häxan pioneered much of the visual language of cinematic horror still in use today, particularly for exploitation. Nearly every shot is as masterfully composed and stuffed with mesmerizing details as a painting by Bosch or Brueghel. 

In fact, Häxan’s introductory lecture incorporates period woodcuts depicting orgiastic witches’ sabbaths, the torture machines and human bonfires of the Inquisition, and the macabre monstrosities of hell per church doctrine. In some shots, our lecturer, Christensen himself (a ploy that would later be repeated by such classics of exploitative pseudo-documentary as Mondo Cane, Cannibal Holocaust, and Faces of Death), even uses his pencil to lovingly point out grisly details in these prints, such as a demon pouring hot lead into a sinner’s mouth. Most of these images are brought to life in what follows, sometimes fairly closely replicating their staging. And this is what makes Häxan still quite shocking today, and what caused it to be banned in many countries when it was released: in full graphic and often quite convincing detail, it shows us nude witches dancing and making out with demons, bloody infants thrown into boiling cauldrons, dismemberment and cannibalism, the birthing of hellish abominations, and the application of literal rack and scourge.

Following the introduction, the film in structure consists of a loose anthology of narratives, involving, first, a coven of old wisewomen reenacting archetypal scenes of witchery drawn from lore found in such sources as the Malleus Maleficarum and Armand Bénet’s Bibliothèque Diabolique; second, an inquisitorial tribunal that spirals into a frenzy of accusation, torture, spurious confession, mass hysteria, and fiery execution; and finally, more modern scenes of “nervous conditions” like sleepwalking, night terror, and kleptomania, so as to provide 1922 psychiatric medicine’s take on the underlying causes of the witch craze. 

What we are supposedly meant to take away from all this is a thesis about the connection between superstition and mental illness, and how the humane treatment by scientific medicine of women and the elderly suffering from various infirmities that would have been labeled demonic in another age should supplant irrational religious persecution-- and so forth. But as in so many works of later exploitation cinema with solemn messages tagged on the beginning and end, the audience and the filmmaker both know that’s not really what the movie’s about. It’s about the titillation and shock of demonic orgies and medieval torture! Häxan is brilliant not only because it blazed the path for pretty much all exploitation horror that would follow, but also because it reveals that that had always been the purpose of those grisly woodcuts, paintings, and works of literature depicting hellish and damnable scenes, going back at least as far as Dante: they only ostensibly exist to instruct but really serve to give the audience a sensational jolt.

The Second Night of Halloween: They Look Like People

ON THE SECOND NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I watched They Look Like People (2015) by Perry Blackshear. This is a micro-budget indie movie about two New York bachelors reconnecting and each slowly learning that the other is descending into madness. For Wyatt, this madness takes the form of onset paranoid schizophrenia, which has lead him to believe that most people are infected with demons and that it is his duty to prepare for a bloody war against them. Christian’s madness, on the other hand, is more of a social pathology. Due to insecurities from being bullied in the past, he has fallen down a rabbit hole of male toxicity as a solution to all his problems, which involves obsessively pumping iron and asserting "dominance" in his workplace. 

When the focus is on Wyatt's story, which it is for most of the runtime, it's riveting. This is in spite of the sometimes painful flaws due to budget limitations, which include poor audio and dubbing, spotty acting, and awkward misfires at naturalistic conversation. The film achieves this by pushing against horror audience expectations with regards to possibly delusional protagonists. Going back to the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and continuing through modern horror like the highly underrated The Forgotten (2004) and Oculus (2013) (which was part of last year’s series), when the suspense depends on the reality of malevolent entities perceived by only the hero, almost without exception those entities' existence is well-substantiated by the third act. Frailty (2001), about a father who abducts and murders people he believes to be demons, which we learn in they end they are in fact, is an example that They Look Like People parallels especially closely. All of this narrative pre-programming allows Blackshear to leave us in rapt anticipation of the outcome almost until the last second, both in terms of the truth of the demonic invasion, outside of Wyatt’s head, and in terms of whether or not Wyatt will commit to fighting the invasion by murdering his possibly ersatz friend. For this reason, They Look Like People strikes closer to the isolation, sadness, and terror of real madness than many other works of horror.

On the other hand, Christian’s struggle with male toxicity, while more topical, does not work as well, mostly because it is relegated to undercooked b-story status. We simply don’t learn enough about how Christian used to be to understand what is driving him to become macho now. We don’t even see enough of the “dominance” behavior that other characters, we are told, are angered by in the present. Maybe a different actor would have been able to sell these aspects without further narrative tangents, but Evan Dumouchel, while enjoyable to watch, is simply too puppyish. This doesn’t detract overmuch from the impact of the rest of the film’s effective exploration of paranoid delusion, though.

The First Night of Halloween: The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane

ON THE FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I have returned for another 31 Nights of Halloween series! 

To start things off, I watched The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), directed by Nicolas Gessner and starring a twelve year old Jodie Foster as a mysterious girl who is a bit too dedicated to preserving her latchkey kid way of life. What's great about this film is that it doesn't seem to be a work of horror at all until we are well into the second act. That's when it dawns on us-- along with the girl's new beau, a teenage magician with a limp-- that the characters have literally been sitting on a horrific scene the whole time. By the same stroke, we realize that there is something much more disturbing than we had imagined going on behind the powerfully sympathetic eyes of Foster's Rynn Jacobs. This is a clever trick, since we have seen her constantly lie through her teeth to everyone she's met from the beginning. Even as a pre-teen, Foster was able to bring a layered and restrained complexity to Rynn that lures us into trusting her and rooting for her, all while we strongly suspect that we shouldn't-- and perhaps even after our suspicions are confirmed. Notwithstanding the patient ironies and delicate autumn compositions of Gessner's directing, I doubt this could have worked as well with anyone else in the role. I love a melancholy 70's horror film with unsettling undercurrents!

The Drive to Paradise

The driver was an ancient man in a black Lincoln. 

He arrived unbidden and offered to take us anywhere, for free.

Robert, laughing, asked him to take us to paradise. 

He readily agreed, saying he knew the way.

Smirking, we three piled in the creaking back seat. 

As the car drove off, we noticed the engine’s eerie silence.

All that month, Gertrude had been goading Robert and I on. 

That had made us easy marks.

Robert asked the driver if he was a pervert

or just liked to show off his weird electric vehicle.

The driver replied coyly, “It’s not electric.

You’ll soon learn what it uses for fuel, when we reach paradise.”

That moment we entered a stygian tunnel. 

When we emerged, the world was different: ashen and dream-twisted.