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.

The Fourth Night of Halloween, 2022

ON THE FOURTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Body Double (1984), the third Hitchcockian shock-thriller Brian De Palma wrote and directed after Sisters. An actor suffering from claustrophobia loses a part playing a vampire in a B-horror flick because he has a panic attack while filming a scene in a coffin. He winds up couch-surfing at a friend’s place. Luckily, a mutual acquaintance hooks him up with a house-sitting job at a bizarre flying saucer-shaped mansion on a hill (the exteriors for which were filmed at the real Chemosphere house in Los Angeles). The acquaintance also makes him look through a telescope pointed out the mansion’s rear. The actor sees that at this very moment down the hill, a beautiful woman happens to be dancing naked in front of her window. The acquaintance informs him that she does this every night. The actor quickly becomes fixated on her and finds himself drawn back to the telescope the following evening. This time, however, he sees that a gruesome-looking man with metal teeth is leering up at the woman from her driveway. The actor thus begins more intently watching and following the woman in order to warn her that the other man is watching and following her. Two nights later, the actor witnesses the other man break into the woman’s house and fatally perforate her abdomen with a huge power drill.

Well, sort of. 

As you may have guessed from the title, all is not as it seems with this murder scene. The woman whom the actor saw performing a private burlesque show was actually a porn star (played gamely by Melanie Griffith) hired to be a rich woman’s body double. The rich woman is the one who is murdered. Meanwhile, the monstrous thug with the power drill is actually the woman’s husband wearing makeup. This man also turns out to be the acquaintance who hired the actor to house-sit. 

Like Sisters, Body Double serves as an opportunity for De Palma to riff on his favorite Hitchcock references and tropes, with the inclusion of an eccentric’s precariously perched house, as in North by Northwest; a down-at-heels man watching his neighbor through a telescope and becoming entangled in a murder plot as a result, as in Rear Window; and the pursuit of a look-alike who stands in for a dead woman, as in Vertigo. Also as in Vertigo, the finale hinges on the protagonist overcoming a debilitating spatial dimension-based phobia. And as in Sisters, De Palma injects shots of nudity and gore that Hitchcock never would have been allowed—though this time there is a great deal more nudity than gore. 

Above all, Body Double showcases De Palma’s obsession with cinema as voyeurism. His camera at once indulges in titillating sights and implicates the viewer in ogling them, thereby disarming the viewer’s moral objections. As we watch the protagonist become an unrestrained peeping tom, De Palma throws our moral scorn back on us by making us aware that we are just as mesmerized. Meanwhile, the film over and over underlines the irony of a protagonist fearing for a woman’s safety because he sees a less attractive man behaving in the same way that he is toward her. Nevertheless, the protagonist is right, there really is a mortal danger, and likewise, De Palma does not let us off the hook for the consequences of our own fascination, even if it is an obligatory part of our nature.  

As for our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme, the most interesting development from the otherwise similar Sisters is the introduction of the actor as a major subspecies of doppelgänger. The woman that the hero is drawn to and seeks to protect is actually two women, one of whom is a professional mimic. On the other hand, the foe that the hero seeks to thwart and the friend who sets him up with a new job are actually one in the same person wearing two different faces. It’s no mistake that Body Double is framed by highly artificial scenes from the film within a film about a vampire. This framing reminds us that all cinematic works of fiction are filled with doppelgängers in that they contain actors playing characters. An actor and her character may have distinct personal identities, but these identities always share a face. Behind every face we see in a movie there lurks another conscious being.

The Third Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched 2014’s Goodnight Mommy (or Goodnight Mummy if you’re British), written and directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. Towheaded twin boys (played convincingly by real-life twins Elias and Lukas Schwarz) cavort in and explore a cornfield, a lake, a cave, and a cemetery near their isolated residence. They live in a spacious modernist house with only their mother. It soon becomes clear that something is very wrong with this woman. Not only is she suffering from external trauma that requires her entire head, save her bruised eyes and puffy lips, to be swathed in gauze, but more worryingly, she is mentally erratic and abusive toward her sons. She slaps them, locks them in their room, apparently kills a stray cat they bring home, and attempts to drown their pet insects. The twins finally take action by tying her up and inflicting various forms of mouth trauma on her to get her to admit that she is not really their mother.

Well, maybe.

For the third time, a horror movie about twins teases us with the possibility that one of the siblings is actually dead, since the mother refuses to speak to, feed, or otherwise acknowledge one of them in any way. She seems to be waging a campaign of coercing one boy into accepting that the other is not real. However, unlike The Other and Sisters, Goodnight Mommy constantly shows the twins together in the same shot. So, unless the film is playing a dirty trick on us, à la Fight Club, by presenting us with false images that represent what one character is hallucinating, the mother is actually gaslighting her children. Meanwhile, it may be that the mother is actually an imposter, as the twins adamantly hold. We learn that the mother had a close friend who resembled her and dressed like her. Also, this woman's face is bandaged because she is recovering from extensive plastic surgery. Later, the twins discover that her eyes are the wrong color, which she tries to explain by saying she’d been wearing contacts. Then, a telltale birth mark rubs off when the twins splash water on it.

So, all of Goodnight Mommy is basically an exercise in gaslighting,  on the part of film against the viewer as much as the characters against each other. The driving tension depends entirely on our increasing desire to know what is actually going on. Again and again, situations are dangled in front of us that seem guaranteed to provide the answer, only for key evidence to be withheld through cleverly ambiguous phrasing and staging. And—paradoxical spoiler warning—in the end we receive no definitive reveal. What we do get are clearer and clearer statements of the two possibilities already mentioned: either one of the twins has died and the other is maintaining the delusion that he is alive (which thankfully the filmmakers at least acknowledge as the expected twist), or the mother is a doppelgänger who for some reason wants the twins to believe that one of them is not real. There is plenty of textual evidence that the latter is the case, but the film often perversely sides with the mother in wanting us to think that it’s the former.

Overall, by these narrative and structural means, as well as through its patient and stylish directing, Goodnight Mommy effectively builds up around us a delirious labyrinth of lost identity.

In terms of our theme, TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS, well, here we get both. The doppelgänger, if the twins’ theory is right, has used modern medicine rather than magic to replace her former friend, changeling-like. And given that this is our second horror film (admittedly by design) featuring twin ten year old boys, one of whom may actually be dead, we can also say that Goodnight Mommy stands as a cinematic double to The Other. A side effect of watching these twins-horror flicks back to back is that we are left with no reassurance that the threat is contained in only a movie. You see, the same killer seems to stalk us across all doppelgänger stories. And we may begin to ask, does a duplicate monster even need to wield a deadly weapon? Isn’t the very existence of a true double enough to bring about our end, since it means the death of our unique identity?

The Second Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE SECOND NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Brian De Palma’s 1972 psychosexual classic, Sisters (aka Blood Sisters). Margo Kidder plays Danielle Breton, a Québécois model and TV commercial actress who has just moved to New York. Danielle meets a man on a weird Candid-Camera-esque show called Peeping Toms. On the show, she pretends to be a blind woman who mistakenly enters a men’s locker room and starts undressing. Through a hidden camera, we see a hapless man in the locker room decide to silently watch her undress rather than alert her to her mistake. Despite his choice, Danielle asks the man out to dinner and drinks after the show. Soon they wind up back at her apartment and hook up. In the morning, the man hears Danielle arguing with a strange woman in another room. When questioned, Danielle informs the man that the other woman is her psychotic twin sister, Dominique. We learn the two were born conjoined but surgically separated as adults. Later, when the man brings a cake to the sister whom he thinks is Danielle, she grabs a knife and stabs him to death. This is actually Dominique, who has been thrown into a murderous rage by her sister’s sexual exploits. 

Well, sort of.

Once again, all is not as it seems with these twins. Also once again, it’s quite obvious what the twist is: the murderous twin has actually died some time ago. The surviving twin’s psyche has fractured, such that she now switches between the two identities so as to maintain the delusion that her sister is still alive. This is revealed over the course of a dogged investigation by a Lois Lane-esque reporter (as a bit of retroactive irony, given that Kidder herself would go on to play the definitive Lois Lane six years later) who happens to witness the murder through her rear window.

Sisters was De Palma’s first in his signature series of shock-thrillers that serve as both Hitchcock pastiches and American riffs on the Italian giallo. With this highly entertaining entry, De Palma already manages to masterfully execute familiar Hitchcock tropes—including lingering emphasis on objects that then become major clues, investigators sitting right on top of a body’s hiding place, and clever parallel sequences seen from both sides of the action—while injecting much more lurid sights than Hitchcock was ever allowed to get away with under the Hays code—including full frontal nudity and a gory shot of the paramour’s mouth and cheek hanging ripped open. Sisters’ propulsive pace is fueled by a wonderfully wrenching score by Bernard Herman that recalls his own music for Psycho and Vertigo. Meanwhile, Kidder as usual is incredibly charming, despite her rather cartoonish French accent throughout. 

As far as our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme: it’s interesting that in the same year, the same treatment of twins would play out through the same twist in two major horror movies, The Other and Sisters. In both, it’s revealed the psychotic identical twin sibling has died before the opening, while the supposedly normal and “good” twin commits bloody deeds in order to sustain the belief that the pair remains unseparated. One difference is that while The Other indulges in mysticism so as to allow for the interpretation that the absent twin is a ghost, Sisters introduces the medical horror of an operation to separate conjoined twins so as to lead us to speculate on the mysterious connection between biology and psychology. In carving Danielle and Dominique apart, thus causing Dominique’s death, a substantial piece of Danielle’s mind was also lopped off, it seems.

The First Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I have returned once again for another 31 Nights of horror movies!! As before, I intend to (1) watch well-regarded horror movies I’ve never seen before and (2) write about them. However! This year I’ve further selected things based on a theme … which is: 

TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS 

Why do so many horror stories involve human doubles, whether via natural siblings or unnatural shapeshifters? What is it that we find so frightening about others wearing our faces? In attempting to provide some novel answers, I’ll start with some of the more obvious choices that explicitly explore this theme. Then, I’ll make my way to the much less obvious—since it is my hypothesis that almost every horror movie is on some level obsessed with duplicates.

So, to begin … I watched The Other (1972), directed by Robert Mulligan and written by Thomas Tryon, based on his 1971 novel of the same name. It takes place over the course of an eerily idyllic summer in the 1930's, on a *highly* accident-prone Connecticut farmstead. The sprawling farmhouse here is home to multiple generations of the Perry family. This includes a mystical old-world Russian grandmother; her neurotic widowed daughter-in-law (played by Diana Muldaur, best known as Star Trek’s Dr. Pulaski); her middle-aged son and his staff; and her adult grandson (played by a young John Ritter), with his swelling pregnant wife and their prepubescent boy. The main characters we follow throughout, though, are the widow’s ten-year-old identical twin sons, Niles and Holland (serviceably played by real-life twins Chris and Martin Udvarnoky). 

Well, sort of. 

To the modern viewer, it’s immediately obvious that something is very odd about Holland. He’s never shown in the same shot with Niles. He’s also constantly whispering to his brother from the shadows, encouraging him to do naughty things like rob a signet ring from his own father’s corpse (along with the rotting finger it was stuck on). Meanwhile, most of the Perry family members never mention or address Holland, only Niles. To throw us off, several scenes feature Niles discussing Holland with his grandmother, wherein she seems to recognize Holland as a regular living human. But this is hardly a convincing red-herring, given that these scenes also involve the grandmother teaching Niles some form of astral projection folk-magic that she has invented, called “the game.” 

About an hour in, our suspicions are confirmed: while Holland was in fact Niles' twin brother, he died a few months prior to the opening. Now, either Niles is being haunted by his brother’s malevolent spirit, or Holland’s death caused Niles’ psyche to split into angelic and demonic halves. Niles’ grandmother believes it is the former, such that she blames herself for teaching Niles to astral project and thereby somehow inadvertently raise the dead. But the family history of mental illness, represented by Niles’ mother’s bed-ridden fugue-state over the deaths of her husband and son, lends more weight to the latter interpretation. 

In any case, “Holland” turns out to be quite the precocious serial killer. Inspired by a magic show he sees at a carnival sideshow, he carefully stages his murders as plausible accidents. A pitchfork happens to be left in the hay loft in just the right position so that his annoying older cousin who enjoys jumping into the hay is impaled. A nagging old woman neighbor dies of a heart attack at the sight of rat. The handyman is seen leering at the window just before a new-born baby is stolen in the night. 

Thus, as we will find in many horror movies revolving around twins, the plot turns on central twist. Here, though that twist is fairly obvious from the beginning, The Other effectively creates a creeping sense of broken reality that is chilling even under the golden summer sun. Moreover, I think it succeeds *because* the twist is obvious. On my first viewing, I could already notice and appreciate the strange inconsistencies surrounding Holland’s appearances. This works more in favor of The Other’s haunting nostalgia than a truly surprising head-flip would have, I think.

Back to our theme: The Other surely falls in the category of horror movies that are explicitly and emphatically obsessed with double identity. Not only is the film about an identical twin whose brother is at once his imaginary friend, his own shadow self, and a ghost, but furthermore, in narrative and structure it goes out of its way to include many other forms of doubling. Two young boys die by accidental falls while playing, and two older women fall down stairs as a result of Niles’ actions. Niles has two deranged mystical mother figures, the grandmother has two grown children, and the young couple has a second child on the way. Finally, the climactic theft and murder of an infant is doubly presaged by textual references. First, a headline in the newspaper at the breakfast table concerns the then-current Lindbergh baby kidnapping saga. (“Christ, it’s the Lindbergh thing all over again,” one of men in the search party later declares, in case we forgot.) Second, Niles twice recounts to his mother a fairy tale about elves stealing a baby and replacing it with a changeling-- which his mother seems unusually horrified by, as it both reminds her of her own loss of a child and foretells the impending climactic murder by her son.

All of these doublings surrounding the central pair work to produce a funhouse maze of redoubled reflections. The final shot leaves us lost in an eerie mental state of illusion mirroring Niles’ disassociated consciousness.

His Knock Will Come

He knows what you have done from the moment your heart commits to it. 

His knock at your door will come.

The one who thought she could trick him, you saw him drag her to judgement.

We gathered in the square to hear her wailing, to see her suffering, to receive his blessing.

You thought she was the cleverest, bravest one and believed she would escape him. 

Now you know better.

Under his shadow, you feel his fathomless eyes on you.

Despite all this, you still test his limits. When the moon is black, you tiptoe to the gate.

But I have been watching you from the beginning.

Lost and Disappearing

I got off at the wrong stop and soon was lost in a maze of crooked streets.

As dusk narrowed to night, I heard a cry behind a vacant building. 

There, I found a small girl who said she was being chased and begged for protection.

She told me a man who could make people disappear with a touch and a whisper was after her.

I scanned the structures’ dark husks and told her we would walk to the distant lights.

Was that man really following us? 

Could I hear his clicking heels and his rasping whisper behind us? 

Were his fingers in fact reaching for us?

As I looked back again, the girl’s hand slipped away. 

She had disappeared.

Entombed

The door won’t open. Nothing I’ve tried will break its lock. 

And there are no windows here, in the dark below.

But I am not their prisoner. 

They put me here and locked me in for my protection. 

Now they’ve all fallen silent.

At least, the voices and human sounds have all gone. 

Though, I sometimes hear unearthly things.

After our pastor saw the visiting men looking at me, I was put here, in the church cellar.

I’ve collapsed from weakness on the doorstep, where I dream of bodies moving in the walls.

Finally, my scraping and banging is answered: the door opens.

I peek through the crack and see only the now pitifully neglected church hallways. 

I creep forward and call out.

An explorer to this centuries abandoned church stumbles back, 

aghast at the sight of me.

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SCP-6937 - The Terminal Loom

My first SCP article

 SCP-6937 - The Terminal Loom

Mother Night Will Find You

Watching me claw to reach you—don’t you trust me?

But I am your mother. I birthed you in a forlorn place.

They took you from me before your first breath.

I have sought you ever since down the long labyrinths of lost nights.

The craving for your embrace drew me to you.

Now that I’ve found you, I’ll claw you out of the false womb.

You’ll live again inside me after I swallow you whole.

In Your Shadow (edit)

The Wormwood House

We learned from the visiting doctor how to live with infection and spreading decay.

He’d been to the neighboring township before he arrived at our blighted deep-woods lodge.

He saw through mother’s fearful lies to the violent wants of the creatures inside us.

The incisions he made in our skin resembled the cuts in the walls father first hacked to get at the worms.

We’d found them after our herb gardens had failed that summer and we’d withdrawn to the lodge.

Suspicion of an invasion from within can make a place no longer home.

Even so, the doctor’s caring curiosity led him to stay days longer,

tending to our afflictions, with no care for himself.

Maybe a healer can sense the sickness growing only in others, even as it silently consumes him.

I dreamt that the doctor had died and decayed of our infection long before he came to us.

I overheard him whisper of me to his recorder:

“The daughter’s worms make her skin tremble under my touch.”

I took the doctor out at night to see the owls seize scurrying things, and I watched his joyful eyes.

I began to care, then worry for him, told him to leave the woods, to escape becoming one of us.

But in our worm-infection, soon, he at last discovered what he had long sought: a death-eating cure.

Exploring one another’s bodies beneath my sheets,

he explained his search to cure himself, by this infection.

So keenly and desperately did his eyes shine as he told of hunting parasites across the county,

before finding us.

I confessed what he’d told me to father, who despite his infirmity,

burned with fury and took down the axe.

Confronted, the doctor pretended ignorance of the true nature of the creatures consuming us.

Father’s skin burst, streaming fluid,

and mother, also awoken, stretched her fingers through walls, howling.

Deftly, I struck the doctor on the head and dragged him away from danger, into the cellar.

I padlocked us both in, leaving the lodge to my changing parents.

Down there, we listened to the worms.

The doctor teaches me now, as we grow into one thing, about the song in our splintering bones.

A Sudden Silence

The wind and water fall still.

Everyone’s heads begin throbbing. 

They can hear only the quiet.

This small collective of families has gathered for a church picnic at the reservoir.

A high laugh comes from one of the fathers, a stocky man grilling meat.

When his laugh becomes a choke, the rest throw desperate looks.

Thoughts of a demon or a divine visitor arise in them, but the silence is neither.

Can you guess what has caused this beating in their brains? 

Perhaps you’ve felt it before.

The Girl Behind the Curtain

More rats scurry out in the night now, crossing the wet street,

chewing through the remains.

The girl across from us was never sick. 

She kept indoors. 

She peaked at me from behind a curtain.

One of the boys down the street started bothering her,

throwing pebbles at her window, leaving ugly gifts.

His body was found in the deadend ditch, rats gnawing at him. 

They wondered why his skin was so blue.

Within a week, many more along our street had turned as blue as him.

Perhaps ours was never a real neighborhood

but just a place invented for memories of the dead.

Now I am the only one in our house left alive.

But I am safe as long as I stay in the light of the girl's eyes.

The Man Behind the Wall

A man on the other side of the wall whispered to me one night.

He taught me how to get revenge.

I pressed my ear to the plaster, huddling so I appeared to be sleeping.

I scratched in reply to his questions.

I followed his instructions.

Soon, my step-father was in the hospital, where he’d curse at me no more.

The next night the man told me he had been alone in darkness for many years,

so he was happy to help.

He explained that those in power had put him in the dark for helping the helpless,

as he had helped me.

But he wouldn’t tell me his name.

And I knew nothing of the strange gated area on the other side of our wall.

So, I knocked on the gate in the morning.

A caretaker showed me that behind our wall was only a sealed old furnace.

Halloween Sketch 2021

The Thirty-First Night of Halloween: Analog Horror

ON THE THIRTY-FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … it is Samhain, when the veil between worlds thins and the uncanny outer-things known as the aos sí come through. And it is the eve of Día de los Muertos, when the dead return to walk among us.

… and I am watching short films in a new genre called Analog Horror. This genre began in 2015 with a YouTube series called Local58, created by Kris Straub. Local58 includes what is still the best work of its kind, “Contingency” (see below). In Local58’s wake came a number of imitators, the most interesting and innovative of which are: Gemini Home Entertainment, The Monument Mythos, Employee Tapes Archive, and Eventide Media Center. The premise with pretty much all works of Analog Horror is that a strange videotape from the predigital era of broadcast TV (hence “analog”) has been found and uploaded to YouTube. The contents of the tape allow the viewer to piece together a horrific narrative. 

Analog Horror draws on the aesthetics of amateur and crowd-sourced horror fiction sites like Creepypasta (https://www.creepypasta.com/) and SCP (https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/). This is post-Lovecraftian horror that takes place in a liminal space where the wall between reality and nightmare is breaking down. It usually relies on faux-documentarian framing involving dedicated research scientist or journalist narrators who meticulously record the technical and procedural aspects of their excursions into the unreal, so as to insist that this really happened. As such, they cultivate a cultish ethos that closely borders that of hoaxes.

Analog Horror takes this quasi-hoax framing a step further by presenting its works as real VHS-era artefacts from a suppressed catastrophe. They mimic the static and tracking errors of degraded magnetic tape and the kitschy title fonts and muzak of channel sign-offs, public service announcements, training videos, and emergency warning messages. In doing so, they evoke the haunting isolation of after-midnight TV viewing in the 80’s, 90’s, and early 2000’s. Imagine drifting in and out of sleep while channel surfing and finding absolutely nothing on—doesn’t this seem an opportune time for entities from the hellish beyond to ride the interference surf between broadcast waves and human brainwaves straight into our reality? 

Here’s my favorite work of Analog Horror, “Contingency”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c66w6fVqOI

Here’s a fairly comprehensive explainer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An1OJXIMCTo

Here’s a more recent work by an eighteen year-old filmmaker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8d12w6pMos

Here are some playlists of other excellent Analog Horror:

Gemini Home Entertainment: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKgH3wc9NbYBwQJzaf1QQdL4q3z6i3Ct2

The Monument Mythos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYEu-9YXzZuIFn8rtAYiE433KC5loEkrj

Channel 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX5l7whVcZw

Employee Tapes Archive: https://www.youtube.com/.../UCiC_xc-OQf1wwWoCratfA-Q/videos

Eventide Media Center: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLja5Tq0NuYBm3ebyRJHNdRH97TvIYzwjp

Enjoy yourselves tonight, everyone! And thanks for joining me for this year’s 31 nights of horror films! See you next year! 🎃👻👹👽🧟‍♀️🕷🎃

The Thirtieth Night of Halloween: Impetigore

ON THE THIRTIETH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Impetigore (2019), an Indonesian horror film by Joko Anwar. A machete-wielding maniac attacks a tollbooth operator named Maya. He accuses her of murdering babies. Just before the police gun him down, the maniac gives Maya the name of a village. This clue prompts Maya to undertake an investigation into her past. She travels to the isolated and morose woodland village that, as it turns out, she was taken from as a small child, after her birth parents both died. Today this village has no children. It seems that all the babies born here must be euthanized. For some reason, Maya’s father, his shadow puppets, and the circumstances of Maya’s birth are blamed for this curse. Soon, the village matriarch convinces the other villagers that their salvation lies in ritually sacrificing Maya.

I really enjoyed how Impetigore uses rich details to build toward the core mystery’s skin-crawling solution. We learn early on that there is a connection between Maya’s childhood and the condition afflicting the village’s infants, a condition so hideous that they must be drowned immediately upon birth. We also implicitly understand that we will only learn what this connection is by witnessing Maya uncover it firsthand. Thus, there is a setup for a reveal that we both desire and dread. Just as when we crane our necks to look at a car crash but simultaneously squint our eyes in anticipation of what we may see—so here, we are tugged in opposite directions by our curiosity and our squeamishness, both on our own behalf and on behalf of Maya. And the film executes on this setup and reveal structure flawlessly, giving us enough time to savor the sickening implications of every piece it lays down without wasting a moment on mere filler. The cinematography is as lush as a traditional Balinese painting and the dialog is full of humanizing color. But all of the film’s many assets are in service of its central question and answer, which is potent enough to make one squirm long after one learns what it is. Which is to say, Impetigore is impeccable at creating one of the finest forms of fear that horror cinema has to offer, so I hope it continues to garner international acclaim.

The Twenty-Ninth Night of Halloween: Sole Survivor

ON THE TWENTY-NINTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Sole Survivor (1984), written and directed by Thom Eberhardt. A young TV producer named Denise emerges unscathed from the crash of a commercial airliner. She learns that all of her fellow passengers suffered grisly deaths. She feels as though the universe has made an accounting error and that it won’t be long before it corrects its math. She’s not wrong. She is nearly crushed by a truck with a faulty parking break, and she later spins out on a slick highway. When these freak mishaps fail to smite her, the angel of death decides to take a more direct approach by using the bodies of the recently deceased like weaponized meat puppets.  

This is a neat supernatural chiller with concepts that were fertile enough to inspire the plots of two major premise-based horror films, Final Destination (2000) and It Follows (2014). Final Destination (and its many sequels) dispenses with the corpse-puppet aspect and focuses on killing those who escape the grim reaper’s grasp by means of Rube Goldberg-esque accidents. It Follows, conversely, eschews the accidents and has an entity control an endless series of strangers in pursuit of those who have eluded its lethal curse. (Meanwhile, Sole Survivor itself must have been inspired by a couple of Twilight Zone episodes, namely 1960’s “The Hitch-Hiker” and 1961’s “Twenty Two” (more popularly known as “Room for one more, honey”).) 

Sole Survivor is a capably shot slow burn that most excels in its script, which is full of warmly quippy dialog and stimulating but never over-explained ideas. It makes especially good use of low whispers and shadows darting in the periphery, which recur so as to break up the cheery scenes of Denise getting back to normal life with subtle reminders that all is not right in the world.

The Twenty-Eighth Night of Halloween: Possum

ON THE TWENTY-EIGHTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Possum (2018), written and directed by Matthew Holness. A puppeteer named Phillip has created a grotesque puppet with huge spider legs and a human face. The puppet gets Phillip fired when it horrifies the schoolchildren he is supposed to entertain. This forces him to return to his boyhood home and dwell there with his gnarled and sadistic uncle. Phillip tosses the puppet off a pier, burns it, buries it, but try as he might to get rid of the thing, it keeps reappearing in his room, good as new. Now it seems to be getting out of its case at night and murdering local boys.

Possum is surprising for a number of reasons. First, Matthew Holness is best known as the comedian behind the funniest horror comedy I have ever seen, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004), so the release of such a serious and artful work by him, concerning the bleakest nightmares of cyclic abuse, was unexpected to say the least. (But come to think of it-- the move does parallel Jordan Peele’s transition from sketch comedy to writing and directing the best horror movie about racism ever made, Get Out (2017).) 

Second, it’s very rare that a text within a text can stand on its own merit, even when it's supposed to be a wildly successful song or show within a given fictional world. The dark nursery rhyme that Phillip is supposed to have written and illustrated (actually created by Holness) is fantastic though, worthy of independent consideration as gothic poetry. It begins, “Mother, father, what’s afoot? Only Possum, black as soot. Mother, father, where to tread? Far from Possum, and his head.” 

Third, I didn’t anticipate that this creepy character study would remind me of Ireland’s greatest author, Samuel Beckett (whom I was obsessed with in college-- incidentally, if Kafka can be considered a horror author, Beckett certainly should be). Several hostile breakfast chats between Phillip and his uncle recall the harsh gnomic rhythms of Beckett’s Endgame. 

Finally, I was surprised by how well all of the temporally disjointed and nightmare image-laden scenes came together in the ending’s truly nasty reveal. Possum probably spends too much time watching Phillip mess around with his puppet in the post-industrial wastes of Norfolk—it’s sometimes unfortunate that feature-length isn’t an hour instead of ninety minutes—but overall I found it to be a surprisingly excellent Halloween treat.

The Twenty-Seventh Night of Halloween: The Shout

ON THE TWENTY-SEVENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched The Shout (1978), directed by Jerzy Skolimowski and based on a story by Robert Graves. John Hurt plays an English church organist whose real passion is acoustic science. By means of the most cutting-edge HiFi equipment the 1970's have to offer, he conducts experiments on the capture and manipulation of various micro-aural phenomena, including a wasp walking inside a bottle, water beading on a tin tray, and the smoldering of a lit cigarette. One day, a mysterious man in black appears and invites himself in. The organist and his wife are too English to resist. Soon, the man is sitting naked in their guest room and explaining how he attained supernatural powers from a shaman in the Australian outback. One of these powers is the ability to kill with a shout. The organist’s wife detests the man and wants him gone, but the organist’s curiosity overwhelms his misgivings. He makes a Faustian bargain with the man to witness the shout. After the organist stops his ears up with wax, the man lets loose a terrible wail. A hapless shepherd and his sheep one hill over fall dead, confirming that the man’s powers are real.

This highly unusual supernatural horror film is beautifully made, featuring naturalistic editing and evocative cinematography, particularly in its panoramic scenes on the coastal hills of Devon. In part, The Shout appears to be a product of Britain’s mid-century fascination with fusing mysticism and science, along with such works as Quatermass and the Pit (a 1967 Hammer film based on a 1958 BBC TV movie), The Stone Tape (1972), and various Tom Baker-era Doctor Who serials (starting in 1974). However, the collision of magic and technology is only teased in The Shout, or posed as a problem to be pondered by the viewer, since the man in black’s binding fetishes and the organist’s oscilloscopes never quite meet. Instead, Skolimowski interposes a surreal framing device in which the man in black himself, who has become a patient in a rather chaotic asylum, serves as the unreliable narrator of the film’s story. Usually such framing devices are called upon to build credibility for the supernatural events to follow. If an especially authoritative individual avows that the ensuing testimony is authentic, we can be lulled into trusting it. Here, though, the man in black's narration has the opposite effect—it disorients us. But perhaps this is exactly the state in which the manipulative wizard wants us. In any case, owing to John Hurt’s genius for creating irresistibly sympathetic characters through layered facial expressions, we soon forget the weird framing and get entirely on board with the organist’s reactions to his unwanted guest, which progress from annoyance to anger to intrigue to terror. This works so well that by the time the man in black bellows forth the lethal shout at the camera, we feel as though we are in danger of being struck down along with the sheep.

The Twenty-Sixth Night of Halloween: The Burning

ON THE TWENTY-SIXTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched The Burning (1981), a golden-age slasher directed by Tony Maylam. So, there’s this mean old groundskeeper at a sleepaway camp (what they call summer camps around New York, I guess), name of Cropsey. Some boys decide to play a prank on him, see, but the prank goes wrong, and Cropsey gets horribly burned. Hospital workers treat him like a sideshow attraction, and ladies of the night refuse his service. So what does he do? He vows revenge and goes back to the woods to kill this year’s campers with a giant pair of garden shears!

The Burning is steeped in urban legend. It features counselors at campfire circles relating the actual New York legend of Cropsey with great relish. The early scenes in particular are saturated with exploitative nostalgia for things city kids whisper in the dark to scare each other. 

I’m a bit perplexed by the Cropsey mythos, however. Not having grown up with it, from what I can gather online the signature elements are: (1) Cropsey escaped from a mental institution (possibly on Staten Island), where he had been put away for murdering his family; (2) he has a hook for a hand; and (3) he lives in the woods and murders camping children. The Burning’s Cropsey only retains (3), differing from the standard version in both origin and appearance. 

A great documentary from 2009 called Cropsey searches for the kernel of truth behind the Cropsey tale. The filmmakers, who had grown up with the tale as kids, conclude that this kernel resides in a man named Andre Rand. Rand had worked as a janitor at a Staten Island mental institution for children called Willowbrook. Upon Willowbrook’s closure, Rand became homeless and shortly thereafter began abducting and murdering children in the nearby woods. He was finally caught and convicted in 1988. Revisiting all of this now in light of The Burning, for which the initial treatment was written in 1979, I wonder how Andre Rand could have inspired the legend of Cropsey after all. The timeline doesn’t seem to match up. Even if The Burning’s writers first heard the tale in their late teens, it must have been circulating by the early 70’s, before Rand’s crimes. Given how different the version told in The Burning is, it seems that the elements inspired by Rand must have been added onto a preexisting legend, after it had already been around for at least a decade, rather than Rand serving as the primary impetus for Cropsey. Then again, I wonder how much The Burning itself served to synthesize disparate tales under the “Cropsey” rubric. Clearly, more research is needed.

Back to the movie. After a fertile and taut opening, The Burning slackens quite a bit and turns into a summer camp teen romp for the duration of the second act (the main highlight of which is a pre-George Costanza Jason Alexander), until the slashing starts in the last half hour. These scenes of stalking and stabbing in the woods and an abandoned mine are soundly made, with some excellent gore effects by splatter-master Tom Savini, but they aren’t particularly groundbreaking. The Burning was scooped by Friday the Thirteenth on taking the genre to the woods, and honestly, Friday the Thirteenth handles this aspect better by infusing the woods with an atmosphere of haunting echoes. The Burning’s woods are just a place where kids do camp activities and get stabbed. However, again, I thoroughly enjoyed the nostalgic urban legend framing, so depending on your interest in the tragedy of Cropsey, it may be worth your while.