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Horror
The magic contained within the rich history of the found footage subgenre, which includes 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust, the Paranormal Activity series, as well as the runaway hit The Blair Witch Project, depends on the filmmakers presenting something that might have actually happened. That’s harder to do when you look up at the screen and immediately think, “Hey, it’s Polka-Dot Man from The Suicide Squad!”
Talk to Me, the nasty, visceral horror film out of Australia, offers up plenty of themes for dissection, but there’s something to be said for simply getting caught up in its wicked charms. Twin brother directing team Danny and Michael Philippou, who are the creative minds behind the YouTube channel RackaRacka, have made a chilling feature film debut in Talk to Me. If you can handle its gruesome sensibility, their film delivers horrific imagery and a scare around every corner.
A woman crouches on a rocky cliff overlooking the sea. She is examining a handful of white flowers with long, red stamen. She sticks a steel soil thermometer into the ground next to the flowers to check the temperature. From a distance, we see her walking along the horizon; her bright red windbreaker is striking against the green and gray of her island surroundings. She carefully drops a rock into a deep well, listening for the splash as it hits the water far below. Next, we see her recording her observations in a notebook. She writes the date – it’s April of 1973 – the temperature from the soil thermometer (14.3° C, or about 57° F) and the words “no change”.
Everything else that happens in Enys Men happens around this basic routine, which we see a dozen times over the course of the picture. It’s the most mundane depiction of data collection you could imagine. In contrast to that mundanity, the woman, referred to only as “The Volunteer” in the film’s closing credits, experiences either a psychological crisis or a metaphysical terror, though the movie never definitively answers which. We experience her reality in the form of existential dread.
“For a minute. Just a minute. You made it feel like home.”
Those are the final words we hear in the last seconds of Bones and All, the new film from director Luca Guadagnino. With a quiet, contemplative score by duo Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, those words, sung by the Nine Inch Nails front man Reznor, cut right to the bloody, visceral heart of Guadagnino’s picture.
No matter what you hear about the movie – it features graphic violence and vivid depictions of cannibalism – its real power lies in capturing the almost ineffable experience of finding a sense of home, belonging, trust, and deep love in another human being. Bones and All is about finding in someone else that illusive sense of home in an inhospitable, cruel world.
Executive produced by Bryan Fuller, Queer for Fear looks at queer representation in horror movies from the beginnings of cinema through roughly the 1990s. It covers everything from gay director James Whale’s outsized influence on the horror genre, via his seminal work for Universal Studios in the 1930s, to the Wachowski sisters exploring queer desire in 1996’s Bound.
Any person committed to understanding the world with as much complexity and nuance as possible craves ideas and perspectives other than their own. Queer for Fear gave this (mostly) straight guy a new perspective on dozens of cultural artifacts and made them richer and more interesting for it. It also validates and reclaims a vibrant history for people who have experienced intolerance, rejection, hostility, and violence from those in society – sad to say, probably still the majority – who can’t slap their hands over their ears fast enough when new ideas are presented to them. Queer for Fear is a wonderful achievement in queer cinema. Both LGBTQ+ and straight folks should relish the ideas it presents.
A tagline on the poster for the 1934 horror film The 9th Guest proclaims, “Eight were invited…but death came unasked!” The all-but-forgotten pre-Code murder mystery is an example of the “old dark house” subgenre of horror. The 9th Guest was based on a Broadway play, which itself was based on a 1930 novel. I love the fact that the plot employs the hip new technology of the time, wireless radio. The eight guests are informed by their unknown host – via mysterious radio transmission – that he considers them all his enemies, and that over the course of the night, they will meet his ninth guest…death!
The old dark house trope in horror movies is exactly what it sounds like. Get a motley cast of characters together on a “dark and stormy night,” signal that there is danger afoot in the form of a killer, introduce a power outage, let mayhem ensue. My favorite exemplar of the model is literally called The Old Dark House, and I was introduced to it in college. It was produced by Universal Studios horror impresario Carl Laemmle Jr. in 1932 and directed by the legendary James Whale, who directed the 1931 character-defining version of Frankenstein as well as the 1933 adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel The Invisible Man. Another pre-Code entry, The Old Dark House is, especially for 1932, fairly freaky stuff. Seek it out if you get the chance.
The new horror/comedy from independent studio A24, Bodies Bodies Bodies, is the old dark house subgenre for the 21st century. The script was based on a story by writer Kristen Roupenian, with a re-write by playwright and first-time screenwriter Sarah DeLappe. It was directed by Dutch actress, writer, and director Halina Reijn. I’m including that litany of names as a way to signal that I’m not sure who gets the credit for doing their homework on bringing the authenticity of the old dark house tropes and aesthetic to the picture. It’s likely that all three of them did.
Director Jordan Peele’s much anticipated third outing of big-budget, spectacle horror filmmaking, Nope, has a lot of big ideas swirling around inside it. The comedian-turned-horror-maestro explored the horrors of racism in his debut, Get Out, and the horrors suffered by an American underclass who exist in order to make life easier for everyone above it in Us. With Nope, Peele’s ideas never quite gel into a cohesive whole. The story is ambitious, the storytelling is thrilling, but Nope ultimately feels like a blockbuster-budgeted episode of The Twilight Zone.
I’m attracted to the kinds of transgressive, subversive movies that Joe Bob Briggs curates in his TV and live shows because they’re like a pressure release valve. They let us laugh and be shocked and be grossed-out in a safe environment. They, like virtually all movies, allow me to experience the world in a way that is radically different from how I experience it. They overturn the acceptable behavior – or, more often, show it for the hypocrisy it often is – of square society. (And, yes, I realize that I’m about the squarest person you could ever meet, which adds to the appeal of these movies for me.)
I can’t think of a better overseer for these dubious masterpieces than the man, the myth, the legend, Joe Bob Briggs. In his immortal words, “The drive-in will never die!”
While it must have been personally frustrating for director David Cronenberg, the fact that it took almost 20 years for him to get his latest film, Crimes of the Future, onto the screen was probably for the best. Originally titled Painkillers, Cronenberg’s return to funky, disturbing body horror was first set to begin production in 2003, but the project stalled out until last year.
What he’s made feels like a snapshot of our current moment. I suspect Painkillers wouldn’t have captured the feel of its time, had it been released when initially planned. Crimes of the Future’s fidelity to our present malaise is probably due in part to the rewrites and revisions that undoubtedly took place in the interim between Cronenberg’s first draft and the start of production.
“Listen. There's only one woman in the world. One woman with many faces.” Those are the words of Satan, disguised as a guardian angel in the form of a young girl, in Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ. This is what Satan says to Jesus in order to tempt him to come off the cross and live his life as an ordinary man, so that he can have what he truly desires, a family. In the movie, Mary Magdalene, Jesus’s true love, is dead, but Satan tries to convince Jesus he can still have what he wants, only with a different woman – or many different women – since they’re all the same.
Writer/director Alex Garland has gender swapped that idea for his new film, Men. It’s an intense fever dream of a movie. Using the subgenre of folk horror, Men is an exploration of every disturbing behavior that men perpetrate against women. Gaslighting. Intimidation. Possessiveness. The threat of violence. Actual violence. The picture’s final message, delivered in its last line of dialog, struck me as being a cop-out for why so many men treat women as property. Garland seems to think it’s a misplaced desire to be loved, instead of systemic oppression and culturally accepted subjugation. Still, his movie is startling in both the themes it tackles and its hallucinatory aesthetic.
It seems like advertising is a good enough place as any to start. Maybe that’s because MCU movies themselves are starting to feel less like the art/entertainment that the marketing and advertising is designed to support and more like merely an extension of that marketing and advertising. On the day Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was released, May 6th, I saw an online ad for it. The text of the ad read, “The Marvel universe will never be the same.” I had already attended a press screening for the movie four days earlier, so I knew that claim was basically bullshit.
Things happen in Multiverse of Madness. There’s even a major development in the movie’s final minutes that does promise to change Dr. Stephen Strange in a fundamental way. But, as is increasingly the issue with these movies, the entirety of what comes before that moment feels like a flimsy excuse to get us there, not so that we can marvel (pun completely intended) at the development within the movie itself, but so we can be excited for what this change will mean for future installments.
Like the endless possibilities contained within the movie itself, if you asked a dozen people coming out of Everything Everywhere All at Once what their main takeaway was, you’d likely get a dozen different answers. The themes, connections, and wildly inventive filmmaking come spilling out of this movie at warp speed. The second film from the directing team known as Daniels – the duo is made up of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – is even more bonkers than their first, the inexplicably goofy Swiss Army Man. This time they have the outlandish budget to match their outlandish ideas. The result is a joyous, dense take on human existence that celebrates hope and empathy.
I feel like I should have loved Titane. Possessor was one of my top ten films of last year. Climax was a disturbing yet exhilarating experience. I might not be an A#1 fan of the body horror genre, but I can certainly respect and enjoy it. I need a little something more under the surface, however, than director Julia Ducournau has on offer with Titane, her follow-up to 2016’s Raw – a film I haven’t seen, but about which I’ve heard good things. With Titane, Ducournau has a lot to say, and that’s part of the problem. The movie never gels into a cohesive whole. It’s merely an excuse to stage half-a-dozen or so incredibly shocking and provocative body horror set pieces.
Those set pieces, tho. They’re a definite gut-punch, and I won’t be forgetting them any time soon.
The newest iteration of the Candyman franchise does everything the original film wanted to do, but better. The 1992 slasher, which Bernard Rose directed and adapted from the Clive Barker short story, The Forbidden, only grazes the surface of the racial politics it claims to be interested in. The new Candyman explores race in a much more satisfying way. Director Nia DaCosta also uses a fresh and exciting approach to build and expand upon the mythology of the world.
With A Quiet Place Part II, director John Krasinski has delivered a cinematic experience every bit as exhilarating and taut as the original. At only 97 minutes, this sequel is lean, allowing Krasinski – who wrote this installment solo, without the help of Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, the writing team behind the original – to keep the suspense ratcheted up for nearly every minute of the picture. As exciting and thematically rich as Part II is, though, Krasinski’s screenplay also suffers from a few logic problems that the movie can’t quite overcome. Still, this is a hell of a ride, especially as seen on the big screen, where the movie’s thrills come at you larger than life, the way movies are meant to be experienced.
There are two bravura sequences in director Brandon Cronenberg’s waking nightmare of a film, Possessor. Brandon, the son of legendary horror director David Cronenberg, proves with Possessor, his second feature after 2012’s Antiviral, that he’s up to taking on the family business: creating mind-bending cinema centered around queasy body-horror special effects.
Possessor follows Tasya Vos, a contract killer who works for a company with a revolutionary process for carrying out its assignments. Vos is a possessor; using the company’s technology, her consciousness is implanted in a host body to do the killing. After each hit, Vos is pulled out of the host body, leaving that poor soul to deal with the consequences of a murder that he or she had no choice in committing.
I came for Nicolas Cage, I stayed for Richard Stanley. In the newest adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft tale, Color Out of Space proves itself to be a delightful throwback to horror movies in the vein of Event Horizon and the original The Evil Dead. It’s a well-paced, atmospheric shocker that entertains as it horrifies.
Set on a rural farm on the east coast, Color Out of Space centers on the Gardner family. Husband and wife Nathan and Theresa have moved their three kids, teenagers Lavinia and Benny and younger son Jack, to Nathan’s father’s old farm. It’s a classic getting-out-of-the-rat-race setup, with the characters all making adjustments to their new lives.
It started with a Fresnel lens. If you’re wondering what that is, then we have something in common; so did I when I first read the term. For his second feature effort, The Lighthouse, director Robert Eggers knew he wanted the 19th century technology – developed specifically to make lighthouses visible by ships from farther away than was previously possible – as the centerpiece of his film. Just like with his directorial debut, the hypnotic 2015 film The Witch, Eggers was obsessed, and achieved, the most meticulous period accuracy for The Lighthouse. It seems blasphemous to use the word masterpiece so early in his career, but with his painstaking attention to detail, his eye for striking cinematic imagery, and his exploration of the human psyche, that’s just what Eggers has produced with both The Witch and now with The Lighthouse.
Set in the late 1890s and making use of sources like Herman Melville’s writings and actual lighthouse-keepers’ journals for its idiosyncratic dialog, Eggers hasn’t just re-created the time period with The Lighthouse. He’s brought it back from the dead.
So, with (most of) the nostalgia gone from this part of the story, what’s left? The answer is a movie that is, for the most part, consistent with its predecessor in creepy tone and jump-scare fun. Chapter Two also has some of the same problems as the first part, namely that we are asked to believe Pennywise the Clown is a merciless killer, except when it comes to our heroes. Whenever his target is one of our beloved Losers Club, Pennywise is suddenly very bad at his job. Chapter Two is also interminably long at 169 minutes, with a structure that feels more like a video game than a movie.
The horror/fantasy film Tigers Are Not Afraid is being compared favorably to the early work of director Guillermo del Toro. Like del Toro, its writer/director, Issa López, hails from Mexico, but the similarities go much deeper. The American distributor of the Spanish language Tigers – streaming service Shudder – is eager to encourage the connection to the Academy Award winning director of exquisitely crafted fantasy films like Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water. Their publicity material features a quote from del Toro about the movie: “An unsparing blend of fantasy and brutality, innocence and evil. Innovative, compassionate and mesmerizing.”
I wasn’t nearly as impressed as Mr. del Toro.
