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Evil, Inc. : The Institution in the Works of Joss Whedon

Before Joss Whedon's Avengers (2012) (reviewed here) rocketed him onto the main stage, he already had a core following of dedicated fans watching and analyzing his works. A lot of attention has been paid to the role of gender and language across Whedon's canon, but on the verge of a new series carrying his creator's seal, Marvel's S.H.I.E.L.D., to premier on ABC, there is another repeated element that deserves examining. Since the beginning of Whedon's television career, his main characters have been pushed and pulled by shadowy unseen organizations, and pitted against not just individual villains, but also entire evil institutions.

Angel (1999-2004) begins by introducing viewers to Los Angeles' literal darker side. The show is set up as a combination of a detective noir and horror/fantasy. The head of this grim side of LA, though, isn't organized crime, it's a law firm, Wolfram & Hart, that specializes in defending and protecting the worst of the worst, which in this universe, means vampires, demons, and genocidal maniacs. Though each season of the show has it's own arc and main villain, the law firm remains as the central embodiment of evil throughout the show.

It's an obvious joke, a firm of powerful lawyers that keeps the rich richer and the poor underpowered (“Evil white folks really do have a Mecca! … Oh, I get it, I get it. You all can cater to the demon, cater to the dead man, but what about the black man!” - Charles Gunn, Episode 1.21 Blind Date). Here, they are taken to the extreme, with demonic clients and bloody rituals. But Whedon uses the idea of evil lawyers beyond the humorous gag. They become an examination of evil, (often seen as wild and animalistic or demonic) as it is enacted through something so proscribed and systematic as law. Angel, a hero on a quest for good and personal redemption, is forced to face a world where evil is institutional, and intrinsically engrained. At one point, the former head lawyer of the LA branch tells him as much:

    "Our firm has always been here in one form or another. The Inquisition, the Khmer Rouge—we were here the first time a caveman clubbed his neighbor and watched in fascination as his brains oozed out in the dirt. We're in the hearts and minds of every living human being [...] The world doesn't work in spite of evil, Angel. It works with us. It works because of us."(Holland Manners 2.15 Reprise)

Wolfram & Hart, then, is about how evil is part of civilization from the beginning, because it is part of us from the beginning. Evil lawyers are in power, but isn't evil always?

Whedon's next evil corporation never got a chance to come out of the shadows. Much of what viewers know about Firefly (2002) and Serenity's (the 2005 movie sequel) mega corporation of Blue Sun comes from piecing things together from the 14 episode show, interviews, and official merchandise. What is clear is that Blue Sun is everywhere. The logo is all over the show, on products from food and clothes, to more luxury goods, to transport vehicles. But the company reaches much farther. On some planets, they are an exclusive monopoly. The show reveals (or would, but didn't have a chance to get that far, and instead does so on DVD commentary) that they have even begun human experiments for their medical and military contracting subdivisions, which have led to horrifying results. There are clearly implied ties to the government and it is not clear whether Blue Sun and the Alliance Government are even actually separately functioning entities. Unlike Wolfram & Hart, which operates inside a system as it's necessary or ever present evil, Blue Sun is the system. Our Heroes, in this show, are rebels against this system and in 14 episodes and one movie, we only see reasons to agree with them. But in an interview, Whedon elaborated on more nuance of the main character, Captain Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds's politics:

“Mal’s politics are very reactionary and ‘Big government is bad’ and ‘Don’t interfere with my life. And sometimes he’s wrong — because sometimes the Alliance is America, this beautiful shining light of democracy. But sometimes the Alliance is America in Vietnam: we have a lot of petty politics, we are way out of our league and we have no right to control these people. And yet! Sometimes the Alliance is America in Nazi Germany. And Mal can’t see that, because he was a Vietnamese.”

If Wolfram & Hart is about evil inherent in the system, Blue Sun is about the dangers of an unbalanced system, of one company with too much power, and people with too little voice to change that.

Dollhouse (2009-2010), unlike his two previous shows, takes us inside a corporation, a biomedical firm, Rossum, that produces the most advanced neurological treatments, and also runs an underground elite network of “houses” of programmable humans, known as dolls. From the inside of one of these Dollhouses, the show depicts several characters moral struggles with the technologies that allow for the complete rewriting of the human mind. The dolls are people who have entered into a contract of slavery to do things they cannot imagine and will not remember, in exchange for financial compensation and being cured of whatever problems they may have had (often mental illnesses) or instead of prison sentences. As the end game for Rossum is revealed, and the stakes get higher, allegiances change and justifications fall away. Rossum has a lot of elements of Blue Sun, in that they are too powerful, and too long unchecked, but it also brings in some elements of Wolfram & Hart's message. The series tells us that the technology that Rossum possessed was so powerful that it would almost inevitably end all of civilization. Why? Because people seek power and control, and now they can have it.

In his non-TV shows, Whedon cannot seem to leave the institutional evil behind him. Though the main character of Dr. Horrible is technically supposed to be evil, the “Hero,” is clearly an absolutely terrible person. In the 45 minute web musical, Whedon makes sure to mention that this hero is a “Corporate TOOL.” Cabin in the Woods, (which this blog already touched on here, [spoiler warning]) toys with a corporation that seems quite evil, and well, turns out to have a more complicated purpose.

The reason all this is important to understand in the wake of The Avengers and the anticipation to S.H.I.E.L.D., is that in the source material,  S.H.I.E.L.D. is a very large, very powerful organization. Though technically under either US or UN control, in the recent Avengers, they are shown to be largely autonomous, and occasionally even act against the advice and order of these authorities. In the block buster superhero movie, of course,  S.H.I.E.L.D. is unambiguously the good guys, coming in and saving the day. But Whedon's fear of such institutional power survived even until filming, as a cut scene from the beginning shows. This scene would have framed the whole movie with the question of whether this agency is, in fact, reckless, dangerous, and too powerful.

With a whole series, more personal creative freedom and less big name super heroes, I for one, and anxious to see where Joss Whedon plan's to take this next large institutional power in the future.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose

The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2008), directed by Scott Derrickson, is an exorcism movie. It begins after the death of the possessed – the titular Emily Rose. Now, I don't have much experience with exorcism movies, but from what I understand, they tend not to do this. Nor does the plot tend to concern a court case which happens after the exorcism. Actually, I'm pretty sure exorcism movies tend to be horror. The Exorcism of Emily Rose, however, is not (though I do think it tries to be one).

Father Richard Moore, the priest who attempted the exorcism (Tom Wilkinson), is accused of negligent homicide; the film's protagonist is his defense attorney Erin Bruner (Laura Linney). Moore doesn't want to defend himself so much as he wants to "tell Emily's story". In this way, we get the story of the exorcism through a series of flashbacks as the story is told in court and to Bruner. So it certainly has things that are supposed to be scary. At 3 AM on successive nights, various characters (Emily, Bruner, and Moore) are visited by an invisible force – a demon which opens and closes doors, knocks over objects, and in Emily's case, invades your body. And Emily's possession and exorcism scenes are unnatural and creepy: her body contorts and convulses, she eats insects, she screams in Latin and German.

But the film just doesn't succeed at being horror. Part of the problem seems to be that it isn't even earnestly trying to be horrifying. After all, most of the time is spent in the courtroom, where Laura Linney has Law & Order-style arguments with the mustachioed prosecutor. Actually, the film really feels like an episode of Law & Order more than anything else. 

And that gets at the second reason I think it fails at horror: the characters feel like they're lifted from an episode of Law & Order. Now, don't get me wrong: I used to love that show. But I don't think anyone has ever claimed it has particularly dynamic characters. My point is, the characters in Emily Rose are flat. Emily herself barely gets any characterization at all, so all the creepiness we get from her exorcism never rises above generic creepiness. Worse, the two protagonists' characterization is clichéd. Bruner is the ambitious, workaholic lawyer with a conscience (cue scenes of her drinking wine alone in her apartment in a city tower while studying case materials) . Moore is the honorable, righteous priest who knows he's right, and wants to go to trial to get the truth out – and besides, taking a plea bargain would be lying. 

Not that you can't have these types of characters, of course. But they aren't very dynamic. Bruner is supposed to develop somewhat as a character as she slowly gets convinced that Moore is right, but that isn't believable or interesting. And if you identify the climax as the moment when the tension peaks, it comes during each side's closing statements, in true Law & Order style. Which, again, could be fine – except for the contents of the speech, which only make a legal point (which is that the jury needn't believe Moore to acquit him – they need only to allow for the possibility that he could be right, and recognize that the scientific explanations and medical diagnosis of Emily Rose aren't fact).

All of these narrative issues stem from the fact that Derrickson doesn't seem interested in drama so much as he's interested in making a point about something. Don't ask me to summarize what that is, though. Something to do with whether demons are real or not. The problem with moving the drama to the courtroom, though, is that it inherently makes the drama come from the question of whether or not the defendant is guilty, while Derrickson is really trying to ask a different question. The end result is the film is disparate, unfocused. It seems to want to abandon being horror at all, but doesn't. It wants to ask philosophical questions about knowledge and belief, but confuses that as well with the courtroom structure.

The courtroom drama aspect is probably doing more harm than good to the narrative structure, in the end. Maybe what this story needs is less Law & Order and more law and order.

The Cabin in the Woods: Humans in Horror

If you haven’t seen The Cabin in the Woods, the recent meta-horror movie written and directed by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, you may have heard that it’s crucial to avoid all spoilers, but that you should see it because it is good. Both of these things are true; the experience will be somewhat ruined for you – more than usual – if you learn too much about the film beforehand. This is because, though it begins like every other horror film you’ve seen – five college students go on a weekend trip to a cabin in the woods – nothing is as it seems. The official movie poster shows a rotating house, and says, “You think you know the story” – but you don’t.

So if you haven’t seen the film, I’m going to advise that you not read the rest of this post, because the rest of it will contain spoilers from the film. I think there is a shortage of analysis of the film in favor of vague, positive platitudes. There’s a lot to say about the film, but not if you refuse to spoil anything.

It turns out that there’s a corporation which is manufacturing this stereotypical horror movie plot for a mysterious client, which seems to demand this kind of thing. This is the driving interest in the plot for much of the film – on the one hand it is a horror which succeeds in being genuinely suspenseful despite its embrace of horror movie tropes (precisely because it is so self-conscious about them) – and on the other, it is a truly funny movie, also because of its hyper awareness. This produces an interesting effect on the audience. I often bounced between laughing hysterically and gripping my seat in suspense. Often times both horror and amusement came simultaneously. I don’t know how many films have done that, but I would call The Cabin in the Woods a success.

And the “client” this corporation works for is slowly revealed to be the “Old Ones”: ancient, evil gods who demand ritual sacrifice to continue to sleep. Without a successful one they will rise and kill every human on the planet. This ritual demands the horror movie tropes the film has followed so far. Most importantly, the five friends must die in a specific order. First, the “Whore” (Jules); then the Athlete (Curt), the Scholar (Holden) and the Fool (Marty); and finally the Virgin (Dana), though her death is optional as long as it comes last. And the corporation has a script to follow: when it’s time for the monsters to attack (in this case a “Zombie Redneck Torture Family”), they manipulate Jules and Curt into the woods. Jules is attacked and killed just before they have sex. Curt and Holden die later, but Marty and Dana manage to survive long enough to confront the people manipulating them and wreak their own havoc.

The interesting thing here is that none of the main characters really fit into the molds the ritual demands for them. Jules is not a “whore” in any sense of the word – she’s in a committed, monogamous relationship; Curt and Holden are both shown to be equally athletic and scholarly; Marty, who quickly catches on to the fact that they are being manipulated into acting out of character, is the least foolish of the bunch; and Dana, though a virgin, shows many aspects of her character which are far more interesting or relevant than whether or not she’s had sex before.

Once you finally understand everything going on in The Cabin in the Woods, it becomes clear that it’s a commentary on the genre – which is why I called it meta-horror earlier. The corporation manufacturing the ritual scenario represents the filmmakers and the “Old Ones” represent the audience, who demand a certain pattern. The film wants to reassert the humanity of the characters in its genre. It refuses to treat them as anything less than people, as horror often does and as it implies audiences sometimes demand. Instead it pokes fun at these demands, though the film clearly remains a horror film. And it’s precisely because of its treatment of its characters as human beings with inner lives that makes it so horrifying when the monsters are unleashed on them.

Beat Halloween: Sidney Peterson's The Cage and The Potted Psalm

I believe there are two sorts of moods conjured up at Halloween, and they are both tied to anxiety. The first involves lust for gore, fright, heart palpitations and being generally unnerved. Films in this vein do not necessarily have to reach the gruesome, cathartic extremes of Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Hooper) or Silence of the Lambs (1991, Demme), although they may. What matters is not so much the content, but that the filmic form of that content effectively manipulates emotions. The mood (primal insecurity, agitation, pure fear) need not be connected to cannibalism. The same primitive human angst can be exploited through a variety of genres, including the slasher, psychological thriller, horror and even war films. What they share are momentary or prolonged emotionally manipulative sequences. I’m thinking of the gripping feeling Vertigo (1958, Hitchcock) evokes as Scottie, in an awkward sweaty panic, follows Madeline up the campanile at San Juan Bautista. Or, channeled through more grotesque visual language, the shots of Leatherface’s kitchen littered with animal skeletons, feathers and detritus; the icebox containing the body of his teenage victim in Massacre.

The second type of mood connected to Halloween is slightly more cerebral. The main driving question for this mood is not “What is the capacity for others to wreck violence against me?” but rather, “How far do I have to venture to detect the truly bizarre and unfamiliar within the familiar?” Anxiety is still a factor here, for we have to make the conscious decision to set aside normalcy, congruence and linear thought. If the slasher film relies on visceral responses and our most primal human fears, then surrealist and experimental films challenge our intellectual pursuit of narrative progression, reason, meaning and causality. Sometimes none of these exist, and sometimes they exist only to very small degrees. So experimental films are unnerving, not because they threaten our corporeal security, but because they problematize the conventional ways in which we think about the world.

Of the two Halloween “moods,” I believe the second is more difficult to achieve. Or at the very least, the industry has invested less time and fewer resources into its development. Hollywood is quite good at exploiting our instinctual, animal-like need for security. It is slightly less adept at illuminating the absurd. So, while films that agitate, terrorize or unnerve are not the exclusive purview of mainstream media, movies that venture —even briefly— into the surreal and avant-garde are generally treated as art cinema. Nevertheless, I would argue that these sorts of films are essential viewing at Halloween! Gore alone is insufficient. We also need a dose of the slightly strange — not supernatural, and not wholly divested from the objects and spaces of everyday life, but the distorted anatomy, jarring stop-action, and the playful conglomeration of store windows, shabby things for sale, reflected pedestrians and bifurcated vehicles. I’m advocating that all of you sit down and watch two shorts: The Cage (1947) and The Potted Psalm (1946), both by filmmaker and beat poet Sidney Peterson.

I first came across Peterson in Art Cinema, which classifies his work as surrealist. The point of that movement, according to Young and Duncan, was to "reestablish links with the 'primal mind.'"¹ I would argue there is no more appropriate time than All Hallows Eve to reaffirm such a connection.

The Cage and The Potted Psalm function as a nice pair, diverging subtly in the mood, but also complementing each other. Viewed together, they provide excursions (amusingly absurd in The Cage and somewhat more ominous, though still not ghoulishly so, in Psalm) into the unfamiliar side of seemingly normal people, interactions and material things. In The Cage, Peterson establishes a surprisingly coherent visual language reminiscent of the Soviets' Kino Eye. He warps and distorts images, spins the lens across axes of symmetry, collapses space and captures pedestrians navigating San Francisco backwards. Surveillance is a motif that permeates both shorts. In Cage it is articulated explicitly: an escaped eyeball rolls, maneuvers, appears and disappears along the California streets and around an amusement park, spawning a protracted chase. What we perceive as a narrative progression perhaps makes The Cage more digestible than Psalm, but the internal logic of Cage is also undercut by the existence of the protagonist's alternate personas, and the wrought-iron spiraling bird cage that encloses his head.

Peterson also seems to communicate a fascination with the threshold between life and death. Resurrection is suggested almost continuously throughout the film. For instance, early on, cooked ducks in Chinatown windows are juxtaposed with live pigeons. The film also constructs an indeterminate space which could arguably function as a world for the living or the dead. Cars and people move in reverse, as though sleepers moving through a dream. The carnival space becomes doubly unnerving as its visitors and rides predominately move in reverse. The physics of rotating rides and bullet-like cars tunneling through space seem simultaneously graceful and precarious, and the odd forward running march of the group chasing the detached eye connotes them as social misfits. To us, they look both militaristic and hilarious.

As weird as things get, they never stray too far from an inner documentary basis. True, a man may lose an eye, butter his bread with fresh oil paints, and inhabit different bodies, one of which buries itself in the sand. But at its core, the short investigates the possibilities of the absurd built into the textures of everyday life. A female thief who steals a bundle of onions strikes us as odd as the male companion threatening to shoot the stray eyeball with a rifle (and later a dart). The two become nearly interchangeable. They both characterize what we possibly fear most about ourselves: that we are driven not by rational thought, but by instinctual, even animalistic inclinations.

If The Cage strikes contemporary viewers as "playful," then The Potted Psalm is notably less tame. Clownish makeup, graveyards populated by tropical flora instead of the typical hemlocks, and distorted women all render gothic horror motifs slightly exotic. Whole sequences seem devoted to the "body mischievous," a theme communicated through elongated limbs, goiter-like necks and mannerist torsos. Things get stranger as the film progresses: most notably, women submerged and abandoned imply the aftermath of violence, but not the violent acts themselves. Yet, even in Psalm, Peterson exercises great restraint. He does not manipulate viewers, or at least he does so subtly, so that we feel we have come to all the conclusions on our own. At the film's closure, a woman runs a considerable length, shot at variable distances. She stumbles, yet persists, and this time the hilarity of the small steps and brisk cadence that characterized the chase in The Cage is replaced with a sense of urgency. The force that pursues her is imperceptible; the lack of dialogue or even other humanity is acutely felt. And whenever she is captured in a frame with another human form, it is only herself, superimposed and dissolving briefly on an overexposed horizon.

 

1. Young, Paul. Art Cinema. Ed. Paul Duncan. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2009. Print.

When TV Gets Spooky

TV shows and their Halloween episodes—it's a hallmark of the season, so long as the show isn't taking a hiatus that week to accommodate children being led door-to-door. One would think sci-fi and fantasy shows, shows that already delve into the edges of belief, would have a particularly easy time with these sorts of episode.

Well, yes and no. It's a gimmick, and when your show already has vampires, or takes place on another planet, how are you going to fit in children and masks and make it interesting?

A variety of ways, it turns out. I'm just going to run through a few of my favorites here.

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Probably the most straightforward example of this trope that I'm going to discuss is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Here we've got quite a few episodes that could qualify as implicitly Halloween-themed, but the two obvious ones are “Halloween” and “Fear, Itself.”

The twist in these episodes is that, in a world of demons and vampires, the baddies stay in on Halloween. Performing evil deeds when everyone around you is dressed up all scary in order to score candy? It's cheap. And so, Halloween is meant to be a calm and relaxing night—except, of course, unless you're Buffy or one of the gang.

While not exactly scary, “Halloween” is definitely an entertaining episode with several character twists—Xander as the capable soldier, Buffy as the maiden in distress, Willow as a sexy ghost. Whatever costumes the characters put on, they become. While the plot could be more gripping, the episode is very much worth it just for the clothing and the symbolism inherent in every character change.

Then we have “Fear, Itself.” As one might guess from the title, the fear factor for this episode is greatly improved. Here, we have a college haunted house that actually appears to be haunted. The gang is split up, characters are abandoned or attacked, and a demon has been summoned. With traumatized co-eds hiding amidst the cobwebs, and characters all alone in the darkness, the episode becomes a chillingly effective success.

I'll let you, reader, find out what happens to the demon. Let's just say he goes out with a bang.

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Our next show is Castle. (While it's a bit of a stretch to describe this show as fantastical, these episodes either refer to Nathan Fillion's stint on the cult sci-fi hit Firefly or toy with the supernatural. They're also really fun.) Take season two's “Vampire Weekend,” otherwise known as vampires, goths, and ghouls, oh my! (Okay, maybe not ghouls.) This episode begins with Castle dressed as Mal, captain of the spaceship Firefly.

“Didn't you wear that, like, five years ago?” his daughter asks him.

“So?” he replies.

“So, don't you think you should move on?”

“I like it!”

The episode continues in standard fashion: a body has been found in a graveyard, a stake driven through the victim's heart. Castle and Beckett find themselves in a subculture of black clothing and synthetic fangs, and the possibility of real vampires excites Castle in a delightfully childlike manner.

Eventually, they solve the crime, and there is no immortal life involved. The journey there, however, is endlessly entertaining. Also, for those among us with an appreciation for the more Gothic side of the clothing spectrum, highly aesthetically pleasing.

More recently is the episode “Demons,” wherein Castle and Beckett investigate a murder in what appears to be a real-life haunted house, home to several murders. There are no Firefly references in this episode, but the was-or-wasn't-it-a-ghost tension works, and the banter is top-notch. Is it the best episode of Castle ever? Probably not. But it's certainly worth the price of the candy corn you'll snack on while watching.

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Perhaps my favorite example of this trope, though also the least straightforward, is the Farscape episode “Kansas.”

John Crichton is an astronaut, trapped for 3 years in a distant part of the galaxy, who finally makes it home to Earth. Problem: he makes it back several years too early, in 1986. Problem: his friends are aliens, very non-human looking aliens, though mainly with two arms and legs. Sometimes with bonus tentacles or blue skin, but still, the general shape is the same.

Solution? Visit during Halloween. Also, focus your plot on John Crichton's attempts to fix the timeline and John's familial relationships. Just make sure to have several sugar-related jokes, and have a cop investigate our jolly group for their suspiciously realistic masks and limited English skills.

Truth be told, this episode is fantastic. By far the best I've discussed here.

John's homecoming to Earth does not disappoint, and the difficult relations between John's parents (with one another, with a teenage John, and with our adult John) pull at the heartstrings. Even Chiana's short fling with a teenage John does not disappoint, or disturb too badly. Perhaps the one downside is that this episode comes late in the show and is thus the culmination of a lot of emotional drama. After all, who would want to start watching The X-Files on the day Mulder learns the Truth?

In other words, Spoilerphobes beware. Everyone else? Please choose this scare.

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Obviously this list is by no means exhaustive. While not strictly supernatural, Psych's “This Episode Sucks” is as silly as it sounds, and when Dead Like Me features children and costumes, it's a bit funny, a bit sad, and a bit horrifying.

These are some of my favorites, though, and if you're as in love with TV and Halloween as I am, they are sure to make for one awesome weekend.

10 Horror Films You Probably Aren’t, But Should Be Watching

10 great, original horror films for those of you who are tired of remakes, reboots, rip offs, and other disappointments.    

Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006, Dir. Scott Glosserman) What may at first seem like a run of the mill mockumentary is actually a very smart, very funny little film that follows a team of graduate students as they document Leslie Vernon’s quest to become the next horror icon.  Wonderfully subversive, well acted, and with a fun little cameo from Robert Englund, this film isn’t really scary, but well worth watching.

Black Christmas (1974, Dir. Bob Clark) While true horror fans know this film well, it seems to have slipped through the cracks of the slasher cannon.  Before Bob Clark directed the holiday classic A Christmas Story, he painted the holiday black in this tale of a sorority house terrorized by a mysterious caller who begins murder the sorority sisters.  Combining American conventions with Italian giallo sensibility, Black Christmas is the sadistic older brother to the slasher Godfather Halloween.

High Tension (2003, Dir. Alexandre Aja) Two friends, Alexa and Marie, travel to Alexa’s country home for a vacation that turns into a nightmare when a mysterious man shows up, bent on killing everyone.  Few films are as simplistic as High Tension.  The film guns it right out of the gate and never lets up.  It’s ending may seem a little slapped together, but if you’re in the mood for 90 minutes of blood soaked tension, Aja’s French thriller will do the trick.

Inside (2007, Dir. Alexandre Bustillo) This French shocker is for everyone who thinks that American horror films have become just a little too safe and predictable.  On the eve of giving birth to her first child, a woman is visited in the middle of the night by a woman intent on taking her unborn child.  Visceral, unforgiving, and downright surreally violent, Bustillo’s breakthrough film is everything horror should be, if you can stomach it. 

May (2002, Dir. Lucky McKee) This unsettling little indie film tells the story of May, a young woman finding it increasingly impossible to interact with those around her, who decides to create her own perfect friend out of the best parts of people.  Angela Bettis gives an amazingly creepy, and surprisingly empathetic performance as the title character.

Pieces (1982, Dir. Juan Piquer Simón)  Falling into the category of "so bad it's good" films, Pieces follows a chainsaw wielding killer as he saws his way through a college campus, steal body parts along the way.  This film is the Citizen Kane of tasteless, talentless slashers.  Watch it with friends.

Pontypool (2008, Dir. Bruce McDonald) Based on a novel by Anthony Burgess, this uncommonly intelligent zombie flick changes up the formula by having the infection spread, not through blood, but through language.  Strong performances all around help flesh out this great premise and turn an interesting film into a great one.

Thirst (2010, Chan-wook Park) The director of Old Boy tries his hand at the vampire genre in this tale of a priest turned vampire.  The amazing performances of Kang-ho Song and Ok-bin Kim elevate this twisted, bloody love story into something really worth seeing.

Torso (1973, Dir. Sergio Martino) This Italian giallo slasher follows a mysterious killer with a knack for strangling American exchange students.  While the first 45 minutes are almost incomprehensible pedestrian it all comes together and the film’s final act builds more tension than most horror films can dream of creating. 

Trick ‘r Treat (2007, Dir. Michael Dougherty) This horror anthology is probably the best Halloween film since John Carpenter changed the way we think about Halloween in ‘78.  Dylan Baker, Anna Paquin, and Brian Cox all give great performances in this celebration of the holiday.  The film also introduces Sam, the Spirit of Halloween, one of the best horror villains in a long time. 

Happy Halloween.  Go watch something scary.

 

 

Zombies: Our Greatest Fears Come to Life

Zombies. The undead. The walking dead. The living challenged. Whatever you want to call them, they’re everywhere. Zombie films have been around since the beginning of cinema and are now more popular then ever. What is it about the undead that continues to fascinate and terrify audiences? Zombies are the physical representation of what we fear most: Death and the unknown. Not only do they embody the fear of what happens after death, even further than that, zombies reflect the greatest fears of each era.

 

White Zombie (1932) is given credit for being the first feature length zombie flick

 

 

The film centers around a maleficent master of voodoo in Haiti who turns a young woman trapped in a bizarre love triangle, into a member of living dead. America was experiencing an influx in immigration. The idea of strange, new people infiltrating in the country brought animosity and fear to America. White Zombie plays on that fear as an innocent American girl is put into an unbreakable trance by voodoo. The zombie in this film is your typical slow moving, non contagious zombie.

The King of Zombies (1941) is a film about a couple who crash lands at the doorstep of a Nazi Doctor who has harnessed the power of voodoo to raise the dead for his own diabolical purposes.  The America public was well aware of Germany’s cruelty and inhumane treatment of Jews during the Second World War.   Hitler was thought to have a fascination with the occult. Hitler used science in terrifying ways, such as using fertilizer products to make nerve gas.  Zombies could be produced in a terrifying rate using this mad scientist’s formula.

 

 

      Night of the Living Dead (1968) is the most famous zombie film ever produced.

This is the first time zombies are seen as hunters that could leave their environment to seek out food sources, albeit slow moving predators.  It was believe the zombies were caused by radiation given off by an exploding space probe. In the heart of the cold war, radiation given off by an atomic bomb was a very real fear for many people.  Even the Congress and Senate had a secret fallout shelter nestled in West Virginia to escape radiation from an atomic device.

 

In 2002, films like 28 Days Later and Resident Evil gave rise to the zombie apocalypse. The faster moving zombies physically represent the quickened spread of the flesh eating undead. In other words, with these guys after you, you’re screwed. These films displayed the public’s fear in gene alteration and the idea of super-viruses that could spread with such speed that escape was virtually impossible.

 

Zombies are the loss of a person’s uniqueness and humanity.  Zombies feed on other humans turning their victims into someone devoid not only of life, but individual essence.  Cannibalism is just one of the frightening elements.  In each period of time, these films capitalized on the fear that was known, but unknown so seemingly plausible.  As knowledge and experience change so evolves the zombie, the embodiment of the new fear.

 

Sources:

Film posters for ''White Zombie'' ''King of the Zombies'' and Night of the Living Dead all used in accordance to Wikimedia Commons

Candyman (1992): A Self-Conscious Slasher Film

Of course, the above title may sound rather redundant. It is difficult to think of a more self-conscious genre than the slasher film: not only have there been a plethora of obvious pastiches, but even the ostensibly serious Friday the 13^th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises often poke fun at their own favorite clichés. Every film begins with a group of sexually active teenagers who must listen to the ravings of the obligatory toothless old man (or some other familiar harbinger of doom) before being promptly dispatched ingeniously (or not, depending on how cheap the SFX are) by Jason, Freddy, or whatever other relentless killer the screenwriter has created. The heavily formulaic nature of the genre has caused it to accrue as many critics as fans; indeed, it became commonplace in the eighties for older horror authors like Robert Bloch to unfavorably compare the new outcrop of slasher films with the traditional ghost stories and psychological thrillers of former eras.

            One could argue, however, that it is within the very predictability of these films that their appeal lies. This familiarity causes them to feel more reassuring than unsettling; it is not only “the final girl” who will make it to the film’s credits – it is ourselves, the audience. The sequels sustain this sense of survival: we are familiar with the entire history of a certain slasher, all his quirks and traits, and no matter how improbable (or often contradictory) his sequel-spawned history may be, this knowledge gives us a further sense of security. Like a hardened explorer wading through familiar territory, we know that no matter how bewildering it might get for the unfortunates onscreen, whatever happens will still remain reassuringly familiar to us. Like fairy tales and urban legends, slasher films seduce their audience into a world in which routine sets of clichés and formulae are not only the commonplace fallbacks of lazy screenwriters but are actually embraced by the audiences themselves: a world in which Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees become modern bogeymen and in which every victim’s death is seen as a memorable milestone, hailed at once for the originality of its execution and the predictable place that it occupies in the film’s overall plot structure.

            Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992) is a different sort of slasher film, however; one that is self-aware but not comedic; a movie that explores the mythic space that urban legends and slasher tales inhabit, focusing on why these tales absorb our imaginations so deeply and suggesting that there is some mysterious draw even greater than the comfortable familiarity that these gruesome fairy tales have. Based on “The Forbidden,” a novella by British author Clive Barker, its titular supernatural antagonist resembles neither the wise-cracking Freddy Krueger nor the silent, masked killers in Friday the 13^th or John Carpenter’s Halloween. Rather, Tony Todd plays the character of the hook-handed Candyman with an intense, seductive charisma, transforming him into a monster who functions both as a supernatural killer and as an almost allegorical embodiment of all that seduces and terrifies us in the slasher mythos, or even in horror fiction in general. Barker’s work both in literature (The Books of Blood, The Hellbound Heart) and in film (Hellraiser) constantly connects the twin emotions of terror and desire as two related impulses and the dynamic found in Candyman between the film’s heroine Helen (Virginia Madsen) and her terrifying antagonist is no exception. The most compelling moments in the narrative are Helen’s encounters with Candyman – those enigmatic interchanges in which he implores her to “be his victim” and asks “what is blood for if not for shedding?” The point of his appeal is that there is a certain glory in being counted as a legend: if Helen becomes a victim of Candyman, she will become – as he terms it – one of those tales “to frighten children, to make lovers cling closer in their rapture.” She will become immortal like him precisely because she, too, will become a legend of terror. To attain the status of legendry, “the blessed condition” as Candyman terms it, is perceived as a higher spiritual state, the cost of which is, in his eyes, far outweighed by the reward. She will no longer be merely a curious audience; she will, in fact, become a horror tale herself.

            The beauty of Bernard Rose’s film is that it can be enjoyed in the same manner as any other slasher film, for like all the others, it charts the familiar territory of hook-handed killers, flattering us with our knowledge of grisly urban legends while delivering a healthy amount of gore and scares. But for those who choose to contemplate the titular villain’s mysterious seductions more deeply, it holds perhaps the key to what it is that makes many of us not only enjoy Horror but even wish to create our own tales of terror. Candyman is not only an avenging ghost: he is a legend, a horror story himself. Stories are immortal, therefore Candyman himself is immortal – and, moreover, being a legend as well as a ghost, he is an immortal being whom lovers and children both revere, fear, and yet all the same enjoy whispering of. Any lover of Horror can understand how this “blessed condition” could be perceived as quite seductive.

            And, if the opportunity to unravel the philosophy of Horror is not enough to entice the reader to watch this film, then let me also add that the ending of this film gives an entirely new (and rather eerie) meaning to the common slasher film cliché of the “final girl”…

Why We All Need a Good Scare Every Once in a While

We spend most of our lives in our comfort zone. We seek safety, and it shows when you think of how easily we all fall into our respective routines.  What this safe sphere is may be distinctly unique to each person, but each is inherently the same: full of consistency, security, shelter, and control. But let’s face it. With this routine comes monotony, conformity, and tedium too.  So that’s why every once in awhile you need to be bold and brave, and step outside your comfort zone.

 

And what’s a better way to do so than with a good scare? I’m not suggesting you take a stroll alone on Greenmount Avenue later tonight or even go base jumping. I’m merely asking that as a part of your Halloween celebrations this year you watch a scary movie, one that truly terrifies you.  It doesn’t have to be a horror film (like our sense of safety and security, fears are quite subjective), just one that tackles something you’re scared of. It could be Snakes on a Plane for all I care!

 

There’s no safer place to test your limits than with a film:  it’s a short, finite period of time, you can watch conveniently from almost anywhere you want, it can be a shared or solitary experience, and if it becomes too horrifying to handle you can always close your eyes for a while. But most importantly, the magic of cinema makes watching a scary movie the best way to push your limits, because no matter what film scares you or what happens in it, in the end it will always just be a movie. You can still take a giant leap outside of your comfort zone knowing that with just a click of a button you'll be right back in the security of your routine.

 

We live our lives in fear of fear, but is there a more satisfying moment than facing a fear, the rush of adrenaline that comes with that accomplishment? It’s a feeling of invincibility, and even if it doesn’t last long it’s still affecting. We don’t come across many moments where we can exhibit bravery in everyday life, but facing a fear is one of the most profound ways. Suddenly the safety of the comfort zone seems even more protective after being so incredibly frightened, and there’s the temporary break in the monotony of routine. So this Halloween I ask you to watch a scary movie as more than a holiday tradition (you should still watch Hocus Pocus, but maybe on another night), but as something that is entirely terrifying, something that faces your fears to give you a scare, and will remind you of the power that is the fantasy of film. 

 

GINGER SNAPS and Hell in a Handbasket

As the decades keep ratifying the truism, “High school is hell,” filmmakers too continue to find adolescence a rich playground for the supernatural. The cinematic landscape of the new millennium is positively rotting with juvenile gore and romanticized horrors. But perhaps one can extract a modicum of truth out of such teenage populist delights this Halloween. John Fawcett's 2000 film Ginger Snaps, for one, makes a bloody lycanthropic mess out of feminism. The film is equal parts teen comedy and camp horror, exploiting the werewolf metamorphosis as a metaphor for puberty.

Meet Ginger and Brigitte, sisters on the precipice of adulthood. Hobbies include making suicide pacts and slideshows of their gruesomely staged deaths in their dungeon of a bedroom – clearly humor tempered by a thousand paper cuts. Late bloomers, the two dread the thought of menstruation for it would mean yielding to conformity and venerated womanhood. Menstruation disgusts and embarrasses them but also threatens their sense of identity as misanthropic outcasts, which they gladly play up as students. When Ginger finally gets her first period, a werewolf attacks her the same night to make the transformations run parallel. Ginger begins to take on masculine qualities, becoming sexually aggressive and physically abrasive, sprouting a tail in the process. She learns how to wield her newfound sexual confidence to disrupt the the social hierarchy at school and racks up a body count along the way. Consequently Ginger comes to resemble the archetype of the monstrous femme fatale, which in turn is the manifestation of the historically male fear of being overtaken by a woman; she might as well have sprung fifty feet.^[1]

The title of the movie itself is a pun of a binary opposition between femininity and masculinity, wherein the domesticity evoked by baked goods is contrasted with the machismo Ginger develops once she “snaps.” Qualities of feminine power – being nurturing, tender and positively aggressive – are seemingly rejected in this story by Ginger's dubious transformation, but subtly reaffirmed by her mother and younger sister. It is, after all, the gleefully ignorant mother who takes to investigating the girls' behavior and actually discovers the truth. Brigitte, the more introverted sister, also demonstrates power through her unwavering devotion to Ginger. Overcoming her social inertia, she even enlists the help of others to save her sister. Indeed, it is through her triumph that those growing pains of youth finds the most cathartic articulation.

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¹ See 1958 cult classic, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

Image courtesy of the author.

Funny Games

Anna: Why don't you just kill us?
Peter: [smiling] You shouldn't forget the importance of entertainment.
                     Funny Games (2008)

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The setting was Shriver Hall, Halloween 2009. I sat back in my seat as a member of The Johns Hopkins Film Society, after weeks of promoting a spooky holiday double-feature, and prepared for what was to be my least favorite screening of my undergraduate career. Though I've loved decorating my new post-grad apartment with glossy skulls and pumpkins, Halloween is not my holiday. I don't like being voluntarily frightened. I don't enjoy feeling nervous. I don't like things taking me by surprise. And, though I appreciate some Diane Arbus-style forms of the grotesque, scary things freak me out.

The way I appreciate a film is inseparable from my experience with the clothes in it. So the paralyzing fear I felt during our first screening of the night - Funny Games, the 2008 English-language remake of the 1997 Austrian psychological thriller by the same name - began first and foremost with the choice of costumes. The clean white golf polos on our villainous duo immediately brought to mind Malcolm McDowell & co. in A Clockwork Orange, sans bowler hats but with an equal amount of premeditated evilness. Paul and Peter's achingly friendly attitudes at the start reminded me of Alex's cordial, composed, practically relaxed forms of violence. (Plus, anyone catch the biblical reference in their names? Creepy.) Their highly stylized characters from the start struck me and sickened me before I even knew what was to come.

And after sitting and squirming through the entire thing, I decided that what it all boils down to is this - the thing that makes Funny Games so terrifying (and, admittedly, so successful) is just the opposite of theatrical: it's the fact that it could happen.

Think about it compared to our other beloved scary movies. Scream is so foolish, if only for the Ghostfaced Killer mask alone. How can you take something like that seriously? If it had a knife, maybe. But the movie is practically a spoof of a horror film in itself...and the mental image of Drew Barrymore screaming and crying on the phone in her little bob hairdo makes me laugh just thinking about it.

Halloween could happen, I suppose. But what are the chances that everyone in your town will just happen to be out that night, leaving no one to answer their doors and lend you some help? Oh and also, what about your cell phone? Get your iPhone out and call 911, problem solved. (Although the isolation of being in 1978 without a cell phone is frightening on its own for some people, I'd imagine.)

Nightmare on Elm Street, The Exorcist, Poltergeist, The Ring, Zombieland, and most other thrillers require some sort of belief in the magical or paranormal. Something alternate that isn't quite real or logical is causing trouble, mixing up the "usual" we've come to know and expect. Some elements of the story may be possible, but as a whole these films are simply so much less believable because they constantly remind you, in some way, that they can only exist in an alternate reality - the movie theater.

But Funny Games. It's thought of everything. Our main characters are a family of three plus family pet - and, though the only totally likable character is the little boy, the cozy family unit still gives us a sense of stability to be broken. The film drops the family in an "ordinary" rich neighborhood (aka The Hamptons), where luxury, comfort, and security should be high. And what happens when you pay the steep price for a getaway so you have a place to go when you don't want to connect with the world? Two men, slickly groomed and dressed in eerie white, force themselves into your home, drown your cell phones, torture your family, have a laugh, and over the course of 24 hours painfully pick off one loved one after the other. For fun. (And then the tall one joins the cast of Boardwalk Empire.)

I recently thought of Funny Games again when I went to the theater to see Martha Marcy May Marlene. There on the screen is the same luxurious isolation, the same dread of something/someone being after you, the same fear of evil invading your comfortable home and trapping you there in a sort of hell - with the complex addition of pondering whether your hell and your home are one in the same. (Or if any of it happened at all - but that's a discussion for another day.) But more strikingly, I thought of the film again after following the trial of a New England pair who stalked a family of four, invaded their home, and ended up torching the place with a mother and two daughters inside. The courts have just convicted the second man of committing the crime (they've got him on 17 counts, including six capital felonies), but they're waiting to sentence him. So the "story" of Funny Games can happen and, recently, has happened. It's existing horror. And what defense do we have against it?

But really, a movie that thrills you, makes your heart pound and your palms sweat, runs through your head long after it's over, haunts you in the safest of places...isn't that the best scary movie of all? Because I saw this film ONCE two years ago and I still wake up at 3am sometimes thinking about it, I figure it's definitely one worth talking about.

Happy Halloween.

Scribbled in Blood: The Ghoulish ABC's of David Lynch's Short Film THE ALPHABET

I mentioned the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in my previous post (on the topic of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut) and it seemed to go over well -- at least in the eyes of an approving commenter named Paul -- and so I've decided to do it again, this time in the service of David Lynch's 1968 experimental short "The Alphabet." In the epigraph to his philosophical fantasy "The Library of Babel" (go ahead, click the link, read it, you'll thank me), Borges cites the 17th-century Englishman Robert Burton:

"By this art you may contemplate the variations of the 23 letters..."

--- The Anatomy of Melancholy, part 2, sect. II, mem. IV

In "The Alphabet" -- created when Lynch was but a 22-year-old art student with a feverish imagination, not yet the grey-bouffanted eccentric of popular lore -- we witness the nightmarish exaltation of not just 23, but indeed all 26 letters of the English alphabet. But despite that arithmetic discrepancy, the game is roughly the same: Lynch takes a set of arbitrary, innocent symbols, and, through artful variation, sharpens them and loads them with miasmatic ill-will. The half-animated, half-live-action short (viewable on the web) superficially resembles an elementary-school instructional video of sorts -- sing-song voices chant the letters of the alphabet, which float onto the screen in various witty animations -- but it doesn't take long for those letters to transcend their communicative function and become, instead, the twisted talismans of some malicious intent. Like the falling droplets in an ancient Chinese water torture, the letters ignite a latent madness buried beneath the clean animated surface of the film's beginning. Abstract shapes embark on odd pilgrimages, fuse with other shapes, bristle with sickly restlessness, converse with a bare-breasted corpse-woman, and so, unmoored and queasy, we tumble into a world of live-action red-pierced monochrome. The film ends with a grotesque girl-creature writhing in bed, incanting the letters of the alphabet as if they were the pet names of the Devil himself, before finally vomiting forth a spattering of blood: the elements of speech transubstantiated into the particles of disease...

This typographical nightmare also marks the beginning of David Lynch's career-spanning obsession with sound design: bird-like yawps unsettlingly evoke both the vulnerability of birth and the anguish of death, while desolate wind (or machinery?) sounds imbue the flat animations with all the vastness of an uninhabited dystopia. But even as "The Alphabet" sees Lynch experimenting for the first time with sonic atmospherics (experiments which he continues to perform to this day), with dis-continuity editing, and with other temporally-encoded aspects of film language, the film also functions as a last hurrah of sorts for David Lynch the painter/collage artist. Educated as a visual artist of the pigment-on-canvas variety, Lynch was famously (or not-so-famously, I don't know, I'm a bit of a cultist) inspired to take up film when he saw one of his paintings flutter in the wind -- coming to cinematic life, as it were. This origin story -- one for the ages, I think -- is manifest in his very first film ("Six Men Getting Sick"), which come across, essentially, as an Abstract Expressionist sketch graced with the breath of life. "The Alphabet" retains much of this animated-collage aesthetic, but also -- significantly -- contains one of Lynch's first forays into live action, with all that that implies (mise en scène, editing, actors, cinematography, makeup...) As such, "The Alphabet" can be fruitfully read as a document of a young man in a state of aesthetic (and professional) transition, veering towards cinema, but refusing to accept its strictures point-blank, choosing instead to reshape the medium into something of his own making -- something morbid, something inscrutable, something darkly comic, in short, something Lynchian. 

Keep in mind, though, that this is neither the mid-career Lynch of macabre '50s-infused Americana (vide Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) nor the later Lynch of recursive Hollywood melodrama (Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire), but rather the early, flagrantly grotesque art-horror of Eraserhead -- all oozing secretions and bodily perversions and aimless torment and pancake makeup. As a disembodied, bloody-gummed, eyeless face aptly intones near the end of "The Alphabet": "Please remember that you are dealing with the human form." Indeed, this is one of Lynch's main preoccupations, addressed obliquely but relentlessly not just here but throughout his whole oeuvre. He probes the fragility of the human mind and body, its frail architecture, its mutations, its laughable deformities, its perpetual susceptibility to infection by foreign shapes, objects and dreams. Just as Betty/Diane is seduced, corrupted and ultimately driven to bodily madness by the Hollywood image-factory of Mulholland Drive, so too is the nameless bedridden girl in "The Alphabet" tormented to the point of blood-spewing hysteria by abstract letters that colonize her mental space like so many microbes. It is, after all, no accident that gruesome head wounds feature as a recurring trope in almost all of Lynch's films...!

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Photo courtesy of jvoves's Flickr. Cropped and copied in accordance with this Creative Commons license.

Fairytales of a Darker Nature: Slasher Films as Morality Tales

In the early years of cinema, the horror genre was populated by monsters and mad scientists, and was set in the shadows of gothic castles, tombs, and other innately macabre locals.  It wasn’t until the 1970s when films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Black Christmas (1974) began to bring horror into the modern era.  Suddenly horror wasn’t looming in Eastern European crypts, but right in your backyard.  The protagonists weren’t scientists and explorers, but unsuspecting youths.  Horror films began directly targeting the fears of their target audience.  This culminated in John Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece Halloween.

 

"Death has come to your little town, Sheriff." Creative Commons¹

Halloween was certainly not the first film of its kind; the cinematography borrows from Italian cinema and its plot was not remarkably different from other American horror movies like Black Christmas.  Yet most mark the film as the father of the modern slasher genre. Why?  The universal nature of the story and the mythology behind the film’s iconic killer Michael Myers.  John Carpenter’s Halloween exists in a world where sex and drugs equals death, the virgin can stop the killer, and evil never really dies; in essence, the film is a morality tale.  

These themes struck a chord with audiences and after its release in 1978, Halloween spawned dozens of cheap, forgettable attempts to cash in on the films success.  Films like New Year's Evil, Prom Night, Terror Train and April Fool's Day, were all attempts to do Halloween again.  There were, however, a few successful children of Carpenter's work, the most famous being Friday the 13th, directed by Sean S. Cunningham in 1981.  Friday the 13th functioned under the same moral code as Halloween but was far more overt, both in its message and its gore. While Michael Myers’ reasons for slaughtering teens remained terrifyingly unanswered, Pamela Voorhees, the killer in Cunningham’s picture, has a clear motive and back story to justify her murderous moral code: drunk teens having sex were responsible for the death of her son. 

  "Doomed! You're all doomed!" Creative Commons²

Cunningham insists that the film is not a morality tale, but instead a fairytale.  “As children we get fairytales, and the purpose of fairytales… is to take a child’s fears and put them in the safety of a story.” says Cunningham.¹  While the film was originally intended as a sort of stress release for a teenager’s fear of untimely death, Friday the 13th is insistent on presenting Voorhees’s deranged motives for revenge as we watch her slowly off a group of dissolute teenagers.  Playing the film as a revenge film against immoral teenagers makes the message difficult to miss and more understandable, or justifiable.  However, the film is ultimately less effective than Halloween.

 

John Carpenter’s film is so terrifying and iconic because of the anonymity of the setting, protagonist, and killer.  Halloween takes place in Haddonfield, Illinois, a town that is representative of a thousand just like it.  “It’s every town, it’s every place, it could be your town…”.²  The universality of the location creates a fear that is disturbingly close to home.  Laurie Strode and Michael’s other victims are also strikingly anonymous.  The idea of the babysitter is where the film becomes incredibly identifiable to a young audience.  Everyone has had a babysitting job or is friends with a babysitter, which is what makes the basic premise of the movie scary.  The entire movie was pitched to its executive producer, Moustapha Akkad, as “the babysitter to be killed by the boogeyman”.²  But what makes Halloween so terrifying is the boogeyman: Michael Myers.

 

Michael Myers is what makes Halloween work, and what makes Michael Myers work is his simplicity.  Unlike Pamela Voorhees in Friday the 13th, Michael has no real motive. In Carpenter’s original script he is referred to simply as The Shape, not a man, but a force.  The flatness of his character is incredibly effective in stripping the message down to its essentials.  Sex equals death.  Drugs and alcohol equal death.  Immorality of any kind equals death.  Any motive would dilute that potency. 

 

And, after the original 1978 masterpiece, the Halloween series has lost it’s potency, primarily due to decision Carpenter made while writing the sequel that he blames on “a late night and too much alcohol”: He made Laurie Strode Michael Myers’s sister.²  Laurie is the object of Michael’s obsession and suddenly the rest of humanity is safe.  The original was frightening because of the idea that it could happen to you, there was no reason for Michael choosing these kids and that was scary.  Now, there is a motive: to kill the sister.  The number of people with estranged psychopathic brothers is a lot smaller than the entire teenage population; the universality of the terror is gone.

 

The Friday the 13th sequels, on the other hand, retain some of that potency and build upon it with the character of Jason.  Jason, a deformed child who saw his mother murdered by one of the young camp counselors at the end of the first film, has vowed revenge on every drinking, drug-doing, sex having, teenager he can find.  The child-like simplicity with which Jason views humanity makes him dangerous.  Teenagers killed his mother, so they all should pay for it.  Suddenly, terror is universal again.  The problem with the series is that the terror becomes derivative and laughable over the ten sequels, making them more fun than frightening.

   "A curse on Crystal Lake, a death curse. Jason Voorhees' curse." Creative Commons³

For the past three decades, dozens if not hundreds of killers have stalked the silver screen, tearing a bloody hole into the culture of American youth.  While few are as terrifying as the man who, in 1978, changed the face of horror, all of them have come baring the same message: If you do bad things, I will do something worse to you.  This is what makes them fairytales, they are fun little stories that remind us to be good.  And as long as kids enjoy being bad, they will keep filling the seats.

Works Cited

1. The Friday the 13th Chronicles. Dir. Donald R. Beck. Paramount Pictures, 2004.

2. Halloween: 25 Years of Terror. Dir. Stefan Hutchinson. Paranormal Films, 2006.

Photo Credits

1. Photo from Chris (Picasa)

2. Photo from Double Feature Podcast (Flickr)

3. Photo from Darren (Flickr)

The Zombie Film: From Allegory to Introspection (Jason)

    Zombies have been active in the minds of humans for centuries. The question of what comes after death is a mysterious one, and zombies, or ghouls, or whatever you would like to refer to them as, provide a terrifying answer. In film, it has hard to locate a definitive starting point for the zombie subculture, but a major influence on the modern zombie filmmaker is The Last Man on Earth, a 1964 release directed by Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow. It is an adaption of the book I Am Legend, a much more faithful version than the two more recent remakes. In it, Dr. Robert Morgan, our films protagonist, is left alone on Earth, presumably the last living human. He spends his days hunting the living dead and attempting to find a cure. Although technically a vampire movie, The Last Man on Earth evoked many of the stylistic tendencies of a zombie movie. Characters lurk in shadows, as hordes of the living dead fill each frame. However, a more important influence was the interpretation derived from the zombie apocalypse scenario. In the film, the end of the world is used as a reflection of Dr. Morgan the character, a flawed and not altogether sane person. In a crucial twist of irony, Morgan discovers that he is the "legend" among some of the infected who can still function, similar to how we view vampires and zombies. In other words, the true "monster" of our culture may have feelings, even live and breathe as we do; we could even be the monster. This can even be interpreted as a commentary on racial prejudice, a universal flaw of humanity.

    Of course, the zombie film would be nothing without the great George A. Romero. In 1968, he directed Night of the Living Dead, a film that was badly received at the time, but has since become a cult classic. In this film, the modern zombie was born. Stylistically, Romero set the rules for his genre. Lighting was just as important before, perhaps even more drastic, but it took a backseat to the props, makeup, and the style of the zombies themselves. Blood was especially important, the spirit of which soon became that there is never too much. After a decade, and some widespread success, Romero decided to make a sequel, Dawn of the Dead. This film takes place just after the first film, but with none of the same characters. In it, a group of misfits find retreat in a shopping mall, where they hold out for several months before being sabotaged by other living human, and ultimately, by the undead.. Beyond just the gore of your typical zombie move, Romero had a message he wished to deliver. Night of the Living Dead provides commentary on Vietnam-era paranoia and mob mentality. The climactic death of Ben, gunned down by fellow humans, demonstrates the destruction of a trigger happy culture. Dawn of the Dead contains a less than subtle allegory to consumerism, as characters indulge in their every pleasure in the months they are in the mall, despite the end of civilization that blazes outside. In both of these films, Romero uses the "zombie apocalypse" as a scenario to build upon. Like The Last Man on Earth, the zombie apocalypse is not the focus, but is instead used as a mirror to reveal the errors of society.

    Recently, the zombie film has picked up steam in popular culture. Starting with 28 Days Later in 2002, and continuing with Shaun of the Dead and Fido, both comedic approaches, the zombie film has found a new purpose. 28 Days Later and the less eclectic Resident Evil, released the same year, mark a turning point for the zombie film. Particularly, they are the first significant films to have an explanation for why the dead are coming back to life. 28 Days Later attributes the cause to a "rage virus" which is spread through bites. Fido takes a similar route, attributing the reanimation to radiation, but is set in an alterante world where zombies are treated like domesticated pets. The standards remain relatively the same. Zombies are reanimated corpses, they hunt for the living, they can only be killed by destroying their brain, etc. But in both of these films, the mechanics behind the terror are revealed to the viewer almost immediately. In fact, in the very first scene of 28 Days Later, animal activists come to release monkeys that are caged up. Little did they know, the monkeys contain the rage virus, and so it is spread to humans. Just as the viewer began to think it might be a movie that addresses animal rights activism, director Danny Boyle spins around the meaning of the film. With this subtle change, all of the allegorical implications of earlier zombie flicks are stripped away. More recent films have found an allure to the zombies themselves. Once the mechanics are revealed, the fear of the zombie scenario is not a reflection out towards society, but inward. The realization of a possible reality of the "zombie apocalypse" is put into the mind of the audience, no matter how far fetched it is. The viewer becomes terrified not by the blood or the shadows, but by this very reality.This forced look inward has become the new standard of the zombie film, and an introspective gaze has never held such terror.

Disquieting Truths: Jacques Tourneur’s "Night of the Demon" and the Logic of Evil (Colin)

“Well, the sense of being watched whenever one was alone was the most distressing thing to him. After a time I took to sleeping in his room, and he was the better for that: still, he talked a great deal in his sleep. What about? Is it wise to dwell on that, at least before things are straightened out?”

– “Casting the Runes,” M.R. James

 “There are sacraments of evil as well as good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead.”

– “The Red Hand,” Arthur Machen

Dr. John Holden: I see you practice white magic as well as black.

Dr. Julian Karswell: Oh yes, I don't think it would be too amusing for the youngsters if I conjured up a demon from hell for them.

-- Night of the Demon (1957)

 

            The films of Jacques Tourneur are often typified by intricate plots set against shifting, illusionary atmospheres in which much of what seems obvious at first to both the protagonist and his audience is proven to be less straightforward than it first appeared and in which an apparent belief is often proven – often with terrible consequences – to be false. In the realm of the film noir, Tourneur demonstrated this sensibility with powerful effect in Out of the Past, creating the deadly Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) as the archetypal femme fatale who lures the half-willing protagonist (Robert Mitchum) to his death by allowing him to fall in love with what he imagines her character to be and disillusioning him with her true nature only when he is already under her spell. It is little surprise, then, that Tourneur made his name not so much as a director of noirs but as the talented helmsman of a number of subtly directed and imaginatively plotted horror films, many of them produced under the auspices of Val Lewton. Yet though Tourneur’s well-deserved fame lies in such classics as I Walked With a Zombie and Cat People, it is in the more obscure 1957 supernatural horror film Night of the Demon that the auteur not only equals his previous fame in the genre, but in many ways surpasses his own ability to invert established conventions and to surprise out of both his protagonist and his audience a sense of unease both fundamental to the horror experience and, in many ways, particular to the subgenre of supernatural terror.

            Based on a tale by English ghost story author M.R. James (1862-1936), Night of the Demon centers around the death of an eminent professor who, before his untimely death, was in the process of exposing a Satanic cult headed by a Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis). Fellow psychologist Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews), determined to uncover a non-supernatural explanation for his colleague’s seemingly supernatural death, travels to England, interviewing several other colleagues as well as the murdered man’s niece Joanna Harrington (Peggy Cummins) in order to learn more about the details surrounding Harrington’s last days. Rather than uncovering evidence pointing to a “natural” murder, however, he begins to find clues that seem to point to black magic as the only solution. Naturally, he spends a good deal of the film as a stalwart skeptic, attempting to disregard this theory as implausible; it is only when he himself falls under a similar curse that he at last realizes that, if he wishes to survive, he must acknowledge the terrifying existence of the shadowy supernatural world that he had spent all of his life attempting to explain away in scientific terms. The film ends with the successful defeat of the sorcerer Karswell (he is, like every good Faustus, dismembered by the demon that he has been ritually summoning throughout the entire film) and with Holden’s realization that his formerly materialistic perspective is, of course, forever untenable in light of all that he has experienced.  

            The plot’s murder-mystery construction causes one to inevitably draw a comparison between the film’s premise and the school of “rational” supernatural horror emergent in the late eighteenth-century and officiated by the mistress of the Gothic, Anne Radcliffe (authoress of the infamous Mysteries of Udolpho). This comparison, however, would prove misleading. Members of the Radcliffean school crafted lengthy and elaborate plots hinging upon seemingly supernatural events – all of which would be explained away at the novel’s often vaguely bewildering and interminable conclusion as the charlatanry of duplicitous murderers and schemers. A product of Enlightenment thought, the Radcliffean “rationalist” supernatural authors stood in direct opposition to true supernatural horror authors who wrote Gothic novels at the same time: authors such as Matthew Lewis (The Monk), Charles Robert Maturin (Melmoth the Wanderer, Fatal Revenge), and John Polidori (“The Vampyre”). Indeed, this unacknowledged war continued into the age of the Victorians –  Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and Stoker’s Dracula being the towering, representative legionaries from these two respective literary camps during the late nineteenth-century.

It would be a logical assumption to believe that with the rise of Darwinism and accelerated scientific discovery in the early twentieth-century, that the true supernatural horror tale would fall somewhat out of favor. Curiously enough, the opposite proved to be true; with the rise of materialism, Nietzschean thought, and Freudianism, there also rose some of Western culture's most infamous occultists such as Montague Summers, Aleister Crowley, Madame Blavatsky, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – all of them standing in direct opposition to the growing tide of skeptical thought that suffused much of Western philosophical thought at the time. Many members of occult orders such as Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood were more famously known as supernatural horror authors and, though he was not himself an occultist, Professor M.R. James himself was a member of this self-same literary (and, in light of the rise of materialism, revolutionary) movement, crafting many fine ghostly tales besides “Casting the Runes,” all of them of the truest non-rational order.

Jacques Tourneur and screenwriter Charles Bennett faithfully follow the mood of James’ subtle masterpiece, deftly blending the gentle, Old World atmosphere of the English countryside with the ever omnipresent, hovering fear of a supernatural underworld existing beneath the surface and threatening to erupt upon the moors, into the mansions, or – and perhaps even more disquieting – into the conference rooms of materialist scientists at any moment. But more importantly, the film successfully maintains the original tale’s ploy of constructing a deceptively Radcliffean, murder-mystery-esque plot only to turn this plot on its head and show that the gruesome, masked figures are – terrifyingly – wearing no masks at all. To a practiced auteur such as Tourneur, such a horrific inversion of convention came all too naturally.

Much of the film’s subtly subversive supernaturalism is derived from the atypical characterizations of the hero Dr. Holden and his sinister opponent Karswell. In many horror films of the period, the psychologist was portrayed as a sort of materialist equivalent of the priestly Van Helsing: a character who understands the minds of men better than they themselves do and who can even use this knowledge for certain maleficent ends himself. Whether good or evil, it was characteristic of all psychologists to be portrayed in serious cinema as learned, wise, and usually the guiding influence or omnipresent antagonist of the hero. Likewise, Dana Andrews, famed for his portrayal of hard-boiled protagonists in films such as Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), was typically cast in the role of a reliable, intelligent hero whom the audience could trust to make the correct decisions in spite of his wily, witty villains. With these conventions in mind, nothing prepares us for the platitudinous, unimaginative Dr. Holden in Night of the Demon. Most protagonists in horror films must maintain a certain skepticism in order to remain believable; but in Dr. John Holden, skepticism is heightened to a nearly pathological pitch until the audience, rather than experiencing sympathy for his plight, is coerced into feeling a certain impatience instead. Conventionally handsome, well-educated, and American, his character’s presence in a film set in England with a British-heavy cast stands as the mascot of straightforward, scientific, rationalist, modern America – and the portrayal is hardly flattering.

 

Dr. John Holden: Joanna, let me tell you something about myself. When I was a kid, I used to walk down the street with the other kids and when we came to a ladder they'd all walk around it. I'd walk under it, just to see if anything would happen. Nothing ever did. When they'd see a black cat they'd run the other way to keep it from crossing their path. But I didn't. And all this ever did for me is make me wonder why – why people get so panicky about absolutely nothing at all. I've made a career studying it. Maybe just to prove one thing. That I'm not a superstitious sucker like ninety per cent of humanity.

 

Conversely, Karswell is portrayed as the exact antithesis of Holden in almost every way imaginable. Older, British, and (unsurprisingly) more supernaturally inclined, Karswell confesses at one point that he worked at one point as a stage-show magician: a most inauspicious beginning in comparison to Holden’s professorship. He is the living symbol of Old World, old-fashioned, “backward”-thinking. Yet, perversely, the film’s cinematography and screenplay – as well as the plot itself – force the audience to acknowledge Karswell as the wiser of the two: whilst Holden’s face in a number of shots is filmed in shadow, giving a visual emphasis to his doubts and uncertainties regarding his environment, Karswell is nearly always filmed in either broad daylight or in the clear, unbroken light of a parlor or drawing room. Likewise, while Holden merely parrots his tired arguments, Karswell’s dialogue is appropriately ambiguous and yet redolent of a certain secret knowledge:

 

Dr. Julian Karswell: Do I believe in witchcraft? What kind of witchcraft? The legendary witch that rides on the imaginary broom? The hex that tortures the thoughts of the victim? The pin stuck in the image that wastes away the mind and the body?

Dr. John Holden: Also imaginary.

Dr. Julian Karswell: But where does imagination end and reality begin? What is this twilight, this half world of the mind that you profess to know so much about? How can we differentiate between the powers of darkness and the powers of the mind?

 

The casting of Niall MacGinnis as the sinister conjuror was yet another stroke of calculated genius. Four years after playing Martin Luther in the eponymous film, MacGinnis maintains many of the mannerisms of the wise, knowledgeable visionary whilst subtly imbuing them with an added quality of underlying ruthlessness. Karswell is a man who at one moment may be innocuously hosting a Halloween party for the village children and the next moment setting a demon against one of his enemies. One has only to watch the scenes in which he calmly and pleasantly reminds Holden of Holden’s forthcoming curse-induced death, in order to witness Bennett’s fine screenwriting capabilities and the sadly underrated talents of one of England’s finest thespians.

The one scene in which science attempts to take some degree of control occurs towards the end of the film when Holden and his colleagues hypnotize one of Karswell’s cultists with the purpose of gaining some knowledge of the inner-workings of the cult. Ironically, this scientific triumph concludes in a further proof of the existence of the supernatural. When Professor O’Brien asks the man what the true “believer” in Karswell’s teachings must adhere to, the cultist replies that it is those “who blaspheme and desecrate. In the joy of sin will mankind that is lost, find itself again.” To Holden, who has been constantly avowing his disbelief in any sort of supernatural source for evil, this testimony is ridiculous. However, in the context of Tourneur’s cinematic nightmare, it is a terrifying and logical fact.

Indeed, the film’s conclusion magnificently encapsulates the collision of ancient, supernatural evil with modern materialism. As the demon descends to destroy Karswell, a train rushes past in the opposite direction so that the train and the monster seem to head towards each other at opposite ends of the horizon. The effect creates a visual parallel and visual contrast between the smoking train and the fiery demon – one an inhabitant of the so-called primitive shadowland of myth and the other the result of human technology. Unsettlingly, this parallel both asks and answers the question of which one of the two is the more powerful.

Though films such as The Exorcist are given well-deserved credit for portraying the encroachment of the supernatural into the world of ordinary, modern society, it may be argued after this general overview that Tourneur’s Night of the Demon is something of an earlier, drawing-room version of the same concept – a concept that has been propounded and explored by supernatural horror authors since the advent of the Gothic novel. Tourneur, with his brilliant casting decisions and faithfulness to M.R. James’ original concept, created a work of art out of this familiar idea that is certainly worth watching and studying for both its qualities as an excellent film and its achievements as a genuinely unsettling horror movie.