Beating the Devil

Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil (2017, directed by Paul Urkijo Alijo) is based on a fairy tale with deep Indo-European roots, one known in one form or another across most of Western Asia and Europe. This film interprets the story in Basque, one of the only European languages that doesn't have Indo-European roots. Given that this film was produced by Spanish enfant terrible Alex de Iglesias, I can only assume that this is one of the ways in which the film is trolling the audience. This film is both a rich Gothic and a droll comedy. It's one of the year's best horror movies, and this year has not been short on good horror movies.

Note: this contains spoilers.

Sighs and Whispers

The most instantly noticeable difference between Dario Argento's original Suspiria and Luca Guadagnino's 2018 cover version is the way each film chooses to decorate itself. Argento's film often seems intent on burning the viewers' retinas right out of their eyeballs. Many of its best effects are accomplished through abstractions: color, stained glass decor, the pulsing electronic Goblin score. Guadagnino's film, by contrast, is a grey, bleak affair, taking its cues from the dismal world of Fassbinder's 1970s Germany. Both films start with a woman seeking help in a driving rainstorm, but where Argento's opening orchestrates a world of peril and chaos, Guadagnino's opening is a portrait of misery and defeat. It wouldn't be right to claim, as some have, that Guadagnino's film is "artier" than Argento's, because Argento's films from the 1970s are all art objects to one degree or another, both as objects unto themselves and in their contents. Argento made films in which art is dangerous, in which art can be used as a weapon. It shares this theme with the new film. They just have different ideas about art.

Note: this is heavy on the spoilers.

Monsters During Wartime

Some years ago, the Criterion people produced a disc for a forgotten film from the 1970s called Overlord by a director named Stuart Cooper. That film was assembled, documentary-style, from footage surrounding the build-up to the D-Day invasion of Europe and wove in new footage relating a haunting love story. The new film bearing the title Overlord (2018, directed by Julius Avery) bears absolutely no resemblance to that previous film other than its title and that it takes place just before the invasion of Normandy. I can see some gorehound horror fan ordering the previous film by accident and wondering what the hell some black and white art film was doing on his TV or some film snob becoming completely appalled by the newer film. The difference is stark. The new film, for its part, doesn't aspire to art, though it may accidentally stumble over it from time to time. It's the kind of horror film that you just have to follow over the cliff as it careens off the rails. If you can't do that, you're in for a rough time. It's that kind of film.

Mystery and Manners

Good Manners (2017, directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra) is the best werewolf movie anyone has made in the last 37 years. This is, admittedly, a low bar to clear, given the preponderance of Howling sequels that form the backbone of werewolf cinema during that time frame, but it's better than the Ginger Snaps movies, too, and those are pretty good. It might even be better than those two pillars of werewolf cinema from 1981, The Howling and An American Werewolf in London, but I won't swear to that. Like Ginger Snaps, this is a distaff horror movie that finds some of its horror in the biology of women, and some more horror in the social roles women often occupy, salted with problems of class and race.