Whose Woods These Are I Think I Know

One of the least heralded tropes in the horror toolbox is the idea of wrong geometry, the idea that the shape of the world is just a little off. It's a trope that finds expression in that meme that presents people with obsessive compulsive disorder with an 89 degree angle. The idea of wrong geometry gets a work out in stories like The Haunting of Hill House, where walls are upright and doors are sensibly shut, or At the Mountains of Madness, where the city of the Great Race of Yith defies Euclidean notions of dimension and sanity. It's an effective trope because when it's done well, it's profoundly disorienting. Wrong geometry--specifically wrong geography--is at the heart of Lovely, Dark, and Deep (2023, directed by Teresa Sutherland), in which being lost in the woods is a gateway to more cosmic horrors.

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One Damned Thing After Another

You don't have to squint very hard to see the provenance of Cold Blows the Wind (2023, directed by Eric Williford). It's part Shock Suspense Stories from the old E. C. Comics, part Pet Sematary, part H. P. Lovecraft, and part Creepshow II (thanks for the ride, lady!). Mix well. Pour. I don't mean any of this as criticism. Genres tend to remix a common pool of elements and horror movies are particularly prone to this. That's how genres form in the first place. Some filmmakers do it better. Some do it worse. Sometimes, the swipes show. Sometimes they don't. In the case of Cold Blows the Wind, whenever this film borrows something, the filmmakers leave the knife.

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Wait Until Your Father Gets Home

An audience's response to The Vourdalak (2023, directed by Adrien Beau) will hinge entirely on how it reacts to the title character, presented in the film as an elaborate puppet. Perhaps it's better to call it a puppeted practical effect? I don't know. Its closest cinematic relatives are The Crypt Keeper from the old Tales from the Crypt series, and Death in Jim Henson's The Storyteller, the episode that combines the soldier and the devils story with "Godfather Death" from Grimm's Fairy Tales. This effect isn't necessarily a deal breaker. It's a good puppet, and creepy as hell, but it might break the movie's spell if an audience doesn't believe it. Other films have overcome similar effects, even some well-known ones. Otherwise, this is an art house horror movie that's more related to Eastern European horror movies like Viy or Valerie and Her Week of Wonders than it is to a western special effects-driven horror movie. It has a touch of Jean Rollin's Gothic sensibility, too. It is a far cry from this century's extreme horror movies from France, though it's not shy about the cruelty and blood in its source text.

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Godzilla Is Inside All of Us

It seems absurd at this late date to be rediscovering the depth of metaphor in Ishiro Honda's Godzilla. Godzilla has been an icon of world cinema for seventy years, an embassador for international moviemaking in spite of the derision his films have sometimes received. After years of interpretations have pulled Godzilla out of the realm of metaphor and into the world of monster versus monster wrestling fights, that original nightmare born of the hydrogen bomb has faded into memory, but it hasn't vanished completely. Godzilla's home studio, Toho Pictures, has been leasing Godzilla to American studios for years at this point, and Americans don't have that memory of atomic destruction. They see in Godzilla a franchise to exploit, like good little imperial capitalists. Art isn't even in the equation. When it happens at all, it's purely by accident. Every so often, Toho makes a film of their own to keep their hand in and remind the world who owns Godzilla. On the occasion of Godzilla's seventieth year, they've taken Godzilla back to his roots. The result, Godzilla Minus One (2023, directed by Takashi Yamazaki), is an astonishment, a film that can stand not only with the original film from 1954, but as one of the best fantasy films ever made, full stop. It's certainly one of the best films of 2023. It's the real thing. It's a film with something meaningful to say about history and nation and the human heart in conflict with itself. It's a film that the makers of the American "Monsterverse" films should look at with dismay and shame and envy.

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You Reap What You Sow

Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.
--William Shakespeare, Hamlet

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The word "pagan" derives from the latin word, "paganus/pagani," which means, literally, "peasant." Its original usage also connoted "bumpkin" or "hick," though significantly not "farmer" ("agricola"). At its most benign, it meant countryman or civilian. Its modern usage reminds us that Christianity was originally an urban religion. Wander out into the sticks if you're a good Christian, and you'll run into a bunch of bumpkins who still practice the old religions. That's the root of folk horror right there. When you combine this with an America that still occasionally dreams of itself as an agrarian society, you can see how paganism and Americana get inextricably woven together. The people out in the country may think of themselves as god-fearing Christians, but the old ways still linger. Particularly around Halloween. In Dark Harvest (2023, directed by David Slade), a Halloween-y movie if ever there was one, this gets a treatment that's equal parts nostalgia and deconstruction. Like the inhabitants of Summerisle in The Wicker Man, the farmers make a sacrifice to their crop, but they stage it as an all American tradition, like football and fast cars. It's a film that inhabits an archetype, one that would be familiar to Stephen King or Shirley Jackson or (pointedly) Ray Bradbury. It's part "Children of the Corn", part "The Lottery," part Dark Carnival. Certainly, novelist Norman Partridge knew the signposts on the back country roads he was traveling when he wrote the novel on which this is based. And so does Director David Slade.

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Flesh of My Flesh

My first impression of Suitable Flesh (2023, directed by Joe Lynch) during its first act was that it didn't feel like a horror movie at all. It felt like one of those direct to video "erotic thrillers" of the late 1980s/early 1990s. Do you know the ones? They often starred former centerfold Shannon Tweed (who in her defense was a pretty good actress in a limited range) or Andrew Stevens. Suitable Flesh has the same shot on video look to it and the same baffling erotic impulses. I mean, sure. The film starts with an autopsy about to begin, and a psychiatrist visiting her friend and colleague after that colleague has been locked in a padded cell. And this all happens at "Miskatonic Medical School." But once that mental patient begins her story, you can queue up the candles for a night of soft-core. Or maybe not. Because this film doesn't get very naked, even if it does include oral pleasures. And once the film gets to the horror parts of the program, it goes at it full bore. It goes so over the top that I found myself giggling at two of its more outre` set-pieces. The second impression I had in its early going was that this was a film with a serious case of gender. The source material is Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep" which has as protagonists Lovecraft's usual neurasthenic male academics. This film gender swaps the leads and then mixes the novelty of female sexuality into the story's body-hopping shenanigans. Old Howard would run screaming from this, I'm sure.

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Strange Cargo

I commented on social media last week that I thought you could stage The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023, directed by André Øvredal) as a play. Find a production of The Pirates of Penzance that's closing and mooch on their sets and you're all ready to go. One of my friends asked if I would make it a musical. I absolutely would. It would be the off-off-Broadway hit of the season. Buy your tickets now.

The story of the Demeter is from Dracula, of course. It occupies chapter seven of Stoker's novel, represented as news clippings pasted into Mina Murray's journal and as the logbook of the ship as reported in those clippings. The Demeter is usually seen at the end of its journey in movies. In the Tod Browning film, the sole survivor is Renfield (he is not on the ship in the book), with Dwight Frye's mad grin staring up at the investigators when the Demeter drifts into harbor. In Murnau's film version, there's an abbreviated version of the voyage. The first still from Nosferatu I ever saw was of Max Schreck standing on the deck of the Demeter. This was years before I ever saw the film. The most indelible version of the Demeter I ever saw was in John Badham's 1979 version of Dracula in which Harker joins the rescuers for the wrecked ship only to discover a man lashed to the wheel with his throat ripped open. A version of this image appears in Jon J. Muth's graphic novel, Dracula, A Symphony In Moonlight and Nightmares. The final voyage of the Demeter from Varna, Bulgaria, to Whitby, United Kingdom is such a vivid part of the Dracula story that it's shocking that no-one has made a film of its voyage until now. It's been, what? A hundred and twenty-six years at this point?

A lot of the imagery from previous versions makes it into this new film, but most of that imagery was already there in Stoker's book. It's a rich novel for interpolations.

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Hand in Hand

There's a deep mythological undercurrent in Talk to Me (2022, directed by Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou). When I described the film to my partner, she immediately suggested that the film's Maguffin is a hand of glory, a magical artifact made from the left hand of a hanged man which has powerful magic abilities. You may remember the hand of glory's appearance in The Wicker Man, among other places. The thought that it was a hand of glory occurred to me, too, while I was watching the movie. The severed hand in Talk to Me isn't exactly that, but bears a strong enough resemblance nonetheless, even down to the related use of a candle to invoke its power. It reminds me a little of the monkey's paw in the W. W. Jacob's story of the same name, as well, which itself seems descended from the hand of glory and its other mythological relatives. In Talk to Me, the severed hand of a medium is preserved inside a ceramic shell. It enables someone holding the hand, as if shaking it, to see and talk to the dead. If the holder invites the ghost, the ghost can possess them. Like the hand in "The Monkey's Paw," the hand in this film promises answers and wishes. Sort of. In the film, it's the center of teenage shenanigans so it all ends badly, as it must. These kids could have prevented a lot of heartache if they had all watched The Ring or Witchboard or some other tale of teens dabbling in the supernatural. But then you wouldn't have a movie.

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A Sympathy of Choices

“If there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it,
Making it momentary as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!'
The jaws of darkness do devour it up;
So quick bright things come to confusion.”
--William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act I, Scene I

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The espionage thriller has been flirting with science fiction for decades now. The first James Bond film, Dr. No, set the precedent, and the Harry Palmer films, the Flint films, and the Jason Bourne films have all followed its lead. The Marvel films are built in equal measure on the espionage thriller and on science fiction, with their very own super spy organization as a through-line lacing the entire franchise together. Get Smart had a character who was an android. It's in the DNA of the form now in spite of the best efforts of John le Carré and Graham Greene to ground the genre in reality. The Mission: Impossible television series and films are science fiction-y most of the time, with their cyberpunk stylings, but this year's Mission: Impossible-Dead Reckoning Part 1 (2023, directed by Christopher McQuarrie) crosses the border into broad sci fi with nary a backward glance. Like a good science fiction story, it starts with a what if: "What if a self-aware artificial intelligence infiltrated every corner of the internet? What if truth and reality became suspect, at the whims of that intelligence? What if the world's powers raced to gain sole control of that intelligence, and by extension, the world? And what if that intelligence had plans of its own?" Given the socio-political moment into which the film was released, an aware viewer can be excused for wondering if this question is even science fictional. She should ask, rather, are we living in a science fiction reality? (Note: we absolutely are). This is another film about The Singularity, a subject matter that is moving more and more out of science fiction and into the broader discourse about, well, everything. At this writing, the artists who create movies are on strike specifically to thwart the movie industry from replacing them with machines. There's a meme on social media noting that a future in which AIs compose poetry and art while human beings perform subsistence menial labor is NOT the future anyone imagined. More ominously, there is debate in technology schools like Cal Tech and MIT about the ethics of developing autonomous AI for use in drone weapons for the military. Every job in the world that doesn't require a pair of hands is under threat right now. If this sounds like a scenario that leads to Skynet, don't think the makers of Mission: Impossible haven't noticed this too. Dead Reckoning is absolutely descended from Colossus: The Forbin Project and The Terminator.

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The Prodigal Daughter

One of the first questions I asked myself about Monica (2022, directed by Andrea Pallaoro) as the projectionist closed the curtains to narrow the screen was, "why is this in the Academy ratio?"* The flippant answer I gave myself is that transgender people don't get widescreen epics. Upon reflection, that's not far off. The frame of the film constrains its central character as much as her circumstances. It creates a claustrophobic space for her to exist in with no obvious room to transcend that space. The second question I asked myself, mid-film, was "why is this character a sex worker?" I know the answer to that, too, but it would be a huge relief to see a film about a trans woman who wasn't a sex worker. No shade toward sex workers, or trans women who are sex workers, but I think I can name three films this century where a trans woman character wasn't a sex worker when her occupation was known to the audience. Maybe. The third question, and it's one I asked about the similar A Fantastic Woman a few years ago, was, "is there no possibility for joy for this character?" Monica veers perilously close to trans misery porn. But then its B-plot is about a woman dying of brain cancer, so these things are relative.

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True/False 2023: Fathers and Mothers

Red Herring (2023, directed by Kit Vincent) starts with an image of a man swimming at twilight. This man is the director's father, Lawrence, who is dealing with the knowledge that he is going to outlive his son. The Sword of Damoclese hanging over Kit Vincent and his family is an inoperable brain tumor that will kill him in four to eight years. The film covers four of those years. It's mostly about the relationship between Kit and Lawrence, and how they deal with impending mortality, but it also spends time with Vincent's estranged mother, and less so with his partner. His father's confrontation with mortality leads him to philosophical Judaism and ultimately a conversion to that faith. His mother has been keeping a secret about her own parentage that the film drops about two thirds of the way through, potentially creating a drastic reexamination of Vincent's relationship to his mother, though that never materializes. The film is organized around the director's brain scans which provide chapter stops for the film of a sort, in which the entire family gathers around the cell phone to listen to the results.

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True/False 2023: Knocked Up

How To Have an American Baby (2023, directed by Leslie Tai) takes a long look at the practice of Chinese tourism to the United States in order to give birth to children on American soil, thus granting the children citizenship. This is facilitated by so-called "maternity hotels" who host the mothers while they wait out the last three or four months of their pregnancies. These facilities are sometimes apartment buildings, sometimes residential houses, which the services own and rent to their customers for a premium. They also arrange health care. There is a booming economy in birth tourism on the West Coast. As you might guess, certain kinds of American citizens have their panties in a twist over this, though for entirely wrong reasons.

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True/False 2023: Masculine and Feminine

Here's another dispatch from True/False. The festival's programmers don't set out to rhyme the films on the schedule with one another, but sometimes they do in spite of themselves.

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