Netflix Roulette: The Conference (2023)

It's been a while since I spun the Netflix Roulette wheel. Back in the day, it was a good way to generate ideas for blogging. The downside is the amount of sheer crap Netflix has traditionally packed onto its platform. My will to write anything has been at a low ebb this summer, so I gave it a spin this week. Imagine my surprise when it landed on The Conference (2023, directed by Patrik Eklund), a film I watched last year and which greatly exceeded my admittedly low expectations for it. I neglected to write about it last year. It's a mistake I'll rectify right here.

The Conference is one of those films that makes me question whether it's the slasher film that I dislike or if it's the incompetence of most slasher films I dislike. The Conference is a wickedly smart, mercilessly creative bloodbath that weaves a few wrinkles into the fabric of the slasher formula that result in something that's more than just a bunch of elaborate gore scenes. Fans of elaborate gore scenes should not despair, however. It has those, too. It has those in great abundance. The Conference is not blazingly original. The idea of a slasher rampaging through a group of co-workers on a team-building retreat is at least as old as Severance (2006) and probably much older. This story construction removes the slasher movie from its usual moral universe where punishment is dispensed for the moral transgressions disapproved of by puritans and other assorted blue-noses. It places it instead in an even more political/economic context at the other end of the spectrum. This is the kind of wish fantasy in which the entitled rich assholes get the most gruesome death scenes rather than the sluttiest teenagers because predatory capitalism and its attendant corruption must be punished. In a film at least. I'm not so naive as to believe something like this would happen in our own world. In our own world, the bad sleep well. In any event, The Conference adds some flavor of its own to this kind of fantasy, but it is still very much a film in which feckless characters are picked off one by one by a lunatic with a flair for elaborate murders. What matters here, if you'll pardon the pun, is the execution...

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In It For the Kills

I guess you could call it an epiphany. While I was watching Halloween Kills (2021, directed by David Gordon Green), I realized that the artfulness of a slasher movie doesn't matter to its audience. You could say I've been blind to what slasher movies actually are, and maybe I have been. I admit that I've never understood the appeal, except on the rare occasions when the filmmaking is sharp and the sensibility behind the camera has actual ambitions beyond the red meat of the sub-genre. It's purely an accident that the foundational film in the category is a genuine work of art, one that's informed as much by autumnal melancholy and cinematic legerdemain as it is by teenage sadism. It barely spills even a drop of blood. Maybe that's why its inheritors refuse to learn anything from it. Not enough Christians for the lions.

So now we have this film. It was inevitable that a sequel to the 2018 Halloween would be made once that movie raked in summer blockbuster money, and it was perhaps inevitable that the same talent would be attached. It's more of the same; it's more of more of the night HE came home, if you will. In truth, I like this film a little better than its predecessor. I thought that film completely immolated itself with one colossally dumb plot twist. This film has no comparable moment. I enjoyed some of the metacinematic touches in this one, too, which reach just beyond aping moments in John Carpenter's original, while connecting it to the broader roots of the horror genre. Mind you, there are a lot of things connecting this film to Carpenter's original and to the original film's first couple of sequels. This is as much an homage as it is a (not so new) new narrative. If cinema going forward is going to be a recursive echo chamber selling you the same experiences again and again, then this film is a state of the art example. If you want something new, like a story about a latter day druid killing a generation of kids with sinister masks, then you will be left wanting.

I admit that I am swayed a bit by the circumstances under which I saw the film--as the first half of a double feature at a drive-in theater as god intended. That counts for a bit. But the overall film? Well, maybe not so much.

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Still More of the Night HE Came Home

When last I bothered with the Halloween movies*, with Halloween: Resurrection, I lamented that the folks at Dimension films had only themselves to blame for its failure. It committed two cardinal sins: first it killed off Laurie Strode in the prologue, a callous fuck you to anyone who might have become invested in her character over the years. Second: it was released in July. You DON'T release a movie with the word "Halloween" in the title in the middle of summer. You just don't. The makers of the new film, simply titled Halloween (2018, directed by David Gordon Green) don't make either mistake. They've ignored all of the continuity between John Carpenter's original film and their own, so Laurie Strode is still alive and Michael has not been burned alive or beheaded as the case may be, and their film has a late October release date (when it is on track to make a shitload of money).

This film represents the rubber match between Laurie and Michael: Laurie "won" the first match in Halloween H20 when she took off his head with an ax, Michael "won" Resurrection when he killed her at the mental hospital. The retcon here doesn't really bother me, given that the history of the franchise is littered with retcons. Dr. Loomis was killed at the end of Halloween II (as was Michael), but that didn't stop him from coming back in Halloween 4 and 5. Laurie Strode seems a different character in each of her subsequent appearances, too, all suggesting differing timeline branches from her teenage encounter with Michael. In H20, she was a college professor with Josh Hartnett as a son. In Resurrection, she was a mental patient. In the new film, she's a doomsday prepper, a la Sarah Connor, no longer possessed of a son, but of an estranged daughter and granddaughter. This is a series that doesn't give two fucks for internal continuity. And so it goes.

Note: what follows contains spoilers.

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A Dream Within A Dream

My local art house is running a series of classic (or "classic") horror movies for Halloween this year. The first in the series was Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), which plays pretty well to an audience of young people even today. Most of the audience I was with was under thirty. A large part of it was under 20. Teenagers, it seems, never get tired of seeing other teenagers massacred on screen. It was a good time at the theater, though I admit that Nightmare is not a film of which I am overly fond. But, whatever. I don't get to make the canon and it's a film whose place is firmly established.

Craven conceived of Nightmare after reading about a number of refugees from Southeast Asia who had died in the throes of nightmare from unexplained causes, and formulated the character of Freddy Kruger after the model of the song, "Dream Weaver," by Gary Wright. Craven, a magpie for ideas, incorporated a number of other influences as well, but the idea that if you die in your sleep, you die in real life is the spark behind the film's ideas. The central theme of Nightmare is the tenuous boundary between reality and dreams. At its core, it's an epistemological film shaped in the form of a slasher film.

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