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.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem

I don't think more than five minutes had elapsed at the start of Immaculate (2024, directed by Michael Mohan) before I started thinking about the Magdalene laundries and residential schools. What goes on in the convent depicted in this film is not so far outside the actions of the actual Roman Catholic Church that the film can be dismissed as mere exploitation. Don't get me wrong, it IS exploitation, but that's beside the point. It has such theological and ideological axes to grind that it was bound to find Evangelical Christians and devout Catholics and right wing trolls of all sorts squawking when the film reached its end. This film hasn't got time for their bullshit. It has a particular shape of reality it wants to express and it uses bludgeons to present it. It's crude, but it's brutally effective.

Note: there are spoilers here.

Once Upon a Time

I did a podcast a while back discussing Kier-la Janisse's massive folk horror documentary, Woodland's Dark and Days Bewitched, in which one of the panelists (not me) suggested that the parameters of what constitutes "folk horror" might be too broad to be useful. His suggestion was that all horror is folk horror or none of it is. I've been thinking about this idea lately because there's another big folk horror box set on the horizon and because I remembered something after the podcast that's been preying on my mind. There's a section in Stephen King's Danse Macabre in which the author plays a game with the reader. He asserts that all good horror movies are folk tales of a sort or another and suggests describing the plots of well-known horror movies beginning with the classic opener: "Once upon a time." He offers twenty examples. Here's one: "Once upon a time, three babysitters went out on Halloween night. Only one of them was alive come All Saint's day." And another: "Once upon a time there were two children, very much like Hansel and Gretel, in fact, and when their father died, their mommy married a wicked man who pretended to be good. This wicked man had LOVE tattooed on the fingers of one hand and HATE tattooed on the fingers of the other." One more: "Once upon a time, there was a sad girl who picked up men in bars, because when they came home with her she didn't feel so sad. Except one night, she picked up a man wearing a mask. Underneath the mask he was the boogeyman." You get the picture. Thinking about these kinds of framings, I'm inclined to think that all horror is folk horror. It's all folklore and fairy tales. Some movies lean into that idea harder than others. Hard enough that "folk horror" seems like a subgenre when maybe it's not. But then, maybe it is.*

In any event, that big folk horror box looming on the horizon includes two films by Juraj Herz, a director probably best known for The Cremator. The one that caught my eye was the 1978 version of Beauty and the Beast (Panna a netvor, or "The Monster and the Virgin," as the copy I have translates it). This is a film I've had for a long, long time on a gray market VHS sent to me by a pen pal. It's been sitting unwatched in a drawer for decades. Its appearance on the list of films on the next edition of All the Haunts Be Ours prompted me to see if I still had it and if it was still playable. I did and it was. I was a fool to wait so long. It's good. It's very good.

Veterans of the Psychic Wars

Although The Fury (1978, directed by Brian De Palma) is the director's dumbest film--which is saying something--it has its compensations. Prime among them is the director's film sense, which is entirely separate from the story on screen. De Palma knows where to put the camera and when to move it. He uses slow motion and sound (or the lack thereof) to impart a sleek maximalist commercial veneer to the film. He also knows how to be cruel to the audience, like he's in some parasocial BDSM relationship with them. The Fury is also a mini-summary of his career at that moment. It's a psychic thriller a la Carrie, a paranoia thriller like Sisters (complete with sinister experiments at shadowy institutes), and it's a conspiracy film that anticipates Blow Out. It even has that wonky sense of absurdist anti-establishment humor from his earliest films. Then it blows it all up in one of the biggest what the fuck climaxes in film.

Just After Sunset

It never occurred to me that Jerusalem's Lot was a sundown town until two of the central characters in the story were racebent. If you don't know what a sundown town is, it's a town where it was illegal to be out on the streets after sundown if one belonged to a despised minority. This was traditionally directed at African Americans, but other not-white peoples have fallen prey to this as well. It is perhaps too much to ask that the new version of Salem's Lot (2024, directed by Gary Dauberman) actually do something with this idea. They almost get it. So close. But, alas, no. The way race is completely ignored in a film set in Maine in 1975 is conspicuous. There aren't a lot of black people in Maine. But this is off in the woods. 'Salem's Lot is a different kind of sundown town, a fact elided by Gordon Lightfoot's "Sundown" on the soundtrack. A little on the nose maybe, but not wrong.

The Krell Laboratories Podcast: The Substance (2024)

I'm kicking off this year's October Horror Movie Challenge with a conversation with my friend, Donna K, about The Substance (2024, directed by Coralie Fargeat).

30 films (or more) to go.

My total progress:
New to me films: 1
Total films: 1

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