The Tameness of a Wolf

"He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf,
a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath."
--William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act III, Scene VI,

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Leigh Whannell's new re-imagining of The Wolf Man loses the definite article at the start and a lot more besides as Wolf Man (2025), a film that has good ideas that it fails to execute to the best of its ability. It's a film that looks at the elements of the werewolf myth and ditches most of the mythology. It drops the silver bullet and the moon and the invulnerability. It keeps the transformation and the contagion at its core, though, things that could be explained away as disease.  In doing so, it discovers the kernel of a body horror movie on the Cronenberg model. It bears more than a passing resemblance to The Fly, with a salting of the generational trauma of The Brood, but with neither of those films' instinct for violating taboos. The most galling thing about it is that Whannell is certainly capable of rising to the challenge. His version of The Invisible Man can stand in the company of Cronenberg's best horror movies unashamed. But this? This is the kind of film that Blumhouse releases in January (Blumhouse is this film's production company). It's not as bad as something like Night Swim, but it's nothing you'll remember once it's out of theaters.

Said the Spider to the Fly...

The prologue of Sting (2024, directed by Kiah Roche-Turner) is a concise and entirely satisfying little short story in which a woman suffering from dementia hears alarming things from her air vents and calls an exterminator. When the exterminator arrives, he's pissed to discover another exterminator's truck parked in front of the woman's building. He reads the woman the riot act when she answers the door. Then he gets to work, only to discover that he's not at all prepared for what he finds in her vents. The end of the story has a wicked whip of the tale. It reminds me a bit of short stories by Robert Bloch or John Collier or Ray Bradbury, or of E. C. Comics (who tended to loot their stories from writers like Bloch or Collier or Bradbury). It's a poisoned bon bon, a cookie full of cyanide. A tasty warm-up act, if you will. The rest of Sting isn't up to the level of its prologue, alas, but the prologue provides enough good will to carry an audience through the film. Or, at least, it carried me through to the end.

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

The Damned (2024, directed by Thordur Palsson) is a film that shows the widening influence of Robert Eggers on cinema. Elements of all of Eggers's films can be spotted in this film, including the visual design of his recent version of Nosferatu. This is a film that dwells in cold and shadow, making extensive use of its bleak Iceland-in-winter location. One could see Anya Taylor-Joy in the lead in this film rather than Odessa Young, but Young is fine in the part of a woman running a remote fishing station in the 19th century. The screenplay is less disciplined than Eggers, though, including an ending that leaves the audience with questions. The rest? Claustrophobic and chilly, a crucible where close company in isolation fails to prevent anyone from going mad. Superstition runs roughshod over otherwise rational people.

Needles and Pins

The Girl with the Needle (2024, directed by Magnus von Horn) is a film so relentlessly grim that a home viewer might opt out of it before it is too far done. Indeed, the crux of its true crime origins doesn't even come into the picture until the film is half over. An interested audience should seek it out in theaters if it opens nearby, if only to concentrate their attention. I had no such luck. Given the state of the world at this moment in time, I considered whether or not I wanted to see things through to the bitter end. I stuck it out. The film has a point. It has several, in fact. It's a meditation on the precarious lot of women in societies past and present. True. And as such it is very much a film for this moment in time. It's also an interrogation into what true monstrosity entails. It could be mistaken for social realism in its early going before it veers into a full blown Gothic. But then an alert viewer may remember that it gives the audience a warning of its true intentions before the credits even appear, when it projects faces on top of faces in shifting distortions that make monsters of ordinary humans.

Revisiting Horror 101: Onibaba and Kwaidan

My friend Aaron Christensen had me on his vid cast again this month to talk about two landmarks of Japanese horror cinema, Onibaba and Kwaidan. I've written about Onibaba before, as Aaron mentions on the show. It's a pretty good episode, if I do say so myself.

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