Archive: Author: Admin

Knowledge is the Trap: Obsession, The Vanishing, and the Ending Nobody Forgets

Posted on by Admin

By contributor Adam Page

I’ll start at the service station, as that’s where everything starts and everything ends, and because there’s no more honest place in the Western world than a motorway rest stop in high summer.

You know the kind; somewhere in the south of France, which sounds romantic until you’re there: a big slab of concrete baking under a sun that feels personal, a forecourt smelling of hot diesel and somebody’s burnt clutch, a shop selling crisps in flavours nobody asked for, coffee that tastes faintly of its machine. Families leaking out of overheated hatchbacks, kids screaming, dads stretching their backs with the grim heroism of men who’ve driven six hours without stopping because stopping is for the weak. Everybody just passing through. Nobody belongs or looks at anybody. That’s the deal you make on the road: we’re all strangers here, briefly, then we’re gone.

It’s the perfect place to disappear. Director George Sluizer knew it. Tim Krabbé, who wrote the novella Het Gouden Ei that the movie is built on, knew it. Anybody who’s ever lost sight of a kid in a supermarket for fifteen seconds knows it in their spine, in that cold drop in the gut, the moment when the world tilts and every face in the crowd becomes a possible monster.

Saskia goes in to buy drinks. She doesn’t come back.

That’s it. That’s the entire premise. No masked killer or chainsaw, no ancient curse or shrieking strings telling you when to be scared. A young woman walks into a service station on a bright afternoon and doesn’t come out, and her boyfriend waits by the car, and then he stops waiting, and then he spends the rest of his life waiting in a different way.

Before she vanishes though, there’s the tunnel, and we have to talk about the tunnel.

Rex and Saskia are Dutch, young, in love in that sticky, irritable, half-bored way couples are on long drives. The car runs out of petrol in a tunnel. Rex, being a man, and by that I mean an idiot, decides to walk off for fuel and leave her there in the dark. She’s terrified, begs him not to go. He goes anyway. When he comes back with the petrol can she’s gone from the car, and he finds her standing out past the tunnel mouth in the light, and there’s a fight, then there’s forgiveness, and they make the kind of promise young lovers make, the kind that’s really a prayer: we won’t leave each other. Not like that. Not alone.

Then, at the service station, she tells him about a dream. She was inside a golden egg, drifting through space, alone. And there was another golden egg out there, and if the two ever met it would be the end of something.

Now. A lesser movie would lean on this. Shove a violin under it and push your face into the symbolism. Sluizer just lets it sit there, light, nearly throwaway, a pretty bit of girlfriend whimsy on a hot afternoon and moves on. She buries two coins at the foot of a tree. Lovers’ nonsense, a little ritual. Then she walks into the shop.

And the thing about a dream like that, offered up so casually is: you don’t forget it. You can’t forget it. The movie has planted something in you, like she planted those coins, and you spend the next ninety minutes waiting for it to come up out of the ground. You’ll want to know what the eggs mean. You’ll want the eggs to meet. You’ll want, God help you, the end of something.

Remember that. The movie counts on it.

The easy reading of The Vanishing (or Spoorloos in the original title) the lazy, Sunday-supplement reading, is that Rex is a victim, a grieving boyfriend undone by a monster. And okay, maybe technically. But that’s not what makes the movie so vicious.

Three years on, Rex is still looking. Television appeals and posters. A new girlfriend, Lieneke, who is patient in that way people are patient when they’re slowly realising they’re in a relationship with three people, one of whom is invisible. Rex isn’t falling apart, exactly. He’s functional and even lucid about it. What he can’t do is stop. He more or less tells Lieneke that he could live with knowing Saskia is dead, but what he can’t live with is not knowing. The not-knowing is the wound that won’t close, and he keeps picking at it because the picking is the only proof it was ever there.

I think that’s something worse than weakness. That’s appetite.

I’ve known people like Rex. I’ve been, in my lesser moments, a little like Rex. Anybody who’s ever stared at a phone at three in the morning waiting for an answer that isn’t coming, anyone who has reread the last message from somebody who left, combing it for clues like a cop at a crime scene, knows that specific sickness. It isn’t grief, as grief at least has a shape. It has a funeral, the food people bring, a black suit that doesn’t quite fit. This is something else, something hungrier. The need to close the loop, and have the story make sense.

Gene Bervoets plays him brilliantly, which is to say without much charm at all. Rex is a bit stiff, a bit closed, a man who’s turned his life into a filing system with one drawer that won’t shut. He’s neither a hero or a wreck, he’s just a man with a single unscratchable itch, and the movie watches him scratch until he hits bone.

And then there’s Raymond Lemorne, and wow, what a creation.

This is where Sluizer does the thing that separates The Vanishing from every grubby little abduction thriller ever squeezed out of a studio. He doesn’t hide the killer. Fairly early on, the movie just…shows you. Breaks its own chronology, slides sideways in time, and introduces you to a chemistry teacher with a neat beard, a wife and two daughters and a country house. A nice man. A slightly prissy, slightly pompous, bourgeois French paterfamilias who would bore you stiff at a dinner party talking about the renovations.

Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu plays him like a man explaining the rules of a board game. There’s no drooling or twitching, no wet-eyed madness. That’s what’s so obscene about him. He’s reasonable. He’s methodical. We see him rehearse the abduction like he’s practising a recipe he’s never cooked before: timing how long the chloroform takes with a stopwatch, checking his own pulse, running through his patter, trying it out on women who, by blind luck, aren’t interested, don’t speak French or just walk off. He fumbles, and is comically bad at it some of the time. He drives home, eats dinner, sits in the garden. Then tries again.

And the reason he’s doing it? This is the bit that gets under my fingernails. When he was younger, Raymond did something heroic. Saved a girl from drowning. Got the praise and the adoration. And instead of feeling good about it like a normal human animal, he started wondering. If he was capable of the purest good, was he capable of its opposite? Not out of rage. Not out of lust, or some childhood trauma the screenwriter can wave around in the third act. Out of curiosity. Philosophical curiosity. He wants to know.

Sit with that. The monster and the victim want exactly the same thing.

Raymond needs to know what he’s capable of. Rex needs to know what happened. Both men are driven by the itch, the same itch, the same unbearable gap between question and answer. They’re two golden eggs drifting through the dark, and you already know what happens when they meet.

Raymond comes to Rex. Of course he does, he’s been watching Rex’s TV appeals, his posters and his flailing three-year campaign, and something about it appeals to him. Flattery, maybe. Raymond sends postcards, arranges meetings and doesn’t turn up, playing with him. Then finally he just appears, and makes Rex an offer.

There’s a moment when Rex beats the hell out of him, and Raymond takes it, almost serenely, like you’d take bad weather. Because he knows. He knows violence doesn’t matter, he knows the only thing that matters is the thing he’s holding: the answer. And Rex can punch him all day long and he’ll still be standing there holding it.

So they drive. Back to France and the service station. The road trip again, rhymed and rotten. And this is where the movie becomes almost unbearable, because these two men sit together in a car and talk, with Raymond laying out his life story with the pedantic self-satisfaction of a man who’s finally found the audience he deserves. He explains himself, the drowning girl, the logic of it all. Rex listens. So do we. We are dying to listen.

Here’s the deal Raymond offers, and it’s the most perfectly evil bargain in horror cinema: he won’t tell Rex what happened to Saskia. He’ll show him. The only way to know is to go through exactly what she went through. Drink the coffee. Go to sleep. Wake up and find out.

And here’s the question the movie puts to you, straight up with no chaser: would you drink it?

You know what? You’d drink it. Don’t lie to me or yourself. You’ve been sitting on the sofa for an hour and a half, popcorn going stale and bladder full because you’re afraid you might miss something, because you need to know what happened to that girl in the white shirt who walked into that shop. You’ve been leaning forward the whole time. You’ve been Rex the whole time. You’ve been gnawing on the same bone.

The movie knows you’d drink it. That’s why it’s so cruel.

Let’s talk about the coffee, because nobody does, and they should.

Of all the instruments of doom Sluizer could have chosen, he goes with a cup of coffee at a roadside stop. Not a syringe to the neck or a cosh to head, not a gun. A drink. Maybe the most banal, most universal, most trusting act of the road: someone offers you a coffee and you take it, because it’s a long drive and you’re tired, and that’s what people do. The communion of the forecourt or the tiny shared kindness of the motorway, if you’ll allow me a slightly pretentious aside.

Saskia went in to get drinks. Rex ends his story by accepting one.

I’ve drunk coffee on the sides of roads in a few different countries, and I’ll tell you, there’s something a little holy about it, in a degraded way. Bad coffee, scalding, in a paper cup that sweats through to your fingers, drunk standing next to your motorbike while trucks scream past, is one of the great small pleasures in life. It says: I’m still moving. I’m going somewhere. I haven’t arrived yet.

Rex drinks it knowing full well what’s in it. That’s the big gut-punch; he isn’t tricked. Raymond isn’t even being particularly clever. He sets the cup down and lets the itch do the work. Rex drinks that poison voluntarily, in full knowledge, because the desire to know has become stronger than the desire to live. The coffee is the last drink of a condemned man who chose his own sentence.

There’s a lesson there about appetite, and it isn’t one the self-help aisle wants you to hear. Some hungers are bottomless. Some meals eat you.

And then he wakes up.

Darkness. Total. The same dark from the tunnel, the dark Saskia was so afraid of, the dark he left her in. Then the scratch and flare of his lighter and the light is worse than the dark, because now he can see. Wood, inches from his face. Splinters. A box. He’s in a box. He’s under the ground.

He screams. He claws. He calls her name.

Rex finds out exactly what happened to Saskia. He finally gets his answer. He gets total, perfect, absolute narrative closure. The mystery is solved, the loop is closed, the golden eggs have met. And the answer is the most horrifying thing a human being can imagine, delivered not as information but as experience, which is the only way some knowledge can ever be had. He now knows everything, and he’ll know it for the rest of his life, which will be in around an hour when the air runs out.

There’s no rescue. No last-second shovel ripping through the earth or cop who followed the car. No Lieneke, bless her, turning up with the cavalry.

Sluizer cuts to Raymond. Sitting in his garden, a pleasant afternoon, his family around him and the country house basking in the sun. Totally at peace. A newspaper carries the story of the missing pair: Rex and Sakia, together at last in a headline, side by side in grainy photographs. Two eggs, drifting. Raymond has had his experiment confirmed. He is capable of the opposite. He knows now, too.

The monster sleeps fine. The man who wanted to know is in a box in the dirt.

Roll credits. Good night. F**k you.

Because here is where the movie stops being a horror and becomes something nastier, almost an accusation.

Because what did you want? Be honest. You wanted the ending. You wanted to know where she went. You get hooked by a dream about a golden egg and two coins under a tree and a girl who didn’t come back with the drinks, and you followed it all the way to the end, not because you cared about Rex, not really, but because you couldn’t stand an open question.

And Sluizer gave you what you wanted. He gave you the answer, he just made you pay for it with the same coin Rex paid with. Your reward for your curiosity is to be put in the box with him. The final reveal isn’t satisfying or cathartic. There’s no relief in it. It’s the narrative closure you wanted, served up with the lid nailed shut.

The genius of the structure is that it trains you to want it. By showing you Raymond early, by giving away the who, Sluizer shifts all the tension onto the what. Usually a thriller dangles the killers identity; the solution arrives with a click and a sigh, and you go home. Here, the killer is in plain view, having dinner with his wife and daughters, and the hunger has nowhere to go but towards the one thing still hidden: what happened inside that car. What happened to her. What it was like. The movie strips away every other mystery so that the only one left is the unbearable one.

And it’s a trap. A beautifully engineered one. Built from your own appetite.

There’s a story that Stanley Kubrick told Sluizer it was the most terrifying movie he’d ever seen, and I believe it. Not because of what’s on screen, which is surprisingly restrained, nearly polite, but because of what it does to the person watching. Kubrick, of all people, a man who controlled his movies down to the last speck of dust, would have recognised a machine built to grind the viewer up in its gears.

You want to know how dangerous that ending is? Check out what happened next.

Five years later, Sluizer remade his own movie in America. Jeff Bridges as the killer, Kiefer Sutherland as the boyfriend in a hideous yellow sweater that, frankly, deserves to be buried, Sandra Bullock as the girl in the shop. Same director. And they changed the ending. The new girlfriend, the patient one who had been sidelined in the original, gets to dig him up. Rescue and revenge. The bad guy gets his comeuppance. The audience gets to stand up, stretch, and walk out into the car park feeling just fine and dandy.

Which is to say, the remake did exactly what Rex did. It couldn’t live with the open wound. It needed that comfortable closure, the shape that makes sense, the story where wanting things doesn’t get you killed. It reached into the box and pulled the poor sod out, and in doing so it gutted the entire point.

I don’t even blame anyone, not really. I understand the impulse; test screenings, studio notes, the eternal American conviction that a story is a contract and the customer is owed a happy ending like a free refill. It’s the same impulse that drives Rex: the refusal to accept that some questions only get answered in ways you’d wish you’d never asked. But it’s a betrayal, the kind of betrayal that teaches you more about the original than any essay could. The Dutch movie is unbearable because it refuses to lie to you. The American one is utterly forgettable because it does.

Nobody remembers the remake. Everybody remembers the box.

So what’s the moral, if there is one? Don’t be curious? Don’t ask questions? Go home, shut up, accept the void?

Nah, I don’t buy it, and I don’t think Sluizer does either. Curiosity is the best thing about us. It’s why we leave home, why we eat the weird thing off the street cart, why we get on the bus to the town nobody’s heard of, why we sit in the back of some smoky bar at two in the morning listening to a stranger’s awful life story because we need to know how it ends. Without it, we’re just meat in a chair.

But the movie knows something about curiosity that most of us spend our lives trying not to think about. There’s a version of it that isn’t hunger for the world, but hunger for closure. For the neat ending and the story that resolves. And that version, the wanting-to-be-finished, the inability to live with an open door, is a kind of death wish dressed up as love.

Rex said he wanted Saskia back. What he really wanted was to stop wondering. And the only person on earth who could give him that was the man who killed her, and the only way to get it was to die the way she did.

There’s a lyric turn buried somewhere in this, and I’ll give it to you, as the movie earns it. Somewhere in the south of France, under a tree near a service station, there are two coins in the first. Nobody dug them up and nobody ever will. They’re down there in the dark with the rest of it, a little lovers’ wager that nobody won, a promise that held in the worst way imaginable: they didn’t leave each other alone in the end. Not like that.

The eggs met. Something ended.

And the next time you pull into some sunbaked forecourt and stand there, sweating, with a paper cup of terrible coffee in your hand, watching the families come and go through the sliding doors, you might find yourself counting heads. Waiting for someone to come back out. Wondering, just for a second, what happens to the ones who don’t.

Don’t. Seriously. Drink your coffee and get back on the road.

Some things you’re better off not knowing.

Second Sight: Why Second Viewings of Don’t Look Now Reveal a Different Movie

Posted on by Admin

By Contributing Writer Adam Page

A lot of spoilers ahead, so tread carefully…

I’ll start by being completely honest and telling you that the first time I watched Don’t Look Now, I thought I’d worked it out.

I was young and very pleased with myself; the sort of viewer who sits through a movie with arms folded, waiting to spot the twist before it arrives. It was around the hour mark I figured I had it sussed. The sisters were up to something. The bishop was shifty. The police inspector was definitely hiding something behind his little cigarette. And the little figure in the red coat? Well, that was obviously the dead daughter, a ghostly manifestation of grief that John would chase into the dark and in a moment of tearful catharsis, finally let go.

I was wrong about all of it. Cheerfully and comprehensively wrong. And the most humiliating part is that the movie had told me. Repeatedly. In pictures, sounds, cuts, in the colour red splashed across nearly every frame like a road sign the size of a cathedral. Nicolas Roeg spent 110 minutes waving his arms at me and I sat there, nodding wisely about the bishop.

That’s the thing about Don’t Look Now. You don’t watch it twice, you watch two different movies. The first is a mystery. A moody and fractured, creepy ghost story set in an off-season Venice that smells of damp stone and dead fish. The second is a tragedy so carefully engineered that every scene becomes an alarm bell. And I’d argue, with all the hyperbolic enthusiasm I can muster at one in the morning, that this isn’t a happy accident or some smart by-product of a twist ending. No, it’s the whole point. Roeg built a movie that can only be fully seen in retrospect, and that’s exactly the gift John Baxter refuses to believe he has.

Shall we start a tally? Every warning John fails to heed. I’ll keep count. You’ll be amazed.

The first five minutes of Don’t Look Now are among the finest in British cinema, and I’ll fight anyone on this. Well, not fight them. I’ll write a stiffly worded paragraph and then feel bad about it for a week. But I’ll mean it.

An English country house. The sun is out, but it’s clearly freezing cold. Christine, the Baxters’ daughter, plays by the pond in her bright red mac. Her brother Johnny cycles around and runs over a pane of glass, which shatters. Inside, Laura (Julie Christie, never better) reads, while John (Donald Sutherland, all curls and corduroy) examines slides of a Venetian church he’s been hired to restore. In one slide, a small hooded figure in red sits in a pew. John knocks over a glass of water. The water spills across the slide, and the red starts to bleed outward, spreading in a shape like something terrible and liquid, and John is suddenly on his feet, running and knowing before he could possibly know, out to the pond where Christine has drowned.

Here’s the bit everyone remembers from the first viewing: that he knew. That something flickered across his mind and sent him running. It plays out like an uncanny moment, a parental premonition and the sort of thing people swear happens in real life.

On second viewing, you realise Roeg has just given you the instruction manual. John has the sight. It’s right there in scene one, with no ambiguity, in the most dramatic way imaginable. The red figure in the slide isn’t Christine at all; it’s the thing waiting for him in Venice. He has, right in the opening, glimpsed his own death and mistaken it for his daughter’s, and it’s exactly the mistake he’ll make for the rest of the movie, right up until the cleaver comes down.

Warning count: one. And we’re only at the opening credits.

Oh, and the line. Earlier in that sequence, Laura is reading, looking for an answer to Christine’s question about why a frozen pond is flat if the world is round. John’s response is, “Nothing is what it seems.” First time round, it sounds like the sort of thing a dad says when he can’t be bothered with geometry. Second time round, it’s Roeg leaning out of the screen with a megaphone. Nothing. Is. What. It. Seems. Including this movie. Including the bit you think you’ve worked out. Including you, the arms-folded viewer, nodding at the bishop.

I’m going to get a bit academic here, so bear with me. I promise there’s a joke at the end of it. Maybe.

Roeg started out as a cinematographer, and his movies as a director are obsessed with the idea that time in cinema doesn’t have to run in a straight line. Walkabout, Performance, Bad Timing, The Man Who Fell to Earth – all of them cut across time, folding the past and future into the present. But Don’t Look Now is the one where that technique becomes the subject instead of the style. The editing by Graeme Clifford, who deserves much more credit than he usually gets, is a lot more than decoration. It’s diegetic, what’s happening inside John’s head, whether he likes it or not.

Take the famous love scene that got everyone so hot under the collar in 1973, and is intercut with John and Laura dressing for dinner afterwards. On first watch, it reads like a bit of daring structural playfulness: tenderness and the aftermath woven together, with intimacy shot through with the mundane, and it’s lovely and very European. Very Seventies.

On the second watch, it’s something else completely. It’s the movie demonstrating, in the safest possible register, just how John’s perception works. Past and future are bleeding into the present. Moments slip their moorings. A man pulling on his trousers is, at the same time, a man in bed with his wife. This is what second sight looks like, Roeg is telling us, and he shows it to us when it’s warm and loving so we’ll accept it as cinematic grammar and not recognise it as a symptom. By the time that same technique starts showing John his own funeral, we’ve been trained to read it as style.

That’s the trick of the whole movie, really. Roeg teaches you to dismiss the very thing you should be paying attention to. Which is, you’ll notice, exactly what John does.

And because I promised: I once tried to explain this to a friend when we were talking, and she said, “So it’s a movie about a man who should’ve gone home.” Which, irritatingly, is the most accurate one-line review of Don’t Look Now I’ve ever heard. Of course, it takes a woman to cut right through all the intellectualising.

In Venice, the warnings stop being subtle and start arriving in human form.

Laura meets two elderly sisters in a restaurant: Wendy, who is practical and fussy, and Heather, blind and claims to see. Heather tells Laura that Christine is with them, happy and laughing. Laura, broken by grief at this point, is overjoyed. John, though, is having none of it. He’s a rational man, a restorer; he deals in plaster and mosaic and structural integrity. He thinks the sisters are cranks, preying on a grieving mother, and on first watch, honestly so do we. They’re played with just enough eccentricity that we suspect them of something, and Roeg holds the camera on Heather’s milky gaze and strange laughter so we start building theories. Are they con artists? Kidnappers? Something worse?

On second viewing, we see that the sisters are the only honest people in Venice. Heather says quite clearly that John has the gift as well. She says he’s in danger and must leave. These aren’t cryptic hints. This is the closest thing a horror movie has to a printed leaflet.

Warning count: into double figures, if you include the seance, in which Heather goes into a trance and delivers the message again, more urgently.

And then there’s the scaffolding. John, high up in the church, is nearly killed when a plank falls and the platform gives way, leaving him dangling over the nave. On first viewing, it’s a brilliant set piece, genuinely vertiginous, a blast of physical peril in a movie that’s mostly been about atmosphere. Second time around, it’s almost comic in how explicit it is. Your life is in danger in this city. Literally in danger. Here is a large piece of wood. Look how close it came.

And what does John do? He carries on. He goes back to work. He treats a brush with death as an occupational hazard, shoddy workmanship, because that’s the framework he understands. He’s a man restoring the surfaces of a crumbling church while refusing to look at the cracks in himself. I’d call that heavy-handed symbolism, if it weren’t done with such a light touch that most of us miss it the first time.

Now, then. The big one.

Laura gets a call: Johnny has had a minor accident at his boarding school. She flies back to England, and shortly after that, John is crossing the Grand Canal and sees a funeral barge drift past. On it, dressed in black, are Laura and the two sisters.

On first viewing, this is the mystery’s great hinge. Why is Laura in Venice when she should be in England? Have the sisters taken her? Is she being held against her will? John panics and goes to the police, setting the whole investigation in motion and we go with him, totally convinced that something sinister has happened to his wife. Then he phones England and she’s there, totally fine, at Johnny’s bedside. Cue the bafflement. What on earth did he see?

Second viewing: oh. Oh. Oh, you poor man.

He saw his own funeral. Laura in black, returning to Venice. The sisters with her, because they’ve been proven right. It’s the future, arriving early, delivered with total clarity in broad daylight in the middle of the Grand Canal. It’s the single most important warning in the whole movie, and John’s response is to file a missing persons report.

This is where the structure of Don’t Look Now reveals itself as truly brilliant instead of just clever. The barge sequence is at the centre of the movie, and it works perfectly as a mystery on first viewing. It raises questions and drives plot, it propels John into his frantic search through Venice’s alleys. It does everything a good thriller midpoint should do, and all the while, it’s also the answer to every question the movie poses. Roeg hides the solution in plain sight by making it look like the problem.

Warning count: I’ve lost count, to be honest, and the movie hasn’t even finished.

I’ll be quick here, partly because it’s the bit everyone knows and partly because writing about it still makes the back of my neck prickle.

Throughout the movie, John glimpses a small figure in a red coat moving through the Venice alleys. He associates it with Christine, consciously or not, because of the red mac she was wearing when she died. First viewing, we do the same. The figure becomes a kind of ghost, an embodiment of his grief.

At the climax, he finally chases it down, follows it into a building, corners it and reaches out with tenderness to what he believes is a frightened child. It turns around. Oh, it is not a child. It’s the killer who has been dumping bodies in the canals throughout the movie, and there’s a sharp cleaver, and that’s that.

On second viewing, that red figure isn’t a ghost. It’s just death, waiting with nearly bureaucratic patience. Every glimpse is a reminder. The red bleeding across the slide in the opening was this exact figure. John has been warned about this exact moment since minute four and he spends the whole movie reading the warning as a memory.

And that brings me to my main argument, and I’ll put it as plainly as I can.

We are Heather.

Think about what Heather is; a blind woman who sees. Someone with real access to the truth and can clearly perceive what’s coming, who tells people around her as directly as she can, and who is completely powerless to change a single thing. Her knowledge doesn’t save anyone, she can only watch it happen. Her final appearance, on that funeral barge, is a kind of cold vindication: she was right, and it counted for nothing.

That’s the position of the second-time viewer. We know. We see every warning, every flash-forward, every splash or red, every barge. We sit there watching John make the same choices, ignore the same signals, walk into the same building, and we can do nothing about it. We’re blind in the sense that it matters most: our sight can’t touch the world we’re watching. We see too late to help.

This is where the movie’s structure goes from clever into genuinely profound. Roeg has given us the exact experience John refuses to accept. John has second sight and dismisses it as coincidence, or imagination, or grief. The first time view does the same thing, dismissing the flash-forwards as style and the warnings as red herrings. When the movie ends, the editing does something brilliant: as John dies, it flashes through images from earlier in the movie, now recontextualised, now legible, a last montage where everything snaps into place. That montage is the second viewing, compressed into a few seconds. It’s the movie showing John (and us) what he should have seen all along.

So when you watch Don’t Look Now for the second time, you aren’t just rewatching a movie. You’re being granted the gift John rejected. You literally have second sight, and Roeg’s cruellest and most brilliant joke is that it’s no use to you whatsoever.

I have seen this movie more times than I care to admit, and the tally of warnings never stops growing. Even rewatching it for this essay, I notice something new; a flicker of red in a corner I’d missed before. But it could be a reflection, or a sound cue in Pino Donaggio’s score. It’s a movie that rewards obsession, which is either a compliment to the movie, or a diagnosis of me. It’s probably both.

But I’ve also come to think that the first viewing, the one where I nodded smugly about the bishop, isn’t a failure at all. It’s a necessary part of the design. You have to get it wrong the first time. You have to be John, and refuse the evidence, chase the wrong figure, misread the barge. Otherwise the second viewing has no weight. The tragedy needs the mystery to have been real.

So if you’ve never seen it, go in blind, if you’ll excuse the pun. Get it wrong. Be as arrogant as I was.

And then watch it again, sit there like Heather, seeing everything and unable to say a word while a good man in a sheepskin coat walks towards the red.

Nothing is what it seems. Including, it turns out, your first impression.

The Power of Christ Compels you to Sit Down and Shush: Kermode, Friedkin, and the Perfect (Horror) Movie

Posted on by Admin

By contributor Adam Page

This was the first time I understood that a movie could get inside you. Not just frighten you, as any hack with a violin section and a cat in the cupboard can make you jump. The Exorcist gets in, sets up camp, and starts rearranging the furniture of your soul without asking.

Mark Kermode has spent the better part of his adult life telling anyone who’ll listen, and a great many who won’t, that William Friedkin’s 1973 movie is the greatest movie ever made. Not the greatest horror movie, the greatest movie. Full stop, no asterisk, no hedging. He wrote the BFI Modern Classics book on it, which I have in front of me now. He made a documentary, The Fear of God, for the BBC. He has watched it hundreds of times and defended it with all the zeal of a convert and the stamina of a man who plays upright bass in a skiffle band.

But the thing is, he’s right.

I know, I know. Nobody likes the guy at the dinner party who says his favourite movie is Citizen Kane, and the man who says his favourite movie is The Exorcist is often suspected of being a different kind of problem completely. A pub bore with a laminated opinion, or a lapsed Catholic, working something out on the wrong sofa. But Kermode’s argument isn’t that of a gorehound or a contrarian; it’s the argument of a believer, and I mean that in both senses. He takes the movie seriously as a work of art and seriously as a work about faith, and it’s that second part that most people miss, because they’re too busy remembering the crucifix and the pea soup and the head spinning.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. The Exorcist is disgusting. Magnificently and unapologetically disgusting. It’s a movie about fluids; urine, vomit, blood, spit, that thin grey sweat on a dying man’s lip. It understands something that a lot of good chefs understand, and that is the body is a machine for making mess, and most of our civilisation is a desperate effort to pretend otherwise. We invent cutlery and napkins and the fish knife and under the linen tablecloth our gut is working away like a cement mixer, grinding up a perfectly nice piece of turbot.

Regan MacNeil, twelve years old and urinating on the carpet in front of her mother’s dinner guests while an astronaut stands there holding a drink, has to be one of the most honest moments in American cinema of the seventies. Forget the Watergate movies and paranoid thrillers. That’s the rot. The polite dinner party, the money and the Georgetown house with good wallpaper, and a little girl letting go of her bladder while telling a man he’s going to die up there. You want Julia Kristeva, the vomit and the corpse and the border between self and not-self breaking down? It’s all right there on the shag pile, smelling of warm wine and ammonia.

But the disgust isn’t really the point. Any director can throw bodily fluids at a camera, and plenty of them have made careers out of it: I’ve watched most of their movies at two in the morning with a bag of crisps and a vague sense of shame. What Friedkin does, and what William Peter Blatty wrote, is to use the disgust as almost a pressure test. How much faith survives contact with the filth. When your child is tied to a bed screaming obscenities in a voice like gravel in a blender, do you still believe there’s a God, or do you just believe there’s something?

That’s the question. The vomit is just the question with its coat off.

The movie that most people remember is maybe forty minutes long. It’s the stuff in the bedroom, the stuff on the posters, the stuff in clip shows on Channel 4 at Halloween with some comedian you half recognise saying he couldn’t sleep for a week. But the movie Friedkin actually made is something stranger, slower, and a lot more patient. It opens in northern Iraq, in heat so thick you can taste it, dust and tea and sweat and the grind of pickaxes on old stone. An old priest, Max von Sydow looking like he’s been carved out of a church door, finds an amulet, finds a statue, stands in front of the huge thing with its wings and its snarl in the ruins of Nineveh, and two dogs fight in the background like the world is already ending and nobody’s bothered to tell the dogs.

This goes on for a long time. There’s no music, there’s the forge, the hammer, a clock that stops. A lesser moviemaker would have cut it to around ninety seconds and put a sting on the end. Friedkin lets it breathe. He is telling you, before a single American has appeared on screen: this is old. It’s older than you, older than your country, older than your church. You aren’t the first to meet it and you won’t be the last.

Then, Georgetown. Autumn leaves, the steps and the cold, students and priests walking in pairs. And the long, domestic, almost boring middle stretch and the one people usually fast forward through, the one that Kermode rightly treats as the spine of the whole thing. Chris MacNeil, played by Ellen Burstyn with a raw nerve under every line, is an actress, a woman with money and fame and a very nice house and she has no idea what to do. So, she does what many people with money do; she goes to the doctors.

And for my money, with a background working in hospitals and the health service, this is the most frightening sequence in the movie, and it has nothing to do with the devil.

The medical scenes. The arteriogram. The needle in the neck, blood pumping out in rhythm with the heartbeat, the machines clanking like a factory press, the girl strapped down and the technicians behind the glass talking to each other in that flat and bored way professionals talk when they’ve done it a thousand times and you’re just the thousand and first. Friedkin shoots it like an industrial process, because that’s exactly what it is. Your child as a product on a line. Tests, scans, pills, Librium, Ritalin, lesions on the temporal lobe, and every expert in their good suit with their good degree comes back and basically says: we have no idea. Here’s another test. Here’s the bill.

That’s horror. Not in the supernatural, but in the dawning, awful realisation that the whole shining apparatus of modern knowledge, the thing we were promised would save us, has absolutely nothing to say. It’s the moment every parent who has sat in a hospital corridor at three in the morning knows. That fluorescent hum, the vending machine coffee that tastes of burnt coins. The sense that the adults in charge are also just guessing.

It’s only when science has thrown its hands up, when a psychiatrist half-jokingly suggests that maybe, you know, an exorcism might work as a sort of shock therapy, a placebo in a cassock, that the movie pivots to the priests. And even then, it’s done as a last resort, a tired shrug and a to hell with it, what have we got to lose? And that seems to be how most people come back to faith. Not with trumpets, but with nothing left.

And that brings us to Karras, and to the heart of the thing, and to the reason Kermode is right.

Father Damien Karras is the most interesting man in the movie, and it can be argued the most interesting man in American horror. Jason Miller was a playwright who had barely acted on screen, and plays him with a face like a closed fist. He’s a priest and a psychiatrist, a Jesuit with a boxer’s build who runs laps around the Georgetown track at night trying to sweat out whatever it is that’s eating him. And what’s eating him is guilt, class, and his mother.

His mother lives alone in a cruddy New York walk-up, the radio playing Greek songs, the stairs too steep for her legs. Karras has been educated up and out by the institution, as the smart working-class boys always are, and he’s left her behind. He knows it. The scene where his uncle tells him, in effect, that if he hadn’t been a priest he would have been a famous psychiatrist with money, and his mother wouldn’t have ended up where she is, is one of the cruellest moments in the movie, and there isn’t a single special effect in it. Just a tired man in a hospital corridor, telling another tired man the truth.

She goes into the psychiatric ward, and it’s a hellhole. Grey and screaming, a place for poor people who’ve fallen through, and there’s a beautiful and awful shot of Karras walking through it past the reaching hands. She dies alone, and Karras, the man of reason and the man of God, can’t stop thinking about it. There’s a bum on the subway platform a little earlier on, a broken old man who calls out to him and asks for help. Says he’s an old altar boy. Karras keeps on walking. Of course he does; we all keep walking. And later, the demon uses that voice, that exact voice and that exact plea, and it’s the worst thing in the movie, worse than the crucifix and the spinning head, because it knows. It knows the thing you walked past.

This is what Kermode keeps coming back to, and what people who think of The Exorcist as a shock-machine never get. It isn’t a movie about evil winning, it’s a movie about a man who has lost his faith discovering, in the most horrific circumstances imaginable, that he’s still capable of an act of total love. Karras at the end, when Merrin is dead on the floor with his heart given out, grabs the girl, beats the thing inside her and screams at it to take him. Come into me. Leave her and take me. And it does. And in the half second he has before it takes the wheel, he throws himself out of the window and down those long, steep, brutal stone steps, and dies on the pavement with a friend kneeling over him, taking his last confession.

You can say what you like about God, but that’s the most Christian ending in the history of cinema. A man lays down his life for a child who isn’t his, in a house that isn’t his, after failing the one person he should have saved. Kermode, who is, as he’s never been shy about telling us, a churchgoer, sees the movie as essentially an argument for faith, and I think he’s right, although I’d probably put it slightly different as I’m a man of fewer pews. It’s an argument for faith as a thing you do rather than a thing you have. Faith as a verb, or the last move left on the board. And the movie is honest enough to make it cost everything.

And then there is the craft. Because you can have all the theology in the world and still make a bad movie and there are Christian movie distribution companies in Tennessee with warehouses full of proof.

By most accounts, Friedkin was a lunatic. A genius maybe, but a lunatic. He would fire guns on set to jolt his actors. He refrigerated the bedroom so you’d see real breath, real cold, with Linda Blair shivering in a thin nightgown. He slapped a real priest, a real Jesuit he’d cast as a real priest, to get the tremble in his hands for the final blessing. He yanked Ellen Burstyn backward on a harness so hard she injured her back, and he kept the scream. These are not the actions of a nice man. To reach for an analogy, you wouldn’t want him running your kitchen, or maybe you would, depending on how much you valued your Michelin star against your line cooks’ mental health.

But the result is a movie with no fat on it. Every scene lands, with every sound selected. The soundscape alone deserves its own book: pigs, bees, the hum of the house, scratching claws in the attic, Mercedes McCambridge’s demonic voice put together from chain-smoking and raw eggs and the kind of psychic damage you can only get from a lifetime in the business. The music, those few bars on Mike Oldfields Tubular Bells, cold and tinkling and innocent as a child’s music box left out in the rain, turned by the movie into something you’ll never quite hear straight again.

The cinematography is flat, almost documentary, and that makes it almost unbearable. Friedkin filmed The French Connection like a newsreel, and he films Georgetown the same way. No gothic atmosphere or shadowy castles, no fog machines. Just ordinary rooms, ordinary light and ordinary people, and then something that absolutely should not be there, sitting up in bed. The iconic image of Father Merrin arriving at night, silhouetted under the streetlamp in front of the house with the beam of light from the window, is so famous now it’s been ripped off a thousand times on a thousand DVD covers, and it still works. It does because it’s so simple. There’s a man, a house, a light, a job to do.

That’s Kermode’s point, really. That the movie is perfect not because it’s excessive, but because it’s controlled. Every excess is earned. The spider walk, cut from the original release and put back for the 2000 re-release, is the exception that proves the rule. The one place where the movie, I think, does too much. The rest of the time it does just enough, never more.

And since we’re talking about excess, and since I’ve already made my feelings about it abundantly and hopefully amusing clear elsewhere, let’s briefly visit the scene of the crime. Exorcist II: The Heretic.

I’ve written about this movie here before, about why John Boorman’s 1977 sequel is one of the most spectacular failures ever committed to celluloid, and I stand by every word. I’d add plenty more but don’t want to bore you. Kermode himself has never been shy about putting it right down at the bottom of the barrel, and I think the reason it’s helpful to hold the two movies side by side is that The Heretic does everything wrong in exactly the places where The Exorcist does everything right.

The original is grounded. The sequel floats, whole scenes unmoored in some kind of dream-logic mysticism where Richard Burton, a great actor albeit visibly sloshed, wanders about looking like a man who’s been told the pub is closed. The original distrusts the machines of science while the sequel invents a sort of psychic synchronising headset, a blinking gadget that lets two people share a trance, and treats it with a straight face that would embarrass a Doctor Who writer on a deadline. The original locates evil in something very specific and ancient. The sequel has locusts. So many locusts. Swarms of the things, symbolic and airborne and as subtle as being hit with a rolled-up newspaper labelled METAPHOR. But most importantly, the original takes faith seriously as a human act with a human cost. Karras dies for a child. The sequel turns the whole thing into a sort of metaphysical spaghetti western, good against evil, with Regan as some sort of spiritual superhero with healing powers. It has ideas, so many of them, more ideas than a sixth-form philosophy seminar on its third bottle of wine. What it doesn’t have is a single scene where you believe a human being is suffering. The Exorcist is about pain and The Heretic is about concepts. And nobody ever went home and couldn’t sleep because of a concept.

Every sequel, prequel, and requel since, right up to that 2023 misfire that tried to double the number of possessed kids has made some version of the same mistake. They think the franchise is about the demon. It never was; the demon’s the MacGuffin. The movie is about the people standing around the bed.

Okay, I’ll finish somewhere quieter.

Friedkin is dead now. Blatty’s dead. Jason Miller has been dead for a quarter of a century, which is its own kind of cosmic cruelty; a man who gave one of the greatest performances in horror history never quite found another role to match it. Max von Sydow is gone. Lee J. Cobb, rumpled and funny as the detective who just wants to take someone to the movies, gone for decades. The house still stands in Georgetown, and the steps are still there, a tourist attraction now, with a plaque and people taking selfies at the top, grinning and pretending to fall.

I climbed them once. Late afternoon, cold, a coffee I didn’t really want. They’re steeper than you think. A lot steeper. Narrow and old, slippery in the damp. And I stood at the top and looked down, and just for a second, it wasn’t a movie at all. It was just a very long way down. And I thought about a man who’d walked past a beggar on the subway platform and never forgiven himself, who’d let his mother die in a ward full of screams, who had stopped believing in anything but running laps in the dark. And who, when it came down to it, when the thing was in the room and there was nobody else left, opened his arms and said: me. Take me instead.

I’m not a religious man. I’ve seen too many things in my old life, in too many back alleys and too many hospitals to pretend otherwise. But I know what that is. Every decent person knows what that is. It’s the thing we hope we’d do but are afraid we wouldn’t. And a movie that can make you feel that, while also showing you a twelve-year-old girl doing something unspeakable with a crucifix, while also making you laugh at a detective’s bad jokes, while making you sit through a hospital procedure so clinically cruel you want to turn away, while also opening with twenty minutes of dust and heat and dogs in the ruin of an empire older than God, is not just a good horror movie.

Kermode’s been saying it for forty years. He’s said it so often that people have stopped listening, like you stop listening to the guy at the end of the bar with the same story. But sometimes the guy at the end of the bar is right. Sometimes the story is the story.

It’s the perfect horror movie. It just might be the perfect movie. And it’s perfect for the oldest reason in the book: because under all the blood and the bile, and the noise and the cold breath in the frozen bedroom, it knows that the most terrifying thing in the world isn’t the devil.

It’s love. The kind that costs you everything. And the fear, gnawing, three-in-the-morning fear, that when the moment comes, you won’t have enough of it.

Boorman and the Devil (2025)

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By Adam Page

I want to put my position on the table before a frame of this comes up on the screen, as I think you should know where I stand before I tell you this documentary is really quite good.

In my considered and totally unrepentant view, Exorcist II: The Heretic is a bad movie. I don’t mean bad in the cheerful so-bad-it’s-good sense that midnight-movie apologists like to reclaim after a few drinks and a lot of ironic distance. I mean it’s truly and dramatically bad. A movie that mistakes incoherence for profundity and tap-dancing for transcendence. It does not need to be rehabilitated, and I didn’t sit down to watch David Kittredge’s documentary nursing a secret candle for Richard Burton and locust swarms. But after watching, I’m here to tell you that Boorman and the Devil is one of the most purely enjoyable pieces of non-fiction filmmaking about failure I’ve seen in years. I don’t think this is a contradiction, but criticism actually working how it’s supposed to.

Something I think people get wrong about bad movies and the documentaries made about them is they assume the quality of the making-of is contingent on the quality of the made, and it just isn’t. Some of the best non-fiction cinema is about disaster; Lost in La Mancha, Best Worst Movie, Hearts of Darkness, exactly because a movie going totally and career-threateningly wrong is much richer than a movie going competently right. Failure has stakes, humiliation, hubris (pay attention to writer/assistant Rospo Pallenberg, whose utter arrogance oozes through the screen), and if you’re as lucky as Kittredge is here, a director still around several decades later who will sit in front of a camera and try, one last time, to explain himself to the world that laughed him off the screen.

That’s the movie here. Not “was Exorcist II secretly good all along?” (and thank God, because it wasn’t) but “what does it do to a moviemaker to create something this ambitious and watch it blow up in front of paying strangers who actually audibly laughed at your possessed-girl tap-dance routine?” That’s an honestly great question and Kittredge asks it here with great rigour.

What really struck me, and what elevates this quite a few notches above glorified DVD-extra material, is the documentary’s refusal to condescend to either side of the argument. Kittredge isn’t there to mock Boorman, but he’s definitely not there to rescue him either. He sits him down, giving him the space to explain that he really disliked The Exorcist, finding it vulgar and reactionary, nothing more than a nasty little shocker wearing the clothes of Catholic guilt, and deliberately sets out to make its opposite: a movie about ecstasy and faith instead of violation and possession. That’s really a fascinating authorial position for a major studio sequel to take, and the documentary lets us sit with that ambition before it lets us sit with the wreckage. Boorman was coming off Point Blank and Deliverance and genuinely believed he could smuggle a spiritual art movie through the gates of a horror franchise. He was horrifically wrong about how that would land, but the reasoning behind that wrongness is compelling, and Kittredge is intelligent enough to know that the reasoning is the film.

There’s a device in Exorcist II, the “synchronizer,” which is a kind of biofeedback hypnosis machine meant to let two minds share a dream state, and the documentary spends a brilliant stretch of its runtime on how thoroughly it bored and baffled 1977 audiences into a stupor while the crew seemed to believe they were building the future of cinematic subjectivity. I found myself laughing not at Boorman directly, but at the total and magnificent folly of it all, at the specific brand of late-seventies auteurist confidence that convinced grown and intelligent adults that a synchronizer and an interpretative dance routine were the right tools for depicting demonic evil. Gremlins director Joe Dante turns up to note, with a dryness that had me chuckling in the dark, that several of the movie’s techniques have never been attempted again by anyone, ever, in the history of cinema. And it’s that sort of backhanded compliment which tells you everything about how the industry actually absorbed this movie’s failure. It became folklore. It may have been cautionary-tale folklore, but it was still folklore, and that’s a sort of immortality that bad movies rarely earn.

The interview roster does a lot of heavy lifting and Kittredge has clearly assembled it with care rather than just booking whoever answered the phone. Linda Blair is generous and clear-eyed about a production that has clearly left deep scars. Louise Fletcher, interviewed shortly before her death, brings enough candour and craft-focused seriousness that it lends the whole thing gravity rather than nostalgia. There’s a feeling that the documentary is treating her contribution as something to be preserved instead of just plundered. And bringing in modern genre voices like Karyn Kusama and Mike Flanagan to contextualise the movie’s afterlife is an honestly smart structural choice; it lets the documentary implicitly argue that ambition-as-failure has a lineage and that every generation of horror moviemakers has its own Boorman moment waiting for it. Flanagan especially argues that the fear of becoming a cautionary tale is baked into the DNA of everyone who tries to do something genuinely strange with a genre that rewards the safe and punishes the reckless.

Where this documentary earns its stripes as proper criticism and not just hagiography is the willingness to let Boorman, even now, remain a little baffled by his own disaster. He knew the audience wanted the visceral and sustained horror of William Friedkin’s original and he deliberately withheld it. He says as much unflinchingly but there is still a sense, even decades on, of a man turning the wreckage over in his hands and not quite locating the seam where it all came apart. And I think that unresolved quality is a lot more honest than a tidy redemption arc would have been, and it’s to Kittredge’s huge credit that he doesn’t try to create one. This film doesn’t end with an “actually, it’s a misunderstood masterpiece that deserves reassessment.” It ends somewhere I found much more interesting: as an act of good-faith archaeology on a real disaster, and it was undertaken with enough affection that you come away understanding why it happened, but without being pressured into deciding it was worth it.

And I think it’s that distinction, between understanding a failure and forgiving it, which is the whole trick of great films-about-films. Boorman and the Devil never asks you to like Exorcist II: The Heretic, but it does ask you to appreciate the strange, doomed integrity of a moviemaker who had a truly idiosyncratic vision, the studio money to attempt it, and absolutely no ability to see how it would play to a paying audience who were expecting rotating heads and projectile vomiting. And that gap between authorial sincerity and audience expectation is still one of the most interesting fault lines in studio moviemaking, with this documentary walking it with real wit and intelligence, and an obvious love for that messy and embarrassing, slightly glorious business of people trying things that don’t work.

So, does it change my mind about the movie itself? Not a chance, and I’d be suspicious of any documentary that could do that for me. That’s not what criticism is for and it’s definitely not what this one is attempting. Exorcist II remains for me an unnecessary and incoherently bad movie that nobody asked for and one that damaged a genuinely great original just by association. But I think Boorman and the Devil is something rarer and better than a rehab project. It’s a clear-eyed and curious, occasionally very funny act of cinematic archeology, one that’s dedicated to the idea that the most interesting stories in cinema history are often the ones where very talented people tried something bold, believed in it totally, and fell flat on their face in front of everyone. Give me that story told this well, over another competent and forgettable sequel any day of the week.

Four stars. Maybe four and a half, just for Joe Dante’s face when he talks about the synchronizer.

Boorman and the Devil is in cinemas from September 25th.

The Unrateable Man: Henry, the MPAA, and the Long March to Release

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By contributing writer Adam Page

Every now and then, a piece of art is created that the machinery simply hasn’t been designed to process. It isn’t banned, exactly, as banning at least implies someone in a position of authority looked at the thing and made a decision. What happened here was worse. This was a movie that fell into the gap between the categories then sat there, for four years, while men in offices tried to work out which drawer to file it in, and eventually just shut the drawer altogether.

Among his multitude of different jobs, John McNaughton was a documentary maker from Chicago who had never made a narrative movie. In 1985, two brothers named Malik and Waleed Ali, who ran a modest home-video outfit called Maljack Productions (MPI), handed him about $100,000 and told him to go and make them a horror movie. They wanted something with a hook, something they could get on the shelves next to the werewolves and guys in hockey masks holding big knives. What McNaughton then delivered, shot on 16mm over 28 days and with a cast largely pulled from Chicago’s Organic Theatre company, was a psychological horror movie about the random crime spree of a serial killer who seems to operate with impunity. It starred a totally unknown actor named Michael Rooker as Henry, who was loosely sketched from the real, horrific, and largely made up legend of Henry Lee Lucas, a man who who had confessed to hundreds of murders he almost certainly didn’t commit and was believed anyway because the confessing is so much easier than the checking.

The Ali brothers were not happy. They wanted a drive-in monster flick and had gotten something closer to cinéma vérité; it was flat and patient, interested in the texture or boredom that surrounds violence, rather than the violence itself as spectacle. There were no jump scares, instead it delivered dread as a permanent atmosphere, the way some cities deliver humidity. And notably, there was almost no music in it beyond a spare, droning score, because McNaughton knew something that a lot of more expensive moviemakers never quite work out: silence makes the audience lean forward and pay attention, not look away.

MPI didn’t know what to do with this movie. So they did what companies with an expensive mistake in the vault often do. They premiered it quietly at the Chicago International Film Festival in September 1986 and waited to see if anyone with some distribution muscle would take it off their hands. Atlantic Releasing sniffed around. New Line, not exactly strangers to horror themselves, had a look. Then the movie went to the Motion Picture Association of America to be rated, and the MPAA did something to it that was, in its own way, more brutal than what Henry does on screen. They gave it an X.

It’s here where this story stops being about a movie and starts being about the weird psychology of institutional gatekeeping. The way a body ostensibly made to inform consumers can, with total sincerity, functionally suppress a work without ever technically banning it. By 1986, the X rating in America had been hijacked by the pornography industry, which had adopted it like a badge instead of a warning, which meant that any studio-adjacent distributor who touched an X-rated movie was volunteering to have it treated by cinema chains, newspapers, and the video rental clerks of America, as basically smut. No major chain would book it, no newspaper would run ads for it. The rating was pretty much a coffin lid instead of a classification.

What makes the MPAA’s handling of Henry interesting, and I’d argue a small case study in how censorship bodies really think, is that when the moviemakers asked what specifically needed to be cut to earn an R rating, the board didn’t offer a list. The MPAA replied that nothing could be removed and the X was for Henry’s “overall moral tone.” Just pause with that phrase for a second. It wasn’t a scene or a shot. It was a tone. This was a ratings board admitting on the record that its objection wasn’t to the depicted violence; a genre in which other mainstream slashers of the same era were a lot more graphic and sailed to an R with no incident, but to the movie’s refusal to punish its killer and its refusal to let the audience off the hook with a satisfying comeuppance. Roger Ebert was one of the movie’s earliest and loudest defenders and noted in his review that the MPAA denied an R rating, saying that no possible cuts could qualify it for an R. So this was not a content problem; it was a values problem dressed in the language of a content problem. It seems the ratings system has no box on the form for “we are uncomfortable with your worldview.”

So Henry sat there, for four years, a movie with no home, too expensive to have been made for free and too honest to be sold as product. In a move that tells you a lot about the desperation of independent distribution in the pre-internet era, McNaughton started mailing VHS copies straight to movie critics in the hope that enough positive ink might just shame a distributor into action. And it worked, slowly, in the way these things do. Elliot Stein at the Village Voice called it one of the best movies of the year. Ebert put his considerable influence behind it in 1989. Errol Morris, fresh off The Thin Blue Line and serving as guest programmer at Telluride, invited it to the festival and that’s a small irony itself. One true-crime adjacent movie about the unreliability of confession giving a leg up to another. Midnight screenings started popping up in Chicago and New York, the last refuge of any movie too odd for a normal release calendar, and the movie built the sort of word-of-mouth reputation that money literally can’t buy, as it had no money behind it at all.

By the time a small company named Greycat Films finally picked it up for a real theatrical run it was January 1990; four years after that first festival screening and five years after the cameras rolled. It opened unrated rather than saddled with the X, in a limited run of about twenty cinemas. It made a few hundred thousand dollars in its opening weeks and eventually crossed the half-million mark against a production budget of $100,000 which, by the unforgiving arithmetic of independent movies is a genuine hit, even if it looked on paper like a curiosity that merely made a mark on multiplex America. MPI, in a fit of righteous indignation that really made me smile when I read about it, sued the MPAA for $50,000, arguing that the rating had been applied in a discriminatory way and had crippled the movie’s ability to find an audience through no fault of its actual content. The suit may not have reshaped the ratings system, but the argument under it, that the X had become an instrument of suppression instead of information and that a genuinely serious adult movie had nowhere to live in the American classification system, was loud enough and made by enough serious people that it became one of the pressures that pushed the MPAA towards creating the NC-17 rating later that same year. Henry didn’t single-handedly cause that reform, but it’s one of the handful of movies people point to when they explain why the reform happened, and that’s a strange sort of legacy: you can shape the regulatory architecture of a whole industry by being the corpse nobody could figure out how to bury.

“It’s always the same and it’s always different”

And here’s a detail that should make you laugh, if institutional absurdity amuses you the way it amuses me: in 2016, thirty years after its original submission, Dark Sky Films resubmitted Henry to the ratings board for a theatrical rerelease. It got NC-17. Thirty years, one dead moral panic and a whole genre’s worth of gorier and grislier successors; Saw, Hostel, the torture-porn decade, had come and gone in the meantime, with all of them collecting R ratings on the way to the multiplex. Henry, by comparison sedate and nearly bloodless, was still deemed a bit much. That’s a hell of a comment on what the ratings system was actually built to protect people from, and it was never really about the blood.

If the American story is one of a movie falling through the institutional cracks, then the British story is one of a movie being actively and repeatedly reshaped by an institute that knew just what it wanted and kept changing its mind about how much of the movie it was willing to allow you to see.

To understand the BBFC’s handling of Henry, it’s worth taking a minute to understand the room it was standing in. The mid-1980s in Britain had just been through the “video nasties” panic; an honestly remarkable episode of moral hysteria in which the newly deregulated home-video market, unpoliced by the same classification system that governed cinema, filled up fast with cheap horror imports and the tabloid press, a few members of Parliament, and a coalition of concerned moral entrepreneurs decided this represented a civilisational emergency. The result was the Video Recordings Act 1984 which brought home video under the same statutory classification regime as theatrical releases and effectively deputised the BBFC as the permanent border guard of the VCRs (please see Darren’s ongoing study of the video nasties for more details). Henry, an American movie that had nothing to do with the DPPs original list of nasties, arrived in Britain at the tail end of this fever, and inherited all of the institutional paranoia.

Electric Pictures, the movie’s British distributor, smelled trouble before the board had even looked at it, pre-emptively cutting thirty-eight seconds themselves; near the beginning, where a pan across a hotel room reveals a half-naked murdered woman with a broken bottle in her mouth, hoping to spare the whole submission from being poisoned by that opening image. It didn’t fully work, as when the board classified the movie 18 for cinema release in 1991, it wanted a further twenty-four seconds be cut from the movie’s other set-piece; the murder of a family in their home, and specifically trimming the shots of Otis groping the mother’s body before and after her death. Sixty-two seconds gone, and that was only the cinema cut.

The video submission the following year is where the story turns seriously strange, because it’s less a story about censorship and more a story about one man’s personal aesthetic authority over a whole nation’s home viewing. The board’s own examiners were ready to largely reinstate the previously cut material for the video release. Then James Ferman, director of the BBFC at the time and by reputation an incredibly hands-on and idiosyncratic gatekeeper, overruled his own staff. Not only did he insist on trimming the family murder scene down to almost nothing (seventy-one seconds cut, more than ever before), he went a step further and physically restructured the sequence. As McNaughton shot it, the scene plays out as an unbroken piece of horror and at the end reveals that we’ve been watching Henry and Otis’s own home-video recording of the crime, being played back on their television. It works as an absolute gut-punch that indicts the audience for having watched at all, something that would go on to influence movies like Man Bites Dog and the found-footage strain of horror that followed. Ferman moved that reveal to the middle of the scene instead, which diffused exactly the effect the sequence was built to produce. It’s worth pausing on this because it’s a whole different category of censorship than mere deletion. This was an unelected civil servant deciding not just how much of a movie British adults were allowed to see, but rearranging its narrative grammar, so that its meaning was changed. In a hundred and thirteen seconds of total cuts for that video release, as well as shortening the runtime, the BBFC rewrote its argument.

The movie limped along in differing neutered states through the 1990s; a version with the reordered climax, another round of resubmission in 20001 that reinstated some material and cut other bits, a slow negotiation conducted almost completely through stopwatch increments, until February 2003 when the board finally passed the movie completely uncut, seventeen years after it was made. Examiners noted that the effect of the scenes in question was to horrify and not arouse, that any erotic elements were minimal and practically incidental and that the scenes served “important narrative and thematic significance within a carefully constructed and acclaimed feature.” They also noted, with what I hope included at least a flicker of institutional self-awareness, that the cuts made in 2001 had been “relatively arbitrary, given that some of the reinstated material was arguably stronger than what had been cut.” Translation for those keeping score: we spent over a decade drawing a line, and even now we’re not quite sure where we drew it or even why.

Looking back over this whole grinding transatlantic saga, what really strikes me is just how little any of this had to do with protecting anyone. The MPAA’s objection was to a mood. The BBFC’s objection, filtered through one man’s personal editorial hand, ran to the level of shot order. Neither of these institutions were defending the public from graphic content so much as they were defending a set of narrative conventions: the idea that violence in cinema should come with a moral chaperone, that killers should be punished, and that cause and effect should resolve into something audiences could file away safely as fiction. Henry didn’t provide a chaperone and both of those regulatory systems, independently, identified the refusal as the dangerous part.

Of course, there’s a delicious irony in that every single one of these obstructions did the opposite of what it was designed to do. Four years in American limbo turned a cheap regional horror movie into a cause célèbre that Roger Ebert and the Village Voice were writing thinkpieces about before it ever reached a regular audience. Two decades of BBFC chopping turned a British home-video release into something like an academic industry, a staple of media studies syllabi, and a movie people sought out specifically because they’d heard it was too intense for the state to permit. Every attempt to manage the movie’s exposure ended up manufacturing its mythology. That was the great, recurring, and apparently unlearnable lesson of movie censorship in the 20th century: gatekeeping doesn’t suppress cult status, it manufactures it. You just can’t build a better argument for a movie’s seriousness than an institution’s frightened insistence that ordinary people can’t be trusted to watch it whole.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer eventually got its clean, complete, boring theatrical rerelease. It now sits in respectable company with other Criterion-adjacent special editions, its at-the-time radical flatness having become a house style of an entire generation of grounded and unglamorous crime cinema; Silence of the Lambs, Zodiac, the whole lineage of movies that treat murder as banal, rather than operatic. But the movie’s real second text, the one running under the credits, is the paper trail: the ratings appeals, the lawsuit, stopwatch negotiations over seconds of footage, and the board director who changed a movie’s meaning without changing a single line of dialogue.

That’s the story that tells you what the era’s gatekeepers really feared and it sure wasn’t the blood. It was a movie that refused to tell them how to feel about it.

Consumption Without Revelation: Emptiness and Appetite in Martyrs (2008)

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By contributing writer Adam Page

I’m going to start this with a confession, as that’s really what this movie is about; confession and the horrible possibility that confession changes nothing. I’ve seen Martyrs more times than is probably good for my, or anyone’s, mental health, and each time I left the cinema, or more often these days, peeling myself off the sofa at two in the morning, unable to sleep or really process what I just witnessed, I find myself hungrier than when I sat down. I don’t mean for food, but for meaning. For the thing the movie has spent the past 99 minutes promising me is just out of reach, if only I keep watching, if only the next scene, the next scream, the next flaying, will finally deliver the revelation. It never does, and that, I want to argue, isn’t a failure of Pascal Laugier’s magnificent and repugnant movie. The withholding is the key to the movie.

I have to talk about hunger, and talk about it properly – not in that cosy, metaphorical way critics reach for when they can’t be bothered to think about what a movie is really doing to its audience. Martyrs is a movie obsessed with appetite in the most literal and medieval sense; the hunger of the flesh for punishment, the hunger of the intellect for certainty, and the hunger of institutions for proof of the very thing that, by definition, can’t be proven. And running alongside all of that, embarrassing and compulsive, is our own hunger, sitting there in the dark with the popcorn untouched, waiting for the movie to feed us something. Laugier knows we’re hungry, and he’s counting on that fact. He then deliberately starves us, right at the point where a lesser moviemaker, let’s say a Hollywood remake director and yes I’ll get to that abomination, would have thrown the meal down onto the table and let us gorge.

I’ll get the plot mechanics out of the way, although “mechanics” feels like the wrong word for something so feverish. Lucie is tortured as a child by a mysterious cult, and grows into a woman consumed (yes, there’s that word again) by the need for revenge against her tormentors. She finds them, then kills them in one of the most sustained and horrible openings in modern horror cinema; a shotgun massacre that should really exhaust the movie’s capacity to shock in its first act. It doesn’t, it’s just the overture. Anna, her friend and carer, the movie’s moral centre if it can be said to have one, stays behind to clean up the literal and figurative mess. She discovers the cults’ real purpose in the basement under the house. And it’s here where the movie pivots from grubby revenge flick into something far stranger and more theological: we learn that the cult is not sadistic for sadism’s sake. They are epistemologists; torturing young women, flaying them systematically over months and denying them death right up until the final excruciating moment, because they believe that an extremity of suffering will produce martyrdom in the original Greek sense: martyrs, a witness. Someone who has seen beyond the veil and can testify to what’s there.

This is where the French intellectual Georges Bataille comes crashing through the floorboards, whether you invited him or not. The cult’s project is what he called l’informe made institutional policy: a deliberate and systematic destruction of form, of the coherent and bounded self, chasing some formless truth that only exists on the other side of that destruction. Bataille spent his whole brilliant and miserable career arguing that transgression doesn’t defile the sacred, but produces it, and we only know the limit by smashing through it, and that horror and ecstasy are next-door neighbours sharing a garden fence. The cult in Martyrs has taken this as an operating manual, and they have a sincere, well-funded research program. There’s a woman, the Mademoiselle, the head of the institution, sat in tasteful and expensive clothes while unimaginable things happen downstairs, whose entire life’s work is waiting for a martyr who can survive long enough, endure enough, to come back and tell her something. Not scream, or die beautifully for the camera the way horror cinema usually wants its victims to. Speak and report. Deliver content.

It’s here that I want to highlight what Laugier is really doing, because it’s sly and it’s cruel and I think the reason this movie sits so uncomfortably alongside its torture-porn cousins, the Hostels and Saws of the world it got lazily bracketed with on release. Those movies, whatever their merits (and I’d defend Hostel a bit further than fashion probably allows) are in the end economies of spectacle with clear exchange rates. Pain in, gross-out in kind, out. Martyrs sets up the economy and then refuses to pay the debt. The cult wants revelation and we, the audience mirroring them with an exactness that really should unsettle us more than it tends to, want revelation too. We’ve sat through Lucie’s psychological disintegration, through Anna’s building ordeal, through flaying, actual flaying, shot with a matter-of-fact clinical patience which makes it worse than if it had been operatic, because somewhere in the lizard-brain part of us that goes to horror in the first place, we believe suffering this vast has to be for something. It has to cash out. Susan Sontag wrote about the photographs of atrocities, and warned that repeated exposure to images of suffering doesn’t sharpen our understanding but dulls it, and replaces comprehension with a sort of exhausted numbness; we look and look and the looking then becomes the point, detached from any real increase in knowledge. Martyrs stages that exact mechanism, and then in the final scene turns around and asks us, practically dares us, to admit that we’ve been doing the same thing as the Mademoiselle. We’re waiting for the flesh to pay out in meaning.

In photography theory, there is the punctum; it’s a detail in a photo that pierces the viewer, wounds them personally outside of any culturally coded reading of the image – something that seems to jump out of the frame and dig under the skin. Critics, including me on other occasions, love reaching for the punctum to explain why one certain horror image lodges in the brain and won’t leave: the girl in the well, the twins at the end of the corridor, the blank mask over Michael Myers’s face. They’re images that wound outside their narrative context; surviving the movie that produced them and becoming freestanding cultural objects that mean something even divorced from the plot. Laugier, I think, understood this theory of the image intimately, because Martyrs is built to produce just this kind of image. Anna in the final act is flayed and luminous, and utterly unbearable. Laugier then commits an act of incredible directorial sadism against his audience by refusing to let the image speak. There’s no punctum here because there’s no photograph, just a woman with her skin cut off, whispering into the ear of the woman who ordered it, then a gunshot then nothing. We don’t get the testimony. We get its absence.

This is the crux and why I put “revelation” in the title, even as the movie denies us one. Anna survives the flaying, miraculously, far past the point any human body should endure, and achieves whatever the cult’s theology promised: she sees something. Her face in these final minutes is transformed. She isn’t screaming, she’s almost serene, the muscles of an expression the movie has spent the whole runtime training us to associate with agony now arranged into something we can’t classify, mainly because we haven’t been given a vocabulary for a face that has gone all the way through pain and out the other side. The Mademoiselle leans over her, a seeker, and the movie’s stand-in for every institution that has ever promised transcendence if you just suffer sufficiently and exactly enough. Anna leans in and whispers. And we do not hear it.

The camera lingers on the Mademoiselle’s face as she listens, and what plays over that face sure isn’t enlightenment. It’s horror, curdling almost instantly into despair, and the woman, an architect of decades of institutionalised torture, a true believer, picks up a gun and kills herself before the scene is even permitted to breathe. Her final line to her colleague, to “keep doubting” is the movie’s last spoken phrase, and then she’s gone, along with any hope we had of ever learning what Anna said.

I really want to emphasise just how aggressive a narrative choice this is, because I’ve constantly seen it misread as a cop-out, a director who couldn’t stick the landing and ran out of ideas for what the transcendent truck could be and punted instead of committing to an answer. I think this reading basically misunderstands what the movie has been building towards since its first frame. Martyrs isn’t a mystery box that forgot to supply the key; it’s a movie about the impossibility of the key. About the specific and structural fact that whatever it is lying on the other side of total suffering can’t be transmitted back across the boundary into ordinary language, and any institution promising otherwise – whether a torture cult in a French basement or a horror movie in a multiplex – is selling something it just can’t deliver. Kristeva’s abjection is instructive here, as the abject is exactly what the symbolic order can’t process, can’t fold into language without ceasing to be itself; it sits at the border and language collapses trying to cross it. Anna’s whisper is abjection that is refusing translation. It’s the corpse that won’t become a symbol. The Mademoiselle has spent her life trying to drag the abject into the realm of testimony and institutional knowledge, of evidence, and what she gets, at the last moment, is the abject looking back at her and refusing to resolve into something she can use.

And now I’m going to implicate us, dear reader, because criticism that lets the audience off the hook isn’t criticism worth writing. We came to Martyrs – most of us anyway, those who sought it out instead of stumbling across it – because we wanted the extremity. We wanted to be able to say we had sat through the thing everyone said was unwatchable, and there’s an odd cultural capital in the extremity-tourism that horror fandom trades in more than it likes to admit. We consumed Lucie’s suffering, and Anna’s, in the hope that the accumulated weight of it would deliver at least something, catharsis or insight, or the thrill of having glimpsed a truth too dangerous for ordinary cinema to show us. Laugier gives us the suffering in full and unblinking detail and then, at the exact moment the transaction should complete, he shuts the till. The Mademoiselle is us, and her research institute, with all its decades of investment in extremity as a means to knowledge, is horror’s own promise to its most devoted consumers; if you endure this, you’ll be shown something real. Martyrs calls that promise a lie and does so by performing the withholding directly on our nervous systems.

That’s why I’d argue the movie’s silence is its true subject, rather than an evasion of one. A movie that showed us what Anna saw would be a movie with an answer, and answers can be argued about, debunked, franchised, even remade with the mystery cheapened into a twist. The 2015 American remake, God love it, tries something along these lines and demonstrates just why the original’s silence was the right choice all along: supply an answer and you’ve supplied something small enough to fit into a plot, and the whole point evaporates. Martyrs understood that the only honest ending to a movie about the limits of what suffering can communicate was a scene in which suffering fails, totally, to communicate. As the credits roll, we’re left in just the position the cult has spent generations trying to escape: we’re hungry, unanswered, and aware only that something was seen and we will never see it.

I don’t think that’s a failure of nerve. I think it’s the most honest ending horror cinema produced in the early 2000s, and I’ll die on that hill, thank you very much.

Di’Anno: Iron Maiden’s Lost Singer

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By guest contributor Chris Ward

Don’t be misled – the word ‘Lost’ in the title does not mean everyone has forgotten about him, because if he never did anything else in his career, Paul Di’Anno will always be remembered as the voice of heavy metal behemoths Iron Maiden on their first two albums, those being 1980’s self-titled debut and 1981’s sophomore effort ‘Killers’, before he was replaced by Bruce Dickinson.

No, in this instance it means that Di’Anno himself was a lost soul, a victim of the rock n’ roll lifestyle that took so many talented musicians before their time, and a man who never quite found his place outside of that bubble. That Maiden went on to globe-straddling success with Dickinson at the microphone whilst Di’Anno forged ahead with various solo and band collaborations is neither here nor there, as there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that Maiden would never have reached such stratospheric heights if he had remained in the fold. What this documentary aims to highlight is the street-level integrity that he brought to those first two Maiden albums, and that without him, Maiden would never have had that stepping stone between the spit-‘n’-sawdust pubs of London’s East End and becoming a world-class arena-headlining act.

However, this is not just a look at Di’Anno’s stint with the metal legends as, with a bit of help from a few friends and observers, his post-Maiden career is also given a glance-over; not in any great detail, albeit enough to form a picture of a man with talent and passion, but no direction or discipline to keep it all in check. The central narrative device, though, is the man’s various health battles that plagued him in his final years, most notably the surgery that he required after contracting sepsis in 2015 to reduce the swelling in his legs, and the mental issues that came because of his inability to walk and perform.

If you’ve only ever known Paul Di’Anno through his vocal contributions to two of metal’s greatest albums, this warts (literally) and all look at his final couple of years shows a different figure to the strapping young buck who prowled the stage at both The Ruskin Arms and London’s Rainbow Theatre in 1980, which is, in itself, quite impressive. Here we see Di’Anno suffering with agonising pain as his legs swell up to disproportionate sizes as he smokes endless cigarettes, complains that the NHS won’t operate on him because of his general bad health and contemplates suicide, as he doesn’t want to be in a wheelchair any longer.

The answer to his situation came from Iron Maiden superfan Stjepan Juras, who organised a crowdfunder with various fans and friends to raise enough money for Paul to have the necessary treatment in Croatia, where a doctor there came up with a recovery plan on how to heal his legs. However, getting him to Croatia proved to be problematic and the movie doesn’t hold back in showing Di’Anno losing his temper with everyone who tries to help him, which makes him come across as a bad-tempered and ungrateful old sod, helping to enforce Maiden founder Steve Harris’s version of events about how Di’Anno left the band, as Di’Anno’s story has changed a bit over the years, depending on who was asking. Either way you look at it, throughout his life and career, people have gone out of their way to give the talented singer chances at bettering himself and he threw it back in their faces. Anyway, if you’ve ever fancied seeing knee replacement surgery up close, then this movie gives it to you in glorious close-up as Di’Anno’s elephantine legs are cut open, bits are pulled apart and removed, and given how disfigured and discoloured his legs are it doesn’t look quite real, except it is and you can’t really blame the volatile frontman for complaining, as it does look agonising.

We also get to meet Paul’s fiancé, who was also one of his nurses; well, she was his fiancé at the beginning of the documentary, but not by the end, so that tells you something else. It is a sad journey that we go on, because every time Paul seems to have some good news and something to celebrate, he slips back into his old ways, doesn’t keep up with his medical treatments and sinks into depression, which in turn makes him into an angry and unlikeable person who pushes away everyone who tries to help him, including Stjepan Juras.

If you are not an Iron Maiden fan or have no interest in who Paul Di’Anno is then Di’Anno: Iron Maiden’s Lost Singer won’t hold a lot of value, unless you like watching grumpy old men shouting at people who are trying to help them. However, for the Maiden connoisseur there is a wealth of footage from Di’Anno’s glory days with Maiden, his ill-fated eponymous AOR synth band and some clips from his underappreciated Killers project, as well as talking heads interviews with the likes of James Hetfield (Metallica), David Ellefson (ex-Megadeth), Bobby ‘Blitz’ Ellsworth (Overkill), Gary Holt (Exodus/Slayer), Cliff Evans (Killers), Andreas Kisser (Sepultura), notable former Iron Maiden members Blaze Bayley, Dennis Stratton and Doug Sampson plus many other personalities who were there along the journey. You also get to see footage of Paul Di’Anno reconnecting with Steve Harris backstage at a Maiden gig after many years of not seeing each other, which may bring a tear to the eye if you are of a certain vintage. Di’Anno himself starts to cry when he is told that Iron Maiden will foot the bill for the operation on his leg, and it is those moments when he reveals the vulnerable side of him that you see why people were drawn to him.

Paul Di’Anno died in 2024 aged 66 after years of health issues, and this movie works as both a look into how difficult he could be and at how much he was loved by fans and colleagues alike. Yes, if he hadn’t appeared on those first two Iron Maiden albums and they didn’t subsequently go stratospheric (after he left, important to note) then it is very unlikely that any of this would matter to anyone outside of Di’Anno’s own inner circle, but he did sing on them and by way of a send-off this film ends with his replacement in Iron Maiden (who also met Paul for the first time during his health issues, despite a so-called ‘war of words’ between the two in the press over the years) paying tribute to him from the stage of a Maiden gig in the US when the news of his death broke, and the outpouring of love from the crowd says it all. Yes, Iron Maiden without Paul Di’Anno may have the fame, the money and the big gigs, but with him they had a certain something – an X Factor, if you will – that none of the later line-ups had, and that is something that none of his fans have forgotten.

The Doll That Ate the Anthology: “Amelia,” Memory, and the Killer Image

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By contributing writer Adam Page

Would you like to try a party trick? Say “Trilogy of Terror” to anybody over, let’s say 50, who grew up with a television in the house and an aerial bent and twisted into some superstitious angle, and watch their face. It’s not exactly recognition, it’s more like a full-body flinch, or a muscle memory. Nine times out of ten, they probably won’t be able to tell you what the movie is actually called. They won’t remember Karen Black playing four different women across three different stories all basically sprung from the mind of Richard Matheson, who also gave us Steven Spielberg’s Duel and maybe half of The Twilight Zone’s best hours. But they will remember, with all the clarity of a scar, a small wooden man with a spear and a lot of filed, pointed teeth chasing a woman around a Los Angeles apartment.

That’s the Zuni fetish doll. That’s “Amelia.” That’s the segment which, in all of 20 minutes and with some shift of pure feral kinetic terror, ate its own movie alive and then, just for good measure, ate the cultural memory of all around it as well.

That’s what I want to talk about. Not because the doll isn’t worth talking about; it totally is, it’s one of the best jolts of practical-effects horror ever beamed onto network television at 9pm on a Tuesday. But I want to talk about what happened to Trilogy of Terror as a whole, how it was reduced and distilled, boiled down to one burning image while its other two-thirds disappeared into the footnotes, and how it tells us something ugly and true about how horror really gets remembered. And I mean: not democratically. Not exactly by merit, or merit alone. Horror, I think, gets canonised the way a shark gets identified: with the fin breaking through the water and not the twelve foot animal underneath which is doing the actual killing.

Let me set the table first, because it’s hard to understand what got erased without knowing what was there in the first place.

Trilogy of Terror first aired in March, 1975 on ABC, a Dan Curtis production. He has already given the world Dark Shadows, a man who understood on a cellular level that American living rooms wanted dread delivered in neat, advertiser-friendly parcels. The movie itself is an anthology, three stories, with Karen Black playing the lead in all of them. This is a structural gimmick that in lesser hands would be read as budget-consciousness dressed as a concept.

The first segment, “Julie”, is a morality tale about a nasty little professor who thinks he’s seducing a student by spiking drinks until it turns out, surprise (this genre runs on the surprise that the quiet woman was never as quiet as you thought), that she’s the one running the whole show, and running it towards something way darker than a bad grade. It’s a pretty good slow burn. And it seems nobody remembers it.

The second, “Millicent and Therese” is a Jekyll and Hyde show, with twin sisters: one prim and proper, the other a lot less prim and proper. There’s a twist that anybody who’s seen more than two horror movies will clock in about three minutes. And it’s fine; it’s TV that does what it needs to do, then moves on down the road. Nobody really remembers this one either, although speaking personally, it seems to have the odd honour of being the one people misremember as being about the doll, and that tells us something about how completely “Amelia” has taken over the whole show’s mythology. People seem to project that doll backwards into stories it never touched, because in the cultural memory, it isn’t three stories anymore, it’s one story wearing a three-story coat.

So, then: “Amelia.”

A woman is alone in her apartment. There’s a gift for an anthropologist boyfriend she’s trying to work up the nerve to introduce to her mother. And that’s its own quiet horror, if you’ve ever had that phone call, trying to rehearse your sentences like a hostage negotiator. The present is a Zuni fetish doll, a hunter spirit, with a little card (there is always a little card, horror loves an instruction manual nobody reads properly) that explains the doll is held by a golden chain wrapped around its body, and that chain must never come off as its the only thing keeping the spirit of He Who Kills dormant inside the doll.

Yes, you know where this is going. The chain comes off, as it was always going to. That’s not a spoiler; it’s practically a law of physics in these stories, a Chekhov’s gun, if it were a fifty year old strangulation totem with a spear the size of a toothpick and a continent sized homicidal intent.

And what comes next, in just 20 minutes, is Karen Black, alone and magnificent, battling a foot-tall wooden doll that really should be laughable, but is honestly one of the most viscerally frightening things ever broadcast onto the small screen. That doll skitters and hides. It appears in doorways with the patience of something that is basically already dead and already killing. It stabs her in the ankle with its spear, and it’s a wound so small and devastating that it makes you think about every childhood scrape you ever shrugged off. And Karen Black sells every second of this. She wrestles this thing into the bathtub, traps it in a suitcase, tries to burn it in the oven, and then, the gut-punch, and the reason this 20 minute segment outlived disco: she turns to the camera at the very end, with the doll’s face, filed down teeth and all, grafted onto her own features. Then we understand, with all the horror of an ending that refuses us the mercy of a resolution, that whatever was in that doll didn’t die. It just changed address.

That’s the entire thing, and that’s what people remember. That’s the thing which got quoted and referenced, name-checked in everything from The Simpsons to a hundred internet compilations of “Scariest TV Moments”. It earned the doll its own line of collectible figures a few decades later, and that’s an honestly strange fate for a piece of set dressing that spent most of its screentime being hurled across a room by Karen Black.

And the thing I keep circling, something which interests me more than the doll itself, though admittedly it is a great doll but: the other two-thirds of this movie didn’t fail. They aren’t embarrassing, they’re sometimes better than competent, minor-key Matheson with real teeth of their own. Metaphorically speaking, at least. But they didn’t have an image. They didn’t have that single, decontextualisable 20 minutes that could be clipped and shared, turned into gifs before gifs were a thing, and described breathlessly by kids at sleepovers who saw it on late-night syndication and had to warn their friends. “Julie” and “Millicent and Terese” needed you to sit through setup and character, through the slow build-up of dread which actually constitutes most of what horror structurally is. “Amelia” was like a machine gun. A cold open, almost-immediate threat and building physical peril, plus a jump scare that reframes the preceding hour. It was built, maybe accidentally but probably not (Matheson was too intelligent a writer for total accident) to be the part that people talked about at school the next day, completely stripped of the hour of table-setting around it.

I would argue that this is how most horror really survives in culture. As image, rather than text. As the one transmissible unit of dread that can travel without its context, like a folk song outliving the specific historical grievance that produced it. If we think of The Exorcist, we don’t play the whole movie in our heads; we think of the spider walk, the spinning head, the crucifix, those few images that do the work of two hours of Jesuit doubt and Georgetown atmosphere. That atmosphere seemingly couldn’t do the work on its own, even though it’s exactly what makes those images land. Think about Jaws, and nobody really focuses on the cowardice of the mayor or civic corruption, something the movie cares about a great deal. No, it’s a fin, a bitten-off leg sinking underwater and John Williams doing more emotional work than the whole town council combined. The full text does the work and the image gets the credit. This isn’t fair, but it’s also not new, or even specific to horror. It’s just that horror, more than most other genres, lives or dies by whether it can create one of those condensed little nuggets of real sensation. Horror’s whole business model is the transmission of fear, and it turns out, fear travels light. Fear doesn’t want your subplot, it wants the doll standing in the doorway.

And it’s almost cruel, if we sit with it long enough, when we realise that “Amelia” is the most text-dependent of the three segments, in a way; it needs the card explaining the chain, it needs Karen Black’s specific loneliness and the dread of her mother’s judgement to make the stakes more than just a novelty doll come to life, and that slow ratchet of “is this actually happening?” before the doll even moves an inch. It isn’t an image that exists free of narrative; it just became one through repetition and cultural erosion, like a coastline becoming a different shape after enough time has passed with the same wave hitting the same rock. The context got worn away and the image is all that’s left standing.

There’s something a little mournful in that, if you squint. Every piece of art that gets remembered like this is, in a sense, a story about erosion; about what a culture decides is load-bearing and what it lets get washed away. It isn’t that “Julie” and “Millicent and Terese” are bad art, it’s just that they aren’t quotable, and quotability, sadly, has become one of the main currencies we use to decide what survives. It’s the same thing which turns a two-hour movie into a fifteen-second meme, or a three-thousand word essay into a pull-quote or two, and turns a person’s whole life into “the guy who did the thing one time.” We are all at risk of becoming our own killer image, our own doll in the doorway, just remembered for the twenty minutes that travelled, instead of the two hours that built them.

It’s this that crosses my mind when somebody references the Zuni doll like it’s the whole movie, because in the culture’s memory, functionally – it is. Ask someone to name the anthology it came from and you’ll probably get a shrug, a guess, or (my personal favourite) total confidence in the wrong answer. That doll has achieved a kind of immortality, famous in the way some photographs are famous, completely divorced from the photographer, the assignment, and the darkroom. It doesn’t need Trilogy of Terror anymore. It escaped its own movie in the same way it escaped its chain. And that’s either a delicious irony or the entire point, depending on how generous you’re feeling towards the universe’s sense of humour.

That might be fitting, actually, and maybe the only honest ending here, and the segment’s own text is about exactly this; something small and seemingly containable which turns out to have appetites you didn’t budget for, eats its own restraints and keeps eating, way past the boundary you thought was the edge of the story. The story did more than kill Amelia; it killed the concept of “Amelia” as just one segment of an anthology broadcast. It killed the very idea of Trilogy of Terror as a trilogy, and leaves behind a monolith with a spear, standing in the doorway of culture’s memory, pointed teeth bared, and totally unwilling to be put back on the shelf.

That’s not particularly a tragedy. Matheson got his hit, and Karen Black got her legend. Even the doll got its own toy line, and that’s a lot more than most character actors from 1975 can say. But it’s worth noting, as I wrap up, that the way we remember horror isn’t the way horror is actually made. It’s made in full; scene by scene, with dread built up in careful and unglamorous increments. It’s just remembered in fragments: the doorway, the grinning teeth, the face at the end which isn’t the face we started with. We tell ourselves we’re honouring the work when we quote the image.

But mostly we’re doing what the doll did. We take the part that moves, and let the rest go still.

Small Screen, Big Dread: What Hooper’s Salem’s Lot Understood that King’s Novel Didn’t

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By Adam Page

There is something about Stephen King that, I think, he himself would probably concede after a few coffees and the right provocation: he can’t always see the wood for the trees. There is no question that he is one of the most instinctive and devastating horror writers of the twentieth century, an author whose best work operates like a scalpel and sledgehammer at the same time. But his great strength; a compulsive and almost evangelical need to tell us everything, with every room furnished, every street populated and every secret excavated, is at times his greatest liability. ‘Salem’s Lot, published in 1975, is an incredible achievement in atmospheric dread, taking the creaky Dracula mythology and firmly planting it in the rocky and resentful soil of small-town Maine with real conviction.

But, and there is always a but…

Tobe Hooper’s 1979 CBS miniseries adaptation, working in the smaller space of network television and constrained by budget and broadcast standards, arrived in living rooms instead of cinema screens. And this version doesn’t just translate King; in several crucial, structural, and philosophically interesting ways, it surpasses him. I know, this sounds like sacrilege, but stay with me.

The first and most important argument is the one that sounds a little trite until you stop and think about it. Barlow’s muteness is more frightening than his eloquence. In King’s novel, Kurt Barlow speaks. At considerable length. He is theatrical and articulate, almost Miltonic in his grandiosity. But that’s where the problem lies; as a consequence, he becomes explicable. When you give your monster a vocabulary, you also give it a psychology, and when you do that, you’ve given the reader a handhold, something to grab onto. You’ve given them a way of situating the horror in a comprehensible system of desire and motivation. King’s Barlow is eloquent in the same manner as some other literary vampires; he belongs in the same tradition as Bram Stoker’s Count, Anne Rice’s Lestat, those monsters who speak because speaking itself is an assertion of power and civilisation over the mere animal. And in those terms, it works. On the page, his long speeches and declarations carry a certain grandeur. But it turns out that grandeur is exactly the wrong register for what Salem’s Lot is actually about.

What it’s really about, and what the story is concerned with at its core, is the collapse of the ordinary, the contamination of the banal, and the discovery that your teacher or child, or your wife, has been changed into something wearing their face but no longer them. It’s a story about the uncanny valley in its most literal and frightening sense: the home becomes unhomely, and the familiar reveals itself as deeply alien. To tell that story, you don’t need eloquence at the centre, you need its absence. You need something that looks at you and doesn’t explain itself, doesn’t engage with you on equal terms or grant you the consolation of rhetoric. In other words, you need exactly what Hooper and makeup artist Jack H. Young gave us in Reggie Nalder: a white-faced, rat-eared, yellow-eyed thing floating across the screen like a remembered nightmare and saying exactly nothing.

Nalder’s Barlow, and this is a position I will continue to defend, is one of the most honestly frightening creations in horror cinema. He isn’t frightening despite his limitations, but because of them. He’s frightening because he isn’t a character; instead he’s a condition. He’s what happens when humanity is entirely ripped away. He doesn’t want to engage with you, or explain his philosophy or contempt for the merely mortal. He wants to feed. That blankness, the terrible vacancy behind those yellow eyes is more disturbing than any grand speech King could have written. Hooper knew something that horror moviemakers occasionally forget, then rediscover: the void is scarier than the explicable. Jaws frightens us because for the longest time, we don’t see the shark. Halloween’s Michael Myers is frightening because he is a silent shape behind a blank mask. In Hooper’s rendering, Barlow belongs in that lineage and he elevates it.

Now, I want to make a case that may seem counterintuitive given that we’re talking about a horror series and horror, culturally speaking, is generally understood to be interested in not actually dying: the episodic structure of the series lets the town’s population breathe, and then be mourned. This is really quite a big thing.

It’s an irony of King’s novel that despite its meticulous and near sociological mapping of Jerusalem’s Lot: all the backstories and grudges, the secret shames and adulteries, the parking lot fights that nobody has forgotten; the sheer density of that information can work against emotional investment. We get so much that processing any loss becomes difficult. The deaths build, but they build as data points in an overwhelmed system. By the time the town is being ravaged in earnest, the novel has worked up something closer to a tally than a tragedy.

In contrast, the miniseries works in time differently. There are two substantial episodes, with nearly three hours of television, and in that structure, Hooper and screenwriter Paul Monash make choices that may seem like compromises, but on reflection are acts of intelligent creative selection. Yes, characters are consolidated and some subplots are trimmed, but what the episodic structure adds – and this is crucial – is the rhythm of serialised television, which is the rhythm of ordinary life. You meet people and spend time with them across an episode. You go away and come back. And when they’re gone, you feel their absence in the same way you feel the absence of people you’ve spent time with, not just learned information about.

Think about the Glick brothers: lost, kidnapped and eventually both turned into vampires. Or Mike Ryerson, just working in a cemetery and falling victim to the newly turned Danny Glick. Constable Parkins Gillespie, watching his town fall while being powerless to stop it. Or Mark Petrie, watching his parents murdered. In a literary sense, these aren’t complicated characters, but Hooper gives them space. Actual screen time, and the texture of existing in a world before the horror arrives. It’s that space which creates the conditions for real grief. The genuine horror of Salem’s Lot isn’t Barlow gliding through the night, it’s that the town of Jerusalem’s Lot is depopulated. A community, maybe flawed and squabbling but alive, is systematically destroyed. For horror like that to work properly, we need to have known the community. We need to have spent time in the diners and shops, the schools and motels. The miniseries gives us that time while, paradoxically, the novel gives us more information about the town while giving us less sense of it.

But there is something else I need to talk about, because it seems to me essential to any real account of what Hooper’s Salem’s Lot actually is and what it actually does. There is an argument, and it’s a serious, considered one, that this miniseries worked better on the small screen than on any other medium. And I think this is inseparable from the amazing, generationally definitive trauma it inflicted on the children who first encountered it.

Horror on television in 1979 was operating under constraints that seemed to be purely limiting: no explicit violence, no blood, no real transgression of broadcast standards. Hooper found in these constraints something like discipline. Without being able to show explicit gore, unable to overwhelm the audience with spectacle, he had to generate dread through suggestion and atmosphere, through the slow accumulation of wrongness. And in that discipline, he found a register that is uniquely suited to domestic horror. And let’s not forget, that’s what Salem’s Lot fundamentally is.

Because you watched it at home. In your living room, or if you were one of the countless children who probably shouldn’t have been watching it but did anyway, in your bedroom, or sneaking downstairs after you’d been told to go to bed. You watched it in the same house you lived and slept in, the same town where you lived, and the patient insistence of the camera on the ordinary architecture of domestic life wasn’t just atmospheric, it was accusatory. It was the screen telling you to look at your window and look at what might be on the other side of it. The TV set, the warm and familiar communal domestic object became the delivery mechanism for a horror that was specifically about domestic vulnerability. The message and the medium were perfectly and terrifyingly aligned.

And then, of course, there is the Glick boy at the window. Danny Glick, poor, dead Danny Glick, pale and floating in the misty night air, scratching at the glass. If you know, you know. If you came across this image at the age of 9 or 10, like I did after seeing it on VHS, you know with absolute physiological certainty what I’m talking about, because your body still remembers. This isn’t hyperbole or the warm exaggeration of nostalgic horror fandom. This is a real, measurable and multigenerational phenomenon; an entire group of people for whom the words Salem’s Lot will produce an immediate, involuntary recollection of a floating dead boy at the bedroom window, and a bodily response that no amount of adult rationalism has completely dissolved. The image works because it takes the window, your window, the one you can see right now, and turns it into a threshold between the living and the dead. And it works because that dead boy isn’t snarling or roaring, he’s drifting and scratching. He’s looking, with those terrible eyes, at his former friend, and something about the mix of the familiar face and the totally alien presence behind it is nearly unbearable. Hooper understood with real clarity that the horror of vampirism isn’t mainly the violence; it’s the persistence of the face, after the person has gone.

And that brings me to what I think is the most intellectually generative frame for understanding what Hooper achieved: Salem’s Lot is a case study in productive fidelity; the art of honouring the spirit of a source text while transforming its letter with confidence and creative intelligence. This is rarer and much more difficult than it sounds. The history of horror adaptations is cluttered with versions that chose between two equally unsatisfying options. Either they were slavish reproductions, capturing everything on the surface and missing what made the original vital, or they’re wholesale departures that use the source material just as a brand. Hooper and Monash did something genuinely harder; they read King’s novel, understood what it was actually for, and made decisions – some quite radical – in service of those underlying purposes, rather than in spite of them.

The decision to relocate Barlow’s power and antiquity into a visual and not verbal register is the best example of this, but it isn’t the only one. The decision to let James Mason’s sinister and beautifully mannered Richard Straker carry the burden of the villain’s eloquence and menace is a piece of adaption thinking that needs more recognition than it usually receives. In his role, Mason gives us everything King gives us in Barlow’s speeches; that sense of ancient, cultivated malevolence which has watched centuries pass with contemptuous amusement. Splitting the novel’s vampiric force across the silent ambiguity of Barlow and Straker’s verbose and courtly manipulation, Hooper creates something that’s arguably more complex than the version in the novel: a vampiric operation with a face and a voice, a bestial centre and civilised interface, and this maps pretty exactly onto the way corruption tends to work in small communities. The charming newcomer arrives, opening the right business in the right building, with the darker thing he’s invited in behind him.

How Hooper treats the Marsten House is also instructive. King’s novel gives us the house as a sustained presence, a dark accumulation of local mythology and menace. Hooper uses it more sparingly, sitting on that hill and watching, with Hooper returning to it the way the town does in its imagination, as an inescapable fact. Less, here, is clearly more. The restraint creates something which King’s comprehensive treatment can’t quite achieve: real mystery. In the miniseries, the house stays strange because it’s never fully explained. It has the quality of a recurring dream, in that you return to it, but you can’t quite resolve it.

Writing all this, I don’t mean to say that King’s novel is without its extraordinary qualities; saying that would be dishonest and wrong. Its treatment of Ben Mears’s psychology, and the specifically American mythology of the failed return and corrupted pastoral, of small-town denial and complicity, are things the miniseries can’t quite capture – and doesn’t try to. King’s gift, his radar for the moral weather of a community and his ability to make you feel the weight of decades of local resentment and compromise is there in the novel in ways that a three-hour miniseries could never fully replicate.

But in exchange for what the format required him to leave behind, Hooper gave us something rarer in the history of horror on screen: a version that knew the emotional and thematic centre of its source well enough to serve it more faithfully than the source itself sometimes did. He kept its soul and found new forms for it. He tore away the eloquence and discovered the silence that eloquence had been covering, and gave the town enough room to exist so that its loss would mean something. And he brought all this into the living rooms of an audience that was utterly and brilliantly unprepared for it. An audience now in its fifties and sixties and still, still, checks the window before turning off the light at night.


That is what great horror adaptation does, and that is what Tobe Hooper did. Four and a half decades later, it remains one of the most intelligent, most frightening, and most underrated achievements in horror history.

The Wall Within: Divided Selves, Divided Cities in Possession (1981)

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By guest contributor Adam Page

There are some cities in the world that get inside you. I don’t mean in the tourist-brochure sense, like Rome seducing you with its golden light and self-satisfied beauty, but in the way a wound gets inside you. Berlin in 1981 was that type of city. You didn’t visit Berlin, you survived it. It sat there in the middle of East Germany like a philosophical argument turned violent, a city split down the middle, literally, by concrete and ideology and the polite fiction that it was a permanent solution to anything. Andrzej Żuławski completely understood this. He had been thrown out of Poland by communist censors, watching as his own country built its own invisible barriers and when he got to West Berlin to make Possession, he brought the certain sensitivity of a man who knows what it feels like to be divided by forces bigger than himself.

What he made wasn’t a horror movie, although it’s still filed that way by people who need their monsters visible and their categories neat. Possession is something far more uncomfortable than a horror movie. It’s a movie about the end of a marriage, and by that, I mean a movie about the end of a shared reality. And it uses Berlin, a wounded but impossibly alive city pressed against its concrete negation, not as a backdrop but as an argument. The Wall isn’t scenery in this movie, it’s the whole thesis.

Let’s talk about what Berlin really was back in 1981, because I think we need to feel it to understand what Żuławski was working with. West Berlin was an island. I don’t mean that metaphorically, it was a literal enclave of Western capitalism floating in the middle of the Soviet-controlled East Germany. It was accessible by three narrow air corridors and a number of checkpoints, where men with uniforms and guns checked your papers with that specific dead-eyed contempt of people who had been given a little power and knew how to use it. The city seemed to have a strange psychic atmosphere, drawing artists, draft dodgers, people running from something or looking for something they couldn’t name yet. It was heavily subsidised by West Germany, which had to function as a showcase, a real-life advertisement for the Western model. This built an odd economy of creativity and desperation; cheap rent, government money pouring in and the subliminal awareness that you were living in a place existing by political will alone, and in theory could cease to exist if that will failed.

David Bowie recorded his Berlin Trilogy there. Iggy Pop was wandering the streets. Nick Cave would go later. They were not people drawn to cheerful places. They were drawn to a city wearing its damage openly. To a city bombed into powder and rebuilt with all the grace of a society working under existential threat and sat in the shadow of a wall telling them: This far and no further. Here is where freedom ends.

It was into this city that Żuławski put Mark and Anna and a marriage that was already, in the opening frames, indistinguishable from a war zone.

Mark comes home from an unnamed assignment; he is a spy or something spy-adjacent, the movie deliberately vague in the way intelligence work is all deniability and implication, and discovers Anna wants to leave him. She can’t really explain why. She tries, in an early scene with Isabelle Adjani’s face doing things a face doesn’t normally do, cycling through fury, and anguish, and what seems like cosmic exhaustion. She can’t give him a reason, as the reason isn’t ideological. It isn’t that she’s chosen a side, but more that she has discovered she contains multitudes that can’t co-exist. Her marriage has been the container that was forcing them to try.

It’s here where the Berlin Wall becomes something more than a choice of location. Żuławski, himself surveilled by the Polish secret police and intimately knowing the texture of living in a watched state, frames Mark and Anna’s apartment like a border zone. The apartment isn’t a refuge, it’s a checkpoint. Characters move through it with the wariness of people moving into contested territory. There are no shots that make it feel like a home; instead the camera, operated by Bruno Nuytten with an aggressive mobility, makes every room potentially hostile, and every doorway a possible confrontation.

It’s surveillance aesthetics applied to intimacy. The husband is watching the wife. The wife knows she’s being watched and performs, not deception but a kind of hyper-awareness that happens when you know your movements are being monitored. Bob, their son, moves through the apartment like a small animal navigating around territorial adults, dealing with the tension with that eerie adaptability children have when they have no choice but to adapt. The family apartment should be the most private place in the world, but here it operates like a no-man’s-land between checkpoints, where the normal rules don’t apply and violence is always near.

Think of the geography Żuławski establishes. Mark occupies the apartment; he’s returned to it and his life is organised around it. More and more, Anna’s life does not. She has another apartment, across the city, where her lover Heinrich is and eventually the thing she is creating, or the thing she has summoned or the thing she has become; that tentacled horror that the movie’s more literal-minded critics focus on as the genre element. But let’s not get distracted by the monster, it isn’t the point. The monster is what happens when a person refuses to keep their interior life walled off from the outside world, and when the suppressed self stops accepting its containment.

Anna’s other apartment is the East to Mark’s West. Not literally of course, as both are in West Berlin, but structurally. It’s the other side, a place that can’t be visited without a sort of border crossing or without confrontation. When Mark follows Anna, when he hires the private detective to watch her, he’s doing what states do: treating the unknown as a threat and responding to a mystery by gathering intelligence. He just can’t accept that he doesn’t know what’s happening. He needs a report, a file. He has to know where his asset is located.

And that word, asset, is deliberate. After all, Mark is something like a spy, and the movie suggests he has brought his professional terminology into his marriage. He treats Anna as a handler treats intelligence; a resource to be tracked, a variable to be considered and a potential defector who has to be monitored for signs of ideological drift. The tragedy is that this isn’t malice, exactly. Mark loves Anna in the only way he knows how to love, like a state loves its citizens. With possession, and the real belief that this constitutes protection.

Sam Neill, and this might be the movie’s most underappreciated achievement, plays Mark not like a villain, but as someone so colonised by the logic of his world, he can’t perceive its violence. He is earnest and in his own way, devoted. He’s also totally unable to understand that his presence is itself a kind of occupation. There is a scene where he beats Anna, and afterwards, he sits there with the specific bewildered look of a man who honestly can’t understand how he got here. He followed the rules, he came home. He wanted to be a husband. So why has this become a war?

The answer lies in that city outside his window. In 1981, West Berlin was a city that had learned to live with division, with its entire identity organised around it. For West Berliners, the Wall wasn’t an emergency. It had been there for 20 years. It was part of the infrastructure, and you arranged your life around it, incorporating it. The cold fact that this meant building your life around an obscenity, around literal concrete proof of human cruelty and political failure, well, you adapted. You had to, as the alternative was a kind of ongoing existential crisis that nobody could maintain.

Mark and Anna have done the same thing with their marriage, learning to live with the Wall between them. They have incorporated that division and made it functional. They have built their routines around areas that still communicate and the areas that are sealed off. Then Anna does the unthinkable: she stops pretending the Wall is acceptable. She starts acting as though the division is catastrophic. And this refusal to accommodate, the insistence on feeling the full weight of what’s been walled off, is experienced by all those around her as madness.

Isabelle Adjani won the César Award for her performance in the film. She also reportedly suffered a breakdown during filming. Both things are credible. What she does in Possession isn’t acting in any conventional sense; it’s more like a controlled demolition of the self, a performance enacting the very disintegration it’s depicting. The subway scene has been written about so often that I’m reluctant to add to the pile, but it remains inexhaustible. Anna in a subway corridor, her body moving between rage and grief, and then something beyond both, her body becoming the argument the movie has been making with words, architecture and geography. The body as a border zone, and a place where two incompatible selves finally stop negotiating and start destroying.

Watch where Żuławski has his camera during this scene. There’s no cutaway, no relief of reaction shots or distance. He stays close with it, in the same way surveillance cameras stay with things. Without mercy, without interpretation, and just recording. Here, the camera isn’t empathetic, it’s gathering intelligence. And here, I think, is the movies most devastating formal choice. At the exact moment of maximum human vulnerability, Żuławski copies the aesthetic of the surveillance state.

That’s what love has become in this movie. Monitoring and watching. Gathering evidence of other people’s interiority and trying to predict their next move. Contain the damage and maintain the border.

Heinrich, Anna’s lover (played by Heinz Bennett), represents the third option which the movie’s Cold War geometry demands. He isn’t East or West. In his nauseating way, he is beyond ideology. A man so committed to his own spiritual projects, that geopolitics slide off him. He meditates. He has achieved a serenity that the movie treats with the contempt it deserves, because that serenity is built on not being in the world in any real sense, and on having walled himself off from history so totally, he can float above it in his beatific self-satisfaction.

When Mark confronts Heinrich and kills him in that bar’s toilet, it’s ugly and disproportionate. But it’s also, by the movie’s logic, totally coherent. Heinrich represents an escape from division, a man who claims to have transcended the Wall by just not acknowledging it. Mark, for all his horrific flaws, at least knows he’s on a side. He knows the Wall is there and there is something almost honourable in his refusal to pretend otherwise.

The double ending of the movie, the arrival of what seems to be the ideologically normalised version of Mark, mirrored by the destruction of Anna and the approach of what is suggested to be an apocalypse, has been read as an anti-Cold War allegory, and as Żuławski’s prediction of some final confrontation. As Marxist critique and as pure surrealism. I think it’s all of these things and resists final explanations in the way that great movies often do. But what strikes me about it is the implication about what division costs. The “good” version of Mark who arrives at that apartment is functional and clean. He has done something with himself, made some peace or reached some accommodation. In the most important sense, he is no longer divided. And this is not presented as triumph, but horror. Anna’s proxy, the creature grown from her own divided self, her doppelganger, is looking after Bob, and he recognises what the two doubles are, drowning himself in the bathtub. The price of integration, the movie seems to say, is the death of something real.

Berlin would come to understand this. The Wall would come down eight years later and the reunification of Germany would be celebrated as unambiguously good – and it was. But also, gradually, it would be revealed that the East had brought its own scars, and its own way of being in the world. The West also had its condescension and pathologies. Walls don’t just disappear when you knock them down, they become interior architecture. Ostalgie is the name given to the nostalgia you may feel for a way of life organised around oppression that was, at least, your oppression. You knew it and had learned to navigate it.

Mark and Anna’s Wall can’t be pulled down, and that’s the tragedy. It has become structural to them. Remove it and the whole thing, the selves, the marriage, the shared reality, comes crashing down.

Żuławski made Possession while exiled, in a city which was defined by exile, about a marriage in the process of internal exile. He was drawing on his own divorce, his experience of the Polish state, his readings of theology and a deep suspicion that the modern West had organised its emotional life around the exact same principals of surveillance and containment it claimed to politically oppose. And he was right. We are all, in our most intimate spaces, Cold War architectures. We have controlled zones, buffer states and our mutually assured destructions. We all have our Walls.

The thing about Berlin, and it’s something that the tourists who go now with cameras and Instagram posts about the East Side Gallery don’t always feel, is that the Wall wasn’t imposed on the city from the outside. It grew from the division of the city, which grew from the division of the country, which grew from the catastrophe of a people losing its mind, and the further catastrophe of other people arriving to administer the aftermath. The Wall was already there, the concrete just made it visible.

That’s what Żuławski understood, and what he put on screen with brilliant and monstrous clarity. The Wall within. The division there long before the marriage, expressed by the marriage and outlasting the marriage.

What he is telling us is that love is not the opposite of ideology. Love is just ideology with better lighting and more convincing special effects. We’re all divided cities and we all have our checkpoints. We all, at 3am in the apartment we share with someone we can no longer reach, put our hands against the concrete of our own interior Wall, wondering when we built if and whether we still have the key to any of its gates.

Some questions, West Berlin knew, don’t have comfortable answers.

Some walls, it turns out, are load-bearing.

The “Sam Neill Goes Batshit” Trilogy: Why Omen III, In the Mouth of Madness and Event Horizon Define 90s Horror

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By guest contributor Adam Page

I want to start by addressing something that may seem like a ludicrous claim on its surface. I want to argue that Sam Neill, the charming New Zealander who played Alan Grant in Jurassic Park and whose default facial expression is a sort of warm, self-deprecating amusement, is arguably the most important horror actor of the 1990s (I know one of these movies is from the 80s, but just go with it). Not the most bankable or prolific, but the most important. And I will make this argument by what I have termed the Sam Neill Goes Batshit Trilogy. Three movies spanning roughly sixteen years, if we’re generous with our bookends, and in which Neill plots a trajectory from diabolical composure, through psychological collapse and finally arrives at a destination that could only be described as beyond all human reckoning.

Of course, I’m talking about The Omen III: The Final Conflict, the wildly underrated In the Mouth of Madness (which I recently discussed at length), and Paul W.S. Anderson’s cosmic horror Event Horizon. What unites them, beyond the existential dread and some impressive eyebrow acting, is Neill himself. The through-line isn’t directorial or thematic. It is, brilliantly, the performance of an actor who understood something about horror that a lot of his contemporaries just didn’t: the monster is most frightening when it starts as the most reasonable person in the room.

“I was conceived of a jackal…”

To begin at the beginning, and the most elegant performance Neill ever gave in a horror movie which is also, and I say this with real affection, the most openly camp. The Final Conflict, third in the Omen franchise, had a near impossible task. Lee Remick and Gregory Peck had died in the first movie in what is still one of cinema’s best marriage portraits gone horrifically wrong. Damien, played by Harvey Stephens, had been truly unsettling. And so how do you make the adult version of the Antichrist compelling and not just ridiculous?

It turns out, the answer is Sam Neill. And more specifically, him standing in front of a large crucifix, delivering a monologue to Jesus Christ that begins as theological argument, and ends up somewhere close to romantic rivalry. It’s one of the greater unhinged set pieces in 80s horror and it works because Neill plays it with total and unwavering sincerity. There isn’t a single wink to the camera or flicker of self-awareness. Damien Thorn believes what he is saying, because Neill believes it, and so we believe it too. That is a genuinely remarkable achievement, given that what he is saying basically is: I’m going to murder all the baby boys born in this specific twelve-hour window, and I’m quite looking forward to it.

What Neill brings to Damien is a quality that I don’t think a lot of other actors could have, which I can only describe as a boardroom malevolence. Here, Damien isn’t the sneering villain of lesser horror movies. At any gathering he attends, he is the most impressive man there. He is charming and witty. Genuinely erudite about his own mythology in a way that suggests he’s done quite a lot of reading about himself, which is, frankly, fair enough. Neill plays him with that kind of confidence which only comes from people who have never, not once in their lives, experienced a moment of self-doubt.

The sexuality of his performance is also worth talking about, because it does work that the movie’s critical reputation always undersold. Damien’s relationship with the journalist Kate Reynolds, played by an excellent Lisa Harrow, is more than a villain chasing a victim. Neill plays it as real desire complicated by destiny, almost as though Damien is really annoyed that he finds this woman so compelling, when he has some urgent apocalyptic business to attend to. There is a scene, you know the one, that is still genuinely shocking not because of what happens, but what Neill communicates in the aftermath. The look on his face isn’t triumph. More interestingly and disturbingly, it’s regret. Neill seems to be saying that the Antichrist is capable of feeling the wrong thing at the wrong time. And I think that small crack of humanity in the demonic is what makes him the most monstrous.

The movie isn’t perfect by any means. The director, Graham Baker, is more capable than visionary, and the third act plotting is, shall we say, theologically convenient. Neill’s performance, though, rises above the material with a cheerful contempt for the limitations put upon it. He seems to be acting in a better movie than the one he’s been given, and in doing that, he creates a character who stays in the memory long after the movies slightly anticlimactic conclusion. At the end of The Final Conflict, Damien Thorn doesn’t feel defeated, he feels temporarily inconvenienced.

“Every species can smell its own extinction…”

Okay. In the Mouth of Madness. Now we’re cooking. Into territory where I need you to sit down because this movie, and I will defend this until I’m blue in the face, is John Carpenter’s most formally daring movie, one that understands Lovecraftian horror at a primal level and does something incredible with it. It takes the idea that reality is a construct and fiction can become fact, that the simple act of reading can rewire the world, and builds those ideas into a narrative structure that enacts its own themes. The movie doesn’t just describe madness; it performs madness. Standing in the centre of it all, a fixed point in a universe which is actively dissolving, is Sam Neill as John Trent.

The genius of this casting is apparent straight away. Trent is an insurance investigator, and professionally speaking, a man whose entire career is built on the premise that most things that appear extraordinary will have a mundane explanation. He is sceptical by vocation and cynical by disposition. In the early sequences, Neill plays him with coiled energy, all rapid-fire dialogue delivery and physical confidence. He is a man moving through the world like it owes him a clearly itemised invoice, and he is genuinely funny in a way that disarms the audience. We like John Trent, and trust him. We accept his version of reality because he seems so utterly certain of it.

And then Carpenter starts to pull it all apart.

John Trent’s unravelling across the movie’s runtime is one of the great acts of sustained psychological deterioration in American genre cinema. What separates it from so many similar trajectories in lesser horror movies is how granular Neill’s work is. He doesn’t snap all of a sudden. Instead, he erodes. Each time he encounters something genuinely inexplicable, it takes a specific toll and Neill follows that toll with brilliant precision. About halfway through the movie, there is a moment where Trent explains to Linda Styles, Julie Carmen doing fantastic work basically as an audience surrogate, why none of what they’re going through can be real: “God’s not supposed to be a hack horror writer!” Neill plays that explanation with desperation barely hidden by the apparent reasonableness of the argument. On a level that he refuses to acknowledge, Trent knows he’s already lost. His rationalising is all performative. That of a man talking himself out of a truth he’s already understood.

The physicality in the later sequences is something else completely. By then, Trent is fully immersed in Hobb’s End and Neill has thrown off all the confident, coiled energy, replacing it with something raw and exposed. He walks differently and holds his body differently. There’s a very particular quality of wrongness in how Neill carries Trent through the final act; that of a man who no longer fits in his own skin. It’s technical acting of the highest order, and invisible enough that we don’t consciously notice it, but powerful enough that it builds a deep unease.

The framing device of the movie, Trent in a padded cell explaining his story to Dr. Wrenn and finally walking the deserted streets, is where Neill gives what might be the single most quietly devastating moment in the trilogy. The laughing in the cinema. It starts as a regular movie-crazy laugh but keeps going, changing character and becoming more genuine and more terrible. It’s the laugh of a man who has finally understood the cosmic joke and found it honestly hilarious. The laugh of someone for whom sanity is no longer an option. Neill holds it for a little longer than is comfortable and in doing that, changes what could have been a cliché into something which feels like a real emotional truth. It looks like when someone totally comprehends their own irrelevance in the face of cosmic indifference. It looks like that laugh.

“You can’t leave: she won’t let you…”

Event Horizon, then, is a movie which has been vindicated by time in spectacular fashion. When it was released in 1997, it received reviews ranging from merely dismissive to openly hostile. Critics called it derivative; a haunted house movie in space – as though that was an insult. And at the time, Paul W.S. Anderson wasn’t yet a director whose name commanded real attention. Around thirty minutes were cut by the studio prior to the movie’s release, and the damage that caused to the narrative coherence of several key sequences is still plain to see, scar tissue on an otherwise excellent body of work.

And yet. Here we are, twenty-nine years later, and Event Horizon is regularly described as one of the defining horror movies of the decade. Why? Certainly because of the ideas; the notion that a dimension of pure evil could exist alongside our own, accessible with some advanced mathematics is one of the best unsettling conceits in modern sci-fi horror. Absolutely because of the production design too, the interior of the ship full of Gothic overtones and a central gravity drive that looks like a medieval torture device remain one of cinema’s greatest sets. But mainly and definitively because of Sam Neill.

His Dr. William Weir is the most complex character in these three movies, and Neill’s performance here is the most technically demanding. Essentially, what he has to do is play three versions of the same man across the movie’s runtime and has to make each one feel like the natural and terrible consequence of the one before. His first Weir is a man totally hollowed out by grief; his wife’s suicide haunts his every interaction; every quiet moment and every time Neill lets the professional surface slip just a little, we see how enormous the absence beneath is. Neill doesn’t play the grief as distraction, but foundation. Weir can’t separate his obsession with the Event Horizon from his loss, as the ship represents something more than scientific achievement. On some level, it represents the doorway back to the person who is no longer there.

The second Weir, beginning to hear and be influenced by the ship and slowly being unwound by whatever is inhabiting it, is where Neill’s physical work becomes extraordinary. He uses a quality of listening that is seriously unnerving. He starts to become attuned to sounds and suggestions nobody else can hear and Neill plays this not as an obvious distraction, but more like a terrible attentiveness. He becomes more present as the ship starts to take hold of him. More alert and focused. The wrongness of this is near impossible to articulate, but impossible to miss.

Then we have the third Weir. The sequence where Weir reveals himself, eyes ripped out, covered in gore and speaking with an awful calm about what he’s seen and where he’s going, is truly one of the best horror performances of the decade. By this point, Neill is operating on a totally different register than anyone else on screen. Laurence Fishburne is genuinely excellent in this movie, but following Weir’s transformation Neill acts him off the screen every time they share it. Neill has found something in Weir’s corruption that Fishburn’s Captain Miller can’t access: a kind of ecstatic peace. The most frightening thing about this third Weir isn’t the violence or supernatural wrongness. It’s his serenity. He is a man who has found, in a dimension of pure evil, the answers to all the questions grief raised in him. It’s a horrible kind of love story. The ship gave Weir his wife back, and he has decided that the terms were acceptable.

“Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see.” Neill delivers this perfect, horrible line with the gentle tone of a man offering directions. It’s the line that haunts the trilogy, and afterwards, us. And I think it works exactly because of the three movies in this unofficial trilogy: because we watch Neill play control, then watch him lose it, and now we understand what it looks like when control is gone so completely that even its absence becomes unfamiliar.

What the Sam Neill Goes Batshit Trilogy traces, and yes I’m aware I’ve named it a little flippantly, but I hope all those preceding words have shown that its affectionate and not dismissive, is a meditation on the relationship between intelligence, control, and horror. Damien Thorn is the most powerful being on Earth, and Neill plays his ruin as a natural consequence of the hubris of his certainty. John Trent is the most rational man in any room, and Neill plays his breakdown as the unchangeable fate of anyone who invests too completely in their ability to understand the universe. And William Weir is the most educated man on that ship, but his corruption is played as the horrifying fulfilment of a mind that was simply too large for the reality it had been given.

These performances, I think, are about the limits of the human. They’re performances about what is waiting beyond those limits. And taken together, considered as a body of work and examined with the seriousness they deserve, they are among the most important contributions any single actor has made to the horror genre in the last fifty years.

Sam Neill went batshit three times in three different registers and with three different instruments. The end result is a triptych that tells us a lot about what we fear, about our intelligence failing, or reality shattering, or love becoming the crack through which the darkness enters, than almost any other sequence of performances in the genre. He deserves all of these words.

And probably an apology for the title.