If ever there was a horror franchise that elicited an equal sense of both joy and frustration, it is surely the Hellraiser franchise. How many films have managed to nail (sorry) such a heady blend of slasher flick and (to paraphrase Doug Bradley) ‘Gothic Ibsen’? The first film, Hellraiser, established a template that has long seen cult status achieved and a host of sequels spawned, unfortunately with ever diminishing returns. Unsurprisingly it is Hellbound: Hellraiser II, filmed with many of the same cast and crew and featuring the direct involvement of creator Clive Barker as Executive Producer, that of all the sequels best manages to keep intact the atmosphere and artistry of the original.
Hellbound retains a gloriously archaic quality to this day, that of a time capsule imbued with the remnants of old, once potent magick. Creature effects, rudimentary animation and set design – all hampered by budget restrictions imposed by collapsing studios and the like. Concepts on a grand metaphysical scale imperfectly realised by the technology of the time, halfway between the practical effects of the 80s and the nascent era of CGI. The fecundity of Barker’s vision was such that any attempt to capture it within the strictures of the mundane realm of the late Eighties film set was always going to be fraught with imperfections. Yet, it is in many ways these imperfections that makes the first two Hellraiser films so enjoyable, even to this day.
As often
happens throughout the various storylines of the franchise, the
Lament Configuration itself is at the heart of things. So too with
Hellbound, where we begin with the sight of a strangely familiar
individual in childlike repose – cross-legged and furrowed of brow –
turning the box over in his hands, seeking to unlock its mysteries.
His fingers write his desire upon the golden patterns of the box, and
soon his workings invoke the familiar dolorous tolling of bells and
dimming of light. As the device opens to the tinkling strains of a
child’s music box, the hungry eyes of the man peer into it. His
curiosity is rewarded with hooked chains, blood and pain. We are
taken then into some kind of subterranean dungeon and forced to bear
witness to the unmaking of this man and the creation of something
else – something with precise lines carved into living flesh and
decorated by nails hammered into skull by inhuman tentacular
appendages. The entity known as Pinhead is therefore revealed to have
origins as a man, while it is also made clear that there is some kind
of will behind the enticement of the Lament Configuration, some
shadowy being using the puzzle box as a fisherman uses a lure.
Returning
to the present day, we are reunited with Kirsty Cotton (Ashley
Lawrence), as well as the disastrous state of medical facilities of
the era. Waking in a dimly lit and dirty hospital room, still covered
in grime, the threat of the Cenobites has understandably left her in
a parlous state. However, she is not in any old hospital; no, the
lucky girl is attended to by the reassuring presence of one Dr.
Philip Channard (Kenneth Graham), who we first see delivering a
rather metaphysical-in tone speech, while simultaneously delivering a
(live) patient from the contents of her skull. The Doctor’s
professional detachment can’t quite disguise a certain special
interest in Kirsty’s case, but she is none the wiser and in fact has
more than enough to deal with after seeing a bloody message daubed
from on the wall of her room by a skinless man she believes to be her
father.
As Kirsty literally struggles with her demons, we come to learn more about Channard, who takes an elevator to the subterranean depths beneath the hospital. If you thought the regular patients had cause for complaint, the lower levels seem to have been modelled on a cross between Jack Harker’s asylum in Dracula and Freddie Krueger’s boiler room. Patients in the grips of horrifying psychoses are left to battle their imaginary enemies in squalid padded cells, Channard paying them a visit as if checking on seeds germinating in a potting shed. Still hiding behind the veneer of professional concern, he arranges for delivery of a certain blood-stained mattress from the crime scene of Kirsty’s old house. Meanwhile his assistant Kyle (William Hope), bringing some much needed humanity into proceedings, develops suspicions about Channard and breaks into the Doctor’s home, whereupon he discovers sheaves of paperwork including articles on psychic children, diagrams and sketches of a certain exotically-detailed box and photographs showing the individual we first saw at the very beginning of the film.
Much like
Kyle, we the viewers have seen enough to know that Dr. Channard is
yet another man driven beyond human morality by insatiable curiosity
and thirst for knowledge pertaining to life beyond the earthly realm,
beyond death itself. Following on from Frank and Captain Elliot
Spencer (he who would become Pinhead), the Doctor’s pursuit of the
unholy unknown is like a puzzle itself, comprised of various pieces
he assembles and begins to manipulate: knowledge gleaned from his
studies of the Lament Configuration, his unfettered access to
psychotic patients, a young girl with a preternatural skill for
solving puzzles, a certain blood-stained mattress – all these
elements he brings together, drawn by the dark force behind
everything, the force that unmade Captain Spencer and raised a great
demon in his stead.
There were, of course, others before Channard who were drawn inexorably into the machinations of the box. Soon, his bloody experiments have raised one of these individuals back into the earthly realm, namely Julia (Clare Higgins), the woman whose lust for good old Uncle Frank proved just as great as Frank’s own deadly desires in the first film. She provides a crucial facet of the story, that of being a romantic foil for Channard. Naturally enough for a Clive Barker creation, sexual magic is as potent as blood magic and both together are irresistible, especially once the hapless Kyle – always far too nice to be anything other than cannon fodder – falls victim to Julia’s thirst for restorative blood. With the young girl Tiffany working to unlock the Lament Configuration, Channard and his partner in lust seem destined to step into the world beyond.
With the rather extensive use of flashback scenes in the first part of the film (perhaps a consequence of the aforementioned financial woes afflicting the production), a fairly coherent narrative is established as the principal characters chart an inevitable course to Hell, the labyrinthine dimension of Leviathan, the great power behind the Lament Configuration. Henceforth, perhaps encouraged by the creative possibilities of a place located beyond the boundaries of our world, things get a little less linear and a touch more chaotic. This state certainly suits the visual concept behind Hell, represented here as a vast Escheresque maze of stone stretching beyond the horizon, shadowed by the monolithic, diamond shaped Leviathan. While you’d be perhaps be forgiven for thinking a visual representation of such a realm would be beyond the set designers of the time, in fact for me they do a pretty good job with the tools at their disposal, in creating a vista in which atmosphere just about manages to outweigh the clunkiness.
Character
motivations now become a little harder to discern, as Julia reveals
her true purpose, presenting Leviathan with another soul in the shape
of her beau Channard, who is then remade as the Doctor Cenobite. This
memorable new creature is umbilically connected to Leviathan,
empowering the former surgeon with more of the tentacular appendages
we saw in the creation of Pinhead at the very beginning. These
bizarre appendages, brought to life with a kind of third-rate
Harryhausen animation style, are like some kind of Swiss Army
knife/worm hybrid – they really have to be seen to be believed –
and aren’t in all honesty the most impressive of weapons, at least in
terms of appearance.
The
Doctor’s charm as a villain lies instead in the way he combines the
Cenobite stylings of leather and scarification with remnants of a
surgeon’s patter, camply declaring ‘I recommend…amputation!’ among
other gems. Whereas Pinhead is a model of icy comportment and moves
as though he has all the time in hell, the Cenobite formerly known as
Channard is all juddering, malformed laughter and ‘What was on the
agenda today? Ah yes, evisceration!’ Certainly he is grotesque and
awful, but also quite amusing.
The film tumbles as if hurricane-blown toward its conclusion, all ham-villainy, gore galore, double-crossing and chases down dead-ends. We get to see Uncle Frank in both his vest-sporting and skinless guises, while Julia too learns that borrowed flesh can easily be returned against her will. Leviathan’s great power seems not to extend to omnipotence within its own realm, something I admit to never having a detailed comprehension of, but then again, in examining Hellbound we are asked to turn a bloodied cheek; to the erratic plot, the general campness and the occasionally shonky visual effects.
It may not make a great deal of sense, but in combining the timeless gothic-gore style of the Cenobites with the lust-addled human element – in all its error strewn and shambling incomprehension – Hellbound: Hellraiser II is a worthy successor to the original and certainly worth a watch at 30 years old.
Power corrupts. Superpowers corrupt absolutely. That’s the message of the 2006 comic series ‘The Boys’ – a 72-issue story arc about superheroes gone bad and the people who fight them, and now a TV series for people who don’t like superheroes, or are at least bored with the current, ever-spawning, squeaky-clean superhero movie franchises.
Except maybe Deadpool. If you like Deadpool,
you’ll probably love The Boys.
The Boys in the original comic are a CIA-sponsored black ops team consisting of a rage-filled, vengeful and manipulative ex-Royal Marine named Billy Butcher; his curiously-named second in command Mother’s Milk, an ex-US military single father of an errant teenage girl and a diminutive, mute and traumatised Asian female assassin-for-hire simply referred to as The Female. The Female, who is prone to horrific uncontrolled outbursts of deadly violence, is taken under the caring wing of ludicrously Gallic and still possibly fake Frenchman (‘Frenchie’) who may or may not have once served in the French Foreign Legion. A clueless, small town Scottish everyman and conspiracy theorist, Hugh Campbell, (nicknamed ‘Wee Hughie’), recruited by Butcher after his fiance is killed in front of him due to the careless actions of a popular superpowered individual named ‘A-Train’, completes the team. Their purpose is to punish and corral the worst behaviour of notoriously degenerate teams of superheroes, all thinly disguised analogues of various Marvel and DC heroes. All ‘supes’ are essentially the latest corporate product and property of a sinister US weapons company named Voight-American, which also has a propaganda arm churning out – you’ve guessed it – endless superhero comics.
The Boys takes the deconstruction of the superhero genre started in the 1980s by Alan Moore’s classic ‘Watchmen’ to its natural end point. The satire is filthy and brutal. Nothing is exempt from mockery. The comic offers barrels of bawdy humour, irreverent dialogue, vastly over-the-top characters, many and varied Anglo Saxon swear words, excessive bloody violence and constant sexual depravity. It plants a mocking kiss right on the forehead of the comics industry itself and raises a jolly middle finger to the corporate world and its machinations. Originally published by the DC Comics adult imprint Wildstorm, it was hastily cancelled and then picked up by Dynamite after the DC head honchos actually bothered to read the first few issues and realised the off-message, anti-superhero and far too brutally adult nature of the beast. The comic even features a personification of the comics industry as a whole in the form of a incredibly sleazy, cynical old man simply named The Legend, who lives in the basement of a comic book shop, knows all the dirt on everyone and hates ‘supes’ quite as much as Billy Butcher.
I’m a longtime fan of creator Garth Ennis’s writing, and The Boys to me is among his best work so I was very curious about how the adaptation to screen would be handled. Would they retain the brutally irreverent nature of the original work? Could they handle the sick humour? In an age of Twitter mobs, ‘cancel culture’ and casual accusations of ‘misogyny’ regardless of intent or narrative context, how would they handle a major part of the story, in which sweet, idealistic Christian ingenue supe Starlight, aka Annie January, is coerced into a humiliating and abusive sexual initiation by the male members of The Seven, Voight’s premier supe team, led by the obvious Captain America/Superman analogue, The Homelander? Would they dare feature the over-endowed Russian superhero Love Sausage or would that be a bridge too far? Would Disney get their knickers in a twist over the soiling-by-association of their various intellectual properties? Would they chicken out and tone everything down? Or would they go there? Let’s find out!
One binge watch later, my overall impression of
the series is that it is a highly enjoyable and quickly darkening story that
takes the plot points of the comics as a jumping off point. There’s less
outright bawdiness, fewer gratuitous sexual moments and a lot more delving into
the various characters’ backstories and their humanity, or lack of it. My one
real disappointment is that Hughie is not the Simon Pegg-lookalike young
Scotsman of the original whose often naive, fish out of water view of the USA
provides some comic moments, but is instead portrayed as a native of New York
city. This is slightly made up for by the fact that Pegg actually appears as
Hughie’s father. Jack Quaid however does a fine job as the meek, unassuming
Hughie, an innocent abroad anyway in the world of supes and the only member of
the team who starts the story with no blood on his hands. Apart from that of
his fiance, of course, in an impressively gory scene which actually matches the
visceral horror of Darrick Robertson’s original art.
The standout performances are from Antony Starr as the Homelander and Karl Urban as his nemesis, Billy Butcher. Urban, who I think often doesn’t get quite the credit he deserves as a actor – he always seems to disappear into a role – is note-perfect, a charismatic man who will give you a bizarre pep talk laden with comical Spice Girls metaphors, but who really harbours a deep-seated rage, and a deadly purpose. There’s a scene in which he brutally murders a physically harmless yet traitorous supe that is chilling in its brute physicality and fury. Just as chilling is Antony Starr’s turn as Homelander. He nails the physical presence and the wholesome, all-American charm of a classic superhero; a charm that instantly evaporates to reveal a petulant, angry and deeply damaged individual when the cameras are off. An individual who is beginning to wonder quite why someone with his powers should be taking orders from lesser mortals. An individual with some rather weird psychosexual issues that are … ah, managed by the Voight vice-president Madelyn Stillwell, as played by the ever-excellent Elizabeth Shue. Nice to see her pop up in something of this quality. Both Homelander and Billy Butcher are ticking timebombs who mirror each other in their violence, anger and their ability to put on a mask that puts others at ease. Their confrontation in the last episode turns certain events in the comics on their heads and I’m very curious to see where they will eventually go with it.
As for the whole Starlight rape issue, well, it’s done rather differently, as one should probably expect in the current era. It’s less gratuitous and involves only the aquatic supe oddity The Deep, rather than the Homelander, A-Train and the rest as in the original comic. Perhaps the whole casting couch analogy hits far too close to home in current Hollywood, as well it should. The grand reveal in the comics of the dirty secret of Starlight’s ascension to The Seven that sends Hughie into a tailspin of judgement and shows Butcher for the manipulative sod he is – and allows Ennis to probe the topic of sexual double standards – doesn’t occur. It’s rather handled as a simple female empowerment arc as Annie/Starlight eventually goes off-script in public to shame The Deep aka Kevin, a strange character played as a mixture of arrogance and complete insecurity by Chace Crawford. Kevin seems oblivious to basic standards of decency when it comes to women, but has an actually quite touching empathy with sea creatures, making him a somewhat more interesting character than just a stupid, one-dimensional rapist type. Interesting take. Tables are eventually turned and indignity upon indignity is piled upon The Deep until he begins to break down. Then there’s that scene with the poor dolphin. Blackly comical, and totally Ennis-ian, but damn.
There’s little to say about Mother’s Milk as played by Laz Alonso except that he IS the MM of the comics. Perfect. Moral, respectable and committed to his family, exactly how I imagined him, down to the way he speaks. Alonso makes the perfect foil to Tomer Kapon’s Eurotrashy Frenchie, whose character is quite wildly different from Ennis’ original work, as he should probably be – what works on the page doesn’t always translate to screen, and Frenchie’s utterly ludicrous speech, although hilarious in the comic doesn’t seem to fit this version of The Boys at all. Instead we are given a vastly toned-down interpretation with a believable backstory. What remains from the comics is his instant empathy with Karen Fukuhara’s The Female. Her backstory has also been vastly expanded from the original comic. She, like Laz Alonso, is pretty much exactly the same visual presence onscreen as in the comics, a ball of tension and murderous misery who starts to soften under Frenchie’s care, but still remains utterly deadly when pointed at the enemy.
Another female character whose role and backstory has been expanded is The Seven’s Wonder Woman analogue, Queen Maeve, played by Dominique McElligott. There does seem to be a focus on giving women more to do than in the comics, down to the gender-swapping of Stillwell which actually works really well, given the fact they actually had a reason other than ‘it’s the current year and by gum, we need more women in stuff’ to justify it via the vital plot point of her relationship with Homelander. Anyway Maeve here is a long way from the totally dissolute, aloof and permanently trashed supe of the original and I do wonder if successive series will hasten her descent into that state before long. As it is, she’s almost too likeable, too lovely even, compared to the jaded ageing blonde with ‘cracks around the edges’ (Butcher) seen in the comics. Her sheer horror at Homelander’s behaviour on that plane (an event that’s actually even way more horrifying in the books, somehow, as a much more pointed 9/11 analogy) seems destined to be the thing that will tip her over the edge.
So, yes, I can say that The Boys lives up to expectations, despite some obvious changes. Sadly no Russian arc featuring Commie hero Love Sausage yet though. One can only hope for season two. Maybe we’ll even get an appearance from Terror, Butcher’s dog (geddit) next season? More importantly I really have to wonder where that final plot-twist is going. Hopefully not into tedious marital soap opera, but judging by the quality of this first season, there doesn’t seem to be much chance of that.
We often exclaim, or hear others exclaim, ‘They don’t make ‘em like that any more!’ Call it sentimentality, rose-tinted spectacles, or plain old nostalgia; whatever you call it, the audience for stories refracted through the lens of retro-appreciation is huge these days. Listing various works of the small or big screen that tap into this desire is hardly necessary, so frequently are the devices of nostalgic product placement and faithfully detailed cultural recollection employed. Therein lies a great deal of the charm of one of my personal favourite Hammer Horrors – the adaptation of Dennis Wheatley’s novel The Devil Rides Out. The film turned 51 years old this July and is itself set in the 1920s. So go ahead and remove the lens of modernity, the self-referential irony and all traces of contemporary social politics. This is a story of good old-fashioned Satanic ritual and derring-do, set among the leafy lanes of the British countryside, and is simply great fun.
The tale begins with the meeting of two of our heroes. The Duc de Richleau (Christopher Lee), protagonist of several of Wheatley’s novels, greets old pal Rex Van Ryn (Leon Greene), freshly arrived via twin-seater biplane. They are planning a reunion with a third man, Simon Arron (Patrick Mower), their charge since the death of Simon’s father, an old companion, some years beforehand. Simon is however not there to meet them and as they settle into the Duc’s Rolls-Royce, he brings Rex up to date. Simon has not been seen or heard of for several months. Instinctively sensing trouble, the Duc instructs his driver to take them to Simon’s recently-purchased house.
They arrive at Simon’s rather splendid new country home, which features a domed rooftop observatory set against an ominously clouded sky. Heralded by the warning notes of the splendid and distinctive score, they step inside. It becomes apparent they have arrived in the middle of some kind of soiree. The guests are formally attired, standing around chatting in small groups while being waited upon by servants bearing silver platters. Rex and Richleau locate Simon, who is clearly disturbed to see his friends but he breaks away from conversation with two of his guests to greet them, a friendly grin swiftly replacing his unsettled expression.
It turns
out that Simon has joined an ‘astrological society’ and is hosting a meeting of
the group. He introduces the Duc and Rex to two of their number, a Mr Mocata
(Charles Gray) and the sultry Tanith Carlisle (Nike Arighi). Although a look of
recognition passes between Rex and Tanith, Mocata swiftly leads Simon away for
a private word. The Duc senses they will be asked to leave and he and Rex take
the opportunity to move among the assembled guests and listen in on their
conversation before they are ejected. The guests seem to be discussing matters
of astrological import and tantalisingly, something more…
As
predicted, Simon returns from his conversation with Mocata and awkwardly ushers
them out on the pretext of this important – and private – meeting of his
society being about to begin, but the Duc has other ideas and diverts straight
up a flight of stone steps to view the observatory they spied upon their
arrival. Instantly, he recognises that the charts on the wall are anything but
astrological. The design in the centre of the circular room’s floor features
the Sabbatic Goat. Most damning of all, a persistent scratching sound is
revealed to be a basket containing two chickens, one white hen and a black
cockerel, captured in preparation for sacrifice – no surer sign of the practice
of black magic could exist. The Duc confronts Simon, who denies everything, but
before he can raise help from his guests downstairs, Richleau’s right-hand
punch renders the younger man unconscious. Rex shoulders his friend’s body and
they make their escape, Mocata glowering behind them.
The groundwork has thus been laid for a good old-fashioned battle between good and evil, as Rex and the Duc seek to keep their friend and the winsome Tanith from the clutches of Mocata and his well-heeled acolytes. Lantern-jawed Rex, recalling the likes of Roger Moore, is a combination of bumbling sceptic and dashing man of action. He whisks Tanith away in what develops into a memorable vintage car chase through winding country lanes, far more comfortable in such a role than as an uncomprehending sidekick to the esoterically educated Richleau. The Duc meanwhile takes himself off to London in order to conduct research into the occult practices of Mocata and his purple robed minions. Upon his return he enlists the help of his niece Marie and her husband Richard, as they face the inevitable onslaught from Mocata. Richleau’s study of occult doctrine is put to good use as he attempts to ward off the Angel of Death and Baphomet, amongst others. The scenes in which our heroes seal themselves within a magic circle and face off against the dark sorceries of Mocata is one of several classic set pieces throughout the story.
With capable support all round and a charismatic villain, played with cold and steely presence by the glacier-blue eyed Charles Gray of Blofeld fame; filmed amid lush green English countryside with its opulent manors and mansions; replete with supernatural chills and thrills; The Devil Rides Out is a gloriously enjoyable romp. In particular Christopher Lee is marvellously cast as the indefatigable Duc de Richleau. It was a role he apparently enjoyed more than any other in his career and it is indeed wonderful to see him bring his own unique screen presence and gravitas to bear in a heroic capacity for once. On top of that there are several areas of interest for those who like their music metal and occult in tone – the film’s distinctive Baphomet imagery has been adopted by doom legends Electric Wizard and the wonderfully bombastic score was adapted by super group Fantomas for their movie music-themed record The Director’s Cut.
All in
all, The Devil Rides Out offers a hugely enjoyable 90 minutes of pure escapism,
with roots in an era free from the affectations of modernity and any
contemporary need for validation. A film that reminds us how much fun raising
the Devil can be.
With the weather in this country finally starting to resemble the heat and humidity of last year, summer, it seems, is finally well underway. Swiftly following on from the critically-praised Midsommar is a second piece of folk-horror for these warmer months. But while Ari Aster’s film is replete with the fertile imagery of flowers and feasts and white-clad maidens dancing in the Scandinavian sunlight, William McGregor’s Gwen utilises a very different, rather unseasonal atmosphere. Set among the beautiful yet austere mountains of Snowdonia in Wales during the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, the landscape is heavy with a brooding sense of foreboding, which culminates in the stark narrative of this gothic-toned production.
Gwen (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) is a girl still, not quite
yet a woman. As the oldest daughter she is both the main support to her
struggling mother Elen (Maxine Peake) and friend and playmate to her young
sister Mari. Although tender in years, for Gwen adulthood looms large, in the
form of her duties upon the small farm she tends with her mother. With the
father away at war – his return hoped for, but without any recent contact a
seemingly distant prospect – life is a daily struggle. The times she plays with
Mari offer brief moments to enjoy some vestige of a carefree childhood, but
these are as scarce as the reward for their long hours of toil upon the cold
and muddy slopes of the Snowdonian hills.
Where once the valley they resided in was home to three families and their small flocks of sheep and humble crops of vegetables, the recent death of the Griffith family – struck down by cholera – means Gwen, her sister and mother are all that remains of the farming community in those hills. Much of the surrounding populace are now employed in the mining of the distinctive grey slate that is such a common sight in Snowdonia to this day. The mining industry is the true source of wealth in this part of the world, and with the guaranteed work in factories as well luring more and more people from subsistence on the land, Elen and her family increasingly seem to be regarded as outsiders by their own community. Under pressure from the glowering Mr Wynne (played by who else but Mark Lewis Jones), who repeatedly attempts to buy the farm to give the land over to industry, the beleaguered Elen is struck down by illness. Despite the well-meaning advice of the mine-employed doctor, for young Gwen there is no question of leaving their home – they simply must keep the farm running ready for her father’s return.
With Elen weak from illness and exhibiting increasingly
erratic behaviour, and with the twin threats of Mr Wynne and failing crops, it
is no wonder Gwen often wakes in fear of an intruder, or suffers vivid
nightmares. Increasingly it seems as though there may be a malign presence out
there in the windswept darkness.
Where Midsommer focused on a vibrant community, engaged in bright and colourful fertility rituals with no small amount of social cohesion, Gwen is concerned with a very different scenario. Always beneath the stare of icy peaks, surrounded by windswept expanses of cold grass and black rock; with a shroud of dark cloud that seems to hover just above the hills; this is an oppressive landscape that serves only to heighten the sense of an imminent catastrophe. People seem sullen and indifferent to Gwen and her family’s situation, even as she takes the farm’s meagre produce to market and battles to uphold the duties of her bedridden mother. The more we see of Mr Wynne, the more likely it seems that he and his thugs are prepared to go beyond verbal offers to secure the farm. Gwen is old enough to see what happened to the Griffiths and read into the nature of her mother’s hushed but heated conversations with Mr Wynne. Is some agency, human or otherwise, working to destroy her family? Are her nightmares prophetic, or merely the product of a child’s imagination?
Director William McGregor has made a name for himself by employing Britain’s rural landscapes as a hallmark of his work, and in Gwen his appreciation of the power of the Welsh mountains as a storytelling device is obvious. There are numerous lingering shots of the dark-hued valleys, whether of the small house Gwen and her family live in, set against dark sky, or the horizontal lines carved across the landscape by the slate miners, who themselves appear indistinguishable and industrious as ants as they go about their labour. Often these shots are silent apart from the sound of the wind. To once again draw comparison with Midsommar, Ari Aster’s preference for strident use of the film’s score is in direct contrast to the style of McGregor. Often he uses silence, rather than sound, in a way that draws the senses further into the scene, inviting us to search for meaning written in the landscape. A sense of mystery soon to be unveiled, indeed possibly hidden among the details of the physical geography, pervades throughout.
For all that we are impressed by Gwen’s maturity and
determination to keep her family home, it is hard not to be concerned for her
plight, so tightly do the hills and clouds encircle her, so unrelenting is the
air of gloom that lies upon them all. Indeed, this film works well on two
levels – a gothic tale of haunted landscapes and memories and also as a piece
of social history, documenting a time of huge change across Britain as the
industrial era saw a shift away from a rural life toward one centred around the
factory and the mine. Certainly, there is a sense of inevitability that infuses
proceedings. Gwen’s family is caught between the immovable object of the
mountains and the weather, and the unstoppable force of change that swept over
Wales and elsewhere during the 19th century.
For all its historical context, it is the human component that resonates most strongly and the central performances are key to this. Gwen herself is beautifully played by Eleanor Worthington-Cox, who manages to demonstrate the character’s vulnerability, toughness, resolve and fearfulness all at once. Forced to grow up before her time, to work the land and care for her ailing mother as well as her young sister, she elicits both our sympathy and our admiration. Elen, looking like a woman worn thin by her own battles, serves as a warning to Gwen, a reminder of what the forces seemingly aligned against them can do to someone over the years. Maxine Peake brings both a sense of frailty and of ferocity to the character of Gwen’s mother, a woman who, despite her debilitating illness, lights up with an inner fire in defence of her daughters and their home. Elsewhere Mark Lewis Jones delivers his stock-in-trade performance as Mr Wynne and Kobna Holbrook-Smith offers a small yet much needed element of humanity as Doctor Wren.
Beautifully shot and sympathetically told, Gwen is a stark, sometimes chilling tale of life at a time when folklore and tradition were being swept aside by the forces of socio-economic change, but for all that the land is sometimes cruel and seemingly haunted by dark spirits, perhaps in fact it is man himself who stalks the valleys; who is monstrous of deed and the true agent of misfortune.
Nowadays there is a kind of movement or at least prevailing school of thought that seems to be infusing through certain echelons of horror filmmaking. A school of thought that would prefer to see the genre transcend its lowly place as a parade of predictable distractions, to instead be regarded as the perfect medium for meaningful reflection upon the dark side of human nature. If this could be said to be a reaction to the proliferation of ‘torture porn’, cheapo found footage slashers and the like, what happens when you look at the flipside to all this post-modernist interpretation?
Clowns is
what happens.
As we all know, clowns are just plain horrible, creepy and sanity threatening. Pennywise, John Wayne Gacy, Ronald McDonald; clowns are, in their gleeful mockery of our collective grip on reality, in no need of any leg-up from the validation brigade. Much like the court jester of old, in their shambling, capering turns they throw our sensibilities into disarray, turn our considered proclamations into gibberish and take our childish delight to turn it into the laughter of hyenas at the kill.
While it is certainly great to see a new generation of passionate advocates for horror, who believe in the genre’s occasionally underappreciated depths, we should never forget that what drew most of us to the medium in the first place were the feelings of being disturbed, shocked and appalled by something that flips our cosy reality on its head just because it can. Something without a backstory and seemingly motiveless beyond a kind of joyful malevolence. Enter the fray one Art the Clown, protagonist of 2016 slasher Terrifier. Developed from a 2011 short of the same name from director Damien Leone via 2013’s All Hallow’s Eve, Terrifier may occupy the murky territory of the ‘cult favourite’ and therefore maintain a certain reductionist vibe, but give credit where it’s due; this is unapologetically nasty, gratuitously brutish and fortunately, at 82 minutes long, reasonably short.
Terrifier
begins with an interview taken from a kind of late night TV current affairs
show, which turns out to be an interview with the only survivor of the Miles
County Massacre. In surviving the killing spree that night she suffered hideous
facial injuries, leaving her looking much like a twin to Hannibal’s Mason Verger. Watching the programme on his own old
television set is Art himself. Upon hearing of his own supposed death he
destroys the TV, applies his black and white clown’s make-up and assembles a
crude set of ominous looking old tools. Art the Clown is back for more – that
much is clear.
After this
mildly intriguing start, Terrifier continues with a solid entry into the
slasher trope library – enter the obviously soon-to-be victims. Tara and Dawn
are in boozy form and heading home after a night on the tiles. While they argue
over who will drive, who should appear on the corner but Art, fully dressed in
his baggy monochrome clown suit, black plastic sack thrown over his shoulder.
He menaces the girls with his sinister stare and they retreat to the safety of
a late night pizza joint. As they wait for their food, guess who flops down on
to a table opposite – yes, you-know-who. In the bright light of the pizzeria we
can fully appreciate the preternatural wrongness of Art; his Punch the puppet
features, blood-filthy teeth and tattered gloves offset by the jauntily angled
hat and perversions of friendly clown gestures. The silent rogue tolerates one
of the girls sitting on his lap taking mocking selfies, but finally the pizza
parlour’s custodian decides to do the girls a good turn and moves to eject the
clown, who has nipped off to the men’s room, from his premises. Commotion
ensues as the owner bundles Art out of the door, yelling that the mute villain
has committed some form of abomination in the toilet. With his face a mask of
mock surprise, he catches his bag of tools as it is thrown at him by the
outraged vendor. With a menacing wave he retreats into the night…
So the scene is set for the kind of cat-and-mouse scenario that provides the framework for a series of stalkings, creepings and frenzied attacks. The female characters are from the classic school of slasher flicks; they mainly hide and scream and for some unknown reason seem to think that beseeching the killer clown who is hunting them to ‘please stop’ is going to have some kind of effect. We have a few incidental characters to add to the trio of young female victims; the pest control guy who plays the roles of both a red herring and potential hero, and the strange woman in the basement who believes her daughter – a grim faced Victorian era doll – is ‘alive.’
Of course
there are a number of grisly scenes, mainly carried out with decent quality low
budget effects, as wanton, gratuitous and bloody as you like. One in
particular, if not always carried out with the most grittily realistic of body
props, is at least certainly a damned horrible way to go. Art conducts his
various stabbings, slashings and sawings with crazed determination, a contrast
to his almost measured display of silent clownish gestures. At times his sense
of humour is very much from the Freddy Krueger school of serial killer japery.
Randomly describing pointless circles on a tiny child’s trike as one of his trembling
prey watches on from the shadows, or in one of the most disturbing/ridiculous
moments, conducting a preening, strutting mince while ‘dressed’ in various body
parts harvested from a female victim.
Without a shadow of a doubt, Art the Clown is the main event in Terrifier. David Howard Thornton apparently has experience in mime artistry and it really shows – his poses in the early scenes in the pizza parlour are textbook. His mock surprise as he is bundled out after an extensive ‘dirty protest’ in the bathroom is almost funny. Frankly, Art is one horrible looking mutha, his intentions are so obviously malign that the idea anyone would tolerate him staring at them, yet alone try and take a selfie with him, is laughable. But of course you don’t need to start pulling apart the plot with these films; they are set up to provide an entertaining villain with as much opportunity to do his thing and end his victims’ struggles in as many revolting ways as possible.
I won’t claim to be an aficionado of the low budget slasher sub-genre, but Terrifier has grimness and gore aplenty and a well designed, well performed killer clown who is as creepy looking as they come. The thin plot and general predictability are no surprise, the lame female characters seem somewhat out of place in today’s political climate, but then again these types of film exist because they can. Because it is in their nature to act as the unrepentant, defiant counterpoint to any contemporary sense of equality, any notion of worthiness and humanity that others may utilise to broaden the spectrum of horror’s appeal. Without killer clowns and their ilk mindlessly running about causing unseemly chaos for the pure fun of it, horror would be like an army without foot-soldiers.
For the first part of Matt’s special feature on Mike Flanagan, click here.
For Keri’s feature on The Haunting of Hill House, click here.
‘What struck me the most is that I think grief is such a universal experience that when we were in the writers’ room, every one of the writers at the table had their own perspective on it that came to bear with this, and that’s something that jumped out immediately that yeah, when you talk about ghosts and you talk about what gothic horror can do, this is an incredible opportunity to really lean face first into some of the saddest and darkest things that we all deal with.’ (Mike Flanagan on The Haunting Of Hill House).
If Mike Flanagan’s output since 2011 helped to establish a certain template – reverence for classic literary horror, preoccupation with family and the after-effects of trauma – then landing the adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s classic The Haunting Of Hill House on Netflix would provide the team at Flanagan Films the perfect opportunity to expand upon those themes which had become so central to their oeuvre.
Apart from the challenge of expanding a novel into a television series, in fact Jackson’s 1959 gothic horror novel had already been the subject of two adaptations. The first, Robert Wise’s 1963 The Haunting, was broadly well-received by critics and despite a modest box office showing has long been highly-regarded by the likes of Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, while Wise also received a Golden Globe nomination for his directorial role.
Spielberg and Stephen King actually joined forces in the early Nineties, in an attempt to remake the story under the name Red Rose, but despite working on the project for several years, it was mutually shelved due to creative differences between the two – King apparently wanting more horror and Spielberg more action. Toward the end of the decade came the 1999 remake of The Haunting, starring Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta-Jones. This was poorly received by critics and audiences alike and was eventually lampooned in the Scary Movie franchise.
It was the Robert Wise version, though, that proved influential to Mike Flanagan and as such, presented the first hurdle in considering any retelling of his own. How could he improve upon what he regarded as ‘a near perfect’ adaptation? In the end it is his status as a fan, first and foremost, that most deeply informs his skills of reinterpretation. A genuine love for the material, cultivated since reading the novel as a young man and presumably viewing the Wise version in a similar time-frame, seems to have driven the decision to craft an original piece that not only offers the potential for contemporary mores but also preserves the purity of the original. Flanagan describes his take on the Hill House story as a ‘reverent remix.’ He takes a fan’s-eye view of his favourite scenes, themes, lines of prose and so on and expands upon these threads, weaving them into a new whole and extruding a new form from the raw material of the source text.
Having experienced similar pressures in the making of Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game, Flanagan chose to continue to work with a number of actors, as well as behind-the-scenes team members, with whom he had worked in the past. Describing the process of creating Hill House as the toughest assignment of his career to date, the reliance upon a family-like group seems to have encouraged a depth of approach that greatly assisted the expansion of the themes hinted at by Shirley Jackson.
The Crain family, like other families, are at once a collective entity and a group of individuals. They find their own paths in the world beyond Hill House, but for all that they have flown their nest in very different directions, so they are all ultimately linked by the shared experience of family. Hill House, as hungry for souls as the day matriarch Olivia fell into its hungry maw, is as patient in those dark woods as the inevitability of our own connections to family. Our shared histories and their intertwining roots lead deeper and deeper into the bedrock of the past, to drink from the dark forgotten depths where emotions and energies are drawn; waters that feed the constant blooming of future life. Not all of these waters are healthy in their nature though, and the poisonous taint of some of them seem to gather within the very walls of the old house.
Is the house less a malign entity than a conduit or receptacle for uncounted years of human fear and pain? Are the demons and insecurities that afflict those that dwell within its walls merely amplified by the place, or has it grown over the years like some vast parasite, feeding upon the tragedy and trauma that occurs beneath its roof? In the end humanity, exemplified here by the Crain family, must find a way to live with its shadow side. For to attempt to destroy this facet would be to attempt to destroy human nature itself, with its joys, loves and victories built upon countless strata of memory and emotion, passed from generation to generation. Our true family inheritance.
‘I was so taken with getting to spend time with Danny Torrance again. It touches on themes that are the most attractive to me, which are childhood trauma leading into adulthood, addiction, the breakdown of a family, and the after effects, decades later. It really speaks to a lot of my favourite stuff, so I was really, really fascinated by the possibility of being able to play in that world.’ (Mike Flanagan on the making of Doctor Sleep).
A year on from Hill House and if one thing is for certain, it is that the writers, actors, producers and many others that comprise Mike Flanagan’s creative family are embracing ever greater challenges in their efforts to bring truly relevant storytelling to an increasingly expectant audience. While he may have described his previous work as his toughest challenge to date it is very much a case of ‘that was then, this is now’ for Mike Flanagan. Already proven as someone equally brave and adept when it comes to adapting the work of luminaries such as Stephen King and Shirley Jackson, he has thrown himself into a new project which seeks to combine and update not only King’s work but also the unforgettable cinema of another legend – Stanley Kubrick.
Doctor Sleep, slated for an autumn of 2020 release, will act as an adaptation not only of King’s novel of the same name but also an intertwining of the two versions of The Shining that have become so revered in their respective fields. Rather than merely aiming to bring the Doctor Sleep story to the screen, the intention is to nod to Kubrick’s own reworking while being mindful of King’s specific vision. This of course, meant getting approval from not only King – an avowed fan of Flanagan’s previous adaptation of his work as well as Hill House – but also the Kubrick estate. Successfully sending his script to both parties for evaluation surpassed the Hill House production as the new zenith of Flanagan’s career to date, especially considering King’s well-established antipathy toward the Kubrick version. Therein lay, to quote Flanagan, ‘the source of every ulcer we’ve had for the last two years.’ Spinning plates of this magnitude – balancing not just the desire and vision of the original creators but the demands and hopes of the fans of both iterations – means the eyes of the world will be upon the finished piece in greater number than ever. Coupled with this is that the Kubrick version has attained virtual iconographic status in the nigh-on forty years since its release.
There aren’t too many cinematic releases that can claim such a presence within the collective consciousness. Ridley’s Scott’s Alien franchise comes to mind as a series of films defined by the source material to such an extent that latter day deviations from the ‘classic’ material resulted in much wailing and gnashing of teeth, despite the attempt to align the Alien mythology with the concerns of a contemporary audience. Will the Flanagan trademark of combining classic tropes with universal human themes act as the glue that binds the disparate elements together, or ultimately water down the visceral impact and teeth-grinding tension? Conversely will the efforts to both pay homage – the addition of numerous ‘Easter eggs’ has already been mooted – and satisfy a certain prerequisite for scares, both psychological and physical, overpower any humanist element woven into the narrative?
At this point, all we can do is wait and see, although industry murmurings seem positive and with Netflix announcing the ordering of another new series (Midnight Mass) from regular collaborators Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy, the momentum seems set to gather for the foreseeable future. For those of us who have followed the works of Mike Flanagan and his collaborators and seen that is it possible to give an audience brain-rattling scares and deeper meaning at the same time, we will surely be hoping for the best for his new ventures. For by approaching horror as more than a mere fairground ride of jumps and frights that can be timed on a stopwatch and delivered to order, Flanagan and co have shown the potential to reinvigorate and re-purpose the genre for an ever-changing world.
Roky Erickson’s passing on May 31st rightly saw a wave of recognition from those touched by his life and works. Musicians especially have been quick to acknowledge the influence of his band, The 13th Floor Elevators, as progenitors of psychedelic and garage rock, as well as Erickson himself as a shining example of the wild energy of underground music in the formative days of its rise into the heart of the Sixties countercultural explosion. The story of Roky Erickson is well-known in broad terms but to a degree that, to me at least, still feels somewhat underappreciated. His life was like the tale of the Sixties encapsulated in one man; the raw, naive idealism and hedonism that swept like a wave across America and the Western world in particular, eventually breaking apart on the savage rocks of the Establishment, the Moral Majority and the Seventies.
The notion of the Psychedelic itself, the tripped out, mind-expanding kaleidoscope of energy from that era, was never completely destroyed. It merely became more diffuse, surviving and gradually infusing itself throughout multitudinous sub-cultural tropes in the decades that followed. Roky Erickson, whose light shone so brightly and whose subsequent downfall felt like a retributive strike from the conservative hegemony (in fact on some level it probably was), did not stay down but rather fought on and on and did enough to make a lasting impression on many of today’s musicians. Witness for example, Chelsea Wolfe’s rendition of ‘Night Of The Vampire’ or Joshua Homme’s words on social media upon news of the great man’s death – ‘I believe in Roky Erickson.’
Despite
the admiration of such high profile musicians, a quick look at IMDB reveals
that You’re Gonna Miss Me, Keven McAlester’s 2005 film about Erickson, has a
little over 900 ratings. Compared to some other music documentaries, for
example Dig! (over 5000), A Band Called Death (over 3000) and The Devil &
Daniel Johnston (over 8000), it seems as though this story has perhaps not
fallen on the same number of ears as the music and influence deserves. If you
have an interest in acid culture, the Sixties counterculture or the ongoing
story of psychedelic rock ‘n’ roll; or if a tale that combines the tragic
demise of Syd Barrett with the plot of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest sounds
appealing – then you really should give this film a chance.
It essentially has two distinct elements, the most expected being a recounting of the saga of The 13th Floor Elevators. To this end we hear from a host of ‘originals’; from drummer John Ike Walton, whose experiences with LSD led to him quitting the band, to Erickson’s ex-wife Dana, as well as other luminaries such as Powell St.John, Chet Helm and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top.
The
Elevators formed in the fertile Austin scene in 1965 when Roky Erickson left
his first band The Spades and joined up with future bandmates including
lyricist and jug player Tommy Hall and (still criminally underrated) guitarist
Stacy Sutherland. By the autumn of the following year they were touring the
West Coast and subsequently released their first album The
Psychedelic Sounds Of The 13th Floor Elevators, a huge
favourite of the countercultural movement. A raw slice of garage rock and the
newly coined ‘psychedelic’ rock, it is also notable for Hall’s sleevenotes,
which espouse the use of drugs to ‘chemically alter [mankind’s] mental state’
on a ‘quest for pure sanity.’
Despite
the success of their debut, follow up Easter Everywhere was, despite
being widely regarded as their best work, not enough to repeat the national
success of its predecessor. The band’s use of drugs, notably LSD and peyote,
saw drummer John Ike Walton and bassist Ronnie Leatherman leave and by 1968
they were having to perform without Erickson due to his frequent
hospitalisations, including an eventual diagnosis of schizophrenia. While his
use of psychedelic drugs is well documented, Erickson also fell victim to that
old musician’s scourge, heroin. His excesses with both drugs were becoming a
thing of local legend, much to chagrin of the local police. So it was that law
enforcement came down hard on the singer. Arrested for possession of a
‘matchbox’ of marijuana, the erratic frontman found himself being sent to Rusk
State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. For a man described by first wife
Dana as ‘just a little boy’, known in earlier years for his unfailing
politeness and innocent charm, this was a heavy-handed gesture to say the
least.
Erickson’s former psychiatric doctor recounts how his charge was a quiet presence who seemed content simply to write music, which he noted down in a legal pad as he sat in the hospital corridors. Eventually, galvanised by his presence, a collection of inmates decided to form a band of their own. Alongside the musician were a collection of murderers, rapists and violent offenders. ‘You tell me how that makes sense,’ asks Dr X. ‘Because it doesn’t.’ There were more than just potentially uncomfortable associations to come for Roky though, as Doctors chose to treat his psychosis with a combination of forced electric shock treatment and thorazine injections. It would be four years before he was finally released.
Interspersed with the recounting of this story, we are also shown the results of years of dubious diagnosis, ongoing drug and mental problems and ineffective treatments. Roky in person, or rather, to borrow another eccentric artist’s nomenclature, The Non-Artist Formerly Known As Roky Erickson is by now living amid a sea of electronic sound-emitting equipment, from musical keyboards and toys to television sets and alarms; a cacophonous cloud of white noise and bleeps and static hiss. This is the only environment in which Roky, now a portly, shuffling but harmless individual of 53 or so, can find the mental quietude that allows him to sleep. The only person he answers to is his mother Evelyn. She is an interesting lady herself; indeed in some way the film is as much about her as it is about Roky. A chance, as she herself puts it early in the film, to give her own side of the story, after ‘being judged for my sons.’
Evelyn’s story is recounted by her using a collection of large cardboard displays of photos, hand written notes and assorted ephemera that she had created over the years in an attempt, she admits, to reassure herself she had done the right thing as a mother to five sons. Marrying young, she gave her best years to her boys, of whom Roky was the oldest, with a gap of around twenty years to youngest son Sumner. Physically and mentally exhausted after Sumner’s birth, and faced with a husband who simply refused to talk to her, she gave up alcohol and ‘withdrew sexually’, choosing instead to focus for once upon her own recuperation and spiritual growth. Her devotion to her sons was however such that she inevitably became warden to Roky in the years, beginning around 1980, when increasingly he turned away from music and inwards to his tangled thoughts and impenetrable inner logic.
In the decade following his release from Rusk and legal readmission into the ranks of the ‘sane’, Erickson continued to pursue his music, his heart’s desire and his unfortunate predilection for drugs, but the previous years of substance abuse, heavy treatment and confinement had left him prone to paranoid delusions. Perhaps chief among these was the infamous notion that he had been inhabited by a Martian, thus rendering him an alien and furthermore an ongoing victim of psychic attack by humankind. There were failed marriages that in their brief terms saw lucidity and structure inevitably dissolve. The mind of Roky Erickson began to seek some kind of predictable pattern in the lives of others, as he developed an obsession with the post, one time even being arrested for taking his neighbour’s mail into his house in huge quantities (the charges were later dropped after he pleaded that he didn’t actually open any of it).
Eventually he stopped taking his psychiatric medication – something he had been prone to do all along. In this he was supported by his mother Evelyn, who believed (not unreasonably) that drugs ‘hide your real feelings’ and that a clean living, spiritually rewarding life could help Roky live with some modicum of independence. For several of the other Erickson boys, this behaviour was symptomatic of the overly controlling behaviour of their mother from the early stages in their lives. Perhaps the most disgruntled was Sumner, the youngest, who had virtually become estranged from Evelyn and had made it his one goal as a young man to leave the Erickson household and move as far away as possible. In future years he made a success of his own life in music, as a classically trained tuba player. He never forgot his oldest brother, but his desires to have meaningful contact foundered upon his ever-strained relationship with his mother.
The childhood home was an environment that evidently left a lasting impression upon several of the sons. Chaos and clutter abounded. The pool a stagnant green puddle, the yard a confusion of abandoned junk and overgrown plant life. The kitchen a playground to rats until the lights were turned on, the cats and dogs of the house scrambling over each other and around anyone wanting to make food. Given Evelyn’s own cluttered home, filled with musical instruments, endless letters, paintings and photographs, Roky’s own junk-filled abode seems to have less roots in his psychic turmoil than we initially assume. On a darker note, brother Don, who himself admits to struggles with alcoholism and an attempt to commit suicide in the late Eighties, refers obliquely to his mother telling him of seeing his father alone in the bedroom with one of the other boys. It’s a memory he chose not to pursue, deciding to leave the unknown horrors of his mother’s partially formed revelation buried in the depths of the past.
Finally, in the pivotal act of the film, the past and present lives of the Erickson brood converge. As Evelyn dips her toes in the flowing waters of a nearby river, Sumner and accompanying officers of the law swoop and persuade Roky to leave with them. This repatriation to Sumner’s home in Pittsburgh, for all the shock waves caused within the family itself, provides an opportunity for something that at one time seemed at best an impossible dream. Afforded the proper treatment, both in terms of modern psychiatric medicine and for his potentially fatal dental ailments, and crucially now resident within the stable environment of his youngest brother’s home, Roky Erickson defies every expectation of a tragic ending, and returns to health and amazingly, to his music.
In the last 15 years of the Roky Erickson story, he would return to the recorded and live arenas on many occasions. In 2015 in Texas, he took to the stage with Tommy Hall (the jug playing psychedelic guru whose absence from the entirety of You’re Gonna Miss Me is its most glaring omission), John-Ike Walton, Ronnie Leatherman and his own son Jegar. The 13th Floor Elevators defied time and any kind of reasonable logic to perform again, over 50 years since their fiery heyday. A remarkable twist in the story of a man who seemed to live many lives during his time on earth; loving son, interdimensional voyager, wayward parent. One of the founding fathers of psychedelic music and the spirit animal for countless like-minded experimental musicians the world over. No matter how enduring the man himself, he who returned again and again from so many trials, the musical legacy of Roger Kynard ‘Roky’ Erickson will surely continue long into the future. I will leave the last word to a contemporary of Roky’s, a certain Doctor of Journalism and fellow psychedelic traveller;
‘History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.’ (Hunter S.Thompson).
‘The stories aren’t about horror, they’re about challenging ideas, confronting our darkest natures, and facing universal fears.’
Part 1: Absentia to Gerald’s Game
Mike Flanagan is a name you could reasonably describe as ‘hot’ among fans of screen horror. The self-confessed Stephen King nut recently declared a wrap on shooting for his second full-length adaptation of the famed writer’s work. Following on from Gerald’s Game in 2017 is Doctor Sleep, itself a sequel of sorts to Kubrick’s classic rendering of King’s 1977 novel The Shining. If the weight of expectation surrounding such a venture wasn’t daunting enough, this is also Flanagan’s biggest project to date in the eight years since his breakthrough full-length Absentia. However for anyone with an eye on the progress of the showrunner behind Netflix hit The Haunting Of Hill House, it will seem as though this is merely the continuation of a smooth ascent into the upper echelons of silver screen horror for the Salem-born director.
Is it reasonable then, to assume that Flanagan must have a keen eye for what sells tickets and for what studios want when they agonise over where to spend their dollars? On one hand, yes, he has been quietly successful and well-received for a string of modestly budgeted successes. However it is his persistent admiration of the human potential of horror, his refusal to ‘dumb down’ or resort to the well-used and abused tropes that infuse so much mainstream fodder, that has seen his star rise. Could it even be possible that he can also help to raise the notion of the worthiness, depth and importance of horror, that oft-maligned, lampooned and at times almost contemptuously disregarded branch of fictional entertainment?
Although the seeds for Flanagan’s success were sewn back in 2006 when his short Oculus: Chapter 3 garnered positive attention on the indie circuit, it was the 2011 release Absentia that marked his first major directorial step. Made for an estimated $70,000 budget, Absentia is in fact a great example of what has become recognisable as ‘a Mike Flanagan film’. Although there is a supernatural ‘monster’ of sorts – which remains virtually unwitnessed throughout and is referred to only speculatively – the overarching themes here are of loss and grief, hope and despair. The main characters include a heavily pregnant single woman and her sister, herself a one-time drug addict and runaway. The two are reunited when the latter rejoins her sister, who has been forced to declare her long missing partner legally dead (‘In Absentia’, to use the legal terminology).
Flanagan draws together a dark web of loss, regret and forlorn love. Through the speculation of the characters, he suggests a link to mythologies throughout human history in which individuals mysteriously disappear from their loved ones. With Absentia, he gives this realm of accumulated human pain – what spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle might refer to as the ‘pain body’ – an actual physical manifestation. No matter how resilient man and womankind might be, this shadowy realm seems to persist as an inevitable underside to the human experience.
2013 saw Flanagan’s 2006 short emerge as a fully fledged horror
film, named simply Oculus. This film delves into the dark history of a seemingly
malevolent looking glass, that causes those who gaze upon it to experience
nightmarish hallucinations and eventually enact bloody murder. This is perhaps
a more genre-typical use of a haunted or possessed object, but it is humanity’s
own dark character that is the food upon which the mirror hungrily feeds. The
mirror suggests the infinitesimal meta-realities of the individual human
experience, each person seeing their own subtly distorted version of reality.
In this instance the mirror wreaks havoc upon a young family – family being
another preoccupation of Flanagan’s work. The two young children grow up and
finally unite to try and destroy the mirror in a sharply directed, clever and
satisfyingly scary horror.
2016 was a busy year for Flanagan, with three releases. Hush,
which stars his wife Katie Speigel (who also co-wrote), sees fresh life
injected into the slasher flick, via the crucial use of perspective change. In
this case we see and most importantly, ‘hear’ the world from the point of view
of Maddie, a deaf-mute woman who lives alone in relative isolation. Despite the
temptation to shoot entirely sound-free, Flanagan and Spiegel opt to drop the
sound at certain moments, thereby showing the proximity of the killer to Maddie
even as she goes about her evening activities blissfully unawares. Much of the
script was developed in Flanagan and Speigel’s own home, allowing them to
literally walk through the potential scenarios in the script. The use of the
domestic setting succeeds in connecting us – likely as we are to be watching
the film in our own homes – with the peril Maddie finds herself in. We see her
preparing food as the killer stands pressed against the window behind her, we
want to reach out, to shout, but in some ways we are as helpless as Maddie
initially appears, before she eventually triumphs through sheer will and
determination to survive.
Before I Wake is perhaps less an outright horror than a
supernatural fantasy. Again Flanagan bases his tale within a very specific
family dynamic, this time telling the story of an 8 year-old boy named Cody who
starts a new life with foster parents who had previously lost their own young
son in an accidental drowning. From the very first night in his new home, the
sleeping Cody appears to manifest incredible visions, which later begin to
include the couple’s own deceased son. While Cody’s ability to manifest his
dreams entrances his new foster mother, who sees her birth son before her every
night as though he is real, Cody also experiences nightmares. From within these
bad dreams a monstrous creature – The Canker Man – appears, and begins to
terrify the family in the waking world.
Eventually we learn that the Canker Man was created by the child’s
perception of his birth mother’s death from pancreatic cancer years before. To
once again borrow the idea of the ‘pain body’, here the fear and loss
experienced, this time by a child, is manifested as a seemingly malevolent
force, all too real and capable of causing terrible harm. How easy it is to
imagine children everywhere in such their own terrible circumstances, be it
war, illness or the threat of violence. Many times children are forced to frame
their own pain in a narrative they can understand, to conceptualise what is
beyond their ability to rationalise at their young age. Flanagan admits to
having come from a large extended family who, as a consequence of having so
many members who inevitably would suffer their own fatalities, illnesses and
travails, in turn became inspiration for the themes he chooses to express
through his work.
To wind up the busy year, the next project for the director was
the sequel to 2014’s popular but critically panned supernatural horror Ouija.
Despite a declared aversion to sequels, Flanagan took the project under the proviso
that he would be able reframe the narrative in order to distance his film from
the original. In Ouija: Origin Of Evil, the family unit this time
consists of a young widow and her two daughters, who are watched by malevolent
spirits awoken by use of the titular Ouija board. Again this film is notable
for Flanagan’s trust in young actors. Starring alongside Annalise Basso, who
previously featured in Oculus, is Lulu Wilson, who delivers an impressively
creepy performance as younger sister Doris.
With an eye for period detail (in this case the 1970s) and an effectively chilling atmosphere, Flanagan and cinematographer Michael Fimognari created a film that kept enough subtle links to interest fans of the original, while managing to break away from the first film sufficiently to establish their own narrative. Critics hailed the film as a huge improvement. Another feather in the cap for Flanagan, whose approach of a family-centred dynamic and trust in unknown young actors would be taken to a new level with his future work.
Having worked his magic on a heavily criticised franchise, Flanagan next turned his attention to what had long been regarded as an ‘unfilmable’ book adaptation, namely Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game. In what is regarded as one of King’s sparser narratives, Gerald and wife Jessie retreat to an idyllic but remote lakeside property, with the intention of reviving their ailing marriage. Even on the outward car journey there are signs that the couple have differing energies. Bruce Greenwood’s Gerald seems wolfishly focussed on Jessie (Carla Gugino), who for her part seems aware of her husband’s ardour but unwilling to engage with it.
They are briefly held up by the appearance of a large dog, which
they surmise to be a stray, which refuses to move out of the road as it feeds
on roadkill. Soon after arriving, in another demonstration of the
contrasting intentions of the couple,
Jessie tries to call the dog to feed with the expensive Kobe beef Gerald
purchased especially for their getaway. Does Jessie’s concern about this feral
animal act as a metaphor for her failure to recognise the darker, animalistic
impulses within her husband? If she is not entirely ignorant of Gerald’s
intentions, she does not actively fight against them.
Soon they are in the bedroom. Gerald’s fervour is obvious; although seemingly unwilling, Jessie somewhat passively allows him to manipulate the situation. To her surprise, he produces a pair of handcuffs, which he uses to secure her wrists to the wooden bed frame. With his wife helpless, Gerald’s interior life is suddenly revealed as one of dark and possessive sexual lust, something which seems to shock Jessie. As things progress beyond her control, now faced with the stark fact of their own utterly opposite feelings, the mood darkens further. Jessie yells to be released as her husband becomes frighteningly rough. Suddenly he catches his breath – the onset of a heart attack. He slumps on top of Jessie, unconscious. Trapped beneath his inert body, Jessie struggles to move her husband’s body. Finally she succeeds in pushing him off of her and off of the bed. His head cracks sickeningly on the hard floor. Blood quickly begins to pool around his skull. Gerald is most definitely dead, and Jessie remains handcuffed to the bed. Amazingly, the above takes place within the first ten or so minutes of the film!
In the novel, Jessie begins to hear voices in her head, each representing a facet of her psyche. These voices help Jessie to delve into her past to uncover painful suppressed memories, such as the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. Working through the pain caused by these memories in turn renews her will to survive. Flanagan, along with another regular collaborator in producer Trevor Macy, cleverly recasts Greenwood and Gugino in much the same way King uses the voices in Jessie’s head. A more confident, knowing version of Jessie parades in front of her; the version of her that knew what she was getting herself into over the unhappy years as Gerald’s subservient trophy wife. Alongside her we also see Gerald, now repurposed as the antagonistic, critical facet of her dead husband. Together these phantoms torment Jessie with the knowledge of her past failings and her increasingly dire current predicament, but in their own way they too force Jessie inwards, allowing her to confront those demons of her past, both of her childhood and her adult life.
Alongside these visions Jessie also sees another strange, dreamlike figure, who appears in the darkness of the bedroom carrying a box full of bones and strange trinkets. Gerald taunts her, telling Jessie that it is Death himself coming for her. Much later, with Jessie free from the lake house and healing her wounds, we learn that this figure was all too real – in fact a necrophagous serial killer who is being tried in court. She strides into the courtroom and confronts the man. Seeing his face shift from her father’s, to Gerald’s and back, she tells him that he ‘seems so much smaller than I remember.’ This marks the final triumph for Jessie, who turns and leaves the court with the ‘monsters’ of her past diminished and conquered, her true strength discovered and her life renewed.
Look out for the second part of Matt’s feature – Hill House and beyond – coming soon.
Game of Thrones has finally ended, and not in a way everyone found entirely satisfactory.
This is nothing new in television; there’s a history of beloved, long-running shows dropping final seasons or finales that leave their audiences feeling cheated. Take the long-running 80s hospital drama St. Elsewhere, concluded with the abrupt and unlikely revelation the entire show was a figment of an autistic boy’s imagination, and took place in a snow globe. The last season of the hugely successful sitcom Roseanne upped the ante by asking audiences to believe the previous nine seasons about the comedic trials and tribulations of a lovable working-class family were merely a pathetic work of fiction written by a depressed, widowed and financially-ruined Roseanne. Like most clever-clever metafiction pasted onto perfectly functional stories, let alone long-running comedies, this proved less than wildly popular. Then there was the more recent and hugely popular Lost; years of mystery
piled upon mystery revealed to be simply red herring piled upon on red herring
and a revelation that the entire story took place in – literally – Purgatory
was generally rejected as rather unsatisfying by those who had tuned in for six
years previously. Amazingly, that kind of ‘fooled you! it was all nonsense, all
along!’ bait and switch just doesn’t play well with audiences.
Hell, fan engagement and disappointment with fiction goes back a long way further than the TV age. People have always engaged emotionally with good stories. It’s not just Game of Thrones that had people speculating on probable deaths. In 1841, when the newspapers carrying the final chapter of Charles Dickens’ novel The Old Curiosity Shop arrived on a ship in New York, people following the saga crowded the harbour and shouted to the sailors, “Is Little Nell dead?” so beloved was the character in the hearts of the general public, in an age where nobody cared about spoilers. When she was revealed to be indeed (spoiler!) dead, it evoked outrage. Letters were written to the newspapers. Reputed judges were found in their chambers, weeping over the book. The Irish politician Daniel O’Connell declared himself so outraged by Nell’s death that he flung the book out of the window of the train he was travelling on and declared the writer incompetent. Oscar Wilde waded in some decades later to declare the death should move anyone to tears .. . of laughter, which just goes to show trolling also existed a long time before the internet.
Certainly, bitching about fiction – and being inspired by it, and bitching
about it because we care about it, goes back to the ancients. We care about stories – about imaginary people
and places – because they help us make sense of ourselves and the world.
Stories define nations and people; they forge identities. On a more prosaic
level, investing hours and a great deal of thought and emotion in a thing tends
to make people protective of a thing, and the flipside of excitement is
disappointment.
So it’s not actually weird for people to get a bit upset when they feel a
good story has been let down and metaphorically want their money back, throw
their remote at the telly in the manner of the aforementioned Mr. O’Connell
throwing books off a train or just take to the internet to bitch and meme a bit
(hello!).
So, back to Game of Thrones and its last hoorah. I present the following with the proviso that I have not spent eight years finding major fault with the show; I thought it was near-flawless for the first four seasons, went south in season five (those live-action Bratz Doll versions of the Sand Snakes didn’t seem to belong in the same universe as the other characters for starters) and six (again, the nonsensical Dorne plot which is really enough for an article all of its own given it replaced an actual, usable and better plot from the books, but hey, the showrunner wanted to work with the actress Indira Varma who played Ellaria Sand, and jettisoned Alexander Siddig’s character Prince Doran Martell to write some nonsense around her), and started to show serious narrative problems with the truncated season seven, but generally I was galloping along relatively happily with it for the most part and very excited for the final run.
So this isn’t about simply never being pleased with the show or about attachment to particular characters whose arcs went ways I didn’t care for, or throwing my toys out of the pram the moment I found something I didn’t like. It’s about watching an epic come to an conclusion that not only doesn’t live up to its promise, but presents some of the worst writing of the entire run in what should have been its finest hour. The expectation, despite some serious bumps along the way, was a pay-off as complex and interesting as what had gone before; what we got what a series of poorly-connected plot points, meaningless ‘subversion’, plot holes and character regression all of which seem to add up to more of a lazy ‘fuck you’ than a satisfying conclusion.
Egos abound in showbusiness where actors and showrunners like to pretend audience opinions matter deeply when those opinions are overwhelmingly positive, and suddenly cease to matter when negative. It’s a business where everyone wants to believe they deserve the bouquets, but never the brickbats. Well, in my view the brickbats for this season are fully deserved and nearly all of them have been aimed squarely at one single aspect of the show – the writing…
Let’s start with Daenerys. Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Protector of the Seven Kingdoms, the Mother of Dragons, the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, the Unburnt, the Breaker of Chains.Which, after episode five of season eight, can be basically shortened to, ‘Hitler’. Her descent into blood and fire Targaryen Nazi, or shall we more tactfully say ‘potential tyrant’ (Adolf Targaryen?) was not without foreshadowing.
She’s always been capable of violence, as indeed are pretty much all the characters in Game of Thrones. Even Sansa eventually coldly sits and tortures a man (deservedly) to death. It’s a horribly violent world where the strongest prevail and rule, the throne is taken via war when primogeniture fails, and where justice is retributive and punitive, never rehabilitative. Yes, she had declared her intent to ‘break the wheel’ of wars, successions and oppressions, which some took as her intent to foist some pleasant form of social democracy on Westeros via dragon power, but I always saw as rather ominous, Tito-esque kind of viewpoint. Can’t oppress each other when you’ve got one big scary tyrant to oppress the whole lot of you equally, right? And of course, she has all the lofty entitlement of an aristocrat.
Yet she also showed an instinct to protect the weak; as Khaleesi, she prohibited the rape of captives by the Dothraki. She chained up two of her dragons – her ‘children’ – in a dungeon, when the third went rogue and incinerated a shepherd’s child in Mereen. She refused to open the fighting pits at Mereen despite it being a popular move with the citizenry because she hated the violence. She spent a deal of time freeing slaves from their shackles and when she crucified 143 ‘masters’ it was in response to their crucifying the same number of children along the road to Mereen to taunt her. She burned Vaes Dothrak to the ground, but only after the Khals declared their intention to rape her to death, using horses if they couldn’t complete the job themselves.
Yes, she’s from a line known for their tendency toward madness. Her own
father had succumbed to it, but is described as having taken nearly ten years
for the symptoms to go from increasingly poor hygiene and paranoia, to sadism
and murder, to eventually deciding to annihilate the entire city and everyone
in it with wildfire. Ten years.
So you have to give me more than one single episode between Daenerys feeling increasingly frustrated with the North for not falling at her feet, Jon getting cold feet about their incestuous relationship, a dragon dying due to her own stupidity (framed by Benioff and Weiss, showrunners as her ‘kinda forgetting’ the Iron Fleet existed) and the death of a friend to going full Russian Front on King’s Landing innocents, not before, but after the city surrendered to her. Her mutterings as having to ‘rule through fear’ come across less as encroaching madness and more as a policy decision made through little more than ego, pique and impatience together with the rationalisation, not entirely uncommon throughout history, that the ends justify the means. The post-devastation Little Nuremberg moment (dragon wings substituting for cathedrals of light, I guess, and a really nice effect actually) in the finale just came off as oddly campy, ‘turn up the evil to eleven’ territory while Grey Worm doing an ISIS-style execution scene fresh off the blocks was a bit much.
Given a full season at least of a gradually decaying personality, the ‘magical mad queen’ storyline could have been entirely convincing and actually fascinating; Tolkein’s Galadriel if she had chosen to keep the Ring and become corrupted by its power. The tension would have built toward more interesting and hopefully, more intelligent betrayals. Varys, master of spies and whispers, writing a plain text betrayal letter to potential allies? Come on. This man survived years of Mad King Aerys and then the erratic and sadistic King Joffrey without a scratch. As it was, her sudden attack of the genocides came off as just another in a line of pop-up ‘subversion’ of audience expectations that had ironically become entirely predictable in a thoroughly rushed season where getting from A to B in as little time as possible was the point, character and in-world reality be damned.
Subverting expectations. Yeah. Here’s the thing. In Television Land, though, it’s possible to become a victim of your own success and the carefully-plotted genre subversions (such as setting up a protagonist who is killed before the end of the first season) eventually seemed to set up an expectation for the show to keep surprising the viewer for the sake of surprise alone, not because it makes sense of anything or follows on from previous plot developments. Take the the killing of the Night King by Arya Stark, a decision made by the showrunners a couple of years previously for the sole reason of the old ‘subversion of expectations’. Subversion for the sake of simple shock-surprise is not subversion. It’s just a cop-out.
Other characters suffered from as similarly abrupt and unsatisfying turnarounds as Daenerys. Jon Snow, after being given little to really do all season after his arc was terminated to hand Arya the big kill in The Long Night, wanders around like an increasingly confused puppy, is persuaded by Tyrion (who seems to have all the big ideas in this show now) to murder Daenerys and carries out the order within the matter of a few minutes’ screen time. This, despite spending much of the episode convinced she has really done nothing wrong. Arya, after spending years being obsessively and actively murderous, is convinced by The Hound to drop her pursuit of violence after a few seconds of consideration in the thick of the massacre at King’s Landing. Meanwhile, her endless episodes of Faceless Man training proved of zero use in the entire final season apart from some admittedly impressive staff fighting – the last time we see her use another face is to serve up some relatively pointless House Frey revenge porn in season seven.
Jamie Lannister spent years slowly being humbled by experience and redeemed
by his actions, only to be the fool that returns to his folly as the dog
returns to his vomit – the vomit in this case being his sister and their
incestuous relationship, but only after a really odd 21st century-style one
night stand with Brienne of Tarth. Classic tragedy, I suppose, a man destroyed
by succumbing to his worst instincts,
but again, so abruptly done it’s just jarring and unconvincing. From fighting for humanity and then
cheerfully beering it up with comrades post-Long Night battle to bailing the
next day and finally stating he doesn’t give a damn about anyone but himself
and Cersei in the space of one episode – this from the man who at his prideful,
obnoxious Lannister peak killed a king to save the small folk. They not only
abruptly terminate and retard seven years of character development, they make
Jamie a smaller and meaner man than he started. One has to ask, why? Has a
certain nihilism set in and they simply wish to deliver a fuck-you to those
good old audience expectations yet again, or did they just not think it
through? I can only think that if this is how Jamie Lannister ends in the book
series, going down in a pile of rubble with his sister, it will make a whole
lot more sense than, ‘Got up this morning, decided I love Cersei after all, see
you suckers in hell’.
I’d ask the same question about the whole kingship deal too. After a really jarring scene in which Grey Worm has inexplicably summons the lords and ladies of the seven kingdoms to decide the fate of Tyrion, and then allows the prisoner to dominate the proceedings, we end up with King Bran the Broken, for no reason other than Tyrion suggesting it for vaguely poetical reasons and everyone agreeing within a matter of seconds as if it’s a matter of deciding what to have for lunch. Bran, an impotent king with no heir or likelihood of it who is – quite literally – away with the fairies, creepily omniscient as his various quips imply, uninterested in the nitty gritty of ruling, doesn’t seem altogether like the wisest choice.
Amongst Bran’s closest advisors turns out to be Bronn, who may be a highly entertaining and understandably popular character, but is a man who has from the moment he appeared stated how his loyalty is always for sale. Then there’s Tyrion as his Hand, a man whose terrible advice, not to mention his eventual betrayal, set Daenerys up for eventual final defeat. Why is anyone listening to Tyrion at this point about anything, let alone Grey Worm? Why hasn’t Grey Worm killed Tyrion, and Jon for that matter, given his previous enthusiasm for murdering prisoners and traitors on the spot? Why didn’t Daenerys? She had nothing better to do than burn another traitor alive for the spectacle at that point but instead acted oddly reasonably toward him for a ‘mad’ queen and kept Tyrion on ice, unlike Varys. Perhaps, like Daenerys, Grey Worm recognised Tyrion and Jon’s incredibly thick and enduring plot armour and need to survive to the series end? This whole council scene has to be the most underwritten, illogical and unconvincing event to ever be portrayed in eight season with only Sansa really saying anything relevant to the realities of the situation.
We are then witness to a weird tonal shift with a meeting of King Bran’s Privy Council with Tyrion and Bronn sniggering about getting those brothels built again, eh? We’re left with two middle-aged frat boys who are concerned with having their boners serviced in the face of a ravaged continent with a pissed-off dragon on the loose, and Brienne of Tarth who is inexplicably writing soppy entries for the record about the precious honour of Jamie Lannister who, in Westeros term, had very much dishonoured her last time they met. Remember this is a world where a one night stand between Rob Stark and a girl from a noble house and issues of honour pertaining to that essentially led to the most infamous massacre of the whole series, the Red Wedding. Oh yeah, and there’s Sam to deliver a cringey reveal on the book series titles, and Sir Davos so we can hear one last Stannis-type grammar joke (Stannis told it better). In reality, how long is anyone expecting this dodgy set-up to last? And what is Bran really king of anyway, apart from a pile of bones, ash and rubble? Why does anyone need a high king now anyway, given he has no armies to protect them with or food to feed them with?
Is the subtext here that we’re just back where we started, the struggle for power is eternal and that all that bloodshed really achieved nothing? It’s really hard to tell if it’s all meant to mean anything at all. Perhaps like Jamie seducing Brienne before backflipping into sister-worship, it was all bit of ill-advised fan service because hey, people love Bronn’s wit and Brienne’s courage; Brienne is of course an underdog, and Sam has been set up as the greatest underdog of all time from season one so must predictably win everything – women, career, babies, life itself – whatever the obstacles or odds; and people understandably love the ever-sympathetic Peter Dinklage as Lannister underdog Tyrion -and want him to end well no matter how stupidly his character has behaved, and so on. It comes off as a weirdly shallow happy ending in a series which isn’t supposed to deal in them. Only Jon and Arya’s departures have any sense of bitterness or emotional devastation to them, although the nerd in me is still wondering where Arya found the money for the cool clothes, the sailors and the rather nice ship, given her ancestral house was just reduced to rubble and a whole lot of dismembered peasants. Endless war leaves you poor. Sansa got some nice new threads too, despite Winterfell being sat on and ripped apart by an ice-dragon and zombies not long before. Perhaps everyone individually made a run to the Iron Bank for a generous reconstruction loan? Remember when the series actually dealt with the reality of running a kingdom? So much is glossed over, which wouldn’t matter if so much of the series hadn’t been dead set on dealing with the actual intricacies of power before all this. You can’t help but wonder, as they all nod sagely at Tyrion’s whimsical suggestion that Bran should rule because he has the best story, what Tywin Lannister or Oleanna Tyrell would have to say about the whole thing.
There’s also the question of Bran’s or rather, the Three-Eyed Raven’s omniscience never being used when it would have advantaged the North and Daenerys, time and time again during the battle of The Long Night or beyond. Was that simply bad writing and we’re meant to believe just as Daenerys ‘kinda forgot’ (kudos Benioff and Weiss) the Iron Fleet existed in episode four, Bran ‘kinda forgot’ he could warg into animals, see all of the past and bits of the future and warp time (see the whole Hodor plot, seemingly long-forgotten) and so on because the writers sure did – or is there a suggestion he’s the real final villain of the piece, allowing the various bloodbaths to take place so that the One Eyed Raven, not Bran Stark, could eventually take the throne? A final defeat of men by the Children of the Forest? I honestly think that’s getting way too complex for what series eight turned out to be, which was really little more than a series of poorly-connected bullet points and some fan servicey bones thrown in here and there.
Of course, not all of the fanservice was terrible – it was great to see as
much of the ever-popular Tormund Giantsbane as we did before he was consigned
to the north again. Kudos to magnificent ginger Kristofer Hivju for his always
pitch-perfect performance. The writers didn’t fail him either – he was as
charmingly offputting as ever. There were some really nice small character
moments in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms too; Arya and Sandor’s brusque,
understated conversation on the battlements, Brienne’s knighthood, Tormund’s
flirting and Podrick’s song.
Great acting from Nikolai Coster-Waldau too, by the way, in his scenes with Tyrion and Cersei, and kudos as ever to Lena Headey who spent years perfecting that self-satisfied Cersei power-smirk and wine-swirl business. You can’t fault most of the acting in this series (OK, apart from that ridiculous moustache-twirling panto-pirate Euron Greyjoy hamming it up to eleven, but the blame for that lies directly with the directors), or the FX or the set piece battles; it’s just the narrative becomes hurried to the point of incoherence in the final stretch and the floor goes out from under the thing under the pressure to finish everything. Perhaps the lone survivor apart from Tormund in terms of character was the always wonderfully-written and played bitter bastard Sandor Clegane aka The Hound, whose character arc seemed fulfilled by trying to dissuade Arya from a life of soul-destroying violence (albeit a bit late in the game, and with far too instant success) and dying with massive courage, confronting his brutal brother and his lifelong terror of fire.
Overall though, I fall into the Daniel O’Connell , remote-chucking
disappointment camp. I hope when The Winds of Winter finally emerges in print –
in late 2020, we’re now told by Martin himself – I won’t be inspired to fling
it off any form of public transport.
The biggest accolade I can give the Dead By Dawn International
Film Festival is the fact my continued attendance ensures I devour every
delectable morsel projected onto the silver screen. Annually, without fail,
darkly feverish cinematic delicacies are chosen with unbridled passion and
scheduled with logical precision. If you can in any way relate to that concept,
for 4 days in April, The Filmhouse on Lothian Road, Edinburgh becomes a horror
fans’ Mecca!
2019 incredibly witnessed Dead by Dawn in its 26th year. With assured
quality to match its longevity, what sights did festival director Adele Hartley
have to show us….?
THURSDAY
Along with 19 programmes showcasing a staggering total of 66
films, guest of honour this year was the subversively masterful American
director, Jeff Lieberman. Modestly claiming that, after John Landis last year,
having a guest with the same initials was easier on the DbD email filing
system, Jeff was invited to the stage to officially launch the event.
With the festival boasting 5 of Lieberman’s finest flicks,
there were plenty of opportunities to listen to his charming anecdotes, some of
which even managed to refrain from mentioning LSD! Jeff explained that his love
for cinema began in the 1950s when gorging on the plethora of atomic horror
flicks that were essentially inspired by nuclear war propaganda peddled by the
US Government. When the 1970s rolled round and atomic bombs were replaced by
misinformation regarding the effects of Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on the human brain, it
appeared a cynically obvious choice to conjure a yarn that exploited this fear
to violent extremes.
Fittingly, the inaugural film was a personal favourite of
mine, 1978’s BLUE SUNSHINE. The story about the belated side effects of a menacingly
potent strain of LSD transforming dabblers into murderous follicularly-challenged
psychopaths exudes 1970s panache and satire.
(I discuss Jeff Lieberman a little more when relaying a
discussion I had with a lovely lady of Latvian heritage if my memory serves me
correct who I ‘purely by chance’ bumped into during one of the sensibly placed
festival intermissions…)
But for now, back to Thursday evening’s proceedings and next
up was the ‘One Big Happy Family’ selection of short films. Of the five films
featured, it was MAGGIE MAY by director Mia Kate Russell from Australia that
really resonated. It’s a tale of female siblings who deal with the passing of
their mother in very different ways which results in accentuated languor in its
purest and most vicious form.
My journey north of the border had started to take its toll at
this point, so it was interesting to note that Dennison Ramalho’s THE
NIGHTSHIFTER was scheduled for 1.15am, resulting in an eye burning finish just
after 3am. Adele’s fervent prologue regarding
the film went on to explain that the reason for such an uncompromising time
slot was due to its ‘injury time’ inclusion after the schedule had effectively
been agreed.
If our empress of ceremonies’ words stoked my interest, it is
fair to say my heavy eye lids were truly obliterated with the opening frames of
this Brazilian masterpiece. Sao Paulo’s finest marching powder couldn’t have
done a better job – basically, I woke
the fuck up and was so appreciative of the efforts put into getting this
picture crammed onto an already bustling schedule.
The tale concerned Stenio (Daniel
de Oliveira), a morgue worker who engages in a bit of cadaver chatter while
going about his nightly duties. While these surreal nocturnal conversations
usually just involve the corpses disbelieving their demise or craving revenge,
events take on a sinister turn when Stenio actually acts on a bit of advice offered.
The fusion of the deceitful domestic milieu, along with a depressingly gritty
and plausible backdrop, easily lured me into the narrative. Add to that
lashings of autopsy-based gore and the bar of debut features was set
astronomically high, to say the least. A
stunning piece of filmmaking and one that I was so grateful to witness on the
big screen. The appetite had been whetted and the touch paper lit. An awesome
start…
FRIDAY
Friday’s programme kicked off in beautifully bizarre fashion
with the ‘What You Make It’ shorts. ARTURO simply blew my mind. It was
flagrantly my favourite animated short. This 7-minute oddity from Italy’s
Alessandro Bavari, complete with thumping soundtrack, would be the perfect
aperitif to Gasper Noes’ CLIMAX in my humble opinion.
Other personal highlights on the programme were Kimmy Gatewood’s
morosely comical CONTROL, a 16-minute serving of suicidal preparation that
admittedly left a lump in the throat. ALTERNATIVE MATH provided some hilarity
with its political correctness on steroids clip about a teacher correctly
marking a student down in a test for making basic error go viral.
Another debut feature was to follow in the form of G Patrick
Condon’s brain frying INCREDIBLE VIOLENCE. The picture begins with a filmmaker
confiding to a friend that he has squandered away the quarter of a million
bucks he was granted to finance a movie he was contracted to make. His
predicament is compounded by the fact that he has been loaned the money from a
law firm. In other words, he is fucked! What follows is a devious tactic to
conjure a horror film with no funds.
As the title suggests, this was an arduous watch at times,
with some daring sequences graphically depicting torture and humiliation. The mazy plot as the film progressed was a
little perplexing I felt. However, the
sheer boldness of Condon to announce himself as a director to the world with
such an audacious piece of cinema shone through and ultimately justified its place
on the schedule.
‘It’s the End of the World’ assortment of mini movies followed
after welcoming director Max Isaacson to the festival. His 12-minute
apocalyptic chunk of kickass, PIPE, was made all the more enjoyable when
hearing tales of 12 year old actress Elizabeth Hunter’s confidence when going
for her role as Pup. Max was approachable and it was lovely to see him attend
most of the screenings and indulging as a fan not just a guest. Cool jacket too!
Up next was another Lieberman feature, JUST BEFORE DAWN, and
the onstage Q & A that complimented it provided more light-hearted but
factual insight into his individual style as a film maker. The outdoor
sequences seemed death defying at times, though I am not sure the audience was entirely
convinced by his claim that, despite being friends with Tobe Hooper, he has
never seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Mmmmm….
We were then onto something that has intrigued me from the instant
I first heard about it – Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren’s HEAVY TRIP. While not
in any way a horror movie, this Finnish, Norwegian and Belgium production is
one of those films you walk away from the festival telling your friends, “you
NEED to see this!”
Initially I felt it was a little too slapstick for my palate,
but once the characters and narrative started to ripen, assisted by some razor-sharp
dialogue, the movie won me over
big time. It’s a simple enough tale of a
Finnish Black Metal band, Impaled Rektum, who have been honing their “Symphonic
post-apocalyptic reindeer-grinding Christ-abusing extreme war pagan
Fennoscandian metal” skills
for 12 years before finally getting their big break at the biggest music
festival in Norway. Unfortunately
dealing with sleazy promoters and having a vocalist who projectile vomits when
faced with an audience hinders their evolution!
The high tempo of jokes and storyline fuelled with the energy
of Scandinavian metal (helped along by Filmhouse’s state of the art sound
system) made this perfect Friday night viewing.
The risk of missing something distinctively twisted and
beautiful meant I fuelled myself with caffeine and reserved those elegant pint
glasses of ice cold exuberantly priced Erdinger Weissbier for post-screening
bonding with fellow attendees. So tonight, with a sensible finish time of just
after 1am and the bar still open for a couple of hours, the perfect opportunity
presented itself to clink glasses with friends old and new and discuss personal
highlights so far. Cheers…!
SATURDAY
Saturday began with more high calibre and diverse shorts by
way of the ‘Natural Selection’ film programme. Personal highlights were Alex
Noyer’s beautifully crafted and vicious CONDUCTOR whose 7-minute tale involving
a music competition with an ominously violent climax really impressed. And special mention has to go to TJ Power’s
YOUR CALL IS IMPORTANT TO US. It is a genius slice of call centre hell that not
only culminates in a ludicrously extreme finale, but also managed to extort my
sincerest sympathies for the initially abhorrent victim’s torment!
The subsequent film earned my vote for ‘Best Feature’ and this
opinion was apparently shared by other attendees, as it walked away with the prestigious
Audience Award chainsaw for that category. TOUS LES DIEUX DI CIEL (All the Gods in the
Sky) started life as a short film in the form of award winning short UN CIEL
BLEU PRESQUE PARFAIT (A Nearly Perfect Blue Sky).
Rather than simply expanding the original yarn by process of extension,
enigmatic director Quarxx has literally taken the original short movie, diced
it up and used the originally filmed scenes as pillars for a mesmerizing
panorama to be built around.
Apart from learning the movies’ naissance via its
introduction, I had no prior clues as to narrative, subject matter or style. I
am certain this lack of knowledge was hugely beneficial as this powerfully
captivating piece of cinema positively enthralled me for the full 110 minutes.
Although the imagery was
at times extremely outlandish and bizarre, the story had me gripped in reality,
with its unique depiction of anxiety driven depression and twisted
guardianship. Admittedly distressing at times, Quarxx poetically manages to
treat each character with the utmost compassion despite their deplorably bleak
plights.
I make no apologies for the vagueness of this summary as I
feel the impact of this fascinating piece of cinematic brilliance needs to be
encountered with as little preparation as possible in order to experience its
full effects. Simply genius.
The ‘2D and Deranged Shorts’ programme that followed provided
a rich tapestry of warped animation peppered with sharp wit and surrealism.
Pick of the bunch for me was David Barlow-Krelina’s CATERPILLARPLASTY with a premise
concerning the concept of society’s fixation on physical flawlessness. The
Canadian short proved to be a marvellous blend of weirdly repulsive sequences that,
despite their peculiarity, still made a blatantly obvious statement.
The Saturday agenda of Dead by Dawn is traditionally a
monstrous one. Looking at your watch at 21.45hrs with the comfort there is
still over 8 hours of weird and wonderful entertainment to gorge on is
testament to that.
CUTTERHEAD, the debut feature from Rasmus Kloster Bro, was
next on the bill and proved to be a truly gruelling watch at times. It centres
on a reporter Rie (Christine Sonderris) who joins the workforce structuring an
extension to the underground transport system in Copenhagen. Initially, the movie plays out as a fly on
the wall visual document as it cannily immerses the viewer in the confined
setting. Bereft of natural light, with
the intricate processes by the workers shrewdly woven into the dialogue, the
style of the movie is astutely authentic.
What develops is an extremely effectual depiction of
claustrophobic catastrophe. The infectious use of sound made all the more
potent by accompanying panic stricken scenes of complete darkness. Not content simply
to submerge the viewer in the stifled environment, the proverbial mind-fuck of
needing blind faith in crisis rescue I found remarkably effective, as our
protagonists are faced with the unenviable task of shielding their sanities. I
highly recommend this picture and was privileged to be subjected to its full efficacy
thanks to the pitch-black theatre.
Fried chicken courtesy of a certain Colonel admittedly
provided my evening sustenance for the full four nights. While this gourmet
choice may seem somewhat unadventurous, watching the security guy on the door
really earn his pennies defending the Colonel’s honour was too irresistible not
to enjoy on a nightly basis. How fitting then that a programme of ‘Finger
Licking Good’ shorts was next up.
I recently learned that the grand master purveyors of sizzled
poultry dropped that particular slogan from their marketing propaganda back in
2011. Apparently it was considered too “food-centric” as the
corporation aimed for a more “healthy eating” image. Ridiculous eh?!! What next? A Disney remake of
A SERBIAN FILM just to keep things “nice”? Anyway. I digress…
I am sure my 1970s comrades are familiar with the aforementioned slogan, along with old wives’ tales regarding deep fried rodents being inadvertently served up. But there were no Kentucky Fried Rats in this programme of shorts. Oh no, it was WAY worse than that! Food-related subversive short films featuring foul mouthed psychotic grannies, harmonious hilarity, bizarre TV commercials and a heart-rending tale of a pet bunny were entreatingly diverse. But it was a bowl full of retch inducing acne flavoured retribution in the form of Kate MCoid’s IT’S NOT CUSTARD that tested the old gag reflexes. Despite running at a mere 7 minutes, it still managed to lay the foundations for a grossly effective punch line.
The Lieberman Late show double bill was soon to be upon us.
Interestingly for me, this coincided with the interesting exchange I referred
to earlier. You see, despite this being a film festival and not a convention,
guest of honour Jeff Lieberman very kindly agreed to sign and pose for selfies
with fans for free. He also brought a wonderful array of rare goodies to tempt
attendees to cross his palm with silver.
OK so… some of you may have heard of so-called “pubic
triangle” in Edinburgh, duly named due to the trio of strip bars. I admit
my thirst got the better of me at one point and no sooner had the head settled
on my pint of Tenants that I heard those enticing words..
“You want dance? Just twenty pound….”
“Oh hi. Erm… no I am having a quick drink in-between
movies.”
“Look… I do you dance, ten pound…”
“Oh right… well…. you see I would…. but Jeff
Lieberman is doing this signing at 11pm. I mean he has some amazing stuff. Like
he raided his office or something and brought them over for the festival. Lobby
cards, reproduction original posters and a selection of Blu- rays. If you’ve
got your own stuff, he’ll willingly sign it for free but anything off his stall
is £20. Really unique stuff, so I am kind of saving my cash till then”.
“Jeff who?”
“Lieberman! Lie-ber-man.
You know, he is known as “Lebo” in the industry. He did SQUIRM and DEAD BEFORE DAWN. You ever
heard of that movie BLUE SUNSHINE? Wow you MUST see it. It has this scene right
at the beginning. This guy is, like, crooning to this lass at a party and… well
I won’t spoil it but there is no gore, no blood, no violence, no nudity but the
scene STILL shocks the bejeezus out of me every goddam time! Its sooo cool!
“
…sighs.. “Ok, I do you dance for five pound…”
(Smiles knowingly at the camera and winks… fade to black…)
Back at the Filmhouse (via the cash point), and after
snatching a wonderful memoir from the Lieberman marketplace, the Late Show
featuring SQUIRM and SATAN’s LITTLE HELPER was about to begin. The wonderful
introduction by Lebo himself explained the simple inspiration for each movie.
For the former, it was how he was haunted by a childhood experience of watching
his brother electrocute the soil in order to ascertain worms for a fishing
trip. This gross-out memory when later mixed with LSD quite simply gave way to
the slithery shocker that that is SQUIRM.
The latter, on the other hand, came to be via observing folk
who don gorilla fancy dress outfits feeling it somehow grants them the right to
grope female party goers and be a complete and utter dick in general.
Henceforth, SATANS LITTLE HELPER was spawned.
The Saturday night programme is where your constitution for
late night horror really gets a rigorous workout. But, knowing there is only
one day to go was motivation enough for this attendee to endure scorching
retinas and see it through to the final credits.
SUNDAY
I had a decent enough rest given the circumstances, but was
still somewhat fatigued as I dragged myself into the bathroom of my humble B
& B on Sunday at around 11am. Luckily the good folk who ran it must have realised
this and very graciously turned off the hot water for the day. Thanks guys! An ice-cold
shower and pint of steaming hot coffee later I was in place for the final day.
The two short film programmes that graced the final day, ‘Splendid
Isolation’ and ‘Red in Tooth and Claw’ proved to be another eclectic blend of
skewed originality. It was from this collection that the joint winners for
“Best Shorts” emerged. Conin brothers Chris (director) and Sam
(cinematographer) along with actor Paul Bullion were on hand to introduce their
12-minute film, OSCARS BELL, revealing it was inspired by true events. The intriguing little film centring on a
simple family camping trip really delivers a shockingly eerie climax and is
definitely worth tracking down.
Sharing the Audience Award for Best Short was another British
film directed by Jonny Kenton, DEAD BIRDS. Weighing in at 35 minutes, the mix
of black comedy and poignancy topped off with some deliciously-framed gore got
my nod.
YOU MIGHT BE THE KILLER (Brett Simmons) on the other hand did
little to stoke my interest, most likely due to my subjective aversion to so
called comedy horror. While that personal stance is often compromised by the sharp
ingenuity of certain short films, I struggle to maintain interest with full
length productions of that ilk. This hip
Scream-esque reference-laden slasher destroys any notion of plot ambiguity with
its very title. The regular “counsellor death count” graphic that
peppered the movie with annoying regularity had a hint of a one trick pony to
me. It did however rouse my fellow audience throughout and appeared to be
generally well received.
The final day had two new features. LUZ, a German production
written and directed by Tilman Singer. Introduced as having a ‘fractured
narrative”, this relatively short feature of 70 minutes is disorientating
and unorthodox, with a distinctly vintage feel without overstating the era. The
seemingly dispersed, almost sketch-like sequences eventually converge to skilfully
blend the story together in a very clever way. The result was a picture very satisfying
and enough to entice this viewer into a revisit for subsequent viewings.
The customary hoot that is ‘Punk Pass the Parcel’ meant a
flurry of little black packages looped around the auditorium with gusto! There
were no gimmicks here as the little prizes revealed themselves to be a crop of
current Arrow Video Blu-ray releases. Impressive.
It was, however, a little disappointing that the time-honoured
Shit Film Amnesty only had three entries. Can’t complain, as I didn’t
contribute myself, but I already have next year’s donation wrapped in Andrex
with a damning verdict ready to be inked!
The festival was sadly nearly at its end. The closing feature,
REMOTE CONTROL, was a very fitting way for the final Lieberman feature to
screen. The scheduled post screening Q & A gave way to a more informal ‘meet
and greet’ in the bar afterwards.
I had no plans to write a review before attending this year’s
festival. But there is such a unique spirit to Dead by Dawn that I felt
compelled to spread the word. The pure devotion and drive that goes into
organising this event is something to behold. I very naively had this vision that
festival organisers had filmmakers petitioning them to showcase their wares and
therefore being faced with the simple task of cherry-picking what they thought
worthy. How wrong I was!
Digital streaming of movies to miniscule devices continues to
promote ‘convenience’ above ‘enchantment’ when it comes to indulging in
films. If that is not enough, the vile
terms ‘consumers’ and ‘content providers’ have nauseatingly made it
increasingly complex to negotiate a film onto the festival schedule when not
dealing directly with the filmmaker.
Dead by Dawn, however, radiates a deep love and respect for
the uniquely magical cinema experience which, for me, is nothing short of
inspiring.
Adele Hartley, we salute you…
Dead by Dawn Festival runs every April in Edinburgh. For further information, check out the official website: deadbydawn.co.uk
In an era where a phrase such as ‘world building’ has entered the lexicon of the expectant cinema-goer, it is all too easy for the brightest lights, most groundbreaking camera work and most stupendous action sequences to steal the hearts and minds of the viewer. Conversely, it seems that all too often the films which make the loudest noises leave the faintest trace, as we watch beautiful people with impossible powers saving the world with almost numbing regularity. In the case of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, we have a film which asks questions relating to the weightiest of subjects, but does so with what seems like an uncharacteristic subtlety in modern mainstream cinema.
It is unusual for me to discover a film via the score, but that’s how I first came to know of the existence of First Reformed. Lustmord is a name familiar to fans of the Dark Ambient sub-genre and it was via his Bandcamp page that I discovered that the characteristically ominous strains of his work were being used in a soundtrack. This had the effect of imbuing the film with a sense of dread and anticipation before I even knew what it was about, as Lustmord has carved out his career as a supreme master of the audial sense of foreboding. His music can also be described as cavernous, oceanic, intense and chilling, so I was instantly expecting something in the realm of a psychological horror. While there are one or two hard-hitting moments which can be described as horrific, what is delivered is far subtler than some typical horror tropes such as the malign supernatural or extra-terrestrial entity. The source of the inauspicious threat is very much part of the zeitgeist, discussed across all platforms on a daily basis; namely, our destruction of the planet.
It
is difficult to talk about the nuts and bolts of First Reformed
without a nod to the personal history of writer and director Paul
Schrader. Perhaps inevitably known as the screenwriter behind Martin
Scorcese’s 1976 classic Taxi Driver, Schrader has made it known on
several occasions that the medium of screenwriting should be used as
an opportunity for catharsis. Indeed, he suggests it is only through
the willingness to ‘drop your pants and show your own laundry’ that
writers should work in the field. A cursory look into his past
reveals that while espousing the ‘self-therapy’ of writing, Schrader
himself once suffered a stomach ulcer due to excessive drinking, as
well as other turmoils suffered under unsustainable stress. Given
these experiences, as well as a self-professed fascination with
characters who go against the grain of society and who seem to act
against their own best interests, it is clear that the film’s central
character Reverend Toller (played by Ethan Hawke) represents to some
extent Schrader’s lifetime of interests and experiences as a writer
and a man.
Toller is himself a writer, albeit he writes in a journal with no intent of publication or witness by another – other than his Creator. The goal is wholly cathartic – ‘when writing about oneself one should show no mercy’. Although often painful and not without moments self-recrimination, this process of daily confessional is carried out with an ascetic’s rigour. The exercise of withholding nothing becomes increasingly influential in Toller’s journey throughout the film. The events that transpire upon meeting troubled young couple Mary (Amanda Seyfreid) and Michael (Phillip Ettinger), act as a spark to tinder against his increasingly stark mindset of unflinching honesty.
It is heavily pregnant Mary who introduces herself and Michael to Toller. She confides that Michael wishes her to terminate their unborn child. Upon meeting him, Toller learns that the cause of Michael’s despair is the what he sees as the inevitable collapse of human civilisation within his own lifetime, due to the wilful destruction of our natural world for fuel and resource. How, he reasons, can he justify bringing his daughter into a world which faces an inevitable cataclysm of environmental and subsequent societal collapse? Michael strongly questions Toller about the folly of raising a child in a doomed world. Sensing a challenge, the pastor responds with vigour and asserts that Michael’s daughter is ‘as (alive) as a tree. As an endangered species…full of the beauty and mystery of nature. A life without despair is a life without hope,’ he continues. ‘Holding these two ideas in our head is life itself.’
For all Toller’s wise words, in private he continues to act against his own interests in a way which is strikingly reminiscent of Paul Schrader’s struggles as a young writer back in the 70s. His journal writing is accompanied by the nightly drinking of whisky, by the bottle, despite his own escalating ill health. The despair which ultimately proves too much for Michael begins to consume him too, until, seen as an anachronism by the Church’s ruling body and harbouring an increasing sense of indignant rage, he begins to formulate ideas of retribution. Here there is a clear parallel with Schrader’s earlier creation Travis Bickle, memorably portrayed by Robert De Niro. Toller too is a former member of the military, and like Bickle is drawn toward a violent solution to the problems imposed by the world, one that carries the stain of impotent fury and a state of mental fortitude on the brink of collapse. Toller’s actions declare a willingness to stand up and make a mark for the fallen heroes of the struggle against corporations and governments who damage the planet for gain, while also acting as an outward expression of his own changing attitudes. Fuelled by the words of Michael ringing in his ears, as well as the increasing sense of isolation inside his church, he begins to dream of martyrdom.
While it may be easy to see Toller as a cross between Taxi Driver’s Bickle and Michael Douglas’s D-Fens in Falling Down, First Reformed defies being easily categorised alongside those films, specifically by introducing Amanda Seyfreid’s character Mary as a source of compassionate, inclusive energy, one that acts as a counterpoint to the more violently masculine impulses shown by other characters. Despite her own fears and vulnerability, she refuses to condemn Michael for his actions and later on, as she becomes closer to Toller, she introduces a ray of light into his increasingly dark world view.
The film’s final sequence could have gone in one of several directions, with Schrader apparently having written two different endings before settling on the one he did. The chosen ending perhaps suggests love is the mechanism by which the opposing forces of hope and despair are balanced. While this sentiment has a well worn feel to it, it is the power of First Reformed to provoke questions of the viewer that is perhaps its great strength. There is the question of responsibility – of state, of Church and of the individual. Not only toward the natural world, which through greed and apathy faces what many observers agree is a mounting crisis, but crucially toward ourselves. Can we each face our maker, our conscience, or our own sense of morality with absolute honesty? In the light of this fearless honesty we may choose to shine upon our own actions, are we able to recognise a way to balance the light and darkness in ourselves and thus the world? If so we may, like writer Paul Schrader, yet have a say in which way the story goes.
