I can’t help it. I see a film is set at sea, I hear mention of ‘creatures’ and my Pavlovian response is ‘Lovecraft!’ God knows, we don’t need every horror story set at sea to feature the Great Old Ones, but it’s a response that’s always lying in wait with me; saying that, some elements of the synopsis for Sea Fever (2019) do call to mind ideas of unnameable, unknowable creatures lurking in the profound darkness of the deep. Well, whilst there is something unnameable and unknowable here, it doesn’t spiral into the kind of madness, nor indeed become the kind of creature feature I assumed it would. If Sea Fever has any one film in its family tree, I’d say it was The Bay (2012), though happily without the ‘found footage’ shooting style. Whilst whatever-it-is seems to be anomalous, it’s people who make the mistakes which throw them into its path. This is a film of human dynamics under extreme circumstances, and your enthusiasm for it will depend on your tastes for that kind of ‘family group in isolation’ drama.
Siobhan (Hermione Corfield) is a driven young scientist who eschews socialising in favour of getting on with her work: she is interested in biological patterns and trends in the marine environment, and along these lines she manages to get herself passage on a fishing vessel in order to study the ecosystem first-hand. She’s a somewhat awkward fit on board the boat, and the superstitious crew are none too pleased to observe that she’s a redhead – it’s bad luck – but they set off as planned. The deal is that skipper Gerard (Dougray Scott) alongside his partner Freya (Connie Nielsen – and before it sends you mad as it did me, she’s Lucilla out of Gladiator) prioritise getting a valuable catch. Siobhan stays out of the way, and does her work around all of that. The first problem with this comes when Gerard chooses to ignore an exclusion zone, cutting through it in pursuit of a lucrative shoal; he doesn’t explain this to the crew, but before long it’s clear the advice was sound and so the vessel gets stuck there.
But what is it stuck…on? They seem to have run into some sort of organism which has mistook them for a whale, according to Siobhan’s best guess anyway. It has attached protuberances onto the hull which are strong enough to infiltrate it; as the crew wonder what to do, a kind of (scientific term) gloop begins to amass inside the ship. A solid catch is still the crew’s priority but Siobhan, now the voice of reason, warns them that this substance could well be harmful. Too late; first Johnny (Jack Hickey) and then Sudi (Elie Bouakaze) become infected with what seems to be a parasitic organism.
As the crew ponder, and grow paranoid, and try to gain help from the nearest, incommunicado vessel, I’ll admit that thoughts next turned to The Thing (1982) and I know it would be mercilessly unfair to judge a film on the fact that it is not, in fact, The Thing, beyond these couple of similarities. This is another issue, separate from the Lovecraftian one; mention ‘strange parasite’ in your synopsis, bring up thoughts of The Thing. Sea Fever has a few moments of body horror, but overall, it is very understated. In fact, it’s frequently rather quiet. It’s a study of enclosed spaces, really, where the threat is larval in every sense of the word. Dynamics between the crew members are – some minor script issues aside – plausible and watchable, but we see but a little here beyond that. There is some intimation of a grander being out there, but it plays only a little part in the narrative style overall. Again, how you feel about that – whether a tad disappointed, or glad of the character-driven alternative – is with you.
If you value a slow-burn horror of enclosed spaces and strange nature, where a large share of the horror derives from the vast, isolating expanses of the sea itself, then there is much to recommend Sea Fever. It looks good, it’s well shot and the performances certainly do the job, with back stories gradually teased out of the narrative as the film goes along. It’s also, thankfully, a sparse ninety minutes – hallelujah, as things would have been unnecessarily diluted by a longer running time. All in all, whilst not the escalating monster epic I’d gotten into my mind, this is a well-wrought film with many merits.
Sea Fever (2019) screened as part of Glasgow FrightFest 2020.
Perhaps it’s to be entirely expected that the number of social media-related horrors continue to grow and grow. Alongside the likes of Tragedy Girls, Assassination Nation and Making Monsters, we can now count The Cleansing Hour, though quite unlike those others, this most recent film melds the premise of a successful social media channel with something altogether more occult. The resulting film is a very physical, often gory project, with elements which are eminently recognisable alongside the rather newer horrors of live feeds and ratings – things are kept fairly light-touch, though the film suffers somewhat by just how much it strives to do during its touch-over ninety minute running time.
The title of the film is also the title of
a successful, but plateauing ‘live stream exorcism’ channel, hosted by an
allegedly real priest – Father Max (Ryan Guzman). It’s no great spoiler to say
that we’re soon shown he’s nothing of the sort, but he’s good on camera and
alongside his friend and partner Drew (Kyle Gallner) they shift a fair amount
of Vatican-blessed merchandise. Again, you can probably guess how legitimate
that all is. Things are ticking away pretty well but Drew is getting antsy
about expanding the brand; he wants to branch out, do something a little
different – seances, maybe. Max isn’t so sure. He’s happy with how things are,
rocking up with minutes to go but turning in a reliable performance. He
promises Drew he needs to book a friend of his, a drag queen who is willing to
take part in the rite; sadly, this friend doesn’t show so Drew asks his
girlfriend Lane (Alix Angelis) to step in, read the prompts and gnash her teeth
a bit. Very reluctantly, she agrees. It’s time for the show to begin.
Thing is, this time, it seems as if it
could be for real. Lane is doing more than just ad lib here; Drew and Max,
after adjusting to their sense of justified shock, are instructed by the
mystery demon now inhabiting Lane to unpick the reasons why it has manifested
right here, right now…
The Cleansing Hour deserves credit for
appreciating the need for comedy here, as despite the internet framing device,
a lot of the other elements it needs to play through during its time are very
familiar by now. Demonic possession, in
all its gravel-voiced, gurning glory has been with us for a while; this film
opts to run with the Evil Dead-style of possession, all wisecracking and grim
physical manifestations (if I remember rightly, there’s even a pencil). This
works, showing a sense of legacy whilst also not delving too far into the kind
of drama which would not be such a good fit.
That said, the friendship between Max and
Drew feels very genuine, and their backstory is explored in just the right
amount of depth to sustain interest in what will happen to them. The only
moment which felt truly strained to me occurs when the demon forces a
revelation regarding a prior romance which affects these two; I guess the
filmmaker/writer Damien LeVeck didn’t want to tarnish a character by suggesting
adultery, but the way in which this was otherwise approached, well, it didn’t
seem like too much of a thing to get upset about to me. However, overall I did
feel on side with Max and Drew, and Max in particular gradually gets humanised
by his brush with a real entity. This is a very physical film, too, with every
actor put through their paces. There might be a girl tied to a chair, but she
still manages a physical performance. There are lots of practical effects,
which match the overall OTT tone and style of the film.
There are also some good, if again quite
light-touch comments on the nature of live streaming; the people watching all
of this unfold, many of whom – we can infer – believe utterly in the notion of
demonic possession do nothing but pour
scorn on what they’re seeing; you get to watch the comments stack up, and most
of them are of the ‘never read the bottom half of the internet’ standard.
(During one of these scenes, by the by, I got to see my first example of Welsh
used during the weekend, though not the last. One of the comments read, ‘Cymru
Am Byth’!) A serious appraisal of online behaviour this ain’t, but it does provide
a very plausible addition to proceedings, even if the film’s skit on ‘going
viral’ perhaps feels like a bridge too far, given the onslaught which brings us
up to this point.
And that’s my only real criticism of this film, as it’s otherwise good fun and in earnest; it crams in so much, it almost feels as though LeVeck wanted to get everything he ever wanted to put on-screen, into this one movie. As the film broadens out beyond its otherwise confined set and small cast, it perhaps goes further than it ever needed to. But, hey, if ambition and a burning desire to push one’s ideas as far as you feasibly think they can go is a crime, then it’s by far and away not the worst crime out there in indie cinema. The Cleansing Hour overall has a good sense of its own strengths, has fun with its subject matter and keeps things entertainingly gory, splicing its occult theme with some well-realised gore.
The Cleansing Hour played at Glasgow Frightfest on Friday, 6th March 2020.
Short films are fun because they often make for statements of intent: whilst good short films do more than simply act as calling cards, it’s still true that the best of these show something, in terms of style and theme, of what could follow. This is certainly the case with Mr. Clean (2020), an economical short film which blends its own ideas with a sense of the horror canon.
Based loosely on real-life cases, Mr. Clean describes a character whose thing is breaking into people’s homes to deep-clean them – doing so thorough a job, that he leaves no trace of who he is. That’s if anyone would want to complain, anyway. We soon see our Mr. Clean at work, as described by local radio DJ Jess during her show (Sophie Klaesson) – and of course, she can’t resist wishing aloud that he’d come and clean up at her place – but there’s more to this than just harmless eccentricity. It seems that Mr. Clean is so good at what he does because he’s cleaning up more than your usual day-to-day mess…
Mr. Clean (2020) is intended to be the first of three short films, so it doesn’t give away all of its ideas in one go; what we get instead is something which tantalises, rather than tells. The film reserves its energy for some decent practical FX and, via some mooted links to something akin to cosmic horror, an indication of a bigger picture, yet to be revealed. This film certainly does enough to generate interest in this, whilst moving at its quick but suitable pace (using Jess as a narrator as well as a character is a neat move, for instance). At just over six minutes, Mr. Clean shows what it’s possible to do in such a short time frame, and sets its agenda for films to follow. As such it’s a successful and fun project which blends moments of gore with hints of ‘old god’ weirdness.
It was with no mean amount of anticipation that I went in to Robert Eggers’ newest film; his last film – and his first ever feature – The Witch (2015) blended just enough ambiguity with its supernatural content, leading to a film which kept its mysteries without sacrificing its scares, but perhaps most of all, it successfully crafted a tale of the profound impact of isolation. It seems this is a theme Eggers wanted to explore further, so The Lighthouse has an even smaller cast, and the complete isolation of two men who – shall we say – would not ordinarily be friends. However, for me, the interplay between possible supernaturalism and isolation simply is not sustained here with the same level of success as in the earlier film. Atmospheric it may be, but The Lighthouse is in other key respects very, very dull indeed.
The premise is simple enough: on a remote island somewhere off the wind-battered New England coast, two men have taken on the role of tending the lighthouse there. It’ll be a four-week stint, then someone will be along to relieve them. The older of the two men, Tom Wake (whose name I heard as ‘Wick’, and thought was a bit of nominative determinism) is a grizzled old hand at this, and he makes it very clear to his new second-in-command that tending the light itself is his job. Everything else, it seems, is to be done by the younger man, who eventually introduces himself as Ephraim Winslow. It’s back-breaking and thankless work, and there’s little respite: the only thing to do in the evenings is huddle in the dim lamplight and, eventually, share a few stories.
But there’s something odd about this place: Wake reveals that his last helper went mad, and whatever is on Winslow’s mind seems to be troubling him, too: his dreams are increasingly traumatic, and he soon begins to lose his sense of time. Wake comes across as a practical man used to the life, but his determination to stop Winslow from having anything to do with the lamp – as well as his demented fixation with the power of the light – suggests that there’s a force or a presence involved with it somehow. Winslow’s curiosity is given little credence, and as the two men continue to co-exist, tensions develop between them. Winslow reveals that he isn’t, in fact, called Winslow – his name is Thomas Howard. Lots and lots and lots of rum (I assume) gets consumed. Many suppers are eaten. A seagull gets battered to death, possibly leading to an awful lot of bad (or worse) luck. And eventually, the confinement begins to get to Howard far more appreciably, driving him to desperate, violent behaviour.
Granted, there are elements here to admire. The choice of black and white certainly lends the film a grim sort of gravitas, and the tempestuous seas genuinely look impressive on screen. The continuous booming of the foghorn lends an air of menace which suits the content well. Inspired, also, is the casting: Willem Dafoe does a great deal with what he is given as Tom Wake, and Robert Pattinson is barely recognisable from his days as a harmless but feckless Twilight pin-up boy. They plausibly enact two men getting heartsick of one another, doubting one another and finally exploding into anger; they each play very physical roles, growing steadily more ingrained with filth and soaked by the perpetual rain. The Lighthouse is a very sensory film indeed.
The thing is, in its unwavering pursuit of atmospherics, narrative coherence and structure have been almost totally sacrificed. Whilst the horrors of witchcraft in The Witch could conceivably have been all in Thomasin’s mind, her family’s remote lives and hardships taking its eventual toll on her, it never felt like a cop-out for all that, and works just as well as a film whose witchcraft is real. The film felt as though it had a shape to it, too, whereas that is almost totally lacking in The Lighthouse which, at one hour fifty minutes, desperately needs some sort of pay-off to reward audience patience (several people walked out of my screening, I’m sure beaten back by the relentless nothingness of it all). In common with The Witch, The Lighthouse hints at some supernatural goings-on, but removes these even further from plausibility by making it all possibly ‘just a dream’, even suggesting in the script that it could all be a figment of the imagination of a young man trying to run from his own guilt. And there is no exposition at all, just a couple of hints of something weird out there, enough time for a mermaid sex scene (I guess that’s ONE burning question the film answers) and some deeply suspect seagulls. I liked some of the allusions to sailor lore, and who doesn’t love a shanty? But with so much screen time dedicated to watching two men steadily getting sloshed, The Lighthouse is less a brooding study of madness and more a Lovecraftian piss up. Moments of humour don’t really work, either: the farting, wanking and brimming bedpans jostle for position with long monologues about how bad the other person smells.
So, sadly, whilst I could marvel at the physical hardships undertaken by the two leads, and whilst Eggers has done sterling work displaying the ocean as a malign entity in its own right, this is a jagged, indulgent film which says very little. It is likely to be a very divisive offering, with its fans adoring its psychological horror and its detractors feeling almost completely detached from its psychology. Perhaps the ability to split viewers so cleanly is an achievement in itself, and if this was ever the aim then – mission accomplished, but ultimately there is just too little of substance here and the ends do not justify the means.
Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula has always proven a particularly rich seam for filmmakers hoping to develop their own interpretation of his story. Thus, Dracula has been a rat-like creature, a suave nobleman, an aged warlord, and all manner of subtle variants of same. By no means is every interpretation going to please all of the people, all of the time. I happen to love the Francis Ford Coppola Dracula for instance, a film which was a formative influence on me (it came out when I was twelve). Many other film fans take serious issue over its claims to be in any way ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’. And so, it was with mixed feelings that I saw the BBC were about to screen a brand-new interpretation of Dracula, penned by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat. Whilst I have nothing but respect for Mark Gatiss’s lifelong love and support of horror cinema, where his frequent co-writer Moffat is concerned, I’m rather warier. To use the word of the age, in his case I often find his re-tellings ‘problematic’. Thus we come to Dracula 2020, an at times reasonably diverting, but far more frequently exasperating skit on the novel which doesn’t seem sure it wants to play for laughs, shock with gore or – most appallingly of all – play to the Twitter choir, the sorts of people with thumbs primed to send out tweets which begin, ‘Well, actually…’ into the echo chamber, having usually decided to share with the world the factoid that ‘Stoker waz gay’; the same people who will already have stopped reading here, were they to find their way here at all, believing somehow that I’m a right-wing Daily Mail reader for daring to quibble. Well, actually…
In this version of the plot, Jonathan Harker is still going to Transylvania to sort out the paperwork for Count Dracula’s property purchase in England, though here we dispense with the ‘stranger in a strange land’ element of the initial journey which is so integral to creating the initial unease in the novel, and in many of the greatest film adaptations; we essentially start with Harker knocking at the castle door. Count Dracula (Claes Bang) is at first aged and enfeebled (why?) but soon begins to feed on Harker, who spends much of his time on-screen steadily weakening; the make-up SFX for this process is admittedly very good. Dracula, by nature of feeding on Harker, is instantly privy to his knowledge and understanding, though he seems to acquire a Cockney accent despite Harker’s own RP accent; anyway, after a disastrous sequence where Harker eventually tracks down the other person in the castle he’s certain he’s seen scuttling around, there’s a vampire baby sequence and a ‘bride’ who seems to live in a Skinner box; Dracula, by now a cruel, wise-cracking, charming arsehole, allows Harker to see one more dawn before breaking his neck and chucking him off the parapet. Harker is sort of undead, though, and able to make his way to a convent in Budapest, where he is cared for.
There he meets an irreligious nun (!) called Agatha Van Helsing; after the twist where she asks outright if Harker has had sexual intercourse with the Count, well, before the opening credits roll as a matter of fact (‘Well, actually…’) Van Helsing being a woman is, I’m sure, intended as another fist-bump twist. When seismic changes are made in a BBC drama, they always follow a reliable pattern – a bit like making a collage by chopping the existing material to pieces, but then laying out the strips in an instantly recognisable pattern. All told, Agatha (Dolly Wells) does well with what she’s given and is able to generate a largely likeable character, but the emphasis on droll one-liners quickly becomes an irritant; hers is not so much a script as a set of slogans, and the same goes for her adversary. Harker is reunited with a disguised Mina, whose wimple is made of far nicer fabric than her wig (seriously, could they not find an actress with their own hair?) but he’s beyond saving, and as Dracula tries to game his way into the convent with its array of armed nuns, Harker eventually revives and invites him in. Cue some nun-centred, and Harker-centred grue.
Agatha seemingly survives, however, and is shown chatting through events with Dracula, as they enjoy a game of chess which leads to one of the three-parter’s most enjoyable about-face moments, though first you have to wait for Gatiss and Moffat to dispense with yet another frightening, brooding sequence (the voyage of The Demeter) which seems now to have turned into Murder on the Varna Express, with a lot of new characters who don’t make it beyond the episode. We have the aged woman of means, the deaf-mute Indian child and her doctor father, the black servant who conveniently manages to verbally challenge on-screen those who would judge him on his race, the nasty young, rich white guy (natch) and his duped bride (nearly all female sexuality here is the province of dreams, memory, or otherwise thwarted through things like ‘fiance being undead’, ‘husband being secretly in love with his African manservant’ or ‘being a nun’). We also have characterisation of all the crew, oh and Dracula is on board, not concealed in monstrous form beneath deck, but striding around eating people ad hoc, something which takes them a while to notice as they seem to be stuck in the 19th Century equivalent of Big Brother, with all the petty interactions this brings.
This is frustrating, as the next episode then seems to feel it has to shoehorn in all of the characters from the book who have been MIA until this point – characters who then get lip service, but little more. There simply isn’t time. Still, Agatha manages to survive long enough to almost off the Count, but can’t, and dies, though getting a grudging respect from Dracula for almost achieving her aim. But he ends up sinking to the bottom of the sea where, in modern Whitby, he finally revives and gets taken to a specialist research centre for study by Zoe, a descendant of Agatha’s (also played by Wells). With me so far?
There’s just about time to get a Lucy Westenra, a Jack Seward, a Quincey Morris and a Renfield (Gatiss) into the final proceedings; once Dracula has mastered WiFi and has a lawyer to get him out, he can handle a mobile phone and so he intercepts a conversation between Jack and Lucy, arranging to meet her. Her utter fearlessness about death assures him that she will make a good new bride, but the intercession of her family choosing cremation puts the kibosh on her being an eternal beauty; it’s not clear to me why Lucy would know and use the archaic word ‘bloofer’ to describe her beauty (or her hallucination of her beauty) but there we go, this is what I mean: when running out of time, pack in those references. Dracula has moved to London; Zoe, Agatha’s relative, drinks a sample of Dracula’s blood, absorbs Agatha’s knowledge, and works to discover what Dracula is afraid of. Turns out, it’s death, and when he has this represented to him, he opts to throw in the towel by feeding on her conveniently diseased, and therefore poisonous blood, because there’s nothing like a bit of narrative expediency.
Along the way, proceedings pause multiple times to offer the audience various ‘Easter eggs’, as nods to existing projects have come to be known. That there is such a term says a lot about how screenplays are written today, as there has been a massive proliferation of Easter eggs, and by the by that is not a sentence I saw myself typing today. I understand this urge to show a bit of group solidarity, and I know that many viewers really enjoy being the first to spot these references; I do, though, feel that a little goes a long way.
Modern horror almost falls over itself to tip the hat to older horrors; Stephen King adaptations are some of the worst offenders here, to the point where it often feels as though the references pre-date the new script. This telling of Dracula was partly filmed at Orava Castle in Slovakia, where (actually) Nosferatu (1922) was filmed almost a century ago; this is impressive, sure and something which was always going to impress horror stalwarts, in I’m sure the same way it made horror stalwart Gatiss go giddy. There are also clear links to Hammer, not least via the blood-red contact lenses used on Claes Bang in some shots. Fine. But did we need the Lugosi ‘I never drink…wine’ line quite so many times? The Cushing/Van Helsing ‘curtains’ reference? And perhaps least forgivable, links to Moffat’s own Doctor Who and Sherlock? I’m not sure if this is pure vanity, or just what constitutes acknowledging one’s fans, but given that it seemed a panic and a rush to end the story in Episode Three, perhaps more time could have been spent on doing that. As it stands, by the time the end credits roll, there are a number of questions and issues which don’t quite bear up, and all the distractions of other references will never cover up for that.
Tonally, this was a hard pill to swallow. Dracula has always been able to withstand a certain amount of camp; you could argue that, between Van Helsing’s phonetic English and Dracula’s rather verbose grandstanding in the novel, Dracula was camp from the very beginning. Claes Bang has some panache here, and he is entertaining on screen. But he goes from moments of deliberate camp to gut-churning cruelty in ways which feel rather unconvincing. I understand that the aim is to show just how little he cares about lives; he likes people, but he doesn’t respect them on any level, and simply wants to drain them for sustenance. Doing this via enforced laughs works in a piecemeal fashion, often breaking the spell of cruelty, or vice versa – rendering the cruelty a little thin, a little rushed, as all things seem rushed, swept along in a race to fit in everything which is deemed necessary.
But I think, for me, the thing which most derails this version is its disposal of subtext. All of the queasy, barely-expressed ideas in Dracula (1897) about sexuality, race, imperialism…you know, the academic Easter eggs, which people still use to write journal articles – they’re there to reap and critique precisely because they aren’t overt. If they were, there’d be nothing to decode. It’s the inability, or refusal to tackle eroticism head on in Dracula which lends the novel its rare power. We can unpack Dracula’s line concerning Harker which reads,’This man belongs to me!’ and, if you like, ponder whether it means sexually, spiritually, proprietorially, or otherwise. The brides are malign and terrifying because Harker is as fascinated with them as he is repulsed. Lucy Westenra as the ‘Bloofer Lady’ is appalling because she uses her sexuality to manipulate the man who would free her soul. It’s a book which absolutely creaks with subtext, and the best films and adaptations retain this unseemly, secret aspect.
The BBC Dracula, in its rage to pander to a generation of short attention spans and worthy agendas, brings the subtexts out into the light, where true to form, they burn away to nothing. The one-liners and modern social mores render it down into a vaudeville Dracula yarn, occasionally funny, splattery entertainment – again, fine – but splattery entertainment which fancies itself as doing something rather radical and profound, really sticking it to those social conservatives, but in fact just whirling through a mess of ideas before finally just copping it. I don’t think I’m a social conservative of any stripe, but – sadly – I felt talked down to by this version throughout. Yes, this version is energetic; yes, it is ambitious in its way, but it still comes across as constructed to satisfy agendas I’m not interested in. I know I’m very much in the minority with these opinions. Ultimately, though, I don’t think this show was ever made for me; having only just got over The War of the Worlds, I will tread with care from now on.
For the first part of Keri’s article, please click here.
‘Keep Filming…’
It would be borderline impossible to write about the horror of the first two decades of this century without mentioning a phenomenon which, like ‘torture porn’ cinema, has been rather divisive. I’m talking about the found footage craze – and I think ‘craze’ is a fair term for it, as post-Blair Witch scores upon scores of filmmakers wanted in on the relative ease, accessibility and profit that the form offered. As technology improved and came down in price, leading to the rise of digital media which made it far easier to shoot and edit entire projects, many more would-be directors found themselves able at last to make their own movies. In many respects, this is a positive: it led at least to an extent to a democratisation in filmmaking, where people were no longer excluded from the game simply by a dearth of equipment and funding. However, when you open a floodgate, all manner of material gets through, and some of the affordances of ‘found footage’ soon began to feel just as much like limitations, quickly hardening into cliches of their own.
At its best, the found footage sub-genre has provided us with films such as the [Rec] (2007+) franchise, its very title coming from the ‘record’ function which displays on most camcorders when recording is taking place; utilising a plausible reason for the filming, as well as decent performances, the [Rec] films successfully exploit a sense of unfolding panic as events in a Spanish apartment building spiral quickly out of control. The ‘night vision’ setting is used to particularly good effect here, as the camera becomes a necessary tool to enable the person using it to face down whatever is out to get them, rather than simply being there to get footage. The films were successful enough in their own right to spawn a number of imitators and reboots. Other good examples of the genre include Cloverfield (2008), where videocam is pitched against something absolutely vast in scale, and The Bay (2012), which has enough about it to maintain interest as a host of aquatic parasites besiege a small seaside community. As time has passed, people have reached that little bit further looking for new threats to explore, meaning that most of horror’s classic monsters have been refracted through a shaky camera by now – anything from ghosts to dinosaurs to Bigfoot have had the found footage treatment, with variable outcomes.
One of the great issues which has come to trouble the subgenre, though, is creating an adequate reason for doing so much filming in the first place. Many filmmakers are half-aware of the issue, and will often have characters ask one another, ‘What are you doing? Why are you filming this?’ Well, the question isn’t often adequately answered, and in haste some filmmakers have failed to account for how their film has ostensibly come together in the first place (was it genuinely ‘found’ in this state, or has someone edited it, or..?) Add to that the often unpleasant sensation of motion sickness which can come about, not to mention the utter saturation of the horror market with films of this ilk, and it’s not too great of a leap to see why certain fans (self included) came to get a certain sense of dread when the next low-budget, handheld camera movie came around. To me, some of the best films which use this technique blend it with more conventional filmmaking elements, such as utilising some recovered footage segments alongside, say, mockumentary elements. The absolute best of these, and one of the most unfairly overlooked horror films of the past twenty years, is Lake Mungo (2008). When a teenage girl is found drowned in a lake near her home, her family soon become convinced that she is still with them somehow, and they start to see her in home movies and photographs. They speak to a film crew about their experiences, as slowly they begin to piece together events leading up to Alice’s death. It’s a deeply effective, unsettling film with just the right balance of video footage against more conventional shooting styles.
Other effective found footage titles have started to draw their found footage from the still relatively new world of social media and online interaction: this is to be expected, as social media is now so deeply entrenched in people’s lives, not to mention frequently implicated in the real-life horrors of bullying, doxxing, stalking and all manner of charming human behaviours. Unfriended (2014), which unfolds in real time, is rather better than I expected it to be and weaves together some genuinely unpleasant scares, bringing together online chats, YouTube footage and social media in a very up-to-date supernatural horror. I think that this will continue to be a rich source of horror from this point in; we’ve already had entire films shot on an iPhone (such as To Jennifer in 2013) so as our relationship with ever-augmenting tech continues, the horror potential will doubtlessly continue to grow.
Social Media Horrors
By no means is found footage the only place where we see social media get examined and taken through to extreme, though perhaps not impossible conclusions. If a constant source of anxiety and horror is losing agency, whether through being locked in a castle or tied to a damn chair, then living in a world where all of our deepest, darkest secrets could potentially be accessed and exposed online is a sure fire source for horror, a ‘what if?’ which is, let’s face it, far from impossible. In 2018’s Assassination Nation, a vast data breach threatens to expose the secret lives of townsfolk in small town USA; the resulting hysteria creates a very modern witch hunt as people suddenly see one another as they perhaps really are; it’s an uneasy watch.
Aspects of online interaction can also be extremely lucrative whilst inducing people to behaviour they might not otherwise accept or practice. An early, and excellent example of this came with 2011’s Panic Button. Riffing on the popularity of reality TV, the film followed the fortunes of four competition winners, treated to an all-expenses flight by a popular social network called All2Gethr.com. However, the experience soon turns increasingly nasty as the contestants realise they have been spied on and exposed, before being coerced into taking part in cruel online games which pit them against one another. The increasing potential for online stardom in the new age of the vlogger has given rise to several other recent films, several of which marry the idea of ‘torture porn’ with live streaming, thus providing some justification for the horrors unfolding: people are getting maimed for clicks and comments. As an example, Finale (2018) takes a recognisable premise – kidnap – and turns it into something akin to an old horror host set-up, except the very real torture he presides over is unfolding live online. Making Monsters (2019) pitches a successful YouTube couple against a more savage version of same, swapping their highly successful pranks for something altogether worse which they must battle to escape. It seems highly likely that we will get more films in a similar vein, clear evidence to my mind of ‘dark web’ paranoia and a fear of the loss of control (and in fact, the Unfriended sequel in 2018 had ‘Dark Web’ in its title.) God knows what screenwriters will ever do if we get exhaustive WiFi access, though: horror still seems to depend on phones which suddenly stop working…
Self-Aware Horror…
Another phenomenon which has grown and developed during this century so far stems – to a large extent – from the sheer length and breadth of the horror movie tradition, now that it is over a century old. We as audiences have access to a vast amount of that legacy, and the more we see, the more we might come to recognise trends, or tropes – just as I’m doing here. The other side to that is fans frequently have more of an idea of what to expect; they can delineate the features of a slasher film, for example, or consider likely outcomes. The same goes for any subgenre within horror, and it has doubtlessly become harder and harder for filmmakers to land the element of surprise or even garner some aspects of reinvention to keep their audiences engaged.
One solution has been to challenge the conventions of horror cinema from outside – by deliberately stepping outside the anticipated narrative, disrupting the ‘fourth wall’ that typically divides audience from on-screen events. One such film is Funny Games (2007, though this is a remake, almost frame by frame, of the 1997 version of same). During one scene, it seems as though Ann (Naomi Watts) has been able to turn the tide against her two male aggressors, grabbing a gun and shooting one of them; however, this potentially redemptive scene then actually rewinds on-screen, resuming the previous storyline. It’s a strangely discomfiting experience. It’s also a tad risky, potentially disrupting the film in a way which is hard to set aside, though I suspect this is the whole point.
Filmmakers have also felt able, based on how well-established their subgenres of choice might be, to send the genre up. This probably started in the Nineties with the popular Scream franchise (1996), though at that time it felt more like laughing at horror, rather than with it – a rather dismissive takedown which rubbished tropes Wes Craven had helped to establish in the first place. Rather wittier and better-handled, to my mind, was Behind the Mask: the Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) which started out as a documentary on a would-be slasher anti-hero, an affable fella keen to point out to the crew that you have to do a hell of a lot of cardio to endlessly turn up ahead of the person fleeing from you without being out of breath. As the film progresses, however, the expected formula for Leslie’s upcoming murder spree gets disrupted, with the crew themselves suddenly in the path of danger. It’s a clever film, it shifts its style very successfully and it’s definitely laughing with us. Tucker and Dale Vs Evil (2010) did a similar thing for ‘hillbilly horror’, that rather mean stereotype which positions everyone who is working class with a Southern accent as about to explode into violence.
Perhaps the most ambitiously self-aware horror, and one which again divided audiences accordingly, was The Cabin in the Woods (2011). Here, the horror narrative unfolding is being controlled by outsider forces, people who select elements at random because that’s their job – but in their defence, they need to have the horror play out successfully because it’s part of a bigger picture; there’s a lurking horror which could genuinely break out if not for these contained, regulated narratives. The film works because it depends on our shared understanding of a myriad of movie monsters and scenarios; even the idea of the ‘cabin in the woods’ used in the title is part of horror history at this stage. To me, it’s an affectionate and ingenious piece of film, and a million times more fun than many of the reboots and remakes which the past twenty years have brought…
It’s hard to believe that two decades of the new millennium have already passed. It seems like only yesterday that we were complaining about ticket prices for Millennium Eve, whilst simultaneously fearing a computer glitch which would potentially mean the end of the world as we know it. Well, it didn’t quite happen that way – but it’s fair to say that we live ‘in interesting times’ these days, hyper-connected to one another whilst also experiencing epidemic levels of anxiety and loneliness, riven by social, cultural and moral uncertainties and often living very precariously, even whilst being aware that, comparatively speaking, we’re often healthier and wealthier than our predecessors. Little wonder, then, that horror cinema has survived and thrived in the 21st Century so far. If we accept that horror offers up a distorting mirror to the society which generates it, then there’s ample material there, not to mention more and more ingenious ways – at least ostensibly – to reflect our fears back to us, in terms of what can be done on-screen. Horror is alive and well, a constant in many regards, but also something which is morphing and shifting as life morphs and shifts for us all. Perhaps it’s more vital than ever. However, over the past two decades, it’s become more and more common to see horror cinema represented as being something else entirely. Having castigated the genre as being low-brow and tawdry, occasional viewers have had a tendency to feel rather surprised when a horror film turns out to be rather good. So they do what anyone would do – they decide what they’ve seen must belong to a different sub-genre altogether.
The ‘Post-Horror’ Fallacy
Seeing horror dismissed outright by many critics and viewers as beneath contempt has been a bugbear for its fans for many years longer than twenty, but the one thing which seems to irritate us more is seeing horror re-named as something else, simply because if it’s good, then it can’t be horror. It’s a little like calling the stuff you like ‘erotica’ and the rest ‘porn’ – it’s justifying ones mores to oneself. Horror is rife with it. This cognitive dissonance does a great disservice to the filmmakers and audiences who already get the point that horror can be clever and nuanced, and it makes the commentator making their half-baked distinctions look woefully misinformed, even deliberately disingenuous. I mean, if it’s Kiss bassist Gene Simmons talking about how HIS films are going to be ‘elevated horror’ rather than, y’know, horror, then we can probably safely assume it’s a marketing strategy as much as a legitimate declaration. But when you get a mainstream newspaper like The Guardian running a feature on ‘post-horror’, then you have to wonder what’s going on. The distinction is still not clear to me, as most of the films mentioned as ‘post-horror’ in the article are – you’ve guessed it – horror, in all its wonderful variety. As Nia commented, in one of the most popular pieces we’ve ever run, “the only thing that is too rigid about horror is the persistent and false belief from some that it is not good enough and not profound enough; and, somehow, not broad enough to encompass all that it does.”
The compulsion to disparage seems to lead directly to the compulsion to re-divide and re-name; it’s entirely unnecessary, wrongheaded, and exasperating. (The same goes for calling horror ‘highbrow horror‘, by the way. Same applies. I could go on and on.) What’s especially galling, though, is when a horror director whose work has been embraced by fans, their profile raised accordingly, decides to shrug off the association with the genre when the going looks good. This simply entrenches the old attitude that horror is simply a step up to better things, which surely makes it harder to argue that the genre is inherently satisfying in and of itself. So, we will get more ludicrous attempts to call the genre more palatable things, we will almost certainly get more directors calling their horror movies ‘social thrillers’ or ‘dark fantasies’, and horror fans will always find it galling. Sadly, in the days of viral articles and accessible outrage, we’ll continue to see all of it, too. But what of the films themselves? What has been significant about the horror cinema of the new millennium so far?
Let’s start on a heart-warming one.
‘Torture Porn’ and the Rise of Ordeal Cinema
Yep, having just defended horror for its expansiveness, and argued against its detractors, we come to a sub-genre which has very definitely divided audiences, right down to the choice of term ‘torture porn’, as coined. Ask different people and you will get different ideas about the derivation of the term: some say that it refers to an unsavoury sexualisation of on-screen violence, whereas others say it’s to do with the unflinching focus on physical trauma, in the same way that the camera refuses to look away from sex acts in pornography. Perhaps though the point here really is – where did this divisive type of film come from, and why did it escalate its graphic cruelty in the first decade of this century? Even for many diehard horror fans, It quickly felt like an intrusive addition to the genre. Sure, people had been put through excruciating ordeals in horror before, and the 1970s had their fair share of cruelty for cruelty’s sake, but the sheer glut of torture and torment after Saw (2004) seemed to open the floodgates, something which feels pretty significant in hindsight.
I still believe that there are examples of this kind of ordeal cinema which are well-paced and delivered well enough to shine through, but the number of Saw-clones and tied-to-chair horror films quickly made me feel inundated and a little bored, and it’s not nice to feel completely alienated from someone’s on-screen suffering. Familiarity breeds contempt, here as anywhere. But the formulaic nature was so quick to establish itself: unwitting outsiders (or unwitting hosts) find themselves menaced with household tools, always tied to something, always maimed in slow-mo. Wolf Creek (2005) severed a girl’s spine and turned her into a ‘head on a stick’ so she couldn’t run away; Hostel (2005) saw a jaded man blowtorch a woman’s eye because he was utterly bored with his life and wanted something to ‘remember’; in the absolute nadir of the subgenre for me, Neighbor (2009) has a nameless woman torture a group of guys – subversive! – for no particular reason, right down to a penis torture scene, which was inevitably cut by the BBFC.
I have read some interesting commentary on how the genus of this kind of cinema seems to be our cultural exposure to scenes of torture via revelations coming out of Guantanamo Bay post-9/11, and I do think there’s something to this: there’s that distorting mirror again, with real-life footage of people manacled and their faces covered bleeding into horror narratives, as we collectively tried to make sense of a world irrevocably changed and more overtly violent, threatening and divided than it had been in decades. However, I think there’s a kind of grim pragmatism to the proliferation of ordeal cinema, too. Firstly, it isn’t riveted to stellar storytelling. The better ones have characterisation and (some) direction, of course, but ultimately you could potentially get a film green-lit on its boasts of unparalleled violence, not its narrative arc. It was a popular, affordable ingredient. With decent make-up effects and lighting, the gore could look plausible, the action could unfold on a limited budget and the end result could potentially appeal to a new wave of audiences who prided themselves on getting through it at all. No film is ever made in a vacuum, either – so as one ordeal film did well, another would quickly pop up. It now all seems like a torrid, but fairly short-lived horror trend, with the potential for an easy, lucrative horror spreading like wildfire through the ‘horror scene’.
Some of the most monstrously cruel films did not originate from the US, however, and the early years of the decade saw the rise of what is now dubbed ‘the new French extremity’, as French filmmakers took advantage of new opportunities to get films funded and made. That said, their cruelty is often of a rather different, more nuanced variety overall, even whilst not scrimping on the gratuity or the bodily close-ups. Mental breakdown segues into bodily breakdown more readily in this kind of French (or sometimes Belgian) cinema, with Dans Ma Peau perhaps my favourite example of a bloody, but engaging and deeply sad study of one woman’s withdrawal from the pressures of modern life. However, the ultimate meld between existential angst and torture has to be Pascal Laugier’s film Martyrs (2008), a film where torture is ostensibly not undertaken out of mere cruelty, but because pain is deemed to be a gateway to a higher understanding. For me, this is where the wave rolled back for torture cinema: having gone to that extreme, further instalments of that level of protracted torment felt rather empty, newly needless in a way which marked the beginning of the end.
On-screen torment, whilst still protracted in its own ways, now seems to have morphed into sensory deprivation, rather than sensory overload in the form of physical agony. It is still cinema which riffs on helplessness, often re-introducing literal monsters into the mix (the monsters in ordeal cinema were almost invariably human), but its anxiety is linked to sightlessness, or soundlessness – an inability to see or speak. Some examples include Don’t Breathe (2016), A Quiet Place (2018) and Bird Box (2018) – perhaps films too few in number to really declare a new sub-genre now exists, but an interesting indication of where on-screen ordeals could be going. People seem to be losing the taste for torture and looking elsewhere.
Horror Cinema and its Millennial Monsters
The films discussed so far almost all have people as their monsters, but the more literally monstrous – in the sense of inhuman or supernatural in some sense – definitely hasn’t gone away. In fact, the earliest years of the new millennium seemed to generate a new wave of zombie horror, although the zombies themselves were often barely recognisable from George Romero’s shambling, but relentless hordes across his initial trilogy of the 60s, 70s and 80s respectively. At the beginning of the Noughties, zombies even seemed more inclined to run than to shamble, to the consternation of many fans; high-profile remakes of Romero’s work, beginning with Dawn of the Dead (2004) and followed by a new version of Day of the Dead (2008) opted for bigger, bloodier outbreaks, where not only was the threat of contagion present and correct, but these zombies seemed to be in a weird state of enraged athleticism, which brings its own terrors, even if you don’t much like this development. The same is true of ‘is it or isn’t it a zombie film’ 28 Days Later (2002), a film which at least carries enough of the hallmarks of a zombie film for it to feel right to mention here; the same societal breakdown, the same desperate survivors, the same masses of no-longer-humans who want to catch you and turn you into ‘them’. That it was all blamed on ‘rage’ seems very fitting, all things considered. Call it a zeitgeist film, perhaps.
Romero himself was back directing in 2005, with a film which picked up where his Day of the Dead had left off; Land of the Dead extends the premise hinted at with Bub in ’85, with the idea that zombies can, to an extent, remember, learn and cooperate. For me though, this creates a difficulty which even Romero couldn’t get past in his final two zombie films, Diary of the Dead (2007) and Survival of the Dead (2009). If zombies can eventually learn to master the things which made them human, what is it which makes them (or keeps them) truly monstrous? Where can this particular monster then go? Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, as devotees of Romero’s earlier work, understood this and went very much back to basics with their stand-out horror comedy Shaun of the Dead in 2004 – their zombies certainly didn’t run. But this is another facet of millennial zombies: it was a familiar enough trope by this point that it could withstand more than being redrawn; it could cope with being sent up, or used for social satire in ways which could now be wholly overt. Fido (2006) is one of my favourite of these kinds of films, a clever skit on the much-vaunted links between zombies and commodification. Other films, like Pontypool (2008) linked a zombie outbreak with the viral spread of language: those who ‘caught’ language would be reduced to mindlessly parroting the same words or phrases, whilst irrevocably drawn to those who still had the command of their own language. It’s a clever idea which lends itself to several interpretations – whilst still being a damn good film, which is also important. So, the zombie has shambled (or sprinted) along fairly consistently, a continual well of inspiration for budget-less new filmmakers at one end of the spectrum, and fodder for a big-budget TV franchise at the other.
What of vampires? The vampire film doesn’t really feel to have been in ascendancy over the past two decades, at least in my admittedly subjective opinion. There have, however, been some stand-out vampire films, typically those which do a similar thing to my preferred zombie flicks: they draw on some familiar aspect of the lore, and take it somewhere altogether thought-provoking. Shadow of the Vampire (2000) is an excellent place to start along those lines, positioning itself at the making of arguably the first horror film, Nosferatu, and mythologising it, turning the making of that film into a horror of its own. 30 Days of Night (2007) took the straightforward idea that vampires thrive in the dark and extended it, by placing it in a sunless Alaskan winter; Let The Right One In (2008) is a charming adaptation of the Swedish novel of the same title, interrogating ideas of friendship and loyalty as the isolated Oskar and his new neighbour Eli form a strange, often beautiful bond. The ambiguity of the closing scenes has never faded for me. Other big-budget outings have used vampires as a plot device, but just as we have the spectre of thinking zombies, so we now have ‘vegetarian vampires’, which, again, seems a development too far…
Supernatural horror, too, has sadly often been confined to multiplex hits like the Paranormal Activity series, or else we have had to ‘borrow’ ghost stories from the Far East, albeit that some of these have been excellent. Demonic possession, whilst an oddly sexist cinematic sub-genre (demons seem to infinitely prefer inhabiting girls) has clung on, with several ‘The Possession of [Girl’s Name]’ titles over the past couple of decades and even a new tendency whereby even deceased females can get taken over by malign forces – see for example Unrest (2006) and The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016). There’s no rest for the wicked; why female flesh in particular is so embattled is an interesting question, but perhaps one we can answer rather blithely by saying that female flesh is so embattled. Haranguing over questions of bodily autonomy has become a fact of life, even in the 21st Century, so perhaps inevitably, films explore these questions in grotesque manner. A film like Deadgirl (2008) brings all of these ideas together: when a couple of misfit boys find an apparently dead, but reanimate female corpse in the basement of an abandoned building, they find an opportunity to assert themselves over her, sexually and proprietorially. Here, with her, they are in control, when the world outside is in a state of flux which precludes them from being who they want to be – who they feel they deserve to be. It’s a grotesque film, but it’s an underrated horror.
Finally for this part of my article, I want to talk about one other as-yet minor, but significant development in cinematic monsters – one which brings us right back to ‘people as monsters’, but has shifted the roots and reasons for the avowedly monstrous behaviour. In the new millennium so far, we have seen a few films which shift the idea of cannibalism away from being something ‘other’, something that happens ‘over there’, to something more akin to a cult practice, existing just behind the facade of polite, normal society – the societies we recognise. In this guise, cannibalism is often treated as empowering and a key part of familial identity: both versions of We Are What We Are (2010, 2013) enact cannibalism as ritual, something without which the dynamics within families are endangered.
Similarly, Habit (2017) explores cannibalism as something like a code for in-group belonging, as well as being something compulsive which draws people to it; it takes the idea of society’s invisible people, people who linger on the fringes of society, and shows us where they might go, and why. The Clare Denis film Trouble Every Day (2001) re-positions cannibalistic urges as a pesky side-effect of an experimental medical procedure, which is also linked to libido, gifting us the vision of Béatrice Dalle as the ‘ill’ Coré, partially eating a man she has just seduced. Finally, Raw (2016) introduces us to an isolated young veterinary student (and vegetarian) whom, after consuming raw meat as part of a hazing ritual, develops intense cravings for human flesh. This film melds philosophical ideas about angst, anxiety and self-knowledge and propels them through a grotesque series of events, and as such, Raw could equally be seen as the tail end of the new French extremity mentioned above. It’s a fitting place to pause.
Look out for the second part of Keri’s examination of the new millennium in horror…coming soon…
At the risk of an extreme case of deja-vu – here we are again, then, with another year (and a decade) done. Business as usual, in many respects – but if I was to identify anything particularly significant about 2019, it’d be to say that the distance between mainstream cinema and independent cinema never seems to have been greater. I have attended a standard, or high street cinema just a handful of times, at least once to see what has become an unlikely crossover success. For the rest of the time, all the new films I’ve seen have come via film festivals, where – sad to say – a lot of excellent cinema thereby goes overlooked by many people who might find plenty to love. Some of the bigger-budget films have struck a chord with audiences of all stripes, however, and in many respects it’s been a pleasure to dodge some of the big-budget guff that’s been hurled at audiences who might not know there’s a big, bad, but better world out there, beyond bloody Marvel and, at the time I write, Cats…
But anyway, 2019 has brought along a host of great films: here are my personal favourites.
Black Circle
Bringing cult heroine Christina Lindberg back to the screen for the first time in decades, I really enjoyed this science-meets-occult film, an original idea which effectively merged the creep factor with a workable fantasy world all of its own. Playing with two familiar ideas – the notion of ‘self help’ and the notion of self-hypnosis – Black Circle revolutionises the trope whereby all vinyl records with supernatural potential are bound to be heavy metal, bound to summon Old Scratch. Not so here. It’s a film which knows how to splice traditional ideas with new, and it had me gripped. You can check out the full review here.
3 From Hell
Step around the point that this is a very unlikely sequel, both in terms of time passed and how events last unfolded on-screen, and what you have here is a filmmaker who has nothing to prove, nothing to worry about, only a deep desire to make films in his own way. The result is, effectively, several films rolled up in one, and whilst it’s a really sad note that actor Sid Haig’s poor health prevented him from reprising his role as Spaulding in the way Rob Zombie originally intended, 3 From Hell is a fun nod to the exploitation cinema of the late 70s and early 80s. Yes, in many ways it’s a retread of the plot from The Devil’s Rejects, and it doesn’t surpass the earlier film, but it certainly has its own fair share of energy, violence and cruel wit. With no agenda to fulfil, it’s still enough of its own beast. You can check out a full review here.
The Nightingale
A film which couldn’t really be further from the film above in terms of tone and treatment, The Nightingale is one of the most staggeringly brutal films I have ever seen, and I can honestly say I don’t think I will ever watch it again. I will still encourage anyone with a stomach for stone-cold historical epics to see it once themselves, however, as without preaching or sentimentalising, this film has a message which will stick to your skin for weeks to follow – as it should. Its tale of a young, abused woman in early colonial Australia, seeking the help of a native Australian to help her pursue the men who took everything from her is a gruelling, upsetting watch, but the supreme efforts taken over the verisimilitude, acting, locations and direction elevate it beyond most films I have seen. You can find out more about The Nightingale here.
Joker
I have no interest in the vast majority of comic book adaptations and the sheer glut of them is equally off-putting (‘watch these ten to understand this new one’) but Joker cut through a lot of the usual noise, because it seemed to irritate paternalistic critics and commentators who were alarmed that, for reasons not usually fully explained, the film might (gulp) inspire violence in its audiences. It hasn’t, of course, but this terror that the film bore some sort of message was intriguing in its own right. What were the great thinkpiece army afraid of? It turns out they were afraid of a sophisticated, finely-wrought character study of a damaged man; modern cult narratives of privilege and superiority are undone here slowly and meticulously, as Joachin Phoenix’s masterful performance gives us not a two-dimensional comic book stalwart but a real, sympathetic, if flawed person, sinking in a world which is not designed to help him. Links to the Batman universe are minor at most here, only underlining the undeniable distance between the powerful and the disempowered. No wonder the establishment hated this; they should do. You can read Helen’s great appraisal of Joker here.
Midsommar
Ari Aster’s riff on possession horror, Hereditary, was a massive statement of intent and ability; Midsommar, his most recent film, couldn’t look more different nor feel more different than the earlier film, but it is still a masterclass in showing us people out of their depth, surrounded by a knowing community with a functional, mutually-understood but downright dangerous culture. By moving the action to rural Sweden, Aster is able to channel the best of the folk horror tradition: alongside Robin Hardy, he shows us that nature can be a beautiful, expansive, but utterly indifferent setting for human misery (although you could argue that this ultimate break-up movie has a happy ending, of sorts). Midsommar has some familiar elements, sure, but it is still a highly original piece of storytelling, combining the age-old horror of ‘a stranger in a strange land’ with a prettified, theatrical isolated community (another folk horror staple) – this is undeniably horror to my mind, it’s an instant classic, and it’s the best film I’ve seen this year. You can check out my full review of Midsommar here.
Honourable mentions:
Why Don’t You Just Die! – Russian splatstick which works brilliantly within its confined set, hurling grisly sequence after grisly sequence at the audience. For all that, it’s not mindless and has an interesting story at heart which it delves into in good time. Check it out here.
The Color Out of Space – whilst not every element worked for me (I’m not sure what film Nicolas Cage thought he was acting in, even by his standards) it takes some guts to come back after a hefty career break and attempt to take on the vagaries of Lovecraft – but Richard Stanley did it. It’s a lurid, bold attempt to adapt a tricky story and as such it deserves credit. Take a look at the review here.
Please note: this is a discussion of the recent BBC version of The War of the Worlds and as such contains spoilers.
Like many other H G Wells fans, I was suitably excited by the promise of a new, televised version of War of the Worlds: taking the action back far closer to the time when Wells actually wrote it, the trailers promised a real spectacle, with evident care taken over how the new version looked, although for reasons unknown the action was moved ever so slightly into the future – taking place in Edwardian, rather than Victorian England. Well, the mantra here has to be – be very careful what you wish for. The costumes might be attractive, the settings (almost) plausibly contemporary, but sadly, as soon as things get underway, the appeal starts and ends there. It seems extraordinary to me that you would go to the trouble of choosing a period setting and a well-known story, and then tinker with the story itself in such a series of ways as to irrevocably alter, and mollify, the original. The changes made are often head-scratching, changing the substance of the Martian threat in ways which beg many questions and undermine many of the story’s key elements. Though, perhaps, the other kinds of alterations are the most irritating, because they come wholly via modern predilections and concerns, and here’s another mantra: familiarity breeds contempt.
There were some moments of real optimism when Robert Carlyle first appeared on-screen as the astronomer Ogilvy, charting developments on the surface of Mars which seemed to show some sort of disturbance at the surface. This chimed very nicely with the opening elements of the novella and its brilliant opening, the concept that, as their resources dwindled, the vastly-superior Martians ‘regarded this earth with envious eyes’, plotting and undertaking an invasion – all whilst man busied himself with his own petty concerns, not given to taking much interest in something usually the preserve of the scientific community. This is something that Wells does brilliantly – he depicts the sullen stupidity and self-absorbed nature of everyday people, right up until the first capsule lands in parkland near his narrator’s home in Woking. No one writes the stupidity of crowds like Wells. No one.
And yet, the part of the story when the capsule first lands, and a monotonous, ominous tapping begins to be heard within it, is omitted from the 2019 version. Rather than taking it slowly, building the suspense on screen which Wells generates in his story, the new screenplay does two things: it plunges the audience instead into a completely unnecessary love story (which, by being extra-marital, allows some hemming and hawing about Edwardian morals whilst adding a brand-new and possibly obligatory female character into the mix) and then, when we’re back to the site of the first landing itself, there’s no slow, awful unscrewing of the canister, no shock reveal of the creatures themselves who, incapacitated by the stronger gravity on the surface of Earth, need to retreat almost immediately – but still generate terror and panic in the watching crowds. Instead, writer Peter Harness and director Craig Viveiros give us the flashy sequence of a levitating sphere and an early attack on the crowds outside the foreign craft. We see nothing of what is going on, only a rather ham-fisted means of flagging the danger! to come.
Having committed itself to a female lead character in the plucky, educated, and of course pregnant Amy (can’t be plucky unless you have a reason to live beyond yourself, right girls?) the screenplay seems to spend an inordinate amount of time preaching the true love which exists between her and her partner George, who has bailed out on his rather prim wife to play cottage with his new girlfriend. Whilst the performances here are… okay, the relationship itself feels exactly what it is throughout: a distraction. By focusing almost continually on whether or not George is 4 Amy 4 Ever, this rendition of War of the Worlds assumes that we will readily sympathise with them both, to the exclusion of the hell which is eventually to be unleashed on society at large. Personally, I found them both lacking in interest, a microcosm which couldn’t quite hold as anarchy was unleashed. In effect, although it’s not the most prominent aspect of the plot in the novella, Wells also gave consideration to a relationship between a man and a woman, but – by separating his narrator from his wife by the extraordinary circumstances overtaking their lives, we are made privy to his range of concerns, fears and motivations rather than simply treated to a tale of boy meets girl at the exclusion of all else. This works well; it is fully-realised and plausible, with a vindication of the narrator’s faith and bravery at the book’s close which hangs together with everything he has witnessed and experienced. What makes the 2019 TV series even more disengaging is that, via adding a new timeframe which takes us regularly forward into a bleak new future, we are presented with Amy again but not George: are we intended to ponder whether they will be reunited, and invest fully in this possibility? It doesn’t work. The shifting moments in time are disorientating, the futurescape itself barely-realised, other than to show that it’s both dysfunctional and particularly unsafe for women. Distraction layers upon distraction here, and with it comes frustration.
Perhaps, had the screenplay focused more on the threat unfolding, it would have had time to show us not just the Martians themselves (who when they rather incredulously decide to scamper around on the ground look like the critters from Starship Troopers) but the eventual appearance of the fighting machines, or ‘tripods’, which cause such a stir when they’re first sighted that they are able to successfully decimate large swathes of England. Whilst the tripod design itself is quite effective, it’s lobbed in very early on and then dominates proceedings, being the only Wellsian visual which seems to survive intact from the book and is as such flaunted, credentials-like, during every remnant episode. Less is more, at least as the horror of the original story begins to build and new vessels continue to land in England, the threat rising incrementally. But then, the series dodges the redemptive moments: the Thunder Child sequence, the sense of (perhaps misplaced) hope that mankind could rebuild, live underground, the loving but understated reunion at the novel’s close. It skips all of this, and shows us that humanity has all but regressed; this, to me, is part of the series’ odd, skittish and simplistic agenda.
Now, before anyone jumps to say that The War of the Worlds is an anti-imperialist novella, I know. I’ve read it. The entire concept for the story came from a conversation which Wells had regarding how the British had brutalised the native Tasmanians during their campaigns to claim that territory: against the might of the British, with their industrialised weaponry and trained troops, the people living there stood no chance to defend themselves. Wells pondered this, and wondered what would happen if a force superior to the British could emerge and do the same to us Brits. However, in creating his story of a Martian invasion of English territory, he steers his reader to see this possibility with a very light touch, not devoting paragraph after paragraph to scold people into seeing the parity. In effect, he largely trusts his readers to have the intelligence to work it out.
The 2019 screenplay not only lacks any faith in audience intelligence, but it communicates its loathing of the British Empire, regularly, via its crude script and so many needless additions which can be rendered down into ‘British Empire bad’. From the minister who looks up at a fighting machine and goes off into a reverie at all the awful things the British could do with it to the ‘ISN’T THAT WHAT WE DO?’ lesson when the subject of Martian destruction comes up, right through to the laughable monologue by Amy at the end which rather bizarrely celebrates the lovely ‘brown skinned people’ she remembers from India, with their nice clothes and sunny weather, the hectoring is absurdly crass. The whole thing is watch-through-hands, embarrassingly bad. It’s barely beyond dog-whistle, deliberately swapping out the key elements which make the original story great whilst redressing the diversity in the cast, elevating fashionable postcolonial ideas but communicating them in unsophisticated, worthy vocabulary which feels like a chiding, skipping the slow build for three episodes where quite simply, some machines harangue an unorthodox romantic couple.
I appreciate that the funding and the approbation these days comes from espousing all the right ideas which never brook any opposition in vast swathes of the media, but come on. Wells’ novel is still popular over a hundred years since it was first serialised because it’s good. It still works. And this was meant to be an adaptation of it. When we read it, we understand the great vulnerability of mankind, its arrogance, the old British certainty that nothing could assail it. However, it also shows us ingenuity, complex ideas, a range of emotional states. It shows us that vulnerability is not just ours alone, and that for all the stupidity of crowds, Wells also believed in its inverse – people’s capacity to go on, to adapt and to keep strong. He also believed that his contemporaries could appreciate nuance and subtlety without missing the point he wished to make. What a shame so few films and TV series afford us the same optimism.
Whilst the whole ‘terrified babysitter’ shtick is nothing new in horror cinema, its use and development in Fright (not far off fifty years ago now) is just one facet of the way in which the film works quite differently to a lot of its contemporaries, as well as the films which have followed in its wake. Fright deals in threats and intimations, rather than great amounts of violence or bloodshed. In this respect, it’s a very effective film which creates a great deal of atmosphere.
From the opening scenes of babysitter Amanda (Susan George) arriving at the rather remote house where she’ll be working that evening, you get the sense of something inauspicious waiting in the wings. Add to this the incredibly nervous behaviour of mother Helen Lloyd (Honor Blackman) as she checks and double-checks the locks, and you get the distinct early impression that things are not quite as they seem here – that this goes beyond a mother unused to leaving her three year old son at home. Still, it’s a rare night out, and husband Jim (George Cole!) urges her to get going; Amanda says everything will be fine and there’s nothing to worry about. However, as soon as they’re in the car, the couple discuss whether or not Amanda ‘knows’ the real circumstances of their celebration. It’s a small village, after all. It seems that Amanda’s guess that they’re celebrating an anniversary is not entirely accurate…
Amanda settles in for the night, but an unexpected face at the door startles her; shortly after, her sometime boyfriend Chris (Dennis Waterman) appears, and makes it pretty clear he’s come round with the express purpose of sleeping with her, though he gets short shrift. He says it wasn’t him looking through the window though; he’s also able to give Amanda some local information about the Lloyds, telling her that Helen does in fact have a husband, who had been incarcerated for trying to kill her. The stage, then, is set. We know why Helen is so anxious, and we know who might very well be about to turn up.
Whilst the Chris explication is a little overly convenient, the film does take this aspect of the plot and do interesting things with it. For example, the endlessly panning camera as Amanda moves around the property does create a sense of unease for the audience; actually, from the moment the camera first finds her, as she gets off the bus and walks down to the house, the film is excellent at creating a sense of her vulnerability, so her instant fear as she hears Chris’s story works pretty well. Even before this, every noise in the house takes on a resonance; we’re clearly primed for an ordeal before any ordeal takes place, and it’s all economically done. Other things are nicely handled, too, such as the inclusion of a horror film within this horror film. As Amanda tries to immerse herself in what’s on the TV, the fantasy horror of Plague of the Zombies, she misses the very real threat at her door. Again, it’s subtly done, but it works in terms of developing interest. The systems which are meant to be put in place to help her (such as the police) are represented as stultified and inept, too, which builds frustration on Amanda’s part and allows the threat against her to progress.
Despite all of that build-up, Fright is perhaps surprisingly low on actual violence; its escalation is in terms of human emotions, far more than it is in physical harm (although there is some). This means that, interestingly, Amanda and Helen’s characters are presented as two sides of the same coin in key respects, and indeed one of the characters sees them interchangeably, with the film helpfully representing this to us by swapping them, showing Amanda as she appears as Helen. Amanda quickly understands this mania, using the survival instinct women often have to play along and placate, though all while enacting very plausible terror at her situation.
Fright is very good at projecting a steady, yet sustained kind of horror, from the perspective of the panic of two women, and how they try to protect themselves and those dear to them in dire circumstances. Yes, there are a couple of abrupt sequences (such as the ending itself) but overall, good performances and a palpable atmosphere help to get the most out of what on paper would seem a very straightforward, tried-and-tested story. This Studiocanal release looks great and you would never believe this film was nearly half a century old; you can find out more about their edition here.
Art as either a conduit for evil, or a form inspired by evil has been used in many horror films down through the years, and Art of the Dead makes no bones about taking a little of both of these ideas as its central thread. The resulting film is a crowd of ideas, which translates to an attempt to throw a great deal at the screen in the nowadays rather slim running time of ninety minutes.
We begin with an art collector returning home with a new piece, a canvas depicting a lion. The piece of art clearly has quite an effect on him, not least because this means he’s completed his collection of other animal paintings by the same artist. His family are strangely uninterested however; this provokes great irritation on his part. He retreats to his collection – but, the now completed range of paintings suddenly seems to have a bewildering, disturbing effect on him. And then…are they time lapses? Hallucinations? Or genuine murders, which the paintings have inspired? (We can assume these aren’t hallucinations, I’d say.) When our erstwhile art collector tries to destroy the works, he finds that they have a supernatural ability to ward him off…and thus concludes our experiences with this particular family. Safe to say it hasn’t ended well.
The artwork is retrieved, and we next encounter it at auction – an auction hosted by a lady called Tess (the indefatigable Tara Reid in a small cameo role). Now listed as ‘Dorian Wilde’s collection’, there’s a great buzz around the auction room as some very well-dressed bidders try to get their hands on said collection. The winning bidders are the Wilsons (Lukas Hassel and Jessica Morris), but they are soon warned by a mysterious former priest (Robert Donavan) not to hang the paintings; no one encounters these works of art without incurring serious harm, he tells them. Well. They don’t listen of course, displaying the art all over their plush mansion, and they soon have a strange, negative effect on the family members – including Dylan’s visiting twentysomething son Louis (Zachary Chyz), who only happens to be an artist himself. Gradually, Louis begins to see vision of Dorian Wilde, all whilst his family members get subsumed by the deadly sins which have inspired each artwork, and while those in the know – including before too long Louis’s girlfriend Kim (Alex Rinehart) – try to break the spell.
That’s a brief synopsis of the plot then, but rest assured, there are hints and pointers to all manner of other potential themes along the way too. Clearly there are ideas here, but I can’t help but feel that less would be more – for example, having Dorian Wilde reference Jack the Ripper, albeit briefly, was a whole other avenue which wasn’t (and probably couldn’t have been) explored with the time and resources available. In doing so much, the film felt a little like the series Night Gallery, though not confined to one painting/one episode, instead cramming a series worth in. Tonally the film was a little difficult to place, too: in some aspects, it’s played for high camp (a tactic which I think works best, given other practical factors), but then again, there are some moments of (pretty decent) practical gore effects and prosthetics, which seem to suggest the film reaching for something else (as do the frequent moments of titillation along the way, one of the director Rolfe Kanesky’s major calling cards). All told, it’s very busy, and there’s quite a lot to digest, which can be a little jarring as you wonder whether this is a straightforward horror yarn, or something altogether more wry. Also – and it’s the eye of the beholder I know – but the paintings themselves are not quite as ominous as the characters seem to suggest in their behaviour, so it’s a little difficult to suspend disbelief here as people refer to them as ‘masterpieces’. Again – high camp? I could never fully relax into a sense of this.
Essentially, there is just so much going on that events begin to zip past you in Art of the Dead – as much as it’s largely a positive trait in a film to have such ambitions to get a great deal done in a film on a low budget. Sometimes taking a breath and stripping things back a little might have been the best course of action, however.
