You could be forgiven for thinking that whatever could be done with the zombie genre has been done by this point, but a viewing of The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale (or Zombie For Sale, as it was titled at the screening I attended) proves this wrong. A deeply funny and ingenious spin on the idea of zombie as contagion, this is as much as anything else a film about family life in a provincial part of Korea – where the pace of life is far too sleepy and detached from the rest of the country for a zombie outbreak to get adequately dealt with. But, ever enterprising, what could have been a disaster for the Park family is rendered a boon. This rather troubled clan see their fate move quickly from the ridiculous to the sublime.
The source of the outbreak is not really the important thing, but for the record: big pharma are the bad guys here, and medical experiments gone wrong give rise to the not-quite-dead but certainly mindless, shambling zombies. One such zombie is a young man who finds his way out of some top-secret medical waste and makes his way to the Park family home – after wandering the back roads for a while first, where it seems zombies are afraid of dogs. Frightened of both the zombie and the dog, the Parks tie the boy up in one of their outbuildings (they run a petrol station, or did) whilst they think about what to do next. In the melee, the pater familias is bitten. You might think you know what is to follow, but out of nowhere the film delivers its first surprise: Man-deok doesn’t turn into a zombie himself. The film takes a turn towards Cocoon, as the zombie bite rejuvenates Man-deok, making him look and feel years younger. Before long, his friends all want a piece of the action and the Parks sense a business opportunity…meanwhile, teenage daughter Hae-gul takes quite a shine to the mute, cabbage-prone zombie boy, even christening him Jjong-bi (sounds an awful lot like ‘zombie’, see) and doing her best to make the lad remember his humanity.
This all sounds too good to be true and it is, but the gradual descent into more of a standard zombie fare is a very diverting journey which manages surprises all along the way. Knowing they are playing, essentially, a pack of ratbags, the Park clan play for laughs throughout – there is no glamour here, only a rather dour daughter-in-law, a sacked salaryman, an isolated teenage daughter, a chancer of a husband and an even bigger chancer of a grandpa; I had no idea that Korea was as fond of pratfalling and other physical humour as we Brits, but the film is very much a physical comedy and this is a good match against the overblown character types on display. But, despite their tendency to see everything through the lens of what could financially benefit them, they do develop and grow and you can find yourself broadly in sympathy with them come the end.
Zombie For Sale does not make any attempt to make any of this scary, either; it knows exactly what it is, even referencing the far more serious Train to Busan as the characters try to work out what to do once the shit hits the fan. It also references other zombie horrors, including a certain scene from a certain Braindead (Dead Alive) so it clearly has a sense of where it does, or doesn’t fit in with the genre and pays due deference to it. There are definitely shades of Fido here, too, as the Parks all try to make the most out of the semi-domesticated Jjong-bi – but when it transpires that a zombie bite isn’t simply a means to cheat the ageing process and the big pay-off comes along, this is a high-energy, escalating crisis to rival many of its peers, even if the sense of threat is mitigated by the comedic style. This is also a film about rural life, how whatever could befall a major city would at least generate some kind of response; here, it takes a whole lot of time for anyone to really notice what’s going on. All of this only adds to the good-natured appeal of the film overall.
A quirky, often ingenious film, Zombie For Sale keeps things pretty light whilst bringing a series of surprises to the screen – and the genre. It’s great entertainment throughout, if you allow its profound silliness to carry you along.
Zombie For Sale screened at FrightFest Glasgow on Saturday 7th March 2020.
Whilst depictions of loneliness are not rare in genre cinema, on odd occasions a film comes along which treats the subject with a level of sophistication and subtlety which is both compelling, and difficult to do justice in words. Saint Maud (2019) definitely fits into this category. Having some similarities to Lucky McGee’s May (2002) in terms of subject matter, Saint Maud nonetheless disposes with the left-field ‘kookiness’ and colour of that film (accepting that the earlier film does of course wind up in a very dark place). Stylistically and tonally, there are some links to Possum (2018). But whilst similarities and connections can be noted, Saint Maud is very much its own beast nonetheless. This is a very finely-wrought, often subtle film which trusts the audience to fill in the gaps. It also trusts in our empathy, even when our central character grows increasingly destructive. It’s a trust which is amply rewarded.
Maud (Morfydd Clark) is a nurse, and we meet her just as she’s about to embark on a new role: she will live in with her new patient, Amanda Kohl, offering living support and palliative care. Kohl (Jennifer Ehle), once a renowned dancer and minor celebrity, is terminally ill with cancer; there’s an obvious disconnect between Maud’s new-found piety as a born-again Christian and Kohl’s defiance of her condition, electing to drink, smoke and enjoy herself as much as she can whilst she can. However, a guarded relationship begins to form between them. As we find out more about this quiet, introverted young woman, we are given hints that something terrible lurks in her past; this is revealed little by little, and some of the burden of Maud’s pre-conversion days is never discussed, only shown to us – little physical clues, for example – or alluded to in the script. For Maud, her religion is very real and the crutch upon which she leans; she asks for answers from God, talks to Him as if they have a cordial relationship, and pleads for the sense of direction she desperately wants. Soon, she feels he has revealed it to her: her mission is to save the soul of the lost Amanda Kohl, bringing her to the light before it’s too late.
Yet, for all the sense of purpose this bestows, Maud’s certainty in God is soon tested and her quiet introversion begins to slip. She begins to veer back and forth, between elements of her old life and her desperation to hang on to the new. Having a purpose provides great responsibility, therefore it’s a source of anxiety and it’s something this damaged young woman cannot sustain. Her subsequent disassociation is deeply involving and difficult to watch; she’s ever more a person not equipped to cope with a grasping, mean, superficial world and she moves away from it.
The use of religious ecstasy in the film is very interesting. For Maud – in the early parts of the film – it seems connected to her need for direction, for a purpose; when she thinks she has it, she exists momentarily on a level with what she believes to be a higher power. It is not sexual – it has replaced sex. When religious ecstasy isn’t possible, sex is – as is mania, which comes later satisfyingly spoken in Welsh to reflect actress Clark’s heritage. Maud tries to encourage her patient to replace the pleasures of the flesh with something spiritual and is led to believe that she has been successful; her disillusionment is a central plank in what later goes wrong for her, and even as a non-believer, the crushing sense of loss which Maud feels is really rather difficult to watch. Equally, Maud’s state of mind is always presented rather adroitly, her facial expressions and gaze revealing the most part of the turmoil she’s feeling. We even get odd moments of bleak humour. Again, it feels very much that director Rose Glass trusts her audience to see this; the script so rarely spells anything out that moments when the film breaks out of this subtlety are genuinely shocking. Morfydd Clark is phenomenal as Maud, an almost frail girl emoting huge existential crises with a glance or a sob. Equally, Jennifer Ehle – whose genuine motivations are never really explored – is an ambivalent character in her own right, equally as deserving of sympathy, despite her own wrongdoing. Characterisation is never fully straightforward, but it definitely allows empathy and understanding, even whilst not liking everything which unfolds.
It takes skill to represent a flawed character, like Maud, who calls to us through all her flaws and her actions. Add to that a fantastically-framed and shot film, with the sad faded artifice of Scarborough forming a suitable backdrop for what unfolds, and we have a fantastically sad, sophisticated but oddly redemptive story. It’s not an uncomplicated response, and to reiterate, it hasn’t felt easy to do this film justice. But if you have space in your heart for a character-driven, sensitive exploration of mental states via moments of note-perfect horror, then this is for you.
Saint Maud screened at FrightFest Glasgow on Saturday 7th March 2020.
The (almost total) demise of the anthology film is a crying shame: despite a minor, if noteworthy comeback with some notable entrants into the genre such as the ABCs of Death or Dead Girls over the past decade or so, it’s still a format which just doesn’t seem to attract the interest it once did, whether from filmmakers or distributors. But why? As I’ve said elsewhere, the anthology or portmanteau film has all the ingredients it could need to endear it to an audience: there’s scope and range, there’s the possibility that one or more of the stories will appeal to different people, and there’s the promise of a good, workable framing story which can only to the appeal. It’s as close as we get to old-fashioned storytelling, gathering around to share a selection of stories shared by an overriding purpose or need – different tellers, somewhat different styles.
I don’t think it’s audiences who have rejected this format, either; rather, it’s been done for them/to them. Horror fans so often fondly recall anthologies from their early viewing days: depending on their ages, it could be an Amicus production, or it could be the likes of Creepshow – but the love and appreciation is there, and it’s encouraging to see filmmakers like Ryan Spindell, after directing a raft of excellent short films (including the singular, superb Kirksdale) making his first feature-length film an anthology horror.
The Mortuary Collection is a selection of four short tales, as told by an undertaker (played with aplomb by Clancy Brown) to a visitor at his establishment. From the outset, and via the kid who opens and closes proceedings, this feels like a rather sumptuous, overstated piece of Gothic and feels to be channelling some of the ‘kiddie horrors’ of the 1980s. This, however, gives way to the tales themselves, which are rather more grisly and cautionary; they also get away with being tonally quite different to one another, as they are only very loosely themed by the mordant undertaker’s desire to tell a few tales about interesting deaths. So,, whilst this isn’t the most thematically-solid framework, it’s plausible within itself and to be honest, Brown is so much fun to watch in-between times, channelling the high macabre camp of the AIP classics, that it works on the basis of that alone. Spanning around three decades all in all, the tales cover the likes of an inter-dimensional bathroom mishap, a tables-turned warning about sexual conquest, a sad tale of Til Death Do Us Part (my personal favourite) and, finally, a bridging story which quite cleverly joins up tale to framework, exploring the real reason that there’s been an unexpected caller at the mortuary that day.
This film gets so much very, very right and the first thing which springs to mind is what an absolute visual treat it is. In a perfect world, there’d be a three-hour extra feature on the DVD release where you get to potter around and explore the sets – there isn’t a single wasted object or a dud angle which dispels the magic; everything is note-perfect for the setting, whether the faded Victoriana of the funeral home or the period settings used in the tales. There’s also a very watchable balance of a kind of stagey performance against more natural moments which work well, never going too far into realism (which wouldn’t make sense) nor too far into hokey acting either, which would derail things in the other way.
Now, if I were to criticise the film at all – and, having heard the director’s immense excitement about getting this film made, it almost pains me to do so – it would be regarding the film’s total running time. The Mortuary Collection has had a strange journey to feature-length, having first consisted of short films made individually , then getting stitched into one film afterwards. This is also a film initially written, edited and directed by one man, though I understand that an additional edit has taken place since. Coming in at around two hours with four stories altogether, this is a long film and whilst to give credit to all involved, it certainly doesn’t feel like a patchwork, it’s also clear (and appreciable) that Spindell didn’t really want to let anything go. Tough love would suggest that the first and shortest story could go altogether, leaving the more usual three stories behind.
But, this minor quibble aside, The Mortuary Collection is what it should be – a lot of fun. It feels retro and it looks it, and it offers entertaining tales around a successful central plot device. If this film’s legacy is to make the point that the anthology film is not dead, then that would be a great outcome for a modern film with such a classic feel. Oh and hey, I got a custom toe-tag as a memento…
The Mortuary Collection screened at FrightFest Glasgow on 6th March 2020.
Unorthodox stories of the afterlife seem to offer a great deal of potential for exploring fundamental ideas about what it means to be alive: when faced with disruptions to what we know, or think we know, or believe in, we’re encouraged to think differently, or given a new focus on what’s important. A Ghost Waits (2020), in some respects, reminds me of the classic alternative afterlife movie Beetlejuice (1988) with its after-death bureaucracy and perplexing guidance for hauntings; to an extent, there’s something of The Lovely Bones in there too, a story which equips its heaven with an ‘intake counsellor’ to help people settle in and yet also makes its heaven a frustrating, even sometimes alienating place. Yet for all of these comparisons, A Ghost Waits manages to feel entirely original. Yes, it introduces its own unorthodox afterlife into its narrative, but it does it with a gentle charm and a pitch-perfect interplay between the living and the dead; the resulting film is both humorous and deeply moving.
MacLeod Andrews plays Jack: Jack works on behalf of a rental company as a fixer-upper, going into properties after the tenants have left to make sure the electrics work, the fixtures and fittings are intact – that sort of thing. One house in particular seems to have a strangely high turnover of tenants, and we’re made privy to the fact that this is because the house is haunted. Unawares of this, Jack finds himself with nowhere to go during this job and so winds up staying over at the now-empty house, even though he’s technically not supposed to. But everywhere he turns, his supposed friends ‘can’t help’ (something which provides the film with one of its most organic yet bittersweet scenes when Jack calls a friend to ask for a place to stay; she turns him down flat, but ends their phone conversation by glibly repeating ‘if I can do anything for you, just ask!’) So Jack is stuck in the house until the job’s done. He waits around a lot in the evenings. He twiddles his thumbs. He plays on a guitar that the tenants left behind, wondering out loud why in hell they left so much of their stuff.
Perhaps Jack’s sense of detachment from the land of the living prepares him for what follows; he begins firstly to hear voices, and then to dream that he’s actually sleeping in one of the beds upstairs, rather than his good old sleeping-bag. Eventually, he sees something manifest in the house. This is ‘spectral agent’ Muriel (Natalie Walker) – not a ‘ghost’, never a ‘ghost’ – and she’s employed here too, though they seem at cross purposes. It’s her job to drive away the living. Why? It’s just what spectral agents do. Gradually, these two come to understand one another better; Jack’s lack of fear enables Muriel to begin exploring human emotions once more, and come to that, she allows Jack to move on from his deeply-entrenched loneliness. But there are issues at hand; there are other powers at work behind the scenes which decree that Jack must be scared away. Muriel has to navigate these, as well as defend her place in the house she loves.
A Ghost Waits absolutely thrives on its performances and its script, which is balanced with improv and moves seamlessly from very naturally and plausibly funny to equally naturally, plausibly sad. Whilst Andrews plays his role absolutely convincingly as a kind of ‘everyman’ character; clever, witty but stranded in an indifferent modern world, Walker is at first appropriately stagey and dispassionate; she grows back into a woman with human emotions and her own kind of sadness as the film progresses. These two are but rarely in the same shot (actually, Andrews carries almost the entirety of the shots with ease) but nonetheless, the film engenders a sweet developing relationship between them; other character additions add layers of humour in their own right, but the film belongs to the two leads and how they each change, given their new awareness of each other. The film being in black and white – well, that works, too, though it’s harder to define why; perhaps it adds gravitas and a sense of a story bigger than the sum of its parts, but also adds a nice contrast to the normal, suburban setting we find ourselves in.
I absolutely understand that one of the plot points in the film’s ending isn’t for everyone, and I spoke to some people after the screening who felt absolutely flattened by it; I wouldn’t dream of correcting or commenting on that outlook, and I can completely understand why it is not for everyone. For me, the conclusion gets a pass because the film itself is a fantasy, albeit one with a great deal of the real at its heart. It extends this fantasy at its close, but does so to offer a kind of redemption to characters which it has encouraged us to invest in.
Overall, the film’s great energy and ability to weave something new out of pre-existing motifs more than sustains it for me. A Ghost Waits is a clever, harmonious and darkly funny film, an oddly but genuinely heartwarming story which deserves to be seen. For a directorial debut, this is an incredible piece of work.
A Ghost Waits premiered at Glasgow FrightFest on Friday 6th March, 2020.
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…
