Keri O'Shea

21st Century Horror: the First Twenty Years (Part 1)

Posted on December 31, 2019December 31, 2019 by Keri O'Shea

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…

Keri’s Top 5 of 2019

Posted on December 20, 2019December 20, 2019 by Keri O'Shea

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.

What Went Wrong with War of the Worlds (2019)

Posted on December 11, 2019 by Keri O'Shea

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.

Fright (1971)

Posted on November 20, 2019November 20, 2019 by Keri O'Shea

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 of the Dead (2019)

Posted on November 13, 2019 by Keri O'Shea

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.

Doctor Sleep (2019)

Posted on November 11, 2019November 11, 2019 by Keri O'Shea

When Mike Flanagan and his creative partners stepped into horror cinema’s big time with the announcement of their adaptation of Doctor Sleep, they were assuming responsibility for one of the most eagerly anticipated sequels in modern cinema. Widely (if not necessarily universally) heralded as a classic, Kubrick’s The Shining is an established treasure trove of modern cinematic iconography, casting its brooding shadow since its release in 1980. With such an atmosphere, and so many scenes, lines and photographic stills firmly embedded within the contemporary consciousness, any sequel would have plenty to live up to in order to be regarded as ‘worthy’. Factor in too, that Doctor Sleep is not ‘just’ a film sequel but also a literary one, its author ‘Master Of Horror’ Stephen King – and suddenly the hordes waiting with baited breath are swollen in number by those who are invested in Kubrick’s vision, to those who, as they say ‘preferred the book.’

Happily, for fans of both iterations, stewardship of the storytelling universe centred upon the Overlook Hotel could hardly be in safer hands. Mike Flanagan, along with principle collaborators such as producer Trevor Macy and cinematographer Michael Fimognari, has in recent years established a body of work that has skilfully woven an appreciation of horror’s classic tropes with a thread of contemporary relevance, in keeping with the demands of a modern reading that looks for a certain degree of humanism at the heart of its central premise. So, for haunted houses, haunted dreams, haunted objects and urban monsters, we have interconnected wider themes of family, negative forces and how they can be passed from locations to persons, from person to person and thus from generation to generation. Also, how these negative forces may originate from human agency but can also be nullified by the right kind of human interference. Crucially, the depiction of these distinctly human themes do not come at the cost of atmosphere or scares.

Another notable factor is the patronage of King, who praised not only the adaptation of his novel Gerald’s Game but also Flanagan’s most noteworthy success to date, Netflix horror The Haunting Of Hill House, itself adapted from Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel. If nothing else, this thumbs-up from the author should surely embolden Flanagan and co to carry on interpreting King’s writing with confidence. Also, for those who grew up as fans of the King literature ahead of the Kubrick cinema, any doubts they may have harboured about their hero’s work being misinterpreted would surely be dispelled by such a vote of approval.

So much for the hype…what about the film itself? If anyone who watched the remake of King’s IT like me baulked at the almost instant use of blood and violence as poor Georgie has his arms ripped off by gutter-haunting clown Pennywise, rest assured there is a greater degree of subtlety employed in the opening scenes of Doctor Sleep. We are at first introduced to The True Knot, a sinister group whose lives are made unnaturally long through predation upon young people who exhibit various powers of Shining. More than simply feeding upon them, it is in fact necessary to ensure that they die in as much agony as possible, for the greater the pain inflicted, the greater the purity of the essence (or ‘steam’) released during their dying moments. The de facto leader of this group is the charismatic Rose the Hat, who, alongside her lover Crow Daddy, decide whether to harvest their victims there and then, turn them into one of their own, or eke out their suffering (and their precious steam) over as long a time as possible. This vampiric tribe exists in a state of nomadic hunger, searching it seems ever farther and wider for the once plentiful supply of children with Shining who seem to be ever rarer, their Shine more and more diluted by modernity.

In the same timeframe as we discover the Knot, we also reacquaint ourselves with young Danny Torrance and his mother Wendy, shortly after the events of The Shining. They now live in Florida, but as far removed as they appear to be from the mountain fortress of the Overlook, the rapacious revenants of that place still haunt young Danny. He is shown a way to harness his power to rid himself of these shades and their seemingly ceaseless quest for his life, as he is visited once more by the ghost of kindly fellow-Shiner Dick Halloran (memorably played by Scatman Crothers in The Shining). Fast-forward to 2011 though, and it seems that for all he was taught to defeat the ghosts of his past, nothing suppresses the disturbing visions inherent with the Shining like alcohol, drugs and cheap sex. Dan, as he is now known, lives by at once drowning his past and racing toward an inevitably bleak future. He receives another visit from his old protector Halloran, who tries to turn him away from his path of self-destruction.

Dan is forced to travel far and wide, to try to run away from himself, as far from the destruction and horror of his past as possible. Finally, he washes up in a small town where he is accepted by a kindly local, a man who seems to recognise the roots of the fragility in Dan’s eyes. Discovering support and employment, he finds the courage to put down the bottle and begins to forge a new life. As the previously suppressed Shining returns in strength, so he finds a way to use the power he has as a force for good, ushering the dying patients of the hospice he works at across the threshold from life to death, in peace, unafraid. In so doing, he finally comes to live up to his old nickname ‘Doc.’

Another consequence of his returning powers of the Shining is a strange friendship with another who shines, who begins to leave messages scrawled on the wall of Dan’s room. Young Abra Stone is aware of her ‘magical’ abilities, much to the bemusement of her parents, who refuse to talk about it and so force Abra to reach out into the world using her powers, looking for understanding. Sensitive to those who use the Shining and herself acting as a beacon for those who are also sensitive, inevitably she comes into contact with Rose and The Knot, their own search for sustenance these days growing increasingly desperate. In this way, the stories of Dan, Abra and Rose begin to converge. The stage is now set for a battle of astral projection, the hunter becoming the hunted, and the inexorable pull of the past and its demons upon Dan…

On many levels, Doctor Sleep is a story in which the past, in its brooding, dogged way, must be conquered or at least reconciled, in order to defeat both its hungry ghosts and its multifarious consequences – tendrils that reach out as if in pursuit, only to be found waiting exactly where they came from, all along. Danny Torrance must therefore come full circle in his journey, returning to the place he has spent so long trying to escape from, whether with some magical trick taught to him by Dick Halloran, or by turning to drugs, drink and violence much as his father once tried to do. In the end, although he spends his life running ‘from himself’, as he puts it, the absurdity of trying to do so is made apparent when he decides, in his desperation, to head for the old hotel once more.

For the makers of this sequel-of-sorts, reconciling the past and the future to create a cogent resolution to the 42-year old cycle started by King’s 1977 novel, similarly meant finding a way to step from beneath the looming shadows of giants. Flanagan and co wisely choose to embrace those shadows, and as such everything in Doctor Sleep is cast in much the same hue as The Shining. Pacing and score contribute to the heavy sense of foreboding, and much weight is given to the Kubrick contribution to the story. The scenes in the Overlook itself are faithfully recreated, waves of blood and all, as if to emphasise the timeless waiting presence of the place. The comparison with Hill House is an obvious one – both buildings conceal a patient yet ravening hunger behind their grand facades; both are homes to ghosts who crave the succour of living souls. Both Hill House and the Overlook Hotel pursue their quest for souls via the agency of family, of blood ties that are so strong as to bind against madness. Families that can be so catastrophically inverted by the corruption of a parent or parents against their children.

By choosing to integrate The Shining and Doctor Sleep, rather than reframe or reinvent the former to suit the latter, a strong element of continuity is preserved. This attention to detail is followed meticulously, such as with the cameo performances of Alex Essoe and Henry Thomas as Wendy and Jack Torrance, as well as the visual elements of the Overlook. Whether The Shining was a film in need of a sequel is perhaps arguable, but having decided to tell the story of what happened to Danny Torrance, Stephen King could hardly have hoped for a more sympathetic or diligent team to bridge the gap of years. The casting is excellent all round. Ewen McGregor is easy to sympathise with as Dan, his fragility and basic goodness as a person shine (ahem) through, as much as Rebecca Ferguson’s witchy Rose is cold and unknowable. Kyleigh Curran is likeable as the surprisingly confident Abra Stone, even if her almost happy-go-lucky performance is slightly at odds with the sense of imminent threat that pervades throughout. Support from Cliff Curtis and Zahn McClarnon is also standout.

All told, Mike Flanagan has taken what might at first appear to be a daunting and thankless task – producing a follow up to a cinematic classic 40 years down the line – and made of it about as successful an attempt as anyone could do, given the various demands of those various factions invested in it; be they King fans, Kubrick fans or book-over-film fans and so on. True to his style, humans themselves are not portrayed as wholly evil or wholly good – rather they are able to become corrupted all too easily; by drink, by their lusts, by the nameless power resident in an old hotel. In one of the most affecting scenes, Dan stands up in an AA meeting, ‘eight years sober’ chip in hand. He recounts the tale of his father, who he only really knew when the darkness of drink and violence descended upon him. There was a time, he says, when his father tried to embark upon his own recovery and would have wanted nothing more than to stand where his son proudly stood that day, eight years sober. In this way the humanity of Jack Torrance is reclaimed, after 40 years as a virtual comic book villain.

It is this power to ‘reclaim’ the traditional ghost story or horror film from the ignominy of mere shlock entertainment that has made the work of Mike Flanagan so effective, but this is not merely a case of watering down the essential darkness at the heart of the best horror. There are plenty of chilling moments; in particular the Knot’s ghoulish pursuit of children with the Shine produces some grisly scenes. Having already whetted their blade upon Hill House, the Overlook is of course milked for all it’s worth. There is a certain degree of satisfaction as we return there to the ominous strains of Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s original, hauntological score. Whether you will feel equally as satisfied upon the film’s resolution is your choice – for me it felt like as suitable a way for the story to resolve itself as any other. Well-acted characters who are easy to care for or dislike, a heavy atmosphere of inevitable, looming dread, and plenty of ‘Easter eggs’ for those who look out for such things. Perhaps the greatest compliment you can give Mike Flanagan is that he took the work of King, Kubrick et al, and made it part of his own, increasingly recognisable storytelling universe.

Celluloid Screams 2019: Making Monsters

Posted on November 8, 2019 by Keri O'Shea

It’s perhaps pretty inevitable that ideas and anxieties about social media stardom have begun spilling into horror cinema. As a relatively new means of attaining wealth and stature presents itself, and as new risks to autonomy and privacy come along, the human imagination begins to ponder all the things which could go awry. Tragedy Girls (2017) depicted two social media-obsessed teenagers who transform their minor stardom into something big when they begin documenting real-life murders in their town; last year’s Assassination Nation looked at the real-life threats caused by a data breach where the deepest, darkest secrets of people’s social media usage were exposed. We’re primed for this kind of thing. Making Monsters melds elements of ideas present in the films mentioned above, but more overtly marries these to what is by and large a slasher movie – albeit one which hinges upon the potentially malign presence of the internet. It’s a very watchable, often imaginative film, even if one which struggles in places to sustain all of its ideas (and there are far worse crimes than that in debut features).

Chris (Tim Loden) and Allie (Alana Elmer) are a young, engaged couple who make a living through their online videos. Precisely, Chris is a prankster, and the person he exclusively pranks? Allison. This has been massively popular, with millions of hits and a successful social media presence – but Allison, who is on the verge of IVF treatment, wants Chris to stop. She argues that she is about to go through a great deal and constantly being made to jump out of her skin will help their chances of conceiving none. Chris is very disappointed by this request and how it could impact upon his brand, but he’s cheered up a little when, upon leaving a fertility clinic with Allie, he runs into Jessie, an old friend of his. Jessie is living in a big, renovated church out in the boonies and he immediately invites them to come and stay that weekend – it’ll be a great chance to catch up, and an opportunity for them to meet his husband, David. The couple agree, and that weekend they make their way there.

They’re greeted not by Jessie but David (Jonathan Craig), an odd character to say the least, but he soon deadpans them into a state of ease. Unfortunately, Jessie’s flight has been severely delayed and he won’t be able to join them until the following morning; never mind, David reassures them, it’s a chance for them all to get to know one another a little better via a total drink-and-drugs blow-out. This they do. In fact, by the time Allison comes to, the house is ice cold, David is nowhere to be seen and she is having severe difficulties getting a handle on what time it even is. Her disorientation is not helped by the fact that she begins to see visions of deformed supernatural entities which seem to be trying to communicate something to her. Are they really there, or is this another facet of a trip which has clearly gone horribly, horribly wrong?

When she and Chris locate each other, they slowly attempt to piece together events of the previous evening (if indeed it was an evening ago). It’s clear that something has gone badly wrong somewhere – Jessie hasn’t appeared and his husband is still MIA – so they decide to leave. That, unfortunately for them, is not so easy. Then there’s the small matter of the surveillance cameras they notice…

Making Monsters successfully adds a few twists and turns in its plot that I didn’t necessarily expect, which is to its credit, and much of the film’s overall success depends on the good acting performances of the three leads as the power dynamic shifts around and the film heads off in its different directions. Some of these shifts raise an eyebrow in that early plot motifs disappear (or at least don’t figure highly after all) and as the narrative shifts, there are a couple of minor lulls in the action. However, Making Monsters does raise a few interesting ideas along the way: what substitutes entertainment? Where is the line to be drawn between real life and online life, and do we now have a generation of people for whom this is a problem? What is fame, and what is it worth? All the while, though, this is a fairly grisly film, one which may come to resemble a certain older genre in the end (with the visual tropes of that genre) but nonetheless rewards the attention it demands.

This is the first feature-length film from director Justin Harding, alongside co-director Rob Brunner. I’m familiar with Harding from a short film he made called Latched, which has burned its way into my memory forever; I’ll say no more as I think it deserves to be burned into your memories too. In any case, even from my limited experience of his work, he’s clearly a guy with ideas and a particularly effective way of presenting them on screen; I hope he continues to make horror movies, as the range of ideas on offer in Making Monsters is a pleasing thing. Any film which can go from black humour to gory fare and make both work is something to be proud of.

Celluloid Screams 2019: Outback

Posted on November 7, 2019November 7, 2019 by Keri O'Shea

Australia’s tourism board must read movie synopses from behind their hands: Wolf Creek might not have been the first outback horror, but it’s become pretty well-known to a whole generation now, feeding into all the (true) stereotypes of a harsh, remote climate ready to isolate and endanger the unwitting and unwary, coupled with the (rather less accurate, hopefully) stereotype of the lone maniac who knows the landscape and might just kill for kicks. Well, take away the lone maniac altogether and you’ve still got the recipe for an unsettling film. This is the case in Outback, a film which underlines its point that if you wander off the beaten path, you’ve had it, unless a miracle comes along. Hell, you don’t even need to go very far. If you aren’t equipped, and if you’re – shall we say – a tad naive, then you’re potentially a goner. Such is the case here, in an ordeal based on a true story.

Unlike many ordeal/survival films, we aren’t faced with a group of happy friends or a loving couple who have their love and loyalty tested by incoming circumstances, because in the case of Wade (Taylor Wiese) and his fiancee Lisa (Lauren Lofberg), they’ve already hit a pretty big bump in the road, even before arriving in the country. Childhood sweethearts, Wade decided to pop the question on the flight over; Lisa however turned him down. Needless to say, things are a little frosty after this point, as they embark on their holiday of a lifetime. Wade is coping by shutting down completely; clearly hurt, he can barely bring himself to speak at all. Lisa is coping by reverting to inane conversation, as if nothing ever happened and as if it will all be just fine, if they avoid tackling their very big problems head on. Whilst most of us, hopefully, won’t end up stranded in a deadly environment at any point during our lives, we might still recognise the hell of the awkward silence. Perhaps to break its momentum, Lisa proposes a change to their trip: why not go to Ayer’s Rock, or Uluru to give it its proper name? Sure, it’s a few hundred kilometres out of their way, but they have a decent vehicle, fuel and most importantly of all, the modern altar: a sat-nav. For reasons best known to himself, Wade entertains this momentary madness, and so they begin their (new) journey, on roads which increasingly look less and less like they have been designed for cars…

Convinced that his tech could not let him down, Wade begins to follow the sat nav in circles, until daylight is almost running out and the pair are growing more and more disorientated. Now, here is where the couple begins to make a series of deeply stupid decisions, decisions which form the bedrock of all the other stupid decisions to follow (and I hope that isn’t a spoiler, but this would probably not be a film we’d cover here if a couple of tourists simply had a lovely time at a popular Australian landmark).

They decide, towards the end of day, to get out of the car and hike to the top of a nearby mountain, in the hopes of being able to see a light or some evidence of a nearby road. As darkness draws in and the unadulterated outback night masks everything, they inevitably cannot remember where the car was. Problem number one. Without adequate clothing, a long-life flashlight, a sleeping bag or any substantial food or water, they’re immediately in trouble. Thus begins a chain of events which, considering they take place in vast expanses of deserted landscape, feel oddly claustrophobic (the film frequently shows us via overhead shots just how tiny and insignificant humans are here, and that’s without Lisa alluding to the same fact in the script). The emphasis is often on the small-scale, focusing on interactions between Wade and Lisa; he tends to know best, right up until he doesn’t, whilst she does her best to rise to the challenges of the situation, but often reverts to insecurity and fear.

These human relationships are placed under a pretty extraordinary microscope and, by and large, the two actors sustain audience interest in their plight. The surrounding environment is stark and beautifully shot, whilst director Mike Green knows just how to intersperse the inevitable lulls in movement and action with something foreboding and downright physically harmful; both Wade and Lisa are physically threatened and harmed by their plight in a range of gruesome and unpleasant manners. However, any sympathy you might have for these two is dampened a little by, well, marvelling just how stupid they’ve been. If most horrors or thrillers contain the odd daft decision, the kind of thing where you almost cannot believe anyone would do it, then Outback does it far more frequently than ‘the odd time’. This is based on a true story, too, and this intermingles with your assessment of character behaviour; you can’t get too exercised, as this really happened to real people, people who clearly suffered a great deal. Mixed emotions result, particularly just before the credits roll and you find out about the final outcomes here.

So – a frustrating watch at times in terms of its key players, but still a tense, decently-made film which makes good use of its shooting location and joins a proud tradition of Australian films which, if they don’t put you off completely, might make you think carefully about taking on this landscape. Or, you know, implicitly trusting your sat nav.

Celluloid Screams 2019: Why Don’t You Just Die!

Posted on November 6, 2019July 23, 2020 by Keri O'Shea

One of the great things about film festivals is the sheer range of films you get, even though most of them might be loosely assembled in one particular genre or other. Horror in particular has a broad remit and can veer from terrifying in one incarnation to hilarious in another, without dropping any of the expected qualities such as peril or the fantastic/improbable. Why Don’t You Just Die! leans very heavily towards ‘splatstick’, playing largely for laughs. It takes place almost entirely in one setting with a limited, but larger-than-life set of characters and wears its heart very much on its sleeve, splicing cartoonish levels of ultraviolence with darkly comedic characterisation and a steady supply of comeuppance for its worst offenders. It skirts very close to the improbable or impossible in terms of what characters can physically withstand, but you quickly park your common sense and enjoy where the film is taking you.

Matvey (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) is just dropping by his girlfriend Olya’s parents’ apartment for a visit. They haven’t met yet, but mother Tasha (Elena Shevchenko) immediately swings into hostess mode whilst father Andrey, a detective, although rather more standoffish, at least seems like he’s trying, in his gruff way, to be friendly. That is, until he notices that Matvey has a hammer sticking out of his back pocket, which he claims to be lending to a friend later. This naturally sets alarm bells ringing; well, it would, wouldn’t it? This excuse is of course untrue: actually, it’s one of the few dishonest things Matvey really does, although he has indeed come into the apartment with the intention of killing Olya’s father, based on something she has recently revealed about her childhood. It’s a murder planned for noble intentions in its own way. Only wanting to help her, and acting entirely at her behest, Matvey attempts to get the better of Andrey – isn’t able to – and so the film’s energetic, grisly sequence of fights, stand-offs and reveals begins to kick in. Believing Matvey to be in his apartment for a whole other reason, Andrey takes the first opportunity to panic, going straight for a stash of illicit cash he’s concealed; as the film progresses, we learn where the cash comes from, and why it could be Andrey’s undoing. None of which interrupts the grisly violence for long…

There is a real host of unsavoury folk here, with the possible exclusion of Matvey and perhaps Tasha, who doesn’t seem to have a lot of options open to her: Andrey does an excellent turn as a well-loved, well-established but essentially corrupt police officer, a man who has passed on his tendencies to serve himself first and foremost to his daughter, the incredibly blasé Olya ( Evgeniya Kregzhde). Thise who have been caught up in Andrey’s machinations may have come off badly, but weren’t massively moral in the first place – though it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Andrey’s old partner Evgenie (Mikhail Gorevoy), whose life has disintegrated since his dodgy dealings with his old partner. However, the film doesn’t dwell too long on emotional trauma, other than for a light gloss of ‘you reap what you sow’: it’s really more about a rapid rotation of double crosses and revelations, with the graphic violence being quick-edited and layered on for kicks.

You could probably tie yourself in knots trying to link the corrupt farce at the heart of Why Don’t You Just Die to some wider point about modern Russia, but all told, I think it would be a shame to waste a film which is clearly going for the fun approach to electric drill torture. Perhaps there is something there distinctively Russian in here, but this is just as much of a splatter movie as it is a satire, and one is far more available to us as viewers. At just 29 years of age, director Kirill Sokolov is certainly one to watch and as a first feature, this deserves to get him hired again and quickly. Why Don’t You Just Die looks great, is colourful and inventive, and moves at just the right pace without ever outstaying its welcome.

Celluloid Screams 2019: The Nightingale

Posted on November 5, 2019November 5, 2019 by Keri O'Shea

If ever a film spoke to unpalatable truths, then it’s Jennifer Kent’s most recent film, The Nightingale. Where her previous feature The Babadook put a fantastical spin on mental trauma, The Nightingale strips back all varieties of artifice and fantasy, striving to represent a notoriously brutal period in Australia’s colonial past as realistically as possible. In so doing, it thankfully avoids getting mired in modern-day political predilections – there’s not, in my opinion, a clumsy script, nor talking to the audience loudly and slowly to make them get the point. But, by faithfully representing the horrors of history through a plausible, sensitively-acted drama, the history lesson here is doubly effective, because human drama will always appeal to us more than academic treatises. The resulting film is a difficult watch. Certain scenes led to audible gasps from the audience. The Nightingale prevents you, or should prevent you, from looking away.

Set in the early decades of the 19th Century, transportation and the conquest of Australia was in full swing, with Tasmania in particular one of the most brutally-managed and exploited territories in the whole of the country. Were you sent to the penal colonies there, then ostensibly you could eventually earn your freedom but, as both an Irishwoman and a woman, Clare (Aisling Franciosi) has been unable to exercise this right, despite completing her sentence for a petty crime. Hawkins, the commanding officer of the incumbent British militia (Sam Claflin) sees her as barely human, justifying his sexual exploitation of her by reminding her that he’s allowed her to marry – to a fellow Irishman, Aidan (Michael Sheasby). Aidan and Clare are penniless and to a large extent tainted by their pasts as ex-cons, but they have a young baby together, and they seem very happy. Clare keeps hope that she will receive her ticket (her guarantee of freedom) and they will be able to leave for good. Well, that would never do for Hawkins, who has Clare right where he wants her. An altercation follows when Aidan tries to intercede on her behalf, to make Hawkins make good on his promise. The worst happens; in a world where the British military make the rules, and where any semblance of law and order is a long way away, there was never going to be a positive outcome for this powerless, impoverished family, who have no recourse. That said, the brutality of the outcome is truly hideous.

Clare is left a broken woman, with nothing now left to keep her docile. After she tries and fails to get justice via conventional means, she learns that Hawkins and his men have left to go to the nearest town where Hawkins is hopeful of an important promotion. Determined to catch them and avenge herself, she turns to a member of a nearby Aboriginal camp who knows the land. Billy (Baykali Ganambarr) agrees to take her – for a fee – but makes no promises of offering her any help beyond directing her to where she wants to go, making it clear that he doesn’t relish working for white folks. Together, they track Hawkins and his men, working their way through an often hostile, if beautiful landscape.

One of the most interesting dynamics in the film occurs between Billy and Clare; who has the most power here? Is it the disinherited local, who nonetheless has recourse to knowledge and skills? Or is it Clare? Clare is white, and she instantly begins to use language to exercise her authority over Billy (such as by calling him ‘boy’), but then being female carries its own vulnerabilities in this brutal world, and as an Irish woman, she’s a few rungs further down on the ladder the other whites she encounters. It’s a distinction she tries to make clear to Billy, who has little concept of any difference between whites and listens to her with some surprise as she rails against him calling her English. It’s also interesting that Clare uses Irish language, and refreshing to hear it on the big screen – in a similar way to Billy, who uses a moribund Tasmanian language called Palawa Kan, the first time this language has ever appeared in a mainstream film. Language is both power and powerlessness, a marker of culture, but one that is invariably suppressed; Clare and Billy, to a large extent, find that they share some common ground through their use of non-English languages and a friendship begins to grow. It becomes the bedrock of the film, supported by phenomenal acting performances. What isn’t said is as important as what is. Billy infers a great deal about Clare’s plight, and handles it carefully.

Throughout, there is little let-up in the unflinching hardship and cruelty here; thankfully, the British aren’t turned into simplistic villains, and as the narrative follows their own journey we see them as flawed, arrogant, but also frequently scared and isolated from one another, scared boys clinging to the only systems they know. You find yourself hating them, sure, but you see them as weak as much as you see them as bad, particularly in the case of Jago (Harry Greenwood) who is haunted by his role in Clare’s tragedy – a panicked, troubled young man. Eddie (Charlie Shotwell), a child who picks up with the military men and at first gains Hawkins’ favour, is a sad emblem of a broken system, a world where unattached women and children are terrible things to be. But then, almost no one thrives in this environment. Those that had thrived in the environment have been disinherited, transported people are still at the mercies of the system and even the self-assured Hawkins cannot operate without help to do it. The representation of Tasmania at this point in time is of a merciless, indifferent place. Some critics have commented on the detached, under-explored nature of some of the visuals and motifs on screen but for me, it’s exactly as it should be. We glean some sense of other tragic stories unfolding, but then the landscape draws us quickly elsewhere. Likewise, there were several walk-outs during some of the scenes of rape and sexual assault in the film, and it’s absolutely fine for audiences to do that if they feel they simply cannot watch such things any longer, but as I see it, you’re exempting yourself from the nub of the narrative. Perhaps cruel things just are, and desperate people simply try to make sense of this, try to go on.

Admittedly not a film for everyone, then, but an important, ambitious historical drama which clings to you like a fever dream. You do not come out of viewing The Nightingale feeling good about humanity, but you can at least grasp what fragile elements of human goodness there are, and marvel at how this could ever be in such circumstances.

Celluloid Screams 2019: Antrum – The Deadliest Film Ever Made

Posted on November 1, 2019November 1, 2019 by Keri O'Shea

The notion of the ‘cursed film’ is nothing new in horror cinema, and it has formed the basis of some deeply disturbing, evocative projects over the course of the years. The Ring was a hugely successful crossover from what was, for many viewers, a largely unknown horror tradition with its own mythology and rules of operation, but even without an understanding of Japan’s fantastical relationship with the seas which surround it, the curse of Sadako still made hideous sense. More recently, the Masters of Horror television series offered us an episode called Cigarette Burns, taking for its central premise the idea of a mysterious, dangerous film which endangers its audiences via its very being, even causing cinemas to burst into flames upon screening.

This brings us fairly neatly to Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made (2018), which shares many characteristics of each of the above; there’s an oddball, somewhat intractable cursed film which only hints at any bigger message it may have, but there’s also a broader awareness of this cursed film’s reputation, and what could befall audiences who watch it. Using a brief mockumentary format to bookend Antrum itself, we are primed for the potential ill-effects of seeing the film, with examples of calamities which have befallen audiences in the past. The resulting experience is a lot stronger in premise than in execution, though, with perhaps more attention paid to the cosmetic appearance of this ‘lost film from the 70s’ than to a film which really rewards being seen. After all, if the curse ain’t real, what we are really looking for is an entertaining film – not a verdict you can easily come away with here, even whilst you might enjoy aspects of the atmosphere.

Antrum (which means ‘chamber’) follows a teenage girl, Oralee (Nicole Tompkins) and her younger brother Nathan (Rowan Smyth). Nathan is bereft after recently having his dog Maxine put to sleep; due to an offhand comment which his mother then makes about her being a bad dog, Nathan’s childish imagination therefore places Maxine in hell, something which terrifies him and gives him nightmares. In an unorthodox way of relieving his anxiety, Oralee devises a story whereby using a grimoire she’s gotten hold of, they can go and access hell itself to free Maxine. This involves digging at the spot where Satan allegedly fell to earth, which will take them down through the different levels of hell. Using on-screen titles to tell the audiences at what point they are currently, it quickly becomes apparent that their efforts to get into hell are symbolic at best, but they begin to notice odd phenomena and people around them in the remote woods: could they really have freed harmful entities? Or drawn attention to themselves in a dangerous way?

As you might well already have gathered from that summary, the plot itself is very low in the mix, with the directorial emphasis much more on sound, unusual visuals and cutaways to some unknown, unexplained scenes of torture. There are also multiple examples of occult symbols being allegedly scratched onto the film itself, leading to a deliberately multi-layered approach presumably intended to generate a sense of unease. This is referred to directly via the mockumentary frame at the end of the film, though even without this it’s pretty clear that the various sigils are intended to signify malign efforts, presumably to hex the lot of us.

Antrum is therefore fairly successful on the unease front, though I found myself craving more explication; beyond that atmosphere, the film was so thin that any genuine impact or occult content – i.e. being able to believe in the central premise or its implications in any way – was soon lost. Perhaps making this a short film, taking Antrum closer again to Ring (or at least to that film’s own cursed film) would have avoided this, and I note that directors Michael Laicini and David Amito have collectively got more experience of the short film format; Antrum is an odd choice for a full-length, all told. It’s very hard to sustain both artifice (making a film appear to be from the late 70s) and interest across a feature-length project. Whilst the ambition here is laudable, as a feature Antrum can’t quite live up to what is essentially its own hype, its notional existence as a somehow dangerous film.

Still, in terms of aesthetics, Laicini and Amito have done good work in presenting something which genuinely does look like an unearthed film reel from forty years ago. The audio track is equally very fitting to the time and place intended to have generated Antrum, nicely discordant and suitably strange for the subject matter and the style. It’s just that it doesn’t really work on a deeper level to me, which is a shame.