Placing monsters on screen – as in your vampires, or your aliens, or so on – has its own share of challenges, but at core, there’s a fairly obvious requirement to, well, get the monsters on screen. When you are aiming to represent monstrous behaviour or thoughts, however, this can be rather more tricky, even whilst allowing a great deal of scope for how this is done. This brings us to Seeds (2018), a thoughtful, very sombre examination of a damaged man, as he comes to terms with the path he has lately taken. It’s not a particularly easy watch, though this has to rank as one of the film’s key strengths.
An idyllic family beach scene opens the film, though cedes very rapidly into something altogether darker – our key character Marcus (Trevor Long) is taking part in a sexual game which goes badly wrong, requiring the intervention of a friendly fixer-upper to take care of the aftermath. Marcus then leaves the scene, heading away to the old family home on the coast of New England, presumably to recuperate and to gather his thoughts. This should be the ideal place. His brother and family live nearby, and the house itself is rather grand and comfortable – the perfect place to recover from whatever sequence of unfortunate events recently befell him. However, a few neat visual clues soon show us that all is not as it seems here. Yes, the idyllic beach of the opening reels is this beach, and the little girl running back to the house with a hermit crab to show to her family is all grown up now – this being Marcus’s niece Lily (Andrea Chen). But this is no simple family reunion; his brother Michael and wife Grace are having a tough time, the isolation of the small close-knot community is taking its toll, and as if this wasn’t enough, there’s something as-yet unspoken going on between Marcus and his long-time-no-see niece. When Lily and her younger sibling have to come and stay with Marcus unexpectedly, this source of anxiety begins to shift and develop. Marcus’s already rather slippery grasp on right and wrong is about to let loose altogether, and from here on in, Seeds becomes more and more of a horror story – even if continually very subtle and ambiguous.
This is a film which layers discomfort on top of discomfort, and as it tackles the spectre of incestuous feelings, it certainly isn’t subject matter to relish – by no means will this be for everybody. But, thankfully, Seeds is far more than just a version of Lolita set elsewhere and in a different time, and it does a range of interesting things with its themes, contemplating what these contested emotions could do to a person. In effect, if a person acknowledges something monstrous is in them, how can this be shown to an audience? Seeds opts to be very dialogue-lite, with a very deliberate pace and atmosphere which is occasionally disrupted by a sudden, shocking sequence; this tactic helps to underline key developments along the way. Visual representations of trauma are, largely speaking, very subtle, threading together elements from the past and elements we recognise from the present moment. All of this is very beautifully packaged, shot on film (which looks great) with an artistic eye and a wide range of shots, from macros to landscapes, and some great soundscapes. These all showcase high levels of skill, and overall this care and attention helps the film to deliver.
Perhaps my main criticism would be with regards the quandary faced by filmmakers when dealing with the concept of exploring an underage relationship. On one hand, they can’t throw in a genuinely underage actor to subject matter of this kind in this day and age, and nor should they – that would be all kinds of unpalatable to modern audiences. However, to get the audience to believe in the relationship aspect, the actor still needs to…look younger. It’s a sizeable divide, with no real easy way around. So, whilst Andrea Chen does a good job with her role as Lily, it is still somewhat difficult to see her as a vulnerable teen, as she must surely be intended to be, being as she’s in fact around thirty at the time of filming. By no means is this an issue unique to Seeds. But it is something of an issue in the suspension of disbelief, at least part of the way.
So, this issue notwithstanding, and also accepting that Seeds is not a film which will be to everyone’s tastes, I very much appreciated its handling of mood and atmosphere, which evidently rank as highly as the narrative aspect of the film. If it reminds me of anything at all, it’s Possum (2018), wherein another damaged man returns to the old family home to try and tackle something disturbing in his own past, which itself takes on some literally monstrous aspects. A series of understated performances combine to deliver something gorgeous and grotesque here, which is certainly something to be applauded. As a directorial debut from Owen Long, this really does promise good, if rather ominous, things to come.
Seeds (2018) will receive a theatrical release (US) on September 13th 2019.
As this is a detailed examination of the film, it contains spoilers.
Seldom has the sole creation of one person travelled so far and changed so many times as the story of Frankenstein (1818). Sure, horror is populated with multiple vampires, mummies and zombies, but even the best-known stories have often been woven out of pre-existing folklore. Mary Shelley’s story was, at the time in which it was written, unique; Romantic ideals about man’s relationship with nature, the burgeoning scientific developments of the day and Mary’s own distorted, mournful experiences of creating new life conspired to develop a horrific tale without real precedent. And yet, her story has itself always been pulled into new forms when brought to the screen – which it has been, often, since cinema’s earliest inception, with the first ‘liberal adaptation’ of the novel arriving as early as 1910. Subsequent generations have always want to emphasise (or even add or replace) key elements of the original novel in their own ‘liberal adaptations’. So it’s surprising that it took until as late as 1994 for a film to make the claim that it was ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’, and to declare that it would follow the novel very closely.
Step forward, actor and director Kenneth Branagh. Best-known for his direction and performance in Shakespeare productions, Branagh certainly had the literary pedigree to tackle the book, although he was at the time a relatively inexperienced director beyond Shakespeare – in some respects, this shows, and the film’s rather mixed reception has often commented on its tonal shifts between horror and drama which don’t always sit well. However, for all of its flaws, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has many redeeming qualities, and does some things very well indeed. Looking back at it from a quarter of a century on, it’s interesting to note these, as well as to re-examine the film overall. For me, in a nutshell, the film’s a mixed blessing: the period setting, the cast and certain elements of faithfulness to the original plot are very bold. In other aspects, its deviations and decisions are a little exasperating. Here’s a look at how, and why.
“Strange and harrowing must be his story…”
For those unfamiliar with the novel, Frankenstein is an epistolary tale, where the fantastical story is relayed via a ship’s captain, Walton, writing to his sister Margaret back in England. The 1994 film retains Walton and the North Pole setting, keeping faith with the crew’s encounter firstly with a strange, unnatural man, and then with a stranded and seriously ill gentleman – Victor Frankenstein, who says he is pursuing the strange figure. They get him on board and he soon forms a friendship with Walton – another man of ambition, whose determination to pursue his voyage against terrific odds leads Victor to tell him his cautionary tale. Taking in his early years, his studies in Ingolstadt and his subsequent successes in the field of human biology, Victor’s greatest achievement would be his downfall. Whilst his description of his method is scanty, he acknowledges that he makes a man out of salvaged body parts – the spoils of the charnel house and the dissecting room. When the unnamed creature awakens, Victor flees in terror.
He finally returns to his lodgings and the creature is gone; assuming it will have crawled away and died somewhere, he rather naively dismantles his scientific apparatus and hopes the whole thing was something of a nightmare. Instead, the creature survives, holes up in a shack alongside a cottage in the woods, and begins to learn from the inhabitants. As the creature learns language, he learns about man’s cruelty, and man’s hatred of any being so malformed as he. Learning of his creator’s name from the journal he blindly stole from Victor’s lodgings, as well as learning of Victor’s horror at what he has created, the creature vows to seek him out, satiating his rage on members of Victor’s family and inner circle, before finding Victor himself and demanding that he makes him a female companion so that he may absent himself from the world of men for good. Victor initially agrees, but at the last possible moment, reneges: the creature therefore avenges himself in the most brutal manner, and Victor, now bereft of his family and his wife, chases him North. An artful game of pursuit ensues, one which ends in the frozen wastes, where Walton finally encounters Victor.
“The accomplishment of my toils…”
The vast majority of adaptations of Frankenstein dispose altogether with the framing narrative and concentrate on the story of Victor Frankenstein and his creation. It is heartening that Branagh and screenwriter Steph Lady retain the section of the story which takes place in the frozen North, as there is lots of subtle horror to be inferred from the isolation of this extreme environment; it also provides a justification for Victor’s narrative, as he would presumably never have shared this tale unless he wanted to warn his new friend of the perils of ambition. I would quibble over the creature’s early cruel behaviour (to the sled dogs) as this doesn’t necessarily chime with his character overall, but I can see that it allows him to be viewed as potentially incredibly destructive, which is relevant. The stage is then set for the more typical examination of Victor Frankenstein’s life and loves, which comes via a superb cast and care and attention to details of setting that are of great importance. The backdrop of the Alps, for example, is an important contextual point, offering natural beauty and perilous enormity in equal measure, reflecting character moods and dispositions and also, the location of Victor’s first meeting with his now lucid creature. It’s heartening that this is retained; it couldn’t really be ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ without this nod to the dynamics of Romanticism, which influenced her so profoundly.
Other key strengths in this version could in some respects be seen as a little clumsy, but in the limited time available to flesh out the story on screen, they still work. For example, having Caroline Frankenstein – Victor’s mother – dying in childbirth, rather than of scarlet fever, does at least allow the film to establish Victor’s warped obsession with birth and death, a visual cue for a plot point which is even a little obtuse in the novel. The frequent allusions to some future wedding-night for Victor and Elizabeth are equally a little blunt, but given that the wedding-night scene is this film’s chief deviation from the novel, and contains several of the more horrific elements in the film, then evidently it was felt that the audience had to be prepped for its conclusion.
“…The tremendous secrets of the human frame…”
When films adapt Frankenstein, in so doing they often devote a large share of the screen time to the ‘science’ of the creature’s ‘birth’, and the style and focus of these scenes often tells us a great deal about the era in which the film is being made – our own mores always have an impact on what science, and how, we get to see, which inevitably however involves lightning (something never mentioned in the novel, although the development of galvanism, a new understanding of the relationship between electricity and muscle stimulation, was certainly an influence on Mary Shelley). In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the ‘birth’ scene is both interestingly novel and frustratingly formulaic, with a few curious details that don’t quite work.
Rather than simply have Victor piecing together a man from component parts, Branagh links back to the trauma of childbirth (particularly given his mother’s grisly demise) by showing us Victor collecting amniotic fluid; it is this substance that he uses to immerse the creature, connecting birth and science here in a very literal way. This is an interesting enough motif, but then the film still goes ahead with the whole lightning shebang, emulating films which had gone before it, right down to the “It’s alive!” line, which has by now become a complete cliche. Homage? Possibly so, but it seems strange to dip back into Universal horror tropes when making ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’. In other respects, the film definitely feels like it belongs to the world of the novel. The body parts ‘gathering scenes’, where parts were often taken from hanged criminals (a change in the law meant that practitioners of human dissection could claim criminal remains for their experiments, a fact which struck terror into the hearts of the general population – and was meant to) work pretty well; the decision to take materials from people known to him underlines Victor’s blind passion for his project, at least, even if there is no intimation of this in the book; the creature himself (played very ably by Robert De Niro) looks original, and very disturbing. Why Victor works so hard to revive the creature and then grieves momentarily when he seems to die is a strange choice, as surely it is Victor’s success that appals him – but otherwise, the creature’s birth has a reasonably strong impact overall. Much as it seems unlikely that an egotist like Victor Frankenstein would work alongside someone senior in years and expertise on a project such as this – and also his isolation in it drives much of the story – there is therefore a startling choice to be made when his partner is killed, which adds to the film’s much-needed horror.
For me though, however many minor gripes I find with the film, possibly its greatest strength is its inclusion of the De Lacey family – the impoverished inhabitants of the woodland cottage where the creature initially finds himself and hides. Watching him slowly begin to learn speech, and via language, self-awareness, is very compelling. The creature’s initial profound goodness in the face of horrifying human cruelty never fails to move me, and when he is driven out of the cottage after his hope of acceptance is so brutally snuffed out, weeping like a child in his isolation, you can understand perfectly why he turns his face from the goodness he knows he has. It is a harrowing, upsetting scene. In a film which has boundless overacting in several places (why speak quietly when you can just shout character names across the set?) De Niro provides the film’s greatest performance. He is plausible, pitiable and very human, ironically enough for a character who bewails his differences from mankind. Deviations from this level of tender detail harm the film, inevitably. Making Victor Frankenstein a bit sexy is needless (for example, having Justine Moritz look upon him as a love interest?!) but De Niro, for me, saves the day. The quieter moments in the film are the best it has to offer, too.
“I keep my promises…”
We have looked at some of the film’s key deviations from its source material, and so we come to the greatest deviation of them all – the wedding-night scene. And, although it plays fast and loose with the novel, I still feel it’s quite a clever move overall. In the novel, Victor, unable to interpret the creature’s threat that ‘I will be with you on your wedding-night’ as anything other than a threat against him (see? egotist) spends the early part of the evening on watch for the creature’s inevitable attack. The creature instead gains access to the bedchamber, where Elizabeth, Victor’s new bride, is waiting for him. He then strangles her, thus avenging himself on Victor by killing the person he loves the most. Grief thereby compels Victor to pursue the creature, hoping weakly for revenge.
In the 1994 film, the creature also murders Elizabeth – but the horror ante is upped by having him plunge his hand into her chest, ripping out her heart, just as Victor enters the room. In his desperation, Victor now sets about reanimating Elizabeth – she becomes the de facto Bride of Frankenstein, mutilated and partly burned by a fall into her bedside candle, making for an impressive set of make-up effects and a truly striking female creature. Rather than the anonymous female creature which Victor makes in Orkney in the novel, destroying her when he sees the creature looking on expectantly through the window, here we have all sorts of potential for deeper questions to be explored – will Elizabeth remember Victor? Love him still? Or will her awareness of her new state compel her towards the creature, with whom she has ghastly common ground? Helena Bonham Carter – who is also compelled to shout a lot during the course of the film, when she can do rather better than that – manages to communicate great anguish and hurt during her few moments as a reanimate corpse, and she does it all without recourse to language. Also, Victor’s blindness to her new, monstrous appearance shows how far gone he is by this point – willing to compete for her attentions with the creature, who of course believes her beautiful, because she resembles him. This sequence allows the film to repeat an earlier scene – where Victor and Elizabeth dance, whilst the camera circles them. Now when they dance, the camera circling them again, it is as a mockery of the past; Elizabeth is dead, Victor is too far gone to ever belong to society again, and the creature even appears to have the upper hand for a moment – before Elizabeth opts out of her grotesque situation, burning herself alive rather than belong to either of them. It’s the first real agency she’s able to display, and it makes for a thrilling, very dramatic plot point.
So could the film have stuck to the novel’s version, and conjured such a dramatic sequence out of the undoubtedly violent, but rather briefer way in which Elizabeth departs proceedings there? I don’t think it could. It’s a bold shift in many ways, not to mention a gamble, but it pays off. It’s also economical – dispensing with the protracted part of the novel where Victor and his friend Clerval tour around mainland Europe and Britain until Victor finds a suitably isolated spot to make a female creature. The revised version keeps things far closer to home, without dispensing with the important plot point that is the female creature.
Hideous Progeny
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) was by no means the first on-screen adaptation of the novel, and it certainly hasn’t been the last: numerous new films have emerged since its release, each of them utilising the source material differently. I imagine many more will follow, too, as this is a story which always seems malleable in times of crisis, reflecting and refracting our contemporary unease over whatever big questions of life and death trouble us currently. And, whilst the 1994 film is a film which begs many questions in terms of its method and manner, I still feel that its many strengths continue to make it worthwhile; it does stick closely to the novel in a number of ways, just as it claimed it would, and many of these ways contribute positively to the film, creating a sumptuous period piece which still looks very good today. Whilst some of its elements are bewildering, which is a shame, it is still a decent movie, one which perhaps deserves a re-visit, or even to find a new audience altogether as it enters its twenty-fifth year.
Sometimes the loss of an actor just gets you somehow, because you automatically associate that actor with a role which is highly important to you. So, yesterday, it was hardly surprising that, with the news that Rutger Hauer had passed away at the age of seventy-five following a short illness, the internet was quickly awash with Blade Runner images, celebrating Hauer’s performance as Roy Batty in one of the finest sci-fi films ever made. Batty’s last words – delivered in such a way and at such a time that you are made to debate just what being human means – will obviously take on additional prescience, when the superb actor who delivered them (and indeed helped script them) has themselves died. It was the first thing which came to mind for me, and for many others.
But Rutger Hauer’s legacy certainly didn’t begin, or end with Blade Runner.
It simply helped to place him, for many genre film fans, as a great performer who could put his heart and soul into the job. Perhaps he is chiefly associated with dark sci-fi and dystopia for a lot of us, working as he did on films like Salute of the Jugger and far more recently, Sin City, but Hauer got his teeth into a wide variety of roles over the years across film, TV and advertising.
There was a lot of love for Ladyhawke when the news broke yesterday, and this is another film beloved to many folk from their earlier years; on a completely different tack, who could forget Hauer in The Hitcher? It’s a film which taught us true dread, a role played brilliantly ominously and a sterling example of the menace he could bring to the screen. His performance in the TV version of Salem’s Lot completely revolutionised the character of Barlow, remodelling him into something not a monster, but still utterly monstrous. And, in 2011, Hauer surprised us with his role in Hobo With a Shotgun – a lowbrow, fauxploitation movie sure but, as with many of these films contemporary or homage, it had a heart, not least because of the lead role and how it was played. These are just a handful of the roles which spring to mind, and there’s a vast legacy of performances I confess I have yet to see – bittersweet, given the reminder.
It’s genuinely sad, therefore, to have lost such a versatile, dedicated and by all accounts, decent man. RIP Rutger Hauer and we thank you.
If it comes in miniature and could conceivably be evil in nature, chances are Charles Band has probably used it as the basis for a schlock horror film (even ‘worry dolls’ have gone very, very wrong in his hands). And, in terms of success stories, the Puppet Master franchise has probably been one of his most successful; it’s the gift that keeps on giving, certainly, spawning numerous films over the past thirty (!) years. Even though Band himself doesn’t have such a direct hand in The Littlest Reich, it uses many of the same puppets we know and love – even if I’ve never quite gotten over the early retirement of Leech Woman. I may not have known quite what to expect from a film with such an indecorous title, but it turns out that this Fangoria project is a lot better than I could ever have expected. It knows not to overflex, but it has buckets of ingenuity, as well as a range of gory sequences which, yeah, you can half-imagine were there before the plot filled in around them, but you love them no less.
To join the new film to the first, we start back in the late 80s, where a mysterious stranger arrives and spooks a barmaid and friend…and hang on, that’s Udo Kier in a fun cameo as the ‘puppet master’ himself, Andre Toulon. This European visitor is a little socially awkward, appropriately facially scarred and none too keen by witnessing their lesbianism, so off he goes, back into the night. But not before the two girls suffer through his invocation of his puppet minions, in one of the film’s first, cards-on-table practical gore effects. After a fun animated sequence over the opening credits fills us in on the intervening years, we’re bang up to date: we see a divorced fortysomething, Edgar (Thomas Lennon) moving back in with his parents, into a room which has been frozen in time decades previously after the death of his brother. His dad is clearly none too impressed with his son as things stood before the divorce: Edgar works in a comic book store, which is beyond the pale. and dad doesn’t much like him going through his brother’s old toys either, despite being equally displeased that they’re all still in the house in the first place. Still, Edgar finds one old thing which looks like a collectable; he decides to find out when he accompanies new girlfriend Ashley (Jenny Pellicer) and boss/best friend Markowitz (Nelson Franklin) to a very special convention…
In another link to the original franchise, this convention is all about the Toulon Murders. A cop involved in the case, Officer Doreski (Barbara Crampton) leads tours for those interested in the case, the history of Toulon’s exodus from Europe is explained and this very select group of interested parties bring along examples of their own Toulon puppets. Except, no sooner is everyone checked in to the hotel, than a lot of the puppets go missing. Oh come on, that’s not spoilering really. This simply the frame for the highly entertaining hell which breaks loose…
Firstly, the relationship between the main characters of Edgar, Ashley and Markowitz is very sweet, plausible and well-written, with some genuine humour. The argument about not playing grindcore in the car made me laugh, certainly. Their interplay, along with the interplay with the supporting cast also fills the plot gaps in an effective, if none-too-subtle way (well what did you expect?) so that the premise for all of the rather ingenious slaughter is established. The gore is the film’s stand-out feature, and the CGI is kept deliberately low in the mix in order for the camera to linger on the set-up and the pay-offs. Also, the path is paved for the second half of the film to be a complete bloodbath at the hands of a bunch of marauding, RACIST killer puppets. I can only imagine watching this film with an audience; many of these sequences are genuinely laugh-out-loud funny, and whilst there are a few head-scratching moments, I can’t imagine anyone would really mind; there’s gratuity at the expense of intricacy, let’s say. The one-liners peg everything together just nicely too.
If you like splatter and silliness but appreciate decent characters to see both of those things along, then The Littlest Reich is indeed worthwhile. It dandled the promise of another sequel at the end, and this would be extremely welcome. Retro nostalgia meets graphic, cartoonish violence. Sometimes you can ask for nothing else.
Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich is available now from Exploitation Films.
The notion of folk horror – of isolated communities, barbaric practices and something distinctly sinister about the land itself – has received an awful lot of critical attention in the past few years, not least of which from this very site, so it’s unsurprising to see new films are now appearing, borne out of that renewed interest no doubt. Ari Aster is a filmmaker very much on the up, given his success with last year’s Hereditary; it was a film which very nearly became a victim of its own reputation. I was one of the people who went in with expectations that a film with a very dark, bleak name for itself would be even darker and bleaker than it was; the moments of high farce threw me a little. There is no such confusion with Midsommar, a film which splices its incredibly graphic gore and creeping horror with overblown, definitely-allowed-to-laugh sequences. For all of that, it’s still an effective horror story, possibly because it allows itself to toy with its characters (and its audience) so effectively, its folk horror moving from quaint to bizarre to gratuitous. None of this would hit home so effectively, however, without the strong characterisation of those thrown into the midst of all this.
Dani (Lady Macbeth’s Florence Pugh) is a troubled young woman whose relationship with boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) is very clearly in a death rattle: the more she clings, and calls him, and waits for him to ask how she is, then passive-aggressively makes him ask how she is, the more he pulls away – towards weed, towards his friends, towards anything he can find, whilst those close to him tell him to finally cut the cord after a solid year of wanting out. Meanwhile her friends tell her he isn’t giving her the support she needs (there’s a nebulous modern word!) therefore she should let him go; friends on both sides seem utterly correct. And perhaps, perhaps these two were at the stage of taking this advice, when the unthinkable happens. A family tragedy lands Dani with a horrific bereavement, and so who can she turn to? Christian, who has to set his misgivings aside. They stay together. The months pass. What’s more, that tang of guilt compelling him to do his best leads him to invite Dani along on a trip to Sweden that summer, something that leaves his friends Mark (Will Poulter), Swedish boy Pelle (Vilhelm Blongren) and Josh (William Jackson Harper) none too impressed. Josh is hoping to travel to Pelle’s old closed community in Halsingland in order to study their very secretive midsummer rituals for his thesis. The idea of a mildly disturbed girlfriend tagging along to whine and cockblock doesn’t really fit what they had in mind.
All the same, they all travel to the remote reaches of Sweden, where en route to the settlement proper Pelle introduces them to some of the other young Harga who have been travelling elsewhere in the world. The Harga believe that one’s life falls into four neat stages, and it’s encouraged for the young to voyage abroad before returning to the community. At this juncture, the film has adequately established its aesthetic and its modus operandi. Are rural Swedes all clad in embroidery and off their nuts on shrooms? Maybe not, which is a shame, but here they are, and the hallucinatory scenes which punctuate this film are very well-observed indeed, melding humour with subtle, but nonetheless affecting hallucinations which, for Dani, turn sour remarkably fast under the weight of her still raw grief. The stage has very much been set: the waiting Harga elders are welcoming, prone to the odd mind-altering substance, oh and fiercely protective of their way of life – understandably so, as they enjoy a rural idyll in the summer, where every meal and gesture seems to have a covert ritual significance.
That all said, this is folk horror: if the rituals didn’t turn steadily more and more sinister, where would we be? The unabashed, slightly crude depictions of sex and sacrifice are one thing and the visiting Americans can just about handle them, but a certain group ritual assures the visitors that these people are not just going through the motions. With a tranquil, but suitable pace, Dani and the other outsiders grow steadily afraid of their new neighbours. Woven into all of this are intimations that, yes, this may all seem strange to outsiders, but what’s the alternative? No family? No one to love? A lonely death? The Harga take their community spirit to at times laughable extremes, even voicing the same words and screams at the same time, but the point is made pretty clear: they are united. And it’s their unity which makes them an unstoppable force.
Whilst these elements will draw pretty basic comparisons to The Wicker Man, Midsommar is far more unlike the 1973 film than like it, in this reviewer’s opinion. Sure, we have the staples of a closed community and their unchristian behaviour, but from the colour palate to the rituals themselves, the differences are abundant. This is no community being exploited by a charming outsider like Lord Summerisle; this is a community where the elders are very much the bedrock of the practices which take place. Unlike Howie, there’s a group of outsiders here, all of whom have significantly different motivations for being present – motivations which change and blur, whilst dear old Sergeant Howie’s aims stay dutifully the same. In fact, one of the film’s great strengths is that my sympathies for various characters shift throughout; those which irk me to begin with, take on a different significance as they try to make sense of the new, barbaric and beautiful world which subsumes them. The closing reels for me were absolutely perfect.
Life in Halsingland is the definition of ‘ridiculous to sublime’; Aster has referred to Midsommar as his ‘break-up film’, and in actual fact it is both of those things in abundance – a series of personal journeys set against a shocking, horrific, and yet pleasantly rustic backdrop, where a relationship finally fucks up in glorious technicolour. No one could ask for violence and terror to be any prettier, nor for a more carefully-constructed, engrossing and, yes, original piece of filmmaking.
When I saw that Pet Sematary was being remade, I had a strange sense of deja-vu. Just like IT, another late-80s/early 90s Stephen King adaptation which has recently received an overhaul, the original version of Pet Sematary is bound up with late childhood memories for me, with scenes which have stuck in my head long into adulthood (the lines “No fair! No fair!” came rushing back to me when I watched the new film, for the first time in decades.) Actually, I first saw both IT and Pet Sematary within a very short time of one another, so it’s interesting that there are new versions of each within a fairly short time, too – something which probably represents something about the current market in 80s and 90s nostalgia; these days, us kids of the 80s and 90s now have the disposable income filmmakers are after. The older source material is being brought up to date in a series of recognisable ways, however: I knew that, if the IT remake was anything to go by, then I could expect a darker, more gritty re-interpretation of Pet Sematary. And yes, this is what we get: the new film is slicker, harsher fare, which takes great pains to strike out on its own. However, in so doing, it opts for a number of problematic changes to the source material which rest a little uncomfortably. In a nutshell, there’s a lot to commend in the 2019 story, but a lot of things to question, too.
The story starts familiarly enough, with the Creed family relocating to rural Maine so that Louis, who is a doctor, can take up a new position which encumbers his time less, allowing him more time with his family. So Louis (Jason Clarke, who looks like a Satanic Chandler here), wife Rachel (Amy Seimetz), daughter Ellie (Jeté Laurence) and little Gage (played by twins Hugo and Lucas Lavoie), alongside the cat, Church (played by a whole host of felines!) arrive at their new, spacious abode. The house’s property line extends way out back, encompassing a large swathe of local woodland – as is explained to them by friendly neighbour Jud (the inimitable John Lithgow).
However, it’s only a (very) short space of time before Ellie and Rachel discover something strange on their property – the ‘Pet Sematary’ of the title, brought to the screen in a Wicker Man-reminiscent scene as a group of local children, in animal masks, escort a deceased pet there. This disconcerting event aside, other things soon seem to go wrong for the Creeds. Louis loses a patient, a young man called Victor, who just before he dies speaks to him directly as if he knows him and even seems to revive momentarily, warning Louis about what is to come. And then, when Church is knocked down and killed, with Jud’s guidance Louis takes the fatal step of burying him on the land beyond the Pet Sematary – land which has strange powers to resurrect. Granted, in this instance Jud doesn’t share the story of Timmy Baterman, but all the same, Louis’s thinking already seems disordered. He is dreaming – or is he? He even awakens with his feet caked in mud, as if he has been in the woods.
Things can only go from bad to worse. Church indeed returns, ostensibly now as an evil cat (though truth be told, he doesn’t do anything that my cat doesn’t do on a daily basis). Louis quickly finds himself considering his rational world view, reinterpreting both what is important and what is real – the film’s sense of American folk horror seems stronger here overall, with the land holding sway over civilised ideas – whilst Rachel struggles with barely-repressed childhood memories of her deceased sister Zelda, with the house itself only too ready to oblige the trauma by throwing hallucinations her way. The film seems to be escalating towards the crescendo that we all know and expect. But then, in an about-face, the screenplay decides to simply dodge the original story’s most infamous sequence – the (spoiler alert?) resurrection of Gage Creed, and does something else instead. To explain what would be to heavily spoiler, as the rest of the film leans heavily on this writing decision.
Thus, unfortunately, the second half of the film struggles to hold together in the way that the first half does. I was, if not ready to love the 2019 Pet Sematary – you can only truly love one Pet Sematary at a time – certainly ready and willing to give it kudos for managing an effective sense of pace, with some neat atmospherics and visuals. The visuals and the atmospherics are still there in the second act, but the pace certainly seems to dissipate, as the film’s new direction forces it to engage with certain aspects of the effects of the ‘sour ground’ which are left to imagination in the older film, a tactic which made the overall horror more unsettling. Indeed, by avoiding a re-tread of the Gage section of the novel/first screenplay, the newer film goes to a place where it has to enunciate some of its mysteries; the remainder of the film then feels rushed, with a new conclusion (apparently selected from various filmed options) which lacks the stark horror of the original. I’ll always wonder how one of the other potential endings would have worked here; I really don’t think the one we actually get surpasses the oblique malign power of the original. Of course, subtract all of the moments making endless reference to other Stephen King stories and films, and there could have been a bit more care for the story at hand. The ending is impacted both by the horror tropes which are added in, and the weight of fan service. This is an indisputable shame.
It’s no easy thing though, and certainly no guaranteed easy money to remake a story which has such a long history; even a casual one-time viewer or reader would always have a strong idea of what was coming, so no one could blame directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer for deciding to forge their own vision in their rendition of Pet Sematary. And there are many enjoyable aspects to this polished, often unsettling film. Overall, this remains a worthwhile watch, albeit one which takes a risk and suffers somewhat for its ambitious streak.
Mads Mikkelsen has turned his hand to all manner of different films during his career, from priests to cannibals, and he has certainly shown that he can handle, shall we say, the more challenging roles – and physically-demanding roles too. It seems that he went through more than a few hard knocks during the making of Arctic (2018), which was actually filmed in Iceland, but by no means any less of a struggle with the elements for that. And it looks it, too: Arctic clearly took a lot out of the principal actor, who looks genuinely exhausted and freezing for most of the time. Sort of authentically miserable. However, Arctic is not the straightforward battle with the wilderness that I expected. Rather, this is an unusually understated, even oblique piece of film. In fact, Arctic is to the disaster movie what Valhalla Rising was to the historical epic: these are both brooding mood pieces which have little concern with neat, linear narratives. And this is exactly what makes them so engaging and appealing.
We never learn what happened to Overgård’s (Mikkelsen) plane, nor do we learn how long he has been sat on the ice alone, waiting to be rescued – but it seems that he has settled into something of a routine, and so must have been there for some time. Beyond carving ‘SOS’ into the frozen earth, he is simply waiting for something to happen, although he seems to have some aptitude for looking after himself – he has some shelter, he can procure food, and so he’s surviving. Things soon go from bad to worse, though; a helicopter finally begins circling the area, but it gets caught up in a sudden change in weather and crashes, killing the pilot and badly injuring the co-pilot. So, rather than securing that rescue, Overgård finds himself in the position of needing to be the rescuer. He patches up the woman and takes her back to his plane, together with some useful salvage from the helicopter.
Overgård becomes something of a ministering angel to the mysterious woman, and it seems that his own loneliness has had a profound effect on him, but truth be told her injuries are so grave that she spends the film in its entirety as an inert substance – she never stands, barely speaks and will barely eat or drink. Still, Overgård makes the decision that they cannot just remain where they are, even if this means towing the woman on a sled. She has an infection which could kill her, if they just do nothing. With the use of a map he found on the helicopter – much better than the makeshift one he was using previously – he plots out a route, and they set off.
The film thereafter follows them on their journey. And, yes, whilst this throws them into peril, not least with the film’s sole jump-out-of-skin moment, this is more of an existential piece than a straight-up man vs. the elements yarn. The pace of the film is incredibly, even oddly languid. It is almost dialogue-free, and under director Joe Penna’s watch everything is allowed plenty of time to unfold, creating a nicely atmospheric piece of film. There’s a great balance struck between the expected vast landscapes, but also some rather nicely-handled moments of claustrophobia – with our very small cast crammed into wrecked planes, dangling from wrecked helicopters or literally crawling into holes and caves to escape the conditions. Again, all of this is made possible by the film’s very careful, deliberate handling of pace. Mikkelsen does a superb job with what he’s given, too. And a massive part of the appeal here is the phenomenal soundtrack by Joseph Trapaneze – it’s brilliantly ominous and expansive, suiting the burgeoning mood of the film perfectly.
So this was not the kind of film I was expecting, all told, but Arctic is a superb piece of work, a reflective kind of film which rewards a more reflective approach. It might throw just a little redemption in there, but overall this is a man’s journey through his own turmoil, as well-enacted and rendered completely plausible by Mads Mikkelsen.
Arctic will be released to DVD, Blu-ray and digital on June 24th 2019 (Signature Entertainment).
They’ve been regularly made since the very first film of the kind in the 1920s, but perhaps the 1970s were particularly unusual for the sheer volume of vampire horror films which emerged. Many different varieties of vampire horror appeared, too: Hammer Studios toyed with classic stories and folklore to create their own lurid, luxuriant spin, with many of their best-known vampire films getting released during the decade; other studios, contrastingly, felt the time was right to make fun of vampire tropes, delivering full-blown comedies such as Love at First Bite (1979). But perhaps the most visually-appealing, tonally-different film of its kind was Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht. It’s a film which can trace its lineage back to the very birth of horror cinema via its links to the Murnau original, and then to the epistolary novel which has birthed so many on-screen incarnations of Count Dracula, creating a movie culture all of its own. But, aside from its pedigree in this respect, Herzog’s Nosferatu is quite unique in its depiction of the jaded, lonely Count Dracula, a character compelled to live forever, and a man who seems to detest his own ghoulish existence. Truly one of the most existentially bleak renditions of the Dracula story, there are no grand battles or salacious details here. What we get instead is a blend of staggering beauty and pitiable loss. It’s a remarkable piece of cinema.
The story itself is quite straightforward, and quite closely follows the version of the Dracula story used by Murnau. In both, the story has been moved from England to Germany, and set largely in a small German town (Wismar). Also in both, Jonathan Harker is sent abroad to Transylvania to attend to the needs of a mysterious nobleman, though ‘Orlok’ is dispensed with in Herzog’s telling of the tale. Harker agrees to take the job, and leaves his wife Lucy in the hands of friends before beginning on his way. It’s a strange thing, but there doesn’t seem to be any story quite like Dracula for having its key characters shuffled around and reassembled; unlike Stoker’s original, here it’s Lucy (Isabelle Adjani) who is wed to Harker, and Mina appears only as a peripheral figure. Van Helsing (Walter Ledengast) and Renfield (Roland Topor) do their turns, but Van Helsing is unusually minor in this particular version, whilst it’s characters who are usually completely passive who come into their own here (more below).
Harker is beset by risk throughout his journey to Transylvania – a journey which is itself agonisingly long, and afforded far more on-screen time than we usually see. Whilst the locations used are very beautiful, Harker’s vulnerability is brought into sharp relief by his environs – places he does not know, but must safely navigate nonetheless. He trudges over unlit grasslands, sidles his way along perilous waterfall paths and pleads with those he encounters to help him; he’s met with taciturn refusals by authentically dour rustics, and must do things for himself. He’s finally swept up by a mysterious black coach and deposited at the ramshackle castle, where the monstrous Count Dracula awaits him. Nobleman he might be, but he’s far closer to monstrous here than any number of the suave and well-dressed Draculas that we may see elsewhere. Like Orlok, Klaus Kinski’s Dracula is wraith-like, and it’s difficult to understand how Harker is able to greet him quite so calmly given his pallor, his sharp teeth and nails and his preternatural appearance more generally. Yet, Harker – at least at first – is quietly polite, if alarmed, assisting the Count with the business he has been entrusted with. It’s Dracula’s frightening response to seeing a drop of his blood which first fully repels him, and leads him to want to escape from the castle. By the time he realises what Dracula’s plans are, it’s too late: things have been set in motion, and Harker will ultimately be unable to “stop the black coffins” which are soon headed for Wismar.
Throughout this part of the film, Herzog is a genius at making us feel some sympathy with each main character. Harker is, in all respects, a good man who took this fool’s errand because he hoped it would benefit him and his beloved Lucy; Ganz enacts a certain level of naivety and vulnerability incredibly well, and as he increasingly begins to gain a sense of his own danger, we empathise with his attempt to escape. But Kinski is a Dracula like no other. We are used – and maybe far more so in the 70s – to seeing vampires as privileged somehow, as revelling in their eternal life and feeling great anger towards anyone who would attempt to snuff it out. Whatever befell Kinski’s Dracula some centuries before, it has hardly preserved him in some perfect state, nor has it seemingly done anything other than make him suffer. He has degenerated, more animal than man, compelled to lap up blood in order to drag on his miserable existence. Why does he not electively die, we might ask? Does he not know what would do the trick? Well, perhaps he just can’t. He simply continues, going through the motions. And after everything, despite his repellent appearance, he has a human heart still. He suffers. He can remember enough of love to suffer by its absence, and he feels that death is not the worst thing that can befall a person. His gentle, introspective brooding is very affecting, and very unusual too. You find yourself sympathising with a monstrous creature; this is a rare skill, but one which the relationship between the director and the actor is able to offer. In this, Herzog has been able to embellish the character of Dracula as-written (Stoker’s Dracula is rather two-dimensional, with only one paltry mention of ‘having loved’) and Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht therefore establishes a new kind of cinematic vampire. Even now, nothing has ever come close to that.
The character of Lucy – as played by the beautiful Isabelle Adjani – breaks further ground, and gives a new kind of life to a character who seems to be a straightforward victim in so many tellings of this story. Here, rather than taking a salacious path into living death where she needs a band of men to ‘save’ her, Lucy is unusually active. She is, throughout, in tune with her husband’s sufferings and senses his plight; when he returns to Wismar, though he is utterly catatonic (and Jonathan effectively dies on her without recognising her), she puts her efforts into investigating what has happened to her little town. It is Lucy who understands what Dracula is, and where he is; she even has the presence of mind to remonstrate with him. It is, of course, completely in keeping with the film overall that her efforts to restore order are ruined in the very final reels. Yes, she is pure of heart, and as the lore stated, she was able to sacrifice herself to destroy the vampire. It nearly, nearly works. Unfortunately, and in contrast to Murnau’s vision, the love of her life has by then become a damned creature himself. The ‘plague’ which has decimated the infrastructure of the town may have cast all people together in a kind of literal danse macabre, but so long as enough of the old social order exists for him to order a servant to sweep up the crumbled host which Lucy intended to keep him fixed in his seat, then the old social order can still be exploited.
So is anything about the ending of this film redemptive? Dracula finally opts out of time, but the decision is ultimately made for him; his death throes don’t seem to grant him peace, either. He dies, an ugly wraith on an unfamiliar floor; there’s no redemptive last sunrise here. Lucy dies too, for all her best efforts, and her husband – mobile at last – escapes, to do god knows what elsewhere. Will he become like Dracula – will he one day remember the woman who loved him, and feel something of the same abject pain? It’s a sobering thought. But then, the whole film is painted in these colours, and any happiness here is fleeting. It can perhaps be best summed up by Lucy, blindly seeking help in the town square, as a procession of pale coffins is carried past and around her. She is hemmed in by death, by forces unrecognisable, as ‘plague’ disrupts everything she’s ever valued. This isn’t, by the way, a film to watch when you’re labouring under any sort of existential angst (or is it perfect?)
Whilst, yes, the eagle-eyed may have noticed a few anachronisms along the way in Nosferatu (at last, we’ve found people with more of a dismal attitude to life than Dracula) for me, the atmosphere is perfect throughout. It’s a film which melds the picturesque and the grotesque; finery rots, grave-mould intrudes, a microcosm collapses in on itself. And for forty years now, audiences have been able to embrace this rare pestilence. It’s a film that will no doubt still being talked about in forty years more. Time is, after all, an abyss…
When Drag Me to Hell was made, an unbelievable decade ago, it did one thing straight away: it delivered director and writer Sam Raimi back into the eager grasp of a multitude of genre film fans. An Evil Dead remake may have been floating around at the rumour stage by roughly this point in time, but Raimi himself hadn’t worked on an honest-to-goodness horror since Army of Darkness set the seal on his perfect marriage of grisly and silly. He had, to all intents and purposes, moved on: the Spider-Man movies were a different world, being big-budget, big studio affairs. Now, these films make solid commercial and career sense, and there’s nothing exactly wrong with them per se, but perhaps it all felt a little clean and tidy to the people who’d cut their teeth on The Evil Dead. Drag Me To Hell promised a welcome return to that particular form, and it was exciting, something to look forward to. Looking back and revisiting the film now, even the opening credits would do any horror fan the power of good. It’s a fun film from the very start, full of a blur of shlock horror components – a gypsy curse, together with monsters, psychics, graveyards and strange ‘should I be laughing at this?’ rituals. Even Hell itself seems somehow OTT in this film, and that’s a place which has a rich cultural history of shlock.
So all the prerequisite elements are clearly there, all present and correct. Drag Me To Hell is terrific fun. But it does have a nasty edge to it, for all that, when you think about it. Does Christine really deserve everything she gets, for not extending a loan? Are we not encouraged to empathise with her? – She’s clearly not a character we’re meant to hate, and the film would be a failure, in all likelihood, if we just saw a dreadful person get punished across ninety minutes. Instead, Christine (Alison Lohman) is a girl desperately trying to escape her provincial background and better herself. It’s the American Dream – get somewhere, be someone. But long before the shit hits the fan, her American Dream is clearly being knocked from all sides – her boss, her co-worker, her boyfriend’s family. None of them want her to get ahead. It’s a bad day at the office, and then Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) turns up, asking for another extension on her mortgage payments. She’s already had several. Should Christine have extended her more credit? Possibly, but then she’s doing her best in a tough professional environment. Maybe Mrs Ganush should have cursed someone higher up. Come to think of it, weren’t we in the throes of a banking crisis at this time?
But hey, it is what it is: dreadful curses happen to good people, that’s the real lesson here. A vulnerable old woman turns out to be a menacing old witch (Raimi always does stellar work making old age seem more monstrous than frail) and Christine has the obligatory three days to save her soul. They’re not a nice, peaceful, relish-your-last-hours three days, either. One of the film’s strengths is in how it creates a mash-up of occult phenomena, forging a familiar-but-different mythology. The ‘lamia’ invoked by Mrs Ganush is a figure from Greek myth and legend, usually imagined as female – but our lamia walks with cloven feet, like a good old fashioned incarnation of Satan. The ‘cursed object’ idea feels like another borrowing, but altogether, it works well. It certainly lends itself to another key Raimi genre film feature: the gore. Oh the gore.
I think if I were to sum up Raimi’s style of on-screen gore, I’d call it something like ‘wonderfully nauseating’. Splatter which feels like an old friend. And there is abundant splatter here: even a straightforward nosebleed turns into a dousing; Mrs Ganush’s superpower seems to be emitting disgusting fluids, in life and in death, and she gives the film a lot of its gross-out-loud moments. Blood and vomit slosh around against a raucous soundtrack for the most part, too, lending the film a sense of sensory overload. But there’s a lot more classic Raimi here: the camera which operates from a ghoul’s-eye-view, pursuing characters along the street; the unseen presence pin-balling around any available space, destroying everything as it goes; the host of demons which have a strange joie de vivre, gurning and laughing as they go. Even the assaults on the main character feel like essential Raimi directing, and Christine is thrown around like a ragdoll just as much as Bruce Campbell was in the Evil Dead trilogy (and, yeah, it’s hard not to draw that comparison: two everyday people accidentally pitched against demonic forces which take a real pleasure in their work. It’s also not lost on me that the first trip Christine and boyfriend Clay (Justin Long) plan to take is to…a cabin in the woods!)
Now, for all of that, Drag Me To Hell isn’t a perfect film – there’s no sense pretending it is – and there are a few weak points along the way. Some of the sticking points for me would doubtlessly include the ubiquitous ‘family dinner’ which just invites you to squirm at the inevitable embarrassment to come. Christine goes through enough, without a baking disaster in front of the prospective in-laws. And I would say that the expendable psychic is one trope too many; you know damn well that if you see one, then their number’s up once they’ve passed on just enough information about the other world. The jury’s out on the seance scene, some fans were turned off by it, but I think I’m still erring towards the side of ‘hahaha, talking goat, cool’. But perhaps the thing which has aged most poorly over the past ten years is the CGI. Now, this is always a topic which divides people, but it’s clear to see how far the technology has come in the last decade, even if you’re not generally a fan of these effects. Even if the CGI in Drag Me To Hell occurs in some of the most cartoonish scenes in the film – someone gets an anvil in the back of the head, Wile E. Coyote style – it still jars somewhat, and looks a little out of place; it did then, so it really does now. But, hey, you can’t have it all…and for the film’s final scenes, you’d forgive a hell of a lot anyway. A sequence of false endings give way to a final jolt as the plot reveals its big cruel joke on Christine and then, after all hell breaks loose, there’s a cut to the final credits. Done. Lamia 1: Christine 0.
So, looking back now after ten years have gone by, Drag Me To Hell feels like a worthwhile return to form, and it may be slightly odd to say (you get slightly odd after decades of horror cinema) it’s one of those films I can always put on and enjoy. But at the time, it was perhaps more valued as it was a ‘hello again, goodbye again’ from Sam Raimi, as he went back to more mainstream fare – that is, until the glorious Evil Dead TV series gave us more of the same, and what a joy that was. But we’re bang up to date, almost, when talking about the TV incarnation. Drag Me To Hell was, in 2009, a welcome dose of demons and gore at a time when horror was saturated with found footage and torture porn: how nice it was, and is, to have a film which balanced the humorous with the gruesome, and held the camera still. What’s not to love? People fretting over whether the film is meant to be scary or funny are missing the point. This is a Sam Raimi horror. It’s both, duh.
These days, the horror genre can only be rendered palatable to select members of society by suggesting that the horror they enjoy is, in some hard to define ways, ‘elevated’ beyond the confines of mere horror cinema. It’s a curious impulse, but it speaks to the way in which the horror genre still has the power to unsettle. People often want to squirm away from its hold, to suggest that it’s not horror per se that they enjoy, that it’s okay because they’re not really fans of something they can’t simply allow themselves to like.
All this said, the possibility of censorship and outright bans has never gone away, which may be a contextual reason why some people are so concerned to declare that their tastes lie elsewhere. Horror movies still fill certain sections of the population with bemusement, and sometimes outright disgust. The insinuation remains that there must be something wrong with people who want to watch this kind of thing…well, allowing for the fact that ‘horror’ is a huge genre which is growing increasingly broader, I’ve always been a passionate defender of horror films: horror should be just as permissible as any fantasy medium. And so on, ad infinitum, as a vast number of articles and reviews on this site over the years will attest.
What my defence of horror doesn’t do is to explain my own interest in and passion for horror movies, and it now strikes me as strange that I’ve never really taken the time to consider something so integral to my personal life. My usual glib response – that I was born very close to Halloween – doesn’t quite cut it, does it?
So why horror? Why do I, or you, or we, variously enjoy sitting through depictions of torture, murder, agony, fear, unequal threat, malevolent supernatural forces, unstoppable foes, psychological trauma or insanity?
There is a good deal of academic study which suggests reasons for the enduring appeal of horror, both in literature and in film: writers like Julia Kristeva and Judith Halberstam, to name but two, are theorists on the subject. However, this ain’t an academic essay, and although I may overlap with existing theory in some places, the following thoughts are things which make sense to me, as a horror viewer. So, as far as I’m able, here’s what I’ve been able to come up with.
Firstly, I think horror is a safe arena, a place to play out dimensions of human experience which have been largely excised from everyday life, or which remain a real, unwanted danger if they haven’t. Death itself, for instance, has largely disappeared from the domestic sphere. We have industries and protocols for dealing with the dead where once the deceased would be laid out at home after being nursed at home, and would be washed and dressed by (usually female) members of the family. But even though death has been co-opted by officialdom, it’s there still – as are all the experiences and feelings surrounding the subject. There seems to be a part of the human psyche which needs to reacquaint itself with death and suffering – perhaps satisfying some manifestation of the ‘forewarned is forearmed’ idea, or at least playing with mankind’s morbid fascination for its own limitations. People will crane their necks to look at roadside accidents on account of this morbid streak; horror movies allow people to safely and harmlessly explore dangerous, tragic and unsettling events without actually gawking at real tragedy. It’s a vicarious means to explore human concerns which – especially for Westerners – we routinely repress or remove.
Death and suffering never leave our sides, but there are other pressing concerns played out via the medium of horror films which do change over time: Communist paranoia gave us the horror of soulless automata and the in-group/out-group anxiety of films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers; mindless consumerism gave us Dawn of the Dead and They Live; corporate corruption brought us Alien. Again, horror films reflect and refract current social fears, ramping up the impact with allegorical monsters, fantastical situations and an emphasis on humans attempting to make sense of their situations – and to survive. By engaging with current concerns and fears through a responsive medium, people can try to make sense of the world they live in. That ‘torture porn’ has been so prevalent in recent years suggests that modern times are difficult times indeed, and that people feel significantly disempowered and under unflinching surveillance…
But that is only part of the puzzle. As much as horror fluctuates according to what’s going on in the world at large, it would never have its enduring appeal if it didn’t also entertain us. People like stories, have done since time immemorial, and for millennia stories have made no distinction between the gruesome and the uplifting. Think of the fate of Prometheus in Ancient Greek myth – punished for stealing fire from the gods by being bound to a rock, where an eagle pecked out and ate his liver every day – only for it to grow back in time for a similar fate the following day. To return to my first point, death and suffering were part of everyday life and this was amplified in traditional storytelling. Stories have always been ambiguous, and it’s only in relatively modern times that we’ve trimmed away all the disconcerting parts of tales. To illustrate this, let’s remember that Cinderella’s ugly sisters hacked off their toes in the original story, in their efforts to wear the glass slipper.
Perhaps, then, it is horror’s detractors who are aberrant, and, in promoting a sanitised version of the world, deliberately misunderstand human nature. Like all good storytelling, horror balances the gruesome with drama, humanity, catharsis and black comedy; there is pain and suffering, and there is also redemption and solidarity in abundance. Horror works because it works with human concerns, is responsive to change, and permits vicarious experiences in a safe, entertaining format where – if it’s a good movie – a good story is married to a willing suspension of disbelief. It’s not just children who need or like tales, and as a horror fan, I still like the imaginative world woven around the genre. And, ultimately, this encapsulates why horror never needs to be described as ‘elevated’, and nor does it deserve to be denigrated as trash. The fact that it’s as old as cinema itself, as well as enmeshed in folklore and storytelling since time immemorial, makes our societal dislike for the genre more of an odd quirk at best, something which says a great deal more about our culture than the horrific tales themselves.
An earlier version of this feature once appeared on the Flowers of Flesh and Blood blog.
There’s hardly any need at this stage to say that the late Jess Franco was one of the most prolific low-brow filmmakers we’ve ever known, but the terrific plus side to his frenetic pace of work during a nearly sixty-year career is that, for most of us, there’s still a wealth of film titles out there we’ve yet to see. Well, I may have subtracted one from that still significant number with Devil Hunter, but as ever with Franco, I had an absolute blast. They’re fun films to watch, they’re fun to write about, and provided you’re happy with knowing that you are not going to be wowed with snazzy SFX or indeed slick production values, then you’ll have a blast with Devil Hunter or any number of Franco’s films too. No one has ever come along to take Franco’s place – turning out busy, entertaining exploitation films which have an odd sort of joie de vivre.
This looks at first to be your common-or-garden cannibal exploitation movie: a young woman runs, arms flailing, through an unnamed jungle, with a band of men in pursuit. Now, were you to think that only in such remote climes could a woman be travelling at speed, waving her arms around, scantily clad, then you’d be wrong. We get a cut scene to a young woman hanging over the top of a convertible, waving her arms around in a very similar way, and herself only minimally clad. That’s parity, that is. And this young blonde lady, recently arrived in the faintly unlikely movie hotbed that is Benidorm, is Laura Crawford (Ursula Buchfellner) – a massive star and pin-up.
After some ebullient dog-walking, she’s busy getting on with her languid soft-focus existence when all of a once, she’s ambushed in the bath (natch) and kidnapped. Now, here we have one of the film’s many gloriously daft moments: Ms. Crawford seems to be subdued with a bit of Silvikrin, which is being brandished by some guys in the worst disguises you could imagine. True, they have put stockings on their heads, but somehow this has had the effect of their facial features being brought into even sharper relief. Anyway, our Laura is taken off, to somewhere unnamed, but suspiciously like the jungle we saw earlier. The plan is to ransom Ms. Crawford for Silly Money, and hide her in the jungle (?!) until that ransom is paid.
But wait…could it be that the cannibal shenanigans we thought we saw earlier have a bit more about them than it first seemed? Is that some kind of…zombie on the loose? And is that bloodshot-eyed idol which the locals all hold in some kind of dread reverence the key to understanding all of this? (Yes to all.)
Anyway, Laura Crawford’s people begin working on a plan to retrieve her, sending off a Vietnam vet and…a guy with awesome boots, who isn’t above making it look like he’s climbing a vertical cliff face when in fact, they’ve put the camera on its side, and he’s actually on the floor, pretending. The tree growing bountifully at what would be a perfect ninety-degree angle to the ‘cliff’ is a dead giveaway. With regards the veteran, there’s even a PTSD-flavoured sequence in here on his account; this film really does have it all.
The ensuing melee between captors and rescuers, not to mention of course Mr Googly Eyes on the prowl, leads to a series of highly entertaining scenes, all shot through with classic mid-period Franco fare: barely-excused nudity, super-zoom shots, camp dialogue and a weird, unmistakable feeling that everything going on here must have been fun to shoot. There’s a little, only a very little, dead time before the grande finale. Sure, it’s a tree, again, which breaks the spell of the profound isolation of this ‘jungle’ by having loads of European names carved into it, but so what? This is a film designed to be baffling and gratuitous, and it achieves this from start to finish.
If it sounds like I’m knocking Franco in any respects here, then assuredly I’m not. I thoroughly enjoyed Devil Hunter. Whilst Uncle Jess may not have purposefully set out to make comedies (well, mostly), he did set out to make films that people could simply enjoy, and so here we are. In fact, this was a ‘video nasty’ at one point, though all that says is that they’d ban anything in those days. Oh, sure, it has T&A, some garish (if at least ambitious) gore and various exploitation elements, which mean this would probably be a poor choice of entry-level film for anyone who didn’t have at least a passing understanding of the genre or the director, but for the likes of us, this is bloody improbable fun. I’d go further and say that all the mugs giving this bad reviews on IMDb and similar outlets have probably missed the point and they shouldn’t be given nice things.
Devil Hunter will be released by 88 Films on April 8th 2019.
