Keri O'Shea

No Jump Scares Needed: 5 Stand-Out Supernatural Scenes in Horror Cinema

Posted on July 30, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

Pardon me a ‘get off my lawn’ moment, if you will: supernatural horror-making in recent years has gone down the drain.

Oh sure, on occasion you’ll see a film which has its moments, but the fact that this often strikes us with such genuine surprise and delight should testify that for the most part, supernatural horror is badly-done, poorly-executed and just plain lazy. Box office success seems to hinge on the following: winning favour with a horde of recalcitrant teens who measure quality according to how much or how little a horror film makes the weakest member of their group amusingly shriek out loud. More and more films have begun to follow a formula, one which plumps for cheap thrills and sudden shocks over all else. Actually, to call it a formula is to suggest it has a number of elements which combine successfully. That would be overstating things. Lacking the wit to craft a slowly-building story, one which immerses you in the world of credible (even if unlikeable) characters whilst allowing you to feel the tension they feel in an incredible, otherworldly situation, the tendency now is to lob in a cookie-cutter family unit and then haunt them with all the subtlety of fireworks at a funeral. Move them in to a spooky house and then have a shitty CGI child leap out at them for eighty minutes so that the evil can be resolved for the final ten minutes before everyone – on screen and in the cinema – leaves. Promise some extra footage of said shitty CGI child for the DVD release, and rake in those pennies. You did good!

There’s a reason advertising campaigns rock out the night vision to promote their films these days. It’s because they make the error of thinking that the quality of horror is measured by how much – and how high – the audience members jump. That’s what it’s all about now. Terror has become a Richter scale of involuntary leaps and jerks; it’s a lowest-common-denominator way of thinking, and confusing a reflex action with genuine fear is a hell of a mistake to make. For example: if someone comes around a corner ahead of you and you didn’t hear them approach, then you’ll jump when you see them. This is the brain’s way of getting you ready for action should you need it; the good old reptile brain stops you daydreaming and puts you in ‘drive’ in case this new, unanticipated person is a threat. It’s non-discriminatory and it’s instantaneous. We can’t control it; we’re just primed to jump a foot into the air if we’re caught unawares. A small child can make you jump by popping up and shouting ‘boo!’ but give it a second and you realise you were just caught off guard.

In a movie it’s not foolproof, but it’s pretty foolproof. Yeah, you do get the odd build-up which is so ridiculously obvious that the scene fails because you’ve been tensed against it for a whole minute, but filmmakers aren’t about to give up yet. Perhaps even they are in doubt of the permanence of this approach in horror, as if even our oldest brain structures will eventually completely disengage from whatever is in front of us, we get the regular-as-clockwork ‘boo!’ moment, so what we get now is that hugely annoying sampled screech sound which is dubbed across every jerky GRAB! Or BOO! scene. Case in point: the Poltergeist reboot. At Brutal as Hell we were actively drawing straws against even going to see the film until Dustin stepped up to the plate, but for me the scene in the trailer where the kid gets yanked up a flight of stairs accompanied by that tedious bloody cacophony of screeching was proof positive that I would think it was shit.

The human imagination has the capacity for so much more than that. That’s where we feel a real scare; that’s where we try to process events which seem to point to an existence of ours beyond us, and consider the implications of this. Think back to when you were a child, which is when a lot of us get a taste for the type of frights we rarely see in modern horror cinema now. If you believed in ghosts, or monsters, or the thing in the closet, you feared its quiet presence, its potential, its all-seeing eye. You may have thought from time to time you heard something breathing, or saw something out of the corner of your eye, or heard something – but that initial shock invariably gave way to greater fears, and so, the best supernatural horror manages to accommodate that. The most frightening things don’t always move fast. They certainly don’t have to land on you like a tonne of bricks.

Of course, and although I’ll post video clips where they’re available for the following list, it’s important to remember that, taken out of context, any scene can lose its impact. In fact, if you haven’t seen the films or programmes I’m about to mention, I’d avoid the links and track down the end product.

Dracula (1979) – Mina’s Reunion with Van Helsing

Actress Jan Francis has been cheated of her horror reputation, in a way, as when she ‘made it big’, it involved crossing over to a lot of frankly underwhelming British TV, and this is what she’s now best-known for. However, before she was making the likes of Just Good Friends, she had turned her hand to Hammer’s television series House of Mystery and Suspense, tackled M R James in an ITV version of Casting the Runes, and – most notably of all – appeared in John Badham’s 1979 retelling of Dracula. It’s not a long filmography then, but it’s a good one. In this version of Dracula it’s Mina (Francis), rather than Lucy, who falls prey to the Count’s advances, sickens and dies. Her father Van Helsing, suspecting some sort of supernatural foul play, tracks her to the vault where she’s buried – with, for me, skin-crawling results. His shock and her blank-eyed, quiet requests for her father to go with her – in their native Dutch – are haunting. Badham has the good sense to keep her appearance low-key too, enclosing the whole scene in near total darkness.

Lost Hearts (1973) – the Hurdy Gurdy

Lost Hearts is probably M R James’s most visceral horror story: although framed with the usual (if still brilliant) rational account of a sequence of events which challenges convention, we shouldn’t forget that at the crux of the story, there are two ritually murdered children. MR James veteran director Lawrence Gordon Clark takes the story in some unanticipated directions here, including making the boy play a hurdy-gurdy: it seems to work, and the fact that it’s not a crashing cymbal or sharp flurry of violin notes makes it both quaint and defiant to modern ears. These ambiguous child spirits don’t seem to want to harm Stephen; they simply want to show what has happened to them, and when they reveal their chest wounds to him in his dream it’s a shocking moment, but one which appalls, rather than startles.

The Haunted (1991) – “Janet”

Once upon a time, the whole ‘inspired by real events’ was a lot rarer on our screens, and in the case of this largely unassuming direct-to-TV movie, the fact that the ‘real events’ were linked to a family called The Smurls would not have meant a great deal to many people. However, this family had sought the help of a pair of celebrity – if there can be such a thing – demon hunters, by the names of Ed and Lorraine Warren. If you’ve picked up The Conjuring and Annabelle of late (and my condolences for the latter, if you have) then you may know that these films are also ‘inspired by real events’ and that these events also involve the Warrens. However, despite the at-times hokey TV vibe of The Haunted, I think it is a deeply creepy film which outstrips Annabelle by miles and has the edge on The Conjuring too, although this is the better film of the two newer offerings. Its believable domesticity and order are most horrifically impinged upon by the quiet little shocks the film offers. There are manifestation scenes in here along the way, but for me the simple addition of a voice is one of the most effective, when Janet Smurl is called by – what she thinks is – her mother in an adjoining room. She’s not there. In fact, it’s just the start of their ordeal. If you wish, and this is correct at the time of writing, you may watch the whole film here.

The Innocents (1961) – end sequence

A great deal has already been written about The Innocents, a highly-regarded film based on Henry James’s lone decent book, The Turn of the Screw. It may have dispensed with the original title, but the action described in that title is abundant on the screen, as the hysterical, obsessive governess Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) becomes convinced that her employer’s house is haunted by the former governess, Miss Jessel, and another employee – Peter Quint, and gradually creates an unbearable situation at the house. With mental illness and sexuality bubbling cold beneath the surface, that old adage that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ is never more true than in the case of Miss Giddens; in trying to protect the children, she causes immense harm, culminating in the end scene of the film. It’s able to its maintain ambiguity, however. Is there really something there? Does Miles see it? With no fanfare, the film’s tragedy unfolds here and we are never permitted a neat, one-size-fits-all ending – not for us or for them.

The Woman in Black (1989) – bedroom scene

I think this is a perfect point on which to end, as we now have two cinematic versions of the original Woman in Black story by Susan Hill. One was made over twenty-five years ago; the other is one of the smash-hit horrors of recent years, released in 2012. These don’t compare very closely.

It probably won’t be a surprise to anyone, by now, that I prefer the earlier film; although I quite enjoyed the 2012 retelling of the story for its locations, costumes and performances, it definitely had all the hallmarks of the jump-scare-horror (though, in fairness, so does the successful stage production of the novella). The whole film felt like a showcase for screenplay-writer Jane Goldman to have her spooky Victorian toys mysteriously start working; the Woman in Black here was bobbing up on camera on a regular basis, and she didn’t go about it quietly either. Clearly made to corral Harry Potter fans who turned up in their droves to see actor Daniel Radcliffe in his role as Mr Kipps, the lawyer, the newer version of The Woman in Black concentrated on how high it could get people out of their seats. Yes, it’s one of those films, and overall it’s a shame.

The Nigel Kneale production of two decades previous didn’t attempt to make people jump. It kept the Woman in Black herself off-screen most of the time, and for its fright effect it called to our thinking brains with quiet glimpses, or sounds, or other low-key phenomena. It had one trick up its sleeve, though; hence, this clip shows the film’s most startling moment. This was certainly a break from the material which had preceded it, and as such it seems to have stayed with people (hence the clip’s title!) One surprise change in direction – again, without massive ceremony – is more than adequate here, and works well with the film overall in this dynamic and well-wrought version of a classic story. Sure, to many modern viewers more amenable to ghosts who all look a certain way – and they do – this character may seem dated to you. Some of the comments on Youtube complained that the ghost wasn’t attractive enough; I know you shouldn’t put too much faith in what you read on the bottom half of the internet, but all the same – this has to tell you something about what people expect from their supernatural horror these days.

Less is more, folks. Less is more. And long may there be this kind of creeping, uneasy, understated cinema to remind us of this fact.

Film Review: The Devil of Kreuzberg (2015)

Posted on July 28, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

When a film is described by its maker as ‘modern Gothic’ then I have to admit, I’ll always jump at the chance to see it, even if I’m often disappointed. The term ‘Gothic’ is tough to define in many ways, but even if we can’t always agree what Gothic is, then we can often agree on what it isn’t. Many modern horrors consider themselves Gothic, after all, and attempt to trade off the name, often for the lucrative October market, though often presupposing that a certain aesthetic is quite enough – usually women in black, pop-up ghosts which screech and a few obligatory nods to creaky architecture. I don’t think this really fits the bill; I’m looking for atmosphere, that skin-crawling sense of some lowering presence which overshadows and overpowers us. So hand me a film that calls itself Gothic and is set in one of my favourite cities? Sold.

In many ways, then, I’m so glad I liked The Devil of Kreuzberg – I don’t think the ol’ sensibilities could have coped with a dead loss here. Happily this isn’t the case, and despite clearly being made for next to nothing (IMDb suggests a measly 3,000 euros) it has three things which sustain it through that rough terrain of low-budget filmmaking in which others flounder: ideas, ambition, and a sense of where it belongs in the long tradition of films which came before it. Had director Alex Bakshaev pitched this film as Gothic because it was simply a bit dark some of the time, then it would be easy to knock holes in The Devil of Kreuzberg. But he knows his stuff, both in how he shoots and in what he references along the way. The film does have its limitations, but a lack of imagination – or knowledge of Gothic cinema – isn’t amongst them.

I can even forgive the fact that this film begins with some dancing (and has some more along the way) – because the film quickly improves, and we are introduced to what at first seems to be a loving couple, reclusive writer Jakob (Ludwig Reuter) and Linda (first-time actress Sandra Bourdonnec). Jakob reflects on how he typically likes to hide from the world in general, but so far, he’s made an exception for Linda. However, he’s begun to have some disturbing dreams about his lady companion in which she straddles and then kills him – which is leading him to withdraw from even her. Linda just wants to help. Jakob however is becoming afraid of Linda, and confides in his best friend and sometime-hitman Kurt (Suleyman Yuceer) how he feels, hoping for a resolution. In the ensuing tangle of who should fear who in this film, it does transpire that perhaps, Jakob has reason to feel afraid.

The first thing to greatly admire about this film is how it gives Berlin back a bit of the demi-monde allure it deserves (and I mean that in a complimentary way). The city looks rich and alive in the way it’s shot, all colourful long-shots of driving rain and neon lights, not to mention excess a-plenty in the form of numerous sex shops and porno cinemas. To me, this all qualifies as Gothic. The idea of the city as vast, alluring but potentially threatening is every bit as Gothic as your lofty landscapes and castle dungeons. Some of the shots used here are brilliant, too, giving a nod of reference to even the oldest horror movies, and successfully making concrete monoliths and desolate urban places into evocative spaces. These stylistic choices are fun in and of themselves, but add in a cemetery which looks great on screen as highly plot-relevant and then reference one of the most famous 19th century stories of love as consumption (no, probably not the one you’ve just thought of, but one you might think of quite soon after that) and there’s enough going on to keep me engaged. Hearing a familiar name from horror history being invoked can make you feel a little cautious, true, but make it interesting and it’s definitely good to have them around again.

At the unusual running length of fifty minutes, The Devil of Kreuzberg is somewhere between a short and a modern feature, and as such it doesn’t spend a great deal of time elaborating on its themes and developments, which may keep some viewers at arms’ length. It does have some initial issues, too, with the nature of a multi-lingual production where some of the cameo actors seem ill at ease speaking English, which could be seen to compound their inexperience. All that said, I thought the slightly unorthodox leads worked well together (again, that dancing notwithstanding) and Bourdonnec really is good, maybe even off-screen a bit too much. The ending, with its dreamy dialogue and setting, reminded me a bit of Jean Rollin – The Iron Rose or Fascination, maybe. All interesting things to pick out, in a low budget movie in 2015.

Full kudos to Bakshaev for putting this project together: he’s clearly a man committed to horror, knows his stuff and takes pains to capture that on-screen despite the constraints. Honestly – I wish there were more opportunities to give this kind of praise to low-budget filmmakers. I really do.

Blu-ray Review: Quatermass (1979)

Posted on July 27, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

When creator Nigel Kneale brought Professor Bernard Quatermass to the screen in the late 70s, it was not the first time that this intriguing and rather under-appreciated figure had appeared; since the 1950s, when he was first introduced, he had become a quiet but interesting institution, a man whose scientific acumen was often acutely thrown into disarray by the forces he encountered as part of his work. However, by the late 70s – when it seems the Prof had decided to take time out from shall we say a ‘challenging career’ – there was no escaping the chaos on the streets of Britain, and it seems fair to say that this later TV series carried with it some of the anxieties of its own time.

I say ‘chaos’, and the strikes, three day weeks and power cuts which were really taking place in the UK in the years around the making of this series certainly look that way, but in the fictional universe of Quatermass, it’s not really full on chaos at all. There’s something oddly polite and rather British about the breakdown of society in the early scenes of Quatermass; the marauding thugs of London all speak with Received Pronunciation (damn you, acting school) and although many parts of the city look like ghettos, TV continues to run, there’s clearly fuel for vehicles and the police are still around too. This ain’t Threads. But what is behind this unprecedented dysfunction, this so-called ‘urban collapse’?

If he has any suspicions, Professor Quatermass (John Mills) is keeping quiet about them, at least at first. The multinational (read: Russia and the US) space project ‘Hands in Space’ seems to be the priority for TV output rather than the conditions on the streets, and in his professional capacity as someone who has worked in space research and development, Quatermass has been asked to participate in a show which will air at the time a new mission is taking place. When asked about his feelings on this superpower-driven new project, Quatermass goes off-message and declares his skepticism; thus when the mission ends in disaster moments later, with some unspecified disaster causing the US and Russian craft to decompress (including one haunting scene when one astronaut desperately tries to escape) the superpowers begin to wonder if he’s involved. However, alongside fellow scientist Joe Kapp (Simon MacCorkindale) he’s able to flee, with Kapp offering him refuge at his home. All Quatermass is really interested in at this stage is finding his missing granddaughter; however, his attempts to find her are interrupted by their burgeoning scientific suspicion, based on data collected at Kapp’s place, that the space accident was caused by a hitherto unknown phenomenon.

Meanwhile, the country’s youth seems to be broadly divided between the mercenary street people and the Planet People – a slightly more sinister version of Age of Aquarius hippies, who all claim to be on the verge of escape to a new planet. Well, many cults have said as much; what’s different here is that a new call to a stone circle seems to be common among them, with thousands making their way to the same site. It’s the scientist’s nightmare: the possibility of a relationship between supernaturalism – magic – and forces which seem more from the realms of astrophysics. Quatermass and Kapp have to entertain the possibility that what they see unfolding challenges and endangers everything they know or indeed hold dear.

As I said, this is in its way a rather gentle take on dystopia: no viruses, no zombies, no cannibalism through necessity (or choice), but rather a culture verging on the precipice of complete breakdown, at risk from forces outside itself. It’s a completely recognisable world with some additional touches, which would have made it more relatable for contemporary audiences and makes it interesting in subtle ways for us. The Planet People would have been, and still are, familiar characters – the series mentions that their likes would formerly have ‘visited Glastonbury or Stonehenge’, and they’re hardly the most threatening cult ever to appear on screen. But what we have here is a series which can ratchet up the pace rather carefully, gradually intermeshing human behaviour with an astral cause, then allowing the situation to grow ever more threatening and hostile. This is a very character-driven story too, and whilst it may appeal to nostalgists who watched it the first time around (it comes complete with breaks where they originally appeared) it will also appeal to new viewers, who may like to see science fiction with a different focus and handling, particularly via a man of science who has come to an impasse; he just wants his family safe, and recoils from the horrors which are taking place.

Nigel Kneale was an absolute master at crafting tension, and he had an eye for framing scenes in such a way that they stay with you (I contend that anyone who has ever seen his version of The Woman in Black can be rendered prostrate with fear by simply mentioning ‘the bedroom scene’). He was also superb at introducing a cynical veneer to his scenes: in Quatermass, the stalls of books ‘guaranteed to burn well’ and the coddish Paganism embraced by a desperate and ragged population – with trinkets to match – are just two examples of opportunities he seized which go on to look amazing on screen, thanks of course also to director Piers Haggard, whose horror movie Blood on Satan’s Claw is one of the UK’s finest. Quatermass does far more than give us effective scenes, of course, and sets up its overarching tension between rationalism and supernaturalism very well, sustaining it across its episodes; Kapp’s sincere assertion that a love of learning is ‘the only way’ indeed seems the only way in the face of what is going on, but then again, Kneale forces us to give some credence to the big ‘what if?’ – here, learning and science has hurtled into forces beyond itself, and its proponents have been forced to consider things previously thought impossible. All of this is achieved with a good balance throughout between quiet pause for thought and high action.

This series had been unavailable for some time prior to this new release by Network, and their presentation here is of a good standard (with only one niggling omission – one of the episode synopses included on the disc is mute for some reason). Still, good quality new releases of these otherwise-lost series can only be a good thing, so for a still-innovative spin on how humanity just might unravel, it comes recommended.

Quatermass (1979) is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Network now.

Comic Review: The Island #1

Posted on July 17, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Svetlana Fedotov

Comic anthologies are hard to pull off. There’s always someone that doesn’t pick up the slack in one of the stories, whether it’s the crap art or dull dialogue, and that one anchor can weigh down the entire ship. Luckily for The Island, while perhaps a mixed bag of story quality, it is at least beautifully drawn, fantastically dialogued, and pretentious in the best way possible. If you ever wanted to feel fancy reading a comic, this is the way to do it. Mostly sci-fi with a touch of bizarre, The Island brings together three creative people and lets them loose in a Heavy Metal style madness to poetically explore the world around us.

Made up of three comic works and one short story, The Island opens up with the Emma Rios’ short work, ID. In the not-so-distant future, a riot breaks out in the street outside of a café where three people sit and discuss changing their bodies with experimental technology. Just as they wrap up, both the rioters and the police break into the café, forcing them into the streets and into the reality of a future obsessed with war and beauty. The second story, Ghost Town by The Island founder Brandon Graham, is a nonsensical exploration of a guy with a gifted werewolf penis living in a strange fantasy world filled floating whales, talking creatures, and pun based humor interweaving with mind-bending buildings and future technology. Does anything happen in it? Not really, but it looks cool. The last story, Dagger Proof Mummy by Ludroe, is set in a place where anamorphic cat creatures run the streets and one girl is on the hunt for her friend who disappeared while skateboarding. (Oh, and the short story is a small work dedicated to poet Maggie Estep).

The Island is a weird read. This is definitely one of those anthologies that was created to push the boundaries of the imagination of the contributors, but it seems to do that at the cost of alienating the reader. But, like a lot of collected works, it needs to be judged on individual work as well as a whole so that’s what I shall do. My favorite so far is definitely ID. I love the easy flow of dialogue and the story, while fantastical, is easy to understand in context to the real world. The art is absolutely gorgeous as well. Well placed panel spacing creates a unique visual experience and the aesthetic harkens to an adult manga vibe that moves well along the pages.

Ghost Town, on the other hand, while a huge pictorial undertaking, does not do much for the story. It seems like Graham spends most of his time trying to get a dream world onto the page than a story that goes with it. I guess it’s like a poem; you have to read between the lines. While the claustrophobic beauty of the art is a thing to behold, I just wish there was something else going on.

Dagger Proof Mummy is alright. It harkens back to the early 90ss indie art with thick inking and blocky letters – you know, like clip-art from an early writing program. The story is fairly straightforward with an interesting twist at the end and is definitely the easiest one to get into. The characters are a bit flat and kind of go to the wayside of the story, but they work for what needs to get said.

So, all in all, The Island is alright. It’s big, it’s colorful, and it’s visually enthralling, but dig a bit deeper and it’s hard not to get stuck on the lack of direction. That being said, it just screams potential and I’m interested in seeing where it goes from here.

Horror in Short: Sweet Madness (2015)

Posted on July 16, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have picked up on the great excitement online regarding the upcoming addition to the Batman series of movies, Suicide Squad. The makers of Suicide Squad aren’t stupid, and they know that a glimpse here or a peek there will do most of their advertising work for them – hence them using the internet to its full potential. Bearing in mind the existing popularity of the Batman universe amongst film fans and the constant drip-drip-drip of tantalising tidbits issuing forth from the team behind Suicide Squad, the safe money would of course be on the new film making a great success. But remember this: director David Ayer is just one man with one vision of how things should pan out. Other fans and other directors may see things differently, and focus on different aspects.

This brings us neatly to filmmaker Peter Dukes: we’ve covered a few of Peter’s earlier short films here on Brutal as Hell, namely Daniel, The Beast and the charming Little Reaper. For his most recent short, he’s donned his fandom hat to take a look at one of the Batman characters who has, to date anyway, never really been given her dues. The character is Harley Quinn – and the film is Sweet Madness:

We can’t say too much at the time of writing about how Margot Robbie is going to play Harley Quinn in the big-budget movie, but you can’t deny Madeleine Wade has charm in her rendition of the character in this snapshot of Harley in action. The film’s mid-action setting – necessary, given the time constraints – places us smack-bang in the middle of a domestic drama, with Harley negotiating for the Joker’s release, offering a straight swap for a kidnapped family. Interestingly, here Harley isn’t a peripheral character; the Joker’s in the film, but rather differently than we’re used to seeing him, and certainly not calling the shots as he usually does with his besotted female sidekick. Stripped of all his make-up and trappings, he even looks a bit less crazy than she does, and she is the one making the decisions. It’s a nice little development to the usual interplay between them.

Although the reach and the budgets of the new Batman franchise continue to sky-rocket, isn’t it nice to be reminded that there’s no single way to have fun with the Batman universe, and that you don’t need a fortune to play with the idea? Peter Dukes’ short film is a nicely-unhinged glimpse into an alternative set of outcomes for the characters. One to tide you over, ahead of 2016…

Horror in Art: Habet! By Simeon Solomon

Posted on July 15, 2015June 10, 2022 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

That lesser-known member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Simeon Solomon, caused quite a stir when he exhibited his painting, entitled Habet! at the Royal Academy in 1865. Up until that point, he had been known for his religious tableaux and his sleepy, rather sexually ambiguous groups of figures – reclining lovers, figures lost in reveries. These had been successful, but Habet was very different indeed, and although Solomon had dallied with Classical scenes before, here he allowed his imagination to find a different kind of focus. Little wonder that a later critic described Solomon’s work as having ‘unmistakeable signs of genius, only run a little mad.’ To our tastes, the painting may not reveal very much – but its power is not in what it shows us, but what it doesn’t.

Rome in particular out of the whole of the Classical world had always afforded ambitious artists free rein to explore less ‘proper’ subject matter: in an often puritanical Victorian social climate, you could always claim a moral message in your art if all the blood and sex got a bit too much for contemporary tastes, but at the same time you didn’t have to scrimp on the good stuff because the histories tell us it happened. That’s not to say the moral message was never authentically there, mind you, but many Victorian artists walked the fine line between prurience and a warning from history, a desire to have fun with stories and characters so very, very far from their own time whilst calling attention to their conduct at the same time. However, Solomon took a very different approach in Habet than you’d see in a William Etty painting, for example. His take on things was very different.

Here, we have a group of wealthy and well-adorned Roman women watching the death-throes of gladiatorial combat: the title of the work, meaning ‘He has it!’ refers to one of the fighters finally having the upper hand, and we know that these women share in the high status required to command the outcome – mercy, or death – because two of them are giving the ‘thumbs down’ signal. Beautiful, young and female they may be, but they are invested in the death scene unfolding in front of them, and they have not called for mercy. But how invested are they, really? The different faces in the group each reveal a different reaction to the scene (with the exception of the servant stood at the rear, who isn’t involved in the group and isn’t even looking at what’s going on.) One of the women has fully fainted away at what she’s just witnessed; one looks with horror, but fascination; one (perhaps the most unsettling figure) is calling for the death blow with a look of rapt hunger and attention in her expression.

Perhaps more shocking still, there is also a child present, and the little girl to the right of the picture may be in the arms of her guardian but she’s being permitted to see everything that’s unfolding, which she does with a bland-eyed look of acceptance. It doesn’t surprise her or upset her. One suspects she’s seen this all before – and the same goes for the central figure in the painting, a woman dressed in all the finery of an empress, who rather than deriving anything from the combat taking place instead just has her hands clasped impassively on the balustrade. Her facial expression presents abject boredom and pitiless indifference. She is not giving the thumbs down, because she doesn’t seem to care. Her eyes are barely focused on the entertainment in front of her; those drowsy pre-Raphaelite lids suggest she’s barely keeping herself awake.

The fact that this was a group of women ‘at play’ would not have been lost on the Victorian audience who first went to see the painting. The burgeoning Victorian middle class had some highly specific ideas on what constituted feminine propriety, and women’s conduct was policed rigorously, with the art world reflecting and promoting these ideals. Seven years earlier, Augustus Egg’s triptych ‘Past & Present’ had illustrated what happened to a middle-class wife and mother who had transgressed the ‘Angel in the House’ role and taken a lover; the first painting, where her husband treads a portrait of the wife’s lover underfoot and crumples her letters in his hand, initiates the woman’s fall from grace. She does well to weep: she ends disinherited, homeless and penniless, losing access to her legitimate offspring – we last see her cowering beneath a bridge with her illegitimate baby in her arms, whilst her innocent daughters suffer under her fall from grace for the rest of their lives.

Victorian sensibilities masked barbs – and as such, Habet may be framed via Ancient Rome, but it displays the debased result of women being allowed such liberty and agency. It would have shocked many visitors to see women – not men – assenting to the death blow, or even not caring about it. Yes, Rome was representative of debasement and perhaps the message is that this sort of behaviour is why it floundered; it embodied all the worst elements of progress, and served as a cautionary tale, perhaps, of a place and time where amongst other things, even women enjoyed barbarism. Hey, there are a fair few people around today who have trouble appreciating that women enjoy watching horror films: in one case we have imagined women watching a real historic event, and in the other we have real women who watch imagined events, but in each case, incredulity and disbelief can follow. Add an innocent child into the mix, even notionally, and then as now this is deemed just cause to restrict and suppress all ‘indecent’ forms of entertainment. The battle cry of ‘children might see it’ is still used to justify censorship in the name of the greater good – UK film censors the BBFC are even today boasting of their ability to ‘grow child protection’ [sic] and they place inordinate weight on the personal verdicts of parents in their poorly-selected focus groups. Where the little girl in Habet looks so calmly at the horror unfolding in front of her, swap the scene for a screen and the anxiety is there still, in the great and the good at least.

To return to the painting’s unusual perspective, then – of the responses of viewers, rather than seeing what they are viewing – it’s not difficult to see how Solomon’s clever move tantalises his audience, then and now, and renders the painting far more evocative than an alternative, more grisly vision would be. It is a technique which has of course been used elsewhere to conjure curiosity and terror, and it’s a technique which is still in use: in modern entertainment, a mainstay of terrifying cinema is the technique of locking us out of whatever is being seen, compelling us to use our imagination (which great painters and directors both know can conjure far greater terrors than their oils or SFX). Indeed, many horror fans complain bitterly that we’re shown ‘too much’ on screen nowadays: give us some mystery, we beg, and don’t spoon-feed us every detail. Trust us: trust us to fill in the blanks.

In doing just this, Simeon Solomon both reflected and continued a tradition of communicating true unease by showing us nothing of it at all. He knew that we have evolved to be excellent readers of facial expressions, and he tells us what we need just by so diligently representing an assortment of reactions to an event so clearly imbued with horror. Whilst his painting may not seem shocking to us now, it still has the power to make us think, it still shows us how mystery can appeal, and the way his art expresses a relationship between imagined worlds and contemporary anxieties is certainly not something we’ve left behind.

Film Review: Miss Meadows (2014)

Posted on July 13, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Well, here’s the thing: although she seems to spend the majority of her time being trailed by the paparazzi while she does mundane things like walking and shopping, apparently Katie Holmes (yes, her) is an actress. Who knew?

Well, you probably all knew, and yeah, okay, I knew too – but (whispers) I’ve never seen her in anything before. Ever. No, not even Batman. No I did not watch Dawson’s Creek; what do you take me for? In fact, Miss Meadows (2014) is the first time I’ve ever seen Katie Holmes in a format other than a photograph. In a way, my pig ignorance has allowed me to come to the film with no preconceptions whatsoever, which is just as well, as this is a bit of a strange project, all told. Even those charged with promoting and selling the film seem a little confused by it. The press materials which accompany the film scream, “KATIE HOLMES is serial killer MISS MEADOWS”, which isn’t the case; one of the film’s one-liners phrases it rather better when they refer to her character as a “Pulp Fiction Mary Poppins”, but even so, it’s said for comedic effect rather than as an accurate representation (duh), and there’s certainly nothing as graphic or challenging as Pulp Fiction in here.

Still, and I don’t think I can be accused of spoilers as the first kill occurs within the first five minutes of film, what we do have is an impossibly saccharin, impeccably-mannered occasional killer, a prissy stickler of a lady vigilante who monitors the correct usage of ‘can I?’ and ‘may I?’ amongst the schoolchildren she teaches, and the adults she encounters along the way (alongside their other ‘quirks’, shall we say). When Miss Meadows begins dating the local sheriff, it even seems like the happy singleton is ready to pair up at last, but unfortunately all is not well in the otherwise perfect-seeming neighbourhood where she lives. Why, a neighbour even declares to Miss Meadows that things aren’t safe around there anymore, because overcrowding in the nearby penitentiary has led to early releases for many criminals who may or may not now be settled in the area. So, folks, the stage is rather sloppily set for Things To Go Wrong. It may or may not do so in the way you expect. It didn’t do so for me.

At around the mid-way point, see, and because the dainty/ditzy script and aesthetics don’t let up whatsoever, I honestly expected the film to give us A History of Violence via The Brady Bunch: surely, all the mentions of ‘criminals who could be in the area’ is the perfect set-up for a particular kind of conclusion involving our titular character, but it doesn’t really go there, and nor does the film ever ditch the chintz for something tonally very different either. The film was crying out to be less bloody nice and more bloody. In fact, and although this film is reasonably diverting in its way, it’s never exactly the paciest ride (though speaking of which, it does have one of the most baffling and awkward sex scenes I’ve seen in a while) but you could have forgiven it all the tap-dancing and grammar lessons if it had the much-needed temerity to actually startle us or challenge us at any point. Some of the slow character reveals are in fact so slow that they stop before they occur, and then the presence of threat when it comes doesn’t feel particularly real because attempts to fill in back stories – which would have given characters their motivation and the film its context – don’t really happen successfully either.

Katie Holmes is clearly this film’s big seller and she’s been given a great deal to do by writer and director Karen Leigh Hopkins. Ms. Holmes is on screen for essentially the whole time: only a handful of scenes don’t have her in them. This just makes me think, wow, if she’d been given something a little meatier here, then it could have really meant something to her ongoing film career, but whatever – what in the very first scenes starts off as a slightly questionable casting decision settles down pretty well (this is an actress in her mid-thirties being asked to enact a sort of twee virginal naivety which you’d sooner associate with a girl half her age, remember). The problems the film has aren’t really down to the lead actress, to be fair. It’s a shame the central idea of the ‘Pulp Fiction Mary Poppins’ mentioned above is so samey and anaemic in its execution…and perhaps the most notably effective thing about Miss Meadows, come to think of it, is the way it weaves its plot around a seemingly perfect pocket of American suburbia; anonymous, nameless and indeed hard to place in a particular time, but one which has an undeniably skeezy underbelly of odd goings-on. It even reminded me of the cult smash It Follows in a few places. It’s a world where sexual abuse and the threat of rape are just around the picket-fence corner – which may have helped justify Miss Meadows’ behaviour – though this isn’t the explanation the director chooses, much less plumping for a supernatural approach. Here, we have only sentimental guff.

Nope, Miss Meadows is an interesting idea, and offers an attempt at crafting a ‘strong female lead’ in an unusual setting which is meant to speak for itself, but the film gets into a terrible tangle by trying to give the audience someone kooky, strong and vulnerable all at the same time – yet all without really establishing anything beyond kookiness, and not rustling up enough sex, shocks or violence to lend weight to the whole. It has some charm and it’s pretty watchable, but without doing anything memorable. It seems more about aesthetics than anything else, all told (that still of Miss Meadows with the gun is clearly the film’s big selling point.) Given that I hadn’t seen Katie Holmes in anything other than a photograph in the first place, this all feels something of a shame.

Miss Meadows is released on DVD and Digital on 27th July 2015.

DVD Review – The Dead 2: India (2013)

Posted on July 11, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

The zombie, one of our most well-worn movie monsters, shows no sign of letting up, and even though zombies have made it into the mainstream, they remain a temptation to indie filmmakers keen to exploit the relatively easy-to-create hordes that bring the horror. All the same, I really wouldn’t want to make a zombie movie these days. The market is just so crowded, and more often than not the end result is not particularly noteworthy – or it’s even worse than that, when even the guy who spawned the whole genre is churning out guff like Survival of the Dead. That said, the movie-buying public certainly haven’t lost their taste for the resurrected dead: when a good film comes along – such as The Dead did in 2010 – it’s a rare pleasure, and it reminds us why we like these films in the first place.

The directorial team of brothers Howard and Jon Ford went through a great deal to make The Dead (as explained in Howard’s book, Surviving the Dead) and so I was curious – well, firstly why they’d put themselves through the trials and tribulations of making another zombie film in foreign climes which may throw up some of the same issues they faced the time before, and also to see what they were going to do differently with their second zombie movie.

Moving the action to India, The Dead 2 actually picks up broadly from the same start point as the first film, with a mysterious outbreak in Africa making its way to India (bloody international travel, eh?) where it impacts upon the life of American wind turbine engineer Nicholas (Joseph Millson). Rather inexplicably, Nicholas has been having a relationship with a girl called Ishani (Meenu Mishra) who comes from a poor corner of Mumbai, and whose first words uttered are to inform him by telephone that she’s pregnant: as she imparts this info, helicopters are clustering in the sky above her head and word of a strange outbreak is on the streets. Nicholas has to make his way to her: we learn that this isn’t the first unplanned pregnancy he’s had in his life, and as he bottled it last time, he owes it to Ishani to look after her (which by and large means stopping her getting killed, in the short term anyway).

As he fights to make his way to the city from the sticks where he’s been working, Nicholas picks up with a little orphan boy called Javed (who’s annoyingly chipper given the circumstances), and the kid offers to help him on his journey in return for Nicholas’s protection. The two progress, then stop, then stave off the undead, then continue on their way to Mumbai. Meanwhile, we are also kept up to speed with Ishani in her family home, where she alternates between squabbling with her authoritarian father and inexplicably unbolting the front door to gaze at the zombies in the streets, before closing it again. Still, it allows her to see the chaos that is still happening out there. Will Nicholas reach her safely, and where will they go if he does?

The Dead 2 has a great deal in common with the first film, and as such, can boast a lot of the same strong qualities. Many of these relate to the film’s impressive aesthetics. The Dead 2, like the first, looks rather wonderful, with the same high production values and gorgeous colour palette; if you were ever in any doubt as to whether a zombie film can look beautiful, then both of these films make a strong case for showing that yes, they certainly can. Both in Africa and in Asia, the setting is shown as rich, vibrant and engaging, as well as being shot (and here’s a dreadful word) authentically, not dressed up or prettified for the cameras. The Dead 2 also employs the same sort of slow burn approach for the most part, with its very slow walking dead more about dread than shocks. Clearly again employing a veritable army of locals to portray the zombies, there are many striking, well-realised scenes in the film, with a host of people far from used to our horror traditions really giving their all as the undead.

Unfortunately, because the sequel has so much in common with the first film, it feels in many ways like a straightforward retread of it. The plots are eerily familiar: an American guy abroad pairs up with a local and they both fend off the undead as they make their way to a destination, whilst the theme of family stays at the fore. And then, where The Dead 2 does elect to include new plot elements, these don’t work very well in all honesty, because the writing feels somewhat out of its comfort zone. I’ve mentioned only recently that I find the whole pregnancy motif, the way it’s so commonly used in indie cinema, hackneyed and off-putting: Ishani seems to serve no purpose in the plot except as a rationale for the road trip which serves as the bulk of the film’s action, a means for a guy who’s already bailed out on one pregnancy to get it right this time. Clearly unused to acting (this is Meenu Mishra’s first role) and uncomfortably picking her way through a script in slightly stilted English, little comes of these Mumbai scenes: indeed, having so many of the characters conversing in English for the camera’s sake reduces the believability of the human drama it’s meant to convey: if people aren’t fully sure of their lines, then they won’t deliver them with much gusto. Asides about the reason for the outbreak – be it ‘fate’ or ‘karma’ – are not developed, which is a shame, as these ideas just hover over the film’s finale, but don’t really move our understanding forward.

The Dead was – positively, I feel – more of a mood piece than a plot-driven movie, and I understand that the Ford brothers wanted to do something else plot-wise this time around; although they seem torn, re-framing a lot of the great work they did in The Dead in their second film. However, you can see that atmosphere is what they do best and what they like best, and sadly they’ve lessened the amount of atmosphere generated in the new film by fudging some of the other going concerns. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Ford team are excellent directors. Can’t deny that. But perhaps, and this is just my own feeling here, they’ve fallen foul of the fact they do everything – directing, producing, writing. I’d love to see these guys working with a seriously challenging script to see what they achieve. I’d say they’d be capable of absolute dynamite. The Dead 2 shows us again that they have high production values and masses of ambition, qualities which are lacking in so many filmmakers, but to date, I’d still say The Dead is the film that best showcases their skills.

The Dead 2: India is released by Altitude Film on 13th July 2015.

Film Review: Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence)

Posted on June 14, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Tristan Bishop

The Human Centipede films (of which this third segment is surely the final installment) have surely had one of the strangest progressions in the history of film. From 2009’s Human Centipede: First Sequence, which, despite the buzz generated by the uniquely disgusting premise (I’m sure there isn’t a soul reading this that isn’t aware of the nature of the centipede), and a great performance from Dieter Laser as Dr Heiter, turned out to be a standard mad doctor film with very little in the way of subtext, to the grossly comedic and nightmarish sequel of 2011’s Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence, which featured a wonderfully repulsive central turn from Laurence R Harvey and came across as a self-referential treatise on the idea of ‘harm’ from watching horror films. That Full Sequence garnered so much disgust and was banned in the UK (albeit briefly, and finally passed with a total of thirty cuts) could be testament to how well it works as, variously, a comment on film censorship itself, a middle finger to the critics, and, at the film’s basest level, a truly grim gorefest. When word came out regarding The Human Centipede 3: Final Sequence, those who had seen the previous two were wondering quite where director Tom Six was going to be able to take this one.

Well, this is one strange film indeed. Where the second film was so removed from the original’s slow, eerie feel, bringing instead a monochrome realism to proceedings which brought to mind nothing less than David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), Final Sequence comes on like Fellini remaking the 1988 Chinese gorefest Men Behind The Sun. This film is bold, brash, and (somewhat ironically for a film set in a prison), takes no prisoners.

Laser and Harvey both appear in this film – both playing completely different characters to the ones they portrayed in the previous instalments. Rather than the quiet, obsessive doctor of the original, Laser here stars as the amusingly named ‘Bill Boss’, a psychotic, foul-mouthed, unpredictably violent German-American in charge of a correctional facility, whilst Harvey plays his long-suffering accountant, Dwight Butler, who is trying to convince Boss, via DVDs of the first two films, that the concept of the Human Centipede will be the next big thing in crime prevention – after all, if prison doesn’t work, surely being part of a 500-man centipede will scare criminals straight?

Boss is not remotely interested in ‘this B-movie crap’ to start with – preferring to spend his days sexually abusing his scantily-clad secretary Daisy (former adult star Bree Olson) whom he charmingly refers to as ‘tits’, torturing the prisoners in ever more inventive ways (“boiling waterboarding! Guantanamo style!”) and constantly spewing (well, screaming, actually) a torrent of racist, sexist and just downright vile dialogue. Eventually Butler manages to bring in Tom Six himself, in an audacious fourth-wall-breaking move, to convince Boss of the ‘100% medically accurate’ claim so famously used as the tag line for the original film, and they conspire together to create the world’s first coprophagic chain gang.

HC3 is a very hard film to like, and this has been reflected in critical response to it so far – it currently holds a score of 1% on Metacritic, which is a pretty impressive achievement in itself. To call it uneven would be a massive understatement. Laser’s dialogue (and he dominates the film) is nearly all screamed out loud in his heavy German accent, and whilst the performance is pretty impressive stuff for a physically-slight 73 year old, it gets wearing very, very quickly. Harvey’s performance meanwhile is so wooden (his broad American accent constantly going wonky) that it must have been intentional, especially given his brilliance in the previous film. Oscar-nominee Eric Roberts (?!?) plays it straight as a visiting governor who is aiming to shut down the pair’s activities, and only Olson really delivers a sensitive and likeable performance, despite being treated like a piece of meat by Boss. The script, when it isn’t being rendered unintelligible by screaming or awful accents, is mostly an excuse to spew taboo-busting dialogue or set up a scene of torture and degradation, and the film runs out of steam way before they get to the centipede – in fact it’s obvious by this point that Six isn’t really interested in the titular creation at all this time around.

There’s a line of dialogue near the end of the film that gives the game away for me – Laser says/screams ‘I don’t want ANYONE to like this’. He’s referring to the centipede, of course, but one also feels this is Tom Six speaking about the film – He has gone out to make a film which is so meticulous in trying to offend everyone that it works – Not just in, say, sexist, racist or violent content (which is actually so liberally applied as to hardly be offensive at all) but also in terms of it being a massive ‘screw you’ not just to critics of the first two films, but also those who championed them. Anyone expecting a tonal continuation of the previous Centipede movies will instead be faced with a scattershot satire on right wing American politics which feels like being smashed over the head with a fridge whilst an old man shouts at you.

So on one hand we have to hand it to Six; he’s made a film that not even a mother could love, one where any sick enjoyment of the on-screen antics (and I did laugh several times in the first half hour before boredom took over) will be crushed by the weight of its own extremity. Impressive in its ballsy attitude, but impossible to enjoy, it will certainly ensure that fans are not clamouring for part 4 any time soon.

The Human Centipede 3: Final Sequence comes to Blu-ray and DVD in the UK on 13th July, from Monster Pictures.

Editorial: Five Shitty Modern Horror Tropes (Part 2 of 2)

Posted on June 10, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

(Editor’s note: for the first part of Keri’s kvetching, please click here.)

Right, where was I? I’d finished talking about the hideously wronged catwalk models who can thenceforth magically bend girders and all the Keepers of Knowledge who fall out of (or leap from) high buildings, or otherwise race to their deaths in their dog-collars. Now, to move on to another cliche which has become ubiquitous so fast, it’s basically become a convenient ice-breaker when talking to other horror fans. Most fans will, to be fair, agree on this one, and you can get a few moment’s conversation out of it before moving on. That, in and of itself, says a lot about its value and popularity. I mean, of course…

3) He or She Who Films Fucking Constantly

I’ll freely admit, I’ve spoken at some length about my issues with the found-footage sub-genre already, so here, like in so many of these damned films, there’s a risk I’ll be repeating myself (though perhaps differently to so many of the filmmakers in question, I don’t expect this rant will be the stepping-stone to great things, an impressive budget, an enviable career and the means to dismiss everything I’ve done before). It still bears comment, though. Whilst it’s hard to pick out one detestable trope from a sub-genre which shows no signs of letting up yet, you can surely point the finger of blame for so many nausea-inducing, plot-lite travesties at the little fucker responsible for doing all of the filming in the first place (followed closely by whoever it is that adds explanatory credits explaining how and where the footage was found, but doesn’t bother to do any other editing whatsoever. Ooh, you’ll get yours.)

Yes, so obnoxious and inexplicable is the behaviour of He or She Who Films Fucking Constantly that even the other ‘characters’ in the film feel the need to allude to it – or more often than that, they’ll openly challenge the person about it, on camera, more than once. What does that tell you? How hard to swallow must this bullshit be, that we have to be told that everyone else even within the growing horrors of the film is getting as annoyed as we are? Hey, the inane question fills some more footage, I guess. It’s also a kind of ever-decreasing circle, this thing: a person (or persons) querying what is happening via the medium it’s happening on – more or less voting the film out of existence, only not getting their wish. And even if He or She… can ever be convinced to “stop filming” or “put the damn camera away” then they just start again, apparently only moments later, with still no reason for doing so. Apemen, aliens and spectres are one thing, but they barely stretch believability more than our not-so-convenient camera operatives.

Stupid behaviour in horror is far from novel, of course, and we’ve had decades of women falling over fresh air, wet-behind-the-ears travellers upsetting the locals in taverns and people picking up sinister looking antiques at bargain prices, and for the short-term feeling smug that they have. It happens enough that we can talk about its presence. None of these rather trite devices bother me as much, though, as those pillocks with their relentless, aimless and pinballing camerawork. Sure, people can be obsessed with filming things in real life, phones are a constant, laptops are a given – but the likes of Snapchat have by now won out over protracted filming sessions, surely, and one thing you often notice now is that even idiots can hold a phone still.

Look, if you’re struggling to justify your shooting style on camera, then maybe it’s time to buy a tripod and do it differently.

Worst offender: Trish (Abigail Schrader) in Tape 407 (2012). Look, I feel almost bad for picking on one He or She Who Who Films.., but having a sickly-sweet pre-teen in charge of a camera just pushed me too far. Still, as you can see from the image, what you lack in charisma you make up in great quality elsewhere.

4) The New-Old Rednecks

Again, prejudices amongst filmmakers against the inhabitants of the Southern states of the USA are nothing new. There’s a lengthy history here, and in a vast country which still often seems to be fractured along that old fault line between North and South, representations of Southerners have long been hyperbolic. Interestingly, it’s gone far and wide: English-speakers all over the world can probably recognise a term like ‘redneck’ now, even if it once derived from a reasonably specific geographical location and time; for horror audiences certainly, rural Southerners are definitively dangerous and not to be trusted, with all of their blithe protestations about ‘family’ and ‘hospitality’ really a barely-maintained front that will give way in due bloody course. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the majority of America’s lunatics were in the bottom half of the nation; well, some are, but certainly not all of them, though them stereotypes keep on comin’.

However, what feels distinctly new is the level of sheer, unmitigated glee which seems to accompany depictions of obligatorily racist, sexist, homophobic Southerners in cinema in recent years. It’s almost as if hurling a ‘redneck’ into your movie gives you a water-tight excuse to have your characters mouth a million things you’d never, ever get away with having anything but an ogre say (and God forbid any character intended to be at all ambiguous or nuanced utters even a fraction of this stuff – they’re done, and so is the filmmaker if this happens. In fact, imagine what would happen to you, if you said it. Every social set has its own blasphemy.)

All the disparaging slurs you can think of – and maybe more – come out of the mouths of these conveniently Southern monsters. A word which has euphemistically become ‘the N-word’ more or less everywhere else, for instance, reverts right back to ‘nigger’ when these people are around, and they don’t just say the word once. They shout it, they scream it, and they add a few other choice terms for good measure – usually about sex and sexuality, ‘cunts’ and ‘queers’. Never mind whether any of this fits or even seems plausible; it’s quite common for a lot of this dialogue to sound as forced as a teenager’s first attempt to drop ‘fuck’ into a sentence. The sheer garrulousness of these two-dimensional yee-haw characters, and their determination to say everything that no one is allowed to say is, well, weird and modern, in a way which I find pretty abhorrent and childish.

Look, I’m not saying no one uses this language. This isn’t about censorship either. But the decision to cram as much manufactured outrage into a movie via otherwise poorly delineated characters switches me off very quickly. Not only does it serve as a particularly tawdry ‘get out of jail free’ card whereby you can never be critiqued for having your characters speak like this because that’s just how they are – if your critics have a problem with it, then it’s on them to rationalise it – but it’s a very lazy way to make a villain. Make someone poor and/or unattractive and put a tonne of racist language in their mouths: do no other work. Hope and pray viewers can see irony or subtlety in your writing that in all likelihood, isn’t there in the first place.

Worst offender: Jed (Ronnie Gene Blevins) in Avenged (2013): great actor, reprehensible and unimaginative role.

5) Pregnant Pariahs

Now, my final trope is one that makes my blood boil and my eyes roll so hard that years of countless films all put together has given me a sort of haunted look; I’ll explain why. Nothing makes me disengage with a plot more quickly or more finally than the revealed presence of the Pregnant Pariah.

Now, I’ll freely admit that filmmakers, like many folk, often plump for the consensus attitude that enthrones ‘the young family’ above all else, because it’s a kind of social currency that can be cashed in everywhere. There is also evidence that the whole kid idea really does work on people. I’ve even heard from friends that, having had kids of their own, they can never again watch any scene containing threat to an infant without bawling, wanting to vomit or feeling the need to leave the room, pronto. Be that biology, decades of inescapable social enculturation or a blend of the two, it’s definitely a real factor in many people’s lives which is utilised as a failsafe by filmmakers wanting to inject some human drama into proceedings without getting too bogged down in intricacies. Just as the evil redneck is given certain things to say to make him evil, so many female characters are given the magic words to say to make them special. Huh.

Thing is, there are millions of us, men and women, who look with incredulity at films which decide that a woman needs that certain something – a pregnancy, duh – to really come into her own as a character. It’s the surprise twist which contains no surprises whatsoever. Just a regular woman escaping a masked killer would be shitty (unless she wheeled around on her heels and miraculously kicked him to death – see 1) but a woman carrying a baby; now there’s a girl who has a real cause to fight back. I mean, what else is there? There’s a reason women are routinely described as ‘mother-of-one’ or ‘mother-of-two’ after the real big event in her life happens, rather than ‘full time nurse of ten years’ or ‘medal-winner’: this shit, this shit is what’s really important. Sigh. I’m not sure if art’s imitating life or vice versa here, but my god, in life and in art it’s boring.

To get the holy grail of pregnancy into their films, though, filmmakers don’t just throw the non-surprise in there, but play fast and loose with the whole idea of childbearing from the outset. (This approach is rather different to making the pregnancy itself the bedrock of the horror, of course.) Having decided to use pregnancy in this way in the first place, I guess there’s little incentive to actually look too far into the realities of the subject; if you’re lazy in one respect then you’re likely to be lazy in another. For one thing, unless you’re Michelle ‘Clown Car’ Duggar, pregnancy isn’t all that common in the developed world anymore where we have the (free, in the UK) option to space things out, stop after a few children or hey, forgo it altogether. Yet women in films are always ‘just’ aware they’re pregnant, even if it’s miraculously early. Sometimes you even see women throwing up with morning sickness after a one-night stand, as if that happens so soon because of pregnancy in all but the rarest of cases (but yay for getting sex and pregnancy into a few salacious, inaccurate minutes). Any forced, equally inaccurate and downright insulting means of introducing this element to the plot is apparently fair game and has been used many times over the years. But worst of all, perhaps, is this idea that women get a sudden passion for survival on account of an embryo, when they would presumably have been far more expendable or even lain down and died? Thanks for reducing us to our reproductive biology again there, world.

Worst offender: Christine (Katie Lowes) in Bear (2010): oh, you want to live because you’re pregnant and not because there’s a huge bear on the bonnet of your broken-down car? I actually wanted the bear to eat her more, just to shut her up.

Editorial: Five Shitty Modern Horror Tropes (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on June 6, 2015 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

It probably goes with out saying (but then, so do a lot of things and it doesn’t seem to stop anyone) – we watch a hell of a lot of horror here at the site. A hell of a lot. Screeners, shorts, trailers, festival releases, mainstream releases, Netflix et al…the list goes on. As such, it becomes easier and easier to get annoyed by the persistent characterisation failures we see in them and those lazy, silly trends which seem to sweep through filmmaking like a series of memes, year upon year. Each further dilution of an already-forced idea piles insult upon injury. Sure, there are nearly always other factors at work in the making of any film, but from my perspective, this doesn’t distract me from the fact that the same stock characters appearing again and again is tedious. It’s mysterious too. Why are some characters so seemingly irresistible? Emperor’s New Clothes? Horror writers feel like their product won’t be well-received unless they select from a very short list of possibilities? Perhaps there’s a positive aspect to this – namely, that when you’re a fan writer finally faced with something decent and well-handled, you dissolve with gratitude – but, all in all, seeing the same shit being unveiled in a succession of films makes me bitey.

To get some of these grievances off my chest, I’d like to share with you my current shitlist. This is by no means an exhaustive shitlist. These may not be your choices for a shitlist – but I bet if you think about it, you have a shitlist. More may follow from me, then – but for now, may I introduce you to…

1) The Eight Stone Titans

As ordeal horror and its love of inflicting physical agony has spread like wildfire through horror movies in recent years, it’s become more important to have characters in those movies who can withstand it for…well, around forty minutes of screen time, preferably, so that the wronged party can unstrap themselves from the chair/kick their way out of the barn/practice some sort of escapology and then right those wrongs, often returning to find the antagonists and tearing them a new one with some ever-handy DIY implements. This begins to become more problematic when you also consider horror’s monomania for pretty, petite twentysomethings, and how all of the above so often gets crowbarred into the same damn movie. Whilst this isn’t a new thing, routinely matching these Megs fighting against the sorts of physical endurance missions which would fell a Marine means that the already-flimsy believability begins to fray to a ridiculous degree.

Oh, sure. The human body can withstand some ridiculous shit. People get lost in the wilderness, people get imprisoned, people survive horrendous injuries and yet somehow live to tell the tale; horror readily buys into this kind of outlandish possibility and extends it into its own fantasy, I get it – but when it seems to be happening again and again and again, it not only feels lazy, it seems as if the filmmakers have lost all grasp of basic physics. This all becomes more problematic when rape is casually hurled into a low to mid-budget horror film – as it is often enough, with the appearance of a new I Spit On Your Grave prequel/sequel/reimagining now seemingly as frequent as a Hallmark holiday. The girls in these films are always petite, even frail. They undergo vile, protracted attacks. And then what happens is – they rally. They seethe and they plot. They survive. And then they overcome physics to go sardonically deliver some of the rapists’ lines back to them, as if that balances things out in a plausible way.

In many ways these girls are the descendents of the old ‘final girls’, only a few other things are happening here. The first is that they’ve revved up to suit the context of modern, OTT tastes – tedious in itself – and the second is that these characters are being assembled by their writers purposely to quell the cries of ‘misogyny!’ which often emanate from critics. This way, filmmakers can keep the torture and feel contented that they’ve also done enough to restore that Philosopher’s Stone of gender equality to their own particular fictional world. If you have your would-be final girl going through hell, surely you can offset all of that by having this size zero model throwing grown men around like they’re shop mannequins? You can keep your shit lazy plot so long as you throw a bit of unlikely ass-kicking in there? I mean, forget the fact that even fantasy films ultimately need to have some sense of internal logic and plausibility in order to engage an audience. That’ll do, right?

Erm, no. This is a massively irritating fantasy, and I bury my head in my hands when I see some woman who’s just almost bled to death going towards the people who almost killed her to engage in some stupid, unbelievable, trite ‘vengeance’. It doesn’t make me feel vindicated, it makes me feel patronised. I forget which comedian it was who said ‘half of women’s self-defence classes should be about running away’, but do you know what? It’s true. Do you know what happens when you get punched in the head by someone a lot bigger than you? I do. You fold up like a concertina and you don’t bounce back up to brandish an axe at anyone. You certainly don’t feel like delivering smart-arse jibes at anyone. This nonsense on-screen? It’s supernatural horror, quite simply, which doesn’t even have the good grace to give us any ghosts. Funnily enough, though, nothing scares me quite as much as the people who think this shite is in some way progressive.

Worst offender: Jennifer (Sarah Hills) in I Spit on Your Grave (2010). A woman who would have died of exposure is presented to us as a superhuman. Thanks, that’s dandy.

2) The Expendable Clerics/Occultists

Now, perhaps it seems an odd choice to lump in the men of the cloth with the heathens here, what with them backing different teams and all, but they often serve exactly the same purpose in horror films, even if the latter is usually wearing a more colourful outfit. Essentially, they’re mostly there in an advisory capacity: no sooner have they got talking to the principle characters, and no sooner have the principle characters found themselves in the sort of situation which can’t be fixed with ordinary means (usually within about fifteen minutes of screen time) than our friendly keeper of the Occult Knowledge is at hand to condense a swathe of plot points into a helpful monologue which both contextualises, and ups the ante for our heroes. Living in the old Ford residence? Waking to find strange symbols carved into your walls? Seemingly being nixed by a multitude of demons who could disguise themselves as anything, but always seem to favour the growly voice and the mad eyes, so they’re easily recognised? Excellent. What could be an array of potentially confusing phenomena can be explained to the audience, possible via flashback, or otherwise just through the amiable gravitas of the character – saving the afflicted party the heinous task of trying to find anything out for themselves. Then everyone can get on with being terrified and knowing what they’re terrified of. A bit later, things can get out of hand and then we can have an exorcism or something and all will be well again. Our main characters can reflect on the Journey they’ve taken. Gentle music rolls…

But there’s a snag. What sort of malignant supernatural presence is content to just rock up, slam a few doors and then piss off back to Hell, without so much as one casualty to brag about? None worth mentioning, to be honest. Some filmmakers are pretty stupid, but they’re not that stupid – they know that if they’re plumping for one tried-and-tested plot development, then they owe another. And, come to think of it, that non-twentysomething with the arcane knowledge is a bit weird, all told. Couldn’t they be the ones to die, so that the real protagonists are there to look wistfully off-screen as the film grinds to a close? The answer would be yes – always bloody yes – often enough that a dog collar essentially = death. Ditto the woman in the fringed headscarf with the suspicious amount of books; let’s fling these people against the side of a tree and have done with it. Having illustrated the altruistic and perchance even Christ-like acceptance of self-sacrifice, there’s only one way they can really go.

I’m not religious whatsoever, and in my experience those people wearing hemp and headscarves are usually terrified of ‘big pharma’ in ways which could rival the terror medieval folk felt about hell, but it comes to something when anyone you see in the role of ‘wise elder’ is apparently doomed to die on-screen. Not only is the idea itself lazy, but the expected expendability of these characters also seems to curtail their characterisation altogether. After all, what’s the point in caring too much about these founts of knowledge? Establishing the back story; establishing the strength of the baddie and then dying that others may live – that’s deemed quite enough.

Worst offender: Evelyn (Alfre Woodard) from Annabelle (2014) A dreadful film which gives us both a priest and a ‘knowing woman’, here a load of toss about sacrifice and demons essentially does away with ‘book store owner’ Evelyn, in a gallingly stupid and predictable outing.

Read on for part 2 of Keri’s editorial here…