Category Archives: Horror

Christmas in June: The Ice House

Leave a reply

.

During the 1970s the BBC ran a series A Ghost Story for Christmas where short horror films, often but not always focused on ghost and spirits were aired during the holidays. The series was revived decades later. Last night my sweetie-wife and I watched the final episode of the original 70s run, The Ice House.

BBC

Paul, (John Stride) emotionally vulnerable following his divorce, has checked into a health spa and retreat in the English countryside. The facility, owned and operated by Clovis (Geoffrey Burridge) and Jessica (Elizabeth Romily), brother and sister who radiate not only an unnatural relationship with each other but a deeply uncanny intimidating presence. The pair show Paul the establishment’s ice house, a structure that predates modern conveniences, and the strange flowering vine that grows on it. The vine releases a strangely intoxicating scent and blooms with red and white flowers, colors mirrored by the siblings. Repeatedly Paul is drawn to the building until he discovers the unnatural nature of Clovis and Jessica.

Given the budgetary and public broadcast standards of the time A Ghost Story for Christmascould never delve into explicit and transgressive horror but instead relied upon mood and suggestion of things unseen to convey its payload. In some cases, this produced dull and lifeless pieces that are best used to cure insomnia and at other times disturbing stories that echoed in one’s mind well after the credits had run.

While it is not generally well reviewed, I found The Ice House to be effective in delivering a short story vibe with atmosphere and dread. Burridge and Romilly perform admirably, always oozing with threat and malice while delivering dialog that is quite the opposite. The characters are as cold to the suffering and deaths of other people as the materials stored in the titular building. It is sad that Romilly’s career never found the stardom that I think this performance promised, she possesses a mere 12 IMDB credits and it is tragic that AIDS robbed us of Burridge. The Ice House is a credit to both of them and their talents.

Share

Why did John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ fail at the Box Office?

.

June 25th, 1982, witnessed the release of The Thing a remake by horror icon John Carpenter of the classic Sci-Fi film The Thing from Another World, both inspired and adapted from the short story Who Goes There by famed writer and editor John W. Campbell Jr. Despite Carpenter’s successful track record of feature films such as Halloween, Escape from New York, and The Fog this movie crashed at the box office, making less than 20 million on a 15 million estimated budget, considering prints and advertising that a movie that lost money. Reportedly Carpenter for decades felt bitter about the movie terrible run even after the film became a classic beloved by millions and considered a masterpiece of modern horror.

1982 was far from a year of depressed box office receipts. Many films scored enormous financial successes that year including such genre fare as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, Poltergeist, and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial but along with The Thing another movie that is now considered extraordinary died at with audiences in 1982 Blade Runner.

Blade Runner, I believe, suffered from both studio interference and audience expectations causing its failure to find the success it would eventually discover once alternate edits became widely available, but The Thing is a different story. That film has not been re-tooled, edited, or significantly altered from its original theatrical release. The version hailed as a masterpiece is the same one I watched in 1982.

The film did not change, the culture around it did. The decade prior to The Thing’s release was one of deep cynicism and anti-heroes. The 1970s brought forth films about failure, systems crushing heroes and the futility of trying. Even when heroes won victory it often came at great costs or produced pyric wins. By 1982 this cultural mood had been swept away with ‘morning in America’ and a renewed sense of manifest destinty. Following that massive success of Star Wars and its first sequel The Empire Strikes Back the cultural zeitgeist was one that demanded happy endings, clearly defined heroes and villains, and unbounded optimism. The Thing stood not only in contrast but stark opposition to all of that. It’s heroes were deeply flawed the mood darkly cynical and the ending so ambiguous as to provide no sense of closure for any audience.

We can never know for sure, but I believe if The Thing had been released in 1976 it would have found an audience on that release but for 1982 it simply marched to a beat so different that few could actually hear it.

Share

We Hope George A. Romero was Wrong

.

In March of 1972 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics launched a pair of space probes bound for the planet Venus. One of those probes suffered a failure of either an engine quitting too soon or not producing enough thrust. Either way was the probe failed to escape orbit about the Earth and has spent the last 53 years in an inclined and eccentric orbit that has very slowly degraded. Sometime tomorrow, May 10th, 2025, it will pass too deep in the Earth’s atmosphere, lose too much velocity, and return to its planet of origin with the very solidly built lander possibly surviving all the way down to impact.

What does this have to do with Pittsburgh filmmaker George A. Romero?

While Romero directed 17 feature films before his passing in 2017 and was involved in both film and television projects, he is best known for the creation of the modern cinematic zombie with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead.

In Night the recently deceased are reanimated to attack and consume the living. The film, with a budget of about the same value as a single episode of the original series of Star Trek, focused on a disparate group of fractious survivors attempting to outlive a siege of the dead there are moments here and there where the larger world of the story is revealed. One of those moments provides a usual bad scientific ‘explanation’ for the plague of ghouls. (It’s worth noting that the word ‘zombie’ is not uttered in what many consider to be the birth of the modern zombie genre.) That explanation is that a Venus probe returning to Earth with a strange and unknown radiation has ‘activated’ the brains of the dead causing them to reanimate. Later movies in the series would ignore that origins of the monsters preferring no solid answers, but the original film remains with its foreboding prediction of death from returning probes that had been bound for Venus.

Of course, there is no danger of zombie and the end of the world from the old piece of communist hardware returning to Earth, but I find the coincidences amusing.

Share

Thinking About Vampires

.

After seeing Sinners this week, I’ve found myself thinking about vampires here and there. Now, vampires are not my favorite type of monsters or horror tale, for me that goes to the ghost story. In fact, most vampire movies leave me cold. I am in that minority that actively dislikes The Lost Boys and count myself among those who read Interview with the Vampire in hardback and had no interest in any other book in the series.

What I do find fascinating is the way the vampire is used by so many creators with so many different attributes.

Until Stoker came along and published Dracula in 1897, the nature of vampires varied a great deal by regional folklore. Stoker in his research gathered the aspects he liked and wanted, discarded many others, and created the template that so many others would follow or deliberately shatter.

Vampires are the dead reanimated. This makes them cousins to the post-Romero interpretation of the zombie and a more distant relation to the traditional version. In modern culture I have seen the two as opposite sides of the same coin. Vampires, as we often depict them in movies today, are the ultimate expression of individuality, iconoclasts surviving and preying upon a larger society that they no longer are a part of. Zombies are the unnamed, undifferentiated great mass, they are the faceless crowd where absolutely no one is special.

Vampires feed on blood. In folklore this is often shown as an unending hunger with the beasts when located in their graves or tomb bloated from their gorging. This is not sexy and is rarely if ever shown in film. By the time Buffy the Vampire Slayer arrived in the cultural scene blood had been reduced to a mere nutrient with any animal’s blood sufficing to meet a metabolic need that remained inexplicable.

Vampires are destroyed by sunlight. This is not found in Dracula where the count walks about in the daylight but with greatly reduced abilities. Count Orlok’s destruction with the rising sun in Nosferatu  set the standard followed by countless films with his gentle fading eventually giving way to explosive detonations in Near Dark. Sinners settled for simple combustion.

Vampires cast no reflection. This is another classic aspect and one that gets upgraded to the contemporary times with the creatures often not appearing in video or film. The British limited series Vhad a secret agency hunting the vampires using pistols that had small video screens attached to allow for rapid identification of their targets.

Vampires must be invited into a space. This aspect comes and goes. Some creators use public spaces like a club or a store are having open to all invites while retaining the restriction for private areas, some dispense with it entirely. Buffy’s force field at the threshold always struck me as a little over the top, while Sinners played a much more subtle action where it was clear the vampire desires to enter but simply doesn’t actually try until invited.

The most problematic and yet widespread aspect of the vampire is the repulsion by a cross or crucifix. Traditionally this is straightforward Christianity, the symbol of the power of a real god and his manifestation in the world of the living acts is a shield against evil and a promise of eternal life not damnation for his believers. As society secularized over the decades, the ‘reality’ behind the cross’s symbolism faded with most creators supplanting a ‘truth’ of the Christian religion with the power of faith by the wielder.

By the time we get to Buffy, the cross itself is simply another talisman wielded by non-Christian with equal efficacy. Sinners wisely dispenses with this aspect entirely, a vampire wearing a cross has no particular meaning and a vampire can easily repeat the Lord’s Prayer without any ill-effect.

I would suggest to anyone thinking about crafting a tale with vampire think deeply about not only which aspects to include but also to why those aspects apply.

Share

Movie Review: Sinners

.

It took me a little while to find the time and the energy to get out to the cinema to see Sinnersa film that had my interest from the first time I watched a trailer. It is worth it.

Warner Brothers Studios

Sinners is a horror film so amid the racism, and the twins’ troubled romantic history, the opening night of the joint is marred by Irish vampires drawn to the establishment by the power of Sammy’s voice and music.

Cinema over the decades has presented all manner of vampires, aristocratic European nobility, tragic lovers trapped by the enormity of endless time, farcical flat mates in contemporary Wellington, and countless forgettable bloodsuckers that inspires no terror. Sinners, while not wholly reinventing the monster, much of what people accept as traditional vampiric lore remains, does present them as monsters to be feared and destroyed not an enjoyable method for dodging the grim fact that all things die. These vampires are seductive but decidedly not sexy. The script also artfully sidesteps the tangle created by crosses and crucifixes.

In addition to its tremendous power to frighten, Sinners is also a celebration of survival over centuries of trauma and oppression a celebration experienced in music. It is a horror film, and it is also a musical leaning on the ancient human tradition of oral history in song. More than once Coogler’s movie reminded me of one of my favorite films, The Wicker Man. Both movies deal with isolated communities that live in opposition to the larger culture surrounding them and for whom music is both reverential and festive.

Sinners is well worth the trip out to the cinema.

Share

ALIENS: When the Director’s Cut is Inferior

.

In 1986, seven years after the release of Alien, the sequel, often lauded as one of the best sequels of all time, Aliens released into theaters to critical and commercial success.

20th Century Films

In 1999 with the release of a boxed DVD set featuring the franchise’s films, a director’s cut of the movie was included, a version that many fans find superior to the theatrical release. I am not one of them.

According to director Cameron, on the audio commentary for one of the releases, the film was coming in long and as non-linear editing had not yet been widely adopted and the production was running out of time, performing numerous small edits here and there throughout the film to shorten it proved to be insufficient to the task. Producer, and then spouse to Cameron, Gale Anne Hurd noted that the entire reel containing all of the colony material prior to Ripley and the Marine’s arrival could get dropped without impacting the plot. A simple, fast fix that allowed the production to meet that rapidly approaching deadline. When given the chance to re-edit the film with digital editing tools for the box set, Cameron restored the reel and several other scenes that had been excised from the theatrical release.

In my opinion, the longer, less focused, run time damages what was a nearly perfect film in two major ways.

The first is in perspective. With the time spent on the colony meeting a few of the colonist, Newt prior to her horrific experiences, and such dilutes the powerful telling of Ripley’s story. This story is about Ellen Ripley, her post-traumatic stress dealing with the terrors she encountered and the guilt of her survivorship. She is the character the audience invests their emotional capital with, and it is her pain and suffering that makes us tense hoping and praying for a happy ending. To take 10 or 15 minutes away from Ripley for characters we scarcely know and are not at all emotionally invested in their stories. This dilutes the film’s power. Aside from Newt, how many colonists can you name from the director’s cut?

The second issue I will admit is more pedantic, but it is one that bothers more and more when I watch the film.

Each alien drone/warrior comes from a single impregnated victim, and it’s stated that the colony on LV-426, — and don’t get me started on the colony name — had a population of 158 person. 158, that’s  a small movie theater’s worth of people. I have never counted but it looks to me, particularly in the Director’s cut that there are a lot more than 158 aliens that attack the characters in the siege. A favorite sequence for many in the extended version is the automatic guns, set up to guard the tunnels leading into the base where our heroes have barricaded themselves. The guns firing automatically cut down waves of alien drones. Even after all that there remain scores that make the final assault and even still more in the nest to threaten Ripley and Newt’s escape.

Especially in the director’s cut there are simply far too many aliens something that chips and erodes away my ability to suspend disbelief for the movie.

Your opinion may be different and that’s part of the beauty of art, but to me the theatrical is the best version of Aliens.

Share

Movie Review: Night has a Thousand Eyes (1948)

.

John Triton (Edward G. Robinson) a stage mentalist working with his fiancé and best friend instead of the manipulated performance begins having spontaneous and accurate psychic visions. After several come to pass precisely as he envisioned, Triton flees, leaving his fiancé and friend without an explanation, hoping his absence will avert her death that he foresaw.

Paramount PIctures

Isolating himself from humanity and surviving by making mail-order tricks, Triton desperately avoids contact with people, unwilling to foresee more tragedy. However, when circumstances bring him into the orbit of his former fiancé’s daughter (Gail Russell) and his visions again spell doom, Triton struggles to prevent the future that now seems predestined.

Night Has a Thousand Eyes is usually categorized as a film noir, but the paranormal aspects make this a difficult movie to place definitively into any single genre. Where noir is often propelled by human weaknesses such as lust or greed, Eyes finds its motivation in Triton’s deep desire to not be the herald of disaster. The seemingly doomed nature of his vision, presenting what appears to be a hard, unalterable future, gives this film a touch of horror. Triton is a tragic character and, like all really good tragic characters, he is very sympathetic. He never sought the power that came to define his life. He never understood it and wanted nothing more than to be rid of it. Fate commandeered his life leaving him as helpless as a leaf blown by a wind. Robinson gives a fine nuanced performance, and he is the heart of this film. had he been unable to exude the required pathos none of it would have worked.

When I began watching Night has a Thousand Eyes, even though it is not a terribly long movie, I expected to watch only a portion before going to bed, but instead it sucked me in, and I completed the movie in a single sitting. It is well worth the watch.

Night has a Thousand Eyes is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

Share

My Two Unpopular Takes on Frankenstein

.

rankenstein is not science-fiction.

The Creature/Creation is not sympathetic.

There is not a small number of people and fans who want to count Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly’s 1816 novel as one of the first if not the first work of science-fiction. I disagree, but not because I want to dismiss such an influenceable work. Frankenstein is one of the most important works of literature. Two hundred years plus after its publication we still not only debate and adapt the work itself, but the theme of irresponsible creation echoes in so many works it would be futile to list them all. Both HAL9000 and the Terminator owe a debt to Shelly’s vision. But the fact that so much science-fiction mines that productive vein that she uncovered doesn’t make the original science-fiction as well.

In a work of SF, the method of the fantastic is vitally important to genre. Taking a Pegasus to the moon is not science fiction, but using a cannon to shoot myself there is. Method defines the genre. While Shelly may have been inspired by Galvanism it is absent from the text. In fact, in the text of the novel Shelly doesn’t just hand-wave her way past how Frankenstein created life, she leaves out the method entirely. She leaves it out because the method is unimportant to her theme and her subject. She wasn’t interested in how he created life only the ethical issues that raised. Verne’s trip to the moon is built upon the method of getting there and far less interested in what that means. Shelly’s creation of life ignores the ‘how’ but explores the why and the consequences. Frankenstein is one of the most important works ever created but it is not science-fiction.

The Creature is not sympathetic to me because it comes off to me as a dangerous, murderous, narcissist. Much has been made about how the doctor abandoned the creature, leaving it to suffer torment in isolation. That’s fair enough and is Shelly’s point, but the creature’s actions following that are impossible to justify.

While I think we can agree that vengeance is at best a questionable course of action, and had the creature’s vengeance been directed solely at Frankenstein it would be far less reprehensible but that it is not how the text unfolds.

To make his creator suffer the creature not only murders a child only because the boy is a relation to his creator but then frames an innocent woman to suffer the mob justice for his own crime.

When the creature confronts his creator in the ice caves of Switzerland, he proclaims that no being could love as greatly as himself but hurt and abused he swore to hate as greatly. He betrays the classic profile of a narcissist, his own feelings are paramount and those of others, such a murdered child, grieving parents, or those unjustly lynched for his crimes are of no consequence. There is precious little difference between the creature taking his violent vengeance on innocent bystanders and the mass murders of American murdering strangers.

Share

STREAMING MOVIE REVIEW: AUDITION (1999)

.

Omega Project

Shigeharu (Ryo Ishibashi) a widower of about ten years and a workaholic with the help of a film producer friend sets up a series of auditions for a non-existent production in hopes of finding the right young woman to become his wife. From the moment Asami’s (Eihi Shiiina) headshot and CV cross his desk Shigeharu is fascinated and soon obsessed with the mysterious young woman, ignoring the communist parade of red flags surrounding Asami. Soon enough Shigeharu discovers the depths of Asami’s unbalanced mind the hatred she harbors for deceitful, manipulating men.

Audition came to my attention due to a YouTube video about frightening moments in film and I have to agree the scene where what appears to be a large laundry bag moves if startling and unsettling. While this film has a generally good score in its reviews and overall, I did enjoy it I think it runs a little long in duration. The second act, the middle of the film, feels a little aimless slows down just a tad too much for my tastes. It many ways the feels much like many Frankensteinadaptations first acts. We know what is coming and the delay in getting that building very little in tension of suspense. At an hour and fifty-five minutes I think Audition might benefits for just being 10 to 15 minutes shorter.

That said, if foreign film works for you and if subtitling doesn’t interfere with your suspension of disbelief than Audition is worth a watch.

Audition is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel and Shudder.

Share

Movie Review: Diabolique (1955)

.

At a run-down private school in France a cruel schoolmaster torments his mistress and assaults his wife prompting the women to conspire in his murder.

I was supposed to see this film on the big screen with the San Diego Film Geeks monthly screening at the Digital Gym but came down with a cold that weekend and was forced to miss it. Luckily the film is playing on the Criterion Channel.

Artwork: Criterion Collection

Diabolique is considered a classic of the thriller genre. Starring Vera Clouzot as Christina, the Spanish spouse of cruel headmaster Michael (Paul Meurisse) and Simone Signoret as Nicole a teacher at the school and Michael’s mistress. Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, Vera’s husband, the film is a tight suspenseful production in the vein of a Hitchcock movie. (The novel which the film was adapted from was one Hitchcock wanted but Henri-Georges Clouzot beat him to it.) Murders never come off as planned and murderers rarely are truthful on their lives leading to a story with twists and reveals right up to the final shot. It is an ironic tragedy that Vera Clouzot, playing a woman with a serious heart condition, died suddenly from a cardiac event just 5 years after Diabolique’s release.

There is a reason why this is considered a classic. Every aspect of the production works, the performances, the cinematography, and the direction all take what is a fairly standard film noir set-up and play it to near perfection. I regret that illness robbed me of the chance to see it for the first time in a proper is small theater.

Share