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Producer Val Lewton working for RKO pictures in the 1940s was tasked to create a number of horror films but without the money to hire established stars or productions of any real scale. His solution, turning to psychological horror, relying on what is left unseen but imagined by the audience yielded some fine examples of horror that has influenced filmmaking and the genre to this day. The Body Snatcher, adapted from a Robert Louis Stevenson story gave horror legend Boris Karloff his finest role and performance and launched the directorial career of Robert Wise who directed films in every genre clear into the 1970s. I Walked With a Zombie, blended inspiration from Bronte’s Jane Eyre with Caribbean mysticism, eschewing the cheap laughs or schlocky horror of zombie-centered stories for something with more drama and reigning as the ultimate zombie inspired film until displaced by Romero’s reinvention of the sub-genre in the late 60s. However, it is 1942’s Cat People that is arguably the most influential of these productions responsible for every over-used jump scare and inspiring an R-rated remake in 1982.

Criterion Channel

Helmed by legendary noir director Jacques Tourneur, who also made Night of the Demon, and written by DeWitt Bodeen, Cat People centers on Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) a young artist recently immigrated to the United States from Serbia. Irena labors under the belief that she is descended from wicked, evil witches,  and cursed that when suffering strong passions, such as lust or anger, she will transform into a large and murderous panther. Quite against her plans, Irena falls in love with naval architect Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) and marries him but refuses the marriage bed due to her terror at transforming. The cast is rounded out by Jane Randolph playing Alice, Oliver’s assistant and the third component to the doomed romantic triangle and Tom Conway as Dr. Louis Judd, a psychiatrist friend of Oliver who attempts to help Irena past her ‘delusion.’

Lacking the resources for elaborate transformations Tourneur and Lewton relied upon atmosphere and mood to achieve the desired tension in the audience. One of the most influential sequences is when Alice, walking alone at night, becomes terrified that someone or something is stalking her. She is correct. As the audience, we know that Irena, hot with jealousy, is indeed following her along the dark street where only isolated islands of lights from the streetlamps allow any real visibility. When Alice reaches the bus stop, she and the audience are wound quite tight when the sudden and very loud hiss of the bus’s air brakes shatters that tension in what is widely considered to be cinema’s first ‘jump scare.’ A technique now so widely over-used that is often associated with mediocre directors who are unable to build the requisite tension in their films.

I find the character of Louis Judd the most perplexing member of the cast as I can’t determine he is meant to be seen as tragic or as an evil man. While I understand that code of conduct between doctors and their patients, even informal ones such as Irena, have changed greatly from 40s I find it hard to excuse in any manner Judd’s actions towards the young woman. Certainly by today’s standard and what we know of power dynamics between physicians and people under their care and power his disastrous attempt to seduce Irena is not only unjustifiable but also criminal, but this was hardly the case in 1942. When he released the panther within her, it can be seen as tragic for Doctor Judd or as a case of ‘good for her.’ Frankly, I believe that he got pretty much what he deserved.

Being produced in 1942 Cat People needed to stay firmly within the puritanical guidelines of the Production Code, which was rigidly enforced from 1934 through the middle of the 1960s, and as such the exact nature of Irena’s curse could not be fully and plainly spelled out. Sexual intercourse, beyond any depiction of it ever occurring outside of marriage, could not be directly referenced, only implied, making the details somewhat obscure to a modern audience, an obscurity that filmmaker Paul Schrader did not labor under when he remade Cat People in 1982.

Both versions of these films, the original and the remake are currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

It is a strange time when one of the, if not the most, popular film series of all time, Star Wars, generates such lackluster interest that a pair of low-budget, non-Intellectual Property driven horror films perform better than the most recent entry in the long-loved franchise.

As with most things in life I believe that there is no simple single answer to as to why Obsessionand Backrooms pulled into such audience number while The Mandalorian and Grogu suffered middling success.

Certainly, the fact that three years passed between the last season of the once hit show, The Mandalorian and the release of the feature film it inspired dulled general interest. It today’s fast moving short attention span driven culture to paraphrase an extra in Jaws, ‘Three years is like three decades!’ It is also not helpful that the third season of that show proved to be the most lackluster one offered, splitting up the dynamic pairing that had driven viewer interest and delving into ‘lore’ of the Star Wars universe that interested the most die-hard fans but for everyone else came off as impenetrable and uninteresting.

When the trailers for The Mandalorian and Grogu finally appeared, promising the return of that pairing they seemed to rely entirely on the affection people once had for the pairing, offering nothing of the plot or story. The studio’s only pitched seemed to be, here are the characters you loved, come see them, and nothing more. In a time of already declining theater attendance, shortening windows between theatrical release and streaming availability, offering up nothing more than television characters on a theatrical screen is not enough to coax people out of their homes for an expensive trip to the local multiplex. The ones who did go reported that the film had no real story to it, it was a very expensive collection of action scenes and references to other programs that the creators of already shown on television. the script was so flabby and pointless that the first 15 or 20 minutes of the film could be edited out and absolutely nothing would change.

The tired and reheated offering from a franchise nearly 50 years old cannot explain why a pair of horror films exploded with financial and cultural success.

The horror movie genre mirrored the Star Wars franchise in the manner that 2026 with yet another entry in a horror series that had grown quite long in the tooth with the release of Scream 7 the latest addition in that 30-years-old franchise. Now, my opinion on this may be somewhat prejudiced as I have never loved or even enjoyed the original Scream when so many people found the movie so perfectly suited to their tastes. That said I find it hard to imagine how a script can breathe new life into a slasher that has continued for seven feature films without becoming a parody of itself. I will confess that ‘slashers’ are my least favorite sub-genre of horror with very, very few holding my interest. While other people adored Ti West’s X, I could only groan as the characters throughout the movie runtime veered further and further from anything I could believe as genuine human action and reaction.  What Obsession and Backrooms offered were fresh interesting horror stories that were either a series of ‘kills’ displaying technical expertise in the effects nor yet another exploration of grief using horror as a metaphor. Instead, each film spoke to a relevant cultural moment that resonated with people, particularly younger adults, and not the grey-haired fans of quite old franchises.

Obsession speaks to entitlement and consent with Nikki being stripped of agency over her body and her mind being the real horror of the tale. This is a subject that is very real to nearly all, if not all, women today. Between rights being stripped away by their government and the need to exercise vigilance over ever drink in public it is hardly surprising that film like Obsession strikes such a powerful emotional chord. Some have suggested the film would be more powerful if it presented the story from Nikki’s point of view however I think that is a challenge that would be nearly insurmountable in a cinematic form. A character without the ability to influence the events around her or even her own actions is one that would not thrive in a visual medium, that would work in prose, I can see a terrific novel with that approach but not a movie. I found the true horror of Obsession to be NIkki’s enslavement and not her outbursts of violent possessiveness. This movie is very much one of its time as is Backrooms.

Backrooms, inspired and adapted from the directors short projects on YouTube is a movie that, while set in the dreary 1990s, speaks to the young adult suffering the early 21st century. In addition to coming from a medium with which they are very familiar, the internet, its visual presentation, an empty, haunted, and ultimately incomprehensible world. Strip malls were not dead and empty spaces in the 90s but they are today and the vast lonely volumes present in Backrooms is an apt metaphor for the lives of young adults today, a cohort of people who suffered the pandemic for their teenage years, and emerged from college burden with debt and few if any prospect to have even the same lives much less better ones of their parents. A seemingly endless world that lacks maps or any other method of navigating is the world that they are attempting to build lives in. Is it any surprise that this is also a horror that touches their souls?

Star Wars emerged in the late 70s, a time of deep cynicism when heroes were often depicted as doomed their values a futile expression. Lucas painted a simpler time with simpler morality, one where it was easy to know right from wrong, that life had a light side and dark side and that resonated with the next several generations but this generation cannot believe in such a world. They have suffered too much to adopt a pollyannish view of reality; the dark, haunted, and manipulative horrors of Backrooms and Obsession mirrors the world that they know far more than a bounty hunter bound by some honorable code.

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“No Matter Where You Go, there you are”. Dr. B. Banzai PhD, MD, MFA

I had intended to see the new horror film Backrooms on its opening weekend but a cluster of migraines kept me at home and it wasn’t until this past weekend that I managed to get out to the theater to catch this latest horror sensation.

A24

Backrooms, the brainchild of Kane Parsons and born of his internet posted short subjects, centers on Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) a man for whom life has not turned out at all the way he had hoped or wanted. Turned out of his home by divorce and living in his discount furniture store Clark listlessly seeks help from a therapist, Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) but clearly struggles to make progress. Late one evening Clark discovers a portal in the sub-floor of his store that leads to an uninhabited and seemingly endless series of rooms and corridors laid out by some sort of inaccessible dream logic. Exploring the labyrinth Clark discovers terrors that echo his own distraught mental heath but remain beyond comprehension.

Liminal Horror entered the lexicon quite recently in 2019 with images of abandoned malls and disused spaces appearing on internet chatrooms and message boards. By 2022 Parsons began uploading short subjects of CGI crafted liminal horror to his YouTube account, developing a talent and fandom that eventually led to the feature film Backrooms with its attendant success and recognition. As a subgenre of horror liminal is the most mood defined. Where supernatural horror ranges from ghosts to demons, to witchcraft, and slashers are very specifically about a series of gruesome and on-screen ‘kills’ and zombies, either undead or virally induced, are about the implacable masses, liminal horror has no clearly defined monster at its core but consists almost entirely of atmosphere. In its purest form it would be possible to craft something that is recognizably liminal horror from a single still image. Backrooms, in its expanded feature film form, is more than liminal horror but rests, in my opinion, on a subgenre of horror just over a century old, cosmic horror.

Cosmic horror, perhaps best illustrated by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, is the subgenre that while often reduced to tentacled monstrosities is at its center about the relationship between humanity and reality, but that reality as presented in the piece is far stranger and utterly incomprehensible to the puny human mind rendering it terrifying. It is not that there are simply great areas that lie unknown to humanity, but that reality itself is unknowable and our pitiful understanding of it is utterly in error. The horrific nature of the universe cannot be explained because it cannot be understood at all.

The strange, nightmarish world that Clark discovers in the sub-levels of his furniture store is never explained, with hints at the film’s conclusion that this is not the only occurrence. While the space, its shape, and its nature is twisted by the psyches that invade it, those psyches do not create nor do they dictate it, merely influence the bizarre and unpredictable events and forms it takes.  The Backrooms are not constructed of timber and drywall; their nature is beyond human understanding and realizing just how far beyond our meager intellect it lies is the true nature of its horror.

I both rejoice in the tremendous success Backrooms is finding at the box office and fear it as well. There will be terrible pressure for a sequel, for a continuation of the story and if that comes to pass then each iteration will rob a little more of the mystery, will seek to explain a little more the terror until nothing at all is left to experience.

I opened this review with a quote from a classic cult film of the 80s because the Backrooms are the dark interpretation of that saying, no matter where you go you take yourself with you, and that includes the demons that haunt our every footstep and the loops of destructive behaviors we are unable to unlearn.

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Unless I am again derailed by migraines I have plans to see two films in the theaters this weekend.

Tonight, Friday night, I want to go out and catch Backrooms. It is so nice to see a wider selection of horror than the slashers and murderous home invaders subgenres. I have nothing against those types of movies which are just more often than not dull and tedious to me. The black-gloved killers of giallo are more interesting, but they too can become rather uninspired and repetitive rather quickly. Backrooms looks to be much more a vibe than a plot, which I will wager either works very well or not at all and I am looking forward to finding out.

Tomorrow, June 6th, strikes me as an ironically perfect day to see the D-Day invasion film Pressure, a film that looks to focus on the vital and uncertain weather forecasts that determined the success of the Normandy invasions. I do know as a historical fact that one of the vital elements for that invasion and the Battle for the North Atlantic was the Allied control of Iceland, occupied since its actual controlling government, the Danish Kingdom, was under Axis domination.

Sunday evening, after my sweetie-wife has retired for the night, I plan to watch the next in the Plaid Project, Johnny Eager, a movie I know almost nothing about.

But, like I said much of this turns on if eye strain doesn’t trigger yet another series of migraines.

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Saturday was a rare two-trip to the local multiplex. In the morning with my sweetie-wife we saw the light action film In The Grey, a quick observation, is a fun film and worth the trip. This review is for my evening feature at the theater, the new horror film Obsession.

Focus Features

From writer/director Curry Barker Obsession focuses on Baron ‘Bear’ Bailey (Michael Johnston) and his seven-year crush on Nikki Freemen (Inde Navarrette.) Though he has known Nikki since high school and is socially a friend, a teammate with her on a trivia team, and a co-worker at a local musical instrument store, Bear had never confessed his feelings or attraction to her, unable to conquer his own crushing insecurities and doubt. While seeking a gift for her at the local crystal and mysticism store, he purchases a ‘One Wish Willow Branch’ and after yet another bout of frustration where he again fails to tell her his feelings, Bear snaps the branch as instructed and wishes for Nikki to love him more than anyone and anything in the world. Now the object of her obsession, Bear discovers, as Spock warned Stonn, that having a thing is not as pleasing as wanting, and by the third act the discomfort turns to outright horror.

The true horror in Obsession is not the maniacal jealousy that the mystically enslaved Nikki presents whenever anything or anyone frustrates her unquenchable need to be with Bear but that enslavement itself. Nikki’s will and her ability to make any choices for herself have been ripped away by Bear’s selfish and childish wish. Here and there throughout the film flashes of the person trapped by the spell peek through the facade of the Nikki that is supposedly ‘in love’ with Bear. By the third act it is clear that the real Nikki is unable to avail herself of any action as her body is puppeteered by forces beyond her control. She is not possessed by an evil entity but has been rendered a ragdoll forced to live out a distorted fantasy of desire and affection. While many recent horror films have been meditations on grief and loss Obsession is about consent and the evil of an entitled mindset.

Barker and cinematographer Taylor Clemons made excellent use of silhouettes, often presenting the ensorcelled Nikki as a figure that could only been seen in outline, with all of her features lost in impenetrable darkness, making her both a terrifying figure to behold and one that reflected the nature of her own entrapment. Inde Navarrette is the stand-out performer of this film, first giving us a Nikki of depth and complexity that we get to know before Bear enslaved her and then a Nikki driven only by her obsession that switches in the blink of an eye from loving to frightening when frustrated in her ‘desires.’ The film’s final resolution comes as both inevitable and a terribly tragic with Inde giving perhaps one of cinema’s best screams that transmutes into heart-wrenching cries.

While this may not satisfy the horror fans form whom ‘body counts’ and ‘kills’ are the metrics of a successful horror movie it worked quite well for me. It is not in the zone of a film where it might be possible to read everything as only suggesting the supernatural, such as last week’s film Hokum, the filmmakers leave no doubt that the mystical nature of the ‘One Wish Willow’ is, in the world of the film, real, placing this clearly more in line with Hereditary than The Wicker Man and that should be enough to let you know if Obsession a film I thoroughly enjoyed is rigth for you.

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This past weekend the Irish-set horror film Hokum, which I had been looking forward to, opened to its theatrical run, but after pinching a nerve or something in my neck by doing the idiotic thing of turning my head, and with the pain forcing me to abandon my plan to go see the film, I stayed home, nursing the protesting area.

20th Century Studios

I got my weekend horror fix by rewatching The First Omen, a 2024 prequel to the wildly successful Richard Donner film The Omen which, like The Exorcist, inspired a franchise of mediocre to terrible sequels. (Yes, I am aware that The Exorcist III possesses a vocal fan base, but that movie is the best of the lot and for me it rises only to mediocre.)

I ventured forth a little more than a year ago to catch The First Omen in theaters and gave the film a middling review here on my blog. So, why revisit something that hadn’t been all that inspiring the first time around? Sometimes the headspace I am in when I see a movie can cause me to come away with an impression that the movie did not earn or is unjust to the feature. The first time I watched The Godfatherit did not make that great of an impression on me. perhaps I was distracted, perhaps I didn’t quite allow the film in, or perhaps it was simply the wrong movie for my emotional state. However, when I rewatched it a few years later suddenly I ‘got it.’ The film is brilliant, and I adore it.

Did the same thing happen with the unloved The First Omen?

No.

The movie remains middling. A competently crafted piece of cinema that is not terrible but failed to reach the potential that had been possible with a stronger script and a bit more attention to the story it was attempting to integrate with.  The performances remain strong, and Ralph Ineson stepping into the role originated by Patrick Troughton is inspired casting. Ineson, while physically very different from Troughton pulls in the sense of the character so powerfully and so perfectly that it is wholly credible that this is the same man who tried, in vain, to warn Ambassador Thorne that his child was in fact the antichrist. Nell Tiger Free as Margaret, a young American woman on a voyage to become a nun and who is pulled into the conspiracy to birth the antichrist, is quite good in her role and none of the failures of the feature can be laid at her feet.

No, the script is the trouble.

In addition to not melding seamlessly with the film it is a prequel to, ignoring such things as that it was very clear that the child Damien, the future antichrist, did not have a human mother but had been birthed from a jackal, or ignoring that Father Brennan had been riddled with cancer, The First Omentried too hard to reset the franchise and set itself up for sequels that could never mesh with the established continuity.

Some years ago, there had been released a remake of the original The Omen, a film I have never been able to watch in its entirety. It is proof that casting and direction are essential elements and put a step wrong there and you’ve critically damaged your production. In my opinion the best course of action as a horror fan is to consider that there is only one Omen film, the first, and ignore the existence of all the rest.

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Last week I published a list of the summer movies I anticipated going out to the theaters to enjoy and here is my review of the first film on that list, the black comedy, Over Your Dead Body.

Independent Film Compan

Married couple Lisa (Samara Weaving) and Dan (Jason Segel) Burton have retreated to their isolated wooded cabin for the weekend, ignorant of the fact that each has plotted to murder the other as a solution to their marital troubles. Wholly inept as would-be killers their plans are exposed to one another but before either party can fulfill their rather simple and highly unlikely to succeed plots, the couple is confronted by a trio of strangers,  Pete (Timothy Olyphant), Allegra (Juliette Lewis), and Todd (Andre Eriksen), that present a far more credible, if not equally comedic, threat to them both, resulting in the film climaxing with over-the-top, farcical, Sam Raimi-like gore.

Over Your Dead Body, adapted from the Norwegian film, I Onde Dager, (Streaming on Netflix with the English language title The Trip) works as broad comedy with a strong sense of the absurd. All of the actors involved play their characters well, walking that fine line between believable, credible persons and exaggerated caricatures, never straying so far on either side as to damage the entirety of the story or the project. The director and the screenwriters, Jorma Taccone and Nick Kocher & Brian McElhaney respectively, played an expert level of set-up and payoff through the film, with several moments that are first presented seem minor color details later revealed to be clever and subtle foreshadowing.

Perhaps the most elegant and deft piece of screenwriting centers around the possibility of a sexual assault that threatens one of the characters. (It is not the character that you would expect that is threatened, providing an inversion of the trope, sliding away from the terrible titillation that often accompanies such sequences in lesser movies.) Once this element arose, I became seriously concerned about the rest of the film. It looked as if the writers had maneuvered themselves into a nasty, ugly little corner. If they took the scene to its conclusion the tone of the movie would irreparably rupture never to return to its comedic color and yet once begun it looked as if there was no way but to play the scene out as it threatened. Their solution displayed the genius of the scribes and saved the movie. I salute such brave and inventive writing.

The film’s final act escalated into cartoonish, wildly impossible, and, for my tastes, hilarious gory violence. I suspect for some it may be a bridge too far which shatters their suspension of disbelief but for those who had correctly calibrated their engagement and understand the movie’s attitude, it should play perfectly.

Over Your Dead Body is a movie that is best seen in a theater, with few distractions and preferably an engaged and laughing audience.

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 You may have noticed that I did not use the numeral ‘2’ in the title of the film as all the advertising has done. I was unimpressed with the addition of the numeral as I thought the title worked perfectly without and when the film’s title card appeared on the screen it pleased me that the filmmakers agreed with my sentiment over the marketers.

Search Light Picture

Ready or Not, Here I Come is a direct sequel to 2019’s Ready or Not. The previous film Grace MacGaullay (Samara Weaving) marries into the insanely wealthy Le Domas family, only to discover that her new in-laws obtained their wealth and power by way of a dark pact with Satan and only by sacrificing her life to their dark god could they not only retain their privilege but their very lives. Ready or Not ends with Grace surviving her ordeal and her in-laws facing the wrath of their benefactor. The sequel, despite 6 years passing between the two movies’ production, starts precisely where the previous entry ended, with Grace sitting on the steps of the burning mansion as first responders arrive.

Grace’s escape from the torments of the satanic cult is quickly ended when she and her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) are abducted by the wider cult that the La Domas’ were only one facet of. As explained the organization’s Lawyer (Elijah Wood) control of the global cult, which until their destruction, rested with the La Domas, is now up for grabs. Determination of the family to take control is by yet another game of hide and seek with Grace and Faith as the targets of the murderous representatives.

While the sequel is much the same as the original film, the basic plot remaining unchanged, and the retcon creation of a sister for the orphaned Grace of the first film could have been ham-handed Ready or Not, Here I Come works surprisingly well. Weaving and Newton have a great sibling chemistry which acts as tonal counterbalance to the principal antagonists the fraternal twins  Ursula and Chester Danforth (Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy.) Like the previous movie Ready or Not, Here I Come is more comedy than horror with few sequences of intense dread and more of exaggerated cartoonish violence. In some ways this compares favorably with Alien and Aliens. Where Ridley Scott crafted a slow burn horror film which James Cameron did not try to replicate but instead focused on an action driven film that share the same beats as its predecessor with this pair of movies, the first is more of a horror film, albeit interspersed with absurdist comedy, the sequel never tries to duplicate the horror of the first, understanding its mission to plow new ground.

Running a mere 108 minutes, this movie doesn’t waste time before diving into its central plot and troubles for its protagonists. The sequence of events is laid out in such a manner that the newly introduced Faith does not suffer an extended period of ‘disbelief’ that would only frustrate an audience that had already been exposed to the supernatural reality of this film’s world. Economical with time and exposition Ready or Not Here I Come knows just why the audience has come to the theater and it delivers. This is a not a horror film that is meditating on grief, or obsession, or the nature of good and evil in a complex world, it is here to show you a good time as two morally decent women are faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges.

If you were a fan of the first one then there is no reason to avoid its sequel, this is a movie best seen in a theater with few distractions and a loud engaged audience.