I kicked off Spooky Season 2021 watching 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a foundational film in the slasher genre and one that I had never seen before. (I must confess of the various sub-genre of horror slashers are among the least like by me.) Made for the equivalent of 700,0000 dollars today, TTCM is a very low budget exploitive movie that had surprisingly little gore or explicitly depicted violence/ It is also in my eye quite dull, uninteresting, and generally unworthy of viewing.

Five young adults, couples Sally and Jerry, Pam and Kirk, along with Sally’s brother Franklin, a wheelchair user, drive is rural part of Texas after reports of graverobbing to ensure that Sally and Franklin’s grandfather’s grave is not among the violated. afterwards they visit the family homestead, long abandoned, and after becoming separated one by one fall victim to a local family of cannibals one of, Leatherface, murders and dismembers the victims with a chainsaw.

Directed, produced, and co-written by Tobe Hoppe, TTCM makes the most of its limited budget, shooting locations, and cast and could have been a far more interesting movie. Its essential flaw is that the five central characters lack any real sense of character. Of these young people in peril the only defining characteristic I can recall from last night’s viewing is that Pam believes in astrology. Beyond that I can’t tell you anything about each of them as a person, other than the cinematic cliches of being quite dim about entering strange buildings uninvited and refusing to go to authorities when people go missing in the wilds at night. This lack of character or personality ultimately means a lack of caring as people stumble blindly into their doom. Rather than a sense of tragedy from unforeseeable events I experienced only boredom and irritation at their actions and dialog. Luckily the movie runs a brief but seemingly interminable 83 minutes.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is currently streaming on Shudder as one of their ‘essentials.’

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

Thale is a 2012 Norwegian horror film about two men, Leo and Elvis, who are contracted to clear away the remains of bodies of people whose corpses were either not discovered before serious decomposing has set in or had died violent messy deaths. While on a job at a remote forest cabin they discover hidden rooms in the building’s basement and a mysterious young woman, nude and mute.

I struggle to accurately name Thale a horror film in part because for so much of the movie’s run time very little occurs. Now, I am not one who lacks patience for a ‘slow burn’ of a horror film, in fact a well crafts slow burn is my favorite style of horror film making but Thale seems to lack enough plot for its scant 76-minute running time which honestly felt much long. As a short feature, 30 minutes or so in length it would have packed a much more powerful punch but over an hour with its extremely limited plot the film drags. The story draws on Scandinavian folklore and had the filmmakers leaned more into that aspect of the tale they might have achieved, even on their quite limited budget, a more effective film. This film is not clumsily made, and it is well shot and well-staged and for some it may act as a curious diversion but for me the film failed to lift off and merely taxied to its runway without every taking flight.

Thale is currently streaming on Shudder.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

This is a movie I haven’t seen since the late 70s when it appeared on HBO and was curious to revisit.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, henceforth referred to as Little Girl, stars a young Jodie Foster, the same year she appeared in Taxi Driver, as 13-year-old Rynn who lives with her curiously hard to meet Father, a commercially successful poet so you already know that we are in a land of fantastic events, in a small isolated, insular, and close New England village. Rynn’s clear brilliance, stubborn independence, and refusal to cowed by adults merely because they are adults provokes suspicion and attracts the attention of the village’s notorious but politically protected pedophile, Frank Hallet, played ably and creepily by Martin Sheen. With nosey neighbors and sexual predators pressing in Rynn’s secrets are soon exposed.

Little Girl is often genre classified as a horror film and horrific events do transpire but lacking any supernatural events and without an ever-escalating body count, not that isn’t one only compared to most horror movies this one’s quite modest, it may be more fitting to place the film within the thriller genre. Given the caliber of performers involved it is of no surprise that the acting to on-point and excellent with Foster displaying the sharp intellect often associated with her characters and Sheen exuding menace with bland conversational dialog. The film is hobbled by a score that at times feels incongruous with the movie’s tone sounding more jazz than suspenseful.

The movie is also disturbing, like Taxi Driver, for its open sexualization of its under-aged character. In addition to the threat of sexual assault from Hallet Rynn is proactively sexually active but viewers can rest assured the one from behind nude scene is of a 21-year-old body double.

With a brief 90-minute running time even with its slow pacing, Little Girl, requires only a small investment of time and is an interest example of contained horror before slashers ruled the coming decade.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane is currently streaming on Shudder.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

There are lots of different types of horror movies. Giant Kaiju monsters may stomp, fly, and smash their way through cities, aliens may menace earthbound and space travelers alike, demonic possession may turn a young girl in specter of degradation, the recently dead may stalk the land consuming the living, or masked and disfigured killer may stalk promiscuous teens, but my favorite form of a horror movie is the ghost story, like The Night House.

In the story Rebecca Hall’s character Beth struggles to accept the sudden and inexplicable suicide of her beloved and apparently devoted husband Owen. Attempting to power through her grief and refusing to recognize it Beth tries to carry own with her life, going to work as a public-school teacher, having drink with her co-workers, but alone in the lakeside house that she and Owen built, strange visitations and events intrude on her solitude. Investigating these strange occurrences leads Beth to discover that Owen had secrets and bring them to light reveals truths she is unwilling to confront.

The Night House is a slow-burn ambiguous ghost story of a horror film. This is not the type of horror movie that presents the audience with an elaborate special make-effects ‘kill’ every fifteen minutes but rather one that lives in the liminal spaces between what is clearly happening and what may be happening. Like Robert Wise’s The Haunting it is a film that can be interpreted as the work of malevolent spirits or the hallucinations of a troubled mind. For my money there is a single two shot sequence that lands the project on the it really happened interpretation, but your mileage may vary.

Rebecca Hall, who also acted as one of the final executive producers, carries the entire film. The story is told solely through her viewpoint with only a couple of sequences in the final moments breaking this convention to give as another characters view of the scene. I have been a fan of Hall’s performances since I first saw in in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige and here as the center of The Night House she doesn’t disappoint. The direction by David Bruckner is solid and executed with a firm hand on the ambiguity needed for this production. Elisha Christian’s cinematography is lush shifting comfortably between daylight scenes of peaceful tranquility to the night’s deep and dark shadows filled with unseen dread. Screenwriting team Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski have crafted a tale of grief and depression’s ability to drown us that utilizes horror as a method of exploration those themes. The Night House’s development of those themes of loss and what it does to us is reminiscent of 2014’s The Babadook without being derivative but rather so complimentary that the pair would make a most excellent double-feature.

The Night House is currently playing theatrically.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

I just saw a tweet extolling the cinematic excellence of the film Revengeand while I am not going to respond directly to that tweet, I have no interest in dumping on someone for something they enjoyed, the movie was one I found lacking and I wanted to quickly compare to a similar film that handled the subject matter so much better, American Mary.

Both movie, Revenge (2017, France) and American Mary (2012, Canada) are centered on attractive young women who are sexually assaulted by older powerful men and the consequences of those attacks.

Revenge is an exploitative movie, fond of the ‘ass cam’ where the lens of the camera follows the woman close and low reducing her to a body part without the benefit of being from a clear point of view. The film utilizes nudity heavily and while it doesn’t film the assault in a particularly titillating manner nor does to capture the character’s full sense of horror and objectification. Following the assault, the movie descends into a series of set pieces of attacks and escape as she takes her revenge all while maintaining minimal or even absent entirely of clothing.

American Mary never falls into the ‘ass cam’ mode of cinematography. Its star is equally as attractive as the star of Revenge, young leading ladies are rarely unattractive, but the filmmakers never reduce her to simply her secondary sexual characteristics. The assault also avoids titillation along with nudity and captures the horror, loss of control, and the character’s objectification bur her assault. Following the attack, the character also seeks and gains a measure of revenge but unlike Revenge this is not presented as a sequence of violent murders but something more methodical and more extreme while maintaining a focus on the character’s mental state and her disintegration emotionally. We see the continuing price she pays from the assault and the ultimate hollowness and emptiness of her revenge. American Mary is a more complex and subtle film that explores the lingering harm of trauma and not simply the gratification of vengeance.

Both films are streaming on Shudder. Watch them and make up your own minds on the difference between exploitation and empowerment.