It’s not The Bikeriders which looks fascinating though I suspect I am going to have trouble with the accents. No, the movie I am almost certain to make a trip to the cinema to watch is MaXXXine the direct sequel and third film in the ‘X’ franchise.

A24

When X originally debuted in 2022 I had little interest in seeing it. Slashers are my least loved genre of horror films and nothing in the advertising gave me any reason to suspect that X would pierce that disinterest. Then a number of horror cinema podcasts began touting the movie’s style and quality and I relented taking in a late-night screening at my local multiplex.

X bored me with cliche character acting in stupid manners that no actual person would. It was repeat with the tropes and worn-out ideas from countless other slashers with only the barest of novelties.

Fine. The movie was not for me, and I chalked it up to learning where my tastes differed from those on the podcasts. The prequal film Pearl came and went without sparking any interest in me and this year we get MaXXXine which follows the sole survivor of X and her quest for fame in Hollywood.

Something in these trailers have hooked my attention and curiosity. The cast looks fantastic and despite my utter disappointment with X and its illogical script I am being pulled into MaXXXine’s orbit.

The podcast The Evolution of Horror for its current season is covering horror films in which nature is the source of horror with Nature Bites Back and last week’s episode reached Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds.

Universal Studios

While I am familiar with the movie and even have some vague memories of it playing on the television while I was present, I cannot actually say that I ever watched the film in its entirety. Now I have and my verdict is that it is vastly overrated.

I am a fan of slow-burn horror which is what The Birds should have been but there is slow and there is full stop dead in the water. The first half of the film is socialite’s Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) and her jesting infatuation and meet cute with Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor). She follows him to his weekend home in the idyllic coastal village of Bodega Bay just north of San Francisco. Meets his former flame, his little sister, and cool, aloof mother. It is nearly 50 minutes into this film titled The Birds before the first bird strike occurs. There had been no real build-up to this, no ominous images of avian observation, in short from the master of suspense there had been no suspense.

The second half of the film is the building level of bird attacks that comes in widely spaces waves with the attack at the restaurant and gas stations providing the most dramatic clips. (It also displays Bodega bay’s fire department as incompetent as they attempt to use direct water sprays to fight a class B fire.)

The films 3rd act retreats to a siege story as the principal characters become trapped in a house, boarded up tight against the flocking fatalities. Then after suffering one last massive valley from the birds the characters in the lengthy pause between waves get into a car and drive away.

I am not bothered by the fact that the cause of the attacks is unknown. I am not bothered by the fact that there is no clear indication that the attacks actually ever end. That sort of ambiguous ending is something I can very much get behind. I am bothered that the characters’ survival and escape has nothing to do with the characters and the choices that they make. There is no moment of decision. No moment of insight. No moment when someone is terribly torn between what they want and what needs to happen. The birds pause and the characters drive away, utterly and completely devoid of agency on any of the characters’ part.

The Birds is a film I shall not watch again.

I am most intrigued by horror films and stories that swing for unusual concepts and ideas. When the trailer for The Watchers dropped it peaked my interested but cautiously.

New Line Studios

The Watchers is the story if Mina (Dakota Fanning) an American woman living in Ireland avoiding the traumatic memories of her mother’s death. While transporting a Sun Conure to a distant zoo Mina becomes stranded in a deep and threatening forest. One that voice over prolog has already painted as not appearing on any map and that draws damaged souls. As night falls Min discovers a concrete structure and warned to flee inside before the daylight is gone or she will die.

Inside she meets the other people trapped by the forest. Ciara (Georgina Campbell) the surviving spouse of a couple that had become stranded in the forest. Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) a rebellious local and Madeline (Olwen Fouere) an older woman who holds the knowledge of the rules that keep them alive. Each evening ‘they’ strange unseen creatures come to the structure and spend the hours of darkness observing the people on display. No one has ever seen the creatures and to be caught outside after dark is to die, as what happened to Ciara’s husband.

This premise, adapted from a novel by A.M. Shine, holds tons of intriguing promise. There are mysteries to uncover. Who are the watchers? Why do they spend their hours watching the trapped humans? What is the nature of the forest and where did the shelter come from?

A premise such as this lives or dies on the answer to those questions and how those answers are discovers. The Watchers fails on both counts. The answers are inconsistent even within the story’s own logic and most are vomited at the audience by way of ‘info dumps.’ when your 3-act movie has a massive info dump in the third act you know that it has failed at the most basic level.

In addition to the supernatural elements The Watchers expects the audience to accept situations that are utterly beyond credibility. There is no way in hell a professors University office remains untouched, unused for 14 or 15 years so a character as go there and discover the story’s final twist.

The greatest failing of The Watchers is not the clumsy exposition or the bluntly illogic f it backstory and construction but rather that the characters are flat, uninteresting, and devoid of any characteristic for which someone forced to endure a screening might find some form of emotional engagement. I never once cared what happened to anyone in this movie. Throughout the screening I was more concerned about getting some sleep unreservedly uninterested in any of these people’s outcomes.

I can find no reason that anyone should endure this movie.

Yesterday I wrote about faith being a critical and essential component in the success of 1973’s The Exorcist. Today I am thinking about the other religiously themed horror film that also work for me and how strange it is that an atheist enjoys these Christian stories.

In addition to The Exorcist the other massively successful and franchise inspiring ‘devil movie’ of the 70’s is The Omen. This film’s theology is not as well sourced or faithful The Exorcist playing much more directly as the genre intended for it, horror. It doesn’t raise question but presents the inevitability of the ‘End Times’ and the futility of humanity’s position in the grand scheme. A perfectly positioned movie for its decade The Omen is the bleak and cynical counterpart to The Exorcist’s questions of faith and love.

Two months ago, I went out and watch the pair of religiously themed horror films release in the spring of this year, Immaculate and The First Omen, the latter being a prequel to the aforementioned 70s film.

Of the pair it has been Immaculate that persists in my thoughts. I have a review of the film here on my blog, but I am going to expand on my thoughts a bit. There are by necessity spoilers.

Seriously — spoilers for the big reveal.

Black Bear Pictures

Immaculate unlike either The Exorcist or The Omen is quite subtle in its relationship with the supernatural aspects of religion. It is an easy interpretation of the film that absolutely nothing that occurs is beyond normal accepted reality. A perfectly valid way to view the story is that the fanatical faithful of the convent are deluded. The ancient and rusted spike is not from the crucifixion and the genetic material is not that of Jesus. That their cloning attempts are of some random person and the deformed products are just tragic miscarriages.

It is also possible that the spike is exactly what they believe it to be and that the convent’s repeated attempts to clone the son of god will, if successful, produce the opposite, the ‘anti-Christ.’

A third interpretation is that the convent and its faithful are doing precisely what they believe, bringing about the second coming of the Christian savior by cloning and producing him by way of a virgin birth.

Side note, it is a common misconception that the phrase ‘immaculate conception’ refers to Jesus’ conception without sexual intercourse but theologically it is about Mary and her being born without ‘original sin’ and thus possessing the purity to bear a god.

The film gives no clues if any of the three interpretation I have presented are the ‘correct’ way to view the events of the film. From the story as presented one cannot determine is Cecila is a young woman abused by fanatics, the savior of humanity, or the vessel through which it is damned.

This week I obtained Immaculate on Blu-ray disc and I look forward to listening to the director’s commentary.

May 9th, at the age of 98, Roger Corman, a man who arguably had the greatest impact on cinema, passed from this bitter mortal realm.

Corman specialized in low budget features, often of a lurid and exploitive nature. His career spanned from the 1950s into the 21st century. He wrote, produced, and directed independently financed feature and along the way ignited the careers of cinema titans like James Cameron, and Jack Nicholson. Bucking the conventions of the period Corman also gave women position of creative control though he was not also above using nudity and ex to sell a picture. (The sexual assault by a giant worm in Galaxy of Terror was at his insistence, over the protests of the director and writer.) Modern cinema and in particular genre cinema simply would not exist in the state it does without Roger Corman.

Sunday evening to honor this man’s achievement I rewatched It Conquered the World.

The film has a ludicrous monster. A creature from Venus that resembles a massive fat carrot and can create organic mind control stinger. Aided by a bittered scientist (Lee Van Cliff) whom the creature has deluded into thinking that this is humanity’s salvation and not its subjugation, the monstrosity seizes control of a small town and the local army base. (Hardly the world.) Pulled back from the grips of his delusion by the death of his wife at the creature claws and the persuasion of a fellow scientist (Peter Graves) he redeems himself in destroying the threat that be led to our planet.

It Conquered the World is fairly typical of a Corman production of the mid to late 50s. There are limited locations and spare sets displaying the absolutely minimal budget but there is also something more to be said than ‘evil monster.’ The film ends with a monologue about the need for humanity to strive and find its own way to paradise and peace. A speech that could have just as easily been part of Star Trek a decade later.

Corman cared about the world. I have read that he apricated the 100 million dollars plus that James Cameron spent making Titanic but was also repulsed by such a sum being used for entertainment when so much misery remained in the world. Keeping his budgets limited certainly made it easier to make money but there was also a moral component that he never lost.

98 is a good run for any human being and we shall never see his likes again.

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There are 3 films that are considered the ‘unholy trinity’ of folk horror movies, The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw, & The Witchfinder General. All three come from that cynical decade the 1970s and all three are British in origin. Now, folk horror with its rural settings, ancient practices, and disquieting people can be found around the globe. Estonia’s November from 2017 remains one of my favorites, but what of American, and by that I do mean specifically United States, folk horror.

There are those who would count Eggers’ The Witch as folk horror but that feels like a misclassification to me. That movie is as writer/director Eggers described it a Puritan nightmare. Others classify the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre as folk horror but while its isolated rural setting fits, one deranged family of cannibals do not a culture make and for me folk horror is always about cultures and the clash of outsider to an isolated culture.

1992’s Candyman get closer with its inner-city culture that is decidedly alien to the pretty, blonde, protagonist but it strikes me as more of a ghost story than a folk horror. Vengeful ghosts are great stories but in my eyes they are not ‘folk.’

Isolated communities living by practices forgotten by the wider world in America would seem to point to with Appalachian Mountain towns in the deep recesses of the that rugged terrain or somewhere in the vast American West where so many communities became ghost towns as their fortunes evaporated.

And yet as my mind twists and turns at the germination of an idea for a novel of American Folk horror it is neither the hillbillies nor the cowboys that is drawing my attention and inspiration but rather the hippies of the 1960s.

Counter-culture is simply another culture one that, to an extent, fetishized the idea of abandoning modernity and returning to nature. An isolated commune, 60 years separated from the rushing madness of modern American life feels like a perfect fit for folk horror. What starts are a collective rejecting modernization and mechanization can grow and transform into a unique and alien culture with its own ideas of what is proper to worship.

This is the direct I think I want to go but I need to make up my mind is the horror metaphysical or is it entirely a matter of practice and belief?