31 Days Of Horror: Day 5: Melancholia

Despite the richness of its possibilities horror always seems to have such a narrow perception of itself. Most people wouldn’t consider Melancholia a horror film, even though horror is its sole subject matter.

We all deal with horror every day. Most of us have just gotten awful good at distracting ourselves from that fact. Able to look the other way from the giant planet that will obliterate everything in time. What is depression then but the inability to look away? To be transfixed by horror to the point that it blocks everything else out, becomes the world Not an undercurrent of life but its overriding theme.

Von Trier has made two horror films before, The Kingdom and Anti Christ, and neither were like this.Both of those films were out and out assaults on the viewer. Full fledged attacks on the viewer’s thresholds of on screen violence and any kind of narrative sense. Melancholia isn’t like that. After the strangely beautiful and horrifying opening, which features imagery that looks like it was pulled directly from Von Trier’s night terrors, awful in the true sense of the word, the film hardly shows anything terrible at all. The film takes on a hushed, almost funeral tone, as is appropriate.

The film is divided into two parts the first set during a wedding reception for Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, held at the manor of her very rich sister Claire, played by Charlotte Gainsborough. At first Dunst is bubbly, luminescent, but it quickly becomes apparent that she is a woman with some very real problems.  It’s a much subtler performance than you would expect from Dunst, at the beginning of the film her mask is so firmly set that you can’t help but mistake it for the real thing. Then it starts to crack, slowly at first and then with increasing inertia. It becomes clear through the interactions with her family that this is a group of people who have done some real damage to each other over the years (This is to be expected as after all they are characters in a Lars Von Trier film).

The second part of the film has Justine returning to her sister’s home after her depression returns full force. This happens to coincide with the news that a new planet has been discovered, followed by the somewhat belated news that said new planet is going to crash into the Earth and destroy it utterly. For the rest of the film it hangs heavily on the horizen (“It looks… friendly” Claire marvels at one moment). This makes little difference to Justine, to truly live with depression is to live every moment waiting for a planet to come out of the sky and crush all live on Earth out of existence.

I’ve never been all that much of a Von Trier fan. All his movies to one degree to another are pranks. While I can’t say that Melancholia is all that different in that regard, there has been a perceptible shift in Von Trier’s point of view. One could hardly call him humanist (though he does draw some remarkably good performances out of the cast. Including Kiefer Sutherland) but it is as though he is genuinely sorry to see the things that his characters are doing to themselves and others this time around. But maybe that is to be expected. In the face of obliteration empathy is all we have. 

31 Days Of Horror: Day 4: Fright Night Part II

Seeing the original Fright Night at The Aero’s horrorthon last year was one of the most pleasant surprises I had at a movie last year. I was somehow all but virtually ignorant of the horror classic in all but the broadest strokes. This despite the film being so far down my alley that it was practically breaking into my house to steal shit.

Yet I was still skeptical about seeking out the sequel. This after all was not just any sequel but an Eighties Sequel. And it’s a general rule of them that an eighties sequel is going to be beat for beat like the original, expect a lot less enjoyable. I mean we are talking about a sub classification of film that requires the line of dialogue “I can’t believe this is happening… AGAIN!!!” to appear in nearly every single one of its entries.

But the lure of 35 mm and The Alamo Drafthouse proved too straong, and I ended up seeing Fright Night Part II with a crowd better and more primed for the film than the ones who sat through the film in 1988.

I wasn’t exactly wrong about what Fright Night Part II would be, but there was a surprising amount of fun to be had to it. Once expectations had been suitably lowered. Fright Night Part 2 takes place three years later with Charlie Brewster just getting out of a stay at a mental institute and into college. In this time period he’s been convinced that vampires don’t exist (This is more than a little hard to swallow, but it’s another staple of eighties sequels. If you’re going to repeat everything again you have to reduce everything back to square one). This gets tricky when wouldn’t you know it, a bunch of Vampires move into Charlie’s neighborhood and start stalking him and Peter Vincent.

This time it’s a posse of Vampires, (They’ve also brought along a ghoul and a werewolf played by ultimate 80’s genre character actor Jon Gries) and unlike the suave, urbane, Chris Sarandon they are totally 80’s. You have no idea how unintimidating a vampire on rollerblades is until you actually see it.

But it is fun to watch William Ragsdale and Roddy McDowell deal with it again, their chemistry intact (The film does suffer from the absence of Amanda Bearse whose quintessential girl next door performance added a lot to the film. Though her replacement is appealing as well.)  McDowell in particular gets one extremely fine moment where he gets to articulate his reason for being to the incredulous patrons of a dingy bar. It may not justify the movie in and of itself, but it goes a long way towards doing so.

The film also carries over the top notch practical gore and monster effects from its predecessors. There’s no getting around the fact that Fright Night Part II is just a fun movie to look at on a very basic level.

Watching Fright Night II is like clammering onto a carnival spookhouse at the midstate fair for the second time. It’s predictable, more than a little cheesy and you know every beat before it arrives. But there’s still some fun to be had. Albeit not nearly as much as you did the first time around.  

31 Days Of Horror: Day 3: The Roost

It’s always a tricky business to go back and what the early films of a director you admire. On one hand you have to be careful not to simply give the movie a pass because of your foreknowledge of what the filmmaker would accomplish, on the other hand its not exactly fair to expect the work of prodigy on a low budget, “We have one take for most of this” Film. You have to try to watch the film with the question “Would this have impressed me if I didn’t know who made it.” Firmly in mind.

Honestly, I don’t know if I would have been all that impressed with The Roost had I walked into it blind. But in the context of Ti West’s career it’s an interesting watch. Displaying lots of raw talent and personality in what is a fairly haphazard film.

From the beginning, The Roost shows West as a director deeply attuned to horror’s past. He frames The Roost as part of an introductory horror show called “Frightmare” with Tom Noonan playing the horror host in a wrap around that telegraphs “My cut of the movie did not make my contractually obligated eighty minutes.” While its always fun to see this stuff, and it draws a connection with his later work the Frightmare material is problematic. On one hand Tom Noonan, which is never a bad thing. On the other hand, it just is so damn unmotivated, not to mention the fact that it allows for a moment that just screams “I’ve just seen Funny Games” and not in a good way and then let’s West end his movie with the exact same jump scare twice in a row.

The rest of the movie follows a car full of twenty somethings on their way to a wedding. They end up stuck on an abandoned country road where they are attacked by bats with a virulent strain of rabies (or something damn close) that ends up infecting them. Hijinks ensue. The concept speaks well of West and his ambition, there are enough challenges for a young filmmaker to deal with without having to wrangle a horde of real, puppet and CGI bats. The fact that

The Roost is surprisingly effective in some places, surprisingly clumsy in other. There are several great moments of tension, a few great shots (including one of an old man walking up to a barn that could come right from the pages of EC) and a couple of great Ti West patented “We know something the characters don’t” beats. But like I said, this is obviously the work of a growing filmmaker. Though West showcases his austere patient style in some places in others he relies on the type of shakycam antics that would never really be seen in one of his films again. He overplays his hand in a couple of corny moments to (At one point the moon turns red! Blood Red I Tells Ya!) In one hilarious moment when switching locations West cuts to a black screen with a giant red NEARBY written on it, for no other reason then the fact that he apparently believes that basic film grammar is beyond our ken.

So perhaps it would be to much to say that The Roost is an auspicious beginning, but it is a beginning with potential. That in itself doesn’t mean much, there are few commodities cheaper than potential. But West capitalized on his, and if The Roost is nothing else than the film that got the ball rolling then it’s well worth a place in any horror fan’s heart. 

31 Days Of Horror: Day 2: Livid

Let us pretend that one fortuitous day Dario Argento woke up and was hit on the head with a coconut. This coconut hit had the happy effect of reversing an early hit to the head with a coconut that occurred some years earlier right after post production on Opera and thus Gilligan’s Island style Argento reverted back to his old self and remembered how to make a fucking film. It is not unfeasible that he would go on to make something very like Livid.

Livid was by far the film with the most mixed reaction at Fantastic Fest. The people who loved it fell head over heels with it, the people who hated it didn’t just hate it, they wanted you to know that they hated it. Unmotivated exclamations of “Boy did I hate Livid!!” could be heard far and wide throughout The Drafthouse Lobby.

By all rights I should have been one of them. I don’t think much of the so called French New Wave of horror, including the directors previous film Inside (Livid itself takes a very funny and effective swipe at the “killer kids” films that have popped up in the movement like weeds in the wake of Them.) But Livid is something truly different. You can count me on the loved it (or at least liked it a whole lot) side of the equation. Though I have to admit that the extreme polarization on this film is confusing to me. Walking into the film after hearing the advanced word I was expecting some sort of actively aggressive anti-narrative to rival The Holy Mountain.

Instead Livid seems to be deliberately simple. Some things happen in it that “don’t make sense” to be sure, but they don’t make sense (or perhaps a better way to phrase it is they make deeper sense) in the way a fairytale or a dream does. Last Year At Marienbad this is not.

Livid follows a young girl who is spending two weeks volunteering as a nurse. She is taken to the home of an elderly woman in a coma. There is something of an urban legend about the woman, who was once a famous dancer, a rumor that she hid a great treasure in her home. When she mentions this to her doofus working class boyfriend he of course gets very excited and plans to rob the house along with his equally doofus friend. Though the girl first resists, she’s dealing with pressures of her own and decides to go along with the break in.

So far so simple, but once our trio makes it into the house things become a little less so. It quickly becomes apparent that things in the house play by different rules, and as they venture deeper and deeper into its dark heart the consequences grow more and more exacting. It’s a great haunted house movie Livid builds an atmosphere of decay, dread and unease that is all its own, with twisted imagery and horrific implications. It builds a feeling of such originality in fact that it is disappointing when in its final bend, to see it sell itself short both in concept (“We don’t know just what these people are that’s unsettling… Oh wait no turns out they’re vampires.”) and imagery (including those damn killer kids that the movie so effectively satirized early). These and a few other flaws (there’s an early encounter in the house that I’m pretty sure would make any sentient individual shit their britches that the kids just brush off) knock Livid down from great to pretty darn good.

Oh well, C’est La Vi, as the countrymen say. Livid might not be perfect but it’s awful damn good, which sets it far above the majority of its competition. It’ll stay with you. 

31 Days Of Horror: Day 1: The Innkeepers

It’s a bit of a tradition for me to kick off 31 Days Of Horror with a personal favorite. A film that sums up what I find so invigorating about the horror genre as a whole. I am pleased to be able to continue this tradition with the fourth (yikes!) year of 31 Days Of Horror, albeit with a film that has not yet seen its official release.

Rest assured, I’m not worried that I’m being premature admitting The Innkeepers into my own personal canon so early. So much of what Ti West does can be seen as a direct reaction against what the rest of horror is doing and God bless him for it. He’s coming up in a generation of horror filmmakers for who story, character, actual investment are all tertiary concerns. West realizes that they are all that matter. It’s no hyperbole to say that with The Innkeepers Ti West has made a film that is exactly what I want in a horror movie.

The Innkeepers follows two employees of a run down hotel which is soon to face demolition. The hotel is supposedly haunted and the two have been playing at ghost hunting as a hobby to pass the time for a while. But now with the place shutting its doors permanently and taking advantage of a nearly empty house, they decide to pull out all the stops.

The first third of the movie is relaxed, funny. Like West’s other films it’s a definite slow burn and once again the chorus of Mountain Dew addled attention spans will probably dislike the film. Fuck ‘em. It’s all to a piece, The Innkeepers is intensely character driven horror, West allows us to grow as comfortable with the characters as they are with each other. He is, of course, aided by the performers Sara Paxton, who is as cute as two buttons, and Pat Healy who’s sardonic and bitterly funny without feeling stock. The two have a report that doesn’t for a moment feel forced.

The Innkeepers is a deceptively organic movie. It only feels conversational; in reality West has made an artfully constructed movie, slowly building his tension, only seeming to disperse it with a few big laughs. He creates an atmosphere of day lit horror, casting everything under sickly fluorescents, though he is more than able at opening up a carnivorous pit of Lewtonesque shadow.

Narratively West is in complete control adding just the perfect touch of ambiguity to the proceedings. He gives you the answer to every question, but he does not answer every question for you. A crucial distinction. West has the rare ability for a horror filmmaker to use fear as metaphor without overplaying his hand. Without giving too much away, he plays very knowingly with the idea of “service industry hell.” Of the frustration at being stuck in a dead end job “forever” of never being able to “move on.” An anxiety I find all too relatable. But it’s not overpowering, it never calls attention to itself. West puts it on the table and leaves it there for you to take or leave. It’s a grace note among many, uninsistant.

There are a few minor issues with the film. As affective as House Of The Devil was, it’s easy to forget that it didn’t really show all that much that was supernatural (Aside from “Grandma” and that’s arguable). In the Innkeepers he does and one gets the feeling that West is not yet a hundred percent comfortable doing so. Don’t get me wrong there’s some horrific imagery here (which I am not going to spoil) but the most effective supernatural imagery is the imagery that looks the least supernatural. It’s certainly not a big deal; it just makes West the latest director to fall victim to hundred Foot Bug Syndrome. No matter how terrible the hundred foot tall bug is at least he wasn’t a thousand foot bug.  Still it speaks well of West that though his imagery is merely scary, his implications are horrifying.

Another problem is that West got a steadicam this time out and you can see he’s really excited about it. There are about half a dozen sweeping, unmotivated shots, which wouldn’t be such a big deal if they didn’t stick out so noticeably with West’s austere, classical style. Imagine The Haunting with a day of second unit done by Sam Raimi. Similarly problematic is the subplot involving a psychic staying at the hotel. Kelly McGillis does a great job in the role and she is necessary for the delivery of a pretty crucial piece of exposition. But at the Q&A after the film West mentioned that he wanted to make a horror film in which the characters were “unequipped” to be in a horror film and McGillis breaks that tone. 

These are really just quibbles though. They do nothing to diminish the film as a whole.

Like House Of The Devil, scratch that more so than House Of The Devil, the pleasures of the film are modest ones. I don’t mean that as a criticism, far from it. If you come into The Innkeepers expecting big special effects, and moments of ultra violence you will be disappointed. If all horror is to you is a lightshow with prosthetics and stage blood you will be disappointed.

But if you are like me. If you see horror as an expression of something deep and pure. If you appreciate a film that gnaws on you rather than revealing all its secrets at once, than I believe that you will love The Innkeepers as much as I do. 

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So that's the kick off for 31 Days Of Horror I think it's going to be a great year. 

Please be sure to check out my friends at On The Stick who are running a 31 Days Of Videogame Horror over on their website. I'll be guesting there myself a few times this month, I'll be sure to provide some links. 

Also I did another guest podcast with my buddy Jose Cruz over at his great new blog Mephisto's Castle, we talk about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 a film that as you know I have a good amount of affection for. Hope you enjoy. 

Last but not least, I've updated Son Of Danse Macabre with two articles since we've parted one on Horror In Videogames, the other on Horror In Comics. Be sure to tell me what I've missed so I can catch it in the second draft.. 

There's going to be lots of great stuff this October, I'm  turning over my inReads articles to the forces of darkness too. So for the month of October expect an embarrassment of riches. Let's just hope I can survive it. 

My Reaction To The Cleveland Game

That was the greatest terrible game I've ever watched. 

I shouldn't be this elated over such an ugly win and such a terrible game but I can't help it. 

Colt McCoy showed he's a true Browns QB by only realizing that there was a game going on in the last fourth quarter. I mean this as a complement somehow. Seriously, it was like watching Kosar play. 

Pulling a win without Hillis was a big big deal for us, no matter how ugly. 

I was in a Texas bar with about a hundred ex patriot Browns fans, I've never been in a sports situation so intense. That whole last five minutes of the game, that last drive was just an adrenaline high, and then when it looked like we might lose anyway... Jesus.. Group hugs cheering the whole ten yards I love Cleveland fans. 

For the first time in five years I have hope.


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It's going to be a bit quiet here until 31 Days Of Horror starts. There might be one more pre October treat, but I've got Fantastic Fest down here in Austin, and I think I'm going to take the oppurtunity to get a few reviews in the reserve. 


Until then here's a piece I did for SODM on Horror In Videogames. There might be one more pre October Treat, but just in case I'll see you guys on the first. 

Super

Super is the sort of film where you spend a good chunk of the runtime starring at the screen aghast at what you are seeing. How much you will enjoy the film is directly related to how much you enjoy said experience of gaping in horror. 

This is something that audiences have had a chance to do at the theater a lot lately. While it’s easy to be numbed by such calculated taboo pushing, it would be a mistake to lump Super in with its inferior brethren. Troma trained James Gunn is genuinely sick and I hope he never gets well. Unlike say Machete, Kick Ass or Hobo With A Shotgun, whose over the top mayhem and self aware style gave audiences an easy out, Super has the balls to actually play its concept straight. It does not even have the decency to leer at the horrible things that it puts on screen. Instead presenting them with a matter of factness that is almost unbearable. The film never winks, even when its hero is being mind raped by God (You read that correctly). This is not a film that is interested in letting you off the hook.

The film follows Rainn Wilson as a loser whose life of “humiliation and disgrace” has been marked by “two perfect moments.” The first when he married his wife, the second when he pointed a cop in the right direction of a fleeing criminal. When drug dealer Kevin Bacon (Who I have to admit I find kind of irresistible now that he has embraced his inner sleazebag) steals his wife away Wilson snaps. After what he believes to be a rather forceful moment of divine inspiration he decides to follow his true calling. Smashing people in the skull with a pipe wrench for offenses which range from Child Molestation to cutting in line. Each offense receives the same amount of pipe wrench.

All credit has to go to Wilson for finding the movie’s tricky tone. There is something about Wilson’s dead eyed bewildered stare that is genuinely unsettling. He elevates Super above the one note joke it could have been and gives it its own sort of queasy power. When asked by one criminal if he thinks “Stabbing me to death is going to change the world?” he responds, “I won’t know unless I try.” And that sort of sums up the whole film.

Gunn brings the same zealous conviction to every frame of the movie. If there’s one thing that Gunn has taken from Troma it’s the ability to make you legitimately unsure how far he is going to take things, there’s something legitimately filthy, deranged and dangerous to Super that makes other films of its ilk look sanitized. Helped immensely by his game cast. Which includes the aforementioned Kevin Bacon and old hand Michael Rooker.  Ellen Page makes the most out of her role as Wilson’s sociopathic sidekick and it is perhaps the film’s ultimate accomplishment that it makes sex with Ellen Page look like a legitimately terrifying experience.

This is not a film for everybody and I have a feeling that many of the people who the film is for will walk away from it actually angry. I think that’s a great thing. You watch as someone falls to the ground and starts having a seizure thanks to a pipe wrench related skull fracture. Your shocked laugh catches in your throat and you’re unable to look away.