After Lucia (Después de Lucía, 2012)

Director/Screenwriter: Michel Franco

By Marilyn Ferdinand

For those of us who were raised on lighthearted boy-and-his-dog/girl-and-her-horse films and cuddly Disney forest creatures, our first sight of a lion taking down a young gazelle on a TV series like Nature is likely to be a terrible shock. How cruel! Well, not exactly. The lion needs to live, too, and nature has seen fit to equip her with the ability to sprint, claw, and bite; the gazelle has speed and endurance to help level the playing field, so generally only the young or the old gazelles are eaten, leaving the healthiest and most sexually mature animals to continue the species.

Human beings are animals, too, and exhibit all the same bestial instincts to mate, tend to our young, flee from danger, and so on. However, human beings also have advanced thinking capabilities that can overcome our basic survival instincts; consider the sacrifices people make, even unto death, to help others. Nonetheless, in many ways, the way we arrange our social structures reveals the beast in us, particularly in our hierarchical pecking orders that depend inordinately upon those at the top to govern our human affairs wisely and embrace our advanced thinking abilities to care for all members of the society.

After Lucia, winner of the Un Certain Regard and Silver Hugo awards at Cannes and Chicago, respectively, takes a grim look at the workings of a pecking order among a group of teens from a prosperous area of Mexico City and how an infraction of the group’s rules leads to rapidly escalating, unconscionable bullying. Many American critics have found the severity of the hazing unbelievable, but I believe this reaction reflects the American tendency to draw a curtain quickly around unpleasant truths, develop positively spun marketing campaigns to pretend that something is being done, and then go back to business as usual. Mexicans appear to have more of an appetite for the lurid and an unblinkered acceptance of darkness in the world, with a particular appreciation for the animalistic underpinnings of human existence. The unflinching approach Michel Franco takes to machismo and human conflict, the plight of the vulnerable, and the archetypal pairing of sex and death makes After Lucia something of a horror masterpiece.

Alejandra (Tessa Ía) is an ordinary teenager from privileged circumstances who is dealing with the death of her mother in a car accident from which she escaped unharmed. Her father Roberto (Hernán Mendoza) wears his grief like sack cloth; in the opening scene, he very carefully drives the repaired car away from the mechanic’s after listening to what sounds like a rebuild rather than a repair and then simply abandons the car in the middle of the road and walks out of his life in Puerto Vallarta to start over with Alejandra somewhere else. Roberto, a chef, struggles to stay focused enough to open a new restaurant; when he walks out on the enterprise at one point, it is Ale who takes charge and makes him go back and get on with it. Almost miraculously, Ale has been brought into the cool-kid clique at her new school by its alpha male, José (Gonzalo Vega Sisto), and seems to be getting along just fine.

Unfortunately, Ale makes a fatal error when she is invited to a weekend party at a posh home. She gets drunk and lets José record them having sex on his cellphone. The video circulates online, arousing the jealousy of the girl who thinks José is her boyfriend. Soon, the taunting emails and physical abuse begin, the boys calling her a whore and exposing themselves to her, and the girls dressing her up like a hooker and cutting her hair off. She doesn’t tell her father or the school authorities about what is happening to her. She just disappears into the shell of her own misery and eventually, just disappears during a mandatory school trip to Vera Cruz.

After Lucia explores some very interesting aspects of human behavior, in general, and the social order of teens, in particular. It seems that Ale understands well the tendency of teens to attack the weak rather than to show understanding. For example, she is careful not to reveal too much about her background, saying only that her mother is back in Puerto when her new friends wonder if her parents will go ballistic when they find out she has failed a mandatory drug test at school. She is a person who contains her emotions by nature, but she also doesn’t want to be seen as having any defect, and having only one parent would pose a status problem for her. She hides the abuse she is suffering not only to keep her father’s fragile equilibrium and, more important, temper under control, but also to prevent the abuse from getting worse. When it can’t get any worse, she goes into an emotional coma, uncaring about what happens to her father or her tormenters. We want her to lash out, be sensible, but a young ego is extremely delicate and the centers of reason have not yet matured.

The horror aspects of the story have to do with punishment for having sex. Ale becomes the target for bullies, it seems, for sleeping with another girl’s boyfriend, but it really isn’t as simple as all that. Her tormenters focus on her sexual conduct and use sexual and physical humiliation to punish her for losing control. It is never revealed who sent the video around, as the cellphone was left in the bathroom for anyone to pick up, but suspicion rightly falls on José, who can prove his machismo, attack the girl who lays a claim to him he doesn’t want, and humiliate the new girl he brought into the group in the first place. It is even possible he befriended her with this ulterior motive in mind. One only has to think of the torment and murder of the character of Juanita, a newcomer to Cuidad Juárez, in Backyard to see a familiar dynamic at play. The disposability of strangers, the acceptance of brutality against women that women collude in to maintain the pecking order, and the fragility of the male ego, which demands violent retribution, all come into play in After Lucia. The film, particularly the last scene, is very reminiscent of the feral behavior and shockingly matter-of-fact violence captured so heartbreakingly by Luis Buñuel in his 1950 classic Los Olvidados.

The film shows a fine attention to detail and expert use of indirect narrative to communicate the events of the story. That first scene, which only hints at the tragic death of Lucia, comes graphically into focus as Ale remembers the details as she swims obsessively to relieve her stress. Conversations occur in the distance, out of earshot, leaving us helpless in the foreground to imagine whatever plot, or horrors, we like. The cinematography of Chuy Chávez takes in the beauty and modernity of this set of people, contrasting the savagery that emerges from it without the pressures of physical survival that make comparison by some with Lord of the Flies erroneous. Although many commentaries focus on how difficult this film is to watch, I actually found Franco’s style discreet, offering enough distance to allow me to view the film to the end and, therefore, see the full realization of his vision. Much more difficult was taking in the incompletely suppressed emotions Ía and Mendoza express with their brave, committed performances.

People who see After Lucia may use it to start a dialogue about bullying and the need for open communication between parents and children. I think that’s just fine. But this is no afterschool special. The issues it raises go to the very heart of the psychic minefield of sex and the human pecking order, as well as the depths of depravity and violence to which the id unchecked by human reason can sink. After Lucia will shake you up and never let go.

I Tre Volti della Paura (aka The Three Faces of Fear; Black Sabbath; 1963)

Director/Coscreenwriter: Mario Bava

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies

By Roderick Heath

Mario Bava is a name to conjure with amongst lovers of horror cinema today, after an interregnum when his brand had waned and he was remembered only by film scholars and the directors who ripped him off. His lush, visually symphonic work in the horror field did not just bridge eras in the genre’s evolution, but actively affected it. Bava oversaw both the great revival of the Gothic horror style, thanks to his rescue job on Riccardo Freda’s I Vampiri (1956), which beat both Hammer Studios and Roger Corman to the mark of sparking that style, and continued with Bava’s proper debut La Maschera del Demonio (1960). Bava however also oversaw that revival’s wane, and its displacing by a new style of horror, one which Bava essentially invented, based in more modern conventions, codes, and tropes. This would become known as the giallo movie. In the wake of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), which gave contemporary horror an electric relevance, Bava first compiled the giallo style in 1963’s La Ragazza che Sapeva Troppo and its brilliant follow-up Sei Donne Per l’Assassino (1964). Where the Gothic genre was historical, rooted in intensely psychologised images and long-settled figurations representing threat – ghosts, vampires, werewolves – the giallo was stylised according to the shape and rhythm of a less superstitious but equally paranoid contemporary landscape, reconceiving threat as a lurking, masked, gloved killer out to attack and annihilate beauty and complacency. Gothic was rooted in Victorian literary and folk-tale traditions; giallo came from pulp literature, modern art, and urban myth. Giallo latched onto the sorts of figures beloved of trashy newspapers and which seemed to have devolved along with the modern urban world – sex killers, heavy breather phone callers, alienated misogynists, and murderous anarchists. 

I Tre Volti della Paura feels like a pivotal movie for Bava, not simply in that its English-language title, Black Sabbath, inspired the name of the prototypical heavy metal band and thus gave it a higher measure of fame than any other Bava work, but because it’s an omnibus movie that allowed Bava to offer variations on new and old horror aesthetics. This analytical presumption contrasts not simply their disparate preoccupations and lexicons, both visual and thematic, but also their shared roots and mutual, closely related power. Bava’s film tells three stories adapted from Anton Chekhov, Howard Snyder, and Alexei Tolstoy, a disparate triumvirate of names and modes of storytelling, ordered depending on which version you’re watching of the film, the Italian or the foreign release cut. The Italian cut commences with The Telephone, from a Snyder story, moves on to The Wurdalak, from Tolstoy, and concludes with Chekhov’s The Drop of Water. The first is clearly an exercise in giallo nerve-wracking, whilst the second is ripe Gothicism, and the third represents a distinct tradition but also presents a curious melding of the two, apt in adapting Chekhov, a writer with old-world class partly veiling a very modern, ironic mind. The horror genre has, over the years, seen more omnibus and portmanteau films than any other genre I can think of, from Paul Leni’s Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (1924), up to this year’s V/H/S. This seems a by-product of the type of story the genre works well with, minimal mood-pieces where sometimes complication despoils the form’s inherent qualities, and the powerful literary tradition of short eerie fiction. Bava’s work came in the wake of Corman’s Tales of Terror (1961) and anticipated Kobayashi’s Kaidan (1964), the multi-director fancies of Histoires Extraordinaires de Edgar Allen Poe (1967), and Milton Subotsky’s series of Amicus films, but unlike most others Bava resists mixing the bag in tone or intent too much, and each episode vibrates with concerted near-perfection.

I Tre Volti della Paura often seems aware of its place as a bridging point of old and new, and certainly Bava keeps glancing over his shoulder at both his own style’s roots, and that of the genre. He signals this most clearly by taking advantage of having Boris Karloff as a star, offering him in a prologue and epilogue as a good-humoured master of ceremonies, warning the audience about vampires who might be sitting next to them – “Vampires go to the movies too!” – and imbuing the film with a self-evident link to the heyday of Hollywood horror. Karloff’s stature as a horror star had taken him through three distinct waves in the genre’s evolution, from James Whale to Val Lewton to Corman and Bava. Karloff’s jests in the bookends suggest an extension to his salutary self-mockery in Corman’s The Raven the same year, and yet his actual role in this film, in The Wurdalak, is serious in a severe and classical fashion. The Telephone, particularly in its Italian version, is remarkable for its concise summary of the underpinnings and methodology of the giallo style. The set-up is simple: a woman alone is terrorised by an unseen threat and a taunting voice on the phone. It’s one of the hoariest of modern genre variants, one that easily turns dull and repetitive in lesser hands, and yet Bava’s version is the ür-text, crisp in its execution and telling in its supple feints and clever miscues. 

The woman here is Rosy (Michele Mercier), a gorgeous young trollop who arrives home one evening, strips down, and gets ready for bed, only to start receiving phone calls. At first the caller does not answer her plaintive demands to know who they are and what they want, and then finally the raspy mystery man begins to taunt her with threats of rape and murder, before slipping a newspaper cutting under her front door. The cutting suggests the caller is a former boyfriend of hers, Frank Rainer (Milo Quesada), who has since gone to jail and now escaped. The caller seems to know everything she does, and Bava privileges the audience to a glimpse of malignant peering eyes through a window blind. Rosy, distraught and told if she calls the police then the killer will come in and finish her off, instead phones up her former lover Mary (Lydia Alfonsi) and begs her to come over. Mary arrives and after soothing her fears ends up sleeping with her, but as Bava has already revealed, Mary is in fact the source of the phone calls – a pretext in her desire to get back with Rosy. But as Mary writes a confession to leave for Rosy to read in the morning, the real Rainer enters the apartment and sneaks up on Mary, assuming she is Rosy.

The Telephone is a masterpiece of compact storytelling, unfolding with Bava’s illustrative intelligence whilst accepting distinct formal restrictions. The lesbian twist to the episode, carefully fudged in the English-language version, gives it a darker and deeper emotional punch than would otherwise offer, making Mary’s malfeasance a keener manifestation of emotional jealousy and longing worked out through a sadistic ploy, and staking the tale in a game of reversing roles. Mary pretends to be Rainer and Rainer mistakes Mary for Rosy, the man and woman swapping parts in their desire to possess/destroy Rosy’s fecund but independent sexuality, but finally only helping destroy each-other. This element plugs into the contemporary anxiety over sexuality and changing social mores overtaking traditional morality which would give the giallo genre so much of its bite, albeit often with reactionary overtones. Only a couple of years after Fellini offered arch queer caricatures in La Dolce Vita (1960), Bava treats this element with beguiling matter-of-factness, carefully depicting Mary as driven by angry desire to duplicitous means, eyeing Rosy’s fancy rooms and wondering out loud who pays for it all. The suggestion is that Rosy has often used her as her emotional comfort whilst working her way through men who could help her financially. Mary’s bitterness at being thrown over is then all too palpable, and it’s clear that Rainer, a dangerous criminal, was one of those men. Bava’s usual punitive moralism, often even stricter than his own hero Alfred Hitchcock, is apparent as all three characters pay a steep price for their transgressions, with Rosy left alive at the end as perhaps the worst punishment of all as the victims of her romantic life lie quite literally sprawled on the floor.

At the same time, Mary’s gamesmanship replicates on a narrative level the fundamental dynamic of Bava’s direction, a reduction of drama to the act of looking, watching, hypnotised by the pure spectacle as Bava stokes Rosy’s fear with pseudo-erotic sadism, the unseen watcher/caller standing in for the camera, director, audience, willing the game to go further, deeper, and climax with orgasmic act of murder. But like his successor Dario Argento in his early work, Bava enjoys disrupting the expectations about whose viewpoint the terror represents, evoking polymorphic underpinnings to a nominally simple exploitation of phobias of sex and death: it’s like Sartre’s No Exit reconfigured as chamber piece horror. The Telephone charts Bava’s precise awareness of just how long to string along the situation, offering his key revelations, like the staring eyes behind the blind and the identity of the caller, with seemingly casual yet actually precise and forceful cuts and camera moves as if following a thread to the heart of the labyrinth. He sustains dread in the meantime with the resolute build of shots around Mercier’s terrific performance, with each new call causing a distinct mounting of tension manifest in Rosy. Whilst the pace of editing builds, the telephone itself turns in an object of adversarial power – it’s coloured red and black, looking forward to the red telephone receiver that dangles as the evocation of severed lives and ruined loves at the end of Sei Donne per l’Assassino. The Telephone sees Bava at once defining the basic principles of giallo for the future – peering eyes, gloved hands, wickedly shining knives, isolation, paranoia, the fetishistic delight in the image of a terrified woman – whilst also looking back to Hitchcock’s immediate influence. He executes the story within one room, recalling Rope (1948) and Rear Window, particularly the latter with its emphasis on voyeurism; the eyes behind the blind evoke Psycho (1960), whilst Bava mimics a singular shot from The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) as he performs a delicate camera move around Rosy, as she listens to an unfolding nightmare on the telephone. A climactic shot of Rainer sneaking up on Mary with an appropriated stocking clearly appropriates from Dial M For Murder (1954).

Which is not to say Bava’s filmmaking is imitative, but simply paying nods where they’re due, whilst also presenting his own stylistic brilliance, his sense of colour and composition and genius for fluidic, sensuous camera movement, and these qualities permeate the whole of I Tre Volti della Paura. The Wurdalak, the second and most elaborate episode, is a miniature epic that offsets the contemporary vision of private hells in The Telephone with a more traditional version. Bava’s penchant for the folkish eccentricities of the Slavic ghost story canon had already seen him loosely adapt Gogol’s ‘The Vij’ for La Maschera del Demonio, and The Wurdalak like that film takes place in a netherworld version of Eastern Europe, with sonorous location shots fleshing out perhaps Bava’s a beautifully crafted exercise in gothic horror. Freda, Bava, Sergio Leone and others of their breed were always expected to make their films look like the popular and commercially dominant English-language genre films in their fields, and even as they began to distort the results towards their own interests they paid lip-service to this necessity: here Bava pays clear nods to Corman by importing the stolidly handsome star of his House of Usher (1960), Mark Damon, to play a variation on his role there as an outmatched ingenue locked in a battle with his lover’s very identity. The set-up has distinct resemblances to several of Corman’s Poe-derived or inspired cycle, as Damon’s Count Vladimir d’Urfe takes on the role of archetypal Wanderer, in a vaguely identified, eerily depopulated land where peculiar social assumptions and menacing activities permeate the onerous scenery. The Count discovers a headless corpse on a riverbank with a distinctive knife in the heart. Vladimir straddles the corpse across his horse and carries it to the nearest house, where he discovers a family living in cowering anxiety and expectation, and he’s confronted by Giorgio (Glauco Onorato) who recognises his own father’s knife as the one Vladimir has removed from the body. 

When Vladimir leads Giorgio outside to inspect the body, it proves to have mysteriously vanished, only to turn up a short distance away, being stabbed through the heart with punitive relish by Giorgio’s brother Pietro (Massimo Righi). Somehow this discovery is actually more unnerving than the corpse’s reanimation would have been, the sight of the headless remnant being stabbed with a need for certainty commingling with the impossibility of ever truly killing the spectre of fear, heightening the atmosphere of hysteria that builds in the forty or so minutes of The Wurdalak’s running time. The corpse, it’s explained to Vladimir, was that of Alibeq, a Turkish bandit who had terrorised the region and who was rumoured to also be a vampire-like wurdalak. Their father Gorca (Karloff) had gone out days earlier to find and kill the enemy after he had murdered the clan’s foreman, but left behind a mysterious entreaty that they should kill him in turn, if he turned up more than five days after departing, a timespan which happens to run out at midnight, for that would mean that he would certainly be a wurdalak too by then. As the family waits fearfully for the appointed hour, Vladimir’s is drawn to Gorca’s stunningly beautiful daughter Sdenka (Susy Andersen). As midnight ticks by, Gorca appears, haggard and alternately fierce and strangely unctuous in his manner, displaying Alibeq’s head which he’s been carrying around with him, a strikingly iconic image of a man who’s given into savage nature even in attempting to annihilate it. His fearful children know they should obey his previous statement, and yet can’t bring themselves to. In the night, as Pietro is left to keep watch, Gorca begins moving about the house, claiming Ivan, the child of Giorgio and his wife Maria (Rika Dialina), and leaving Pietro for dead. 

One of Bava’s distinctive traits as a filmmaker was his ruthlessly clear understanding of the basic underpinnings of the dark fantasies he was engaged in depicting, and just as La Maschera del Demonio expanded intelligibly on the schismatic yet eternally conjoined images of Madonna and whore, and Sei Donne Per l’Assassino would contend with the urge to exterminate beauty if it could not be possessed, The Wurdalak anticipates Operazione Paura (1966) and Lisa e il Diavolo (1973) as Bava’s inwardly spiralling meditations on the encaging horror that can be family identity. Here the poisoned patriarch Gorca, who had gone out to do battle with the marauding villain, comes back as the force of evil he had sought to exterminate, and swiftly causes his clan to fall victim to it, complete with clear overtones of paedophilia and incest as he singles out young Ivan and snatches him away into the night, and the net draws tighter around Sdenka even as Vladimir begs her to escape with him. Images in Operazione Paura of evil lurking outside windows, peering in on the warm and contented with baleful intent to feed on that land of life, are prefigured here, as the household eats itself from the inside out. What’s most striking and pathologically precise about The Wurdalak is its pitilessly unsentimental view of sentiment, one which plainly prefigures the similar brute logic that George Romero would examine in his best films, a tension between emotional reflex and survivalist necessity.

This tilt on the familiar dramatic necessities of fighting evil examines the way people can behave in illogical ways when their lives are at stake and disturbing facts are plainly apparent, but their taboos and intensely entrenched prejudices and loyalties, no matter how retrograde or ignorant of other concerns, have been internalised so completely that they demand people act in contrary ways. Thus Bava shows the clan destroyed by its blindness to anything but its own hermetic nature, in a pungent metaphor for this schism: the sons cannot obey the father’s own advice and destroy him, and Giorgio’s wife murders her husband when he tries to prevent her letting in their plainly vampirized son, who seems to come wandering out of the frigid night to scratch at the door (anticipating memorable moments in Tobe Hooper’s spin on Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, 1979). Many a young lover has often felt like they’re trying to extract the one desirable member from a family of monsters, and Vladimir struggles to convince Sdenka to flee with him as she believes she must stay with her family for loyalty’s sake even as they all expire. Although Vladimir does finally convince Sdenka to leave, the delay is fatal, for the clan are able to catch up with them. In a brilliant depiction of the inescapable nature of formative roots, Sdenka is caught between her transformed family members, advancing to claim her in the midst of a ruined church, shambling corpses still obeying their inculcated ideals of clannish behaviour, and ghosts of ancient repressions still overwhelming all good sense in the present. When Vladimir awakens alone, he retraces the path to the Gorca house and finds Sdenka, waiting in all luscious readiness for him to join the family circle.

Interpretative perversities aside, The Wurdalak is visual gothic par excellence, with Bava manipulating both the studio settings and the location shooting to maximum atmospheric effect, conjuring a magnificent, appropriately fairy-tale world of menace, frames teeming with overgrown thorny bushes and misted forests, frosted windows and warm hues of longed-for shelters and sunrises. Indelible images proliferate, like Gorca stalking across the bridge on his way home, the faces of the undead glaring through frosted windows, and young Ivan clawing and weeping at the door, stoking his mother to emotions so desperate she cuts through her husband to get to her son. Bava pulls off one of his most felicitous bits of filmmaking here as he cuts from Giorgio and Maria arguing to the plaintive yet disconcerting image of what they think is their son kneeling with arms spread on the front door, and then cutting back to the sigh of a pair of scissors, daubed in Giorgio’s blood, falling to the floor, the mortally wounded man still crying out to the wife who’s killed him not to open the door for the monster. The deliriousness of Bava’s sci-fi horror riff, Terrore Nello Spazio (1965), is nascent in the saturated colours and dream-like mood. If the last chapter, The Drop of Water, seems comparatively lightweight after the The Wurdalak, it actually represents Bava’s most purely stylistic coup, in the orchestral use of colour, composition, sound, and camera work utilised in compiling a growing sense of unease. 

Operating in a similar mould of isolated anxiety, depicting a woman alone in her apartment afraid of lurking terrors, to The Telephone, The Drop of Water is the story of plebeian, sticky-fingered, hapless nurse Helen Chester (Jacqueline Pierreux), who is called out on a dark and stormy night from her warm abode to attend to her just deceased charge, a reputed but reclusive medium. Distracted and irritable, Helen espies and surreptitiously steals the enticing ring on the corpse’s finger. If The Telephone and The Wurdalak explore two major strands of horror, The Drop of Water exemplifies a third, the morality play where justice, which may be supernatural or might simply be overloaded mental credulity, comes surging from beyond the grave to punish transgression. For Bava, the mechanics of this kind of storytelling are comparatively simplistic, but the elements of class envy and the depiction of property as a maddening and destructive spur look forward to the insidious supernatural class struggle again in Operazione Paura, and the war over the estate that drives the bloodshed of Reazione a Catena (1971). Bava further invests The Drop of Water with overtones of black comedy, through Pierreux’s amusingly exaggerated performance as Helen, and the minute, nuisance-like, yet cumulatively maddening proliferation of difficulties in her attempts at thievery that start to resemble silent comedy. This restrained slapstick has consequences, as these events begin to recur as increasingly dreadful portents of warning after they’ve already suggested the taboo nature of stealing from the dead, building with a rapid but precise relish reminiscent of Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1957), where again the temptation to profitable transgression is met by the corrosive terror of being caught. 

Whilst the episode’s tone sustains impudent humour, Bava still constructs this episode with magisterial craft, contrasting the decaying splendour of the Medium’s mansion and Helen’s flat whilst filling both with resplendent colour effects that communicate moral, corporeal, and spiritual rot, for both places are filled with hues eloquent of decay and slovenly disinterest. Bava’s camera peers into spaces where any manifestation of evil might appear and yet which don’t – until finally they do, or at least the mind, tired of waiting for them to arrive, conjures them itself. Helen’s midnight suffering as she hears dripping water and is tormented by a single, impudent fly, sees her worked up into a pitch of anxiety. Finally the ghoulish visage of her dead charge appears in the shadows, gliding with eerie weightlessly and terrible purpose, her face, distorted as on the deathbed into a gnarled and gruesome leer, is etched in sickly hues of green and red. Helen is found dead the next day, missing the ring. Perhaps the ghost came and claimed it, and yet, as Bava details the guilty face of Helen’s neighbour and zooms in for a last look at Helen’s dead face, now distorted itself into another grim leer, the neighbour has taken the ring, and the roundelay of guilt and fear invoked by this seamy fixation with possession will continue. You can’t take it with you, but you can damn well haunt whoever else thinks it’s theirs.

The title’s cleverness becomes apparent by the end, as the “three faces of fear” refer not only to the trio of spooky stories, but to the cumulative fixation each episode has with a face that encapsulates fear, whether being experienced, as found in Rosy’s or Helen’s sweat-dabbed, tremulous brows, or inspiring it, as in Gorca’s and the Medium’s funereal visages, even coalescing monstrosity and beauty in Sdenka’s enticing final clinch with Vladimir. If, as Jean Renoir once said, the face was the greatest tool at the filmmaker’s disposal, this was Bava’s response, his proof of faith in the gestural power of the human element to invoke the most extreme cinematic emotions. If Sei Donne or Operazione Paura offer complete statements that are ultimately more powerful, I Tre Volti could well be the best produced of Bava’s horror films: the production carries little of the tackiness a lot of even the best Italian genre cinema could never quite escape, and the costuming, lighting, and settings reflect craftsmanship of a rich and delightful sort. Bava’s collaboration with DP Ubaldo Terzano is superlative. This excellence is ironic, as the film finishes up making fun of its own construction, revealing in the climax the tacky charm required to conjure such visions as Karloff, in his Gorca guise, suddenly stops riding the mechanical horse he’s mounted on to jest with the audience, whilst Bava pulls back to reveal crewmen running in circles to create the effect of forest brush whipping by. This jokey epilogue is Bava laughing at his own showmanship and Karloff mocking his own legacy, but not with tiredness or self-contempt, but the knowing winks of great magicians who don’t mind giving the game away if it’s been played well enough. Or perhaps it’s Bava’s answer to his pal Fellini’s inverted study in cinematic creativity released the same year, 8½. Anyway, when it’s all over, it’s not the humour you remember, or the storytelling: it’s that primal image of the Medium’s face, sliding forth out of the darkness, straight out of every childhood nightmare.

The Phantom Carriage (Körkarlen, 1921)

Director/Screenwriter/Actor: Victor Sjöstrom

By Roderick Heath

The Phantom Carriage has a power which almost defies description, a sense of an overwhelming darkness crowding the edges of the frame and corroding the very flesh and spirit of the characters on screen. It’s a tale of damnation, for whatever remains after death but also on earth too, the poison of psychological fear and anger blighting life as surely as the tuberculosis bacilli eat away its protagonists inside out. Light, with all its redemptive promise, radiates by contrast from the centre of frames, burning candles and lamps stranded in the midst of shadowy rooms, and from the face of the benighted Sister Edit (Astrid Holm). Edit lies expiring on New Year’s Eve, desperately begs her mother (Concordia Selander) and fellow Salvation Army worker Maria (Lisa Lundholm) to track down the one soul and body she’s been trying to save more passionately than any other. That is the soul of David Holm (Victor Sjöstrom), a drunken wastrel tracked down not in the hovel where his wife (Hilda Borgström) and children are trying to stave off hunger and cold, but drinking in a graveyard with two vagrants who listen as David recounts with amusement the fate of his old drinking buddy Georges (Tore Svennberg), who was tormented by an anxiety that used to gnaw at him on New Year’s Eve. As the minutes tick towards midnight, David explains Georges’ obsession with a folk myth that whoever died at the stroke of twelve on New Year’s would be a cursed and sinful person, charged with driving the carriage that collects the souls of those who die during the year. And, as ill luck would have it, Georges died one year ago on the very night he feared. After David chases off the Salvation Army worker who tracks him down for Edit, he fights with his two companions, one of whom smashes a bottle over his head. David is left for dead, and Death’s carriage soon comes rolling around.

Victor Sjöstrom’s career in film climaxed famously with his role in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1958). In casting the aged director and actor in his film, Bergman was paying tribute to Sjöstrom’s status as a father of the Swedish film industry, and as an artist to whom Bergman and others, both in Sweden and around the world, owed a lot. In his heyday, Sjöstrom’s gift for portraying psychological drama and capturing tones ranging from fulminating unease to outright hysteria was second to none, and his cinematic experiments were as rich and innovative as anything that would soon follow in Germany, France, and the US. Along with Mauritz Stiller, Sjöstrom was at the front rank of Swedish filmmakers well before the First World War, labouring like many great early directors on dozens of short features as the quintessential forms of cinema began to evolve, and finally with his 1921 hit The Phantom Carriage, Sjöstrom gained an invite to Hollywood, where he made great films, often with Lillian Gish, including The Scarlet Letter (1926) and The Wind (1928). But commercial success began to elude him, and his career essentially waned along with the silent film. Sjöstrom’s passionately visual, rhythmic, intimately composed ideal of cinema was at once highly stylised and fascinatingly realistic, as the director amongst other things helped to bridge early cinema with the Swedish stage and its tradition of dark, neurotic realist spectacle as exemplified by August Strindberg.

Today the horror film, in spite of patchy acceptance by mainstream critics, is still essentially considered a fringe genre. In the first quarter-century of cinema’s existence, however, it was a favourite field for directors who wanted to interrogate the possibilities of the medium, as they contemplated the intrinsic link between the mystery of film’s power and images of mortality, nebulous existence and concrete form. This was true of much important early cinema, including several of Georges Melies’ most striking works, Griffith’s The Avenging Conscience (1914), Murnau’s Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922), Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1919), Wegener’s Der Golem: Wie Er in die Welt Kam (1920), Lang’s Der Muede Tod (1921), Christensen’s Häxan (1922), and Leni’s Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (1924). The Phantom Carriage itself stands up amidst the most beautiful, eerie, and dazzlingly rendered movies of its time. One reason the horror genre, which was hardly a genre at the time and certainly not called that, attracted such a wealth of early talent was that it presented possibilities for experimenting with the kinds of special effects available to early cinema, in a fashion that later sci-fi, action, and fantasy films would invite, as a testing ground for evolutions in technology and the inspiration to use it. Whereas, apart from Tod Browning, it would take European directors working in Hollywood and, more crucially, the advent of the Depression to shock American horror cinema into its first golden age, in Europe a superlative glut of definitive moviemaking in this mould was closely aligned with the stylistic moment of what became known as German Expressionism. The time was in tune, too, for the great flowering of these films came in the period directly following the Great War, a time in which a great hole had been carved in European society, the pall of death was an everyday, invasive reality, and fascination with spiritualism exploded in a world that felt not at all metaphorically haunted.

But not all of these films were clear-cut in their exploitation of this mood, as many depict the birth struggles of modernism, as artists wrestled with remnants of folk traditions and the detritus of cultures going through painful evolutions, trying to reject the dead-weight of past truisms to embrace rationalism, but often rubbing fears raw in that process. Sjöstrom’s film was adapted a novel by 1909’s Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf, and the story is in many ways a familiar piece of post-Victorian abstemious moralism, playing like a darker version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in which a sinner sees the error of his ways through a supernatural encounter. For Sjöstrom, who had been adapting Lagerlöf’s novels regularly thanks to a deal she had made with the studio he worked for, the task was however to retain the complexity of the novel and depict the perverse, dramatically difficult elements onto the screen, precisely at a time when it was becoming clear that film was open to all challenges. The Phantom Carriage becomes a psychological epic about cruelty, fear, and pain, as experienced and exacted by David, an antihero who takes on Dostoyevskian dimensions in his anger at humanity even as he cringes before immutable forces. David, a former carpenter and craftsman, has long since slid into the gutter under the influence of the ironically well-educated Georges, whose habitual cynicism and florid bon vivant postures attracted both David and his younger brother (Einar Axelsson). Georges only ever registered disquiet when New Year’s rolled around and revived the folk tale figuration of the phantom carriage in his thoughts like an annual memento mori.

One of Sjöstrom’s significant flourishes in telling his tale is the complexity of the narrative, refusing to simplify Lagerlof’s storyline, shifting perspectives and offering layers of stories within stories in retracing the paths the key characters have taken to this converging night of fate. Starting with Edit’s plight and then shifting to David and his wayside buddies in the graveyard, Sjöstrom then segues into the past, as David recalls his time with Georges, and through Georges the mythology of the carriage is depicted. This cues a lengthy, sepulchral, superlatively realised sequence depicting the carriage and its hooded, scythe-clutching driver, going about their work. They watch over all varieties of human misery and misfortune, standing by as a plutocrat shoots himself in his immaculate mansion, and plucking the spirits of dead mean just drowned in the sea, the carriage trundling carelessly into the waves and the driver descending to the ocean floor for his prize. It’s easy to recognise the influence of these scenes on Bergman’s figuration of Death for The Seventh Seal (1957) and other elements of the visual design – one shot of the carriage travelling over a hilltop against a cloudy horizon recalls the famous shot of Death leading the dance of the dead that climaxed the Bergman work. Sjöstrom achieves his otherworldly emanations with that simplest and oldest of movie special effects, the double exposure, rendering with stark beauty the scenes of the carriage venturing onto the waves or trundling through the streets, and the spirits of dead wandering and conversing, the human world oblivious to their presence and the dead gazing back at the world they’re cut off from with forlorn impotence.

Yet whilst the film’s pictorial and emotional depictions of oneiric gloom are compelling, Sjöstrom is equally adept at capturing the grubby world its characters inhabit. Lagerglof’s novel had begun life when she was asked to write a treatise on tuberculosis control, but as she worked a narrative came to her with an aspect of social realism mediated by and reconceived through the veils of mysticism and mystery. Sjöstrom answered with its cinematic equivalent: the seamy taverns, fetid flophouses, low-rent apartments, midnight card games, the chilly graveyard, all are depicted with a care worthy of Von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), with which the film shares a subterranean mood of acidic reportage and neurotic intensity. One function that the narrative complexity serves is to give the tale a sense of haziness about the veracity of what is seen: it could all be David’s alcoholic horrors or dazed dream after getting walloped over the head. But it also suggests that such distinctions mean little in the face of how it summarises the struggle, and attraction, between the all-encompassing nihilism of David and the naïve yet powerful altruism of Edit. Caught between them are David’s victimised wife and brother, early casualties, emotionally and morally if not mortally, for David’s rage, and yet also participants in and causes for it. After David and his brother fell in with Georges, David did a short stretch in jail for drunken behaviour, and as he was released, the prison chaplain (Nils Aréhn) revealed to David with brutal condemnation that his brother is now also locked up, but for the far worse crime of killing a man in a drunken brawl: the chaplain stated that he was of the opinion David should be doing the time instead. David, horrified and chastened, returned home to his family, only to find they had left without any idea of where to find them, turning David’s ill feeling into an unshakeable and near-psychopathic misanthropy.

The existential angst of The Phantom Carriage is aligned with the pain of the post-war period, even if made in a country that was neutral during WWI, as it resembles the nightmare prophecies and structure of Abel Gance’s J’Accuse! (1919) which similarly climaxes with visions of the dead rising up, possibly hallucinated but still urgently meaningful. The difference is that the horror of The Phantom Carriage is microcosmic, a study in personal degradation and damage but with a reformist social agenda. And yet the film slips out of such limits: the notion that David travels deeper into his personal nightmare out of wilful determination and anger at the cheap pieties and soft options that leave him adrift in a bleak world, gives The Phantom Carriage more complexity. Sjöstrom imbues it with a hallucinatory unease that captures that mood of midnight agony anyone who’s drunk to forget the day’s pain might recognise. When David arises from his own sprawled, shattered body to be confronted by Georges, who has spent the last year driving the carriage, except for him every night has been “a hundred years”, collecting souls like a tired garbage man clearing away the refuse of human existence. There’s a quality approaching black comedy as the grim figure of death proves to be the middle-aged, familiar Georges, but his rank melancholia and sombre missives quickly diverge into a form of horror that penetrates far deeper than the later genre’s usual stock visions of psychos in masks killing sundry teenagers, asking instead, what are we most afraid of in life and in death? Whilst Georges ushers David away from Edit’s deathbed in telling him that the job of taking her soul belongs to other, presumably more exalted spirits, there’s no sight of better worlds or paradises in this vision, only of the afterlife as a place where people walk or trundle along in stunned misgiving, staring back at the life they’ve lived with awareness that hell is a place humans create for themselves.

Of course Georges tells David that he’s going to take his place as the driver for the next year, and when David protests, George binds him with invisible strands and forces him to accompany him to Edit’s deathbed, where Edit, not yet dead but standing at the edge of permeable reality, can see Georges, and greets him with confusion: “Death…but too early.” Edit has her own crosses to bear. Her mother had begged her fellow Salvation Army workers to ignore her frantic wish to see David before dying because having given up her life to the cause and now doesn’t want her death to be consumed by it too. As Georges stands over Edit’s bed, he explains her situation to David, thus commencing another lengthy flashback as the narrative retreats one year to the same New Year’s when Georges himself died, and David, drunk and sick, barged his way into the new shelter Edit and Maria had set up, and passed out on a bed. Edit set herself to fixing up David’s torn coat, oblivious to the fact that in doing so she was breathing in all the germs on it, including his chronic TB, which she’s expiring from at an accelerated rate. When he awakened, David ripped off the patches she had put on the coat, stating, “I’m used to it this way,” and she asked him to come see her in a year’s time to let her know how he was getting on. The pair continued to encounter each-other with a quality of combative aggression mixed with erotic fascination, as Edit confesses she fell in love with David, seemingly everything she isn’t, even as she determinedly wrested one of his friends away from him at a Salvation Army rally. David’s wife, for whom he’s been searching for months, was at the same rally, and after seeing Edit and David argue, explained her plight.

Edit, with selfless determination, set about reconciling the couple, but once returned to his family, David’s long-awaited revenge commenced as he refused to give up his drunken ways, preferring to taunt his wife and breathing precariously over his children. David’s vicious misanthropy is at its rarest when he tells a woman at the rally that she shouldn’t cover her mouth when she coughs, as he takes pride in breathing his lethal germs right in people’s faces. When his wife tried to rebel again and locked him in the bathroom whilst she tried to get the kids away, as she fumbled with the sleeping youngsters he hacked his way out with a hatchet, in a sequence that at once suggests a nod to Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) but looks forward too with unavoidable similarity to the iconic “Here’s Johnny” scene in The Shining (1981), complete with the peculiarly intimate terror of the enraged father figure, a potent and toxic vision of masculine violence erupting in the home. And yet when his wife faints, unable to escape, and David gets free, he props her up on a pillow and feeds her water, greeting her awakening with the harshly knowing words, “It wasn’t as easy to run away this time!” To her exhausted reply, “Haven’t you had enough revenge?” As Edit expires, Georges takes David on to his next stop – the slum dwelling where David’s wife and children are living now, as Mrs Holm prepares to poison them all, a final recourse. Finally David’s self-absorption is shattered and he begs with Georges to save them even at the expense of his own total extinction.

The surprisingly naturalistic acting, particularly from Sjöstrom himself, whose husky physicality gives David the insolent charisma the role needs, is littered with gestural marvels that equal the filmmaking. In an early scene, Mrs Holm is brought to Edit’s bedside, the woman a fidgety, dead-eyed wraith who reaches out with clawing, Nosferatu-like fingers at the slumbering Edit in her anger, only for Edit to awaken and immediately smother the woman in kisses in submissive gratitude. When Maria first finds Mrs Holm, she keeps retreating to each corner of the room, standing with back to the room. Just as affecting is the anguished stroke of his brother’s face David gives when presented with him in his jail cell, and in David’s homecoming as he cringes and smoulders in rage as he stands in the midst of the jarringly empty flat, whilst two neighbour women laugh over his misfortune. One stark shot depicts Mrs Holm and her children standing over David who lies sprawled and passed out on the pavement. Sjöstrom’s best moment comes in one of David’s ugliest, as he first clasps eyes on Edit after learning she’s repaired his coat and she waits with eagerness to see his reaction: David’s expression turns as cold as the winter wind as he perceives the embodiment of everything he’s at war with and feels cannot be his, and his frenzied tearing at the patches of the coat delivers his message, but whilst startled, Edit refuses to be fazed, and her fascination for the simultaneously pathetic and grotesque, yet also powerful David is made weirdly coherent. Her subsequent effort to reunite David and his wife see her perpetuate the great Victorian delusion that all you had to do to normalise any experience, any anomaly, any fracture in human dealings, was to slap a pair of decent clothes on it. Thus the story is complicated by its concentration on the way good intentions often crash headlong into harsh realities.

The Phantom Carriage ends happily, after a fashion, but as in Bergman’s work there’s a sense that redemption and facing up to all that’s gone wrong in life can be exhausting, even counter-productive. David, restored to “life” and rushing to intervene in his wife’s seemingly imminent euthanasia, buckles and weeps when she reacts with aggression and disbelief in his sudden show of concern, and it’s clear that even if he really has seen the error of his ways, the same essential cause of both his good and bad behaviour remains a fretful terror of mortality, the disease still in his lungs and the pain that is his burden. The mood of The Phantom Carriage lingers long after it’s over, and its influence on filmmakers, both in the horror mode and outside it, feels deep: as well as Bergman and Kubrick, its atmosphere and original blend of precise psycho-social veracity and the otherworldly anticipates the qualities of Val Lewton’s epochal film series, whilst other aspects vibrate through the works of Murnau and G.W. Pabst, and prefigure a very different film about a misanthrope haunted by past loss, particularly the flashback to scenes of familial happiness for the Holms, in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964). Like many notable silent films, The Phantom Carriage has seen many editions and restorations over the years, but I recommend the version I saw with an aptly spare and eerie score by the electronic group KTL: where many match-ups between silent films and modern scores, like the several Metropolis (1926) has seen, feel arch in the long run, the KTL score expertly captures the sense of nocturnal foreboding, alienation, and bleak emotionalism that fuels the film. Either way, The Phantom Carriage is an early masterpiece of the medium.

The Fog (1980)

Director/Coscreenwriter: John Carpenter

By Roderick Heath

John Carpenter helped change the face of horror cinema with his 1978 hit Halloween. This change, as it soon proved, was not for the better, as legions of poor imitations of his stark modernist nightmare, which translated the motifs of the Italian giallo horror style into American suburban paranoia and mixed them with a radical embrace of purely figurative villainy, filed onto movie screens. Carpenter’s immediate follow-up, The Fog, sits between the singular success of Halloween and the pulpy thrills of Escape From New York (1981), which would see Carpenter work for the first time with favoured star Kurt Russell. The Fog, in spite of a poor remake in 2005, remains by comparison neglected in Carpenter’s oeuvre. It is nonetheless one of the gems of the director’s early career, at a time when it seemed he could do no wrong, and one of the finest cinematic hymns to the pure malevolent joy of telling a ghost story. Halloween explored the frisson stemming from the most sepulchral of childhood fantasies associated with the eponymous date, reinventing the Boogeyman as a blank and primal force of brutality uncontained by any earthly concern or interest. By contrast, The Fog aimed for a more traditional evocation of the mood of campfire spook tales, making this motif both its key-note and its driving logic, to the extent where it opens with a celebration of this age-old act, as children, bathed in flickering firelight, sit in wrapt attentiveness as old sea salt Mr Machen (John Houseman) narrates.

Machen holds an old fob watch out to tick away the seconds to midnight, before snapping it shut and announcing there’s time for one more story before the witching hour begins. He recounts the tale of the Elizabeth Dane, a ship that sank off the coast of the small northern California town of Antonio Bay, smashed to pieces on the rocks when fooled by a mysterious wrecker’s light, bathed in an unholy fog. Carpenter’s camera details the enthralled faces of the children Machen entertains and the aged storyteller’s own visage, before craning up over a dune to survey Antonio Bay itself in the midnight moonlight, placid and beautiful, linking the layers of storytelling involved as well as the spoken myth with the real locale. The eerie strains of a coastal fog horn blare out as well as the drone of Carpenter’s usual simple yet unnervingly perfect electronic scoring, and the story Machen has told soon proves less entertainment than warning and invocation. The Fog explores the town with its faint fringes of nocturnal life, cleaners, lone duty policemen, drinkers. Father Patrick Malone (Hal Holbrook), after seeing off the local church’s odd-job man (Carpenter) who wants to be paid at an inconvenient moment, is shocked when a block seems to spontaneously fall out of the wall in his office. This reveals a hidden nook where Malone discovers his own grandfather’s old journal, containing a menacing missive: “Midnight ‘til one belongs to the dead – good lord help us.”

True to this word, around the town, strange phenomena begin occurring: tremors shake supermarket shelves, gas pumps fall from their cradles, telephones ring en masse, car alarms suddenly erupt in deafening din, and household furniture moves about by itself. Driving into town, Nick Castle (Tom Atkins) picks up a hitchhiker on a dark and lonely stretch of road, Elizabeth Solley (Jamie Lee Curtis), and his rapport with her is both interrupted and deepened as the windscreen is suddenly shattered by the same unseen force. This is all accounted with nerveless, intimate detail by Carpenter, relying on the intense power of stillness and quiet, infused and interrupted by mysterious powers readying to shatter the illusion of normalcy, as the past returns quite literally to haunt Antonio Bay.

Ironically, much of The Fog’s first 20 minutes had be to be hastily reshot and reassembled with the aid of Carpenter’s key collaborators Debra Hill and Dean Cundey, as the film Carpenter had initially envisioned was too short and enigmatic, and also out of date, as the craze Halloween had started for amassing body counts and brutal violence far outpaced its creator. Yet the result adds up to a perfect encapsulation of Carpenter’s feel for the fundamental dynamic and necessary rhythm of the horror genre, and his reliance on visual storytelling as something that does not always require visceral effect to build intense engagement. Already in 1980 this faith in mood, composition, coherence, and a carefully calibrated sense of unfolding story tethered to a sense of locale and mindset, was starting to look outmoded in genre cinema, and indeed whilst today Carpenter’s best work is considered iconic in nostalgia as exemplary old-school cinema, in its original context Carpenter’s work was staked in an ethic of functional intelligence with roots in an older, vanishing filmic sensibility. The Fog was, then, an important crossroads not merely for Carpenter himself, but for the genre, as a kiss goodbye to a classical brand of horror.

The events that plague Antonio Bay as midnight rolls around, redolent of some invisible force playing havoc with the trappings of modern civility (anticipating Carpenter’s much more overt war on sense-severing technology in They Live, 1988, and the finale of Escape From LA, 1997) prove to be a mere prologue to a far more vivid resurgence of supernatural forces, as three fishermen, Dick Baxter (James Canning), Al Williams (John Goff), and Tommy Wallace (George “Buck” Flower), who have stayed out to get drunk, have their boat overtaken by a strange fog bank moving against the wind, and become witness to a ghostly sailing ship sliding past their vessel. Dark, gnarled figures appear on the deck and slaughter the trio, whilst their boat drifts on in the curling mist. Although more visibly violent, this sequence is squarely in a genre tradition that favours intense atmosphere, and vivid contrasts of modernity and the atavistic, wraith-like forms of dead men and ghost ships. It’s offered with a refusal to smirk at the hoariness, only allowing a momentary note of dry humour to slip by (“She’s crazy, there’s no fog bank out there…Hey, there’s a fog bank out there!”) before the weirdness starts. Carpenter’s editing keeps what is seen partly elusive, almost cryptic, and resolves in a moment of pure, phobic nightmarishness, as Baxter is left alone on the dark bridge, panicking as he reports mysterious objects on the radar, thinking the dripping, staggering zombie wielding a sharp tool behind him is one of his friends. One of the same gruesome figures seems to come knocking at Nick’s door, as he and Elizabeth recline in post-coital calm, only to vanish when Nick opens the door exactly at the stroke of 1 a.m., and the forces of darkness retreat into the sea again.

The Fog maintains Halloween’s less-is-more ethos whilst expanding its scope far wider, as it plays out with a similar Greek drama-like limitation to slightly more than a 24-hour period. The previous film reduced its killer to the status of purified, blank symbol of fear and encouraged the audience, like some other recent horror hits like The Exorcist (1973), to give themselves up to the irrational without appeal to psychological or social realities. The Fog on the other hand presents its wraiths as the spirit of old wrongs returning to extract a peculiar, fearsome brand of justice from all who have profited from those crimes. This “rotting body politic” motif recurs constantly in Carpenter’s best work, commencing in the long-achieved breakdown of the professional astronauts in Dark Star (1974) and recurring in Assault in Precinct 13 (1976) and many films after The Fog. It accords with a thematic strand that was popular more in ‘70s horror fiction, including often bobbing up in Stephen King’s works, in keeping with a post-‘60s exploitation of anxieties about suppressed and repressed aspects of history and social life.

Carpenter and Hill’s screenplay joins this anxiety to another theme which became attractive after Jaws (1975) and Nashville (1975), exploiting American bicentennial angst, where communal celebrations become moments for eruptions of those repressed forces, but here given an explicit basis in the crimes of that community: “We’re honouring murderers,” Malone, the devolved remnant of that tradition, murmurs. The founding and growth of Antonio Bay is linked, as Malone discovers through his grandfather’s diary, to a murderous crime in which the settlers who picked out the bay for a home, horrified by the thought of a leper colony being founded a short distance away, conspired to accept the money paid to them by the colony’s financier Blake, and then caused the wreck of the ship, with nature itself seeming to aid the calamity. As the hundredth anniversary of this crime is nigh, however, the fog that seemed to aid the wreckers now returns as a cloak for the emerging dead, who set out to kill the descendants of the conspirators and anyone else who gets in their way.

Carpenter’s faith in pure storytelling is captured in the relish of the depiction of it in Machen’s opening speech, and of course the character’s name evokes Arthur Machen, the anthologist who collected folk ghost stories, some of which helped feed the Halloween mythos. And yet a modernist’s vibrant restraint is constantly in evidence throughout The Fog, refined to a rigorous twinning of form and function. The mid-section of The Fog, between the two nights of ghostly vengeance, entwines off-hand characterisation with exposition. Solitary radio host Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau) takes over from Machen as a “narrator”, as her vigil from the lighthouse, where her radio station broadcasts from, makes her the one person who can tie together the disparate threads of action, and guide them with a director’s viewpoint. Another layer of storytelling opens in the inter-cutting between Malone reading his grandfather’s diary, and Nick recounting a sea story of his father’s that relates to the unfolding drama.

But the film never allows meta-narrative impulses to impede its essential classicism. The personality of the film is signalled by the number of character names given to Carpenter’s collaborators current and former. Carpenter’s fondness for large casts with a Hawksian interactive affinity, and a notable diffusion of heroic status over several characters, hinted at in his earlier movies, comes more fully into focus here as The Fog divides it attention between multiple character threads of interest that eventually collide, and the story converges into one of the siege situations Carpenter has been so fond of. Stevie’s drama and Nick and Elizabeth’s hunt for the source of the mystery connects with Malone’s uncovering of the grim truth whilst Al Williams’ wife Kathy (Janet Leigh) attempts to organise the memorial to the lie, with the aid of her sarcastic assistant Sandy Fadel (Nancy Loomis). It was entirely apt that after Halloween’s several overt references to Psycho (1960), including casting Leigh’s daughter, that Marion Crane herself appeared in the follow-up, and Leigh gives a deft seriocomic performance as a hyperactive booster plunged into a survival struggle, exchanging sundry sarcastic barbs with Sandy (“You’re the only person I know who can make ‘yes ma’am’ sound like ‘screw you!’” “Yes ma’am.”) as a wry commentary on friction between old-fashioned pluck and new-age indolence.

Carpenter’s work with cinematographer Cundey, which had helped make Halloween the film it is, and creating a near-legendary pattern for the use of the wide Panavision screen, is here a stream of restrained beauty and perfectly composed tensions, capturing crisply the alternately eerie and picturesque shores of the northern California setting, skirting Bodega Bay, the setting of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), which is mentioned, with Carpenter getting to pay nods to the master in his uneasily becalmed shots Barbeau driving across the landscape. As in the Hitchcock film the seemingly limitless, empty expanse of the ocean becomes the place where a nameless threat gathers, whilst Carpenter carefully and insinuatingly suggests that present evil is only ever the hangover of past evil, refusing to be laid to rest, and he offers glimpses, sometimes direct but often cunningly supple and elusive, of the irrational nature of the threat, as objects transmute and the seemingly hard contours of reality melt away in the numinous mist.

As is often the case in Carpenter’s work, it’s the specificity of the setting and the characterisations that infuses the drama with a rare kind of life, as Carpenter captures the feel of the small town exactingly, catching both the fine details of a blue-collar, workaday place, and also some of its contradictions, like Nick’s status as a working class bohemian, who connects with rich girl Elizabeth because like her, he has no idea what to do in his life. Although Carpenter was about to become associated with Russell, Atkins, who would also star in the ill-fated but interesting Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1983), was a perfect actor for the director’s oeuvre with his seemingly plebeian charisma and looks, heavy-set and vividly masculine in the least traditionally Hollywood fashion, and he’s terrific as the competent but thoughtful, slightly haunted-seeming Nick, who’s intelligent and imaginative but used to the risky, subtly dangerous world of the fishing fleet of Antonio Bay.

By contrast, Stevie is a big city refugee, who surveys the ocean and murmurs, “Nothing but water, Stevie. But it sure beats Chicago.” In her seaside house Carpenter surveys, dispassionately, photos of herself, her son Andy (Ty Mitchell), and a man, presumably her husband and the boy’s father, in their former enterprises in radio, and the fact that Stevie keeps these photos in view suggests the man died rather than divorced, and perhaps therefore running from a peculiar kind of urban horror only to encounter another kind of it. Barbeau’s terrific performance is at its best as Stevie attempts to stay at her post even as she’s wracked by fear for her son who’s directly in the fog’s path, perhaps the film’s keenest moment of emotional engagement, coexisting with an interesting post-Watergate subtext, interrogating about the slippery divide between reporting on crisis and being involved in it, and to whom responsibilities ultimately belong. By the film’s end Stevie’s ivory tower is being assaulted by decaying remnants of men, emanations of a primeval Id that could stand in for every fear Stevie as a single mother has ever tried to stave off. She directs the survivors from the town to Malone’s church as a theoretical refuge, except that’s exactly where the dead killers are heading in pursuit of Malone. Curtis, by the same token, gets to leave behind her role in Halloween as the haplessly virginal yet plucky final girl in playing the game, swinging Elizabeth, whilst still playing a young woman who seems initially out of her depth but who proves finally equal to the nightmares around her.

Carpenter, like many of the other filmmakers who emerged in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and were ennobled with the general epithet “Movie Brats”, often played games with the referential nature of his excursions, never placing them in quotation marks as in the next wave of post-modern directors a la Tarantino, but trying to iron them into the texture of the film, much as his ultimately quite different but similarly rooted generational fellows Spielberg and Lucas. The Fog may in turn have influenced some other filmmakers: Michael Mann’s The Keep (1984) is in some ways a redeployment of this film’s aesthetics with a more aggressively expressionist tilt. Some of Carpenter’s concepts owe quite a bit to the little-seen 1958 British sci-fi horror flick The Trollenberg Terror (also called The Crawling Eye), from which it borrows one significant element – the smothering fog concealing the lurking evil – and a couple of signature scenes, including a corpse climbing off its deathbed and stalking a heroine, and one in which one character hears another being killed on the other end of a phone line. The former scene also sees Carpenter following in Brian De Palma’s wake of consciously remixing elements of earlier scenes from his films and letting them play out in different fashions, as a late moment from Halloween in which Curtis had the apparently dead Michael Myers rise up behind her is tweaked now as Baxter’s very dead, sea-rotted corpse picks itself up and lurches towards Elizabeth with scalpel in hand, only to trip and leave a mysterious sign that seems to be an ‘M’ scratched into the linoleum – a Fritz Lang shout-out?

This moment points forward in turn to one of the creepiest scenes in Carpenter’s up-coming remake of The Thing (1982), whilst a late scene sees Stevie mimicking the “watch the skies” speech at the end of the 1951 original; the Cold War era message of vigilance is here perverted into one of historical awareness. The second quote from The Trollenberg Terror, as Stevie tries to talk smooth-talking meteorologist Dan (Charles Cyphers) from checking out whose knocking at the door of his remote weather station, only to hear his dying gurgles as a baling hook is jammed in his neck. Much of Val Lewton’s psychological spirit is apparent throughout The Fog, particularly in Carpenter’s emphasis on brusque, eliding edits and oblique framing that constantly render the source of threat slightly out of focus and easy dismissal. The Fog is also marked out by its strong sense of a literary legacy in the form: Carpenter’s constant genre masters Nigel Kneale and H.P. Lovecraft are invoked, anticipating The Evil Dead (1981) in filching Lovecraft through the means of a malefic tome that guides the action, whilst the narrative echoes with references to Machen, M.R. James, Arthur Conan-Doyle, and Sheridan LeFanu, the formative masters of the ghost story.

At the same time, the driving force of Halloween, a solid basis in that modern campfire tale, the urban legend, which exploded in the alarmism of the ‘60s and ‘70s, is identifiable here too. This is manifest in the phobia-exploiting images of mysterious visitors wielding large vicious weapons, and in the sense of isolation around the hitchhiking Elizabeth and solitary Stevie, an intimate awareness of that isolation in a world where threat lurks. Stevie’s radio show, which plays vintage big band jazz, helps generate the intense feeling of both late-night, nostalgia-flecked warmth whilst also reinforcing the sense of isolation. One great and also slightly amusing aspect of The Fog is the unadorned simplicity and force of its suspense situations, including perhaps the absolute best ever “can’t get the car moving” nail-biter sequence, as Elizabeth struggles to get Nick’s truck moving after he’s saved Andy from the zombies, with the shuffling ghouls closing in as Elizabeth struggles to get the truck in gear. Part of the beauty of this scene is its precision of character detail under pressure: Elizabeth has obviously never driven a vehicle like the truck before, and she wrestles the gears with frantic, wheel-slapping frustration but refusing to give up and finally succeeding. The finale, which sees the main cast converge in Malone’s church, sees Carpenter at last back in the siege movie territory he loves so much, with the memorably bold visions of the zombies’ gnarled, discoloured, bandage-swathed hands shattering the stained glass windows and reaching out of the hallucinatory fog.

Carpenter’s habitually dark tendency of killing off unexpected and empathetic characters was more muted than usual here, although he doesn’t mind having the cutesy old babysitter Mrs Kobritz (Regina Waldon) fall into the zombies’ clutches. But he saves one of his darkest final blackout jokes for the very end, as it seems that evil has been satisfied by Malone’s gesture of sacrifice to the ghosts, presenting the gold stolen from them which his grandfather hid away in the form of a cross to Blake (Rob Bottin), the walking dead standing in the midst of the church unfazed by the usually sacrosanct territory in their mission. Malone’s handover of the gold sees an eruption of supernatural power, Nick snatching the priest away as Blake and his crew vanish, apparently returned to the netherworld satisfied. But later, as Malone mulls over the meaning of his survival, he’s confronted again by the ghouls, and this time Blake dispatches him with one swift, brutal blow. The message is as inescapable as it is grimly funny: the past will exact all its debts from the present eventually, and you can only buy it off so long.

Dark Shadows (2012)

Director: Tim Burton

By Roderick Heath

Dark Shadows, a cultishly remembered, increasingly perverse take on the daytime soap opera, presented through a prism of increasingly outlandish gothic tropes, debuted in 1966, but did not gain its true notoriety until it introduced vampiric antihero Barnabas Collins a year into its run. Decades before Anne Rice and Twilight began to make such figures seem commonplace, the show helped make the link between the Byronic romantic and the undead prince, already lurking in some of Dracula’s on-screen incarnations, suddenly solid. I’ve seen little of Dan Curtis’ original TV series, sadly, though I’m a lifelong devotee of Curtis’ subsequent series The Night Stalker (1973-1974). A spin-off movie, House of Dark Shadows (1970), made in the wake of the show’s cancellation, had an air of bare-boned sufficiency. So I’m no real judge of Dark Shadows a la Tim Burton as a tribute to, or send-up of, this original entity. What I can speak of is Burton himself.

Burton’s career since 2000 has been held in increasing disdain by many critics and fans, even as his box office touch has been growing surer thanks to his editions of popular properties carefully made over with a veneer of Burton touches. That disdain is partly deserved: there is no hell hot enough for his hacky remake of Planet of the Apes (2001), I could not fake an interest in his version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), and whilst I found the near-universal negativity turned on his Alice in Wonderland (2010) more than a little hyperbolic—if nothing else, it had muse Helena Bonham Carter’s gleeful Red Queen to offer—it was still clearly a long way from the man’s most inspired work, and redolent of a once-unruly wit tailored into a franchise. On the other hand, Big Fish (2003) and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), near-great films, and Corpse Bride (2005), a fine-wrought bon-bon, deserved no such censure, and merely confirms something obvious from Burton’s whole career—that he was always an uneven talent.

Burton’s general refusal to entirely abandon his sense of cinema as a mere fancy version of a children’s dress-up party, mixed with a Goth rock-and-roll bash and usually realised through leading man Johnny Depp’s variations on a theme of pasty weirdos, is both a strength and a weakness. Its strength is in opposition to the times, where the false verisimilitude of CGI, the rise of self-serious blockbuster auteurs like Christopher Nolan, and an attendant cut-to-the-chase cynicism amongst lesser luminaries, defines big-budget cinema: Burton has embraced CGI, but in a fashion that uses it as merely another prop in his magic lantern shows. Its weakness is that it could be said to be holding him back from growing artistically, although lingering anger for the failure of Big Fish, his most overtly personal and felt film since Ed Wood (1994), might also be involved.

Dark Shadows, on the back of a trailer whose emphasis on its comic elements made many nervous, also seems to have met with a lot of lingering resentment for how much money Alice made in spite of the opprobrium. But whilst it’s not a flawless film and shows distinct signs of having been awkwardly trimmed in the editing room, it’s also Burton’s most playful work since 1996’s Mars Attacks, his antic streak slipping the leash and making the most of Seth Grahame-Smith’s screenplay as a delicious survey of retro camp, and his own undying desire to both laugh at and indulge the frisson welling from a morbidly sensual sensibility. It’s nigh-on impossible to construct a cult artefact in the context of modern Hollywood’s highest spheres, and yet that’s what Dark Shadows actually feels like. Had it been made, production techniques and budgetary differences notwithstanding, in the time it was set, it would have stood a good chance of standing up with other oddball by-products of the era’s wayward impulses, like Bava’s Danger: Diabolik! (1966), Corman’s The Raven (1963), Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), or Losey’s Modesty Blaise (1966). Dark Shadows overflows with ideas and images that reveal Burton as anything but creatively exhausted: rather, it’s such a freaky surplus that it threatens at points to fly apart.

Burton’s film, like House of Dark Shadows, places Barnabas front and centre. Unlike most of Depp’s other Burton-directed characterisations of socially maladjusted misfits, Barnabas is superficially a commanding figure, albeit one rendered a misfit by dint not only of being a vampire, but also by dislocation in time. Barnabas was the respected scion of the successful émigré Collins clan, who set up a fishing business in New England in the 1700s in a town that came to be known as Collinsport, but who had, alas, a witch in their midst. Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green) worked as a servant in the Collins’ mansion and became Barnabas’ lover. When he spurned her and fell in love with local lass Josette DuPres (Bella Heathcote), Angelique began a campaign of terror and revenge on the family, killing Barnabas’ parents, driving Josette to suicide, and cursing Barnabas to his undead state. She then raised the locals to bury him alive as a monster, chained in a coffin and forgotten, until accidentally disinterred in 1972 by construction workers, all of whom Barnabas apologetically slaughters in his frantic hunger.

Barnabas makes his way to the mansion, takes control of servant Willie Loomis (Jackie Earle Haley), and discovers what’s left of the clan living in waned, penurious isolation. Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer) tries to hold things together whilst ignoring the preternatural strangeness of her surrounding kin, including insouciant teen Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz) and her ghost-seeing younger brother David (Gulliver McGrath), both damaged by the premature death of their mother in a boating accident, and their emasculated, petty thief of a father, Roger (Jonny Lee Miller). The clan also houses David’s alcoholic, live-in psychiatrist, Dr Julia Hoffman (Carter), and new nanny Victoria Winters (Heathcote again), on the run from something and residing under an alias. She soon proves, like David, to be able to see roaming ghosts in the castle, warning of Barnabas’ return and the lurking evil that threatens the clan.

Dark Shadows, like scattered forebears, running from The Cat and the Canary (1927) through to The Fearless Vampire Killers and Landis’ An American Werewolf in London (1981), doesn’t divide neatly between its gothic tributes and its satiric impulses. If it fails to match the nearly perfect balance of Sleepy Hollow (1999), it’s because unlike that film, Dark Shadows, as a TV adaptation, is forced to divide its attention between many competing elements, resulting in an occasionally diffuse narrative. The aforementioned signs of editing don’t help, though to a certain extent, they aid the evocations of the arbitrary twists prevalent in even the most upright soaps after a couple of decades have gone by, for example, when Carolyn leaps into a fray, suddenly sprouts hairs and claws, and snarls, “I’m a werewolf, okay, let’s not make a big deal of it!”

Burton can’t entirely deliver the film’s ripe eccentricity from mere plot, but whilst the rushed quality of the last third does somewhat lessen the impact of the film, the earlier parts dance nimbly between tones. Some touches delve into outright skit, like Barnabas trying to brush his teeth in a mirror or opening a secret chamber with impressively rumbly mechanisms, only to find Elizabeth uses it to store her macramé. But others retain a genuine impudence, as when Barnabas, a former student of the occult, recognises the 20th century equivalent to the emblem of Mephistopheles in the golden arches of a McDonald’s sign: the sign’s smaller wording, “9 Billion Served”, takes on a whole new meaning. One sublime gag sees Barnabas expounding his tale of woe to Elizabeth, with strains of eerie, melodramatic music rising—music that sounds like the score of, yes, a very early ’70s TV creepfest—only for these to prove to be programmed tracks rising from the electric organ he’s leaning on. It’s the sort of gag that’s impossible to properly describe, and can only be rendered by a clever filmmaker, managing to riff on several ideas at once: the pained hero making his confession in soap-opera style with appropriate accompaniment, provided by the modern equivalent of the compulsory organ that is the feature of any good vampire’s home.

The McDonald’s gag puts Dark Shadows back in touch, albeit blithely, with Burton’s once-strong satirical streak, as displayed in his early films like Beetlejuice (1987), Batman (1989), and Edward Scissorhands (1990), where a comedic but still potent anti-consumerist, anti-conformist spirit was nascent; Dark Shadows portrays a battle of ruthless capitalistic endeavour involving sabotage and mind control, espoused between a witch and vampire. There’s a pretty obvious, but thematically apt gag in how a baying mob is repeatedly led in a witch hunt by an actual witch, casting meaningful aspersions on those who whip up panics and their reasons. More unexpectedly, signs of Burton’s duskily elegiac romanticism, so powerful in Edward Scissorhands, Big Fish, and Batman Returns (1992), blend with hints of psychedelia throughout Dark Shadows. This quality rises in the opening with it swooping shots of stormy cliffs, thundering seas, and tragic lovers: Barnabas, who had tried to die with Josette as she hurled herself over a cliff under Angelique’s spells, instead picks himself out of the surf, contorting into a perverted being.

The romanticism quietens to a somnolent refrain, as the opening credits see Victoria making her way to her fateful rendezvous with the Collins household on a train with the sonorous fetishism of The Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin” overscoring the train’s passage through forested hills. Victoria is seen in the act of adopting a fake name from a ski lodge poster in the train. Rehearsing her introduction, she almost gives her name as Maggie Evans, an in-joke that gives away how she’s actually a compendium of two characters from the show. Victoria is the doll-eyed, seemingly demure yet quietly adamantine heroine Burton is often so fond of portraying, her self-containment overtly contrasting the flagrant strangeness that whirls about her. She has her own bleak background to contend with, one which comes across like a missing scene from last year’s Sucker Punch: clearly linked to Collinsport and Barnabas as the contemporary incarnation of Josette, she was, we learn, a psychic child whose speaking to ghosts was mistaken for madness, and she was hauled off, screaming and pleading, to an asylum where she grew up as a near-catatonic waif until the will to escape came to her.

Burton’s essential empathy is always with the weirdoes, as they become his heroes in the way they tend to keep an essential humanity burning inside of them even when circumstances seem most challenging—indeed, precisely because they must. Barnabas, upon being told by Victoria how her parents had her locked up and forgot her, speaks with stern judgement, “It is unforgivable. Your parents deserve to boil in Hell’s everlasting sulphur!” Burton’s villains are, by contrast, those who want to control others, or other weirdoes who surrender their humanity, like Danny DeVito’s twisted Penguin in Batman Returns, who screamed with epochal rage, “I am not a human being—I am an animal!” Similarly, whilst the prodigious force of nature that is Angelique, driven by class rage and sexual jealousy, attempts to bend all and sundry to her will, and most specifically Barnabas, he struggles to hold onto his humanity even as he has to kill people to survive. Whilst Angelique is the old figure of the woman like whom hell hath no fury, the fact that this is the time of women’s lib is repeatedly evoked. The film’s lone figure of traditional masculinity, Roger, is so pathetic and perfidious that Barnabas gives him a choice of absenting himself immediately with plentiful cash and leaving the children to his care, or staying and shaping up: Roger chooses the former, fleeing house and family, leaving all in the care of leonine Elizabeth and screwball Barnabas.

In spite of Depp’s foreground performance, the film fills up with archly iconic female characters. Burton’s usual fondness for unusual families and bizarrely lovable figures, and rejection of conservative norms, therefore finds a new accord with a distinctive sociopolitical shift. Dark Shadows becomes a film about the period in which it is set as well as a cut-up refashioning of its aesthetics. Nor is this the first time Burton has exercised such a notion—he managed to invoke it purely through the gradation in Sarah Jessica Parker’s performance in Ed Wood. In this context, as well as offering his alternative lifestyle energy, Barnabas becomes, in true soap opera style, something like the accidental fox in the henhouse, a love object more at the mercy of the women around him than not, sought by Victoria and Angelique. When he gives Hoffman a compliment, the love-starved psychiatrist promptly goes down on him. The psychiatrist tries to turn back the clock and restore her own youth by utilising Barnabas’ blood under the pretext of curing him, only to so anger him at the thought of her cheating him and placing another unruly monster in the household that he kills her and dumps her body in the harbour.

Barnabas’ family loyalty and identity give him purpose when his existence might otherwise have become a nihilistic nightmare. Burton allows a mood of queasy black humour/horror to punctuate the moments in which Barnabas’ monstrous side is let off its leash, slaughtering the construction workers and a clan of guileless hippies whom he fascinates with his trippy-seeming reminiscences and proclamations of the nature of mortality. “You tripped for 200 years?” one girl asks in spacy credulity in a scene that proceeds with broad comic kookiness until it reaches it nasty punchline when Barnabas regretfully sighs that now he has to kill all of them. Burton doesn’t go for an all-out juxtaposition of raw gore and humour, a la American Werewolf, but, more like Polanski, allows a genuinely morbid and malicious sensibility squirm just beneath the surface.

Barnabas, for the most part, remains a weirdly lovable creature chiefly in his mix of confidence and bewilderment, strutting into what’s left of his family fiefdom with a plan to save the clan from being swallowed up by its demons, and attempting to negotiate the modern wonders he encounters with bemused fascination. Confused by television enough to rip out the back of one at the sight of Karen Carpenter singing on it, trying to find her (“Reveal yourself, tiny songstress!”), he’s utterly taken with modern pop music, to the point where he recites the lyrics of Steve Miller’s “The Joker” with the arch solemnity of a Shakespeare soliloquy (“If only Shakespeare had been as eloquent!”), even if he doesn’t quite get the joke of Alice Cooper: “Ugliest woman I’ve ever seen,” he murmurs on close inspection. The correlation of specific, supernatural afflictions with character is constantly apt: David’s ghost-communicating evokes the distracted state of a melancholy preadolescent, whilst Carolyn’s secret lycanthropy fits perfectly with her grouchy, protean, onanistic eruption into puberty, and Angelique’s witchery simply inflates the mesmeric grip of her sensual powers and ruthless obsession.

Dark Shadows, in fact, plays with its musical cues with a sense of intricacy that moves well beyond mere sarcastic incongruity, suggesting instead a nongenre follow-up to Sweeney Todd, whilst trying to weave the pop motifs of the era into the film’s structure to give a slippery substance to the film’s understanding of the changing social landscape already mentioned. The invasive spirit of rock and pop, and the indulgent perversity of the heroes, are correlated, possessing dangerous and frightening, yet also empowering, forces. A major montage of Barnabas’ efforts to rebuild the family fortunes is scored to the Carpenters’ “Top of the World,” its effervescent ebullience both at odds with the strangeness of Barnabas and his enterprise but also according with his ingenuous determination, even optimism, and recalling the “By The Sea” number in Sweeney Todd. Earlier, Moretz’s lupine Carolyn gyrates in a trancelike, sensually protean fashion to Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” whilst the family sit down to an edgy, uncomfortable meal with their new nanny: Roger so uptight under his thinning blonde quaff like a starched shirt holding to a man’s shape without a real body to hold it up, Hoffman lurching in with tipsy grande dame demonstrations, and David attempting to deliver Victoria a welcoming fright swathed in a sheet. The sense of intimate family tension at a nexus and the use of the Donovan song put me in mind of George Romero’s Season of the Witch (1971), which likewise invoked the onset of feminism in the context of a spiralling fascination for the stygian underworld.

The film’s best, most intricately woven sequence comes when Barnabas decides to throw a ball: “They’re called Happenings these days,” Carolyn informs him, and, in listing the things he’ll need, she adds, mockingly, “Alice Cooper.” Barnabas, whilst not realising the essence of the gender-bending joke, nonetheless actually does manage to hire Cooper for the party, through which Barnabas and Cooper strut in competition for the biggest, most entertaining freak. The vignettes here swing from the drolly comic—Hoffman experimentally bobbing her head to Cooper’s wailing strains, the ancient housekeeper reading a book oblivious to the thunderous rock—to the dreamy and the tragic. Burton uses the lava lamp that strikes Barnabas as a mystic totem as a visual motif, sliding past the camera in bobbing psychedelic brilliance as his camera shifts from stage to stage. He cuts from Carolyn providing the introduction for Cooper performing “Ballad of Dwight Fry” wrapped in a straitjacket, with Barnabas listening to Victoria’s recounting of her own history, glimpsed in flashback getting electroshock treatment and glaring out like a J-horror wraith under bedraggled hair, cocooned likewise in a straitjacket. The agile game played here with demarcations between different layers of performance and the invocation of genuine, transfiguring pain through its “fun” simulacrums is genuinely clever and invests the film with a real, off-kilter emotional resonance. Of course, Burton doesn’t push too hard towards perversity and explorations of adolescent trauma as the underpinning of eruptions of primal rage—more’s the pity, perhaps—in a film that maintains a largely frothy tone.

Still, one reason Dark Shadows works where his earlier franchise reinventions failed is because the material is obviously far, far closer to Burton’s heart. Where Sleepy Hollow gained spiritual cohesion from modelling itself on Hammer horror, Dark Shadows similarly adopts Roger Corman’s ’60s gothic works as the major point of reference, copying Corman’s tactic of splicing shots of waves crashing on rocks at every interval, allowing Depp to sport dark glasses borrowed from Vincent Price in The Tomb of Ligeia (1964), and having Depp and Pfeiffer roam the mysterious hidden passages of the Collins house in search of secreted treasure in a manner familiar from Pit and the Pendulum (1961). Other horror icons make the cut: Halloween’s (1978) vision of a real ghoul under a prankster’s sheet ghost costume is invoked, whilst Nosferatu—both Murnau’s and Herzog’s—comes to the fore as Depp buckles and twists unnaturally with his long, jagged fingernails, peers in on telephone conversers and rutting couples like a great bat, and rises stiff as a board from a coffin. Heathcote in vampiric form resembles Isabelle Adjani’s wasting heroine in Herzog’s film, whilst the finale’s twist strongly evokes Jean Rollin’s Lips of Blood (1975). Christopher Lee turns up for his compulsory cameo, playing an aged sea dog Barnabas hypnotises. Nor do the film’s stylistic reflexes and references stick to mere horror film pastiche: in a sequence in which Angelique harangues her board of well-trained males, she struts past a row of portraits, all of herself in different guises and styles over the passing last two centuries, like some undying edition of a Joan Crawford antiheroine.

Green, with her Barbara Steele smile and anime eyes, usually ennobles whatever she graces with her presence, but whilst she’s not always well-served by the story structure here, she nonetheless comes close to walking off with the whole film, moving through the proceedings with an arch sensuality and imperial prerogative blended with detectable lunacy, tearing about in a little red sports car and crashing the ball in a blood-hued glitter dress: never mind scarlet letters, she goes the whole nine yards. Her frustrated love-hate obsession with Barnabas pays off in a sequence with a mix of seduction, threat, and insult: tearing open her dress to show off her cosmos-shaking bosom to seduce Barnabas (“Oh!” he bleats in defeat, “I must admit, they have not aged a day…”), she finally cajoles him into a bout of spectacular hate-sex that sees them careening about the room in ecstatic destruction, reminiscent of the epic bedroom-trashing sex scene in The Tall Guy (1989), except in three dimensions, all scored to Barry White’s “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything.” A moment in Batman Returns where Pfeiffer’s Catwoman licked Batman’s latex-framed face recurs here as this time, Angelique caresses Barnabas’ snowy brow with her long, snaky tongue. Angelique is reminiscent of other New Age stygian temptresses, like Barbara Carrera in Love at Stake (1987) and Amanda Donohoe’s incarnation of sexy evil in Lair of the White Worm (1987), but by the end, there’s a distinct resemblance between Green’s increasingly unhinged, insanely grinning visage and that of Jack Nicholson’s Joker in the final stages of Batman.

It would be very wrong not to mention the brilliance of Bruno Delbonnel’s photography throughout Dark Shadows, rendering the milky hues and splashes of scarlet provided by the blood that daubs Barnabas’ face, the lipstick of Angelique, and coif of Hoffman, contrasting lushly with the blues and greys that fill most frames. The film’s finale gives in to fragmentation in tone and action, reaching its climax abruptly as if someone called time, and I can’t help but wonder how much material involving Carter, Haley, and Moretz hit the cutting room floor. The jerky pacing both helps and hinders the film’s spiralling into ecstatic nuttiness. Burton still pulls off a last coup as Angelique is defeated not by physical action but by the lingering spirit of maternal care that still lives in Collinwood. She lies prostrate, not mangled like a living person, but with her immaculately maintained two-century-old form now stove in and cracked as if she were actually a mannequin, a broken doll still transfixed by an obsessive need: she rips out her own heart and hands it Barnabas, and it crumbles into papery flakes in his palm. It’s the sort of weirdly poetic fairytale image Burton is almost alone in still providing in mainstream American cinema. The very finish is similarly loopy, with Victoria repeating her march to the cliffs from the opening, but this time not from mind-control, but a determination to destroy herself if she can’t live in Barnabas’ world. Barnabas tries to save her by vampirising her in mid-air, a ploy that works. Victoria, now entirely conflating with Josette, awakens as an ashen, morbidly transformed, perfect mate for Barnabas. It might be the romantic in me, but this liebestod finish left me grinning for hours.

Cure (1997)

Director/Screenwriter: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

By Marilyn Ferdinand

In cinema, even documentary cinema, the question of who we think we see on screen and who is actually on screen are two different things, fueling all kinds of existential fun and games for the astute filmmaker and receptive audiences. Identity as a motif has preoccupied numerous filmmakers, from Ingmar Bergman (Persona) to Monte Hellman (Road to Nowhere) to Abbas Kiarostami (Close-up). Identity is often tied up with psychosis, and psychotics frequently feature in horror and suspense films because they channel the nameless, faceless Id that resides in all of us that, on some level, we all would like to release in all its rampaging glory once in a while. The idea that any one of us could become a gruesome killer if someone or something pierced our social conditioning is at the heart of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure. Kurosawa, interested in the shocked comments people invariably make after a neighbor or acquaintance commits a brutal murder (“He was such a nice man. They were an ordinary couple.”), explores the nature of identity and whether our bodies and minds are mere vessels waiting to be filled.

On a busy street in Tokyo, a man (Ren Ohsugi) walks through a damp tunnel as cars pass on his right. A fluorescent light illuminating the tunnel blinks and buzzes. We next see the man in a hotel room with a naked prostitute. He is moving about the room, and she is sitting up in bed. Suddenly, he grabs a pipe and bashes her twice on the head. When next we enter the room, it is filled with police investigators. The lead detective, Kenichi Takabe (Kôji Yakusho), observes that a deep “x” has been cut across the prostitute’s neck and chest. The man is found naked, hiding in an air duct in the hallway. When he is questioned at police headquarters by Takabe and police psychiatrist Makoto Sakuma (Tsuyoshi Ujiki), the man has no idea why he killed the woman. The case resembles other murders under investigation where a similar “x” was carved into the victims.

Takabe will have several more such murders to investigate as the film goes on, but he must balance this puzzle with the increasing burden posed by his wife Fumie’s (Anna Nakagawa) mental deterioration. We first see Fumie talking with her psychiatrist (Toshi Kato) as an outpatient and observe her attachment to the story of Bluebeard. She tells the doctor that she knows how the story ends—Bluebeard is killed by his wife. Fumie doesn’t appear capable of murder, but the worry she causes Takabe, the things she does that drive him crazy, the loss of companionship he experiences by her disconnectedness certainly must cause a kind of death to his spirit. Not being able to talk to her about the pain of his work is especially difficult for him.

As other “x” cases come to the fore—a young man kills his wife of two years, a police officer shoots his partner in the head, a doctor kills a man in a public bathroom and peels his face away from his skull—we and Takabe slowly discover what links them together: a young amnesiac who is soon identified as Kunio Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), a medical school dropout whose disheveled home reveals shelves of books about psychiatry, psychosis, and works about and by Franz Mesmer, a German physician who developed the idea of animal magnetism, or in the term used in the film, hypnosis, to influence behavior. We saw the young husband, Tôru Hanaoka (Masahiro Toda), encounter Mamiya on a beach and after Mamiya collapses, take him home. Mamiya questions him over and over about who he is and asks him questions about his wife Tomoko (Misayo Haruki) while transfixing Tôru with the flame of his cigarette lighter. As Mamiya bounces from one encounter to another—Hanaoka takes him to the police station, where he mesmerizes Oida (Denden) the cop before being sent to a hospital to put Dr. Miyajima (Yoriko Dôguchi) under his spell—the daisy chain of  violence barely outpaces Takabe’s efforts to unravel the mystery before he himself is drawn under Mamiya’s influence.

As with most detective-centered stories, Takabe is no ordinary cop. He is intelligent and tormented, a Japanese version of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse, and his complexity makes him a Rorschach image of good for his evil opposite Mamiya. Mamiya entices Takabe with an accurate assessment of the detective’s torment, mentioning a vision Takabe had of Fumie hanging dead in the couple’s kitchen that incited the detective to helpless wailing. Of course, as a mesmerist, Mamiya causes his victims to conjure such visions by helping them to access their deepest fears and hatreds through his highly developed gift for hypnosis. Only by remaining empty himself can Mamiya be the master rather than the victim.

It is Mamiya’s conviction that most people don’t know themselves, the many selves hidden under the surface, the duality of their generous and vicious impulses. He considers Takabe extraordinary, like himself, for recognizing the split in himself—trying to be a loving husband while seeing the worst in human nature on a daily basis. The encounters Takabe has with Mamiya create convulsions of emotion in him, signaled not only by his violent outbursts toward Mamiya but also toward some of his colleagues; in fact, when Takabe tries to turn the tables on Mamiya by forcing him to look at his own lighter while incarcerated, a vision of a rain-collapsing ceiling overwhelms Takabe, and the lighter goes out. It appears to have been put out by the rain water, but my guess is that while Takabe was having the visions, Mamiya merely blew the lighter out. But, of course, this wouldn’t be a horror story if we didn’t give ourselves over to wondering if the strange sights on screen are real or imaginary.

Kurosawa’s camerawork is beyond good. He scouted locations in and around Tokyo that reek of decay, giving us a fair approximation of a haunted house in the penultimate scene where the final showdown between Takabe and Mamiya takes place. He combines handheld work with static long shots of great beauty and atmosphere. He knows how to create tension by considering the images outside the frame that haunt our imagination, for example, having Sakuma enter Mamiya’s cell, which has a short wall hiding the toilet area in which Mamiya is standing. We don’t see the prisoner, but we know what he’s capable of, and the fear of actually looking at him infuses this scene powerfully. In a later scene, we see one handcuff hanging from a pipe, and the story a cop tells Takabe about it creates the image of the body that had been attached to it in our minds in an uncomfortable parallel to the way Mamiya was able to create images in the minds of his victims. Indeed, Mamiya is rather like a filmmaker, bringing us under his spell, finding our triggers, conjuring images through exposition and suggestion.

But Cure does more than that. It makes us wonder what Takabe achieved by resolving the murder investigation. The last two scenes are powerfully suggestive, but also highly ambiguous. Takabe has put his wife in a psychiatric hospital, and we see a very brief scene at the hospital in which the image of a corpse with the telltale “x” appears. Takabe is later seen eating heartily and happily in his regular diner, apparently cured of his previous troubles. His waitress removes his plates and is called over to speak to her boss. Calmly she moves to a station and picks up a large chef’s knife. Has Takabe taken over where Mamiya left off, or has our experience of the film left us imagining the worst?

Communion (aka Alice, Sweet Alice; Holy Terror, 1976)

Director/Coscreenwriter: Alfred Sole

By Roderick Heath

One reason horror genre fans look back to the 1970s with such keen nostalgia is not simply because lots of horror films were made, but because so many different varieties of horror film were made, before the arrival of the slasher flick late in the decade permanently skewed the genre towards more formulaic bellwethers. This brilliant little crossbreed from independent New Jersey filmmaker Alfred Sole is very much an example of the era. It straddles the mid-’70s Hitchcockian revival that included young filmmakers as radically different as Brian De Palma, John Carpenter, and Steven Spielberg; the George Romero school of gritty, handcrafted genre cinema; and it also breaches the realm of the nascent independent film, with its template of empathic realism in portraying lives in society’s peculiar niches. The setting and characters are depicted intimately, their world investigated with familiarity and feeling, and everyday pains and perversities are invoked, even as the film erupts with intervals of psychotic violence and raw suspense orchestrated in exacting cinematic terms.

Sole cowrote the screenplay with Rosemary Ritvo, and as well as a deep lexicon of film references, much of it has a flavour of being torn from memory and observation. The setting is 1961 in an intensely Catholic neighbourhood, a similar time and place to what John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt tried to revive. The changing mores of the world around the church that is the linchpin of the story and its characters’ social lives is part of the film’s unstated texture, as the tale revolves around young divorcee Catherine Spages (Lisa Miller), who is raising two daughters on the cusp of pubescence, Alice (Linda Sheppard) and Karen (Brooke Shields).

At the film’s outset, Catherine shepherds her daughters to visit the handsome, much-liked young Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich). Tom lives with another priest and a monsignor (Peter Bosch), all taken care of by the dedicated Mrs. Tredoni (Mildred Clinton). The purpose for the visit is to arrange for Karen’s first communion, and Father Tom gives Karen an ornate cross on a chain. Alice, distracted and irritated by the attention her sister is receiving, scares Mrs. Tredoni by sneaking about wearing a doll-like mask. When Karen later receives her communion dress, Alice steals the veil and then one of Karen’s dolls; when the distraught Karen tracks Alice to an abandoned building, Alice frightens her by slamming a fire door shut behind her, sealing her in a decrepit space. When she releases her, Alice bullies her sister into keeping quiet about it. When Karen is standing, last in line to receive communion, she’s grabbed by a figure clad in the same doll-like mask and the ubiquitous yellow raincoat all of the young girls who go to a local Catholic school wear. Karen is strangled with a candle, and her killer stuffs her body into a trunk, steals her cross, and places a lighted candle in with it. Alice enters the church wearing a veil she claims she picked up, and soon, the smell of burning attracts attention and Karen’s body is found to a general furor. When Karen is buried, her father, Dom (Niles McMaster), who has remarried, returns to attend and consoles Catherine, whilst police detectives Spina (Michael Hardstarck) and Brennan (Tom Signorelli) and Catherine’s shrewish sister Annie (Jane Lowry) make little secret of their suspicions that Alice killed her sister, a notion Catherine and Dom reject out of hand.

Alice is from the outset one of the most intensely believable and fascinating portraits of bratty youth ever committed to film. Aggressive, frightened, volatile, secretive, Alice is both victim and perpetrator of evils in a landscape where images and rituals of purity, beauty, and just order are often revealed to have seedy and decaying flipsides. She keeps a private shrine littered with stolen objects, a talismanic photo of her father, candles, and a jar full of insects she will eventually put to good use. The neighbourhood hasn’t gone bad, but there’s a feeling that behind many a door things are rotting. The Monsignor is ancient and decrepit, yet technically still an authority. Catherine’s landlord Mr. Alphonso (Alphonso DeNoble) is an obese shut-in with urine stains on his pants who accepts Alice’s insults with smiling menace as he tries to paw her. Alice seems jealous of Karen partly because, like everyone else, she has a crush on Tom, who offers an aspect of the father figure just as he subliminally offers a figure of romantic aspiration for Catherine, and also because she seems to have not experienced the first communion, perhaps when Catherine was still on the outs with the church for her divorce; each time Alice steps forward to actually take communion, someone dies.

Alice is the sort of embryonic troubled youth punk and grunge rock adored celebrating. (Sheppard would go on to play in her only other film, Slava Tsukerman’s equally cultish punk relic Liquid Sky [1982]). Alice is secretly angry at her father’s departure and wants him home again, and she’s begun lashing out at everyone around her with increasingly artful offence. But she also hides a powerful, if manipulative, streak of real despair and fear of abandonment as revealed when she drops a jar of jam when Annie is bossing her about, sparking a furious kitchen confrontation. Alice is certainly infuriating and perhaps even a little dangerous—but is she unhinged enough to be a murderer? For Annie and others, Alice’s transgressive attitude is easily transmutable into sociopathic acts, especially as the killer consciously adopts the same dress and guises as Alice. When Annie leaves the Spages’ flat after her charged clash with Alice and Catherine, the same masked, raincoat-clad figure attacks her and hacks at her legs on the stairs. Annie plunges bleeding and terrified down into the lobby, screaming that Alice has attacked her, and crawls out onto the sidewalk in the pouring rain as Dom and Tom arrive.

The film’s opening titles proffer a weird gag, in which a young woman in veiling white is seen praying with a crucifix in her hands as an image of sanctified youth, only to lift the cross and reveal a dagger point on the end. It’s the first moment in a film that presents seemingly disparate things—devotion and homicide, innocence and sadism—in a confused singularity. The cleverness of Sole’s film is in the richness with which he melds humdrum detail and the heightened realism of the familiar, down-to-earth preoccupations of the characters, full of family tensions that blend love and antipathy in barely separable ways, and the more expansive cinematic gamesmanship of its thriller plot and visuals. Sole’s use of Hitchcockian visuals, justified not only by story, but also by the fact that Psycho is showing at the local movie theatre; so, the texture of remembering an era and a set of events as filtered through an associated aesthetic method is matched by an individual cinematic sensibility that expresses itself mostly keenly through close-ups. Sole builds to singular moments of feverish, almost operatic telegraphy of feeling in his close shots, as when Karen’s body is found and an exchange of looks between Tom and Catherine confirms the worst, and when Annie, screaming in panic, crawls into the torrential downpour. Sole is constantly receptive to faces, particularly those of the female cast. Miller’s Catherine, with a mature beauty, retains at first a sphinx-like aura of self-containment, often shot in cool profile or watched in silent recline, only to be constantly twisted into a mask of anxiety as she’s beset with the trials of Job as many a single mother might feel. Alice’s face with her unnerving large eyes and sullen mouth radiate force of character unleavened by the deference of maturity, and Annie’s face looks like Catherine’s except slightly smudged by a life of bossy and judgemental self-righteousness. Later, there are faces bent in pain and transfigured by madness and anger.

The actual killer calls to mind other horror movie tropes beyond Hitchcock, with the killer’s deceptive physical appearance and raincoat evoking the killer dwarf of Don’t Look Now (1973) and Dom as a similarly doomed pursuing father, whilst the mask is pure giallo movie stuff. Like George Romero’s Martin from the same year, Sole utilises an almost neorealist sensibility in his depiction of his native milieu, his feel for the assailed, decaying sensibilities of the formerly secure, and his use of genre tropes to try to describe an authentic psychic atmosphere of disconnection and alienation in communities that used to be defined by rock-solid values and an insularity both reassuring and suffocating. Alice and Martin are similar square pegs for very round holes, whose inchoate rebellions inevitably bring on punishing forces, all the more hysterical as the certainties that inform the punishers are endangered. Yet in many ways, the actual mood of Sole’s film is closer in spirit to Val Lewton than Hitchcock or Romero, in its sense of ordinary lives inflected with eruptions of the irrational. For the most part, Sole takes his material on at the far more immediate level of a family drama, and many sequences, like the kitchen bust-up, are convincing depictions of simple, emotional fracas amongst ordinary people; indeed, aspects of the film, for example, the depiction of psychologically injured youth in the wake of calamity, anticipate the more precious “serious” stuff of Robert Redford’s Ordinary People (1980). The process of Alice’s becoming a serious police suspect evokes the similar scenes of Antoine Doinel’s passage into the justice system in The 400 Blows (1959), even as Alice still manages to get a blow back by sabotaging a polygraph when the technician is out of the room. The visual texture around Alice becomes encaging, with repeated shots through bars and window frames isolating her from the world.

The thriller plot, then, works in tandem with depictions of the all-too-familiar dangers and threats of childhood, like the dance of malignancy Alice and Lorenzo engage in. Three sequences of sustained emotional volatility in the film’s mid-section serve both in a propelling plot purpose, but also retain self-sufficient qualities of character study and interaction. The first is when Catherine desperately pleads with, and then threatens, Annie in her hospital bed to divert her from saying that Alice attacked her, but Annie, agonised and fraught, still bawls out to her henpecked husband and the police that Alice was the guilty party. The second comes when Dom and Catherine visit Alice, who’s subsequently locked away for psychiatric evaluation, with a doctor (Louisa Horton) concluding she has schizoid tendencies; Alice at first furiously rejects them, but then buckles and chases after her mother in a teary catharsis. Alice’s incarceration means that she ceases to be the centre of the story, as Dom and Catherine move into focus in the third scene, as they momentarily give in, in their brittle and clingy states, to their still-bubbling attraction, only for a phone call from Dom’s new wife to cut into their tryst with humiliating timing. Nonetheless, Dom’s return and his determination to stick about until he can find the real killer, whom he begins to suspect might be Annie’s chubby, sullen daughter Angela (Kathy Rich), seems a perfect way not only to get his daughter out of immediate trouble, but also to prove he’s still a part of her life, vitally important to saving her unstable psyche as well as her freedom. But in a coldly inspired, mercilessly staged sequence, Dom is fooled into meeting with Angela in a park, and, spying the coated, masked figure, chases it into a disused building, where the figure stabs him in the shoulder on the stairs, and flees to a higher floor.

Dom continues to track the attacker, still believing it’s a frightened and unstable girl, only to then be knocked out, tied up, and rolled towards a high drop with chilling, laborious calm, by the murderer. This is actually Mrs. Tredoni, utterly psychotic and determined to destroy the Spages, who represent everything that’s wrong to her with a world of decaying morals, and who keep distracting her beloved Father Tom from his priestly duties and her tender care. Dom’s panicked, prone screams once he revives can’t stop her from continuing to roll him toward his doom. He manages, however, to tear Karen’s crucifix from her neck with his teeth, and won’t give it even as she smashes his teeth in with a stone, swallowing it instead, before sending him plummeting for the coup-de-grace. The grinding sense of corporeal punishment here, suffered for sins directly subsequent to the moment of near-adultery between former husband and wife, beautifully channels Catholic guilt into worldly suffering, as the killer inflicts pain as self-appointed wrath of god, albeit one who returns to scrubbing floors and making tea and grumbling. The film’s signal image inverts meaning: the mask, which on Alice signifies a longing for the depersonalised power of adult eroticism, is on Mrs. Tredoni a borrowed guise of sensuality turned grotesque, as she seeks to punish “that whore” Catherine for her perceived transgressions, and the secret perversity of the conformist, rather than the outsider, is revealed. Tredoni’s attack on Dom’s teeth carries Freudian dimensions, redolent of a prepubescent oedipal violence.

Bloodied and dirty from her exertions, she returns to the church and takes refuge in the confessional, where she admits vaguely to her sins to be given a reassuring absolution by Father Tom, who tells her she’s a good person, accidentally, implicitly affirming the rightness of her determination to punish the wicked: Tredoni, slumped in the shadows and quivering with feeling after her deed, now lifts her eyes in beatified happiness. Momentary calm, however, threatens to dissipate as Alice returns home, restored to her life by a repulsive sacrifice Catherine decides to keep secret from her for a time. Catherine still taunts Tredoni with her presence in the church, and her attempt to kill Catherine is forestalled by the most bizarre device: Alice, in her return home, leaves her jar of bugs propped on the sleeping Alphonso’s lap. When he wakes with the bugs crawling on him, his cries brings the watching detective charging in, and Tredoni, alarmed, stabs Alphonso to death and is seen fleeing. She makes it to the church, where she stands in the queue to receive communion, unaware that the police are gathering outside. Father Tom begs them to let him extract her, but Tom’s conscientiousness finally proves his own undoing as he asks Tredoni to leave and she, in a rage of betrayal and lunacy, asks why he’d ask her to leave and not “that whore” and stabs the priest in the neck.

Again, Alice’s attempt to receive communion is ruined, this time by the savage annihilation of her last father figure right in front of her, and the spectacle leaves her wandering away with Tredoni’s bag, fingered her mask and knife with a boding purpose. It’s arguable that here finally Sole steps too close to a glib twist ending, but there’s a terrible concision to it: like the same year’s Carrie, there’s a dark catharsis where damaged youth finds itself irrevocably tethered to the sins of the parents and broken morality, and rational forces no longer present any credible barrier to the young inheritor’s vengeful mind. Either way, Communion is a small masterpiece. For a cast of virtual unknowns, with the exception of I’ll Cry Tomorrow scribe Lillian Roth in a droll cameo as a medical examiner and, of course, future star Shields, the cast is remarkably effective. Sole, sadly, never came close to matching it again: whereas, by his own admission, he would have been better off remaining an independent local filmmaker, a la Romero and John Waters, he went Hollywood, and after making the utterly bizarre-sounding Tanya’s Island (1980) and the weak slasher-movie send-up Pandemonium (1982), he finished up in a career as a production designer.

The House of the Devil (2009) / The Innkeepers (2012)

Director/Screenwriter/Editor: Ti West

By Roderick Heath

Revivalism is always a contentious practice in any art form, inviting charges of slavish nostalgia and unoriginality, but it’s also often a signifier of a form trying to reinvent itself and a rejection by younger artists of dominant, but oppressive and depleted models, a way of looking forward by looking back. That’s as true in cinema, though often more piecemeal because of the difficulties of film production, as it is in pop music or painting. In the case of a recent strand of revivalist-tinged horror cinema, it’s easy to see the roots of the movement: the horror film has been in a crisis, it seems, for most of my lifetime. That crisis has been ever-present, even though, or in large part because it’s still a genre with a powerful commercial cache, whilst remaining doggedly verboten in the minds of many filmgoers and cultural watchdogs: many a box office list of recent years has proven what utter garbage can still lure fright and gore fans into the multiplexes. It’s still a genre sourced in an essential ethic that can only be domesticated so far. The genre has seen a variety of pretenders march its halls. The much-hyped waves of Torture Porn, J-Horror and Euro Extreme yielded one or two strong films and a slew of infinitely lesser fare. Fortunately, just lately, there have been distinct signs of a sea change in the genre from the independent film scenes of Great Britain and the U.S.: indeed, whereas indie cinema has for a long time prided itself on distinction from low-budget genre cinema, a crossbreeding of the two seems to be nascent, allowing adventurous young filmmakers to reject the tired reflexes of the slasher movie, endless lousy remakes, and pure stomach-churning nastiness, and channel other models.

Ti West’s films are particularly engaging in this regard, because they represent a melding of the immersed sensibilities of a young genre fan with the anti-generic rhythms of independent film so confidently that he erases the disparity as if it was never there. The House of the Devil, for instance, immediately declares its indie cred with the mischievous touch of casting Greta Gerwig in the type of part often filled by Nancy Loomis back when. West, who began to gain attention with two ultra-low-budget features, The Roost (2005) and Trigger Man (2007), before an ill-fated stab at becoming Eli Roth’s anointed successor with Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2009), is suddenly the genre It Boy, and for once, the attention is for very good reasons. West’s already-signature slow-burn narratives have one foot distinctly planted in post-mumblecore realist cinema, with an emphasis on characterisation through suggestion and an almost discursive sense of narrative construction, and one foot in a classic gothic genre sensibility where a prevalence of a mood of evolving credulity, a sense of precise timing, and a slow rhythmic build-up, is of paramount importance. This mood is directly opposed to the instant gratification sensibility ushered in by the likes of Friday the 13th (1980). West extends that into the raison d’etre of his works, invoking no less a figure than Andrei Tarkovsky in the way he insists, like the Russian titan, that the surest way to build tension is to force the audience to wait. Thus in many ways West betrays the legacy of the ’70s and ’80s genre cinema he clearly loves as much as he celebrates it, because such patience and such wilful resistance to cheapjack stunts was rarely exhibited by such models.

The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers are, in their fashion, extremely simple movies, employing spare settings and casts, and moving to deceptive beats of storytelling, at least until they hit their crisis moments, closer to ambient techno than blaring rock. The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers are linked not only by aesthetic design but by the circumstances of their production: West was inspired to make the second film whilst making the first, during which he and his crew stayed in a hotel with a reputation for being haunted. Most consequentially, they’re conjoined by their human focus, and a distinctive quality of generational biography, skewed a little, but hardly unrecognisably by the ’80s setting of The House of the Devil, and emerging more fully in the context of employment anxiety and the disintegrating faiths and decaying institutions in The Innkeepers.

Both films follow comely, young, but hapless and semi-alienated heroines. The Innkeepers’ Claire (Sara Paxton) is spiritual kin to House’s Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), whilst moving in focus from college into the big, wide world, a world ironically defined by constantly narrowing environs to match their narrowing options. Samantha is more introverted than the kookier, talkative Claire, but each is linked by a flailing lack of direction and both seem clearly cut off from any reliable sense of refuge with, or support by, family, or more than one or two immediate friends. Samantha’s course in The House of the Devil leads her inexorably to the titular abode; Claire’s choices similarly see her unable to avoid the basement she’s explicitly warned not to venture into in the hotel that had become her home and, to a certain extent, refuge from life. If in a subtler, less transparently hip fashion, West’s cinema is nonetheless as attuned to the mindset of the moment as John Carpenter’s was in the hairy, feckless, oppressed atmosphere of Dark Star (1974): like Carpenter’s heroes in that film, the experiences of West’s heroines illustrate immediate realities through the prisms of the fantastic. In both The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, financial anxiety is a keynote, and a subtler but pervasive air of anomie and abandonment.

The early scenes of The House of the Devil depict Samantha eddying in a time between times, preparing to move out of her college dormitory into a rented house, negotiating with a kindly prospective landlady (Dee Wallace), and getting a deal that will allow her to make a quick and relatively cheap leap into living by herself. She has good reasons to do so: her room back at the dorm is perpetually used by her roommate (Heather Robb) to copulate with random men, and the college is a dull, desolate space through which she flits in anxious distraction. West is suggestive but not declarative about the nature of Samantha’s background and present state of isolation, but she evokes such marked heroes of the genre as the eponymous mother of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Sgt. Howie of The Wicker Man (1972), defined by her subliminal distinction from her surrounds, retreating to the bathroom to weep in private, sprawling on steps to wait for a prospective employer, zoning out in music.

The prospective employer is named Ulman, and has placed ads for a babysitter around the campus: the moment Tom Noonan’s voice emerges from the other end of the telephone, you know whoever’s answering this ad is screwed. Fate is given an accidental nudge along when Samantha’s solitary gal pal Megan (Gerwig) takes offence on her behalf after Ulman fails to show for the appointed meeting, and rips down all of his ads, leaving Samantha as the sole alternative when another candidate backs out at the last minute. When Samantha finally gets to Ulman’s impressive old pile of a house located (natch) deep in the woods, the list of complications gets increasingly more daunting, including the fact that she’s supposed to actually sit for Ulman’s wife’s mother, an elderly shut-in, and Ulman is willing to pay an absurd amount for a few hours’ work. Mary Woronov, the darkly vulpine star of ’80s flicks like Nomads (1986), is Ulman’s fur-draped wife, who probes with disquieting effect into Samantha’s personal life and circumstances.

Just as Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive directly evoked older films with its credit sequence, so, too, does The House of the Devil, projecting large yellow titles over an ’80s pop-scored reverie of Samantha (the music is actually on her ever-present Walkman) whilst strolling through autumnal suburbs back to the college. And, as in Refn’s film, it’s a touch that to a certain extent both announces the film’s programme but also miscues those quick to assume what’s following is mere pastiche. The House of the Devil is quite a radical piece of narrative cinema in its quiet way, especially by modern standards, in taking its time to quietly condition the audience and its heroine, to the point where an inevitable eruption of chaos will come as a virtual relief from the tension—and one thing West does superlatively well is build tension. The bleary casualness of Samantha’s scenes with the gauchely agreeable Megan, even when driving her into the deep dark woods, is delectable for the mood of everyday camaraderie blended with irritation and mutual indulgence of failings. For the most part, West seeks to justify his long intake of breath with undercurrents rather than declarations: only when Megan, after dropping off her friend and leaving in a huff at Samantha’s willingness to place herself in such an odd situation for the sake of rent money and then pulls over for a cigarette in a nearby cemetery, does the lurking threat finally resolve. A helpful young man (AJ Bowen), actually the son of Samantha’s intriguing employers, steps up to the car and gives Megan a light, but the instant he realises that she is not the prospective babysitter, pulls out a pistol and shoots her in the face.

Both The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers are structured around buildings, and the elusive sensation of isolation and paranoia that can define being alone in large supposedly empty spaces, a mood West ties ineffably to the unease of his protagonists within their own skin. Throughout the second half of House, there are shots peering in at Samantha through windows, a specimen of study, whilst she in turn explores a space that offers constant mystery and suggestion; only the privileged audience is allowed to understand, as West will seemingly casually give viewers a glimpse beyond a door that has foiled his heroine, to find bodies strewn in bloodied carnage. Such gambits relieve the almost purified pressure of the anxious unknown which defines the way The House of the Devil’s narrative works.

If The Innkeepers is slightly more prosaic in its style, with much more dialogue, more defined generic situations, and a few nods to traditional horror movie tricks, it’s also slightly more mature. The dynamic between Samantha and Megan is reconfigured into Claire’s slacker-hued companionship with Luke (Pat Healy), a slightly older he-nerd and fellow college dropout who’s further along in the process of cultivating disengaged contempt for the real world, spending his days surfing internet porn and building a web page to showcase the supposed sepulchral delights of the hotel they work in. The hotel, the Yankee Pedlar Inn, is a virtually empty Edwardian pile about to be closed down. The boss has skipped out to holiday in a tropical paradise, and the young duo is left as a live-in skeleton staff over a long weekend. It’s the sort of job that could be a godsend to the creatively self-involved, but the anxiety provoked by the job’s imminent demise, the immersive constancy of it, and the lack of any other purpose in their lives, makes the mysteries swirling within the building’s aged bricks and timbers a trap that works a perfect spell on Claire. The hotel is supposedly haunted by Madeline O’Malley, a lovelorn suicide who, it is said, can still be glimpsed wandering the halls. Luke claims to have seen her, though he’s caught no more substantial evidence so far than a video shot of a room door closing spontaneously, and he and Claire salve their boredom by engaging in a part-time ghost hunt.

Claire’s fraying capacity to survive in the outside world is brought out in an early scene, the only one where she leaves the immediate surrounds of the hotel to visit a neighbouring café, only to flee swiftly at a barrage of whining by the barista (Lena Dunham, herself an indie filmmaker). She withers under the anxious contempt of a woman (Alison Bartlett) who’s staying in the hotel with her son (Jake Schlueter), who proves less than an ideal audience for Claire’s ghost stories. An encounter with a childhood hero, former actress Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis), who, tellingly, played a maternal figure in an ’80s TV show Claire once adored, proves equally discouraging. Leanne supposedly comes to stay at the hotel for a fan convention, but it’s actually a gathering connected to her new occupation as a new-age therapist and psychic, and Leanne’s sozzled prickliness is sometimes mitigated by a more friendly demeanour as she willingly uses crystals to try to commune with the hotel’s spirits. Her contributions to the ghost hunt are vague at best in her bad tidings and warnings to stay out of the basement. Claire, left on a solitary nighttime vigil with a sensitive microphone provided by Luke as part of the hunt, seems to hear traces of far-off piano music, and tracking it to the piano in the lobby, she witnesses one key struck with melodramatic impetus, scaring the hell out of her, but also seeming to announce that the haunting isn’t just the hotel’s emptiness getting to them. And yet, there remains a possibility that Claire’s assailed psyche is fraying.

McGillis’ presence in The Innkeepers, like that of Wallace, Noonan, and Woronov in the earlier film, pays a definite nod to ’80s genre cinema, as well utilises the actors’ specific auras and capabilities with intuitive aplomb. Noonan’s capacity to seem both affable and unsettling is expertly employed in his character’s mix of old-world gentlemanliness and desperation to please Samantha enough to get her to stay around. His towering height is utilised in The House of the Devil’s best gag, when Samantha and Megan first meet him, his head cut well out of the frame that comfortably encompasses the two shorter, daunted ladies. McGillis admirably embraces her part as a greying, fatigued, spikily alcoholic old dingbat with élan, her initial patronisation and coldness to Claire transforming a childhood hero into an embodiment of both the alienating schism between art and life and implicitly maternal condemnation and a generational gap. Later, Luke sneaks in a few low blows, figuratively speaking, at Leanne’s drinking and failed career in revenge for her hurting Claire’s feelings, and this bit made me wonder if in some way all our contemporary obsession with the failings of the famous is sourced in similar motives. Either way, West advertises himself through such casting as an heir to Quentin Tarantino’s and Christopher Nolan’s penchant for reviving the careers of faded figures of former cool.

But West is always focused on his central, younger figures, and he gets gems of performances out of Donahue and especially Paxton, whose wrestling match with a garbage bin early in The Innkeepers is a terrific piece of physical comedy that doubles as a furtherance of characterisation, as Claire is easily overwhelmed by inanimate objects, and the sight of Leanne gazing down from her hotel window like a hovering, disapproving owl deepens the moment’s humiliation. There’s a sequence in The House of the Devil where Samantha momentarily wins her war of nerves against both her own depression and her boding surrounds by cutting loose for a moment by listening to music on her headphones and dancing around the place with a kind of footloose energy and innocence that seems definably pre-’90s.

Unlike some obvious precursors like The Haunting’s (1963) Hill House or The Shining’s (1981) grandiose Overlook, The Innkeepers‘ Yankee Pedlar is nominally vintage, but is actually undistinguished in any sense except by age. But in the grand generic tradition, it has become a snare for frustrated dreams and circular lives: as well as the ghost whose backstory carries intimations of despair and abandonment, an aged man (George Riddle) turns up asking for the room his spent his honeymoon in, a room that, like most of the rest of the hotel, has been stripped down and sealed up. Claire and Luke acquiesce to his request, only for Claire to later find he’s committed suicide, the final catalyst for an onrush of terrible visions. Much of The Innkeepers is sustained by the attentive back and forth between Claire and Luke, particularly in an epic movement where the pair escapes ennui by getting drunk and playful, Claire’s flaky forlornness for a moment almost connecting with Luke’s sexual frustration and stymied attraction to his coworker. This tension resolves as Claire suggests descending into the basement to hunt for Madeline, culminating in a intense sequence offering only close-ups of the two actors in the midst of a sea of darkness, and Claire fearfully informing Luke that the wraith is standing right behind him. Luke freaks out and flees the hotel entirely, leaving Claire to try to survive alone. This sequence is enormously pleasurable on several levels—the slow-rising, sustained tension, the precision of characterisation and acting, the cunning use of camera perspective that generates a certainty of the supernatural whilst still never confirming its existence beyond Claire’s point of view.

If West’s otherwise marvellous diptych is hampered by anything, it’s by the relatively stolid conceptualisations of evil and the uncanny once they are actually revealed: the witch-woman (Danielle Noe) who claws her way out of the attic to perform a devilish ritual over Samantha’s trussed form at the climax of The House of the Devil and the mangled ghosts that pursue Claire in The Innkeepers are standard movie ghouls. West hasn’t really yet figured out ways to complicate and explicate deeper edges to his supernatural Macguffins yet. To a certain extent, that appears deliberate. West relishes their cheesy impact as ways of reminding people that he really likes the schlocky side of his films as much as their more ambitious elements. He’s clearly reaching a stage in his career where he might be advised, a la Quentin Tarantino with Jackie Brown (1997) or John Carpenter with The Thing (1982), to tackle an adaptation or a personalised remake that can enrich his lexicon. On the other hand, West displays in both films judiciousness about just what he does explain and depict that evokes the greatest traditions of Western ghost stories, as in the tales of M.R. James. One beauty of this approach is their simultaneous success as psychological narratives and genre fare. The apparently demonic gestation the witch-woman plants in Samantha in The House of the Devil is easily decipherable as the encumbrance of pregnancy putting a final damper on Samantha’s stymied upward mobility, and Claire’s final pursuit and death at the hands of a vengeful Madeline sees her unable to use an escape hatch she herself locked earlier in the film, finally entrapped by her own choices and susceptibilities. Both The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers resolve in genuinely haunting final images, suggesting survival in some form or another entails unknowable menaces.

The Witches, aka The Devil’s Own (1966)

Director: Cyril Frankel

By Roderick Heath

Hammer Studios first moved into making films in the cinefantastique genres with adaptations of Nigel Kneale’s epochal TV serials in the mid ’50s. But Kneale had surprisingly little to do with the studio, except for adapting his own work with the 1957 film The Abominable Snowman, and penning the script for this ripping mid-’60s work that sports one of the House of Horror’s few imported star turns, in the person of Joan Fontaine. Director Cyril Frankel’s name doesn’t conjure many associations, which perhaps partly explains why this film has fallen under the radar: after initial film work, he acted chiefly as a TV director. But The Witches is a delicious slice of classic British genre fare offers much the same deeply neurotic mood of repression and explosive release that also marks out other great, thematically similar British horror films like Night of the Eagle (1961) and The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). It anticipates, in many ways, The Wicker Man’s ironic contrast of idyllic hamlets and uncanny threats, if without the calculated inversions of story expectations, and looks forward to more modern studies on similar material like Wake Wood (2010) and the satiric landscape of Hot Fuzz (2007).

The Witches is an adaptation of a novel by Norah Lofts, who also provided the source material for John Ford’s last feature film, shot the same year, 7 Women, an equally interesting revision of genre film with a female-centric viewpoint. Here, a bizarre and jarring prologue immediately hits a note of frantic alarmism, as it offers a fin-de-siecle twist on colonial do-gooder tales like The Nun’s Story (1959). Fontaine’s character, Gwen Mayfield, running a school in a colony beset by a Mau-Mau-like uprising, tries to pack up and flee before the menace comes calling. Her native assistants are so frightened by the curse of the local Juju man they finally abandon Gwen. The door is bashed in, and the Juju men, one wearing a colossal tribal mask, enter, presumably to rape and abuse our heroine.

After the credits, Gwen reappears in London three years later. She’s patched herself back together but is still bearing signs of trauma, fending off an attack of nerves as she’s interviewed by the pleasant, but fusty eccentric Alan Bax (Alec McCowen) for a job teaching at small, rural school of which he’s a patron. Gwen’s new position takes her to the hamlet of Heddaby. Alan and his sister Stephanie (Kay Walsh) are the wealthiest people in the area, and the town is a backwater without a government school, which is why the Baxes fund their own. Gwen shares duties with another teacher, Sally Benson (Ann Bell), and begins to settle into her job, until the romance of two of her adolescent students, Ronnie Dowsett (Martin Stephens) and Linda Rigg (Ingrid Boulting), is discovered. Linda’s guardian “Granny” Rigg (Gwen Ffrangcon Davies) objects to this coupling, and Gwen finds herself called upon to find a way of keeping them apart. She encourages Ronnie’s talents, and soon he wins a chance to go to a better school out of town. Rather than send him away, which Gwen thinks will make him unhappy, she begins personally tutoring him, leaving vulnerable to secret forces that control the village that want to protect Linda’s virginity. Ronnie falls into a coma one night and is hospitalised.

A disturbing discovery—a male doll Ronnie had bought for Linda as a suggestive partner for her own perpetually carried female figure, hidden in the crook of a tree with its head removed and riddled with pins—stirs Gwen’s suspicions that she’s dealing with something she has encountered before. Ronnie’s mother (Carmel McSharry) flees town with her son when he recovers, and her husband (John Collin) visits Gwen one night in the schoolhouse stinking drunk, distraught at the collapse of his life. When Gwen lets slip that she suspects Granny Rigg might have cursed Ronnie in some way, he goes to visit her, but turns up drowned in a nearby lake. Before she can report her story at the inquest, Gwen, staying overnight at the Bax’s house, is stricken down with a vision of the Juju mask and she awakens in a nursing home, having completely lost her memory of the past three years.

Like many great horror films, The Witches cunningly uses other, more humdrum genres and everyday familiarities as a starting point; although the prologue announces things are going to be sensational and garish, most of the first half is deceptively casual and evokes a traditional depiction of an English village that might have stumbled out of soap operas from The Archers through to Heartbeat. It avoids even the signposted oddness of The Wicker Man, with only a slightly tweaked atmosphere of estrangement, apparent in touches like the cheery brutality of the local butcher Bob Curd (Duncan Lamont), beaming with overemphatic friendliness as he rips the skin off a rabbit, the coolly unexaggerated bigotry of the local mothers aimed at Ronnie because of his father’s reputation as a layabout, and the discomfort Gwen experiences in trying to negotiate small-town politics. She plays the beneficent teacher helping give the poor young lad a leg up in a victimising world, almost a prototype for Kes (1969).

Frankel’s unmannered, clear-eyed direction helps the film walk a tightrope of tone, only skewing from the realistic in such odd moments as Granny Rigg telling her grey cat to follow Gwen, and a slow manifesting sense of more than usual evil lurking under the surface, as Ronnie tries to alert Gwen to his having seen Linda being punished by having her hand jammed in a clothes wringer by Granny Rigg. Ronnie’s romancing of Linda isn’t just verboten because she’s important to a witches’ rite, but also because his mother isn’t local: the other children are all so in-bred, as Sally says, it’s hard to distinguish the variations on the “Heddaby face.” Frankel wields Hitchcockian technique as Gwen notices details like the many bare footprints scattered in the mud by the lake where Dowsett drowned, only to be erased as a flock of sheep charges through, panicked by Stephanie’s dogs; it’s a moment clearly reminiscent of the erasing of Miss Froy’s dust-written name in The Lady Vanishes (1938).

Perhaps another reason The Witches isn’t as well known to Hammer fans as it ought to be is because it mostly eschews the studio’s usual gothic stylistics, preferring crisper, restrained hues in the photography to the usual saturated tones. It also sports an uncommonly good cast of actors not at all associated with the genre, redolent of an attempt to elevate studio fare that was beginning to slide into the blood and boobs formula of the later Dracula films, et al. In addition to Walsh and McCowen, Leonard Rossiter turns up late in the piece as a smug, yet hapless doctor who takes Gwen in charge after she suffers a second breakdown after being hexed. The comely Boulting was a daughter of film director John Boulting whose most recognisable role was the mysterious object of affection in Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon (1976).

Witchcraft has often been one of the more neglected fields for horror films to draw on, in part because it often demands suggestion of unseen forces at odds with the declarative demands of genre cinema, and also because the modern mind is largely inclined to give witches the benefit of the doubt. Frankel doesn’t draw out fulminating sensuality and neurotic energy like Terence Fisher or Don Sharp at their best, but he does master the necessary rhythm of slowly composing strangeness leading into outright nuttiness. Whereas Fisher’s tackling of similar notions in the following year’s The Devil Rides Out is a lushly orchestrated spectacle, Frankel and Kneale’s film builds toward something like black comedy in its depiction of dowdy villagers suddenly hurling themselves with joyous, countercultural energy into satanic rites and orgiastic preludes.

The Witches partners squarely with the same year’s Plague of the Zombies, though not played in a period setting, by invoking similar motifs: the secret link between colonialist horrors and malevolence infecting the coloniser’s homeland, an evil manipulated by the mansion on the hill, and virtually surreal visions of atavistic rites within the supposedly staid and settled English order of things. True weirdness finally, explictly manifests when Gwen ventures into the cave where the coven meets, discovering a cabalistic dial on the ground upon which a strange doll-like object seems to dance spontaneously—it’s actually got Granny Rigg’s familiar-like cat sewed up inside, and has a photo of Linda’s face pinned to it.

The Witches is fundamentally a good yarn, but it required a compelling lead performance to give the drama true pep, and Fontaine delivers. Her Gwen is shaky, but intelligent and dogged, fighting against her own brittle nerves and fear of the unknown. She is severely contrasted by the film’s other major female figure, Stephanie, a popular newspaper writer whose bracing, slightly unctuous bravado contrasts her brother’s air of tragic failure. He had wanted to be a priest, and as well as dressing as one, spends much of his time locked away in private playing church bell and choir music and drifting away in melancholy distraction when trying to explain his fixations to Gwen. Fontaine offers, in a way, a bookend to her career-making part as the heroine of Rebecca (1940), considerably older and wiser, but equally perplexed by the workings of the world where, be it in Africa or rural England, irrational, cryptic, boding forces work to annihilate or assimilate anything that disrupts their cohesive fabric.

When Gwen presents the pin-stuck doll to her, Stephanie slashes heartily through the pretences of witchcraft in describing its practitioners as mostly repressed yokels looking for an orgy. Of course, she is really the secret head of the coven, which she found operating in the town and has taken over for her own purposes: convinced of her own brilliance as a force that could heal the world’s ills, she’s looking for a way to renew herself, and has found it, planning to claim Linda’s body to transplant her soul into. Walsh’s Stephanie is posited at first as a less damaged, more outgoing version of Gwen, radiating cosmopolitan intellectual confidence and, more subtly, a hint of lesbian charisma, all but licking her lips in joy at having Fontaine under her thumb as dominated, unwilling confidant. But she’s also a colossal egomaniac with a hale and aggressive energy that operates a little like an energy vampire against those close to her, even before she reveals her true status and her ultimate intent, which is to slice off Linda’s skin and wear it as a cloak of youth.

The attraction and tension between Fontaine’s and Walsh’s differing editions of middle-aged, woman-of-the-world, strength of purpose then sustains the drama, with Gwen starting off on the back foot thanks to her traumatic experiences and ignorance of the lay of the land in Heddaby, but slowly gathering resolve in trying to penetrate the mystery. When she’s stuck in a nursing home, stricken with amnesia, her memory returns in a cathartic moment, but she’s able to keep anyone from realising it until she can get a chance to escape. She’s soon snatched and forcibly inducted into the coven. Between the women stands the castrated Alan, whose defence mechanism against his monstrous sister is to isolate himself with the apparel of the church: Gwen’s appeal to him to give aid proves ineffectual as he locks himself away again: he is as much damsel in distress as Linda. Only Gwen is capable of standing up to Stephanie.

The film’s climax is also its major set-piece, as Gwen is forced to watch over a mesmerised Linda as Stephanie whips her coven into a sensual frenzy, orchestrating their gyrations as they perform the ritual dances. The tawdry sexual element Stephanie mocked comes out, the villagers, clad in rags, beat drums and blow horns with comic intensity, Gwen is held prone by two of the village men who can’t wait to induct her properly, and the rest cavort like they’ve been choreographed by an enterprising high school dance teacher. But the latent power and fascinating intensity of the rituals also begin to assert themselves as Stephanie, wearing deer horns on her head when clad in her witch’s garb, evokes the most ancient religions, and Linda, as she enters the coven, catalyses through her body the unnerving force she represents as an adolescent female, completely unfettered, a different kind of crucible that offers manifold promises of ecstatic delights. The coven smear themselves in juice squeezed from fruits, rubbing themselves and each other down, including one moment of homoerotic punch as two of the village males gleefully caress each other. Stephanie serves up a magical glop that look like excrement to be eaten in frenzied joy, and she leaves them twitching on the floor as if in a mass epileptic convulsion.

Meanwhile Stephanie’s monstrous egotism is configured in her literally conducting her coven like a puppeteer, sensually grasping Linda from behind and guiding her like a tuned instrument. Fittingly, then, the film’s corkscrewing narrative seems to find in the ritual acts of the coven a metaphor for the genre itself, a carefully orchestrated eruption of elements other worldviews frantically suppress or ignore, and where the dichotomous choice is to grasp or destroy the young female. Fittingly, Stephanie’s arrogance proves her undoing as her reading of the ritual procedure to Gwen earlier in the film gives Gwen the knowledge to wreck the ritual right at its climax, stabbing herself in the arm and soiling Stephanie’s cloak with it, bringing down the offended power of the dark gods on her: Stephanie drops dead and the coven’s power is broken.

The appended coda is a happy ending that’s rather disorienting in its disarmingly cheery tone even as it encompasses some strange implications. A happy Alan sets about aiding Gwen as her liberated potential romantic partner, the town is suddenly dragged into the 20th century as the general store is replaced by a supermarket and the old residents scatter after the coven’s is broken, and Gwen’s students flock in to celebrate her goodness. The shattering of a corrupt order seems to have meant also throwing away that cosy insularity so often fetishized in retrospect in modern British life. In any event, The Witches is a delicious diversion for fans of offbeat horror.

Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

Director/Screenwriter: Brian De Palma

By Roderick Heath

Brian De Palma’s volatile career, whatever you might think of it, is one of the most individualistic of American commercial directors. His oeuvre breaks up neatly, at least from a distance, into three movements, encompassing his raucous apprentice work, his chicly gaudy, richly eccentric major phase, and his often patchy, yet still restlessly creative and critical late career. These phases are each demarcated nicely by some of the many major financial flops De Palma has suffered in the ironic life of a director who so often seemed willing to offer up to his audience everything it wanted, but in such immoderate, immersive, gleefully perverse terms that he instead seemed to be making a joke of such pandering.

At the same time, De Palma seemed to take the idea of being an auteur more seriously than any other young American director, not only offering up personal themes and stories and expressive cinematic techniques that clashed with the settled textures of mainstream moviemaking, but in making his own creativity part of the show. He set about ostentatiously repeating devices, scenes, and sometimes whole movies, composing his epic signature scenes, then pulling them apart and staging them all over again in new contexts and with new resolutions. Such were the building blocks of his most famous string of films from the late ’70s through to the mid ’90s. But De Palma’s eventual pigeonholing as a postmodern remix artiste for genre fare with a thing for Hitchcock to a large extent concealed a major strand of his artistic personality, that of the sly, subversive gamester with a remorseless satiric streak.

De Palma was perhaps the closest of the major Movie Brats to the counterculture, with one foot planted squarely in the guerrilla theatre and film worlds of ’60s New York, and the influence of that zesty freeform sphere remained hard-wired in his aesthetic sensibility, constant dialectic partner to the media-mad young nerd with a yen for the lush, eroticised space of the cinematic frame. De Palma’s early films are therefore mostly comedies of manners, including the hipster gagfest Greetings (1968) and The Wedding Party (1969), and in such company, his first “thriller,” Sisters (1973), seems to wear the apparel of a Hitchcockian tale in large part to satirise the mores of early ’70s New Yorkers, and offer up a deliberately absurd, anticlimactic variation that makes fun of the whole idea of witnessing and investigation, as doomed and self-defeating as that of Gerrit Graham’s JFK conspiracy theorist’s pursuit in Greetings. His next film was his first work to gain major studio hype behind it, Phantom of the Paradise, destined to be a financial failure before cult revival and therefore something of a false start before he stepped back and reintroduced himself with Carrie (1976), a film that expands on many elements of Phantom whilst offering them within a new, deceptive, high-cinema composure.

What distinguishes Phantom from the films that would follow it, and keeps it tied to the less polished works before it, is its sense of anarchic energy and blackly comic rapture. The greatest insult in the ’60s had been to be labelled a sell-out, and written over Phantom in neon letters is the film’s simultaneous embrace and ridicule of selling out, tackled with a pulverising, panicky bravado. Early scenes make use of the same mock-silent film passages of sped-up slapstick that had often punctuated De Palma’s apprentice work, essayed now in the context of a film that transforms the morbid romanticism of Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera and its many subsequent film versions into an outright Faustian parable, mixed with a freebasing critique of pop music and celebrity worship. It’s as radical, and much more visceral a take on those ideas, as Peter Watkins’ unnervingly predicative Privilege (1967), but real life would soon catch up with and surpass its prototypical visions of glam rock, punk, and death metal excess.

The film’s impresario supervillain Swan (Paul Williams) is depicted as the force behind all of the movements in recent music, a man who sold his soul to the devil for eternal youth and therefore always has his pulse on the current youth spirit. Phantom kicks off with an expository voiceover by Twilight Zone scribe Rod Serling positioned somewhere between rock-doc awe and sinister prelude, before the opening credits unfurl over a performance by Swan’s current hit band The Juicy Fruits, a satire on the nostalgic shtick of Grease, The Rocky Horror Show, and other self-consciously retro theatre pieces and acts of the early ’70s. This opening is more gruesome than any of the physical violence that follows, as sleazy mock-greasers fondle each other and audience members, and nearly break into fights, whilst singing an absurd song about a heroic musical artist who killed himself get a hit record and save his sister’s life with the profits. The jokey image of the mock self-annihilation by stabbing repeats later in the film in a “real,” yet also even more flagrantly artificial, context.

De Palma’s version of Leroux’s tragic Phantom is Winslow Leach, played by William Finley, a gangly, adaptable character actor who appears in much of De Palma’s early work, and here takes the lead for the first and last time. His Leach bears a distinct resemblance to Warren Zevon. Hapless, dowdy, and painfully naïve in his life, Leach’s superlative talents as a musician serve only to destroy him. Hired to play piano during breaks in Swan’s shows, Leach is overheard by the impresario, who, impressed, orders his cruder flunky Philbin (George Memmoli) to get hold of Leach’s music. Winslow is reluctant to part with his songs, which are only portions of a magnum opus based on the Faust legend, but agrees on the promise that Swan wants to produce the record. Winslow tries to see Swan at his Death Records office and then his home. There he meets a young singer, Phoenix (Jessica Harper), practising for an audition using one of the Faust songs, and Winslow is dazzled. Winslow is quickly ejected when discovered, and so is Phoenix, when finds out the audition is just the nightly intake for Swan’s harem of groupies and refuses. Winslow, on the other hand, dresses up and joins the concubines and manages to meet Swan, but he promptly has him plucked out, beaten up, and then set up by flunky cops on a drugs charge. In jail, Winslow has his teeth removed and replaced by metal ones as a part of a perverse experiment in sanitation he’s forced into, and when he hears one of Swan’s stars singing his songs on the radio, he goes berserk, escapes, and breaks into Death Records. While attempting to sabotage the production machinery, Winslow is caught in a record press and burns his face. He stumbles outside and falls into the harbour, and is presumed to have drowned.

De Palma’s wild, dark, vicious sense of humour and technique are not only constantly apparent in this fast and furious first act, but at a height of unhinged energy he never tried to match again. De Palma and set designer Jack Fisk’s entrap the actors, including Harper, within rooms just as engulfing and overpowering in decorative mise-en-scene as those she would face in Suspiria (1977). The story, and De Palma’s approach to it, tread a precarious line between skit-like Theatre of Cruelty conceit and frenzied emotional biography. He employs strange, space-moulding sets, obtuse, often handheld camerawork, oddball scene grammar, and a barrage of student film tricks in the course of telling Winslow’s story. De Palma’s basic point comes out the better for such magnified distortion, that for much of the world’s self-appointed founts of power able to beatify with fame and fortune, gatekeeping against pretenders and the potentially unruly and the excessively talented is as vital an aspect of their power as any other. Thus, the age of celebrity turns devastating failure into mirth for consumers. The storytelling is as charged with the same frantic, drug-enhanced, one-step-ahead sensibility as the legendary ’70s recording industry itself. As Swan himself puts it later, referring to why he doesn’t want to make a star of Phoenix, “She’s perfect, and you know how I abhor perfection in anyone other than myself.” Those who meet this head-on without caution and self-awareness are inevitable victims, comical foils for the cynical.

Winslow’s attempts to penetrate the Olympian monster’s lair likewise anticipate the structural motifs of The Fury (1978) and The Untouchables (1987), whilst Swan is a version of such malefic, would-be masters of fate as John Cassavettes’ Childress and De Niro’s Al Capone. The notion of the Phantom being a scarred and furious victim of artistic plagiarism and the evils of commercialised culture—an idea that comes not from the novel but from the 1943 Claude Rains version—is played up here as a tragicomic exercise where, as is often the case in De Palma’s work, naivete, aspiration, and innocence are hardly guarded from harm, but are instead brutally assaulted and cruelly broken (e.g., in the grim fates of Carrie White, Charles Martin Smith in The Untouchables, and the victimised females of The Black Dahlia [2006] and Redacted [2007]).

The flipside is often a furious, amoral retribution that reproduces and exceeds the violence of the wicked. Winslow returns as the Phantom, a work of performance art, encased in black leather and an art-deco bird mask, to haunt The Paradise, Swan’s gaudy new theatrical setting for his roster of acts. Winslow is agonised by his disfigured face and broken voice, but his artistic dedication and passion are to a certain extent released by becoming the Phantom, a point underlined with the ease with which Swan, after Winslow has announced his vengeful presence by exploding a bomb during a rehearsal in the Paradise, seduces him back into rewriting Faust. Winslow points out Phoenix to Swan at an audition and insists on her as his onstage avatar, and Phoenix rises to the challenge with an impromptu performance.

Swan’s genius as a creator and manipulator of talent is drawn out with impudent concision as he fine-tunes an electronic gadget for Winslow to speak and sing through, turning his hoarse, electrified wailing into a smooth croon with studio gadgets: he can turn the worst freak into a pop god, and vice versa. It’s worth noting that De Palma’s Phantom (being as De Palma was a friend of George Lucas, and who would write Star Wars’ opening scroll) seems to have influenced the look and concept of Darth Vader, who would similarly be revealed as another resurrected Phantom. Swan, of course, plans to double-cross Winslow even in the act of pretending to give him a second life.

Phantom of the Paradise references horror film imagery and mystique, naturally, but it’s also strongly under a comic filmmaker influence: as the first part uses Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin as templates, the second is under the spell of the Marx Brothers and A Night at the Opera (1935), as Swan gets Winslow to sign an impossibly long and obtuse contract (“All articles that are excluded shall be deemed included”), Winslow hovers above the stage a la Harpo to commit sabotage, and the distance between audience and performance is erased. Swan’s ludicrous acts meanwhile all use the same singers (Archie Hahn, Jeffrey Comanor, and Peter Elbling) shifting between musical guises and eras: The Juicy Fruits with their ’50s style, their successors, the hideously faux-groovy The Beach Bums, and finally, The Undeads, whose grotesque onstage shenanigans, including pretending to tear audience members to shreds to build their lead singer, “Beef” (Graham) whilst caked in sepulchral make-up, charts a logical evolution of pop tastes towards calculated outrage and excess. The film’s jibes at manufactured stars, schlocky gimmicks, industry sexism, and coercion were intended to be Paddy Chayefsky-like satire, but life caught up with it all quickly and not only assimilated the criticisms, but made them part of the mystique.

Nonetheless, the humour and revulsion the film invokes toward the pop industry retain a charge far beyond the relative innocence of the equally farcical This Is Spinal Tap (1984) because De Palma backs it up with his twisted fantasia. Images of punctured and roasted flesh and operatic emotion alternate with this satiric panoply, imbuing it with a similar feel of sodden, sensual overload and consumerist satiety found through corporeal violence, such as in the later scenes of Scarface (1983). De Palma spares no one because it’s a world that spares no one: even the talented and intelligent Phoenix is easily suckered in by Swan and turned literally overnight from willowy starlet to drugged-up fame whore whom Swan can seduce and marry (but actually planning to assassinate to outdo Winslow for onstage killing as entertainment coup). Swan’s first choice for a Winslow stand-in is not Phoenix, whom he relegates to back-up singer, but Beef, a flagrantly gay showbiz pro whom Swan reinvents as a Frankensteinian id-beast compelling all potential audiences with his ambiguous hunkiness, one of the many moments of arch gender-bending that inflect both the film and De Palma’s oeuvre. Beef stands in for Carlotta, the prima donna in The Phantom of the Opera who is threatened into standing aside for the Phantom’s preferred singer. Here, in the first of De Palma’s many send-ups/variations on Psycho’s shower murder, Winslow slices his way through Beef’s shower curtain with a knife, but instead of stabbing him, jams a toilet plunger against his mouth and delivers his warning. Swan has Winslow bricked up in his studio after he’s finished writing Faust, but Winslow, realising he’s been betrayed again and that a hack is singing his music, smashes his way out and kills Beef onstage by dropping a lightning-shaped neon sign on him.

Swan, it proves, really has made a pact with the devil to retain his youth, turning his own habit of videotaping everything around him into a vessel for a Dorian Gray-like preservation. De Palma’s career fascination with recording mediums within recording mediums, and the act and experience of voyeurism blending together into a self-reflexive arc, is ever-present here, but surges to the foreground particularly during the film’s most dazzling scene. Winslow spies on Swan making love to Phoenix through the skylight of his house, and Swan spies on Winslow spying on him, Winslow’s contorted outrage and now godlike self-pity being provoked and enjoyed by his nemesis. Winslow immediately tries to kill himself, but finds he’s locked into eternal life with Swan by signing his contract and can die from his self-inflicted wound only when Swan also dies, a fact Swan explains as the most elegant capstone to his malevolence. Casting Williams as Swan is an uncomfortable fit, not exactly because of his diminutive size, for there’s a good and thematically apt joke in this, but because he lacks the dark, overwhelming charisma the part really needs; indeed, De Palma’s films often live and die on who plays the Mephistopheles figure. Finley, on the other hand, invests his character with a heightened blend of the comedic and the pathetic: his full-bore embrace of the expressive Grand Guignol heart of the film looks forward as far as Fiona Shaw’s perverse monster in The Black Dahlia, a film as preoccupied with Faustian bargains, conspiracies, and transfiguring bodily damage as this one.

Phantom of the Paradise is undoubtedly a bratty film, and an immature one in many ways, though this does not mean it’s inauthentic or merely flashy. It does, perhaps inevitably, collide with potential dead spots of narrative and invention, which De Palma’s style wasn’t yet attuned to overcoming. An expository sequence of Winslow penetrating Swan’s secret video library, where he finds the key to destroying his nemesis, is overlong, too flagrantly skit-like, and lacks a quality later De Palma would grasp firmly, that of the reality-changing impact of penetrating the final layer to a mystery. De Palma is still inclined to overindulge his comic actors like Graham and Memmoli. But De Palma’s energy is all-conquering, rendering the film as an ecstatic flux that manages to combine two stances often thought to be exclusive: the implacably hip and the flagrantly emotional. Shows of dazzling technique are spotted throughout, if not linked with the same careful sense of orchestration that distinguishes the likes of The Fury, Dressed to Kill (1980), or Femme Fatale (2002). As well as the film’s constant refrains to silent comedy and melodrama, there’s a strangely elegiac montage of Winslow composing in his Phantom lair, swooning on the same tone of deathless romanticism as Winslow’s music. A lengthy split-screen sequence in which Winslow plants a bomb during a rehearsal by the Beach Bums, unfolds in two simultaneous shots that absorb secret machinations and the abuse and coercion that lie behind the contrived appearance of sunny shenanigans, before resolving in the explosion that announces a legitimised terrorist riposte to Swan’s regime.

Winslow, whilst becoming a killer and a terrorist, remains the film’s moral centre in his perverse fashion: his destructiveness cuts through the overwhelming artifice and cynicism of Swan’s, and when he realises Swan’s last, devastating betrayal, he charges to the rescue, cueing a breathtaking sequence, furiously switching between perspectives, from that of Swan’s assassin fixing crosshairs on Phoenix, to a racing hand-held camera chasing Winslow as he charges to the rescue. He swings into the auditorium and snatches away Swan’s mask, which now conceals not his unnatural youth but a shrivelled and hideous visage. Winslow delivers his coup de grace, stabbing Swan to death with the beak of a bird mask from a dancer, turning the emblem of Death Records into the literal instrument of death. De Palma’s staging of the genuinely crazed finale refuses any sense of tragic closure, however, zooming up and away from Winslow’s body in the midst of the orgiastic eruption that aims instead for catharsis, revelling in all spectacle. Here violent death, Winslow’s revealed, hideous face, and Swan’s extermination only register as sideshows of the convulsive carnival. A remorseful, mourning Phoenix clutches Winslow in the midst of a party, prefiguring Blow Out (1981), and a woman stands watching, wearing Winslow’s mask, hinting at the fusion of the two figures in a world where all opposites come crashing together in one great apocalyptic shindig.

Take Shelter (2011)

Director/Screenwriter: Jeff Nichols

By Marilyn Ferdinand

About a month ago, Matt Zoller Seitz published an article titled “Nostalgic for Everything” whose deck reads “From Midnight in Paris to The Artist to Mildred Pierce, in 2011 we wanted to be anywhere but 2011.” While I think there are several reasons for the appearance of so many movies and television series that look back rather than forward, I certainly can agree that the world in 2011 is perhaps scarier than it was during the first Great Depression, and like audiences in the 1930s, we’re all looking for the fire exits.

The flip side of escapism, another kind of film has also been on the cultural scene—the cinema of dread. From the apocalyptic Melancholia, to the torment of Shame and the menace of Martha Marcy May Marlene, the free-floating anxiety that has gripped many people in these desperate times has formed into a variety of nightmare visions at a theatre near you. To my mind, no film has grappled more directly or compellingly with our societal insanity than Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter. Nichols dares to offer audiences a dose of reality, as the frightening personal visions of his protagonist collide with the traumas of trying to survive in a mauled economy with a shredded social safety net.

Curtis (Michael Shannon), a crew manager for an Ohio gravel and sand supplier, is having terrifying dreams of deadly tornados and physical attacks by strangers and friends alike. The 35-year-old Curtis fears that he is developing the paranoid schizophrenia that overcame his mother (Kathy Baker) when she was his age. He seeks medical help while at the same time taking steps to protect himself and his family from the dream figures who attacked him; he puts his dog Red out of the house and has Russell (Ron Kennard), his best friend and direct report at work, transferred to another work crew. He also spends money he doesn’t have to expand a storm shelter in his backyard.

In many ways, Take Shelter is a remake of a film that has been on my mind lately, Akira Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear. In that film, the protagonist was seized with a similar fear of disaster triggered by the initiation of American H-bomb testing on Bikini Atoll. The Japanese patriarch had seen the devastation of atomic warfare during World War II, and spared no expense to try to save his family from a horrible death with actions that seemed delusional to them. So, too, Curtis has reached the age when disaster struck his family and sensibly takes precautions against a repeat of that disaster—mental illness—while nonetheless following some potentially ruinous compulsions.

In Curtis’ case, the ruin is not a mushroom cloud, but atmospheric disaster and betrayal by those who love him. His particular anxiety centers around those who would harm his deaf daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart). It is certainly possible that Curtis is descending into madness, but his fears are not exactly irrational either. Climate change has spawned superstorms like the hurricane that devastated New Orleans, and earthquakes and tsunamis have brought parts of Southest Asia and Haiti to their knees. The natural world really does have an end-of-days feel to it these days.

In addition, good jobs are as scarce as those who want and need them are plentiful. When Curtis borrows equipment from his employer without permission to dig an addition to the storm shelter, he risks losing a job that Russell and others tell him he might not be able to replace. Losing his job would mean a loss of health benefits Curtis and his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) need to pay for Hannah’s cochlear implants. The very real possibility that our children’s lives will not be better than ours, which would be a first in U.S. history, is embodied in Hannah.

Michael Shannon’s disturbing face has lent an edge of crazy to a number of films, most notably Bug, and so it is easy for us to buy into a psychiatrist’s recommendation that Curtis needs to begin a rigorous regimen of drugs and therapy immediately. But Shannon blunts his edges and portrays a caring family man so convincingly that it is hard to dismiss Curtis’ prophetic warning at a community dinner: “Well, listen up, there’s a storm coming like nothing you’ve ever seen, and not a one of you is prepared for it.” Which American does not feel that our country is tipping precariously on the edge of a disaster the likes of which none of us has experienced and might never have thought possible.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

W. B. Yeats could have been talking about the United States today; certainly, screenwriter Nichols has channeled our “terrible beauty” into a film that works on several levels. He has an extremely deft hand at building suspense; a simple shot of a drill biting into stone feels claustrophobic and full of dread after he has lain the groundwork of Curtis’ growing morbidity. Watching starlings move swiftly like black, undulating clouds has always filled me with wonder; in Curtis’ eyes, of course, this strange cohesion is full of dark portend.

Nichols also makes the working-class milieu of this Ohio community real. The familial and friendly bonds, the fears and doubts, the suspicions of the community all ring true. The house Curtis and Samantha have is not the typically glossy, well-appointed home common in most films—the furnishings are well-worn, a bit tacky, and the entire home has a lived-in feel without seeming like a cliché. Curtis, Samantha, and Hannah are a likable, relatable family, and much credit goes to Chastain for giving another full-bodied performance, one of a woman whose warmth and fragile strength make us feel deeply for her and her family.

As we watch Curtis hide his problems from those he cares about even as he sinks deeper into his compulsions, we feel his fear and fear for him. At the end of the film, while Curtis and family vacation as they do every year on the Atlantic shore, Nichols offers a final vision in which Curtis faces the coming storm of insanity with his wife and daughter at his side. However, it could also be that Hannah and Samantha finally have been made to recognize the danger to their way of life. It doesn’t really matter what is “actually” taking place: no interpretation will quiet the unease of Take Shelter for long.

Sleeping with the Enemy (1991)

Director: Joseph Ruben

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Who can turn the world on with her smile? As a fan of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and of its star, I must admit that in a head-to-head tooth-off, MTM would wither in the blaze of Julia Roberts’ pearly whites.

Julia Roberts has been dazzling movie goers with her mile-wide grin, infectious laugh, and Playmate-like naughty innocence since the late 80s. Can she act? Does it matter? As the first $20 million woman among a legion of limited-range actors commanding that sum or more, Julia Roberts is a rarity in today’s world—an old-fashioned Hollywood star in the Gene Tierney mold who can act if a director pushes her out of her comfort zone and forces her to, but whose main assets lie in her on-screen charisma and beauty. One look at her list of films and a flashback to the studio build-up to her nonwedding to Kiefer Sutherland show that the old boys of Tinsel Town understood what kind of a property they had in her.

Many of her films cast her as the fantasy trophy woman every man wants. She doesn’t need to come from the American aristocracy to ascend to it—as waitress Daisy Aruja in Mystic Pizza (1988), she is a self-confessed social climber who snags a hot-blooded blue blood with sex and the saucy insolence that such men seem to like. Of course, her breakout role as Vivian, the hooker who catches corporate raider Richard Gere in Pretty Woman (1990), is as nakedly honest about America’s then-definition of success as any out there; every young turk needs his BMW and his beautiful arm ornament who is, of course, a pistol in the sack, and every woman needs to be a mercenary sexpot who cleans up well to catch one. Vivian going on a shopping spree on Rodeo Drive became Roberts’ signature scene, a representation of the grasping, greedy climber made adorable by Roberts’ naive sweetness.

As Roberts matured, her roles tended to vary, but her iconic status worked most effectively in films that reflected on her persona—her commitment-phobic Runaway Bride (1999), her superstar-marries-a-commoner character in Notting Hill (1999), the reverse-snob triumph of using sex and lies for good in Erin Brockovich (2000). Even Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) became more than a cultural blip because of the way her rich neoliberal character separated her heavily mascaraed eyelashes. In Eat Pray Love (2010), she played a success who throws it all away to find enlightenment, forming a dead-on critique of the characters she played at the start of her career on just another type of shopping spree.

Sleeping with the Enemy is a bit of an aberration in the Roberts canon, showing as it does the downside of being a trophy wife. The film capitalizes on all those things audiences love about Julia Roberts, but allows her to be a woman who uses her tenacity to survive and strive for authenticity. Although Sleeping with the Enemy is a Hollywood movie and a hack bit of filmmaking, it is interesting as perhaps the definitive anti-Julia Roberts vehicle.

Laura Burney (Roberts) has been married for 3½ years to Martin (Patrick Bergin), a filthy-rich investment counselor who calls her “princess,” but sees her more like the bust of Nefertiti he bought her on their honeymoon—his possession, a symbol of his status. They live part-time in a huge beachfront mansion on Cape Cod that appears to have been designed by Luigi Moretti, one of Mussolini’s chief architects. Martin tells Laura what to wear to a party, signals her with a look when it is time to leave, and grabs her for sex when they arrive home. Laura is very good at appearing to be happy when Martin is watching, but the film reveals rather quickly that she looks at sex with Martin as rape and stands in terror of a beating for everything from having her pantry items carelessly stacked to taking off to bury her dead mother without his permission.

Martin likes to sail, but Laura is deathly afraid of the water. Nonetheless, he prevails upon her to go out for an evening sail with their neighbor (Kyle Secor), whose casual remark that he has seen Laura looking out from their home garners her a beating from a jealous Martin. Although the weather report called for calm waters and clear skies, a sudden squall forces them to turn back. When the boat is nearly home, the jib comes loose, and the two men run to the bow to secure it. When they turn around, Laura is gone, and an intensive search for her only turns up her life vest.

Of course, Laura has faked her death. Conquering her fear of the water, she took swimming lessons, preparing for a moment when Martin wouldn’t be watching her. Swimming toward the gap in the boardwalk lighting she made by breaking the bulbs, she runs to their house, dons a wig, grabs a prepacked bundle, and rides a bus to Cedar Falls, Iowa. She rents a house next door to handsome drama teacher and future lover Ben Woodward (Kevin Anderson), gets a menial job at a library, and starts flashing her dazzling smile and naturally curly hair all over the place.

A call to Martin from one of Laura’s swim classmates, however, sets him and his considerable resources on her trail. He tracks down Laura’s mother (Elizabeth Lawrence), who did not die but rather was moved to a nursing home near Cedar Falls. When Laura goes to visit her disguised as a man, Martin is there. She narrowly misses running into him, but we know it is only a matter of time until he shows up on her doorstep.

Based on a book by Nancy Price, Hollywood has upscaled the story to Julia Roberts proportions, making the crummy beach house in the book into a monument to the money-no-taste 80s. The scene during which she fakes her death is the epitome of convenient scripting, and Martin never emerges as anything other than a male version of Glenn Close’s monster in Fatal Attraction (1987). In the final denouement, every horror film cliché gets trotted out as Laura goes to investigate strange noises in the house, looking at her disheveled cupboard with relief, only to return to it shortly and find everything lined up with terrifying regularity. Anyone as frightened of her husband as Laura would run at the first sound and ask questions later.

In addition, the producers at 20th Century Fox felt the need to throw in a Julia playing dress-up scene, using the costume room at Ben’s theatre as an appropriate substitute. I hated being manipulated this way, but I must admit that having Kevin Anderson in the scene improved on it considerably. He’s a wonderful actor who understands how to portray just a guy who comes to understand how he might be frightening Laura, and why. He’s rejected for sex during a heavy makeout session, and accepts no for an answer, but not entirely gracefully. With a lesser actor, Ben would have been a complete gentleman, too good for words. Sadly, Bergin, who is a good actor, was given a character with less opportunity for nuance. It is an unfortunate fact of Julia Roberts films that the script is often formed to create the cardboard theatrics the bean counters demand to ensure success. It happened at the end of Erin Brockovich, and it happens here, too.

Nonetheless, Laura is an interesting character. She would seem to have it all, except that she’s just like millions of women from all classes and walks of life who are abused physically and psychologically by men close to them. Laura acknowledges to a woman she meets on the bus that she stayed with her husband too long, and feels that she is a coward. This is an interesting statement—clearly she was strong enough to get some things for herself while under his thumb, such as a part-time library job, and to hatch an elaborate and risky plan to leave him. It seems clear that her cowardice may be tied to her desire for the luxurious lifestyle he offered, or perhaps just her lack of self-confidence. Laura is a very real woman in recognizing these feelings in herself.

Her romance with Ben is also too fast. As onlookers, we think two such good-looking, age-appropriate people should be together (and, after all, that’s what the Hollywood shell of this movie sets us up to expect), but in truth, Laura is revealing the depth of her lack of confidence by hooking up after only a short period of caution. This is a woman whose lack of skills, as evidenced by the minimum-wage job she lands shelving books, forces her to rely on men to take care of her. Laura is a sister under the skin to Francine Hughes, and was lucky to have held onto her sense of self so that her torment lasted under four years. Fran was put on trial for killing her husband, but Sleeping with the Enemy makes sure there’s a witness to Laura’s attack to ensure that her murder of Martin will be deemed self-defense. So it looks like we have our Julia Roberts happy ending after all, but for once, she gave us a woman who punctured her gassy image.

Trollhunter (Trolljegeren, 2010)

Director/Coscreenwriter: André Øvredal

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Like many other “pennyheads” from “The Land of Lincoln,” when I want to get away from the urban bustle of Chicago, I look to the north. Wisconsin holds many delights for urbanites looking for an uncluttered landscape that still offers high-quality creature comforts—the North Woods for outdoor activities like fishing, cross-country skiing, and snowmobiling; artisan cheeses and beers, including one beer so desirable that a New York City bar owner lost his license and was fined $250,000 for selling it; and charming towns that cater to the tourist trade by peddling their heritage for fun and profit.

One such hamlet is Mount Horeb, home to about 7,000 people of mostly German and Norwegian ancestry. Until it moved to the Madison suburb of Middleton in 2009, the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum—in reality a shop where I used to stop to buy some of the hundreds of unusual mustards they stock—was the town’s big claim to fame. However, even before it lost the museum, in fear that the US 18/151 bypass would kill the downtown retail district, the town decided to market itself in a new way. Playing up the Norwegian part of its ancestry, Mount Horeb became the self-professed Troll Capital of the World. A number of businesses have put “troll” in their names, and Schubert’s Diner and Bakery, the most popular breakfast place in town and a must for visitors, is liberally decorated with trolls of every size and type.

The trolls are amusing and a bit nostalgic for anyone who received, as I did, a troll doll to play with when they were young. But following a viewing of Trollhunter, some might think twice about visiting Mount Horeb. Despite the mordant, self-deprecating humor on display, director André Øvredal manages to find a Cloverfield kind of horror movie inside this Norwegian mockumentary that offers audiences some real moments of dread.

Farmers near the Norwegian town of Volda have been plagued with livestock killings, and Finn Haugen (Hans Morten Hansen) from the Nature Management ministry has been sent to investigate. Amateur documentarians from the local university in Volda, Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen), are on the case, too. After pursuing Haugen, the trio notices a craggy man who seems to be everywhere Haugen is. After the discovery of the corpse of a bear blamed for the attacks—not killed on the spot, as Haugen tells the media, but obviously dumped there—the filmmakers smell a rat and begin following the man as he drives his beat-up Range Rover hauling an even more beat-up trailer to his encampment.

Despite his repeated brush-offs, they follow him into a wooded area, see some bright flashes of light among the trees, and then find themselves running for their lives after Hans screams “TROLL!!!” Their quarry, Hans (Otto Jespersen), finally decides to open up about his activities by introducing them to his quarry—trolls. Warning them that following him is dangerous, he agrees to talk about his work in order to expose the scorched-earth policy the Norwegian government, and specifically the TSS (Troll Security Service), has towards trolls. The rest of the film follows Hans and the film crew as they scour the countryside in search of trolls that have broken out of their territories and pose a threat to human populations.

Trollhunter is a dead-on mockumentary that creates its own relatively believable universe within the confines of troll and hero mythology. The film crew is initially skeptical about the existence of trolls, even after Thomas is bitten by one, and, incidentally, patched up with the universally useful duct tape. They greet the sight of a huge three-headed troll that is felling trees with a mere push of its hand with jubilant amazement, while Hans tells them that two of the heads are actually growths the troll uses to attract females and scare other trolls fighting for territory; the trolls, the film tells us, are animals, not oddly shaped people, and that they have territories just like wolves or bears. They can be killed by exposure to sunlight, which turns the older ones to stone and causes younger trolls to explode. Amusingly, a forensic scientist (Urmila Berg-Domaas) explains this reaction by asserting how intolerance to Vitamin D causes the two different molecular reactions in the troll’s body. Unlike the often-preposterous science in many horror/scifi films, this explanation sounds plausible, which shows the care with which Øvredal constructed his universe, and forms one of the links in a carefully forged chain that sucks us into believing the story.

Another part of troll mythology that gets a humorous workout is their supposed connection with dark paganism. Hans asks the students if they are Christian or believe in God—if so, the trolls will be able to smell them, even if they are cloaked in the putrid “troll scent” Hans gives them to rub all over themselves. When we see one of the crew members rubbing himself furiously with scent while hiding in a cave from some mountain trolls, his terrible secret (“I’m Christian!”) is revealed. He doesn’t fare well among the mountain trolls; his replacement is a Muslim, about which the mythology makes no mention. Hans says cavalierly, “I don’t know. Let’s give it a try!” It’s a funny send-up of belief systems, but also makes us nervous about what will happen to the replacement, thus ratcheting up the suspense.

The film also makes clever use of the physical landscape to advance its story. For example, the filmmakers make note of the power grid, which Hans explains is electrified fencing for the trolls—a hilarious assertion that could feed the mind of a conspiracy theorist for weeks. Trees that have been blown down by storms become convenient props to show that a troll was in the area. After Hans turns a troll to stone with one last blast of light from his “light saber,” he blasts it to bits with some land mines; thereafter, scattered rocks take on the aura of being troll remains.

Jespersen is excellent as Norway’s only trollhunter, a solitary ex-serviceman with no real life outside of his work (perhaps because he and his trailer stink of troll from the skins he has hung inside for camouflage?). In one scene in which he tries to extract blood from a rabid troll, he wears a jerry-rigged suit of armor, looking like low-rent version of a medieval knight of myth and legend. He goes after errant trolls in workmanlike fashion, deploring one government-ordered massacre within troll territory like a worn-out, disillusioned Indian fighter in an American Western. In a brief glimpse, the crew members see Hans without his shirt, his back cross-hatched with scar tissue. Again, the story is ridiculous, but Øvredal knows how to build suspense for the horror half of his film that keeps us with him all the way.

The film crew members seem like believable college kids, excited by their adventure at the same time as they are taking their role as reporters oh so seriously. Thomas doggedly pursues Hans after he has told them to get lost, and Kalle says from behind the camera that maybe they should give up. Thomas retorts, “Would Michael Moore give up if he didn’t get the story on the first try?” Almost simultaneously, the hubby and I had the same thought: No, he’d just make up something and call it a movie. It was a funny joke for us, but I’m not sure Øvredal was going for that punchline.

The camerawork of Hallvard Bræin is absolutely brilliant. Norway’s breathtaking scenery, cascading waterfalls, atmospheric snow fields are pure eye candy in front of his steady, albeit handheld, lens. He switches to the green haze of a night-vision camera for many of the great troll effects. Every scene that contains a troll is exciting, a little funny, and seemingly real. I genuinely bought into the reality of these creatures and the danger they represented to our stalwart crew.

Still, the real villain of the piece is (of course) Finn Haugen. The more the students wonder why the public is being kept in the dark about the TSS, the more threatening he becomes. Clownishly trying to explain why a Russian bear, its tongue sticking out like a cartoon creature, was found in Norway (a hilarious bit with a Polish delivery crew that supplied the bear “under the table” has to be seen to be appreciated), he turns into a bigger danger for the camera crew than the 200-foot-tall troll they just saw Hans dispatch. The obligatory title cards at the beginning and end of the film about the circumstances under which the footage that makes up Trollhunter was found, and pleas to help authorities locate the students shown in the film, give this horror film the mock/ironic edge that makes it so biting and fun.

Nonetheless, on the off chance that trolls do roam the earth, I’m going to write to the Norwegian authorities and suggest they search in Mount Horeb.

Jaws (1975)

Director: Steven Spielberg

By Roderick Heath

The opening seconds of Jaws are more indelible and menacing than many entire movies: with the lead actors’ names appearing on dense blackness and the sounds of marine animals’ sonic vibrations teeming in the dark, the iconic deep cello throbs of John Williams’ score gives instant, malefic portent to the roving, hungry point-of-view shots sliding through the deep. A jarring cut to a beach party, flavoured with perfect mid-‘70s faux-counterculture indolence, as the rich-kid refugees who make up Amity Island’s seasonal resource party the night away, and the exchange of long hard glances between Chrissie Watkins (Susan Backlinie) and Tom Cassidy (Jonathan Filley) presage familiar mating rituals, except that Chrissie, flush with youthful, randy energy, decides to go swimming and leaves the pie-eyed Cassidy on the beach. Chrissie’s swim, of course, becomes not a frolic but a close encounter with a primal force for which a human is just another food source. One touch here that sells the terror of this sad death just as much as the screams and struggling of Chrissie as she’s torn to bits by a monster and cries for the aid of a god who doesn’t answer, is the cutaway to Cassidy lying snoozing on the beach under a Winslow Homer dawn, utterly ignorant of what’s transpiring. Thus commences a drama where complacency and obsession become opposed, destructive forces hemming the conscientious in on both sides.

Now thirty-six years old, Jaws has hardly aged a day. Certainly, aspects of it are very much irremovable from the mid-’70s zeitgeist it both recorded and captivated, and yet the film’s inexorable style and salty screenplay vibrate with a still-fearsome kind of perfection. Jaws is widely regarded as the movie that begat the contemporary blockbuster. That’s only partly true: the first film to follow the template of a studio’s expensive tent-pole production designed to pay for other ventures, based on popular pre-existing material, was actually The Godfather (1972). All Jaws did was tweak the marketing formula. But Jaws did, arguably, introduce a certain hard-charging, pulp narrative attitude, the idea of story as means to motion and special effects as a major creative tool, which had not quite crystallised with such perfection before in Hollywood’s awkward efforts to rebuild its commercial brands after the long interregnum of the ‘60s. And yet Jaws is as distant from the idiocy of the worst modern examples of the blockbuster mentality as The Godfather is from Dick Tracy.

Steven Spielberg’s first huge hit, and still one of his three or four best films, Jaws is flavoured with a perpetually beguiling mixture of old-school writing and cinematic virtues and more modern varieties, facilitated by Spielberg’s particular capacity to meld classical Hollywood and New Wave techniques fluently, from the almost neo-realist use of the small town of Amity, to film school gimmicks, like the famous zoom-in-pull-back shot, that are perfectly contoured into the storytelling, unlike, say, in his contemporary Brian De Palma’s work, where such effects become, in their way, the story. In terms of the genre it most properly belongs to, the horror film, Jaws is a rare hybrid: it’s a monster movie, with elements of action and adventure, political satire, and domestic comedy-drama. Jaws followed hard on the success of The Exorcist (1973) in delving into another, even more deeply phobic subject matter for the mass audience: fear of the deep, of animal terror, of a Jungian unknown, of nature as a raw and careless power. There’s also always been a not entirely accidental link between Jaws’ success and its socio-political moment: it came out as both the Vietnam War and Watergate had entered their final anticlimactic moments, and the film’s themes, of trying to effectively recapture faith in institutions and win a war against a nameless evil in spite of politicians, could hardly have summarised the period mood more acutely.

The ironies of Jaws’ immense popular and aesthetic success proliferate, considering the film’s arduous shoot. As the movie was rushed into production, the script, first penned by Peter Benchley, author of the source novel, had to then be quickly worked over by playwright Howard Sackler, co-star Carl Gottlieb, and Spielberg’s friend John Milius, with contributions from Shaw and Scheider making the cut too. Spielberg, not yet thirty, was already out to regain his footing after his first feature film The Sugarland Express (1974) opened to poor box office on the day cameras started rolling on the new film. It was also a revisit of territory he had staked out with his telemovie Duel (1972), and Jaws in many ways stands in relation to the earlier film like Deep Red (1975) does for Dario Argento and his debut film The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970), or The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) does for a few of Hitchcock’s earlier films: a semi-remake with which the director comes firmly of age. Where The Sugarland Express saw the wunderkind filmmaker draw a curtain on the early decade’s beautiful loser mystique, Jaws looks forward to the reasserted centrism of the ‘80s, in following essentially Everyman protagonist Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) as he contends with the obstructive realities of his society, and then far more primeval and urgent dangers.

Whereas in Benchley’s novel, crammed with bestseller elements the film thankfully mostly divests, the political subplot has overt underworld links, the film rather portrays the clash of intent between Brody and the town’s mayor, and major real estate figure Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), on a more humdrum, if no less urgent, level, pitting concerns of safety against prosperity, reconfiguring Watergate-era political paranoia from outlandish conspiracies into something more realistic and recognisable, capturing a perpetual schism in modern American (and elsewhere) political life: to a certain extent, contemporary environmental debate is only this one writ large. Contributing to the early outlay of social dimensions is the swiftly sketched yet firm portrait of Brody and his family as refugees from New York, and their discomfort with negotiating the clannishness and rigged decks of Amity islanders. Casting Scheider, later invariably associated with this part, nonetheless plays on his casting in The French Connection (1971) and that film’s pop-culture cache as a portrait of urban rot, as Jaws points out that things aren’t necessarily easier out in the sticks, as the Brodys discover, in having traced the wagon routes of white flight, that the bucolic surf and sea can cover up dread dangers that make muggers look homey.

The first half-hour of Jaws is a little whirlwind of exposition and tension-building, introducing Brody, wife Ellen (Lorraine Gary), and sons Michael (Chris Rebello) and Sean (Jay Mello) in their domestic muddles, and Brody at work, where the usual business of his job is today exemplified by contending with the petty complaints of shopkeepers about rambunctious kids. Brody snaps into action when he and his deputy Hendricks (Jeffrey Kramer) discover Chrissie’s remains on the beach, entangled with seaweeds and fed on by crabs. Social tension creeps in ineluctably, where the town’s parasitic relationship with the rich summer folk is threatened by the more immediate kind of predatory behaviour going on in the surf. Vaughn and his clique, catching him on the car ferry he commandeers to call in a bunch of boy scouts, corner Brody in a situation where he’s doubly unsure of himself, being as he is as uneasy on the water as he is in negotiating small-town politics. Previously certified fact is reconfigured to suit the requirements of a well-oiled machine, as Vaughn, in his slick and ingratiating fashion, gives a quick lesson in the power of words – “You shout ‘barracuda’, everybody goes, ‘Huh? What?’” – and the arts of spin.

Brody’s acquiescence to a minor cover-up is uneasy but understandable, as no-one really expects the lightning-strike moment to repeat, but Brody keeps his eyes peeled and becomes witness to a second attack, when Alex Kintner (Jeffrey Voorhees) is consumed before a busy beach. Here, the little gems that coalesce character and story continue with Spielberg’s editing and shooting particularly keen – Ellen being told that she’ll “never, never” be an islander by local matron Mrs Taft (Fritzi Jane Courtney), as the chief is made fun of by Harry Wiseman (Walter Hooper) for his refusal to go near the water, and vignettes so casual they seem snapped by a weekend cameraman, from Sean building sandcastles to a young man playing with his dog, and Alex’s mother (Lee Fierro) fretting over his pruning fingers. It’s only when the dog vanishes that the lurking presence is suggested, and by then it’s too late.

The singularly grim fate of Alex, and the image of his mother darting along the sands in panicked realisation that her son is the one missing from the pack, provides even more voluble emotional heft to what follows, and it also provides a cold-blooded twist to genre niceties, following up the familiar death of the sexually available young woman with the taboo annihilation of youthful innocence. The point, that the lurking death and terror respects no human laws, offsets the continuing, desperate attempt by the community to keep business operating as usual, shark-like itself in that it has to keep moving or die. Whilst many films of the era made political or business malfeasance a background enemy (eg The Towering Inferno, 1974), the question gains almost Ibsen-esque ramifications in Jaws through this coherent twinning, and because of Brody’s sense of culpability, which comes to a head when Mrs Kintner gives him a slap in the face for failing in his responsibility, a guilt Vaughn tries to relieve him of but one which he still holds close to his heart. Brody’s overwhelming sense of responsibility then becomes the core human value that holds the drama together. One of the strongest and yet least analysed Spielberg motifs, first embodied by Brody, is that of the burden of a duty of care, and the corruption and cleansing of the institutions that take up that duty, as individuals are forced to question their fortitude and values in relation to protecting others. There’s also classic movie myth working here: Brody invokes not only the “enemy of the people” in Ibsen’s play but also Gary Cooper’s Marshall Kane in High Noon (1952), destined to head off to his own death-duel with a deadly foe, except that Brody does actually get some help, in the form of ichthyologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and grizzled WW2 vet and professional shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw). As well as the seriousness with which he takes his job, Brody’s fear of the water ironically makes him the most sensitive barometer of the shark’s presence, and its most genuine nemesis, as he senses the menace that lurks underneath the pristine seas everyone else has turned into a playground.

Of course, the social conflict of Jaws is an adjunct to the real drama of first trying to save people from the beast and then going out to fight it in its own turf, as Brody browbeats Vaughn in letting him hire Quint, and they and Hooper head out to sea in Quint’s boat, the Orca, turning from Ibsen to Melville. Thanks to the notorious difficulties in getting Bob Mattey’s mechanical shark to work properly, Spielberg was forced to sustain the opening scene’s tactic of not showing the monster much longer than originally intended, an idea that fortunately deepened the tension and mystery immeasurably. Proofs and hints of the beast’s incredible strength and savagery are employed, from Hendricks, upon finding Chrissie’s remains, first whistling urgently for Brody and Cassidy to come running before collapsing in a sickly heap, to the two idiots who try catch it with a bait chained to a dock which it then pulls apart, and the huge tooth Hooper finds in the hull of the boat of local fisherman Ben Gardner, whose severed head then bobs out to give Hooper the fright of his life so far. Hooper’s own horror of seeing Chrissie’s remains inspires a memorable harangue, after he enters the film radiating good-humour but also a rock-steady professionalism, providing an immediate counterpoint to not only the obfuscation of the Amity locals, but also the bullying of the fishermen who haul a Tiger shark out of the sea after a chaotic fishing jamboree. Vaughn and coterie are happy to pass this off as the killer, but Hooper almost immediately proves that it isn’t, commencing another build-up to tragedy.

A large part of what makes Jaws work, and indeed almost unique in this sort of film, is the sheer overflowing sense of life it gives off. As in The Sugarland Express and again in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and 1941 (1979), the younger Spielberg’s view of American life as a kind of carnival of eccentricity and magnanimity blended with aggression and corruption is in constant evidence. Such attentiveness, offsetting Spielberg’s overt gamesmanship and Movie Brat intuitiveness, extends from the gabbling, arguing businesspeople and selectmen at the town hall meeting, to the flurry of yahoos out to catch the shark and receive Mrs Kintner’s $3000 bounty. The montage of the arrival of the July 4th crowds, scored by Williams with a semi-ironic baroque elegance, sees the processional of tourists of all stripes disgorged by ferries to cram hot dogs and ice cream in their faces and lounge on the beach, whilst Brody and Hooper work frantically to put together a force to protect them. Another aspect of the film is its rich sense of humour, which in many ways operates not dissimilarly to An American Werewolf in London, as comedy is carefully employed to not only offset tension but contribute, and to deepen character and milieu. Co-screenwriter Gottlieb was rightly proud of one of the film’s most effective moments, that of the shark’s first appearance, coming right on the tail of a funny line. Before I traded in old VHS recordings for DVDs, for a very long time the copy I had of this film on tape was actually an American network TV cut, with several sequences that I can never not consider part of the movie proper (on DVD as deleted scenes), including the hilarious moment of Quint bugging a clarinet-playing kid in the music store where he buys piano wire for fishing, and Hooper raving about his nympho former girlfriend’s phone bill. Both moments give more substance to these characters in giving a glimpse of them beyond the parameters of the immediate drama. But even without these, there’s a tangible sense of actuality to the characters without which the film would be just another shaggy dog yarn.

Spielberg’s prodigious, metamorphic sense of cinematic form is in constant evidence throughout Jaws, but it’s also one of the few films where his specific influences seem close to the surface: from shots that quote ‘50s monster movies like The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1953) and The Monster that Challenged the World (1957), and more serious works, with a sense of detail and Yankee maritime flavour redolent of John Huston’s adaptation of Moby Dick (1956), whilst the film’s general aesthetic owes a tremendous amount to Hitchcock in general and The Birds (1963) in particular, through utilising an overwhelming sense of sea and space for claustrophobic ends. For all the moments of overt fright-mongering like, truth be told, the slightly cheesy scare of Gardner’s head, there are few moments as chilling in movie history as that in which Quint’s fishing line first begins to tick, something having taken the bait, but just what still a mystery as Quint silently begins to prepare himself for the fight. Likewise the spirit of Val Lewton and his team hovers approvingly over much of the early action, sustaining as it does a similar aesthetic to much of Lewton’s work before the shark becomes a more overt menace in the film’s final phases. Chrissie’s death has a frisson intuitively similar to the anecdote Jacques Tourneur cited as the inspiration of Cat People’s (1942) pool scene, when he almost drowned when swimming alone at night. Spielberg was given a technical crew of tremendous experience, including cinematographer Bill Butler and editor Verna Fields, and he shied away from working with them again as word was spread around Hollywood that they had been responsible for saving the film. Nonetheless, their work is impeccable. The style is rarely showy, and yet there’s tremendous kinetic force in it, through such barely noticeable yet powerful gimmicks like the edits that sustain Brody’s point of view in the first beach attack scene, and the panning zoom shots of Brody moving through the beach crowd when responding to a shark sighting, repeated with Ellen when she leaves him at the Orca’s dock, entwining the couple with a visually manifested anxiety.

The domestic, sentimental side of Spielberg emerges in the naturalistic yet concise scenes of Brody and his family. The dinner table scene that follows Brody’s humiliation by Mrs Kintner is in many ways the heart of the film, where Sean imitates Brody in a fashion immediately familiar to parents the world over, and Brody’s sense of guilt and regret over Alex’s death, and the way his son encapsulates everything he stands for, informs his semi-drunk sentimentalism. It’s a scene that radiates outward through almost everything Spielberg has made. The arrival of Hooper shifts gears as a friendship begins to bloom, and Brody gets specifically liquored up to go out and take a look in the Tiger shark’s gut. It’s as finely crafted a piece of writing, acting, and directing as anything in American cinema. Just as good is the lengthy scene of male bonding aboard the Orca, where Hooper and Quint display bodily scars from their rugged lifestyles whilst Brody, in a casual moment that never fails to crack me up, can only consider his appendix scar, in spite of the fact that he’s the one who has perhaps most often put body and soul on the line in his working life. The mood and dramatic tension here shifts as lightly as a butterfly, from a virtual holiday booze-up to a sense of eerie isolation as Quint recounts the horrors of his experience of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, and whale song echoes sonorously up from the deep, before the shark returns to visit and bashes at the hull as if to remind the humans that they’re still on his playing field. Quint’s disquieting monologue in this scene demanded the labour of all those writers, indicating its crucial import for the story’s depth. What’s really sad is that today neither these wonderful scenes would be included as a matter of course in a modern Hollywood film of this type.

Hooper and Quint form with Brody a triangle of divergent temperaments and life experiences, even as they dedicate themselves to the same quest of finding and killing the shark. Brody, Hooper, a rich kid (“How much?” “What, personally or the whole family?”), and Quint, an emotionally scarred WW2 vet (“You’ve got city hands, Mr Hooper. You’ve been counting money all your life.”) come to seem like the American national superego arguing with itself whilst trapped in a small boat, moving from quarrel to camaraderie and back again. Vietnam overtones resurge in considering the film’s final third, with Quint as the arbiter of old-school war-craft and dominant machismo, Hooper as the technological agent with a touch of the gentleman hippie to him, both of whom ultimately fail to bring the beast down, getting one of them killed and the other very nearly. For one passage, however, that in which Quint has the scent and the boys finally give chase to the shark that seems at last in their grasp, there’s a sense of high-flying joy in the battle, a joy that however soon curdles as the shark, responding to the Orca as a rival predator, begins to fight back.

Complicating the issue is the fact that Quint is several cans short of the proverbial, waging his private war against the species based in his Indianapolis experiences, an event tied to an earlier conflict and the commencement of American hegemony (“Anyway…we delivered the Bomb.”), and Quint grinds his boat to pieces in his refusal to swerve or change tactics in dealing with an enemy far cleverer than he expects, thus reproducing in many essentials the failure of the American war machine against the Viet Minh. In such a fashion, whilst Jaws is certainly based on Benchley’s book, it seems to channel more effectively the spirit of Norman Mailer’s Why Are We In Vietnam?, which likewise portrays a crisis of American bullish spirit on a Melvillian hunt as a ticket to understanding the underlying obsessiveness of that war. Quint also evokes another classic Western character, Red River’s Thomas Dunson, as a deathless portrait of alpha male hysteria: Quint’s machismo and relentlessness finally prove self-destructive. Shaw’s performance, much like Daniel Day-Lewis’ in Gangs of New York (2002), sustains a note of actorly high-wire daring in trying to render a character who seems a remnant of a pre-modern age in terms that are both palpably grandiose yet also still emotionally bodied, a kind of realistic-grotesque. Hooper’s attempts to use a cage and poisoned spar against the monster likewise flop as the shark smashes the cage open and tries to pick out Hooper like the innards of a walnut. Unlike in the book, he survives, as the shark gets caught in the cage’s suspension and struggles to free itself, a showcase for the real-life footage taken by Ron and Valerie Taylor.

At last, as political, social, even personal concerns fall away, Jaws boils down to one of the most elemental dramatic situations imaginable, and therefore the most resonant, as Quint is finally consumed by his living animus, and Brody is left alone with the shark. Quint’s death, whilst the shark is showing its origins a bit too much at this point, is nonetheless a remarkably visceral moment, perhaps the most vicious in any Spielberg film, as the shark crushes the life out of Quint with screams that shake the world and his mouth spouts a fountain of blood, even as he hacks at his nemesis with a machete until the last breath. The fate which the young Quint was permanently fixated by at last catches up with him, and to a certain extent he brought it on himself. Brody, on the other hand, becomes Saint George with an M-1, forced to face the dragon and overcome it with smarts and raw skill and survival at stake. Brody’s final whoop of joy when he at last dispatches the animal right on the edge of his own death possesses a tinge of irony: Brody can’t believe his harebrained last-ditch plan has actually worked. When he and Hooper swim back to shore, seen struggling onto the beach as the end credits role, Brody does it not just as a man who won, but as virtual redeemer for his kind of man, the man in the middle, the man doing his job. Whilst no deity reached down to save Chrissie, Brody becomes the first of Spielberg’s many righteous avengers.

An American Werewolf in London (1981)

Director/Screenwriter: John Landis

By Roderick Heath

John Landis, who recently returned to cinema screens with the indifferent Burke and Hare after more than a decade’s absence, has been one of the most consistently unlucky and frustrating directors of the ‘70s generation. That’s partly his own damn fault, after the notoriety of his part in the deaths of Vic Morrow and two child extras on the set of The Twilight Zone: The Movie (1982), and partly the strange vicissitudes of the movie business. Landis had a talent which, like his close cinematic kin Joe Dante and John Carpenter, seemed to lose enthusiasm and precision of intent in the mid-‘90s, as studios became progressively less adventurous and consistent box office success proved elusive. The pain entailed by sitting through the likes of Innocent Blood (1994) and The Blues Brothers 2000 (1998) was all the more regrettable considering they were obvious, and obviously failed, attempts to recapture the distinctive blend of energy and poise he had wielded in his best films. Landis parlayed crass but witty early successes like The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) and National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) into a brief run of excellence, with the frenetic blend of satire, slapstick, and neo-musical in The Blues Brothers (1980), and the insomnia-hued comedy-thriller Into the Night (1985). Landis is chiefly a comedy director, and yet he started off with the no-budget monster movie send-up Schlock (1972), and his best work, An American Werewolf in London, was a return to such roots, one which still surprises in the confidence with which it combines unstable elements. The horror-comedy crossbreed is a notoriously difficult style to pull off, with antecedents in the likes of The Cat and the Canary (1927), The Old Dark House (1932), and The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). The first thing a horror comedy has to keep in mind is that it is not a spoof, but should rather try to sustain an unease inherent in situations that spark both humor and horror. If done right, this sub-genre should make an audience giddy in violent switchbacks between laughting and cringing, and American Werewolf actually often achieves this.

As if deliberately trying to put aside the raucous excess of The Blues Brothers, whilst still invoking some that film’s sheer delight in anarchic forces upturning the status quo, American Werewolf is as tight a piece of moviemaking as any made by an ‘80s Hollywood figure, as Landis wraps the whole thing up in an hour and half. Yet he makes that running time count in evoking powerful atmosphere, jolting brutality, strong characterisation, and a dualistic sensibility that swerves between blackly comic farce and gothic tragedy, in a film that works on several levels. Part of what makes it work is the rigour with which it employs the conceit of placing his haplessly charming, glib, very contemporary young protagonists David Kessler (David Naughton) and Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne), into a situation that reproduces knowingly familiar clichés of the genre. David and Jack wouldn’t have been out of place in Animal House, as Jack frets over his frustrated sexual desire for an old school friend. The opening credits behold sonorous visions of the Yorkshire moors at dusk, pure genre territory, except Landis signals his bipolar approach by playing a version of the old standard “Blue Moon”, first of a motif of moon-citing pop songs throughout. David and Jack are dropped off by a sheep farmer they’ve hitched a ride from, and they head into a tiny hamlet, East Proctor, where they’re ogled with surprise and discontent by the local yokels gathered in the town pub, fetchingly named “The Slaughtered Lamb”. With the Hammer-esque collection of rubes, including eye-catching Brit character actors like Brian Glover, Rik Mayall, Lila Kaye, and David Schofield in an inn, the film seems geared for satire with the traditional bug eyes, hard glances, and mysterious intonations.

When the ice momentarily breaks as one chess-playing patron (Glover) tells a silly joke at the expense of the young Americans, Jack freezes it over again by asking about a pentagram scratched into the pub wall. Ordered out and advised not to stray off the road, David and Jack nonetheless stumble off onto the moors in their amused distraction. As they’re stalked by an unseen thing on the moor wreathed in fog, humor curdles instantly into pitch-perfect tension; it’s one of the most dynamic little scenes in any horror film, building in a manner that has been aided, not defused, by the humor. The audience, like the characters, has been made off-guard and giddy, ripe for a sudden shift in tone. The scene resolves in a tremendous rush of action, violence, and rescue. Whilst the pub denizens argue in apprehension about whether they should chase them down and bring them back, the two students become aware of their endangerment and isolation. Before they can get back to the pub, a huge, fanged beast attacks them. Jack is torn gruesomely to pieces and David bitten, saved only by the timely intervention of the gun-wielding villagers. Before he fades into unconsciousness, David sees a shot-riddled man’s corpse lying beside him.

The way Landis alternates between drollery, suspense, and finally bloodcurdling gore seems the result of a curious artistic schism of impulses. On the one hand Landis is well aware of the silliness of the classic horror movies he’s referencing, something his comic side can’t resist lampooning a little, and yet he loves them too, and seeks to recharge their power and validity. He does this by first evoking classical tropes for building atmosphere – the blasted locale, the enveloping weather, the xenophobic tension of the villagers and the exaggeration of their alienating act, the roaming unseen beast – and contrasting it with the sceptical sensibility of the young Americans for whom everything is a bewildering, absurdist trial. Then we get a dose of modern movie violence far beyond the reach of George Waggner’s The Wolf Man (1941) and Terence Fisher’s The Curse of the Werewolf (1960), both referenced in the course of Landis’ film. Consistently humor is used to anticipate and disarm our prior knowledge of the genre and the situations; to gain a deeper sympathy for the characters (their humorous reactions are ours); and to aid the anticipation of the reversion to violence. The jokey pop music alternates with an ornately swooning score by Elmer Bernstein. It’s a difficult balancing act, yet Landis sustains it for the most part. Landis wasn’t actually the first to try it: the previous year’s The Howling, made by Dante and his screenwriter John Sayles, had made a similarly dualistic hash of the werewolf mythos. Where Dante’s film jokingly undermined psychiatry and New Age philosophy with its eruptive emanations of the primal, however, Landis uses the werewolf motif rather to evoke a distress based in ethnic identity and lingering anxieties of history, as well, of course, as the traditional fear that within a good man might dwell a destructive monster.

David, having survived the werewolf’s bite, awakens in a London hospital under the care of dry-witted surgeon Dr. Hirsch (John Woodvine), an unflappable WW2 veteran, and cute nurse Alex Price (the wonderful Jenny Agutter). David tries to report his version of events when it’s been officially reported he and Jack were attacked by a lunatic, but he’s patronised by police inspector Villiers (Don McKillop) and US embassy official Collins (Frank Oz). David is beset by visions of himself running naked through the woods and feeding off deer, and, most bizarrely, of Nazi-uniformed werewolves breaking into his family house and machine-gunning his house to pieces, cutting his throat and slaughtering his family. He seems to awake from this dream only for one of the uniformed monsters to break through the window and stab Alex to death: only then does David really awaken and gasp, in perfect accord with the audience, “Holy shit!” It’s here that An American Werewolf in London gains an overtone that is all the more intriguing for the way Landis doesn’t push it. David and Jack are Jewish as well as Americans, and David’s latent anxiety over holidaying in old Europe, which he has held back from by touring in England first, with its lingering and still pungent ghosts, here blends with the specific terrors he has encountered, based in the guilty clannish secret of the small town that has accepted a horror and done nothing about it until the issue is forced. David’s dream then seems to encapsulate a dread of human animalism, conflated in the image of the Nazi-werewolf, returning to explode into his comfortable bourgeois existence back in the States like a ticking time-bomb. It’s an idea that doesn’t take up more than a minute of screen time, and yet the disturbing, suggestive imagery permeates the entire film: Landis would return to it more crudely in his The Twilight Zone: The Movie episode.

Fortunately for David, if not so much for the rest of London, Alex proves eager for a little cultural outreach, inviting him to shack up with her once he’s released from hospital. Naughton and Agutter make a tremendously sexy couple (What the hell happened to Naughton? And Agutter, for that matter?), caught in bedroom antics scored to Van Morrison’s “Moondance”, and the romantic undercurrent on the film achieves a genuine consequence as David fears that a werewolf can only be killed by someone who loves him. Landis’ comic sensibility actually serves to keep the film grounded in a skewed but solid realism, as Alex and David bitch about inflation and overworked hospital orderlies bellyache, and Dr Hirsch tells his wife that if he can survive Rommel, he can survive a boring dinner party. London is a bracingly lively contrast to the moody environs of East Proctor, Landis offering tourist board tropes only to reveal the seaminess cheek by jowl with them: homeless men encamped near Tower Bridge, flocks of punks on the tube trains, porn cinemas at the Piccadilly Circus. The film’s most original spin on the werewolf myth is also the most bizarre, and central to the two-faced take on the material, with Jack appearing to David as a wraith to warn him about his inevitable transformation into a marauding beast, begging him to kill himself and end the werewolf’s bloodline. The almost Monty Python-esque joke is that Jack is still Jack, witty, deprecating, and friendly, stewing over the fact his lust-object shacked up with another guy right after attending his funeral, and complaining that talking to other corpses is boring. But he’s also beset by existential desperation, the voice of baleful warning and grim fate, and seeming to decay just like his body, so that each time he appears to David he’s in worse and worse condition.

Although carefully built up to, David’s sudden, almost off-hand lurch into transformation comes after a montage in which he uneasily prowls Alex’s flat as Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” dogs him and a brief, comic cutaway to Alex at the hospital – his transformation then arrives as a jagged surprise. The special effects are still, thirty years later, stunning and infinitely preferable to any CGI we’d inevitably get today, a genuine testimony to the brilliance of make-up man Rick Baker, who had worked with Landis on Schlock and would again on their groundbreaking video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller. But what makes the scene more than a bit of effects team show-offing is the tangible sense of existential desperation in David’s cries for help, as his very body rebels against his true character and contorts into a grotesque engine of destruction, one of the most acute presentations of this theme ever filmed. David’s first rampage as a werewolf takes in a panoply of types and initially hits notes of sick humor: first he attacks Harry and Judith (Geoffrey Burridge and Brenda Cavendish), a delectably dim pair of giggling middle class swots, whose dismembered parts are discovered by a brandy-sipping friend, and three bums (Sydney Bromley, Frank Singuineau, and Will Leighton).

Then the tone takes a swerve towards the genuinely nightmarish, as haughty city banker Gerald Bringsley (Michael Carter) is stalked in a deserted tube station. Class tension is again often a theme in Landis’ works, and here there’s initially a temptation to chuckle at Bringsley’s attitude, at first thinking the growls he’s hearing are some miscreants playing tricks, only for the smile to fade as Landis plays the sequence deadly straight as Bringsley flees through the tunnels, chased by the POV monster in brilliantly fluid camerawork, and the beast is glimpsed at the very edge of a shot down an escalator well as Bringsley, having tripped and lying injured, watches the beast approach with implacable hunger. This tremendous set-piece retains a Val Lewton-esque flavour, as it successfully correlates the well-lit, clean, yet claustrophobic modernity of the station tunnels with the foggy moor at the start, as an empty, cheerless space: both keep the menace out of immediate sight and offer no quick sanctuary or sense of aid and fellowship.

Another of Landis’ cunning ideas is to make the werewolves, glimpsed in darting, rapidly edited lunges, properly terrible in their wildness, and indeed they remain, in my experience, the most genuinely ferocious lycanthropes ever glimpsed in a movie, with the innovative idea of rejecting anthropomorphism and rendering them instead as massive beasts utterly inimical to any human presence. This edge of the genuinely implacable gives the horror a frisson that properly offsets the comedy. After Were-David’s first rampage, the film quickly reverts back to comedy with a particular inspired touch, with a jump cut to a roaring, safely caged lion, as David awakens stark naked in a zoo, and has to evade being arrested and finds some sort of clothing and make it back to Alex’s. It’s the sort of sequence that deliberately violates a nicety observed by the earlier werewolf movies, where their monsters got about wearing pants, and answers a perfectly logical question about what happens when a wolf-man reverts. When David’s attempts to get himself arrested flop, and he can’t bring himself to cut his wrists, Jack appears and ushers him into a porn theater where he introduces David to the shades of his new victims, all perfectly in character, Harry and Judith impossibly chirpy as even as they drip gore, Bringsley angry and punitive, as if David has stumbled into an infernal intervention. Occasionally Landis’ humor collides with the piece instead of aiding it, as in the mock porno See You Next Wednesday (that title being a Landis running joke) that David and Jack partake of viewing in this scene, which is hilarious but plays like an outtake from The Kentucky Fried Movie. But it does again lead into a knowing crux, as David’s pleas to be left alone as he begins to transform again mistaken at first by an usher as the slightly exaggerated moans of a desperate onanist, therefore acknowledging with a smirk another variation on the man-as-beast theme, this one sourced in shame of sexuality. There’s also a certain thematic rhyme with Taxi Driver, a different kind of marauding beast in the big city still nonetheless feeding on a diet of porn and rage.

The acidic brilliance continues in the finale, as the dark space of the porn theatre becomes a charnel house, and Piccadilly Circus becomes a bloody circus indeed of crashing cars, crushed and torn bodies, and one very large freaky mutt stalking the streets. This dizzyingly orchestrated bit of chaos invokes the similar chaos in The Blues Brothers’ final phase, a careening dissolution in everyday order. The forces of reaction swing instantly into action, except where the previous film made ruthless fun of the SWAT team coming into the fray, here they’re cool considerate men ready to do a desperately needed job of work, a rare leavening of Landis’ distaste for authority figures, although he does make sure we see the fatuous Villiers get his head torn off. But Alex, having heard David’s movie-derived theory that a werewolf can only be killed by one who loves him, realises bullets can only give a coup-de-grace when that love is invoked, so she dashes into the alleyway where Were-David has holed up, and her cries coax the werewolf out, a glimmer of recognition in its eyes, to welcome the bullets of the police, in a moment that truly catches the romantic-tragic spirit of the best werewolf movies it’s paid tribute. Only right at the very end does Landis suddenly seem unsure what note he wants to hit, crashing immediately into The Marcel’s bop version of “Blue Moon”, as if afraid of leaving the audience with a real emotion. In spite of its hesitations, however, An American Werewolf in London holds up bloody well.

The Blood on Satan’s Claw (aka Satan’s Skin, 1970)

Director: Piers Haggard

By Roderick Heath

Eerie, gritty, unpredictable, and brilliant in flashes, The Blood on Satan’s Claw is one of the best horror films of the ‘70s, and could have been even better. It’s a work that outdid Hammer Studios at their own game, presents a bridging point between ‘60s Gothic horror and the inversions of The Wicker Man (1973), as well as the darker body-centric horrors of the next few decades in the genre, and also develops on elements introduced to the British horror film by Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1969). Director Piers Haggard belongs to a category including Robin Hardy, John Hough, Hans Geissendoerfer, Jorge Grau, John Hancock, José Larraz, Alfred Sole, and other directors to take a sojourn into the horror cinema in the late ‘60s and ‘70s and suggest great talent but achieve only a ragged and stuttering subsequent career. In Haggard’s case, this meant later making the half-assed Jaws riff Venom (1981). The aesthetic control Haggard exercises over this film is nonetheless consistently striking, as he weaves a pungent atmosphere out of an interestingly naturalistic, freshly tactile depiction of a rural period England. The Blood on Satan’s Claw is, amongst other things, a classic example of the filmmaking of its era now much fetishized by genre fans, with a lustrous yet gamy physicality in the cinematography and unvarnished production style that seems unreproducible with today’s so-slick ways of shooting and editing films. Whilst there are rudimentary makeup effects, shot through with a pungent sense of realism and reckoning, the malefic is communicated almost entirely through behaviour and environment.

At the outset, young yeoman farmer, Ralph Gower (Barry Andrews), turns up strange gnarled remains of something that’s neither human nor animal in the line of his plough. He tries to alert the most important local personages, his employer Mistress Isobel Banham (Avice Landone), and her friend, and long-ago suitor, the Judge (Patrick Wymark), but when the Judge inspects the furrow, the creature has vanished, and the magistrate dismisses Ralph’s story. That night, Isobel’s nephew Peter Edmonton (Simon Williams) brings home the girl he intends to elope with, Rosalind Barton (Tamara Ustinov), much to the Mistress’s indignation, and she stows Rosalind away to sleep in an attic room. During the night, Rosalind hears something stirring under the floorboards, and then the household is awoken by her hysterical screams. When Peter, Isobel, and the Judge break down the attic door, she attacks Isobel and scratches her face in a mad frenzy, and the men hurriedly nail the door shut until she can be hauled away in the morning to a Bedlam: as she’s bustled out, she smiles evilly at Peter, who notices that she’s growing claws from one of her hands. A trio of local adolescents, including Ralph’s lady love Cathy Vespers (Wendy Padbury) and her friend Angel Blake (Linda Hayden), inspect the furrow, and Angel retrieves a similar claw.

Soon Angel’s passing this relic about amongst her fellows in the Sunday School class run by the local clergyman, Reverend Fallowfield (Anthony Ainley), and an insidious influence begins to spread amongst the people of the small hamlet, as sundry inhabitants are stricken with pains that prove to be patches of grotesque alien skin and fur growing like tumours upon their bodies. Mistress Isobel after falling into a daze following being scratched, vanishes without trace. Peter, trying to work out what drove Rosalind crazy, spends the night in the attic room, and he too hears something moving under the floorboards. A misshapen hand grabs Peter’s wrist through a trap door, which Peter seals by weighing it down after pulling free. Later Peter awakens from his sleep with the alien hand trying to strangle him. Peter hacks it off with a knife, but when the Judge bursts in it proves he’s actually cut off his own hand in a hallucinatory rage. Angel and a growing band of locals, mostly youths but also including elderly members, form a coven that meets in the woods and lures chosen victims, including Cathy’s brother Mark (Robin Davies) and then Cathy herself, in order to harvest the growths which are gradually reconstituting the devilish creature Ralph uncovered.

The horror genre as it has been defined ever since the first Gothic novels of the late 1700s has consistently been about a disparity between a modern rationalist, sceptical sensibility, and the tendency of semi-repressed anxieties to rupture through that rationalism, clad in demonic guises. Whilst horror films still regularly invoke such guises sourced in mythology from before the Industrial Revolution, like vampires, werewolves, and zombies, nonetheless few venture back into the remoter contexts from which those creatures spring, for just that reason; the genre feeds, ironically, on our simultaneous lack of credulity yet also our willingness to on some level recognise the fears and fantasies they embody, and fascination in seeing the two attitudes collide. The Blood on Satan’s Claw, on the other hand, belongs to the intriguingly small number of horror movies set in that older world, if still shy of a genuinely medieval setting. It takes place instead at the turn of the eighteenth century, the cusp of the age of Enlightenment. As in Ken Russell’s near-concurrent The Devils, this is a world perched between the assumptions of an era in which evidence of witchcraft would have been met with immediate prosecution, and a modern sensibility that would dismiss it, as indeed the Judge does, and yet it presents a ready channel for insidious impulses within the characters and the worlds they represent. Whilst the satanic force that overtakes Haggard’s story, unlike in Russell’s, is genuine, there is a similarly feverish depiction of rampant release and hysterical indulgence permeating the increasingly perverted and cruel events, and innocence is quickly crushed between the opposing forces. As Russell’s nuns and priests erupt in orgiastic behaviour in hunting down the devil, so too Haggard’s villagers are swiftly swept away in a love/death cult where gruesome physical curtailing is the price for release from chains of social and sexual oppression.

The period English hamlet where the drama takes place and its surrounds appear on one level fitting recreations of William Blake’s idealised rural Edens of England’s past. Yet low grey clouds oppress every vista and crows peer out from above tangled forests, hinting at the malevolence as well as bounty offered by nature, which a human world, sustained in far more perilous equilibrium between survival and annihilation than we’re used to, must contend with. The Judge is characterised as both the pillar of the local establishment, and yet also a subversive element, a Catholic with an attachment to the exiled James III, son of the king dethroned in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. When he becomes convinced that something supernatural and invidious might indeed be alive in the village, the Judge sets out as a prototypical rationalist and ruthless political agent to find a way to cleanse the evil and then cut it out. His first advice, before leaving on a search for knowledge, is to let the evil spread, and it’s suggested that the Judge’s knowledge of political sedition and reactionary method, rather than religious matters, is what really gives him potency in such a situation, even as he eventually pays attention to the contents of a grimoire to understand how to destroy the beast. The shape of the social assumptions glimpsed throughout has not yet been despoiled by the effects of the various revolutions, political, scientific, and philosophical of the 18th century, and yet, as one character states outright, the bad old days of fulminating irrationalism and belief in invisible malefic influence are supposed to be fading. Fallowfield, the representative of official religion, is an amateur naturalist first glimpsed chasing after a snake, the serpent in this demi-paradise tamed and catalogued, and attempts to carefully corral the budding sexuality in his young charges in school, only to be frustrated as they pass the retrieved totem of the forbidden around, keeping him from glimpsing it and locking it away.

The Blood on Satan’s Claw dabbles in an idea The Wicker Man was to enlarge upon, transmuting the licentiousness of the hippie era into a meditation on a return to a pagan Britain based in an earthy, unfettered, inescapably corporeal creed, where bodies are the truest barometer of spirituality in substance. In a concept later stolen by movies like The Mummy (1999), Satan is literally assembled bit by bit from the pieces grown on sundry villagers, some willing converts to Angel’s cult, others innocent bystanders. Ralph’s initial discovery of the beast buried within earth releases a long-dormant yet sustained and readily infectious pagan force which seems indivisible from the scenery, and when Angel’s coven is glimpsed it comes garbed not in black cloaks and stygian paraphernalia but in nature-child garlands of flowers. The rampant miasma of sexuality sees the unholy mark spreading on the locals like the tell-tale stigmata of venereal diseases. Hayden, who gained initial stature as a horror starlet in Peter Sasdy’s Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969) playing a respectable Victorian daughter turned into a vessel of vengeful sexuality to punish a hypocritical father, here plays the teenage girl as the embodiment of everything destructive to the settled order.

Satan’s Claw clearly channels a deliberately paranoid vision of the counterculture, presenting anti-heroine Angel as a sort of homicidal hippie chick and distaff Charles Manson who whips up a flock of flower-bedecked folk into a cabal of Satan-worshipping, organ-harvesting fiends. In such a fashion, Satan’s Claw anticipates The Exorcist (1973) in purposefully burrowing into an unease and guilt in the contemporary mindset that maybe those recherché religious notions and stereotypes have something to them after all. Haggard’s film hits the same themes far more squarely in the process, not hiding the fear of emergent, insolent sexuality in a pre-pubescent but in Angel, a roaring erotic force obviously chafing from the start against decency in her toey play with friends and swift readiness to challenge Fallowfield. Simultaneously there is more than a hint, in the images of severed limbs and misshapen humanity, of the way the emphasis of the genre was already shifting in the next decade to one of an assault on the coherence of the body, from serial killer hack-fests to David Lynch and David Cronenberg’s myths of perverted flesh, as repression gave way to erotic anxiety. The images of characters exhorted to hack bits off themselves in order to gain social inclusion, sexual gratification, or simply survival, takes on a predicative dimension, familiar to us in an age where plastic surgery and bodily self-hate infuse a world and desirability has become, not so subtly, linked with economic worth. The scene late in the film where Ralph is tempted to cut off his leg by a nude dancing girl is tangibly erotic, of course, but actually after initial viewings takes on another meaning: Ralph, a working man, is drawn to pervert his own form in order to gain a material pleasure, a notion that again takes on an economic ramification. Satan repeatedly tempts with sex whilst demanding a steeper price, self-mutilation, redolent of class warfare, as per a theory, articulated by artists as different as E.L. Doctorow and Gang of Four, linking commercialised sex with the anaesthetising of the exploited.

The minister’s name squarely designates him as something infertile, contrasting the field from which the devil springs and the subsequent linkages of sex, pillaging, and obscenity that corrode the human world. Angel’s attempt to seduce Fallowfield sees her confront him naked in his own church, provoking him to admit her beauty even as he condemns her shamelessness. Angel’s seduction is a failure, so she attempts to destroy him instead by claiming he raped her and killed Mark. The immediately credulous local squire Middleton (James Hayter) arrests the priest, raising the spectre of something that’s become even more relevant in recent years: the dichotomous way authority figures like teachers and ministers are given a completely unfettered trust role in forming the young and the absolute fury unleashed when they’re seen to violate that trust which always contains a hint of fulfilled expectation. Ironically Fallowfield lives up to his ideals and is soon exonerated, and yet proves a complete bust in counteracting evil. When the Judge finally returns after a long sojourn in London researching the problem, he comes armed with a colossal sacred sword and an unswerving purpose that sees him threaten one of Angel’s coven, Margaret (Michele Dotrice) with being torn to pieces by dogs if she won’t give him information he needs, a moment that coldly and precisely captures that mood we’re familiar with these days which demands terror be answered with terror.

Haggard builds mood with a rigour that mostly papers over the gaps in the narrative, caused when Haggard was called upon to rewrite Robert Wynne-Simmons’s script, which was originally written as an omnibus film on the theme of demonic manifestation, and stitch it into a contiguous narrative. The gaps are evident in the way some characters seem to vanish or appear out of nowhere, making the film inevitably awkward at a few junctures. But in another way these fault lines actually give the film extra force, making the timeframe difficult to judge, so the drama seems sustained over months, and also more ambiguous and unsettling. The script is also notably cold-blooded in its wilful assault on expectation: both of the film’s major romantic couplings come to singularly grim ends, and the sweetly unpretentious Cathy, paramour to Ralph, finishes up being butchered by the cultists. Ralph himself is less a traditional hero, than an everyman who finds himself at the centre of mad events he’s powerless to control. He even finally finishes up with his leg becoming the last necessary part of the demon’s reconstitution, after he’s intervened to prevent the cult from harvesting a patch on the leg of Margaret, and is dragged off to the coven to be tempted by that dancing girl.

The film’s thematic judiciousness wouldn’t count for much if it wasn’t well articulated, and Haggard builds some spellbinding scenes, as in Peter’s lonely vigil in the attic, awaiting the fiend that drove his lover mad, and finally hacking off his own limb in desperate distraction. Likewise, there’s a wince-worthy portrayal of physical reckoning in which Margaret, who is almost drowned by witch duckers, is rescued by Ralph and he has the local doctor (Howard Goorney) slice off the patch of satanic skin on her leg. The Judge uses this to give his dogs the scent and chase Margaret through the woods. She finishes up with a bear trap about her leg, left to suffer and be torn to pieces by the animals by Angel when she discovers Margaret’s surgery. It’s really in one central scene however that The Blood on Satan’s Claw hits an extraordinary note of practical perfection in the genre, when Cathy is lured to an abandoned church in the midst of the woods by two lads pretending to be playing a game. There the cult await her, springing out of the woods, laughing, massed wearing wreaths of flowers and commencing their giddy nature-rites in swooning Pre-Raphaelite hues in the most festive of occasions. Except that as Cathy looks closer, she notices how they’ve all got pieces missing from their bodies, bandaged hands and heads, stained red. A mood of growing terror and outright frenzy builds as Cathy is held prostrate, her back with its patch of furred skin bared to all, she’s raped by one of the cult, and Angel stabs her to death as she and other women in the cult gyrate in auto-erotic frenzies.

This is a startling, vicious, horrifically beautiful scene, not only in capturing the shock of someone like Cathy suddenly becoming a fetish for newly fiendish friends, penetrated by the men but with the girls like Angel and Margaret clearly the ones really getting their rocks off, but in the way it channels and inverts the prettified flower-child and nature-worship tropes into a portrait of total degradation, watched over by the half-finished devil sitting in the corner, groaning hoarsely for “my skiiiiiiinnnnn!” The finale is nearly as vividly bizarre, with Angel now, make-up lending her an increasingly satanic visage herself with each passing scene, actually canoodling with the beast and finishing up skewered on a pitchfork by assaulting villagers, and the Judge making his heroic tilt at the devil, who still only has one leg to stand on, stabbing the fiend and casting him into a bonfire. Haggard brings the film to a screaming halt fixing on the Judge’s war face, gritting teeth as the flames consume his enemy and light his own face, as if the Judge himself and not the devil is the real overlord of perdition, personification of a vengeful god.

The Woman in Black (TV, 1989)

Director: Herbert Wise

By Roderick Heath

I vividly recall the first time I saw this initial adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1982 novel. It was in high school, on one of those afternoons where for whatever reason we had no class. A substitute teacher stuck a VHS tape grabbed from the English staff room in the video to give us something to do with our eyes and less to do with our mouths. The film took its time getting our attention, but when it did, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a room full of teenagers go quite so quiet before or since. The Woman in Black is one of the few truly successful examples of pure mood-piece horror made in the past quarter century, all the more admirable for being a telemovie, made with the no-nonsense sense of functional craft that distinguished British television for so many years. The title is a deliberate play on Wilkie Collins’ famous Victorian-era mystery novel The Woman in White, as Hill’s narrative portrays the gnawing legacy of oppressive generational values and resurgent maternal vengeance roaring out from beyond the grave in the most insidious and crazed of guises, and the act of burrowing into forbidden enigmas only stirs the grimmest of retaliations.

The cult affection for both novel and telemovie has only grown over the years. Now there’s a new feature film version on the way, starring Daniel Radcliffe, and it’s amusing to note that Radcliffe’s role is played in the original by his on-screen Harry Potter father, Adrian Rawlins. The screenplay for the ’89 version was composed by Nigel Kneale, and whilst he took liberties with Hill’s work, he had practically written the book on how to intrigue and scare the hell out of TV audiences with his Quatermass serials and excellent telemovies like The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968) and The Stone Tape (1972), and he confirmed here he had lost none of his touch for weaving richly engaging supernatural mysteries. Set in the 1920s, The Woman in Black depicts a junior member of a London law firm, Arthur Kidd (Rawlins), a stolid but conscientious young professional pressured to take on the more fiddly, annoying, and time-consuming case work that stern senior partner Josiah Freston (David Daker) doesn’t deign to do, in spite of the fact that Arthur has a wife, Stella (Clare Holman), and two young children who take up all his spare time.

Arthur is thus easily compelled, for the sake of his career, to go to the seaside town of Crythin Gifford, to finalise the estate of a recently deceased woman, Alice Drablow. Upon arriving at the town, he soon begins perceiving odd phenomena. At the old lady’s funeral, Arthur observes only one mourner apart from himself and local solicitor Keckwick (William Simons), being a woman dressed in black, gazing balefully from the back of the church, and across the graveyard outside from amongst the tombstones. When Arthur tries to alert Keckwick to this, the solicitor refuses to look at her. Everyone, even the avuncular local landowner Sam Toovey (Bernard Hepton) whom Arthur struck up a friendship with on the train from London, seems uneasy when he mentions Marsh House, Drablow’s home, which is perched on the far end of a long, perilous causeway stretching across a tidal plain. Amidst the tumult of the town’s market day, a young gypsy girl is pinned and injured when a load of wood falls off a cart: Arthur dashes in and snatches her out of the road before she’s crushed by a huge log.

When he’s taken out to Alice’s residence, Marsh House, to begin organising her papers and readying the house for sale, Arthur encounters the black-clad woman again, in an old family plot abutting the house. She glares at him with a feverish intensity so suggestively malevolent that she scares Arthur into fleeing inside, bolting the doors, and turning on every light in the house. Soon after, he experiences a torturous aural manifestation that documents a heartrending event: the sound of a carriage crashing into the water off the causeway, and a young child and his mother screaming in panic as they sink to their deaths. He hears this repeatedly during his time at the house, to the point where he can’t distinguish its early passages from the sound of a real carriage coming over the causeway, a detail the film then exploits for all it’s worth. Returning to town, Arthur begins to perceive the way these seemingly distinct incidents are part of a pattern, permeating the locale and all its inhabitants, as he recognises that both Keckwick and Toovey share similar tragedies in their recent past, as do many others in the vicinity, in having lost young children in accidents or illness. Arthur’s intervening to save the gypsy girl now takes on a new slant, for he has snatched another intended victim of the curse out of harm’s way, but possibly to no good end. Against Toovey’s advice and his own good sense, Arthur decides to move into Marsh House to complete his work and to delve into the mystery, which, thanks to Alice Drablow’s cylinder recordings, he begins to realise is sourced in a tragic series of events that consumed members of Alice’s family. Alone overnight with Toovey’s dog Spider as his only company, Arthur is lured upstairs to a perpetually locked room by a thumping sound and seems to perceive another haunting presence, that of a small laughing boy who plants a tiny tin soldier in Arthur’s hand.

In spite of some formidable competition from the likes of The Haunting (1963), The Legend of Hell House (1973), and The Others (2001), this first version of The Woman in Black is, alongside The Shining (1981) quite simply, the best “haunting” movie ever made, outstripping all other rivals for concisely sketched mood and slow-mounting tension. It’s very much the made-for-TV modesty of it that makes it so indelible, with no temptations to indulge in showy camerawork or special effects to distort narrative essentials. It’s also all the better for rarely trying to overtly frighten, being much more about generating tension and eeriness, making the film’s few moments of urgency and shock brilliantly effective. The story develops some familiar themes, yet expected narrative pay-offs are forestalled, only to rush in when least expected, with maximum, disorienting impact. Director Herbert Wise was a veteran television director whose very first work, ironically, was a TV version of The Woman in White (1957), and whose credits since the mid-‘50s had included stand-out telemovies like I, Claudius (1976) and Skokie (1981).

Here, Wise conjures an exactly honed sense of atmosphere, in the bustle of the law offices and the small town, the domestic warmth of Arthur’s home life, and, eventually, the mood of desolate loneliness in the remote location of Marsh House, where he alternates between agoraphobia-inducing external spaces and claustrophobic interiors, and a tingling sense of threat pervades. The film was shot almost entirely on location, and the resulting three-dimensional realism quality it credibility. The woman’s appearances are often simply matters of cunning framing as the camera dollies back and forth, her spindly figure casually appearing in the rear of shots she wasn’t in a few seconds before. In one particularly excellent moment, the one that first truly makes Arthur understand he’s in a situation beyond his ken, sees Arthur, sensing an alien presence, abruptly feel the hairs on his neck stand up, and he whips about to glimpse the woman only a few feet away, glowering at him with what he describes as a kind of hunger turned to hate, possessed of radiating power.

The paraphernalia of the superlative ghost story is expertly laid out in both script and direction: the eerie visitations of the female wraith with her faintly greenish pallor and red-rimmed eyes burning with prosecutorial loathing; the remote haunted house; the omnipresent fogs sweeping over the death-trap causeway and mysterious noises thudding out during the night; the air of secrecy weighing upon the populace of the backwater; and, lurking behind it all, a powerful source of emotional anguish that drives the ghost in her relentless program of punishing the living for her loss. The use of sound as a particular source of torment is felicitous, in the overt disquiet of the accident anguish, and also in the sound of Alice’s voice on the cylinders, giving its own tantalisingly ghostly hints, of years spent being haunted by a malignant phantom, of fending off her hate and persecution in the night, every night, for half a century. Arthur is an exemplary hero, likeable, generous, a good father and hardworking, gutsy, intelligent man.

All his qualities don’t mean a thing, however, as he’s completely outmatched in his battle with the supernatural force he unwittingly challenges and is victimised by, even as he musters an uncommon determination and bravery in venturing back to Marsh House and trying to unravel the mystery. His failure to respect the tenuous balance of the situation, rather than beginning, as in most such stories, a journey towards finding resolution for it, sees Arthur instead place himself directly in the sights of the woman’s vengeance. Arthur is steadily worn down by his experiences to a pale, feverish, hysterical wreck, as his most charming traits, his love of children and ready empathy, prove to be magnets for the ghost’s most sadistic impulses. In the final phases of the story he’s so desperate to rid himself of the last totems of Marsh House that he haphazardly piles up papers retrieved from the house in his office and sets fire to them with paraffin, nearly incinerating the law firm in the process. He also almost strangles Freston, in realising that his boss sent him to Marsh House because Freston knew about the haunting and was absolutely terrified of it.

Hill’s story essentially transfers the Latin American folk figure of La Llorona, the inconsolable weeping mother of a lost child whose appearance forebodes death and disaster, to an English setting, and invests her with a specific, wilful destructive authority. As such it represents a dark antithesis to the Victorian cult of motherhood and industry, and Hill knew it very well. This meshes with Kneale’s familiar fascination for locations that have become deeply invested by malefic influence, without his usual interest in exploring the edges of scientific credulity, except that Arthur’s pronouncement that the repetition of the accident resembles a recording calls to mind that motif in The Stone Tape. Arthur does uncover the wraith’s identity: she was Alice’s sister Jennet, who had a child out of wedlock. Alice and her husband had adopted the boy to cover up the disgrace, leaving Jennet to become increasingly unhinged. Toovey recalls her wandering the streets in anguish when he was young, and he murmurs with acidic knowing when he fingers a photo of the Drablows and the adopted boy, “Happy families!”

The horrible accident which Arthur is forced to continuously listen to on the marsh occurred when Jennet tried to snatch back her child, and then crashed whilst fleeing. The locked room was actually the boy’s bedroom. The real sting of this event, which Arthur recognises, is the taunting ambiguity of the boy’s cries for his mother: nobody, neither the living nor the dead Jennet, can know if he was calling for her or Alice, and this is the real spur to her venomous haunting. Now she is a living embodiment of rage against Victorian familial pretensions and veils of hypocrisy and lies, still maintaining a reign of terror against all family happiness in the town even as the twentieth century is slowly penetrating its environs. Marsh House has an electrical generator which has an unpleasant habit of conking out at the most hair-raising moments: Arthur’s frantic efforts to get it going, his diligence in trying to keep the house’s lights blazing, and use of the recording device, all indicate a desperate belief that the trappings of the modern world can stave off the miasma of evil and exile the phantom of past wrongs.

As suggestive as the drama of The Woman in Black is, what makes it riveting is the watchmaker’s sense of form and bastard cunning with which Kneale and Wise make it work on screen. Equally vital is the creepy music score by Rachel Portman, long before she became an Oscar-winner. Drama and music work in perfect accord at a crucial moment when Arthur is confronted with disturbing manifestations in the boy’s bedroom, the generator fails, and his panic to get the power back on again is palpable as Portman’s shrieking Psycho-esque strings blare. The film’s most memorable sequence comes when Arthur has been brought back from the house and is sleeping in a hotel, seemingly having dodged the lurking threat, except that he awakens in the middle of the night to the sound of the boy’s laughter, the tin soldier under his pillow. Arthur sits up and tries to communicate with the spirit, only for Jennet to loom over him as a shrieking, fire-eyed demon, implacable in her otherworldly abhorrence for anyone presumptuous enough to enter her domain. The primal scream Arthur releases as she swoops down on him recalls many moments in Kneale’s oeuvre.

When one is well prepared for this moment, it’s delicious and a little campy, but coming out of nowhere as it does on a first viewing it’s genuinely chilling and surprising: otherwise stalwart adults have reported being terrified by it. Similarly powerful is the very finale, when Arthur and his wife and baby take a weekend sojourn in a rowboat. Arthur finally seems to be regaining some peace of mind, only to spy the wraith standing upon the lake surface, smiling with queasy triumph as a tree breaks and crashes down upon the family, racking up three more sacrifices for her unquenchable, perverted sense of justice. It’s as bleak as conclusions come, but The Woman in Black is relishable to its last frame precisely because, like the title character, it plays a merciless game with a showman’s sense of timing.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: “Manos” The Hands of Fate (1993)

By Roderick Heath

“Mystery Science Theater 3000” (MST3K), started in 1988 on KTMA, a Minnesota television station, but was swiftly promoted onto Comedy Central and, later, the Sci-Fi Channel. After some initial line-up changes, the show settled into a formula, with comedian Joel Hodgson, cocreator of the show, playing a version of himself as a victimised everyman kept prisoner in space on the Satellite of Love by evil genius Dr. Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu). Forced to watch bad movies in a relentless experiment in mind control, he constructed a team of acerbic, antisocial robots, Crow (Beaulieu again) and Tom Servo (Kevin Murphy), in a touch inspired by Silent Running (1972), that helped him mock the often dreadful movies foisted upon them. The line-up altered through the years, most notably with members of the writing team, Mike Nelson, Mary Jo Pehl, and Bill Corbett, taking over the parts of victim, tormentor, and Crow, but the basic dynamic remained successfully intact until the show’s demise in 1999, thanks to those corporate maniacs! Damn them all to hell! At any rate, the warmly goofy tone of the witty, semi-dramatic interludes depicting the altercations of the Satellite of Love team and their hapless persecutors helped to make MST3K the most clever and sustained variation on an American TV tradition stretching back to the sepulchral quips of Vampira in the 1950s.

The limited production values gave the show’s creators a chance to exhibit much the same qualities as the material they were showcasing: low-budget, flagrantly tacky invention, but layered with hipster irony, referential dot-joining, and a genuine geek’s affection for the lame breed of cinema on display. The legacy of MST3K has been a little mixed for fans of schlock genre cinema because any film subjected to the show’s signature snark was instantly branded for all and sundry as noxious junk. That was patently untrue of a number of movies the team took on, including This Island Earth (1955), Danger: Diabolik (1967), and The Undead (1957), and other, sometimes excellent low-budget works. Also, apart from occasional dares, like roasting a tacky West German version of Hamlet from the early ’60s, they rarely took on the more difficult tasks of making fun of inflated pseudo-art, or pumped-up Hollywood idiocies like Top Gun (1986) or Pretty Woman (1990), which have no budgetary excuses for their rankness. Instead, the commentaries at their laziest replicated the standard shtick of mocking not terribly photogenic actors or cheap and obvious special effects, whilst ignoring hints of intelligence in the script or direction. But MST3K was arguably as much about a variety of audience interaction and the peculiar fraternity that has always defined fans of junk cinema as film criticism, and at their best, the team’s riffs constructed new, concurrent movie narratives.

The series’ most beloved episodes include their epic takedowns of the South African space opera Space Mutiny (1988), Coleman Francis’ rancid beatnik noir film Night Train to Mundo Fine (1966), and Ray Dennis Steckler’s freaky The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1966). MST3K often foundered on the difficulties of sustaining its signature type of humour, but some of the team’s extended riffs, like the WWF-style commentary on the climactic bout of Godzilla vs. Megalon (1974) and the beach party of The Horror of Party Beach (1964), can stand up with any more polished challengers for sustained comic brilliance. Widely felt to be the show’s most definitive chapter is the 1993 episode that disinterred Harold P. Warren’s barely-screened “Manos” The Hands of Fate. Another product of that vintage year, 1966, “Manos” had failed to meet even its lowly ambition of becoming filler at drive-ins.

This film, whose title translates as “Hands The Hands of Fate,” was a labour of…well, not love, but rather a mixture of envy, gall, and entrepreneurial daring, for Warren, an El Paso fertiliser salesman. See? The jokes write themselves here. Legend has it Warren made the film after a lounge bar encounter with reputable Hollywood screenwriter Sterling Silliphant, whom he a bet he could produce a film for under $50,000. I’ve always been fascinated by the mystique of such risk-taking, low-budget cinema entrepreneurs, but for every George Romero or John Waters (whose no-frills early movies are name-checked at one point in the MST3K episode) thrown up by the cultural bayous, there are too many more like Warren, who simply redefined the depths of incompetence such fly-by-night filmmakers can descend to (a tradition still alive for us today thanks to Tommy Wiseau). Also, “Manos” The Hands of Fate is genuinely unwatchable without the MST3K crew (I know, I’ve tried) and would probably have remained in virtually complete ignominy had MST3K not disinterred it.

The funny thing is that “Manos” shows inklings of promise on a conceptual level. With its plot revolving around a nuclear family venturing into the southwestern backwoods and falling foul of retrograde menaces, it’s a certifiable first draft for the variations of that theme in 1970s horror cinema. The story setup, with the bizarre high priest of an obscure cult with a rugby team of wives and a satyr for a manservant, and the downbeat finale that was just becoming more popular in horror films, also hint at unexplored possibilities for black satire, or at least a half-decent soft-core porn film: paging Jesús Franco! There’s a vaguely existentialist air to the proceedings, as the family who are the protagonists finish up on a road to nowhere from which there is no return, and their smug presumptions swiftly unravel. There are signs Warren wanted to make a film with a lot more sex appeal, but because the modeling agency that he hired the evil cult leader’s wives from forbade anything but rather prim apparel, he spiced things up with the stodgiest mass catfight in cinema history. As Hodgson devastatingly sums it up at one point, “every single frame of this movie looks like someone’s last-known photograph.”

The family, consisting of dim-witted patriarch Mike (Warren himself, under the thin pseudonym of Hal Warren), equally dim-witted but slightly more intuitively aware mother Margaret (Diane Mahree), and young daughter Debbie, drive to their rendezvous with fate…and drive…and drive. The Robots start to fret, wondering if possibly this time Forrester is going to make them watch a snuff film. Finally a missed turn along a side road which seems signposted as the way to Valley Lodge (or “Valley Looge” as Joel misreads the poorly painted prop sign) brings them instead to a remote house overseen by Torgo, who mumbles uncertainly about not wanting to upset the Master (Tom Neyman).

This sequence highlights both the dire lacks of Warren’s film, and the singular inspiration of the MST3K team, as the watching trio make up dialogue for the characters that is both very funny and yet makes much more hay out of the ludicrous situation unfolding on screen than the script ever did. The spectacle of the family trying to negotiate Torgo’s physical strangeness and incoherent mix of warning and greasy hospitality is newly inflected with surreal politeness (“You got family, Torgo?”) and sarcasm (“So what does the Master approve?”), which, ironically, combine to make the scene feel much more…well, realistic—suddenly the characters have depth and pathos, as well as even deeper strangeness. Torgo himself—described initially by Servo as “Tom Cruise is Dr. John!” like a pitch for some nightmarish, yet alarming possible, musical biopic—is frustrated with his master for hogging all the women who fall into their trap, and leers over Margaret when he gets her alone, a liberty she’s appalled by in spite of the fact he’s slightly more attractive than her husband. The family dog runs outside and is later found mauled to death, and then Debbie disappears, prompting a search that brings the family closer to the shrine where the priest and his wives sleep. Quite a lot of MST3K’s comic style was attuned to mocking lazy exposition and cheap directorial tricks, but “Manos” offers a challenge in that regard, considering that Warren seems barely aware of any directorial tricks. A rare instance is a clumsy flashcut between the sight of the Master and his previously glimpsed portrait back in the house: “Ooooooh I get it,” Servo murmurs sarcastically.

It is more Warren’s lack of technique that drives the ridicule. For example, Warren offers a long, boring, opening travel montage without quite seeming to understand the purpose of such montages is to compress the experience, not fill screen time—Hitchcock’s maxim of film being life with the boring parts cut out is numbingly forgotten. When two local cops pull over the family, Joel gives them the line, “Do you guys have any idea how you was framin’ back there?” A peculiar quality of “Manos” is that it almost seems to boil some generic basic of the era down to a pure essence, in a sort of revelatory, inadvertently satirical coup, encompassing a portrait of square ’60s suburbanites trapped in an existential crisis. Mike’s utter insensibility to any sort of caution and constant pig-headed patronisation is balanced by his being completely wrong and ineffectual all the time (“When is this guy going to start showing some simple competence?” Joel demands in exasperation when Mike can’t get his car started), and Margaret’s attitude is one of fretful anxiety and febrile passivity. At one stage, she gets grossly pawed by Torgo, whom she’s taller than and could probably push over with a sneeze considering his lousy satyr’s balance, but she shrinks back in torpid fear.

Another great MST3K trait was their capacity to rip fragments out of films and drop them into different genres, here perhaps best illustrated in a moment when Margaret combs her hair with a glazed and nervous aspect, and the riffs transform it into a musical: “Torgo, I just met a guy named Torgo!” Servo sings to the tune of “Maria” from West Side Story, whilst Joel gives her the line, as if we’re in a wistful romance, “Mrs. Phyllis Torgo…guess I kind of like it.” The trio are often at their best when making fun of movie music, and they eat the score of this film alive, filled as it is with long, haunting flute solos that sound like they’ve been stolen from some sensitive indie film about wandering homeless children (“It’s Herbie Mann-os!”), interspersed with dreadful jazzy lounge singing and hideous dance-pop.

There’s a sort of subplot with barely a hair’s relationship to anything in the rest of the movie that involves two teens in a convertible constantly making out and being harassed by the cops: they do serve a function of alerting the audience to the doom the family is heading into and alerting the cops to their peril. But really, the kissers are just there to kiss. “Manos”’s sleazy aspect, complete with intimations of paedophilia in the final twist, is pronounced throughout even as the film displays no idea of how to make it count for anything sexy or unnerving; instead, it is icing on the cake for the whole film’s rankness. “I’m guessing this why this whole movie was made,” Servo says during the catfight scene, whilst Crow, as one of the wives slaps hell out of the other, inserts a little Chinatown reference, “She’s my sister and my daughter!”, perhaps my favourite moment of the episode. Another is when we get our first glimpse of the Master’s crypt, which bears an odd resemblance to a bad variety club act, emphasised by the rattling drum and cymbal music. Here the MST3K team’s well of cultural references and habit of projecting them into the movies blends perfectly with the editing of the film, as Servo adopts the voice of an announcer: “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight at the Copacabana, Jules Podell proudly presents…Pat Benatar and Tricia Nixon!”

The “Manos” episode is also a prime, if not quite the best, example of MST3K’s host comedy sketches interpolated throughout, with the usually gleeful Forrester and Frank each apologising in turn for going too far for making the crew watch this movie. The increasingly distraught, exasperated robots and Joel try to turn lemons into lemonade by mocking the driving scenes in adopting the persona of a Minnesota Swede and his family enjoying the scenery with “bemused interest” and being harassed by a southern sheriff caricature, but the robots are so nauseated by the footage from the film they can’t finish the sketch. The episode ends with Forrester and Frank ordering pizza, which is delivered by Torgo himself (played by future host Mike Nelson) in his ponderously icky fashion.

To fill out the episode owing to the short running time of “Manos”, it starts with part of an old Chevrolet sales-training film Hired, a bleakly tacky and hectoring piece of work about a senior company salesman complaining to his father about his lazy underlings, but being convinced by his father to put real effort into training them. The trio’s riffing on Hired beautifully draws out the quasi-fascistic edge in the short’s theme, acting, and style, presenting Chevrolet salesmanship as a pseudo-military operation requiring deep commitment and utter perfection of technique, capturing in its way how American big business tried to transfer the ethos of military service into civilian life after WWII. The leading salesman’s gruff advice is rounded out by Crow’s adding, “Name names!” whilst Joel has another ask, “Are you now or have you ever been a Ford owner?” Hired might, in its way, showcase the felicitous sensibility of the MST3K team even more perfectly than “Manos”. As for Warren, I have no idea whether he ever collected his bet from Silliphant, but thankfully, he never made another movie.

Scream 4 (2011)

Director: Wes Craven

By Roderick Heath

Ah, how sadly I remember the pain of the mid ’90s for a horror movie fan, an age when the genre was a barren wasteland. When I was in high school, almost all the great horror auteurs were either dead, trying to shift out of the genre, or entering a fallow phase, and most of the young punks then wanted to be Quentin Tarantino. Whilst the few who stuck at it were increasingly relegated to direct-to-video or cable TV fare, Wes Craven actually managed to hit his stride with several raucous, unsubtle, yet pungently satirical films, including the energetic and original The Serpent and the Rainbow (1987), the hilarious Shocker (1989) and The People Under the Stairs (1991), the flagrantly weird Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), and, above all, his reclamation of his A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), arguably the true arrival of meta-narrative in Hollywood commercial cinema. I know a lot of people hated these films, but I lapped them up; someone else seemed to notice Craven was on a roll, because he was hired to direct Scream, a film written by young hotshot Kevin Williamson, and lend it some old genre cred and hardy technique. When it was released in 1996, Scream revived mainstream horror virtually singlehandedly with its perfectly judged balance of violence, self-aware humour, satire, and high camp. Of course, it immediately inspired a stream of poor imitations, and Williamson’s signature smart-alecky, referential dialogue, which colonised television through his TV series Dawson’s Creek, led the field, including Joss Whedon and Diablo Cody, by a margin in making such argot a now-wearisome norm.

Sadly, the Scream series lost steam with the largely pedestrian third entry in 2000, which Williamson didn’t write, a telling lack. Much of the pleasure of the first two came from the tension and rapport between Williamson’s writing, with his stylised but accurate feel for contemporary teen mores and his tongue-in-cheek approach to the genre, and Craven’s more critical, urgent, go-for-the-jugular sensibility and his intense yet almost Looney Tunes-ish kind of violent action. That tension was always especially apparent in the finales, when the villains explained their reasons for going on murder sprees. For Williamson, these were send-ups of the idea of motivation, whereas Craven always seemed to take them more seriously, as part of a sociological motif in his films as far back as Last House on the Left (1972), manifest in aspects like the hint of homoerotic panic in Billy and Stu’s rampaging that made their relationship particularly, kinkily frenetic. Scream 4, reviving the franchise and reuniting the core trio of the original cast—the only ones who weren’t dead already—comes after intervening years filled with Hostels and Saws and Final Destinations, all of which get name-checked with a dash of disdain for the raw nastiness that has largely become the law of the genre. But Scream 4 betrays a distinctly darker edge than its predecessors, as if it wants to keep up with those nastier flicks, even as it kicks off in a distinctly jokey fashion.

Two teen girls (Lucy Hale and Shenae Grimes), kicking back for an evening, put on the latest instalment in the never-ending Stab series, derived from Gale Weathers’ books about the original murders depicted. They soon find themselves being stalked by a new Ghostface killer, but this whole scene turns out to be the start of Stab 6, which is in turn being watched by two young women (Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell), arguing over the vicissitudes of modern horror movies. Their argument is resolved when Bell sticks a butcher knife in Paquin—and yes, this is the start of Stab 7. Considering that this is exactly what modern Hollywood is starting to feel like, a sequel wrapped in a prequel within a remake, the joke is exact, and the stage seems set for serious, and relevant, meta-gamesmanship.

However, Scream 4 backs off from this almost immediately; Craven and Williamson out themselves as fundamentally old-school guys, for whom the brute immediacy of blood and guts subverts and offsets such trickery, not the other way around. With killers more intent on doing a reboot than a sequel, the stage is again Woodsboro, the bland small town where Scream unfolded. Stab 7, we soon find, is actually being watched by two more trim young missies, Jenny and Marnie (Aimee Teegarden and Brittany Robertson), and they really are attacked and brutally killed by a new Ghostface. This coincides with Sidney Prescott’s (Neve Campbell) return to Woodsboro on a book-signing tour, having turned her earlier battles with evil into Oprah-ready confessional-therapeutic literature. Her appearance puts her back in the orbit of old partners in crime-fighting Dewey Riley (David Arquette), now Woodsboro’s sheriff, and his wife Gale (Courtney Cox). Edging into middle age is gnawing at them all of, as Gale has no new grist for her pulp-smith mill, Dewey is being courted by his worshipful deputy Judy Hicks (Marley Shelton), and in spite of her official triumph and platitudes of healing, Sidney still carries an aura of doom and regret with her everywhere she goes.

Sidney is reunited with her aunt Kate Roberts (Mary McDonnell) and cousin Jill (Emma Roberts), who are happy, if uneasy, to have their benighted relative back home. The killer, or killers, as it quickly becomes apparent that a tag team is at work, seem to target Jill and her friends Kirby (Hayden Pannettiere) and Olivia Morris (Marielle Jaffe). After fooling Jill and Kirby into thinking Ghostface is in Jill’s bedroom, and then getting them to arrive just in time to watch as he disembowels Olivia, Jill and friends genuinely suspect Sidney is an angel of death. Gale, frustrated with no longer being a credible or credentialed investigator and with Dewey freezing her out of the investigation, puts herself in danger.

I feel a personal affection for the Scream series that’s more intense than just about any other movie franchise after the ’80s. Seeing the main characters again really does feel a bit like meeting old friends after a long absence, and time has been a little unkind to them. It’s been 15 years since the first instalment, with the TV shows from which Cox and Campbell were plucked for the original now dwindling memories and the young ingénues now, by and large, fading has-beens. It struck me how relatively listless the cast of young newbies here is, though there proves to be a clever reason for this in the case of Emma Roberts, who distinctly underplays in her scenes opposite Campbell, as Jill is clearly signposted as a younger inheritor to Sidney’s mantle. Also, Panattiere exudes class as Kirby, on the surface a regulation hottie who possesses premature poise and sultry spunkiness, and proves to have a delicious dark secret of being the biggest horror movie nerd in town. Panattiere might well deserve to get the kind of parts Blake Lively’s been tapped for lately.

Jamie Kennedy, Matthew Lillard, and Skeet Ulrich quickly made pop-culture fools of themselves, and Rose McGowan has struggled to put her real talent to good use, but they had a concisely tooled energy in the original. Their newer counterparts, like Nico Tortorella as Jill’s faithless ex-boyfriend Trevor, and Rory Culkin and Erik Knudsen as Charlie Walker and Robbie Mercer, two film and tech geeks who become enmeshed in the murders because of running a Stab marathon, barely register by comparison, though, again, that could be deliberate given the film’s constant dialectic with the tricks and faults of remakes: the new editions always seem so pale by contrast. Increasing the impression is the fact that Craven and Williamson don’t like these characters nearly as much. Trevor is sleaze, and Robbie is an asshole who wears a video headset perpetually for his project of constantly uploading his life; the killers have the same idea, making their murder spree an instant documentary. The younger characters have a self-involved, unempathetic quality, except for Kirby. Eventually, however, there proves to be a devilishly clever motive for this.

Oddly, again, Craven and Williamson don’t work the notion of real-life brutality becoming instant self-reflexive artefact too hard as a motif, in comparison with the live webcast action in Kick-Ass (2010) as an inspired study in a modern technical-cultural capacity to conflate witnessing and voyeurism, play-acting and true consequence. With Cox and Arquette, whose flirty interaction in the earlier films was one of their distinct pleasures, here show their behind-the-scenes strains, compounding the early stiffness in Williamson’s comic dialogue. This strain, the rather rushed first few scenes, and the less inspired youngsters, threaten to make Scream 4 a wobbly trip down memory lane. Sorry memories of Craven and Williamson’s earlier failed comeback with Cursed (2005) leap to the fore.

But the film gets in gear with a solid bit of stalk and slash, as Sidney’s publicist, the chirpily venal Rebecca Walters (Alison Brie), is hunted in a hospital car-park. Brie’s comic performance is terrific, as is the punchline: her body is hurled out from the car-park to land amidst a press conference Dewey is giving to assure the public everything’s all right, a beautifully black-hearted satirical coup. Some red herrings are offered: the always-appealing Shelton’s deft performance shades into a hint of menace as Judy tries to prod Sidney into remembering her from high school, putting in mind that attention, a great modern currency, who gets it, and for what, has been a constant theme in the series. Gale is attacked when she tries to infiltrate Charlie and Robbie’s Stab-a-thon and put it under remote camera surveillance; hoisted by her own petard by the killers who have done the same thing, she is saved in the nick of time by Dewey. There’s still some tongue-in-cheek qualities to some of the film’s murders, like the fates of the two hapless deputies, Perkins (Anthony Anderson) and Hoss (Adam Brody), who fret about the low probability of surviving this sort of film as policemen “unless you’re Bruce Willis,” and Perkins, as he dies, makes his last words “Fuck Bruce Willis!”

The peculiar familiarity and warmth of the first Scream films is largely absent (let us remember that the first film actually did as much to reenergise the teen flick as it did the horror film), in this entry’s generally edgier tone and less likeable troupe of characters. There is no third-act redemption for Trevor and the geek-gets-the-girl touch of Charlie and Kirby coming together in a mutual love of splatter has a nasty payoff. What’s in its place is however equally, indeed more interesting. As Scream 4 really comes into focus the longer it goes on, is that instead of going down a self-satirising route, it is actually a darker, more vicious film than its predecessors, with some really cold-blooded twists, as Kate gets casually iced and particularly as Kirby desperately tries to save Charlie, whom she has the hots for, in a scene that purposefully recreates the very opening of the original. Kirby manages to answer Ghostface’s question correctly and rushes out to aid Charlie, only for him to jam a knife in her gut: “Now you notice me?” he questions in sighing disbelief, “Too late, much too late.” It is very much in the last act where Scream 4 nails what it’s really after, as it is revealed that Charlie’s partner is none other than Jill, who is determined to supplant Sidney as everyone’s survivor hero. She comes perilously close to realising her aim as she delivers a coup de grace to a stunned and terrified Sidney, having annihilated everyone around her in a bloody whirlwind, including betraying Charlie and casually executing Trevor (“I am not the girl you cheat on!”). Jill’s explanatory rant about fame these days not requiring anything more than having “fucked-up shit happen to you!” packs surprising potency because it suggests some real anger and sociological bite on Craven’s part, and also because of Roberts’ unhinged playing that reveals Jill’s claws, and deep, deep sociopathy.

If Roberts didn’t pull it off, likely the film wouldn’t work, but instead she’s delightful as a pint-sized marauder, as homoerotic panic and even revenge give way as motivations to pure, unadulterated narcissism. Jill slices holes in herself and smashes herself through plate glass to set a perfect stage for the cops to “rescue” her as the lone survivor, ending nearly as bloody and scarred as Freddy Kruger. Craven’s gift for cranking his narratives up to hysterical intensity in their finales works at full capacity here—is there another director in his 70s as purely, kinetically forceful?—as the scene shifts to the local hospital where Jill, having been carried out before the cameras of a world ready for their new hero, learns from Dewey that Sidney is still alive. She has to leave her bed to finish the job, leading to a hilarious and bracingly aggressive moment when Jill beats the hell out of Dewey with a bedpan. “The ending of the movie was supposed to be at the house. I mean this is just…silly!” she complains, and shoots Judy in the chest when she tries to mollify Jill, with a quintessential millennial retort: “Don’t fucking tell me what to do!” Jill gets her comeuppance, of course, as Sidney electrocutes her with a defibrillator and gives some sage advice about the first rule of remakes: “Don’t fuck with the original.” Meanwhile outside the media are still massed, raving about their newfound saviour, and it’s clear that Craven and Williamson have sustained their cake-and-eat-it approach, treading new ground with the series in recognising just how quickly heroes are created in the modern world, and how quickly those heroes can turn out to be self-important little jerks. In spite of the wayward qualities of its first half, by film’s end, I couldn’t help but welcome the Scream team back and hope they won’t stay away so long again.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

By Roderick Heath

Bram Stoker’s most famous creation has retained his culturally iconic status largely because of the many fascinatingly varied cinematic takes on the sanguinary Count. His story invites inventive interpretation, with underpinnings that are intrinsically mythic and psychologically primal, yet parsed by modern processes of rational investigation and juxtaposed realism. It’s also expressively bound up with the transformations just beginning to afflict Western society when Stoker published the work. These different tensions within the tale need only be tweaked slightly in any direction to change it comprehensively. Look at the films, and the artistic and cultural traditions therein, evolved from this work. F. W. Murnau offered a Germanic, Death-and-the-Maiden take in his expressionistic Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1921). Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) conjured a high-gothic, dreamlike world that belittled the neurotic repression of its heroes and offered the suavest of vampire overlords. Terence Fisher’s rip-roaring, ironically realistic Dracula (1958) stripped things down to basics and portrayed invasive sexuality afflicting the uptight bourgeoisie. Werner Herzog’s epic recasting of Murnau’s template with Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979), delved even deeper to create a medieval-flavoured folk myth. Various interesting TV takes in the 1970s tried to stick close to the novel and draw out its literary intricacy, whilst John Badham’s 1979 version offered Frank Langella as a romance-novel antihero. Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) was a blend of dance and illustrative fantasia.

All of these versions have fans and several have a claim to greatness. Francis Ford Coppola took his chances in the early ’90s, and it paid off for him, at least in the short-term. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was his last popular hit to date, and it’s still held in fond regard by a lot of younger movie fans, largely because of the magical nexus of Gen-X icon Winona Ryder and a swooning version of the tale perfect for the burgeoning teen Goth subculture. Coppola had begun his directorial career with horror films, including his uncredited work on The Terror and his mainstream debut, Dementia 13 (1963), under the aegis of Roger Corman, so he knew his way around the genre. Being a young horror fan and movie buff at the time, the promise of Coppola making a Dracula film was exciting to the deepest parts of my anatomy. And yet the result was a disappointment so severe that I’ve never quite shaken it off in estimating my opinion of Coppola. I’ve only returned to it again a couple of times in the nearly two decades that have passed since its release. I generally feel Coppola’s post-Apocalypse Now work is badly underappreciated, particularly One from the Heart (1981), Rumblefish (1983), The Cotton Club (1984), and The Godfather Part III (1990). And yet Bram Stoker’s Dracula is definite proof of many of the worst things said about Coppola in those waning days: that he was only interested in style, and that his care with the human element was gone.

The initial selling point of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (hence the title) is the nominal notion that it’s a more accurate adaptation of Stoker than usual. It does restore many elements from the novel, from some of Stoker’s surprisingly potent horror, like Dracula’s feeding a child to his coterie of vampire femmes, to supporting characters like the gallant American Quincey Morris. And yet the possessive title starts to seem more than a bit laughable, because Coppola’s and screenwriter James V. Hart’s own digressions, though different from Murnau’s, are just as great. Conceptually, Coppola’s version is epic, and that is this film’s most resilient quality. Other versions reduce Dracula to a kind of rogue seducer and rodent-like survivor, but Coppola aims to flesh out Stoker’s hinted, if never quite fulfilled, portrait of Dracula as a titan with control over men and elements, a fallen king who only needs a foothold to commence an unparalleled reign of terror. Like other more recent versions, Bram Stoker’s Dracula conflates the historical inspiration for Stoker’s story by commencing with a stylised flashback to Vlad III “The Impaler” (Gary Oldman) fighting for the survival of Christianity against the Turks.

Vlad wins, only for his beloved wife Elisabeta (Winona Ryder) to commit suicide after a false message declaring his death is shot by arrow into the castle by his enemies. Returning home to her body, Vlad is enraged when the officiating priest (Anthony Hopkins) won’t give the sacrament of extreme unction to a suicide, and he declares a vow against God, stabbing the crucifix in his castle’s abbey and drinking the blood that pours forth from it. Four centuries later, young lawyer Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) is commissioned by his boss to replace his predecessor, the now mad and incarcerated Renfield (Tom Waits), to travel to Transylvania and arrange for the decrepit, bizarre Count Dracula to move to London. Of course, after sealing the deal with the Count, Harker is left stranded in Dracula’s castle at the mercy of his vampire brides. Dracula hits the shores of England and quickly sets sights on Harker’s young fiancée Wilhelmina “Mina” Murray (Ryder again) and her saucier friend Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost). Lucy’s triumvirate of suitors, Dr. Jack Seward (Richard E. Grant), Arthur Holmwood (Cary Elwes), and Morris (Bill Campbell), dismayed at Lucy’s afflicted state, call in Seward’s mentor on obscure illnesses and arcane things, Professor Abraham Van Helsing (Hopkins again) to advise. He quickly diagnoses vampirism. The cure? More stake in her diet.

Whilst what follows traces the outlines of Stoker’s tale, Coppola’s wild cinematic flourishes quickly swing far away from the oneiric, creeping menace of the novel. So, too, does Hart’s addition of a new element—Mina is not just another target for Dracula’s attentions, but the reincarnation of Elisabeta, for whom Dracula hungers like the world’s oldest lovesick teenager. This notion essentially cuts against the grain of Stoker’s story, which is about rapacious, eruptive sexuality, and the way it subordinates conscious social constructs, not transcendent amorous attachment. Meanwhile, Coppola attempted to prove on multiple levels how hip he was, stirring the pot with relentless visual artifice, film references, MTV crowd casting, and subtext-ransacking figurations. Coppola set out not merely to make an effective horror movie, but to make every horror movie. His film contains direct visual quotes from Nosferatu, both Browning’s and Fisher’s Dracula, as well as The Cat and the Canary (1927), Faust (1926), Vampyr (1931), White Zombie (1932), The Wolf Man (1941), La Belle et la Bête (1946), Wolfen (1981), The Exorcist (1973), and The Shining (1980). The new central story motif comes from Karl Freund’s The Mummy (1932). The kinkier elements take clear licence from the ’70s semi-underground horror of Jean Rollin and Jésus Franco, and the deliberately po-faced mixture of mockery and erotic exploration in early scenes between Mina and Lucy resemble Ken Russell’s similarly artificial, anarchic take on Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm (1987).

But Russell’s film, less refined and expensive, is nonetheless rather better, largely because it was a pure product of Russell’s unique sensibility, whereas Coppola here is mixing and matching like a half-interested DJ. There are signs he felt an essential empathy for Dracula as a tragic villain not so far from Michael Corleone and Colonel Kurtz, but the way this is handled saps the story’s intensity and excitement. White Worm also had a strongly focused lead performance by Amanda Donohoe as a Tory bitch-goddess, whereas here Oldman as Dracula seems completely at a loss in presenting a singular characterisation when the story and style seem set on sabotaging him. The seriously fragmented impression he leaves is exacerbated by Coppola’s giddy presentations of his various guises. Dracula is, successively, a flowing-locked cavalier, a withered, ludicrously attired old drag queen, an Oscar Wilde-ish dandy, and various forms of monster. Coppola embellishes on the way Dracula ages in reverse in the novel, but he neglects to give connections and explanations for a lot of his changing guises, and Oldman’s characterisation changes with each, offering grossly hammy flourishes, particularly in the first third. Coppola makes the Count and his environment so archly bizarre it’s a wonder Harker doesn’t run off screaming at first sight, and the film’s early portions offered a wealth of material to satirists, from Dracula’s independently gesturing shadow to his amusing hairdo, which the likes of Mel Brooks and The Simpsons have since made a meal of. Within moments of arriving, Dracula is waving a sword at Harker and ranting, lapping Harker’s blood off his razor blade, and delivering the famous “children of the night” with overblown camp relish. Indeed, whilst Coppola’s editing, special effects, and camerawork are all remarkably energetic, on closer inspection, it’s hard to miss how flatly and poorly directed most of the interpersonal scenes are. Then again, there’s only so much anyone can do with dialogue like this:

Mina: Can a man and a woman really do that?

Lucy: I did only last night!

Mina: Fibber! No you did not!

Lucy: Yes I did…well only in my dreams. Jonathan measures up, doesn’t he?

What is this, Carry On Dracula? Coppola aims straightforwardly to explicate the coded sexual elements in the novel. Dracula’s brides are pure carnal fantasy, suckling at Harker’s blood and bodily appendages. Lucy, rather more the flirt in the book than the prim Mina, is here completely reconfigured into a budding tart happy to toy with her three suitors whilst pining for sexual acrobatics, giggling and wondering with Mina over the ancient erotic Oriental illustrations in Richard Burton’s translation of Arabian Nights. How exactly two well-brought-up young ladies got hold of such outré material isn’t made explicit, but it is a cunning introduction to the peculiar way the Victorians vicariously partook of erotica through the mystique of the historic and the Orient. When Dracula arrives on English shores in wolf form, he makes directly for Lucy’s house and bangs her in werewolf form in her garden, after she and Mina have been dancing in the rain and kissing in overripe ecstatics. Theoretically, this should be tremendously cogent and subversive in the fashion of some of the originators of the erotic horror style, but instead it mostly comes across as try-hard. A real problem is that Coppola goes to no effort at all to invoke a proper sense of repression and reaction, as Fisher, in particular, realised so beautifully. Coppola’s all-encompassing stylisation, which at many points starts to resemble a Dracula-themed video clip, numbs the narrative imperatives. Seward and Van Helsing are reduced to druggie weirdoes as crazy as anyone they treat. Seward is even seen injecting morphine, and his asylum suggests Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade crossbred with the pastiche of Terry Gilliam.

Like Basic Instinct, with which it shared a high-water mark in mainstream Hollywood’s embrace of the adult in 1992, there’s something amazingly asexual about the sexiness on screen, with Frost’s Lucy lolling on a bed with her boobs constantly falling out leaving a desultory flavour. Amongst Coppola’s fragments of visual rhapsody, bobbing corpuscles are a frequent motif, perhaps underlining why some thought of the film as a metaphor for AIDS, especially with the tale as sexed-up as this. Most crucially, placing a sentimentalised love story at the story’s heart basically smothers the erotic anarchism in the cradle. The clear dichotomy here, between Dracula’s predatory intentions and exploitation of Lucy’s desires to make her a ready victim, and his wanting to win over Mina through more traditional romantic means, is silly on several levels. After a meet-cute on the street, he’s giving Mina candlelit dinners, encouraging her to cuddle a white wolf, and swapping heavy sighs. This mocks the film’s own provocations by reducing the matters at stake to a lust-vs-love dynamic. When the time comes for the text’s key moment of Mina drinking Dracula’s blood from his chest, which is supposed to possess a queasy mixture of coercion and forbidden indulgence, Dracula gets all conscientious: “No, I do not vant dis!” he declares, against the grain of everything the character stands for, only for Mina to insistently drink, with Oldman contorting as if receiving the world’s greatest blow job. Secondly, there’s no subsequent substance, hysteria, or passion to the tug-of-war between Dracula and Harker for Mina’s affection, as Coppola rushes through the latter stages of the story, and never achieves the kind of poetic dissent Rollin’s films could muster.

The final impression, which left me so seriously irritated all those years ago and for reasons that have since become all too clear, is of a film that’s identifiable as a significant step on the route to the tedious Twilight-isation of the vampire mystique. Another thing that’s hard to get around is the fact that Bram Stoker’s Dracula is barely effective as a horror movie. Corny gore and make-up effects are aplenty, but there’s no coherence of mood or eeriness to the proceedings. Apocalypse Now sports a far firmer sense of dread and building metaphysical menace. Instead, Coppola trucks in some of his visual fixations, like cross-cutting between action and a religious ceremony, with lingering views of classical ceilings and religious icons, and bleeding crosses that heal, suggesting a Catholic-porn edition of the story. That the film is visually impressive and occasionally awesome is easy to concede. Coppola builds certain sequences to crescendos, and there are some excellent set-pieces that display Coppola’s sense of sheer cinematic movement, particularly a quality piece of swashbuckling when the heroes battle Dracula’s Magyar serfs. Coppola takes the epoch in which the story is set as an excuse to explore the evolution of cinema itself, from magic-lantern shows through to the flicker of the nickelodeon, one of which Dracula and Mina visit, to the stylised expressionism of Murnau and Lang, the lush artifice of the Hollywood back lot, and on to the most advanced swirl of technical effects.

And yet the effect, whilst bracing for movie buffs, leaves the movie perched uneasily between mainstream storytelling prerogatives and the world’s most elaborate student film. In this regard, it strongly resembles Coppola’s fellow haute-cineaste Martin Scorsese’s version of Cape Fear from the year before, and likewise is a good candidate for Coppola’s worst film. So many moments are conceptually arresting, and yet fumbled in execution and in relation to the overall drama. There’s a suggestion throughout, especially when Coppola cuts from Lucy’s beheading to a rare roast beef being carved, that he wouldn’t have minded turning it all into a Monty Python-esque spoof, and Hopkins’ Van Helsing certainly seems pitched on that level. He suggests a savant, introduced stating that “civilisation and syphilisation have evolved together,” detached from regular humanity. “Yes she was in great pain, and then we cut off her head and drove a stake through her heart and burned it, and then she found peace,” he airily declares when Mina asks how she died. His moral determination is seen as based in his own erotic divorcement, and is himself momentarily tempted, when Mina kisses him in the throes of vampiric urges. But again, there’s not enough firm engagement with this notion to make it seem more than another failed aspect, and Hopkins’ simultaneously hammy and distracted performance doesn’t help.

By the conclusion, the number of things Bram Stoker’s Dracula is trying to be has piled up like a mass car wreck: revision, send-up, ardent romance, film studies class, homage, spooky tale, action flick, disease parable, soft-core porn. But the aspect of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that finally wounds it beyond repair is the endemic woeful acting, from Reeves at his most wooden in impersonating an English gentleman to Hopkins, Ryder, Elwes, and Oldman all offering uncharacteristically poor work. Reeves’ worst moment is his one attempt to get emotional, screaming in terror when he sees Dracula giving over the baby to the brides. I would go easiest on Ryder, who was still making the shift from teen starlet to leading lady, and she acquits herself with flat competence until that scene with Van Helsing, where she suggests less a moral woman giving in to demonic impulses than an interpretive dance student giving in to her inner tart. It is worth noting a brief appearance by future star Monica Bellucci as one of Dracula’s brides, and a cameo by Jay Robinson, once famous for playing Caligula in The Robe and Demetrius and the Gladiators, as Harker’s boss. But the actor who comes off best is Waits as Renfield, essaying physically one of the grotesques Waits usually conveys vocally in his music: he wields exactly the right stylised blend of mordant humour and perverse ferocity. Likewise, Wojciech Kilar’s terrific music score and Michael Ballhaus’s cinematography lend the film much more authoritative heft than it actually deserves. It wasn’t, however, a complete waste of time for Coppola, for some of his motifs and effects crop up again, infinitely more controlled, in his extraordinary return to mythological filmmaking, Youth Without Youth (2007).