31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 31: Titane

2021! CURRENT YEAR!

Had a rough choice here to decide what movie to cover for the 2021 choice. I have seen tons of great horror movies this year, some this very month. It could have been Antlers, it could have been Lamb, it could have One Night in Soho. It wouldn't have been Halloween Kills because that movie is apparently really bad. I could have dug back a bit and covered Saint Maud or Green Knight or Psycho Goreman or Malignant, all fun movies. Nobody is talking about the Rebecca Hall horror movie, The Night House, and that movie is terrifying. I could have done the new Mike Flannigan series on Netflix, Midnight Mass, which I loved. Still need to see Squid Game. 2021 is a great year for horror. A Quiet Place Part II kicked more ass than it had any right to.

But ultimately, I had to pick one film to review for the series. That's the rule: one year, one day, one movie. So it was tough. But there was really one choice. There’s only one horror movie where a lady fucked a car. Yes, you heard me right. Car fucking. That movie is Titane, directed by Julia Ducournau.

A lady fucked a car in a movie and that movie won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Now I know what you’re thinking: “How do you fuck a car? Like mechanically, what actually is going where?" Maybe you’ve seen Ridley Scott’s movie The Councilor, which had an infamous “catfish” scene. Yeah, this isn’t that. This isn’t a metaphor or an exaggeration, the lady bangs a car in a high-art French-language movie. There is no way to make realist sense of it. But you do see it happen. And the auto-erotica is probably the least fucked-up part of Titane.

Titane is the second movie from Julia Ducournau, but she is already a superstar in the extreme weird body horror subgenre. Her first film, 2016's Raw was one of my favorite movies of that year. That title says it all, it’s a movie about urges and hungers, for both food and sex and often both at the same time. But a coming-of-age cannibalism movie is really nothing compared to Titane. This is as extreme and uncompromising as filmmaking gets. But it never becomes overwhelming bleak. It's a gross nightmare about a bad person who does bad things to people, yet it's a hilarious fish out of water comedy? Uh, sure.

I would not recommend Titane to anybody who cannot stand David Cronenberg at his nastiest. I wouldn’t recommend it anybody who can’t handle female bodies and feminine issues. I wouldn’t recommend it children, grandparents, or adults. This movie is a Sickos-Only convention. You’re either out there, playing around with your Lament Configuration to summon Pinhead to bring you the most intense of film experiences, or somebody has dragged you along to see this just to see the look on your face. 

Because holy shit. Holy fucking shit. The things that go in this movie.

Right now, a warning: SPOILERS. When I publish this, Titane probably will still be in theaters and discussions will still be percolating as to what this movie is. If you’re at all interested in a movie about a lady fucking a car and the consequences of that act, go see it now. If you're not in the New York area, you can rent it on anything. But if anything I've said sounds unspeakable horrible to you and you don’t want that shit in your life, I’ll shake your hand and send you on your way. Your life can continue unaltered and unmutated by everything that follows. For everybody else, let’s get going.

Titane is a movie about Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), a kind of dancer/stripper who works auto-shows, gyrating her body over a car’s hood. This is not the car sex, don’t be fooled, even if Ducournau puts a lot of work into capturing every spasm of her titillating gyrations. Alexia as a kid was in a terrible accident that smashed her skull open, leaving her with a huge spiral-shaped scar over her ear, which she reveals openly with pride. Only moments later, Titane is already off the chart in in extremity. Alexia gets her hair stuck in the nipple piercing of a coworker (Garance Marillier), and murders an adoring stalker fan with a hairpin stabbed into his ear. Then while showering, Alexia hears a banging at the door. It’s a big Cadillac with flame-decals, and she fucks the thing.

No, I still don’t understand the exact mechanism of penetration at play here. No, I am not sure what is real and what is fantasy. I can tell you that after this Alexia is pregnant. Yeah, she fucked a Cadillac and has a half-human half-titanium baby growing inside her. And Alexia is not done murdering yet, not by a long-shot.

What follows with Titane is ninety minutes of increasingly deranged and deplorable acts. There’s an attempted abortion. There’s a hilarious killing spree that goes increasingly wrong (Alexia would not be very good at Hitman). People are burned alive. Then, Alexia shaves her hair, breaks her nose, and pretends to be the long-lost son of a fireman captain, Vincent (Vincent Lindon). Against increasingly damning evidence that this “Adrien” is really a psycho-killer with a rapidly-growing pregnancy who is leaking motor oil as breast milk, Vincent refuses to believe they are anything other than father and son. He has also has a serious addiction to steroids.

But it's oddly sweet. It is disgusted and depraved on every standard of good taste. I spent a good portion of Titane covering my eyes, unable to watch the events unfolding. There are limits I can go to, and this is well beyond them. And yet, even in the face of absurdity of the lie, Vincent and Alexia/Adrien are together, in an unstable genderbending near-incestuous family. They have a sweet moment resuscitating near-dead people to the beat of the Macarena. Nobody else can believe their bond either, but it is real.

There’s certainly no lack of ideas in Titane. It is a movie that dares tackle male-gaze objectification with the un-sexy gruesome realities of female anatomy. That hair scene is a kind of statement of purpose - this is the oozing, bleeding physical reality that makes up the heterosexual fantasy. But it is also a slasher movie at times. It's a pondering metaphor about modernity devouring humanity in the union of sex and hydraulic-suspension and tuned-motors. Titane is making literal whatever fetishistic desire is at play when we have women in bikinis dancing around masculine-coded machinery.

Titane is often too much even for me. In terms of raw audacity, I'm not sure you can find many movies that go beyond it. This is so deeply fucked in so many ways, and yet it is disturbingly enjoyable. I love this movie. I want to see everything Ducournau does in the future. No matter what hair-brained masochistic idea enters her head, I want to see that on screen.

In conclusion, Fast & Furious franchise, you are so pathetically normy compared to Titane. You sent a car to space? Boring! Have Vin Deisel fuck a car next time if you want to impress me.

As for next time for Spooky Month it’s… well, over. That’s it. Today is November. 

This month we covered thirty-one very different movies that attempted very different kinds of horror. We never repeated a director or franchise. We covered movies from twelve different countries and as many languages. We had a comedy, a musical, an anime, a theater of the absurd, and a couple piles of absolute dogshit. There were some obscure finds, a few movies unfairly dismissed, and some movies that probably need a worse reputation. But I had fun with even the bad ones. I think I did good. Happy Halloween! Go eat candy and get drunk, then let a ghost eat you.

31 Days, 31 Horror Movies Day 30: Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train

2020.

Today we cover one of the best movies I’ve seen all year. I’m very excited about this one.

I saw Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train with no knowledge of the Demon Slayer manga by Koyoharu Gotouge or of the Demon Slayer anime, now currently airing its second season. This film takes place right between the show’s seasons, adapting an entire arc of the manga. I walked into the theater knowing I was in the middle of the story. 

But really, how hard could it be to follow? It’s a shonen anime. There are a well-defined set of genre tropes and rules all these stories rely upon. You can clearly recognize who the protagonist is meant to be, who is supporting cast of wacky friends are, and who the villain is. If you grew up on Inuyasha, nothing here can be too stunning. Demon Slayer: The Movie, directed by Haruo Sotozaki, is just really, really great shonen blockbuster. Not groundbreaking,  but genre tropes played to perfection. It is a virtuoso performance by one of the best studios in the business.

Sure, it would help to know the exact details of what and where and how. Really all you need to know is there is a class of warriors in Taisho Era Japan (roughly 1910s) called “Demon Slayers”. Who are the Demon Slayers? Well, what do you think they do?? They slay demons! Demons in this universe are closer to vampires. They have entire hidden cultures based on secretly devouring people, using complex powers and spells. You can be turned into a demon if you're unlucky, like the main protagonist's sister.

Demon Slayer is horror franchise. Things can be very dark here. The siblings at the center of this story had their entire family devoured. There are haunted houses and lost souls and freaky curses. But ultimately, that is all more window dressing for exciting action. This is a story of warrior pride and moral rectitude defeating the wicked. Friendship overcomes evil. The good and honorable get to move faster than the Muggle eye can follow.

Demon Slayer: The Movie is as close as anime gets to a full-on blockbuster. This is a big production with gorgeous animation and fluid action. It is as impressive a cinematic experience as you will find on any screen or any TV today. The movie and series are by Ufotable, who make arguably the prettiest and most lush anime productions today. Their background is in the Fate Stay Night: Heaven's Feel and Garden of Sinners film series, which both feature spectacular fast-passed action scenes and macabre twists. Our movie today might be Ufotable's greatest achievement. Certainly it is not unpopular. Mugen Train is the most successful Japanese anime film of all time. Beyond that, it is the most successful Japanese film of all time, anime or otherwise. It made $500 million at the box office - during Covid.

The entire film takes place on board a steam train rolling forward in the middle of the night. Our core four heroes, Tanjro (Natsuki Hanae), his good Demon sister Nezuko (Akari Kitō), Inosuke (Yoshitsugu Matsuoka), and Zenitsu (Hiro Shimono), meet up with a high-ranking Demon Slayer with fiery red hair and powers named Rengoku (Satoshi Hino). The Demon Slayers believe something evil is lurking on board the train. Their simplest member, Inosuke, believes this is Final Fantasy VI, and he will have to fight the train itself. Instead (at least for now) the train is haunted by Enmu (Daisuke Hirakawa), a very high-ranked super demon with dream powers.

The first act of Demon Slayer: Mugen Train involves Enmu’s clever strategy. His power is to put people asleep. He traps the heroes in a dream before they even realize they're asleep. Enmu has Freddy Kruger-like powers to create dreams, but he cannot kill you in a dream. (Dying in a dream wakes you up, in fact.) He needs a group of malnourished orphans with a drug-like addiction to “good dreams” to actually do the killing. They sneak into the heroes’ dreams and stab their souls. Some of these dreams are pure comedy, like Inosuke imagining his companions as happy animal friends. Some are more emotionally brutal. Nezuko, who is hiding in a box, is missed by Enmu. She's really upset that Tanjiro is asleep and won't give her head pats. Can she save the day?

Tanjiro, in particular, gets sent back to his childhood home, before he was a Demon Slayer. Enmu sends him back to the best dream possible: before his family was murdered. Tanjiro has to face his dead siblings and mother, and somehow fight his way back to reality. Even not seeing the first episodes where this slaughtered occurred you can feel the emotional devastation. Our hero, before he gets to do anything cool in the movie, is sobbing uncontrollably.

It is hard to imagine a Western blockbuster daring to be this nakedly vulnerable. The ending of Mugen Train relies on the highest of melodrama, a tragedy where the entire surviving cast is left in tears. I often find a lot to admire in foreign blockbuster filmmaking, this commitment to full emotion being one of them. There's also a freedom to not just be bitter. Demon Slayer: The Movie is silly at times, and the silliness actually builds the final impact. Rengoku is introduced as this ridiculous character who never blinks and shouts “DELICIOUS!” after every bite. He then becomes this perfect avatar of martial value and honor, the ideal Demon Slayer. And then later, even he is unable to overcome the darkness ahead of us.

There is also horror. What Enmu is doing to the orphans is unspeakable, even Demon Slayer: The Movie is sheepish about facing the implications of that. This is spooky month, I need to get back to that. Enmu is more than just a dream master, his body is fluid and evolving, like something out of From Beyond. His hand has eyes and a mouth, so it move on its own to give commands. Enmu can absorb the entire train and turn it into a tunnel of flesh, sprouting tentacles down to devour people. The nastiness of the body horror is less gruesome since this is animation, There's nothing physical that is mutating and decaying. But I can’t imagine it smells good.

Demon Slayer: The Movie has a bit of a quirk in that it becomes really two movies with two different themes. There’s Tanjiro overcoming his past to accept reality to defeat Enmu. And there is Rengoku’s challenge to battle off an even greater threat while remaining a pure valorous hero. That’s probably a side-effect of this being an adaptation of a manga story arc; it was never imagined as a single cohesive script. Still, I would prefer a movie that has far too much going on versus one that has far too little.

That does mean we end up with two absolutely incredible fight scenes. Just jaw-droppingly awesome scenes of dudes being dudes and swinging swords and calling wild attacks with colorful animation. Ufotable lives for this stuff, and so do I. Anime rules. It also lands the emotional affect nearly perfectly. You want the good guys to win. You want the right and honorable to overcome everything. And sometimes, brutal reality kicks in, even in the midst of this hyper-charged frenetic fantasy. Even your best is not enough.

You can face your fears, stand up to evil, and just lose. That is a kind of a horror in of itself. (And yes, I know that argument is weak as shit, I just really wanted to talk about this kick-ass movie that rips hard.)

For our FINALE we travel to 2021, THE CURRENT YEAR, the year of a boat blocking the Suez Canal for weeks, certified shitbag Joe Manchin blocking for progress for months, and our next and final movie, Titane.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 29: La Llorona

2019.

We are not talking about The Curse of La Llorona, an American film that also released in 2019 about the Latin American folk monster. No, this La Llorona is a Guatemalan movie directed by Jayro Bustamante. There are no connections to the Conjuring Cinematic Universe today. The American movie made $100 million at the box office. The Guatemala La Llorona instead was critically-acclaimed and was very nearly nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 93rd Academy Awards. Sorry, I had to pick the cool obscure movie over the normie jump scare one.

That said, I do think La Llorona might have used a jump scare or two. This is definitely in the camp of arthouse horror, things like Relic or The Babadook. I love these kinds of A24/Neon cool indie movies, do not get me wrong. But they’re all slow-paced and rely entirely on atmosphere until the end. They build tension beautifully, edging you up further and further until great payoffs. But along the way you do kind of hunger for a ghost to pop out and go “boo!”. You can also feel something of a limited budget, since there are a lot of movies like It Comes at Night out there, all taking place in a single claustrophobic house. 

Sometimes your horror diet can be too wholesome, is all I’m saying.

La Llorona has good reason to stay classy though. This is not just about a haunted house in Central America, this is a haunted house with serious political history. The figure of La Llorona, the weeping woman, is kind a boogieman all across the Americas. (I'm White, so she never visited me as a child, I missed out.) La Llorona is a twisted maternal character who wanders wet places, searching for children to drown. But here, she’s an avenging creature of awful justice. This film is reshaping horror mythology like the recent reboot of Candyman.

The Guatemalan Genocide is not something much known about here in the US, which is itself a serious injustice. (Take a moment and look up what we did to that country for bananas in the 1960s in case you are unaware what a nice “big brother” we’ve been to the Guatemalan people.) After the US-backed coup, various military dictatorships for decades took part in a "Silent Genocide" of maybe as many as 200,000 people or even more. The victims, unsurprisingly, were largely the Mayan natives in the countryside.

Guatemala is a diverse country and a very unequal country. Spanish is just one of dozens of languages spoken, but unsurprisingly the urban Spanish-speaking elites hold much of the power (this is probably over-generalizing the situation a bit). La Llorona's backstory focuses on a massacres of villagers speaking the Kaqchikel language. Jayro Bustamante made headlines years earlier shooting a movie entirely in Kaqchikel, Ixcanul. I've seen claims that this was the very first time any movie had been made in that language, which shows how unrepresented these groups are.

In particular, La Llorona recreates the figure of General Efraín Ríos Montt, the Reagan-backed military dictator of Guatemala of the early Eighties, committed genocide in the Civil Wars of the Eighties, and in a weird twist, was later elected president in what appear to be fully democratic elections. (Real life is never so black and white.) In 2013, Montt was convicted of crimes against humanity by a Guatemalan court, before the Supreme Court demanded a retrial. Montt would never get that trial or face justice. He died of old age in 2018. La Llorona has the character of General Monteverde (Julio Diaz) as a naked fictional stand-in for Montt.

La Llorona is set mostly after Monteverde’s sentence is annulled by the Supreme Court, allowing him to return home. Furious protesters have the General and his family locked down under siege in their fancy estate. That leaves the General and his family trapped alone with nothing but their petulant rejection of reality and their many ghosts. The family includes Monteverde's wife Carmen (Margarita Kenéfic), their daughter Natalia (Sabrina De La Hoz), whose husband was disappeared by the regime, their granddaughter, Sara (Ayla-Elea Hurtado), and their loyal Kaqchikel housekeeper, Valeriana (María Telón), who is rumored to be the General’s illegitimate daughter. Joining them is a weeping woman that only the General can hear at night. This causes the entire Mayan staff to flee except Valeriana, because they know what movie they're in. The only replacement maid the family can find is a mysterious and beautiful young woman, Alma (María Mercedes Coroy), who is not what she seems.

There are few traditional scares in La Llorona until the very ending. It’s a very patient, measured film. It is made up of lots of long-takes and slow shots of the house at night. Only rarely does something jump at you, such as Alma's head appearing suddenly on frame. Alma is a fascinating figure, carrying frogs around, and wearing a plain white shift. She’s less a traditional horror villain than again, an icon of mood, as alluring as she is unearthly. The violence and most intense horror are locked away in dreams. Carmen in her nightmares faces karmic justices when she finds herself positioned as one of the mothers murdered by her husband. She is forced to watch as his soldiers drown her children.

Bustamante is not pulling punches at all on the political horror at work here. The ethnic difference between the light-skinned Monteverde family and their Kaqchikel workers is definitely on his mind. General Monteverde’s awfulness is impossible to ignore, even for his family. Carmen begins the movie with stock rants about "communists", before even she is forced to confront reality. Her eyes start to bleed, a symbol of her previous blindness. Nobody can look away when the General nearly murders his wife by accident, thinking a guerilla has snuck into his house. Nobody can look away when the old man creeps on Alma bathing and everybody, even his little granddaughter, catches him with a tent in his pants.

This is a family tearing apart, but also in a way, coming together. The women have each other in the end and can beg forgiveness. The universe of this film has no mercy for the General, who deserves none. The final scene shows us the universe is not done with this one villain either, it has a hit-list of untouchable old men that will not go unpunished. A boogiewoman is coming for all of them.

And that's really the fantasy at play here. Horror can be a vehicle for desires you can never speak otherwise. Sometimes that fantasy is reprehensible, like how Eighties slashers seem to truly despise sexually-active women. Sometimes that fantasy is empowering like yesterday's movie, Revenge or the class warfare of Ready or Not. In La Llorona's case, it is another violent desire. You cannot say "somebody should just destroy the lives of war criminals" without looking like a maniac, but you can play it out with a ghost story. When there is such a lack of real justice in the real world, at least we can at least find some in horror.

Next time we travel to 2020, the year of 2020, 2020, 2020, 2020, 2020, 2020, 2020… *stares bleakly into the distance, shaking slightly*... and more 2020, and our next movie, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 28: Revenge

2018.

Revenge, directed by Coralie Fargeat, might be our nastiest movie yet. It has the single grossest and most intense moment of any movie we’ve covered so far. Revenge is a French rape-revenge movie, so be warned right now: this is not a movie for anybody who cannot handle sexual violence. It is also not a movie for you if you’re not down for extreme gore. Do not take your Grandma to this one.

That said, Revenge is a thrilling great time. Have I gone full sicko on you all? This rapesploitation movie is fun to me? Well, this isn't a dour movie. Revenge has a lurid color pallet. It heavily sexualizes both its male and female characters – lots of ass close-ups. It employs big, unsubtle symbolism. A Granny Smith Apple turns rotten overnight. Drops of blood raining down on the sand drown ants. By the end, its heroine has become a comic book hero, with her own cool costume and badass swagger. She cuts a killer profile on the page. Revenge is a movie with grit and guts (guts hanging out, in fact), but is not too committed to realism. This is fantasy action.

Let us be clear though, Revenge is not downplaying the utter awfulness of its premise. This is a movie with a moment of sexual violence that is not at all enjoyable to watch. It wants you disgusted by that act and to know that pain. Then it wants you to take that pain and go on a thrill ride of vengeance and catharsis.

We have four principal characters in the cast, all on vacation in a fancy glass chateau on the edge of the desert. They're out just far enough that nobody can hear them scream. Our heroine is Jen (Matilda Lutz), the young trophy girlfriend to a handsome and sinister married businessman, Richard (Kevin Janssens). Jen and Richard’s weekend of luxury and sex is interrupted by Richard’s two schlubby hunting buddies, Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) arriving early. Jen still puts on a good show entertaining them. That is until the morning, when Stan decides he wants more than polite flirting and he’s going to take it, no matter what Jen says. From there, the weekend devolves into a bloodbath. They're slipping on blood-soaked floors by the end.

Faced with Stan’s awful crime, neither other man does the right thing. Dimitri walks away, turns the TV up louder, to pretend nothing is happening. Richard offers Jen a crooked job as compensation, but she must keep her mouth shut. When Jen will not take the deal, Richard throws her off a cliff. She gets impaled through the side on a petrified corpse of a tree, and left for dead. The grim realist version of this story would probably have ended with Jen taking the job, having trouble sleeping, and taking medication for anxiety. The EC comics horror version of this story instead has Jen coming back to life, her zombie exacting supernatural justice.

Revenge hews a bit closer to the latter. There is no blue-skinned zombie Jen, shambling along, carrying the heads of those who wronged her. But Jen does in a way return from the dead. With the help of some Chekov’s peyote to dull the pain, she is able to pull out the branch in her stomach. She then cauterizes the wound using gunpowder and a Mexican beer can, permanently tattooing her belly with an eagle design. That kind of sick biker iconography combined with her red costume star earrings, booty shorts, and of course, a huge rifle, turns Jen into an action star. We're in the realm of psychedelia pulp now, not realism.

The titular revenge is never a simple task. Jen might look the part but she isn’t a superhero, but she is getting better at it with every kill. None of the three men are easy boss fights. They all very nearly get the jump on her. Two probably had her dead to rights but needed to show off and gloat about their masculine prowess… before that prowess is torn right off of them, figuratively. (I’m actually surprised there's no dick gore, considering Revenge has just about everything else.) Richard gets the ultimate humiliation of having to fight entirely naked and gushing blood, his torso held together with plastic wrap.

Revenge saves its nastiest gore for the men. Jen’s revenge upon their bodies is fittingly ironic. Dimitri looked away, so he gets Xs stabbed through his eyes. Richard had Jen impaled, so his stomach is blasted open by a shotgun blast. The worst comes to Stan, the one who raped her. His foot is gashed open in an unforgettably shocking moment. But notably, the gash in his foot is slit-shaped. Jen inflicts a bleeding yonic wound, forcing Stan to violate himself with his own filthy fingers.

I need a drink after describing that scene. Oof. Better hope your mom doesn't walk in on you when that scene plays, that's a long conversation to have.

But you know what? I have no qualms loving Revenge. This is a super stylish fantasy. Revenge is taking the patriarchy and tearing off its head and then drinking its blood, then puking the blood back down the bloody stump of its neck. Revenge spits on the grave of the male gaze. It is gleefully swimming in nastiness for empowerment. This movie loves the nasty. Coralie Fargeat stages dream sequences for no reason other than to construct an awesome head explosion gore gag. It's just fun.

Next time we travel to 2019, the year of going on a hike with a baby in Death Stranding, taking my horse down the Old Town Road, and our next movie, La Llorona. (The Guatemalan one.)

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 27: Anna and the Apocalypse

2017.

There have been plenty of horror musical over the years. Sweeny Todd, The Horror Picture Show, The Phantom of the Opera, Phantom of the Paradise, etc. etc., you can't even count them all. There are obscure gems like Shock Treatment and overrated crap like Repo! The Genetic Opera. Maybe a horror musical was an ironic idea at one point, but that’s long passed now. Horror and song go together like Jason Vorhees and naked camp counselors. Anna and the Apocalypse is just one of dozens. It is a Scottish high school zombie musical set at Christmas time.

Sorry I'm bringing Christmas into Halloween. It starts earlier every year, doesn't it?

I’m less surprised by a zombie musical concept and more surprised nobody has done it before. At least, nobody has done it as a full feature film before. There have been plenty of zombie musicals before on stage. The Evil Dead and Re-Animator both have been adapted to the stage. Then there’s the "Thriller" music video, a timeless classic of these Halloween Times. In 2010, Ryan McHenry made a short film called Zombie Musical which became the inspiration for this full Anna and the Apocalypse. The feature film though is directed by John McPhail, McHenry having sadly passed away two years before release.

With a zombie musical concept, one would expect something very silly, very black humor, and very light. The Evil Dead musical played up the gore comedy so much it promised a “splash zone” in its first three rows. However, Anna and the Musical is nothing like that. The songs are not rapid-fire jokes. Nobody is making bawdy jokes throwing around spleens.

Anna and the Apocalypse doesn’t lack for comedy. The best (and most expensive) scene of the movie features Anna (Ella Hunt) and her best friend John (Malcolm Cumming) skipping happily to school singing “Turning My Life Around” while the town falls to chaos. It is a big bright positive song happening while Shaun of the Dead happens all around them. Around the rest of the movie, there is plenty of gore. These are pretty soft quishy zombies who fall apart easily. There’s a great gag when early on, when Anna accidentally decapitates a zombie and John screams like a girl. Later, Anna uses a big candy cane prop to smash the undead all movie.

But also, Anna and the Apocalypse is not skipping out on the "Apocalypse" part. It is not making light of the fact that this is a dark scenario. These kids have lost everybody, and anybody could die at any moment. Even the high school drama is played straight. John is in the dreaded friendzone with Anna, who is more attracted to a boy she hates, Nick (Ben Wiggins). Steph (Sarah Swire) is the one openly gay kid in the cast and so is isolated. Two cast members get bitten and slow dance in each other’s arms, facing death together. Anna and the Apocalypse is asking a lot out of a very young cast of performers, who do step up.

The one cast member who gets to go full camp is the evil principal, Arthur Savage (Paul Kaye). Arthur is by far the oldest member of the cast with a singing part. He brings some well-aged ham to the movie where is ham is badly needed. He gets a full villain song, “Nothing is Gonna Stop Me Now”, cavorting in glee over the zombie conquest. I really like the rest of the cast as singers, but Paul Kaye runs circles around them when it comes to gleeful camp. Nick also gets a villain-y song, "Soldier at War", but I think the part was out of his actor’s range.

Anna and the Apocalypse is a pretty good musical. They’re aware that their catchiest song is “Hollywood Ending” so they play it twice. That also is the song with the most clever lyrics. It is about a teenage ennui with life not being what they imagined. But the lyrics are vague enough: “We're tired of pretending, no such thing as a Hollywood ending”. That could just be the flat cynicism on its face. Or it could be a more hopeful message: "We're tried of pretending [that there is] no such thing as a Hollywood ending". Anna and the Apocalypse though does not have a happy ending.

If I have an issue with the music, it's how straight they play it. The setlist is made up mostly of ballads, surprisingly few comedy songs. This is not a zombie parody of High School Musical, it’s a High School Musical that just so happens to have zombies. At no point do the undead to sing, even when by the end most of the cast has been turned. I just wanted one corpse song, please.

Even if it wasn't entire what I personally wanted, this is a good movie. Anna and the Apocalypse is another underseen gem in our series. I had never even heard of this movie until a week ago and then instantly had to put on here. Anna and the Apocalypse has a lot of heart, it is giving unknown young actors a shot, and it has a fun zombie fight in a bowling alley. It is a solid combination of adolescent drama and George A. Romero nightmares. If ever you thought Sing Street needed walking corpses, Anna and the Apocalypse is your movie.

Next time we travel to 2018, the year of Meghan Markle living happily ever after with the Royal Family, Big Dick Nick doing the Philly Special on live TV, and our next movie, Revenge.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 26: We Know the Devil

2016.

There is only one action you can take in the visual novel, We Know the Devil. The one verb is to exclude. This game is about three characters and your choice is which character will be the one left out. We Know the Devil, made by Worst Girl Games and Pillow Fight, has no branching paths beyond picking two winners and one loser.

It's a short game too, You only need to go through the story four times to find all the endings. Even with the Prequel bonus story We Know the Devil will easily take less than three hours to complete. It is small as well in terms of presentation. The characters are represented by a handful of animesque sketches. The backgrounds are scanned photographs. Meanwhile, the soundtrack is all intense brutalist horror mood, it does more work to build the horror than the graphics often can.

We Know the Devil is set in a Christian summer camp in a world very similar to ours. One of our three friends is constantly on her smart phone, DMing a friend about how much this all blows. When drunk enough they can share some Harry Potter fandom (2016 was pre-shitbag JK Rowling). Still there are key differences. This is a world where you can summon God himself with the right radio frequency. Radios run on some kind of magic crystals. It is also one where the Devil is hiding in the woods, waiting to take you.

As you can imagine, Christian summer camp sucks. Our three leads are the three "worst" kids in the camp. We Know the Devil is a game of exclusion, so we start with the kids already most excluded. They are Jupiter, the "good" girl who is heavily repressing her sexuality, Neptune, the tomboyish bad girl who is not taking anybody's shit, and Venus, a quiet insecure boy with a secret bitchy streak. The camp councilor is an asshole whose life lessons are mostly passive-aggressive rants about friendships that failed. Again, his world is predicated on division, those in and those out. The "best" campers are petty bullies that nobody actually likes. Neptune, Venus, and Jupiter all have to share a night alone in an isolated rotting cabin. As punishment for their sins, they must confront the Devil.

We Know the Devil takes place over the course of that one night. This is a great spooky premise. Trap the heroes in a bad place, and let the creeping paranoia do most of the work. The Devil's approach is marked by sirens all through the camp, which get louder as the night progresses. The nightmare seems like it will happen at any time.

Yet mostly it doesn't. The devil mostly is not here. Instead We Know the Devil is about killing time. You do teenager shit like try out bad alcohol or play games or make-out. (The characters regret not being able to play Euchre, which apparently is a popular card game if you're from a more Midwestern and religious part of the country than I am.) The structure again, is very simple. Only two people can play out a scene, a third must be left out. Two characters grow closer during the night, one grows more isolated.

There's four endings, and you must see the "bad" endings for each character before you unlock the "good" one. In the bad endings, the Devil takes one of our celestial heroes. They then become something else. Some elemental force of incomprehensible power, revealing a truth they have been hiding. As the night progresses, you'll have a good idea who the Devil will take. Venus imagines lights, Jupiter keeps nervously snapping a hair tie on her wrist, and Neptune has worse and worse coughing fits.

The question We Know the Devil wants to ask though, is what actually is a "bad" ending? The transformations are horrifying, but they are often grotesquely beautiful. Venus in particular becomes an angelic being - a Biblical angel, the ones with thousands of ears and whose light is so pure they will burn away sinners. The endings represent a freedom offered to the Taken character that the Godly paths will not offer the other two "surviving" characters. 

The God of this world is an radio station chanting frenetic poetry. Listening to it feverishly pour out unhelpful nonsense - then a more helpful weather report - might be possibly the scariest single moment of We Know the Devil. It has no salvation other than repression. You must sacrifice everybody who does not fit the pattern. You can probably guess who is offering a better deal here. The ultimate puzzle of the game is finding out to defeat the terms the game sets out. How do balance the scales so nobody is the sacrifice?

The other big theme of We Know the Devil is sexuality. Neptune and Jupiter have a crush on each other, which is a big no-no for Jesus Camp. One characters is trans, and the game will change their pronouns once they discover this. Their fall to the Devil in one ending is an intense rejection of their given fresh. They pull off their misgendered arms and luxuriate in their new form. It's gross in wonderful ways. JK Rowling will not enjoy where the story goes.

There are scarier visual novels out there. We could be talking about Doki Doki Literature Club or the more violent parts of the Zero Escape or Danganropa series. I hear great things about The House Of Fata Morgana. We Know the Devil is more sweet than horrific. It is three friends bonding over how shitty their summer is, we've all had friendships like that. It is a game that finds joy in self-discovery. This might be our single happiest ending of the month.

Next time we travel to 2017, the year of all of Harvey Weinstein's many crimes being revealed, Little Witch Academia becoming a viable alternative to JK Rowling's fantasia, and our next movie, Anna and the Apocalypse.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 25: Howl

2015.

Howl, directed by Paul Hyett, is a movie where werewolves attack a train stuck in the woods. That's the whole story. Whole plot described in a single sentence. If they had just named the movie "Wolves on a Train", I would not even need to do a plot summary. Howl is a very simple, modestly-budgeted British horror movie about a train at night, humans on the train, and werewolves outside. Much like the movie Dagon I covered two weeks ago, it's a pretty obscure find, but a lovable one.

With that lycanthropic locomotive premise, one could imagine Howl playing up the irony. Let us not forget Snakes on the Plane (and the lesser-known mockbuster, Snakes on a Train) a movie that winked so much at its audience that it appeared to be stricken with a kind of palsy. A lot of modern horror, and lower-budget indie horror, is a bit too self-aware. Or they're way too self-aware of the joke, such as movies like Sharkapus vs Whalewolf or 3-Headed Shark Attack or I Was a Teenaged Sharkenstein, all movies that also came out in 2015. (And I only made-up one of them, can you guess which one?) Howl plays it entirely straight, this is an old-school creature feature.

Despite being a monster movie, Howl’s structure is similar to old disaster movies from the Seventies. If The Poseidon Adventure had some werewolves and was on a train, we’d roughly have this. There are a dozen or so people from diverse backgrounds and economic classes shoved together into a tight space. They either work together to survive the night, or break apart into petty squabbles. The train conductor is one of the first people eaten, leaving the fair-collectors and stewardesses in charge without a clue. They must valiantly get the train moving again, or everybody dies. Unlike 70s disaster movies, there's less high-adventure in Howl and more passengers getting ripped out of the cars to be eaten alive.

Howl has a decent cast. Our hero is a fair collector guard, Joe (Ed Speleers), unhappily forced into a midnight shift. He’s got a one-sided crush on the stewardess, Ellen (Holly Weston). Sean Pertwee is the conductor, and as mentioned gets eaten very quickly. A shame since Sean Pertwee is a plus to any movie. The most difficult character is an upper-class sexist twit, Adrian (Adrian), who wants to leave the women and elderly behind as bait and run away. If Adrian is not yet the biggest problem in any situation, he will make himself the problem, he's that kind of asshole.  Another issue is the nice older lady, Jenny (Ania Marson) who has had the bad luck of getting bitten. Following zombie movie character stupidity, they don’t throw Jenny overboard, but leave her to transform.

Most of Howl is not kills, but the intersocial drama. The entire film takes place on the train, so we have an intense claustrophobia that makes everything a bit worse. Adrian, of course, always has to be an issue. But even when characters are good to each other, things can go poorly. I quite enjoy how often Howl pulls off a touching scene of characters forming a connection, only to punctuate it by a werewolf ripping one of them out into the woods to be devoured alive. The kills are infrequent enough, but nobody is safe.

Howl’s budget was well under a million dollars, yet it is impressive how much of a movie they managed to make for that money. The pre-production of the entire film was wrapped in five weeks. It isn't easy to do an effects movie that quickly, especially when the effects are largely practical. They managed to build physical prosthetics and suits for the werewolves, which largely look great. The gore looks great too, poor Jenny's bite wound festers in a disgustingly effective way. This is a low-budget movie, but not a cheap movie.

Director Paul Hyett's background is in effects. His resume includes working on the effects in various British films such as The Descent, Doomsday, and Attack the Block. I will not lie and say the monster effects in Howl look as great as those movies, but the scares always land. These werewolves are less lupine in the face than large mutant people. They have dog-like legs, but they walk upright. You can clearly recognize the humans they once were before they transformed. Howl is a werewolf movie, so as a rule, must have a transformation scene. We do not quite get a full evolution on camera, but gross things do happen to poor Jenny’s body as she loses her humanity.

Howl isn't a masterpiece. The production value is maybe only a few rungs above a really good Doctor Who episode. One could imagine a version of this story where The Doctor falls through the car ceiling and pushes their sonic screwdriver in some werewolf faces, saving the day. That is not the case this time. There is no help coming. So even with modest means, Paul Hyett accomplished quite a great deal in Howl. It's the kind of horror movie you watch on a whim and are pleasantly surprised by its quality.

Next time we travel to 2016, the year of everybody saying "this is the worst year ever" only to be proven wrong by the next annum, My Hero Academia teaching us all Charles V's slogan "plus ultra", and our next... -well, next time we're not actually doing a movie. We're changing it up and covering a short video game from 2016, We Know the Devil.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 24: Goodnight Mommy

2014.

I greatly regret watching Goodnight Mommy. Directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala have defeated me. I lose tonight. I made it about an hour and twenty minutes deep into Goodnight Mommy before I had to start fast-forwarding through scenes. I could not keep watching this, I physically could not handle what was happening on the screen. I feel a bit sick even making myself write this review and think about this movie again.

Horror is a dare we play on ourselves. It can be aesthetically pleasing as artform, but it also relies on fear. Fear is typically something people do not want to feel, we've committed horrendous crimes in our history to not be afraid. But we still love to play horror. We build massive contraptions in theme parks to generate thrills. We have this entire genre here to make our spines chill and our heighten our emotions – but always in a controlled way. A girl might scream watching Paranormal Activity, but that's still play, she's having fun with fear.

I did not have fun with Goodnight Mommy. Not a surprise, it is not a fun movie. But it is much more than "not fun". It is a horrible thing I could only recommend to people with far thicker skins than me. I pushed as far as I’m willing to go and found my limit. It’s this, I don’t want to be here. For a moment watching Goodnight Mommy, I regretted this entire project. If horror is a game, again, I have lost.

This is mostly on me, I imagine. I know what I want out of horror movies and so I’ve avoided the most extreme cinema for this spooky series. Every year I consider things like Irreversible or Trouble Every Day or total exploitation trash like The Human Centipede, and I always changed my mind. I don’t think I’ll ever cover any of those. When I picked Goodnight Mommy, I believed it was just an artsy psychological horror film set in a haunted house. This movie has been compared to A Tale of Two Sisters, a Korean horror movie I greatly enjoyed last year. Maybe somebody should have warned me how violent this was, how fucking painful, how emotionally exhausting. Nobody said this was the Austrian answer to the New French Extreme movement. 

Also, I could have turned the movie off and watched some other 2014 movie, so again, on me. It would be a lot more fun to be discussing Annabelle. Nobody made me do this.

Goodnight Mommy opens with a clip of the von Trapp Family, the ones who inspired The Sound of Music, singing a happy German tune. This is cruel irony, nothing about this movie is happy. It is still Austrian though.

There are three principal players in Goodnight Mommy. There are the twins Elias and Lukas (played by Elias and Lukas Schwartz) and their unnamed Mother (Susanne Wuest). One day Elias and Lukas are out playing in the picturesque countryside when they come home to find their Mother’s face covered in bandages. From here, they are certain this is not their Mother, it is some creature in her guise. The Mother while sleeping is fed a cockroach to test her humanity, and she swallows it without notice. She does not remember any of their favorite moments or favorite songs. She will not even acknowledge Lukas’ presence at all. (If you’ve seen A Tale of Two Sisters, you probably will guess the twist. But please keep quiet for everybody else in the room.)

The first hour of Goodnight Mommy is a very slow but very creepy and intense examination of this family breaking apart. The Mother’s face covered in bandages is a terrifying image. There are scenes of ambiguous reality, of her wandering off, stripping naked, and her head shaking like a demon from Jacob’s Ladder. Elias and Lukas are too close even for twin brothers. No two people should be this attached. There’s something deeply wrong in their Grand Designs ultra-modern house. This all could work as horror story on this level.

Then the last act happens, which is just a continuous sequence of awful, awful torture and violence and pain. I am sure there are more extreme and more violent movies. But I cannot watch much torture, especially shit happening to teeth, no. The fact this madness is descending on a Mother and small children makes it all the more repulsive to me. I can’t do it. I’m out. Sorry. This is cruel to a level I simply cannot take. It's an effective emotional tragedy that lingers beyond simply visceral pain. But uch.

Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala released a movie last year called The Lodge. It is the same kind of dynamic of a mother figure at battle with children who mistrust them, isolated from the world. But as shocking as that film is (and it is shocking, it opens with a suicide scene so sudden I burst into tears in the theater), it is nothing compared to Goodnight Mommy. As rough as that was, it was still a kind of play I could enjoy. The Lodge might as well be a Goosebumps book compared to Goodnight Mommy.

Is Goodnight Mommy bad art for being this intense and this extreme? I don’t know. I can’t say I know anybody I would recommend this to. It definitely is not for me. All I know is that for tomorrow’s movie, we’re switching gears. We're doing a simple monster movie. I need to learn to enjoy horror movies again.

Next Time we travel to 2015, the year of watching me Whip, watching me Nae Nae, grown men weeping openly at the end of Furious 7, and our next movie, Howl.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 23: A Field in England

2013.

One thing that is interesting about horror as a genre is how vague its boundaries are. A western is a very specific collection of images and tropes (e.g. the cowboy, the desert, the duel) that must either be followed or at least acknowledged. Horror cinema, meanwhile, can be just about anything as long as it is scary – at least that’s the definition I use. Looking back at the movies I have covered, is there anything Anaconda has in common with Black Swan? Those are also two films I’ve received comments on asking if they’re "really horror". They could very well actually be thrillers, a genre that is even more poorly defined. Maybe we do not need strict taxonomies for genre discussions; I won’t be solving these questions today. Anyway, with the genre question in mind, we come to a movie that even I hesitate to call "horror", that being A Field in England, directed by Ben Wheatley.

The question then becomes, if A Field in England is not a horror movie, what is it? Well, that is itself a difficult question because I don't really know A Field in England is. It is definitely a movie, I know that much. I will not be able to confirm much more beyond that.

This is the most experimental movie yet, a film utterly uninterested in telling a traditional narrative. Wheatley filmed A Field in England in black and white. which is the least trippy decision made during its production. Events seem to play out in linear fashion, but then characters return from the dead with no explanation. Hours pass but seemingly no time moves, the day never turns to dusk. The film is broken up into various “chapters”, between which the principal players all pause to stage dramatic poses. It's this sudden turn into deep formalism that breaks the realism film making usually relies upon. The result is more uncomfortable and psychedelic than scary.

A Filed in England is set entirely in a field in England, as promised. This field is specifically back during the English Civil War sometime in the mid-1600s. We open on a bearded dainty man, Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), pushing through a dense thicket to escape a skirmish we hear off-screen. We never see anything beyond this vast field. Whitehead joins a small band of deserters who give up on the war to follow the murderous Cutler (Ryan Pope) to a promised nearby Ale House. With Whitehead is a brash hedonist, Jacob (Peter Ferdinando) and a witless singer only known as “Friend” (Richard Glover). All four men find themselves trapped by Whitehead’s Irish rival, O’Neil (Michael Smiley), a dark conjurer certain there is treasure hidden in the field. What follows then is a battle of magic, good and evil, and hallucinations driven by mushrooms.

There are plenty of odd episodes within A Field in England. The four men in the party find themselves pulling on a long rope, actually losing the tug of war, but then somehow pull O’Neil out from some pit that we cannot see. The event simply makes no sense no matter how it is framed. Whitehead is at first piously fasting, but then has mushrooms and beer poured down his throat. By the end, he is chowing down on shrooms, conjuring hurricane-force winds with their power. The wicked O’Neil tortures Whitehead to help him summon the treasure inside a tent. During which, we hear only the painful screams. When Whitehead emerges, he has briefly gone manic, with a Jokerfied smile and limbs pointing at jolly angles.

Then there is the huge black terrifying planet that Whitehead imagines falling towards the field. Or Jacob’s health decline seemingly from poisoning nettles in the balls, which then inexplicably improves. O’Neil enslaves the other men to dig for his treasure, only to find bones in the pit – which is where Whitehead buries some corpses later. Whitehead pukes out polished stones with Germanic runes written on them.

I really have no idea what is going on in A Field in England. It is less a narrative than some kind of endlessly repeating purgatory. Five men trapped in a kind of endless war, firing their 17th century muskets at each other, only to rise from the dead moments later. Maybe it is a kind of punishment afterlife for these souls. Maybe it’s some sort of extended allegory for the English Civil War, with all its rises as falls, including the Stuart Dynasty returning from the grave. Maybe it’s a play on lost pagan rituals from pre-Christian England. Maybe it is all these things. Whatever it is, it is very creepy. Metaphor, allegory, whatever, you never feel quite safe watching this movie.

This year Ben Wheatley made another movie set in the English countryside, also starring Reece Shearsmith, In the Earth. That one is set in current day, so timely it even acknowledges the current Covid pandemic. That’s more of a call-back to Seventies folk horror. But both films are about scientifically-minded men trapped by hallucinations and mushrooms, along with bloody battles for control even while they’re utterly helpless compared to the forces of nature. It is definitely a sister piece to A Field in England. Also, both films end in extremely experimental sequences of flashing lights and rapid cuts to create confusion. (Big Warning: do not see either if you have light sensitivity problems.)

As to what all this is saying, who knows, again. There’s some message of the power of the wilderness defeating science, ritual, and even religion. Both films are very well-made and brilliantly acted. A Field in England is a great movie, even if only appreciated as a kind of Theater of the Absurd drama. Maybe simply breaking all conventions, even that of narrative and genre, can be a kind of horror in of itself. However, I cannot much help you with this movie beyond that.

I don’t have a fucking clue what The Lighthouse was doing either.

Next time we travel to 2014, the year of Ebola looking like amateur shit compared to what’s coming down the line, the police violence in Ferguson looking like amateur shit compared to what’s coming down the line, and our next movie, Goodnight Mommy.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 22: V/H/S

2012.

V/H/S is doing two things I think are really interesting. First of all, it is an anthology horror movie, which are always fun, if often hit or miss. V/H/S has no overall director, rather it is a compilation of six short films all made by different people. Most of those directors were up and comers in the indie horror scene such as Adam Winguard or David Bruckner. The other big concept is that V/H/S is purposefully cheap and small. With V/H/S the directors chose to work with small budgets, crappy cameras, and improvised dialog. We have professional filmmakers working like amateurs, it's cool to see what might get made.

I love the idea of working within restrictions, it forces a kind of creativity on you. You have to work around your limitations or even better, use them to your advantage. Why not dig up an old shitty VHS camera and try to make a movie out of that?

The thing with V/H/S is that it isn’t actually shot that much with VHS camcorders, which surprised me. I think only two of the four shorts are using those kinds of cameras. None of them are in a 4:3 aspect ratio. The rest are all using various kinds of SD digital cameras, or in one case, recorded off of webcam. This is all gimmicky found footage stuff, often without an explanation as to how the footage survived in the first place. One short is imitating a Skype call. Another is shot entirely with trick "video glasses".

Part of me wishes they stuck closer to actually shooting on video. Back in the day, plenty of amateur movies were made using consumer-grade cameras, with same stuff you made home-videos on. These shot-on-video (AKA "Shot-on-Shitteo") movies were always a terrible disappointment if you rented them by accident from the video store, they're godawful. I do not much recommend people dig up movies like Black Devil Doll from Hell or Las Vegas Massacre, but there is something fascinating about them. These are objectively some of the worst filmmaking in human history, but they are kind of inspiring as outsider art. These are stories of people with no knowledge of how to make a movie still completing their weird, often depraved visions.

Speaking of depravity, the content is the bigger problem with V/H/S. The first thing you see is the frame story, Tape 56, directed by Adam Wingard. That opens on a group of pranksters molesting a woman to pull up her shirt and show her breaths to the camera. We then intercut with a woman secretly filmed while having sex, quite disgusted to realize the camera is on. V/H/S keeps going in this tone. Our first short film, Amateur Night, directed by David Bruckner, is about drunk jackoffs using video glasses to secretly tape women they picked up from the bar. It is this awful, sleazy Girls Gone Wild bullshit that was not cool even in 2012. Oh V/H/S also plays the initial molestation scene over and over in the end credits. The Howling II did the same thing too with Sybil Danning’s nude scene in its end credits, which was recklessly stupid even in 1985, but at least that was consensual. Why do we keep coming back to this place, V/H/S?

Worse, most of the segments involve actors that either are drunk or pretending to be drunk. They're all being horny douchebags. None of the improvised dialog is funny. Many segments give me the impression of being the poor sober designated driver in a car full of people who think they’re hilarious because they’re six beers deep.

I think once you get past the dude-bro tone and just awful exploitation of women, there’s some very clever and decently scary shorts in V/H/S. Mostly the fratty idiots get what is coming to them. The prankers in the frame story get killed one by one in a haunted house. The video glasses guys in Amateur Night pick up a cute demon girl who feasts on them, ripping one guy’s dick off. (Trust me, he had it coming.) My favorite segment is Tuesday the Seventeenth, which turns out to be a self-aware play on Eighties slashers. That is self-aware of its horniness dumbness and has a brilliant twist on it.

Most of the V/H/S segments have a lot going on, often too many ideas. One imagines that most of these were feature-length ideas at one point that were heavily cut down. I could not quite make out what had happened at the end of Joe Swanberg's The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger, the Skype segment. 10/31/98 by Radio Silence has a great haunted house with arms reaching out of the walls, a Satanic Cult, and I guess, a ghost girl? That’s too many hats for a twenty-minute short film to wear. Meanwhile, Tuesday the Seventeenth, directed by Glenn McQuaid, is actually better for not explaining anything. It turns a slasher formula into a SCP Foundation short story with disturbing implications for its victims.

V/H/S is an anthology horror movie, and those are always hit or miss. The frame story is easily the worst part of the movie, which is a shame. But I think most of these segments have fun ideas. At the very least, even one completely fails, they're short enough that none overstay their welcome. 

There have been three sequels to V/H/S, including V/H/S 94, which just released this month. I recommend V/H/S 94 more, especially the Indonesian segment made by Timo Tjahjanto. That rules hard. I guess I can respect the original V/H/S a bit more for being a stepping stone to better movies that improve on its obnoxious vibes.

Next time we travel to 2013, the year of where even Kindergartens getting slaughtered turned out to mean all of fuck all to Republicans, BioShock Infinite trying to both-sides its way through American history, and our next movie, A Field in England.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 21: Fright Night

2011.

Part of the reason I do these October reviews is to give movies I dismissed originally a second chance. The 2011 remake of Fright Night, directed by Craig Gillespie, was an easy movie to miss at the time. This was a redundant and unwanted remake of a beloved horror movie, that being 1985’s Fright Night, directed by Tom Holland. It was released in 3D, which is now once again a dead gimmick. Every shot is color-corrected, and indeed, over-corrected like many movies of this era. (Try to spot colors other than blue and orange.) They replaced the classic practical monster effects with fairly generic CG. Fright Night (2011) was everything I didn't want in horror movies a decade ago.

I’m ten years older now and theoretically ten years wiser. Maybe now I can put aside my largely shallow complaints and give this Fright Night a fair shake. I really wanted a great movie considering the Denver Broncos have been a darker source of horror than these movies this month. After watching with my biases put aside and the 1985 movie as far out of mind as I can put it, I can conclude that Fright Night (2011) is….

...fine. That's "fine" said with a high note. It’s okay. I love this cast. I like some of the moments. There's clever moves here or there. There's an attempt at more teen drama. But Fright Night (2011) is a bit less than the sum of its good parts. It isn't a travesty, it isn't a hidden gem.

Let’s talk about that original for a second, why don’t we? I accidentally rented both versions from Amazon Prime, so I’m getting my $2.99's worth here. Fright Night (1985) is very possibly my favorite vampire movie of all time. It is a solid fusion of classic Universal/Hammer vampire stories with modern Eighties effects and teenager sex anxieties. The make-up effects are awesome, a vampire gets a cross stamped onto his forehand and the scarring looks incredible even now. I still load up Youtube every so often to watch Chris Sarandon seduce Amanda Bearse to some sultry Eighties dance music. So much of the old movie rules hard.

The remake is largely the same kind of movie with the same concerns, a vampire invades the normy suburbs. It is less interested in playing homage to old Draculas, but that's fine. Kids in 2011 did not need reverence for their grandpa's vampires. The biggest shift in new Fright Night now involves the high school politics. The new Charlie Brewster (Anton Yelchin, RIP) has decided to jump a level of  popularity, leaving behind his old best friend, Evil Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Now he’s dating Amy (scream queen Imogen Poots) and is too cool to be seen doing nerdy stuff like, going to cons and watching Star Wars. There's something here with this concept. But it really does not matter because Evil Ed is eaten by our new Jerry (Colin Farrell) in twenty minutes. The high school drama is largely forgotten after that, everybody is too busy running for their lives to worry about the year book.

Also, the whole nerd vs jock dynamic feels more stuck in the Eighties than even the original. By 2011 nerdy shit ruled pop culture to an enormous degree. Superheroes already were the dominant blockbuster genre. My high school didn’t even have well-defined cliques of "nerd" or "jock" like sitcoms promised. I got punched in the face in school because I was an obnoxious little shit, not because I played Final Fantasy XII.

The other major change is with the character of Peter Vincent. Rather than a horror host, since Elvira-like figures were long-gone by 2011, Vincent (David Tennant) is now a Criss Angel-style edgy magician in Las Vegas. (Our second such figure this month, there was a similar character in Lord of Illusions.) Rather than the old "bachelor" - i.e. gay - character played by Roddy McDowall, this Peter Vincent is way hetero. He has shirtless models who tend to his hedonistic lifestyle. Charlie goes to Vincent for help, and he winds up playing the same role as reluctant skeptic turned vampire slayer.

I guess if anything is disappointing about Fright Night (2011), it is how straight it is. Where Jerry was coded bisexual in 1985, the new one has no male partner. There’s a change here where Amy is the more sexually aggressive figure in the relationship. Charlie, being an adolescent boy, has no culturally acceptable way to be timid about sex, so there’s a bit of an awkward moment here that I like. It's again, undercooked and by the end of the movie he's doing his straight duty of sowing wild oats. However, where the original Fright Night’s camera was utterly in love with Chris Sarandon, this one does less with its guys. David Tennant and Colin Farrell are very far from unattractive men, but this new version is not a movie that wants a long seduction scene. It just wants to get to the action fast.

There is some very good action in this Fright Night, admittedly. Jerry very cleverly gets around the "need an invitation" rule by setting blowing Charlie's house up. There’s a Children of Men-style long-shot chase sequence as Charlie, his mom (Toni Collette, hello again), and Amy drive away from a pursuing Jerry. There’s a cool fight in Peter Vincent’s Vegas loft and a decent one in Jerry’s house. But was action what we wanted from Fright Night? This movie is less sensual, less scary, less transgressive, an all-around safer version. But Charlie does use a fire suit in a clever way.

I cannot help but sound ambivalent about this movie. I come away from Fright Night (2011) thinking this is a decent movie that isn't for me. The cast is too good to fail, even if I wish we got more out of nearly all of them, especially Toni Collette, who is utterly wasted in this movie. Anton Yelchin is a great lead and this is another reminder that we lost him too soon. Yelchin and Imogen Poots would reunite in a few years to make Green Room, a much more intense and better movie. This Fright Night certainly isn't not fun. But why watch this over the original? The remake never quite justifies its existence.

Next time we travel to 2012, the year of a Hurricane named Sandy, some Games called Hunger, and our next movie, V/H/S.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 20: Black Swan

2010.

We've hit what I think is our final milestone. Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky, is the first movie on our countdown that I've reviewed once before. If you want a horny nineteen-year-old's thoughts about this movie, you can dig back to find that. I do not much recommend that piece - I was even worse at editing back then, and it all reeked badly of adolescent edge.

When I saw Black Swan in theaters in 2010, I loved the Hell out of it. Black Swan was one of my favorite movies of that year, it made by Top 10 at #6. It was thrilling and scary and sexy and twisted, those are all things I enjoy, even now. Eleven years later, however, I found Black Swan to be a very rough watch. It was much more uncomfortable than I remember.

A lot of what's changed in my perception is also how culture has moved in eleven years. Aronofsky was making a movie to disturb his audience, so the movie's emotional affect is still very successful. However, I do have to wonder if he meant for the film's abuse subplot to be more terrifying than the psychological thriller at the heart of Black Swan. This is one of those movies where it is very difficult to know what is real and what is fantasy, what is desired and what is feared. You're stuck in the mind of a woman who is disintegrating mentally, and a bit physically as well. However, that's still less hard to watch than the more mundane power dynamics at play.

The obvious sister movie to Black Swan would probably be Suspiria, the classic Italian horror film also about ballet dancer. But actually I think the better companion piece is 1995's experiment into NC-17 for the masses, Showgirls. They're both queer dramas set in deeply-gendered power structures. Power and temptation are enforced by sleazy male directors over women who are driven to compete. And yet the women escape those male structures briefly in erotic feminine ways. It could be that Showgirls is less complete trash and Black Swan is less classy than its Best Picture-nominee reputation implies. 

Or maybe everything is trash in truth.

Black Swan is the story of Nina (Natalie Portman, Sarah Lane as her dance-double), a talented but repressed ballet dancer working for the New York City Ballet. The company is in upheaval because their bankable star, Beth McIntyre (Winona Ryder) has chosen/been forced into retirement. The scummy director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel) wants to put on a new more erotically-charged version of Swan Lake. He believes Nina is perfect for the virginal White Swan character, but doubts she can pull off the darker, hotter Black Swan role. Nina wins the job and digs deep into her psyche to find the sexual strength and darkness. 

In the midst of her awakening, Nina is terrified by visions of a dark version of herself. Meanwhile, she is also attracted to a more sexually-open rival, Lily (Mila Kunis). Nina's grip on reality breaks down throughout the film, losing track of where she ends and where a Dark Nina begins. In turn, the Dark Nina and Lily are merged in some way.

The issue here that stands out the most to me now in 2021 is Thomas. This guy is the fucking worst, I cannot overstate this. His entire style is a sort of ballet method acting where Nina should not merely dance, but also inhabit a sexual role for him. He demands that she masturbate at one point. (The results are unwatchably uncomfortable.) He humiliates her repeatedly. "Would you fuck that girl?", Thomas asks Nina's male co-star right in front of her.

This is awful, but what makes this more awful is the reality of ballet since 2011. In 2017, the real-life NYCB director, Peter Martins was accused of sexual misconduct. He was one of the first #MeToo dominoes to fall after our old friend, Harvey Weinstein. Martins continued to deny all wrong-doing, but retired in 2018.

Black Swan is also heavily concerned with the physical toll ballet dancing takes on a body. You might be surprised in how gleefully I have described faces melting in past movies, but I actually cannot take much pain on screen. Black Swan is a brutal movie if you're repulsed by bad things happening to nails and feet. I had to cover my eyes when Nina was ripping off a hang-nail or breaking her toes back into place. This is also a bit of a body horror movie, as Nina either is transforming, or is imagining some kind of transformation into a swan-like creature. So her toes merge together on her left foot. She's developing a rash on her back that might be wings. Again, hard to tell what is real and what is fantasy.

On the other hand, reality is also creeping in here. Both Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis had to endure starvation diets to stay in shape. They both weighed under a hundred pounds, creating serious health consequences. Black Swan is a movie about the physical abuse of performers that is actually abusing its performers. The lesbian scene becomes a lot less sexy when you realize how unhealthy and skinny both actresses are.

Black Swan is still a great movie, I will not deny this, even with having trouble watching it. I love how this movie is shot on grungy 16mm and handheld cinematography. Lincoln Center is a gorgeous space and makes for a beautiful setting, contrasted well with the dirty subway right underneath it. Black Swan was prescient about the power structures at play in both dance and Hollywood, it deserves some credit there. It further complicates its argument by having Nina dance in breath-taking sequences of artistic mastery. That's the kind of unsettling question of "did the ends justify the means" that other great artistic dramas leave you such as 2014's Whiplash.

And it's fucking scary on many levels. This is horror, after all. Isn't this what we're here for?

Next time we travel to 2011, the year of the Forever Win earning itself a ten year extension thanks to assassinating Bin Laden, Maroon 5 fraudulently claiming they can dance like Mic Jagger, and our next movie, Fright Night (the remake).

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 19: Tetsuo: The Bullet Man

2009.

This is third year of these Spooky Season daily reviews. Thus, we must return to Shinya Tsukamoto's groundbreaking horror franchise, Tetsuo. Tetsuo: The Iron Man blew my fucking mind two years ago. That is still the greatest movie by far I’ve discovered doing these reviews. That 1989 first movie was a filthy, gonzo, utterly deranged, utterly disgusting masterpiece of heavy metal poisoning. I was very excited to see Tetsuo II: Body Hammer last year, though unsurprisingly, it was less memorable. Still unrelentingly strange and unique, but far less great. So how does Tetsuo: The Bullet Man finish up the trilogy?

Well, it finished the series poorly, I’m sorry to say. This is a still a thrilling ride of shaky-cam and body horror. However, Tetsuo: The Bullet Man is the worst movie of the three by far. One can tell immediately that Tetsuo III was not the movie Tsukamoto wanted to make.

The Tetsuo trilogy is not really connected in narrative. They're more different versions of the same kind of story made over the course of twenty years. There’s always a bland vanilla salary man whose life is overthrown by the outrageous kinks of metal horror. There’s always a creepy monster obsessed with his body fetishes (played by Shinya Tsukamoto). Tetsuo II and III both involve a family being destroyed, with the plot launching when is a little boy is murdered by the nameless Iron Fetishist. The salaryman then transforms into something else, a being of pure rage whose body that is a living weapon. He finally does battle with the Fetishist. The endings rarely are more lucid than the rest of the story.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man's version of the story is about Anthony (Eric Bossick) our latest salaryman, whose son, Tom (Tiger Charlie Gerhardt) is slaughtered on purpose for seemingly after being hit by a car. Anthony cannot deal with thoughts of revenge, while his wife, Yuriko (Akiko Monô), begs and screams for blood. Eventually Anthony is consumed by emotion and is subsumed into a bodily prison of metal and guns. He then discovers that his father, Ride (Stephen Sarrazin) fucked a female android, and that’s why their bloodline is cursed to turn into monsters. Then Anthony is tempted to destroy the Fetishist (Tsukamoto, as always). The narrative gets a little unclear at this point, but apparently if Anthony fires his ultimate laser cannon, all of Tokyo will be destroyed.

There was a seventeen-year gap between Body Hammer and The Bullet Man, which tells me that not everything went according to plan. After the first two Tetsuos made a huge splash in the early Nineties indie film scene, Tsukamoto got global attention as a hot director. According to interviews I found form 2009, Tsukamoto then spent much of a decade trying to make a “Tetsuo America” set in the US with an English-speaking cast. Quentin Tarantino was involved at one point and there were rumors of Tim Roth starring. As happens frequently, bad luck killed that project. The timing was never right, Tsukamoto was uncomfortable working with Hollywood, and of course, 9/11 changed everything. So, The Bullet Man is instead an independent Japanese production, shot in Tokyo. But perhaps as sour grapes for the Tetsuo America that never happened, Tsukamoto made the movie in English.

English is one of the biggest problems with Tetsuo: The Bullet Man. Tsukamoto is not fluent in English and neither are most of the actors. They all do a solid job speaking the language, by which I mean, you can understand what they’re saying. However, nobody knows how to perform as an actor in this language. The star, Eric Bossick, is one of the few native speakers of English. Still his performance is, well, bizarre. The acting in Tetsuo III reminds me a lot of early voice-acting in video games. The deliveries are similar to Resident Evil on the PS1. It is stilted and unnatural, English-speaking people just do not talk this way.

That alienation can be a plus when we’re talking about the Tetsuo series. These are, after all, movies that feel like they were made by digging around a landfill and swimming in the trash. The plotlines are usually only vaguely coherent. (Three movies deep and I still do not know who Tetsuo is.) They’re tone pieces of pure Id, with furious camera shakes and fast cuts so frenetic that you lose track of what is happening. It sadly does not work in Tetsuo III, which has the least body horror of any of these movies. We only have a fraction of the grungy and tetanus-infected vibes of that wonderful first movie.

The Bullet Man is shot on digital cameras, so the film stock looks too clean. At least there is either very little or no CG, which would have looked worse. But where is the filth? Where is the perverted sexual horror of a man growing a drill penis and fucking a woman to death? It’s barely here. Tetsuo III is barely eighty minutes and the moment you think this movie is finally about to lose control, it just ends.

I think what Tsukamoto wanted was a more traditional three act structure. He calls this movie a "rational Tetsuo". There is the skeleton in The Bullet Man of some movie he was trying to sell as a more mainstream film. That’s why the entire thing is less extreme, why it is in English. However, that’s a compromise that gets us nowhere. Tetsuo: The Bullet Man had no hope of ever being any other than a super niche curiosity here in the West (or anywhere really). So why not commit to the gonzo?

Who wanted this Tetsuo for grandmas? I want the irrational Tetsuo, the transcendental Tetsuo, the uncountable infinity Tetsuo, the Tetsuo of the complex plain and beyond! The Bullet Man is not it. It isn't for anybody. But at least I have a movie for me, and that is the original Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Nothing will ever take that magical experience away.

Next time we travel to 2010, the year of a massive oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico, a massive spill of severe disappointment with Final Fantasy XIII, and our next movie, Black Swan.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 18: Let the Right One In

2008.

Now it is time to visit our fifth country on our journey through these Spooky Times, the Kingdom of Sweden. This is a nation known for its cultural exports such as ABBA, depressing crime novels, and today’s movie, Let the Right One In, directed by Tomas Alfredson. This is also our third vampire movie so far. 2008 was the year of two great vampire romances. As much as I would love to tell you all about Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, we are instead looking at something much darker and much more transgressive.

Let the Right One In has most of the traditional vampire rules. They drink blood, they burn in sunlight, and they cannot come inside without an invitation, thus the title. The strangest change to the mythology is that now cats compulsively attack vampires, a la Stephen King’s wonderfully ludicrous movie Sleepwalkers. However, the physics are not what Let the Right One In is deconstructing. It is playing instead with the age of the vampire. Rather than a dapper count or teenager, the vampire is a tiny child. Let The Right One In is a prepubescent romance between a troubled boy and an undead… well, that’s complicated.

Our hero is Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a little blonde boy tormented by bullies and perversely fascinated by murder. The vampire is the feminine-presenting Eli (Lina Leandersson, but dubbed over by Elif Ceylan), who has just moved in the apartment next door. Eli’s familiar is an older man, Håkan (Per Ragnar) who goes out at night to murder strangers. He kills in a cold, all-business manner, collecting their blood in a plastic jug for Eli’s consumption. Unfortunately for Håkan, he keeps breaking stealth on every mission, so he’s never successful. Eventually he gets caught and has to pour acid on his face to keep Eli’s secret. That leaves Eli in search of a new protector, and Oskar might be the next man up.

The movie never says one way or another whether Eli and Oskar are truly in love or whether he is to become just the latest in a long line of “Renfields” that Eli has collected over the centuries. Could be that both are true. Eli claims they are "12, more or less" but they are clearly much, much older. One can imagine that Håkan was once himself a little boy enraptured by a pretty mysterious kid next door, and eventually started collecting collecting bodies. 

But also, Eli and Oskar have a legitimate bond, even if it is really strange. Oskar is still too young to know anything of sexuality, and Eli is eternally a child. Eli climbs into Oskar’s bed naked, so there is intimacy of a kind. Oskar wants them to "go steady" while not really knowing what that means. Their relationship is hard to pin down with any traditional category.

Speaking of categories, this leads me to have to talk about the one thing I really don't want to talk about. I am outright uncomfortable on this issue. Eli tells Oskar that they are "not a girl". We do finally see what’s happened, and frankly, this is bad. I’ve seen horror movies before get very pre-occupied with a young child’s genitals as exploitation. I’m thinking of the notoriously mean-spirited ending to Sleepaway Camp. Let the Right One In is never that bad. Oskar does not care about Eli’s gender, loving them all the same. Eli’s monstrosity is not related to their body's shape. They are treated as sympathetic victims of a bad situation, just trying to survive on the fringes of the human (or heteronormative) world. There are good parts to this queer narrative, but I still think we really did not need to "see it". I never want to see what a child has between their legs used as a shock value. Never.

I have not read the book Let the Right One In is based on, but from what I’ve heard it is worse. There’s pedophilia in it, and if that were in this movie, I would be reviewing some other 2008 horror movie instead. (Lake Mungo is really cool.) The mostly fine but unnecessary English-language remake, Let Me In, directed by Matt Reeves, avoids the gender issues entirely. Its vampire, Abby, is a cis girl. That would make Let the Right One In more palatable. But there is something here in the Swedish original. You lose something essential by just sawing off the uncomfortable issues.

There’s a very creepy and disturbing air to Let the Right One In. It’s not necessary the queerness or the ages of the characters or their fascination with death. It is all of those things. It is also in the cold, Scandinavian winter air and the seemingly friendly population who have no toleration for outsiders. This community is one that has no space for Eli and Oskar. 

Let the Right One In is set in 1981, for seemingly no particular reason. That is until you remember how little space Western society had for queerness of any kind back then (or even now). The faculty mocks the one Russian teacher behind his back just because he makes mistakes with his Swedish. If a regular cis man in a respected profession is an outsider, what hope do our heroes have? Oskar was doomed to be one of the lost people of his culture. There is no place for these children. They have only each other.

So, of course, Let the Right One In is uncomfortable for us, the viewers. In 2021 we still have no space for these kids.

I need to also mention that Let the Right One In is a gorgeous, gorgeous movie. Not to go all "every shot a painting" on you all, but this is the prettiest movie we’ve covered so far, and it is not even close. There are certain images in this movie that people should write entire essays on. If I were a better writer, I could put 1000 words down on a few of them. The movie tells you quite a lot without dialog with just a shot the exterior of Oskar’s apartment. Oskar is framed alone in the left window, and the shadow of his parents are on the right, both arguing. You can see the vast separation happening between them, they live in totally different universes. 

Hoyte van Hoytema is the DP on this movie, and holy shit, is he doing fabulous work with shot symmetry and lighting. The image of over-lit woods early in the movie is just mesmerizing. Fully bravo, sir.

Let the Right One In is the most difficult movie yet. There are parts to this movie even I find to be way too much. But this is easily the most interesting movie we’ve covered. It might also be the very best movie I've reviewed this month. Tomorrow though, I need to talk about something easier.

Next Time we travel to 2009, the year of Hannah Montana conquering the cinema, a plane crash-landing in the Hudson River becoming the only good news for the entire year, and our next movie, Tetsuo: The Bullet Man.