31 Days of Horror Reviews: Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight

Day 31: Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight (1995), dir. Ernest Dickerson

Streaming Availability: Peacock

This has been a month of heavy important movies from Häxan to Hereditary, plus a lot of movies with deep philosophical ideas about the nature of good and evil. Your demon could be a representation of feminist trauma, the dissolution of faith, or a crisis of modernity, but blah blah blah. I just wanna have fun. A movie no pretensions or greater ambitions but a demon punching a sheriff right through his fucking face.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... BILLY ZANE!!! If you never appreciated him before, you have not seen Demon Knight.

First though: history. In the Fifties, publisher EC Comics under the leadership of William Gaines became infamous for a series of very popular horror comics. The most famous of these being Tales from the Crypt, which despite almost seventy years of influence on the course of American horror, only ran for thirty issues and a few years. A major censorship push against comics eventually drove EC out of the horror game and into making Mad Magazine, where its counterculture voice blossomed for decades. Stephen King was a huge devotee of the EC Comics philosophy, as seen in his Creepshow comic and 1982 film. King helped launch a major boom in pulp horror in the Seventies and Eighties. Thus in 1989, Tales from the Crypt was reborn as an HBO series. Before The Wire and The Sopranos, HBO's first original hits were this horror anthology show and stuff like Real Sex. The Tales TV show though somehow not on HBO Max, was a big deal. If you grew up in the Nineties you probably remember the pun-spewing Crypt Keeper puppet played by John Kassir. "Hello kitties!!"

So inevitably, there had to be a movie. Demon Knight was the script chosen, and I thank God for it. I love this movie. It is ninety minutes of gloopy monster slowly whittling down a cast of characters, with some fun effects, and of course, Billy Zane's best ever role. However, Demon Knight does not really fit in mold of a Tales from the Crypt comic or episode. Those are usually short moral fables, usually about the wronged dead returning for revenge. The introduction of Demon Knight has the Crypt Keeper directing a short lurid tale of a wife killing her husband and getting attacked by his zombie in the tub. (With gratuitous nudity, of course.) That is more the tone of Tales. What former Spike Lee cinematographer, Ernest Dickerson films is more a simple horror action comedy. No cultural commentary or big lesson.

Unless that lesson is: do not trust Billy Zane in a cowboy hat. Or in any of his many costume changes.

Demon Knight has a fantastic cast, far better than you'd think for a silly B-movie about silly monsters, though exactly what it needs. Billy Zane is The Collector, the higher order demon that arrives in New Mexico searching for a magical Key. His prey is Brayker (William Sadler), the Key's guardian, a semi-immortal WWI vet who is chased by an army of shambling corpses right to the door of an abandoned church turned halfway house. The residents of that house include Thomas Haden Church, C. C. H. Pounder in a fat suit (to hide her arm when it gets torn off), Jada Pinkett not-yet-Smith, and schlock legend Dick Miller. Most of these characters are here to get killed off, but usually in inventive ways, often transforming into goblins or slimy special effects. Eventually Jada Pinkett Smith's Jeryline will grow to be the "final girl".

Really though we need to talk about Billy Zane. The Collector is a role so much fun that it will make you root for Cal over Jack the next time you see Titanic. Demon Knight is not a poorly-paced movie but it lags between Billy Zane scenes because he's so good in the ten minutes or so he's on screen. He responds to "vaya con dios" with "vaya con diablos". He whines when his favorite pair of sunglasses get destroyed. He tries to seduce Jeryline but is unable to say the word "love" due to being from Hell. After bowling a dead cop's head, the Collector stomps outside tossing away his disguise: "Fuck this cowboy shit! You fucking hoedown, podunk, well them there motherfuckers!" Poetry truly.

I could just list all his lines and name every single gag and call that a review.

The non-Billy Zane parts of Demon Knight are not bad either. Ernest Dickerson does not quite capture the wonderful comic style of source material as George A. Romero did in Creepshow. Mostly Demon Knight is comic book-y through its use of dutch angles. Still we get great monster effects. Especially once Billy Zane is stealing the souls of the cast, and they transform into practical ghouls. Maybe the best is the little kid, Danny (Ryan O'Donohue), whose transformation is metafictionally predicted by the very Tales from the Crypt comic he's reading. We see him as some rat monster without a jaw on the page, and then, next shot, Danny is now that very horror.

The demonology is thin. I can live with that. Turns out Brayker is a successor to a long line of Demon Knights, tracing their origins back to Jesus Christ himself. (Who was weirdly absent this month, only appearing in The Visitor.) This magic Key holds Christ's blood, and many other people's fluids, which can be used to burn away demons like a crucifix on a vampire. The Knights travel the Earth akin to the antisemitic folktale of the Wandering Jew. Jeryline will be the next in the line after Demon-Danny chews through Brayker's chest and sticks his snake tongue through his heart, great gore gag. And the demons are just demons, no real lore to them. Billy Zane's character has no back story and no context, he's just this wisecracking good time for the fun of it.

Apparently the producers considered using Quentin Tarantino's From Dusk Till Dawn script as their next Tales from the Crypt movie. That would have been perfect, that is a very similar movie to Demon Knight, both desert adventures leading to very wacky special effects extravaganzas. (I do love them both, I reviewed Dusk Till Dawn last year.) I could easily see Selma Hayak as a snake lady in the same franchise as Billy Zane giving a newborn demon a kiss. Instead the second Crypt movie was Bordello of Blood starring Dennis Miller, who is not a good actor - and a much worse political commentator. There's a third movie called Ritual that released quietly in 2002. I saw it once with all the John Kassir puppetry parts removed, and remember nothing about it. 

Ernest Dickerson would go on to make the 2001 Snoop Dogg neo-blaxploitation horror film Bones and you should definitely watch Bones. I wish he had more horror movies in his career.

...

Anyway, that's that. Another year of 31 (well really 33) horror reviews. Next year could be about anything: haunted houses, aliens, zombies, Scooby Doo. Who knows? All I know is that I will not be covering The Exorcist: Believer 2.

Until then, Happy Halloween!

31 Days of Horror Reviews: The Exorcist: Believer (SPOILERS)

Day 30: The Exorcist: Believer (2023), dir. David Gordon Green

Streaming Availability: In Theaters

SPOILERS!

It was not my intention to end Spooky Month on a series of downer reviews about new movies I didn't like. I thought all these films, even an Exorcist Legacyquel, had potential. I should have known better considering the new Exorcist was directed by David "Evil Dies Tonight!" Gordon Green. I'm going to be as charitable as I can to this movie, despite my previous run-ins with Green and his creative time. I do not know what he, or his various horror collaborators such as Danny McBride are going for. That first Halloween reboot was really good and then everything else has been awful. I do not think this team has much skill beyond imitating Seventies horror directors, and certainly they have nothing interesting to say. Despite the title of today's movie, I do not know if Team Green believes anything of this. I get the sense this is all a joke to them.

You know, 2023 has a lot of really good horror movies. The newest Saw movie is great. Talk to Me rules and I could have said that's a demon movie. But here we are...

There are good things in The Exorcist: Believer. David Gordon Green at least can replicate the slow-build of the original, and the cinematography is not terrible. Clearly Green respects William Freidkin in his imitation of him, with long lingering shots of exotic locations (a long Haitian prologue fills the same beats as the Mosul sequence did in 1973). There's some clever editing transitions, cutting between a scream and a car horn is a decent filmic idea. I really like that the central family of Believer is African American, who are very underrepresented in these demonic possession movies. Leslie Odom Jr. is a great leading man as Victor, the single-father hopelessly watching his daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett) descend into horror. I'm not even against Believer being the most "sequel" of all the Exorcist sequels, being about a possessed child where none of the other films were. You can cover the same ground as long as you have new ideas.

The problem is that The Exorcist: Believer does not have new ideas. The best idea it is has is just to double the stakes: 'Instead of one possessed preteen girl, let's have two!' Olivia O’Neill plays Katherine, Angela's schoolmate from a White family. Both girls disappeared for three days after leaving school (shades of Villeneuve's Prisoners here), only to reappear with demons crawling around them, causing rapid body horror and jump scares. There is some interesting work with the culture clash of the liberal Victor dealing with Katherine's extremely Trump-voting parents. However, doubling the victims does not double the fun, even if Olivia O'Neill looks a lot like Linda Blair. It just means the plot is way over-stuffed with characters without space for any of them.

Speaking of over-stuffed, Ellen Burstyn is back as pure marketing gimmick. She's in The Exorcist: Believer about as long as she is in the trailers. This is utterly cynical.

That subtitle "Believer" is all about Victor's agnosticism being overturned by the emergence of the dark supernatural in his life. It is handled exactly like The Exorcism of Emily Rose only maybe worse. (I am ever the Maimonidean rationalist plus a humanist, so this shit still does not work on me.) At times, the faith-based demands of this script are so intense that this almost feels like a right-wing propaganda film. Victor's lack of faith is not a legitimate representation of moral or philosophical values, they're just lingering anger at God over his wife dying in childbirth. In this film's worldview there are no atheists in or out of foxholes, everything is really a Christian or just being spiteful against the truth. Abortion, or considering abortion, is a horrific sin. Believer is a very Pro-Life movie. A Catholic neighbor (Anne Dowd, curious casting considering Hereditary and The Handmaid's Tale) is an ex-nun whose great failure is aborted a fetus in her youth, the film leaves open no interpretation other than this was a monstrous act that ruined her standing with God. This character also delivers a long speech about how faith can overcome all - except how it can't.

The problem is that a film operating on a doctrine of "faith alone" leads to something of a thorny issue: which faith? Maybe you have lots of faith, just not in the God of Abraham. Maybe you're Jewish, maybe you belong to a kind of Christianity that other Christians believe is a heresy. The 1973 movie is a world where Catholicism is real, old fire and brimstone Catholicism too, it is not ashamed of this. The Exorcist: Believer instead pushes a compromise that "all faiths are valid", which is fine a tolerant idea. Yet that makes no sense in a black and white world where the literal Devil hangs around. If the Devil proves Catholicism is the literal truth, that means definitionally that these other faiths cannot be true, I'm sorry, these faiths are very absolutist in rejecting the others. So the final act of this film is a nondenominational Avengers team-up with Catholics fighting alongside a Southern Baptist and a Hoodoo practitioner just for good measure. 

(Why no rabbi?? We Jews are not good enough to make the team?)

The other problem is that this shit doesn't work. One rule I've discovered in film exorcisms is that they almost always fail by killing the priest or the victim. The demons of Believer do not care if Vincent has faith, they are just clearly stronger. You can create a power level of faiths based on this exercise. Hoodoo is the most true religion since that almost kinda works. Protestantism has no power at all. I do not think that was what Green was going for here.

It get worse in fact. One of the girls dies, and goes to Hell, to burn for all eternity, while the movie tries to bullshit together a happy ending. Meanwhile a happy montage plays as if this was a positive ending and Ann Dowd tries to tell me that generic faith is powerful. No, movie, no. That girl was innocent and her soul is damned. Satan has broken the laws of Christian dogma, nobody is safe! I'm not going back to church or synagogue seeing this, I'm with Baphomet.

Speaking of demons, the exact villain in The Exorcist: Believer is never named. You would assume just watching the movie that this is Pazuzu again. However, online sources tell me it is meant to be Lamashtu, the other Babylonian demon I mentioned in my Exorcist 1973 review. I guess that's an idea, it is not explored. David Gordon Green intends for this new Exorcist project to be a trilogy. Maybe he'll save that girl's soul too. Count me out.

I know Universal paid $400 million(!) for the rights to The Exorcist and will want a steady run of sequels to make up their investment, I don't care. Whatever Green has in mind is not worth my time. He can imitate Freidkin sometimes, but he cannot imitate William Peter Blatty. This is a creative team with nothing interesting to say about faith. I get no sense any of these men have any faith, except the worst kind of pandering compromises. And if all you want is dumb schlock, they're not good at that either. The actual "scary" parts of Believer are much worse than the set-up. The filmmaking gets lazier the deeper it goes into demon shit. The exorcism itself is terrible. And movies fifty years ago could be edgier and more transgressive than they are today.

Also the fact this movie didn't end on a smash cut to credits playing 'I'm a Believer' by The Monkees is coward shit. Or even The Smash Mouth version. RIP Freidkin, RIP Steven Harwell.

Next Time! Luckily October has thirty-one days in it, so let's end on a movie that is actually fun. So next time we're doing Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight.

31 Days of Horror Reviews: It Lives Inside

Day 29: It Lives Inside (2023), dir. Bishal Dutta

Streaming Availability: Rental

This is another new release, so SPOILERS! Not that I particularly think there is much to spoil this time. You know what this movie is already.

It Lives Inside is the most difficult kind of movie to review: the kind that is not very good, yet one that you do not want to be cruel towards. Its disappointments are offset by its admirable goals. I'm going to say some very unkind things towards It Lives Inside, but let it be known, my frustration is largely built on what a good idea this movie is, and how good it could have been. I hunger for diversity in my horror, and that includes ethnic diversity. The last week saw us go to South America, Japan, Thailand, I'm trying to not just talk about Satan everyday. So a movie about Indian demons should be great. And it is not.

Some of the best movies of the last couple of years have been about the struggle of identity in immigrant families: Everything Everywhere All at Once, Return to Seoul, Past Lives. That is an intense drama that works great in more "serious" films, but as Turning Red shows, it could work in fun genres too. Your mind and even body are torn between two languages, two cultures, two personas. That's upsetting, difficult, and indeed, terrifying. It Lives Inside was made clearly with the intention to tell that story from the perspective of a second-generation Indian young person. Bishal Dutta is Indian-Canadian who wrote and directed It Lives Inside. I love that his heritage was important to him and he got to tell that story. 

And I get the feeling that culture was the only story he wanted to tell. Because the horror side of It Lives Inside... just isn't there. This is standard stuff. Stock. Garden-Variety.

It Lives Inside is a PG-13 horror movie about teenagers, so there's very little gore, few scares, very little sexual content or even horniness. Frankly, I'm surprised to see the Neon logo in front of this movie, because their projects are usually edgier or artier. It Lives Inside does not belong on the same slate as Infinity Pool or the Palme d'Or winner, Anatomy of a Fall. Today's movie has no successful jump scares, and I say that somebody who is not anti-jump scare. But there's no good laughs, no surprises in the script, it is template all the way through.

I cannot find much to say about the filmmaking at all. There's a brief Spike Lee double-dolly shot at one point. That is an idea, I guess.

The cast is fine, Megan Suri is good as Samida or "Sam", the lead role. I hope to see her in better projects. I'm happy Bollywood veteran, Neeru Bajwa is here as the mom and even the movie comments how great she looks for her age. They play off each other well, and the crisis of staying true to your culture or assimilating into the youth culture around you is a decent one.

The cruelest thing I can say about It Lives Inside is not that it is generic. Lots of horror movies are generic. There's a lot of product out there, most of it is not going to be remarkable to anybody. And that doesn't need to be a death sentence. There have been very good unambitious horror moves, notably Smile from last year. This year there was The Boogieman, a really basic yet fun movie that is practically beat for beat the same as It Lives Inside. (There's same-looking monster that's a shadow with two tiny lit eyes with the same gag of disappearing when you shine a light on it.)

No I will slaughter It Lives Inside with this: its culture disappears into genre tropes. I wanted to see how the folk monsters of India would change the basic spooky demon horror movie, instead, they're subsumed into it. They add nothing, except the same story but with Hindi prayers and anxieties about arm hair. It Lives Inside assimilates into nothing. You could tell the same story with any demon from any culture. The great American melting pot turns everything into Bagul from Sinister.

Well, we are here for demons, so let's talk about the title "It", the Pishacha. This is an ancient creature whose history goes all the way back to the Mahabharata so centuries Before Common Era. However, I'm sorry to report, I learned very little about the Pishacha from this film. It has to follow standard tropes, so the creature kinda doesn't like the light. It mostly tortures its victims and only rarely actually kills anybody. The rules are unclear and honestly don't need to be. You can capture them in spooky glass jars but doing so costs your life, so in the opening we see a boy burnt to death without visible flames, which is a solid image at least.

The Pishacha does look great once you finally see it in not shadow. Its body is made up of screaming faces. But as a silhouette you'd never know it was anything other than Standard Horror Demon #2. The monster barely even fits into the theme of It Lives Inside. It does not target Samidha because she's conflicted about her identity. It seems like it would eat anybody.

I like that the conclusion of It Lives Inside involves a reverse exorcism. Sam takes the demon into herself, swallows it literally. So maybe rituals around the world expel the demon, very few try to suck them in. From then on Samida has to eat raw meat to keep it satiated. That's a more interesting place to start than conclude, is the problem. Maybe It Lives Inside 2 will be the movie it should have been.

Next Time! Three movies in a row I did not enjoy, how about four?? And here is the worst one yet, The Exorcist: Believer.

31 Days of Horror Reviews: The Medium

Day 28: The Medium (2021), dir. Banjong Pisanthanakun

Streaming Availability: Shudder

There is a weird, I'd argue perverse trend in demonic horror movies which is this concept that "evil necessitates faith". This can be done well. The Exorcist tore down modernity, a society that had no place for gods or spirits, and replaced it with a primal religious fervor. Elias Koteas in The Prophecy found in his faith a pride and strength to stand tall against Lucifer. Then there's much worse movies like The Exorcism of Emily Rose or (the title gives away the game) The Exorcist: Believer, where demons push the protagonists into the open arms of the Christian God. I'm really uncomfortable with a vision of faith born out of fear from the unknown, it seems dangerous in real-world terms. Your God should not just be an Anti-Satan.

The Medium is a Thai film from 2021 which flips entirely, the demonic does not restore faith in the gods, it destroys it. There is no religion, positive or negative remaining. Just darkness, chaos, and...

...what amounts to a less interesting movie than one first thought. The Medium is a real disappointment because 90% of this I think is extremely cool. I love exploring other cultures in this series and their exorcism practices. But then everything intriguing about this fades away to become a mindless V/H/S segment.

The Medium is staged as a documentary about practitioners of Satsana Phi, the folk religion of the Tai peoples of Southeast Asia. Most of Thailand is heavily Buddhist, but in the rural regions, such as Isan where The Medium is set, older forms of worship persist. The documentary subject is Nim (Sawanee Utoomma), an older woman who has been the priestess and medium for a (fictional) goddess named Ba Yan, the local spirit deity of her town. Ba Yan has been passed down for generations, always inhabiting the women of the family. It appears that the documentary will get to film the next inheritance when Nim's beautiful niece, Mink (Narilya Gulmongkolpech) begins to show symptoms of possession. But then, the family notices Mink's disturbing behavior. Before long, they are unsure if Mink is possessed by the goddess or by something much darker.

The whole mockumentary aspect of The Medium is a decision I'm not against. This is a gorgeous movie, whoever in-universe is editing this doc is doing an amazing job. There's lots of beauty shots of mountainous Thailand, a lot of detail in the shamanist practices. It feels authentic to both the supernatural world of this place and mundane daily life. Most of the plot progresses with very little interaction from the filmmakers. Sometimes Nim will answer a question from a director off-screen or Mink will yell at the camera. The filmmakers are not characters and never should be in a story like this. The structure does a allow a sort of investigative progression. The characters know more than we do, and we learn more and more about this family and how cursed they actually are. 

And for 90% of The Medium, it seems to be avoiding the very dumb and well-trodden tropes of Found Footage horror. There is no frame story about this mysterious footage, no creepypasta fetishes for old stuff, no cameramen fleeing for their lives. Rather the production is artful and subdued.

...Until the last 10% of this movie, which is everything I just said it was not. It is a disaster, frankly.

Until then, the mystery of this family and what is inside Mink is fascinating. We never get a clear idea of what is is inside her. Her mother, Noi (Sirani Yankittikan) refused Ba Yan and turned towards Christianity. But that along with multiple currents of other sinful activities has created a perfect storm of evil inside this young woman. There's incest, there's a dark family history of beheading people, Mink's grandpa ran a factory and had a labor crisis, and on top of everything else, Noi also sells dog meat. (Consuming canine meat is increasingly taboo in Thai society and is illegal, but it still happens.) For a moment we think the demon might a Dybbuk-like ghost of Mink's dead brother. Or maybe it is the souls of the people her ancestors wronged. Or maybe the Christian element has let in a Satan. Or maybe it is Ba Yan's horrifying revenge.

That is assuming there even is a Ba Yan. Aunt Nim is certain of her faith for most of the movie, yet she harbors doubts. There's a devastating post-credits scene after a conversation with Noi, that she realizes she's been a fool this whole time, peddling magic beans and snake oil. Another shaman friend admits to being a con artist half the time - and his exorcism magic does not work for shit. (Not that exorcisms ever work in movies, they almost never do.) The statue of Ba Yan is beheaded mysteriously, causing Nim terrible distress. Either the goddess was never real, or has abandoned this family, or was devoured by whatever is creeping inside Mink. Faith has lost. The Medium is co-written by Na Hong-jin (this is a Thai-South Korean production), the director of The Wailing, another upsetting and hopeless movie where devils win.

So that does make for nuanced and interesting drama at play here with the main female leads. They're great actresses. However, their characters both disappear halfway through The Medium. Mink's rebellious character fades away to just having her writhing around as a full monster lady. The Medium does a full replay of Paranormal Activity for what feels like way too long, just Mink crawling like a freak over and over. And her aunt Nim dies suddenly in her sleep. That leaves nothing for the movie to do but embrace its basest schlock instincts.

It is really disappointing. The last thing The Medium needed to be was a Found Footage movie. The climax is an attempt to save Mink that turns into a huge zombie attack with every character devoured. It goes on forever too. The cameramen getting their guts ripped out are not characters so their plight is uninteresting. And it's really poorly-shot compared to everything else. There is only way to shoot a POV of fleeing through the woods, and Blair Witch Project did this almost twenty-five years ago. It did not look great back then either.

I just like I've seen this shit already a million times and The Medium was doing something different until it got lazy. The Medium goes considerably more extreme with things, killing a cute fuzzy dog and a baby. If you cut out the last half hour of this movie and no ending at all versus this, it would be better. Toss away everything I said about this being about faith, The Medium was an nasty exploitation film at its core. I feel like I was tricked. I'm more a fool than poor Nim.

(...sigh)

Next Time! Another culture's vision of the demonic, this time Indian, with the new movie It Lives Inside.

31 Days of Horror Reviews: When Evil Lurks (SPOILERS!)

Day 27: When Evil Lurks (2023), dir. Demián Rugna

Streaming Availability: Shudder

This is a brand new release today so be warned, SPOILERS!!

I'm just going to warn you now, When Evil Lurks is a very depressing movie. This is shocking, this is cruel, this is upsetting. The awfulness becomes casual, unimaginable horror happening at such a fast clip as to be numbing. Before even the halfway point, When Evil Lurks has killed a small child, a dog, and a heavily pregnant woman. Put away any notions of a happy ending right now. Then stop hoping for some bittersweet conclusion or any sort of compromise. This is all going to go very badly.

I felt really shitty after seeing this movie. I feel shitty writing about it now. It is just a bad time - a very well-made bad time that is bold in ways many movies will not be.

This is the new film from Demián Rugna, an Argentinian horror director best-known for the 2017 film, Terrified. Rugna makes nasty movies where things start badly and keep getting worse. The ghosts of Terrified and the demons of When Evil Lurks prove beyond the powers of the clumsy local government or the experts to deal with. Before long, what is just a small local problem has exploded to a complete collapse of the society. 

In When Evil Lurks, the main characters' first instinct to pick up everything and run. The tragedy of this movie is that they didn't run fast enough. Their choices are bad, but their options were never great to begin with.

When Evil Lurks has a speculative fiction premise. This is not a dystopian future, rather a near-future that seems well on its way through a dystopic process. "The time of churches has ended" we're told, and "God is dead." Nobody fully explains what this means, just those institutions no longer exist. A grandmother grasps her necklace for moral support, but there are no religious icons, instead just four children representing her grandkids. The exorcism technologies do not use religious icons but what look like astrological tools. The supernatural is not absent from life as in our world, it is everywhere. These people believe in demons with the same grim acceptance that we believe in mass shootings. The cities are full of demons, characters say. Out in rural country, normal life still exists. For how long, nobody wants to consider. The government barely functions enough to put out the demonic fires when they appear.

A demon is like a nuclear reactor melting down. When they appear, it requires special procedures, knowledgeable exorcists, and specific rules to be followed. (Don't say demons' names, don't use electricity, don't ever shoot a demon.) Unfortunately for When Evil Lurks, an exorcist, called a Cleaner has been sent - far too late - and the movie opens with his corpse discovered in two pieces. Once the demon has festered, animals go mad, people turn into zombies, and everything falls apart. This spreads like a plague, or say a global virus that's still happening now, remember that? Like here, people are too worried about their land or their profits to stop pretending that everything is fine, and before long, nothing is fine.

That leaves middle-aged brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodriguez) and Jimmy (Demián Salomon) to figure some kind of solution. What they come up with is not a good one. Their neighbor Uriel is possessed and has ceased to be truly a person. Rather he's a "Rotted", an enormous gross cocoon of flesh and pus, unable to move. The brother join their rich, entitled neighbor, Ruiz (Luis Ziembrowski) in dragging Uriel into their truck, where they plan to dump him a few hundred kilometers away. There he can explode and the Hell that follows can be somebody else's problem. Only, no. 

Within a day, this plan fail away, Ruiz is dead, while Pedro and Jimmy are rushing into town to grab their families and flee. When Evil Lurks then finds itself replaying the 2005 Spielberg War of the Worlds, with unequipped men fleeing with children they cannot take care of. An anxious, frenetic chase to some hoped-for safety. Only God is Dead, so no Deus ex Machinas for you. Robbie is not waiting for you in Boston, Tom Cruise.

When Evil Lurks is not a tragedy about moral failings. Sure, Pedro as a lot to feel bad about, he's a divorced father living in a crummy farmhouse with his brother away from his estranged wife (Desirée Salgueiro) and sons. He is a capable person in some ways, yet all he does in When Evil Lurks is blow it. This movie starts with a bad solution and the solutions only get worse. Pedro fails to follow any instruction. It is a bit infuriating. Even when the brothers randomly find an exorcist friend, Mierta (Silvina Sabater), that bit of good luck quickly erodes away. Because again, Pedro cannot fucking listen. Not that following the stated rules seem to help much anyway.

I really like this concept of the demonic as disease. There's plenty of precedent across history with demons as illness, for example the Sri Lankan Sanni Yakuma rituals. The problem is that When Evil Lurks also sees the demonic in disabled characters. Uriel's fatness is lurid exploitation, like something out of Se7en. Pedro's autistic son (Emilio Vodanovich) becomes the next host of a demon. Whether it intended it or not When Evil Lurks show disability as a gross, oozing, difference we need to fear. Characters say repeatedly "he's not a demon, he's just different", and guess what? He eats his own grandmother. And that just sucks. That's bad.

I think When Evil Lurks is a very impressive in a lot of ways. It is well-shot, well-acted, Ezequiel Rodriguez gets to wail uncontrollably in honest emotion. There's cool ideas like "children are drawn to evil and evil is drawn to children". That climax in a school is terrifying. Yet I do not like this movie.

There is a level of misery I do not care for. When Evil Lurks passes that mark and keeps going. If it were not for the spooky ghouls that keeping things somewhat fun, it would in the area of French New Extreme, it's that bleak. But even the wackiest most shambling zombie somewhat loses its charm when it is scooping brains out of a small child's skull. A small child we know and have come to like, and even had hoped could be protected. 

You want to take a shower after a movie like this. Maybe you can wash the misery out of your skin.

Next Time! Things remain really fucking bleak with a Thai-Korean collaboration, The Medium.

31 Days of Horror Reviews: Hereditary

Day 26: Hereditary (2018), dir. Ari Aster

Streaming Availability: HBO Max (now headless)

Note: I could write 5,000 words about this movie if I let myself go. I know these reviews are not short already, but Hereditary is maybe the single best film of the month, extremely interesting in a thousand ways. This is me trying to be concise.

There's an early scene in Hereditary where Peter (Alex Wolff) attends an English class in high school. Peter is a normal boy and would rather think about anything, - weed between periods, his classmate's ass - rather than the teacher's dull lecture on Oedipus. "Is it more tragic if it's inevitable than if the characters had agency?" is the question. Peter is not listening and nobody is impressed with his insights. Another student, otherwise important to the film, gives her answer. "I think it's more tragic - because if it's all just inevitable, that means the characters have no hope and that they never had hope, because they’re just like pawns in this horrible, hopeless machine." 

Nobody in Peter's family knows it yet, but that sloppy, mixed metaphor is exactly what they are: tragic and hopeless.

Hereditary does not use chess or machinery as a visual metaphor for the plight of its characters. Rather it sees them trapped in a dollhouse. The first scene is from inside Peter's mother, Annie's (Toni Collette) workshop of hyper-realistic miniatures. Annie pulls from her own anxiety for her art, so her work is full of recreations of their quiet Utah home. The camera pans around the pieces, before zooming into recreation of Peter's bedroom. Then in a seamless transition, the recreation has become reality. The sleeping doll-Peter is the real Peter, being awoken by his father, Steve (Gabriel Byrne) to attend his grandmother's funeral. From then on the family home is never 100% real. Rather it is always too neat, the shots too symmetrical, fourth walls in the staging too obvious. Of course, there is no home, no Graham family, they're actors performing their drama on a sound stage. They're posed and staged to give the illusions of life, yet they act out the tragedy that is Hereditary towards an inevitable ending of horror.

That name "Hereditary" does not conjure a vision of demons or Antichrists. There are enough nightmares in Annie's backstory that one would never need the supernatural to destroy her family. Her mother, father, and even brother all had mental illness, two have died in suicides. Annie and her mother have terrible history between them built on years of resentment, passing through phases of talking and not-talking, all ending with the burden of caring for an old dying woman racked by dementia. Worse, Annie has instinctively passed on these worst traits with her relationship with her two kids, Peter and the strange, quiet, possibly disabled girl Charlie (Milly Shapiro). There is the literal doom passed on because Annie's mother was a witch and her children are toys for the demonic. But also, the family is doomed by trauma and resentments that repeat endlessly.

Ari Aster would go on to make Beau is Afraid, a work even more opaque and hopeless than Hereditary. These are films where everybody's psychological destruction was set in motion decades ago. We can only watch the final disaster unfold. Ari Aster is not okay - his films only grow bleaker. I'd like to read a more liberatory and transformational subtext into his work, but Beau casts a very dark shadow. This all might just be torturous neuroses. There is no God, there is no therapy, there is only the Hell that is family.

Hereditary at least is a film that is less exhausting in its indulgence than Beau. It is a still a romp in a spooky haunted house - just a romp brought to an extremity of cruelty. This is a modernization of the occult tropes of films like Rosemary's Baby. We got a few ghosts and creepy chanting, that's fun horror stuff. We also get the worst nightmare a parent could ever imagine.

Instead of birthing an Antichrist, we're trying to nurture one. From the beginning, Charlie is an unsettling girl - I feel bad for this young actress since Hereditary makes her look so hideous. She already is the focus of mysterious strangers, and has a perverse fascination with decapitation. Charlie is well on her way to becoming something horrible.

That is until Hereditary pulls one of the most shocking first act twists in film history. I have never been more stunned by a movie than I was when I first saw this film. I do not think the theater breathed for an entire minute. You think Hereditary might hold back and not depict the results of the unbelievable scenario, but then it lingers on Charlie's mangled, ant-covered head for far too many seconds. The film is not just doing unspeakable violence to a child, but it is seemingly killing off its own blossoming villain. Every rule is shattered. Where could this be going now??

From here this becomes Annie's film. Toni Collette puts on the best performance of her lifetime as this prickly, often sarcastic and caustic woman, yet one carrying incredible pain. Hereditary has her screaming her guts out, across a montage of scenes, destroyed in a way I hope most of you have never experienced. Grief is at the center of all Aster's films, usually acute, unlivable grief. Some families can come together during such tragedy, Annie is torn from her husband and son by these circumstances. Even without a single spooky devil, this family was not going to recover for decades. Annie's only solace is found in an older woman, Joan (Ann Dowd), who opens the door to supernatural solutions. Little does she know that kindly, warm-eyed Joan is in fact the Minnie Castevet of this story.

The goal it turns out is to use Charlie's spirit as a medium to summon a demon named Paimon. My first thought was "who the heck is Paimon?" since even I had never head of him. It's a really deep pull. Paimon is listed as listed as one of the Kings of Hell under Lucifer in a few megical texts, such as The Lesser Key of Solomon and The Book of Abramelin. What's weird is that Paimon is not a Biblical demon like Azazel or Belial, or even has origins in any mythology I know of. This name "Paimon", appears mysteriously in the middle ages as a lord in Satan's system of feudal vassalage with seemingly no cultural context. He's depicted as a handsome youth riding a crowned-camel, which is why there is a trans subplot to Hereditary. Charlie has to be reborn, but not as a girl, Paimon needs a male body, Peter's body.

Hereditary allows the door to the spirits to be opened, yet there is no way to close it. Annie's best attempt to seal away the darkness backfires in a cruel defiance of the rules the film already established. There are horrifying scares towards the end, especially the brutal fate of so many characters. (I'm just going to pretend the family dog is just sleeping in the grass.) It is all the more intense since these characters had such depth to their relationships. Peter reverts to a little boy, sobbing in fear at multiple points. Steve grows colder and colder to his wife, trying his best but exhausted by her antics. Annie is pleading and sobbing about her love just minutes before Steve will burn to death and her floating corpse will saw its own head off. Nothing good is happening for anybody.

Except Paimon, I guess. The cult wins, indisputably. They have their perverse headless crowning ceremony. But it is impossible to read what expression is on Charlie-Peter's face. They seem to be in utter terror to me. These siblings have been transformed and evolved, gender-controlled, in ways it seems they never asked for. It's an imposition of a role upon them, a violation in every possible way by their heredity. And there is no escape.

Next Time! A movie even bleaker than this one if you can believe it, When Evil Lurks.

31 Days of Horror Reviews: A Dark Song

Day 25: A Dark Song (2016), dir. Liam Gavin

Streaming Availability: Tubi

Do not get the wrong idea from the movies. Summoning demons for evil purposes might look easy, but it is not. In Rosemary's Baby, nobody gives much thought into how long it took Roman Castevet to even speak to Satan, let alone convince him to make the long drive into Manhattan. Supernatural experiences are rare, usually Pazuzu will not just jump down your throat. The mystical requires study, discipline, work. I'm not willing to do that work so demons never bother me, that's why I have movies.

For those are not lazy like me, there are plenty of magical practices and "technologies" out there, going back centuries or millennia. Most of it shrouded in mystery, often left intentionally vague and opaque by their authors. Maybe this is a smart marketing decision, clarity will only prove that none of these recipes work. Maybe it is just the nature of the esoteric, ineffability. One of the most exhausting and rigorous rituals ever devised is a months-long procedure detailed in The Book of Abramelin, as shown in the 2016 horror film A Dark Song. That is a spell used to summon your Guardian Angel for greater wisdom and truth. It requires fasting, abstinence, prayer, and special oils applied for months. The results can be enlightening, they can be horrifying.

The Book of Abramelin's origin is unclear. It may date back to 14th century Jewish mystics and could be based on ancient Sar Torah practices. Or it might be written by a gentile using the exotic nature of Jewish mysticism to sell a book of magic beans. The oldest surviving copies are from the 17th century in German. The titular Abramelin is supposedly an Egyptian-Jewish sage. I find it all dubious (skeptic through and through), but people have believed in and attempted this summoning. Most famously this was attempted by occult luminary Aleister Crowley in a country manor named Boleskine House by Loch Ness in the early 1900s. Supposedly the ritual got out of hand and demons still lurk the property. (Weird fact: Jimmy Page also lived there.) Crowley's summoning is big influence on A Dark Song, which is set in an old isolated house in a stranger, more Celtic part of the British Isles, Wales.

A Dark Song is filmed almost entirely in and around the house. We have two characters: Sophia (Catherine Walker), a grieving mother searching for answers in the occult, and her supposed expert, Joseph Solomon (Steve Oram). Interesting choices of names here: "Sophia" being a figure in Gnosticism and "Solomon" is the Biblical king heavily associated with medieval demon grimoires. Neither character is 100% honest or the perfect person for this ritual. Joseph admits he's done this three times already, only succeeding once. Sophia was recently released from a psychiatric hospital and her mystical guide is detoxing from drug use. He looks nothing like a wise sage besides the scraggly beard, instead he's a nerdy unkempt man with a nasty personality. These two surround the house with a sand circle and must not leave for many months as they travel together through metaphysical circles into higher planes of reality.

For much of the film, the tension in A Dark Song is whether any of this is real. Are we actually witnessing a mystical experience or just two damaged people indulging in a shared fantasy? How much of a charlatan is Solomon? I notice he uses the five Chinese elements and writes Chinese characters in the ritual, which have no place in Abramelin. He becomes all the more dubious when he manipulates Sophia into a humiliating sexual act. Sophia meanwhile grows more impatient, while she has to confess she's not been truthful. Originally this summoning was to be able to speak to her deceased son again. However, in truth Sophia's goal is to get revenge on the teenagers who killed her son in some other occult ritual. Maybe her story will change even further.

The tension is fantastic largely because of how little chemistry our leads have. This not a romance, nor is it a master-student relationship. They're both awkward, troubled people and struggle to interact even as friends, let alone as partners. Joseph confesses what he wants from Sophia's angel is the power to disappear from society entirely. (He gets his wish in a way.) The obvious and hacky twist would to make Joseph the killer of Sophia's son, however A Dark Song never confirms anything like that. It is better for it.

Meanwhile though, something is happening. The signs start small but grow more and more intense as A Dark Song progresses. We start to hear a dog barking at night. Nothing too dramatic, except how is there a dog in the middle of nowhere? Maybe this is just selection-bias, Joseph choosing any random event like a bird crashing into a window as proof. But then Joseph is punished terribly with a knife to his side. With no way to escape, he must let the wound fester. Then Sophia hears her son speak to her through a closed door, a terrifying voice since she knows whatever is on the other side is not her boy. It is a slow but steady build to finally the house transforming into a place of nightmares, full of filth smeared on the walls and grubby demons sneaking in the shadows.

Speaking of builds, there is little to no score in A Dark Song. Once we finally pass fully outside any rational explanation, we finally get music flooding through the house. The soundtrack might even be diagetic, Sophia may be hearing this.

The demons of A Dark Song are terrifying yet simple effects, no puppetry or digital fakery required. These are just half-naked paint-smeared humans. It is an interesting take, not all-powerful monsters, they're just a horde of unclean chaos, great imagery. And they do terrible things in their short time on screen, painful things happen to bodies in this movie.

A Dark Song is a great horror movie with an incredible conclusion. If the demons are mundane, the climax is a fully uncanny special effect, jarring yet majestic. The mystical we have been searching for all movie cannot exist outside something this fantastic. The conclusion of Sophia's journey and the truth she gains is beautiful. It is a powerful revelation. In the end, A Dark Song is hopeful film, not just in a faith that mystical discipline can unlock cosmological truths, but that any therapy can be lead us into growth and healing.

Next Time! Hail, Paimon! No, not the little goblin child from Genshin Impact, this Paimon is much darker in Hereditary.

31 Days of Horror Reviews: The House of the Devil

Day 24: The House of the Devil (2009), dir. Ti West

Streaming Availability: Peacock

We have traveled far-enough through horror history that the snake is beginning to eat its tail. Filmmakers are no longer inspired by legends or the occult, they're inspired by the very movies we have been talking about all month. We're now in the era where many filmmakers were born after The Exorcist, and living memory of a time before that movie is disappearing.

The House of the Devil was released in 2009, on the cutting edge of the biggest fashion trend of the next decade plus: being obsessed with the Eighties. In just horror alone we had the Eighties-themed It Follows, The Guest, Beyond the Black Rainbow, Turbo Kid, The Void, and many more. What's interesting is that the early-2000s were stuffed with a billion remakes of actual Eighties horror movies, yet none of them were interested in the style or aesthetics of the period. Then by the 2010s, the remakes dried up, but suddenly we wanted New Wave synth soundtracks and practical gore effects again.

The House of the Devil is not made to just play with retro elements, Ti West is trying to make a movie that was ripped out of 1981 and only appeared in cinemas in 2009. House was shot in 16 MM, I believe that's real buzzing film grain, not digital fakery like many other films use. Within a few minutes of the movie, we get a sudden lurching zoom forward on our leading lady, Jocelin Donahue, to clearly demonstrate this is a camera zoom, not dollying-in. The cinematography in general is rather rough. There's a lot of jittery camera moves, showing off the crudeness of the "old technology".

Plus unlike 90% of horror films from 2009, House of the Devil has colors that are not blue and orange. The horror movies were way too color-corrected and looked terrible. It is amazing how much more dated and ridiculous the then-current aesthetics of the late 2000s look compared to the timeless look of the early Eighties.

I sure hope you like Thomas Dolby and The Fixx, you're gonna get a lot of their music. Speaking of cameos for Eighties fans, a good chunk of the cast are old cult film pros. Dee Wallace, the mom in every movie during Reagan's presidency, plays a landlord. The villains are Mr. and Mrs. Ulman, played by Tom Noonan (Manhunter, RoboCop 2, a lot of Charlie Kaufman films) and Mary Woronov (Death Race 2000, Eating Raoul, Chopping Mall). That name "Ulman" is almost certainly a reference to a minor character from The Shining. 

The innocent young girls caught in this plot are our POV character, Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) and her best friend, Megan (future director, Greta Gerwig). Samantha is struggling to pay for an apartment so takes a sketchy babysitting job, that gets increasingly sketchy, but she can overlook if she's paid a full month's rent for one night, $400

Curiously though, Ti West's artistic influences are not grounded much in actual Satanic horror. He's borrowing a ton from Halloween with his slow-paced babysitter thriller plot. Ti West is not shy about his homages, his recent film X was a passionate love affair with Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Despite "Devil" being in the title, West seems to not be terribly interested in demons or the occult. He really loves the slow build of a young woman alone at night, vulnerable from all sides as the blackness outside the windows become portals to mysterious terror. I think he's correct, it is terrifying set-up and the movie is full of suspense. Yet House of the Devil being about a devil is largely incidental. It could have been anything out there, really does not matter what.

The opening of this film talks about the Satanic Panic of the Eighties. House of the Devil also tongue-in-cheek claims to be based on a true story. (Good one, Ti.) But beyond one off-hand reference that Mr. Ulman makes about "stories in the news", this has nothing to do with kidnapping children or abuse in preschools. (And even then, it has the story backwards: the horror did not come from Satan, it came from paranoid parents.) This group of Satanists are more the shabby Semetic-coded conspiracy of Rosemary's Baby than taken from the MTV-era headlines. Samantha is not even babysitting a child, it turns out this job in a big spooky house in the middle of nowhere is to watch Ulman's "mother-in-law". The old woman will keep to herself, please ignore any unsettling noises. 

I'm actually unclear if we ever get an explicit demon. There is a monstrous priestess character that pukes blood that impregnates you with the Antichrist. That's more fun than the Eighties headlines, to be fair. The actual Satanic Panic was not fun.

Since everything about House of the Devil is about old stuff, this is a movie obsessed with obsolete technology. Samantha rocks out to her old cassette Walkman. Landlines are very important to the plot. Samantha is left alone and has no way to reach Megan since Megan has to be physically by her phone at home. Samantha first calls Mr. Ulman at a payphone and leaves a message, only for him to immediately call her back. That might not seem too strange now, but caller ID did not exist until 1989. This is actually the first indication that something supernatural is happening.

House of the Devil is a very patient movie. Your imagination does more to create the paranoia and tension than any ghoul-ery. We do get a dramatic splatter scene a half hour in, just in case you're falling asleep. (If you really hated Barbie and are mad at Greta Gerwig, House of the Devil is your movie.) The final climax is full of gore and satisfying vengeance on some of the villains. However, I think the big set-pieces are the least interesting stuff here. I've often had quiet nights alone in dark houses, and no other movie quite captures the fear of being alone with the monsters you conjure in your head as well as The House of the Devil.

Next Time! Another indie horror movie set mostly in one creepy house, only this one is very interested in the occult, A Dark Song.

31 Days of Horror Reviews: The Exorcism of Emily Rose

Day 23: The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), dir. Scott Derrickson

Streaming Availability: Hulu

In 2006 a German movie called Requiem was released, directed by Hans-Christian Schmid. It is a serious drama film about a young woman, Michaela Klingler (Sandra Hüller) overcoming her stifling religious family to escape out into independence at the University of Tübingen. She finds friendship and explores her sexuality, all while fighting off a history of mental illness. Tragically Michaela's improvements are undone by the stress of her horrible uncaring mother (Imogen Kogge). When Michaela hysterically screams "let me go!!" is she barking at her imagined demons, her epileptic fits, or maybe the person she most wants to escape but never can?  

Requiem is not a horror movie. It is a slow, moving, often beautiful period piece of 1975 youth culture. Hüller's performance is fantastic, very physical, her screams and contortions filling the space where spooky effects and scare strings would play if Requiem were a horror. With characters that are complex and multidimensional, Requiem feels really authentic to its period and Bavarian location. My favorite scene has nothing to do with demons. It shows Michaela finally feeling herself and her freedom and belonging to her generation, freely dancing on the floor. Faced with the impossibility of being the perfect "normal" person she can only be for brief periods, Michaela chooses the supernatural. There is more safety in a demonic explanation than an unfixable medical one. That choice is heartbreaking and disturbing.

Anyway, Requiem is a very good movie, underseen. There's some interesting queer reads you could make out of this material. You also might notice that we just did two thick paragraphs about a completely different movie than the one in the title here. That is because the 2005 American version, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is complete trash. I saw Emily Rose in theaters and had mixed feelings. I'm honestly surprised how much I hate Scott Derrickson's take on this material.

Both movies are about the real-life case of Anneliese Michel, a 23-year-old Bavarian young woman who died in 1976 after sixty-seven(!) failed exorcism attempts by her Catholic priest. She was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy as a teenager, but after years of failed treatment, she and her family became convinced she was possessed by at least six demons. These figures range from old classics like Lucifer, Belial, Cain, to a few more fantastic ones like Adolf Hitler. Those lurid details might cloud the actual facts, which is that Anneliese died of malnutrition after months of refusing food and drink. Her parents and her priests were all found guilty of negligent homicide, given mostly suspended sentences due to mitigating factors in German law.

Where Requiem wants to explore the psychology of this young woman and why she would choose martyrdom, The Exorcism of Emily Rose wants to look at the most lurid and exploitative version of this story. And it gets significantly worse by believing in the self-destructive delusions, even finding perverse religious power in them. It is an awful movie with bad ideas that is shameful given the context.

Both films choose to rename the protagonist and change details. Emily Rose chooses to have no authenticity of any kind by shifting the story to the 21st century United States. Not any particular part of America, mind you, it is all vague nothingness, sometimes rural, sometimes urban. Its version of Anneliese, Emily (Jennifer Carpenter, who deserves a better movie around her), is not the focus. We open in medias res on a grave older man in a black coat and hat walking into home, but this is not Father Merrin or any exorcist. Rather this is the coroner. Emily has already died, and the state has chosen to put her priest, Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson) on trial. 

Thus this movie is really not interested in its title character besides using her in the rare scare scenes, instead this is a courtroom drama. Which rapidly transforms from being about negligence or mistreatment of an ill young woman, to effectively putting Santa Claus on trial. Moore's lawyer, Erin (Laura Linney), initially an agnostic, winds up building a case that by necessity has to prove the existence of God and demons. Seemingly by the end, she pulls that off.

This is a very conservative movie, so Erin's history of being a defense attorney is treated as wicked sinfulness, literally helping murderers go free to murder again. Her law practice (which strangely does most of its business out of a martini bar) might as well be in league with the devil. It is a cartoon vision of the justice system born out of right-wing fantasies.

Besides your own thoughts on what place mysticism should have in a court of law, the biggest problem with Emily Rose is how dull it is. This is the explicitly effects-driven spook show version of the story directed by Scott Derrickson, who thinks of himself as a genre pro. Yet the scares are all hidden away in flashbacks for Jennifer Carpenter's character, while the real plot action is set in a courtroom where nothing supernatural ever occurs. We get spectacular scenes of Carpenter's incredible physical performance. She is the movie, even more so because the CG ghouls are lousy and look terrible. They were able to save on the effects budget because Carpenter was flexible enough to pull off the contortions on camera. It is really impressive. Meanwhile, in the real movie, Laura Linney sometimes wakes up at 3:00 AM, feeling kinda scared, but she's always safe in the morning.

This is a bad screenplay already, characters have no depth, and it is full of unimpressive legal jabbing presided by a very credulous judge who allows anything in her courtroom. But it is all made worse by a monstrous vision of faith. Father Moore is not content to just beat the rap, he wants to prove that Emily was a saint, a Christ-like girl complete with stigmata, sacrificing herself to prove the existence of the supernatural in a court of law. I know "mysterious ways" and all that, but if God needed to prove he was real to the American justice system, he could just do that, he is God. Instead we have this awful cruel deity seemingly in alliance with demons in a vast complicated scheme to prove the miraculous with anti-miracles. We are shown proof that the demon Belial is real, so we are made to assume this means God is real. Evil must prove good. Not that the forces of light are all that pure since since they demand the death of an innocent girl because what, the ACLU was suing about Ten Commandments displays in Courtrooms in 2005? God's Not Dead, he's just an asshole.

We need to remember our context here. This is only a few decades after the Satanic Panic, where terrible injustices occurred because courtrooms were willing to believe in non-existent cults. The state operating in the realm of the supernatural has not ended well historically. Maybe Father Moore likes the witch hunts, I dunno. Besides let's remember what designs the "faith" crowd has on the legal system as a method of control over bodily autonomy. Scott Derrickson, truly, you can fuck right off with this shit.

I hate The Exorcism of Emily Rose. It is the worst movie of this month by far. I would rather have not covered this movie looking back at this review now. The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a waste of an incredible performance to instead futz around with half-thought ideas of faith. And also exploit and degrade a young woman's tragedy. Requiem is a much better movie, but it sadly very obscure. The only version I could find last-minute was a poor-quality upload on Youtube with questionable subtitles. I bet The Asylum version of Anneliese Michel's story, Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes, a Paranormal Activity mockbuster, is better than the well-known Emily Rose. Jennifer Carpenter aside, we should forget this movie.

Next Time! [Mötley Crüe voice] "HOUSE! HOUSE! HOUSE! HOUSE OF THE DEVIL!!!"

31 Days of Horror Reviews: Noroi: The Curse

Day 22: Noroi: The Curse (2005), dir. Kōji Shiraishi

Streaming Availability: Shudder

Noroi: The Curse is a found-footage horror movie, the first major film from prolific genre director Kōji Shiraishi. The whole movie is shot on VHS home video cameras, which were already way out of date by 2005. More advanced digital video cameras were common and cheap, DVD was already the preferred home video format, and the HD revolution was underway. I do not think Noroi was ever officially released on VHS cassette. The strange antiquarianism is important to this movie’s affect, however. Archaic media formats are core to found-footage and the related phenomenon of creepypasta. The more anachronistic the medium, the more complex the meta-layer of the story grows, and the more disturbing it becomes. Even this film, which claims to have been shot in late 2003 and early 2004, needs that cloud of artifacting and lo-fi degradation to be “believable”.

Noroi (which means "curse" in Japanese, so the English title means "Curse: The Curse") has a meta-layer of being the final film from paranormal "researcher", Masafumi Kobayashi (Jin Muraki). Kobayashi is a minor documentarian, studying occult activities in Japan. We never learn about his previous works, but we do not get a sense of much fame or success, and one suspects this guy is not terribly concerned if his stories are actually bullshit. The film-within-a-film, also called "Noroi", is shown to us by a spooky disembodied narrator, explaining that the film was completed, but a few days later, Kobayashi's home burnt down in mysterious circumstances. The director has disappeared, no body found. The distance between reality and fiction are further confused when a Japanese actress, Marika Matsumoto (the voice of Rikku from Final Fantasy X), appears in the documentary playing herself.

Thanks to this concept, we get clear answers as to why all this footage has been tightly edited and who did it. That’s an annoying problem that movies like Paranormal Activity cannot answer. Speaking of that franchise, its central gimmick of staring at a possessed woman all night in case she does something creepy is just one scene in Noroi. Marika has found herself mysteriously tying intricate loops and knots without memory of doing so. Kobayashi helpfully films her sleeping, and indeed, she’s got something controlling her at night. Many found-footage movies are slow, methodical build-ups to the big punchlines, relying on atmosphere, not big set-pieces. Noroi actually has both. We get a demon in camera by a half hour in. Since Kobayashi and his crew are watching their own footage, they play it back to point it out to us. They edit in freeze-frames just in case you missed it. So you end up with a movie that has all the most interesting features of Lake Mungo, The Blair Witch Project, and Paranormal Activity all in two hours of dense plotting and big scares. It will not leave you feeling short-changed if atmosphere alone is not your path to entertainment.

There is a lot going on in Noroi. Kobayashi starts off just by checking out reports of a creepy neighbor, Junko Iishi (Tomono Kuga) and her quiet little boy (Shûta Kambayashi). But later he's folding in the disappearance of a psychic little girl, Kana (Rio Kanno), who draws horrifying asymmetrical faces. There's Marika's possession. Then there's Hori (Satoru Jitsunashi), a paranoid, dirty man with huge cavities in his teeth, wearing a tin-foil hat, and raving about "ectoplasmic worms". You'd expect a character like this to be played more exploitative than he is; a lot of more movies would make Hori into a comic relief - Noroi does not. He’s over-the-top but he’s more an omen of the impending horror that’s coming for the entire cast. Turns out Junko is part of a black magic cult from a recently-sunken village named Shimokage. Worse, she has been stealing aborted fetuses for a horrible reason.

Then there's the issue that everybody keeps disappearing. Junko and her boy keep popping in and out of places in Tokyo. The first group of people who reported Junko to our director disappear a few days later. Kana disappears. A neighbor actress of Marika's disappears. Some guy who played with pigeons in a weird way disappears. The relocated Shimokage villagers keep their homes full of dogs that are constantly barking. All the dogs disappear. And we need to remember that even Kobayashi himself is doomed to an unknown fate. That dramatic irony gives the movie a lot of tension. However, before the end, most of these people will come back, never in great shape. (Warning to animal lovers: you will not enjoy Noroi.)

There's a lot of detail to the spookiness in Noroi. The demon uses pigeons as his calling card. We get a thick mythology involving multiple symbols and faces. The whole issue of abortion is tied into some running problem with mental health and a cold-unfeeling sense of the world. There's so very much wrong happening in plain view, yet it is left unsolved, indeed mostly unquestioned. Nobody seems to be interested in actually solving any of this mystery except Kobayashi, who is probably a con-artist when his movies do not actually involve demons. (Though, that is my interpretation, very few characters get much development beyond being victims of the terror.)

My other disappointment is that the demonology of this movie is mostly invented. The central demon is named "Kagutaba", a local folk spirit of the Shimokage area. We never get much clarity on what Kagutaba is or what it wants, but it is heavily associated with the Shinto traditions. In old 16 MM films - again the spookypasta theme of old technology - we see a priest and a masked woman dressed as that asymmetrical face that Kana drew perform a ritual to cleanse the area. It involves bowing and clapping and cutting a string, only for it fail and the masked woman to scream uncontrollably. Kagutaba's face looks a lot like the demon masks used in Japanese theater, only much more awful.  Later one of the biggest scares of the movie is set under a torii, the iconic gates that mark the entrance to a Shinto shrine. We see Kana covered in little crawling fetuses, themselves looking like mischievous Yōkai spirits. I'd rather have an authentic Yōkai, but Noroi is still a great horror movie.

And it is nice to take a break from talking about Satan every day. I love the Devil as much as the next guy but not everything is about you, Lucifer. The Japanese conception of demons is wildly different. Many of them are more like mischievous fairies or adorable little freaks. Shinto is a really interesting religion, since it is without a central dogma or orthodoxy. It can co-exist with Buddhism in Japan without a worry. So demons are usually not global threats that could destroy the moral order of the universe, they're often just fun little ghouls. Kagutaba seems to be also inspired by Christian demon films, thus the evil conspiracy to create him. Junko's little boy might be as close to an Anti-Christ as you can fit into Shintoism.

Noroi did have some back luck upon initial release. You'd imagine a movie like this would have been a huge international hit, coming out right between the found-footage horror craze and the big run of East Asian horror. However, that meant it landed in exactly the worst spot. By 2005 the J-horror movement in America was dying down. Incredible movies such as Kairo were turned into dogshit like 2006's Pulse and we were sick of it. (I think Takashi Miike made One Missed Call in 2003 cynically to get an American remake.) That leaves Noroi just too late to follow The Ring, but too early to get on the bandwagon of [REC]. There was no way it wasn't going to find an audience, however. The V/H/S franchise would spool up a new-interest in magnetic media by 2012. So Noroi was finally given a release here in the West by Shudder in 2020. Fifteen years too late, but not nothing.

Next Time! You know my sister is named "Emily" and her middle name is "Rose"? I guess I cannot avoid this one, The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

31 Days of Horror Reviews: Wishmaster

Day 21: Wishmaster (1997), dir. Robert Kurtzman

Streaming Availability: Tubi

Wishmaster is a horror comic con that doubles as an actual movie. It is remarkable how many cameos they managed to shove into this thing. You got Robert Englund (Freddy), Kane Hodder (Jason), Tony Todd (Candyman), and Angus Scrimm (The Tall Man) is doing the narration. All we need is Michael Myers and Chucky to complete the set. There's a statue of Pazuzu, of course. Besides that, the movie is crammed with a dozen faces that only a genre nerd would care about: guys like Buck Flowers, Reggie Bannister, and Ted Raimi. This movie expects you to be Once Upon a Time In Hollywood pointing at practically every scene. If you're not excited to say "hey, that's Joe Pilato, the asshole captain from Day of the Dead!" then maybe this isn't your movie.

What is happening here is an attempt to launch a new slasher franchise from the ground up. This is why Wishmaster is borrowing all these icons: to manufacture one. Also, they really wanted to nail the gore. This movie is directed by special effects wizard Robert Kurtzman with assistance from the even more famous, Greg Nicotero. Tom Savini did not work on effects, but he does have a cameo. (Because everybody has a cameo!) Wishmaster at times feels like a super group of all these Fangoria slaughterhouse darlings. This is like Mr. Big, with all these super-legit ultra-talented guitar freaks joining together to make a band, you're going to get a lot of incredible guitar solos. That band... was mostly okay. And Wishmaster itself is... fine.

The concept is great. By 1997, The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise had largely wound down and it left a big hole in the market. The world needs a solid franchise that can reliably supply creative and fantastic kills, if just as a way to get young hungry directors a chance to prove themselves. (These days we have the Saw movies, and indie horror is bigger than ever.) Wishmaster is clearly trying to launch a new Freddy or Jason-sized horror icon in its evil Djinn character (Andrew Divoff). There's a ton of mileage you can get out of a spooky guy with a sense of humor, ironically murdering people with the thing they desire most.

Before we continue: what is a Djinn anyway? We know about demons; they're bad news. We know about the their opposites, the angels. But there is a third class of invisible spirit in Abrahamic religions: our bad guy. The Djinn are known as "genies" here in the English-speaking parts of the world, our mental image of them is of a singing blue Robin Williams helping Aladdin get laid. In mythology though, they are not just cartoon wish-granters. The Djinn are an Arabic myth, predating Islam, yet surviving and flourishing after Muhammad enforced monotheism in the 600s AD. Like us humans, they're capable of both good and evil, and interestingly, they can be believers or infidels. Unlike us humans, they're beings made of fire with great magical powers. Maybe the Djinn are not technically demons, but they can do everything nasty a demon can. They possess people, they rape women, and they appear in black magic rituals. There's still strange news reports coming from the Middle East this very century about men getting divorced from their Djinn-possessed wives or little girls sacrificed to these beings.

Also, the Djinn have become a very popular horror character in the 21st century. There's a lot of Turkish movies with Djinn bad guys. Weird fact: Tobe Hooper's last film was a horror movie shot in the United Arab Emirates called Djinn. (It did not get good reviews.) If I were doing my job better, I would have two or three authentic Djinn horror movies to recommend from around the world.

Instead I have a stupid American movie.

The Wishmaster Djinn is straight demonic. His only goal is to unleash pure chaos, which for some reason requires him to grant three wishes to a person who breaks him out of his ruby gemstone container. In this case it is Alexandra (Tammy Lauren), a nice lady about whom I have nothing to say. Divoff Djinn is basically Satan, granting wishes in exchange for souls. However, Satan is a better salesman and actually delivers on his promises, usually. Our villain is always being the biggest asshole Ironic Genie he can about it. All he wants to do is kill people and it is very annoying that he has to follow these dumb rules. When a guy wishes for a million dollars, his mom dies in a plane crash for the life insurance windfall. Wish to be eternally beautiful and he turns you into a mannequin.

The problem with Wishmaster is that a lot of these kills are not as creative as they could be. Some of these idiots are just handing the Djinn infinite ammunition. Tony Todd is dumb enough to wish to "escape his boring job", so you can only imagine the kinds of nightmare dimensions the Djinn might send him. Instead Todd teleports into a Houdini water cell and drowns. That's the best you could come up with?? Kane Hodder asks for the Djinn to "go through me" and instead of awful grisly body horror, he just kinda turns into stained glass that breaks. That effect even looks terrible.

It does get better once Robert Englund foolishly asks for a party people will talk about for centuries. At that point the Djinn and Wishmaster are free to do just anything they feel like. You piano wire ripping people up and Englund puking out some kind of demon baby fused to his guts. It's great. The opening of Wishmaster is similarly nasty fun. A gormless Persian king asks for "wonders" and oops, bad move. A guy's skeleton rips out of him to run off and cause trouble. There's an alligator man. You better believe Mr. Big could shred, and yeah, Wishmaster can go so hard with make-up effects.

Even the Djinn himself is an alien creature with lizard skin and two tentacles for hair which are always moving. Nice puppetry there. He's got great teeth prosthetics and red-yellow contact lenses. Let's hear it for practical effects, guys! It fucking rules. Meanwhile the CG work from 1997 is as bad as you probably imagine 1997 CG to be.

Wishmaster is easily the dumbest movie we've covered this month. Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian creator god, appears as a statue within which the Djinn is trapped. Now I could be talking about the origins of angels, how Persian religion influenced ancient Israelite religion, but none of that matters to Wishmaster. Instead I'm thinking about how a criminal rips a cop's jaw off in a gnarly effect. That is what this movie is really about. It's fun and it is stupid.

The Djinn never became a true icon like Freddy. However, his movies were not terrible. There were three Wishmaster sequels, and they are all watchable. The second movie might even be better, or at least, it has the single best kill in film history after a prisoner wishes for his lawyer to "go fuck himself". (Oh boy, does the Djinn ever have a time with that wish! Go look up that scene, it will make your day.) The sequels all find themselves drifting more and more into traditional Christianity. The heroine of Wishmaster 2 has to redeem all her sins, and by the third and fourth movies, the Djinn is fighting the Archangel Michael. That final movie also has its protagonist accidentally wishing that she could love the Djinn, posing as her boyfriend, "for who he really is". So the Djinn ends up in a supernatural romance movie, a Genie Twilight. This franchise goes places, the Djinn did not cheat the Persian king when he asked for wonders.

Next Time! Let's wander even further outside the Christian prison I locked this month into, let's watch a Japanese demon movie with Noroi: The Curse.

31 Days of Horror Reviews: The Prophecy (1995)

Day 20: The Prophecy (1995), dir. Gregory Widen

Streaming Availability: Youtube (with a lot of ads, wtf, Google)

The Prophecy has two key selling points: 1) a misanthropic killer Archangel Gabriel and 2) Christopher Walken. Since neither Gabriel or Walken are demons that seemingly should disqualify The Prophecy from Spooky Month 2023. The idea was to cover thirty-one(ish) movies about Demons and Devils and an angel seems like the very opposite of that. Well, to argue with myself, that's merely a technicality. Angels and demons are the same class of being, either serving God or serving evil. Lucifer was an Angel once. If an angel turns evil, what really separates them from a demon?

Also, the Devil is not going to sit out this party. Don't worry.

The Prophecy is the only film directed by Gregory Widen, best known as the creator of the modern fantasy battle film, Highlander. Much like Highlander, The Prophecy was only ever a cult hit, and a minor one at that, followed by a string of less well-regarded sequels. (Which was a huge surprise for me writing this review, there were five sequels to this thing?? The Hell??) The Prophecy does feel a lot like Highlander with a bit more Bible in the DNA. They are both about very handsome immortals fighting a secret war, only now they're angels and demons. The shame of it is that Freddie Mercury died in 1991, The Prophecy would be a truly great movie if it also had a Queen soundtrack.

Queen aside, The Prophecy is a far from perfect movie. It has a lot of really awesome and interesting ideas, not a flawless execution. At 97 minutes, it is actually way too short, leaving several characters underdeveloped. There's a terrible voice over narration from our protagonist, which is just one of many clunky things about the script. There's two DPs credited on this movie, Richard Clabaugh and Bruce Douglas Johnson, and it kinda shows. The Prophecy does feel like a production split between two different filmic ideas. Half of it is shot like a Law & Order episode. The other half is a handsome western set out in the mesas of Arizona. 

One thing to note about 1995: this is way before the online memes about "biblically-accurate angels". The pop culture of angels in the Clinton years could not be more friendly or wholesome. They were nice winged humanoids smiling down on us. One of the sappiest things on TV was the CBS drama Touched by an Angel. There also was a short blip of angelic romance films with City of Angels, Michael, and A Life Less Ordinary. There were a number of books about angelology written to span the gap between spiritualism and self-help guides. See if an angel can help you find yourself. Finally, I recall as a kid hearing stories on TV about people seeing angels. You had ghost sightings, UFO reports, and angels too, why not?

The Prophecy jumps in and is like "No, that nice winged Christopher Lloyd Angels in the Outfield is total bullshit. Angels are beings of terrible power. Be afraid of them." The Prophets in the Bible who get close to God or his angels are usually shaking in fear afterwards. The depictions of them are often more terrifying than the descriptions of demons. A bunch of chimera creatures covered in eyes endlessly, mindlessly chanting around the throne of God sure sounds disturbing to me. The angels in ancient Jewish mysticism were known to be violent guards of the heavens. Any rabbi foolish enough to try to ascend into God's Court would be burnt away - unless you had the right incantations. I wouldn't try to mess around there, the angels seemed to take joy in it.

The angels in The Prophecy are only seen in humanoid form. Christopher Walken cannot bend himself the way you'd need to become wheels within wheels. But a coroner character does fill us in on their biology. They have both sets of sex organs, they have the body chemistry of an unborn fetus, and there's no eyes. Gabriel might be unpowered in human form, he cannot turn a city to salt, but he is an unstoppable Terminator force. His worst power though is non-lethal. He has a talent for trapping near-dead humans in limbo, slowly and painfully rotting in their meat suits, forced to be his valet since Gabriel considers driving beneath him, "monkey work".

There's more interesting ideas at play in The Prophecy. God has disappeared, the souls of the dead have been stuck in the ground for thousands of years, those in heaven no longer have a leader. Out of jealousy from mankind's favored status, the cosmos split away into a second civil war between pro-human and anti-human factions. Gabriel might seem nice in the New Testament, but he really hates people, and wants to rule a reopened heaven with his kind again at the top. The key to all this is the soul of the most awful human being in history. That happens to be that of an American officer, a kind of Korean War Colonel Kurtz. That soul has been hidden away in the body of Mary (Moriah Shining Dove Snyder), a Native American school girl. Gabriel must get to her, to eat her guts and take her soul, before her people can exorcise the spirit.

I should mention that The Prophecy has cool ideas about Abrahamic angels and a disturbing vision of a heavenly throne left vacant. But this Native American business is completely ancillary. While this Enemy Ghost Ceremony seems to be a real cultural practice for the Navajo nation, I have no idea how culturally accurate any of this is. It is treated as strange and foreign as Voodoo was treated in Angel Heart. The Non-White characters are props more than characters, with very few scenes, and they are utterly ignored by the camera when Gabriel attacks.

That complaint aside, there is a very solid cast in The Prophecy. It is packed with character actors. Christopher Walken is a beloved institution for a reason, he gets to chew a lot of scenery as Gabriel. Letting schoolkids play with the trumpets from the Book of Revelation is a good laugh. Elias Koteas is Thomas, the heroic police detective. His journey of faith is powerful, even inspiring. Nobody else has stood to the supernatural with this much courage and certainty all month. Virginia Madsen plays Katherine, who does not get much to do, sadly. Some stand-outs are Adam Goldberg and Amanda Plummer as Gabriel's poor unwitting zombie sidekicks.

I cannot go away without mentioning the little cameo we get from Lucifer (Viggo Mortensen). He is an electric presence of nightmares who appears late in the movie. In plot terms, he's the last-minute cavalry that saves the day, a diabolus ex machina. The Devil is temporarily on mankind's side, seeing Gabriel's heaven as a false parody of paradise, merely "another Hell". I love this performance, every line is iconic. "Little Tommy Daggett, how I loved listening to your sweet prayers every night. And then you'd jump in your bed, so afraid I was under there. And I was!" Lucifer comes off as a sorrowful figure, almost regretful about his place in the universe, maybe he's been doing some therapy. He might still need work because when covered in blood, he switches to uncontrolled malice, suddenly greedy for every soul in the room. "I want you to come home with me."

Even a Christopher Walken angel gets upstaged by a spooky devil sometimes.

PS: Pretty much this same movie was made fifteen years later as the much less interesting film, Legion. Which dared be an even more blatant riff on Terminator. Cool spooky grandma effect, otherwise mid. The Prophecy is much better.

Next Time! There are worse things to make Faustian bargains with than Satan. Pro-tip: do not make wishes in Wishmaster.

31 Days of Horror Reviews: Angel Heart

Day 19: Angel Heart (1987), dir. Alan Parker

Streaming Availability: Paramount Plus

A lot of the movies we covered in the Seventies they were big movies. They were not B-movies, they were not tiny independent exploitation films like horror so often is. The Exorcist was a major studio release, a blockbuster before we even had the concept of blockbuster filmmaking. It is the film equivalent to a really pricey steak at a great restaurant. The Omen might not be chateaubriand, but it is a good cut of meat. I've enjoyed a lot of the movies we've done since, but I'm also not going to pretend that Hellraiser is not a hamburger. Or that Alucarda isn't White Castle.

It has been a minute since we've seen a "respectable" take on devils in cinema. Angel Heart had real money behind it, it shot on location in two cities, it had a big name director and star, and it ended up an also-ran at the 1987 box office. It's ambitious, beautiful, transgressive, all-around impressive, yet audiences wanted to watch Lethal Weapon instead. Steak is not going to be on the menu all that often for the rest of this series.

Surely Angel Heart should have had a better reception. Here is director Alan Parker making a Satan movie, the critics should have been kinder. Parker was an award-winning, acclaimed director who would go on to made Academy Award darlings like Mississippi Burning. Or maybe I'm reading this backwards, his attempt at horror so scared him that he spent his career afterwards in crappy Oscarbait Land with things like Evita and The Life of David Gale. Angel Heart's star is Mickey Rourke, who in 1987 was one of the hottest men in the world. Robert De Niro has a very important supporting role.

Seems like everything got overshadowed by Lisa Bonet.

This is an ugly thing to talk about but we should confront it. Child female stars becoming adults and appearing in sexually-explicit films has been a major tabloid fascination for decades - for all the worst reasons. I can think of movies best known for once-innocent little girls like Drew Barrymore, Elizabeth Berkley, or Lindsay Lohan having nude scenes in them. If this seems awful, and exploitative in a not fun way, it is. I think this trend has largely died down, but I might be giving us too much credit. Sometimes the movies might deserve better, sometimes they deserve worse. In 1987 Lisa Bonet was best-known for playing the beloved daughter, Denise Huxtable on The Cosby Show, then the definition of the pure wholesome family sitcom (but extremely tarnished now). This actress choosing to appear in a neo-noir occult horror film would be a huge swing already. It all gets more intense after she has multiple nude scenes and a very graphic sex scene while covered in blood. I can imagine why people did not see Angel Heart for Angel Heart in 1987 is what I mean.

On the one hand, Angel Heart did not need all this controversy because it is a great movie. On the other hand, it is exactly as horny in gross ways as its reputation implies. Yes, Satan is in this movie, but he's relatively chaste compared to the world he rules over he's mostly. There are multiple murders and the script tells us the graphic mutilation details involved. There's incest. The MPAA wanted to rate Angel Heart a full X, but compromised down to an R.

Angel Heart is very wet movie, either from snow melting in the streets of New York or the constant perspiration from the humidity in New Orleans. Mickey Roarke is soaked all through the second half. Lisa Bonet's character is introduced with a sheer white dress clinging to her chest,fully see-through after washing her hair. If she's not wet from water and soap, it's blood, since her next scene is set in a Voodoo ceremony with Bonet writhing in ecstasy while fresh chicken blood drips all over her. There's a lot of fluids mixing, is what I'm getting at, and Angel Heart is not content with mere sexual metaphors.

This film is set in 1955 with gumshoe private eye Harry Angel (Rourke) landing a new case. Angel is a disorganized, slightly disheveled Brooklynite in an oversized suit with an eye for the ladies. His does not want trouble but $5,000 upfront will make him think differently. His employer is Louis Cyphre (De Niro), a strange man operating out of the second floor of a Harlem Church, owed some unspecified "collateral" from a Forties singer named Johnny Favorite. Favorite disappeared during WWII apparently due to shell shock, but his trail has become suspiciously hard to follow. Angel discovers the case seems to be involved with black magic, stolen identity, and very few happy participants. Nobody liked this Favorite fella, but most of them turn up dead anyway, murdered to keep their silence. Lisa Bonet plays Epiphany Proudfoot, Johnny's bastard daughter, left behind in the Louisiana bayou with already a little son of her own. She also has no idea where her father might be, nor does she much miss him.

Most of Angel Heart follows the usual tropes of the noir. I suspect the film is set as a post-war period piece to keep to keep the detective work fully hard-boiled without needing to deconstruct the concept. (Noir has been so heavily played with by everybody from Godard to the Coen Brothers that postmodernism might actually be a core tenet of the genre at this point.) The cast names are peculiar pulp fiction inventions: Favorite, Angel, Toots Sweet, etc. Harry Angel gets into fights with thugs, he wittily banters with the local police force, he flirts with beautiful women, and he does solve the case - even if by the end, he really did not want to. He's above society's failures, openly mocking the Jim Crow rules of Fifties Louisiana. He sits in the Colored Section of a streetcar and offends the racist cops by sleeping with Black women. This would be a job well done if his employer were not a demon out to balance his books.

Actually Angel Heart might have been just a decade too early. Big twist endings blowing your sense of reality were very popular in the Nineties and so was the Neo-Noir aesthetic. You could even have both if you were the movie Dark City.

There's a very interesting recurring visual motif in Angel Heart: the fans. There's tons and tons of shots of slow-moving electric fans built into the walls of buildings. (Of course we need air circulation in this film, the cast is melting in the heart.) The fans create a great noir visual with the blades' shadows filling hallways. But also this seems to be a core boundary marker in the film. Every time we see a fan we're descending into Harry Angel's subconscious, a world full of elevators and staircases and often quite a lot of blood. All the lifts and steps are going down, you can probably guess where.

I do need to talk about the Satan of Angel Heart. Big Spoilers: that name "Louis Cyphre" is a cipher, not a difficult one, he's Lucifer. ("Ever your name is a dime store joke!") Robert De Niro plays him very coy, he's toying with Angel the entire time. He's relishing his evil without needing to go extremely ham with it. Our devil is only in a handful of scenes, two of which are set on holy Christian ground, clearly indicting the hypocrisy of these institutions. Angel Heart uses some devil eyes effects, which look terrible and hilarious. And they were totally unnecessary, most of the wickedness is brought out just from the costume and hair. Cyphre has very long hair done-up in a bun, and letting his hair down transforms him into a creature that does not belong in the 20th century. He's got sharp long fingernails, which are truly horrible when he's crushing his breakfast, which is - of course - a hard-boiled egg. That sound effect is unsettling. 

In a few years De Niro's peer, Al Pacino would play Satan and turn him into a cartoon. The Devil's Advocate loses this comparison.

The ultimate result is that Angel Heart is a Faustian bargain movie where the Devil gets what he is owed. Faith cannot save our hero, nor can love since the major affair turns out to be an unnatural abomination. The contract has no loopholes. There is no choice but to get on the elevator - going down.

Next Time! Christopher Walken proves that Angels can be worse than Demons in The Prophecy.