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"Is that someone there?"
It is hard to know exactly what to make of Communion, since this is a movie that is unsure of what to make of itself. That is baked right into the dough of the thing: uncertainty, a lack of answers. Communion is a movie where our protagonists never find out what exactly is happening to them, are never in a position to ever resist what is occurring, and cannot solve anything. The "happy ending" is merely a family unit choosing to continue to exist, with our hero writing a book about his experiences. Whether the aliens win or lose, whether these are aliens at all, is immaterial. At a certain point the character just need to accept their existence is no longer rational, there's an of acceptance of the mystical in their lives. It is a journey towards faith, but not in a kind and loving Christian God, but just faith that there is more to this universe than we can understand.
Communion is based on the 1987 memoirs of the same name by horror author, Whitley Strieber. In these horror reviews, we've run into adaptations of his work in the past with The Hunger, and when I choose to do Werewolves one year, we'll meet him again with Wolfen. (Trust me, we're doing Werewolves eventually.) Strieber was part of the Seventies and Eighties horror literature boom along with folks like Stephen King and Peter Straub. Unlike his contemporaries who stayed more or less grounded in fiction, Strieber became a major figure in the UFOlogy space, he's still writing sequels to Communion to this day. He's part of a lurid, pseudoscientific field, so he's contemporaries with a lot of hucksters and sensationalists. The X-Files would base the character of Jose Chung off of Strieber, who is proudly a cynical con-artist. I don't get that sense reading about him that he's trying to scum anymore. I'm not sure how true anything Stieber experienced was, from what I hear the Commuion book seems very honest (I haven't read it), and is full of his own confusion and difficulty in processing these experiences.
But ultimately, I'm not here to doubt him. The reality of aliens is sort of immaterial to Communion, this movie does not need to prove anything to you. It also is not merely exploitation of the phenomenon. A more direct horror movie about abductions would play into the fear and violence of these encounters. We'll see that tomorrow with Fire in the Sky, as a matter of fact. Proof of the supernatual would be more terrifying, but also would be clear and satisfying, that's too neat for a movie like Communion. This is real to the characters, whether they can it explain it nor, whether they like it or not.
The film struggles with Strieber and his material in fascinating ways. Apparently, Strieber was not pleased with the final product even though he's got screenplay credit. At times it does appear to be mocking him and his alien visions. Christopher Walken plays Whitley and he is making big choices right from the start. If you are a Walken fan and love him doing his wacky "more Cowbell" thing, Communion might have the most Walken-est performance of his career. Within his family the film version of Strieber is sort of a big kid, this wild ball of energy. He's slapping his computer, giving aliens high-fives, and dancing merrily to "Putting on the Ritz" when he's about to walk out on his family. There's so much comedy early on that it gets hard to read what is a joke and what isn't, should I be laugh when Walken is shouting at strangers because he thinks they're giant cockroaches? There are moments where Strieber is laughing at the artifice of the abductions. Then the aliens appear as a magician version of Stieber, who laughs right back at him.
These sequences feel as surreal as the Twin Peaks visits to the Black Lodge. It is almost more terrifying because it does follow the clear rules of a spooky alien attack.
At first these abductions are the typical horror narrative of a family stained by inhuman invaders. Whitley, his wife Anne (Lindsay Crouse), and their son Andrew (Joel Carlson), leave their Manhattan apartment to visit their country home in the mountains. That night, these terrifying lights appear, causing missing time and confusion in the morning after. Andrew talks about these "little doctors" that he prays will go away, but never do. Communion takes on the structure of a haunted house movie, think The Shining or Stir of Echoes, where the husband and son have been touched by the supernatural, and the poor wife has to be the voice of reality holding things together. Later, Whitley is having nightmares and is haunted by experiences he cannot understand, and the family is on the verge of collapsing. At one point he nearly kills his wife with a rifle after seeing a dwarf-like creature in the kitchen. This is after a Gray alien jump-scared us by popping out behind furniture.
But then we see more of the abductions and Communion almost collapses as a horror film. Whitley sees a hypnotist (Frances Sternhagen) with a specialty in UFOs, particularly rape cases, and yeah, anal probing becomes a major theme here. It is not shown pleasantly either, not played for laughs, unlike much of the rest of this. The aliens themselves are almost jokes. The effects get more and more unreal. We see a Gray dancing in the background, now clearly a rubber puppet on strings. Whitley sits down next to the head of a dwarf still making its animatronic actions and there's also rubber masks of the Gray hanging there. Later Whitley will pull the Gray's face off like it's a Halloween mask, revealing a lizardlike creature underneath. He tells the aliens that he does not believe in this form either, describing this all to be a "Chinese Box", just one illusion after another. It is all very hallucinogenic, to the point that the final "abduction" ends with Whitley waking up in his car, as if this really were all nothing more than nightmares.
By the way, this is our first Gray in a movie. There have been a lot of aliens with a lot of shapes, this is first time we're getting the classic alien face from the emoji. The new movie V/H/S/Beyond features a character who claims that the Gray shape was made popular by Whitley Strieber, which I don't think is true. You can see Grays already in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The 1965 abduction account of Barney and Betty Hill mention Gray aliens. As a pop culture villain, they're an evolution of the earlier 20th century aliens, "the Little Green Men" from pulp SciFi illustrations, a similarly wicked exaggeration of the human form. And all these aliens have a lot of similarities to goblins or fairies, Communion even makes a reference to legends of "the Kobolds". There's thousands of years of legends of little trickster creatures taking people, often for sexual reasons. The fairies are always taking infants or maidens in the stories, completing some part of their reproductive process we humans cannot understand. The Grays, the science fiction 20th century fairy, also probe and violate.
In Communion, there's no sense that any of this has malevolent scientific aims, it's all so magical and preposterous. Maybe the aliens are just here to fuck with you. Yet, that's no less disturbing. I think the film gets all the scarier when it acknowledges its own formalism. Even with characters breaking the fourth wall and trying to laugh away at these goofy trolls and their o-shaped singing mouths, they're still trapped in the nightmare. It does not go away just because you know it isn't real. If Whitley is suffering from a disease, knowing he's sick is not going to turn his life back to what it was.
That title "Communion" is a religious reference, a Christian rite where you receive the Eucharist. And that's one of the weirdest rituals, a magical transmogrification of food into the flesh of God, a cannibalistic human-divine sacrifice. And please forgive this Jewish author, I say with no malice intended, that is bonkers. Yet a Communion is a core part of the lives of billions of people who imbue it with deep importance and even beauty. That it is inherently irrational and mystical is not a problem to them. Whitley's pain comes from battling all this, either refusing to accept it exists or trying to banish it. He finds a salvation of sorts not from an alien Christ giving any sort of answer, but just, in the fact he's choosing to continue living, knowing he has sensations opened to forms of reality he cannot ignore.
There's something really special there for me, I think Communion might be a really great movie, as strange and off-kilter as it is. Christopher Walken might be trying to ruin Communion with his antics, or maybe he understands the material better than the author did. There are not many movies that handle this topic this way. Most horror movies need to commit to the tone of total negative assault. Communion is trying to be more. I've seen this film twice and find more intriguing about it each time.
I do not have any mystical organs. This might be why I watch and study horror so closely, because it is simulations of things I might never experience. I've never been kidnapped by aliens, I've never been visited by a ghost, I've never been possessed by a demon, I've been to the Holy Land and stood on the Temple Mount and felt nothing. If you want cosmic horror, imagine being at the font of God's power on Earth, the most holy spot in the universe so your people believe, and instead seeing nothing but the infinite void of nothingness. It's painful, like I'm colorblind or incapable of falling in love or some other key aspect of the human experience has been amputated from me. But also, there is comfort there, my world is only ever what I can explain. In the Bible, the prophets shake in fear when the Lord comes to them. Whitley and his family are tormented and nearly destroyed by goofy puppet creatures. Meanwhile, I just get to watch movies, and often really good ones, thought-provoking ones, and maybe I'm better off.
Next time! A movie that will inspire much less thought, tragically. Smoke on the water, Fire in the Sky!
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