Monstrous Creativity: Jeepers Creepers I (2001) & II (2003)

(This essay contains spoilers. Watch the films first.)

The Jeepers Creepers films concern a monster known as 'The Creeper.' The Creeper 'sleeps' for twenty-three year stretches, then emerges for twenty-three days to 'feed', namely upon humans. I really like The Creeper. He's easily one of the most interesting monsters in modern horror film cinema. If we delve into what makes him so interesting, we'll also discover what makes the Jeepers Creepers films more than just fun monster movies; they're also works of art.

The first thing notable about The Creeper--before we ever notice he's a monster--is that he drives a truck. This first point is curious enough. Very few, if any, horror film monsters proper (i.e. physical creatures of non-human nature) drive vehicles. They attack, push, turn over vehicles; but they don't drive them. Driving a vehicle is a learned human activity, involving developed skills and knowledge. Just how far The Creeper's skills and knowledge go is demonstrated in his ability to terrorize the brother-sister protagonists of the first film. The brother, Darry (Justin Long), comments that his assailant is driving some sort of 'souped-up' truck. And indeed, it does appear The Creeper has some knowledge of mechanics, enough to 'soup-up' his truck. But by far the most remarkable thing about his truck is the false vanity plate reading, 'BEATNGU.' That's "Be eating you!", perhaps a play on The Prisoner's "Be seeing you!", telegraphing to the victims he terrifies on the road that he'll be devouring them later. Not only is The Creeper a skilled driver and mechanic, but he also has a keenly perverse sense of humour.

This isn't simply an attempt to mislead the audience in the first half of the film. While it does lead the audience to expect a human villain, subsequent developments suggest a greater significance to The Creeper's humanoid traits. After their encounter with The Creeper on the road, the siblings turn back to the house, actually a church, where they saw The Creeper disposing of bodies down a pipe. When Darry enters the pipe, he finds an elegant, arched subterranean lair where the walls and ceiling are covered with patterns of wax-preserved, stitched-together corpses. At one point in the series, this is described as a horrific approximation of the Sistene Chapel. To be compared to Michelangelo is pretty high praise. However horrific and ghastly the creation, it is indeed very inventive and, in a perverse way, beautiful. This aspect of The Creeper's lair has its effects as far as horrifying the audience goes, but it also shows us The Creeper is an artist. The idea Salva is developing as the narrative reveals more about The Creeper is the monster-as-artist, the possibility for something Other to be capable of creation, not just destruction.

Historically, in monster movies, the monster is a particularly non-creative force. Nosferatu's/Dracula's advances on Lucy are only capable of adding her to the legions of the undead. The Mummy's only imagined union with his chosen woman is, similarly, eternity in living-death, not both alive but both mummies. Frankenstein's monster depends upon his creator, the baron, to make him a woman with whom to live in permanent non-productivity. Creativity is reserved for the living and the 'normal'. Anything monstrous can only destroy. King Kong never builds anything, but he destroys plenty. Dracula, the Mummy, and Frankenstein's monster all take lives. The same applies to the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Romero's zombies, etc.. The rule in horror cinema is that the monstrous cannot create, but can only destroy. The body that conforms to the norm alone is capable of creation.(1)

Given such overwhelming consistency, one wonders why monsters are always represented as inherently destructive. One of the more interesting answers to this question comes from Linda Williams. In her famous essay "When the Woman Looks," she argues that "the monster's power is one of sexual difference from the normal male...the feared power and potency of a different kind of sexuality..." Williams argued that the monster and the female were bound together in their shared otherness from male, phallic sexual power. Since only phallic power can beget, then the monsters are inherently non-creative. However, most of the monsters are male. King Kong, Dracula, the Mummy, the Creature, and Frankenstein's Monster all wanted women, and they wanted, presumably, to fuck those women. That doesn't seem to be a very different sexuality from mine at all! I, too, would have wanted to fuck Fay Wray and Zita Johan in their prime. The sexual difference between the monster and a heterosexual adult male's is that his would be productive and the monster's would not. The monsters, as I pointed out above, consummate their sexuality not in the creation of new life, but in death or violence of some form. So what we can conclude, tweaking Williams's ideas, is that monsters are monstrous not in their sexual difference but in their sexual sterility. (This is more consonant with James Whales's ideas anyway, particularly as presented in The Old Dark House, in which the insane family occupying the house is distinct from their guests in their totally non-productive family form.) They seek relationships that are inherently non-productive and, in the conservative mind, non-productivity is equal to non-creativity.

What Victor Salva does with The Creeper, while he is solidly within the history of traditional horror film monsters, is acknowledge that non-productivity does not preclude creativity. The Creeper is a monster that bears no offspring and is a cause of death and destruction, but he's also an artist. He's such an active artist that one wonders when he takes the time to create his art. If he only has twenty-three days awake to do his artwork on top of all the killing he has to do, then he's a very fast craftsman. Perhaps his twenty-three years of sleep gives him a lot of time for creative thought.

The second film in the series, in which The Creeper targets a busload of high school football players, elaborates further on The Creeper's artistic nature. His weapons are all carved from bone, wrapped with skin, and inlaid with teeth. The Creeper's eye for detail is such that he purposely chose the tattooed skin on Darry's abdomen for the centre of his shuriken. We also see a knife with elaborate scenes carved into the bone handle. But by far the most interesting aspect of The Creeper elaborated in the sequel is his method of feeding, which is itself creative.

The Creeper's 'feeding' isn't performed for the same biological purpose as animal feeding. The Creeper terrifies his victims, smells some odor given off from them while afraid, and by doing so determines which of his victims have particularly choice body parts. When he captures and kills his victims, he doesn't consume the body part and absorb its nutrients as animals would; rather, he assimilaltes the body part whole. In the sequel, The Creeper removes one boy's head and transforms it into his own. He does the same with Darry's eyes in the first film. What's interesting to me about this behaviour is that The Creeper is not just creative, but self-creative. He's able to be an artist of himself by composing his own body out of body parts he finds the most attractive (for reasons unknown to us). The only unchanging body parts are the arachnid-like structure on the back of his head, resembling a face-hugger from the Alien franchise, and his wings. The arachnid creature is, presumably, the 'naked' Creeper, which assembles its body from choice parts. What The Creeper does in this assembly is create its own identity, its way of representing itself to others. Its identity comes not from the point-of-view of others defining it by its difference or monstrosity, but from its own positive self-defining meeting the point-of-view of others.

Jeepers Creepers is not the first of Salva's films to contain this theme. Salva's first feature, Clownhouse, is also concerned with monstrous creativity of a sort. Clownhouse concerns a group of psychopaths who escape from confinement, put on clown costumes, and terrorize a group of children, one of whom is particularly afraid of clowns. We scarcely get to see the escaped psychopaths as themselves. What we see is them invading the clown tent at the circus and applying cosmetics, creating their own identity, as it were. They use creativity to create their identity as scary clowns. They also take a twistedly creative approach toward terrorizing the film's children. Jeepers Creepers just expands and deepens the theme, transforming the psychopaths to a genuine monster and the craftlike creativity to artistry.


It is difficult to take this discussion further without bringing in biographical details on writer-director Victor Salva. Ordinarily biography is best left out of criticism, either because it's speculation read into the film or it's simply not enlightening. In the case of Salva, I think it is both significant and enlightening. Salva, while making Clownhouse, sexually abused the twelve-year-old star and videotaped it. He was reported, tried, and served his jail time. Ten years after Clownhouse, he finally got to make another feature. He even got to make a film for Disney, Powder. This film was boycotted and resulted in protests instigated primarily by the victim, by then an adult, and his family. Each film he's made since has met with some protests by people who believe a convicted pedophile should never be allowed to work again.

That's as much as need be said for our purposes. What we see is that Salva is what is often referred to in our society as a 'monster.' Anyone who abuses a child is 'monstrous'. Perhaps, however, his alternative and distinctly non-productive sexuality (homosexual and pedophilic) is part of what suggests a 'monster' to our society. While I have heard Roman Polanski called a monster very rarely, I have heard it frequently used for Salva. Polanski, despite sexually abusing a twelve-year-old girl, has had wives and has two children with his present wife. Salva, who also sexually abused a twelve-year-old, has never been married and has no children. The difference is one of productivity.

So, like The Creeper and so many other classic movie monsters, Salva is non-productive. But like The Creeper and unlike so many other classic movie monsters, Salva is highly creative. In an interview, he refers to his films as his children. (2) This is very important, because creativity for Salva is allowed to substitute--perhaps very satisfactorily--for productivity; this is true both in his life and in his films. So with The Creeper, Salva is representing a very interesting aspect of who he is: a (social) monster who is also creative, a monster who is an artist, creating darkly beautiful art and creating himself in the process. Seeing the monster-as-artist in the film means seeing the possibility of artistic creation as a substitute for biological creation, artistic creation as a means of recreating oneself: in his films, Salva creates himself insofar as he shows us he is not a monster, but a creator of a different order.

As an amusing turn-of-the-tables, the denouement of Jeepers Creepers II shows the film's major protagonist, a father (Ray Wise) whose child was taken by The Creeper, charging kids to view the sleeping Creeper nailed to a wall of his barn. What's interesting about this is the total lack of creativity in the father's sideshow moneymaking. He's productive enough: he had two children and still has one. But he can only display the Creeper, a self-made work of art, rather than make his own art. Why should biological creation without artistic creation be any less monstrous than artistic creation without biological creation?

But I promised that delving into biography and how Salva reflects himself, the creator of perverse art, in The Creeper would be enlightening. Finally, I want to address this. What seeing the film's relationship to Salva himself makes us ask is just what the protestors of Powder never asked themselves: why can't the monster's art be accepted, even if we don't accept the monster? The Creeper, of course, has to kill to make his art. The Creeper is biologically a monster. But Salva doesn't and isn't. His 'monstrosity' is social only and in creating his art he can also recreate himself. He kills no-one in the process and as I've argued, and am clearly convinced of myself, Salva's films have merit as works of art. There is a possibility of separating moral concerns about the creator from the aesthetic concerns of the created art. Perhaps some are afraid that accepting the monster-as-artist means failing to see him as a monster any longer, failing to see a non-procreative creativity as monstrous.

The Jeepers Creepers films are not masterpieces. They succeed very well as entertaining monster movies, the first being particularly skillful in audience manipulation and the second containing some fantastic monster-slaying action. As penetrating works of art, they are occasionally vapid or confused. The homophobia subtext of the second film is particularly striking as such. It is in the character of The Creeper, a character into which Salva has clearly invested much of himself, that the films show great depth and insight about human concerns of monstrosity and art, and their possible co-existence. (3)

(1) There are, of course, apparent exceptions. Science-fiction horror films tend to rely, in fact, upon the horrible productivity of the monster. The Alien films in particular feature the horrific chestbursters, alien young bursting from the human bodies in which they've been implanted. Inseminoid, as the title implies, is about nothing other than an alien force that impregnates human women. There is, too, a large body of cinema--both animated and live-action--in Japan in which demons and/or aliens capture, rape, and impregnate busty human women. The most fruitful argument to deal with this objection is that in these films the very productivity of the aliens itself, which uses rather than complements human creativity itself is destructive and repulsive. It's production through destruction rather than creation. But that argument must wait for another essay.

(2) "Interview with Victor Salva," by Mike Gencarelli, www.mediamikes.com. Sept. 24, 2011.

(3) Jeepers Creepers III has been conceived and I am eagerly awaiting its birth to see how well it meshes with the ideas explored in this essay.

The Family: Un jeu d'enfants (2001) and Promenons-nous dans les bois (2000)

(I wrote the following essay(s) in October 2010, but for one reason or another it was never completed to my satisfaction and thus never published. Reading it over, I think it is publishable; however, as my memory of the films, not to mention my own train of thought at the time, is too diminished to complete it, it remains in incomplete work. - JR, Sept. 28, 2011)

Un jeu d'enfants (2001) - 2.5/4
Promenon-nous dans les bois (2000) - 2.5/4

The horror film, for its ability to fly under the radar, to directly target the emotions, and to push against or beyond the limits, has often been considered as both the most subversive and, paradoxically, the most conservative genre. More paradoxical still is how subversion and conservation are achieved in the same stroke according to such critics as Robin Wood and Bruce Kawin: the monstrous and subversive force is allowed to roam free only to be destroyed at the end, leaving the audience to go home with their catharsis. Of course, horror films have never been so simple. The films of James Whale are intentionally more subversive than conservative. In Bride of Frankenstein, for instance, the Bride rejects the male for whom she was made, her expression of free will being the film's very climax. The slashers of the '80s, on the other hand, are considered by many feminist critics to be the height of ideologically conservative films.

Some filmmakers, moreover, strive to be subversive and unwittingly create a conservative film; sometimes the very converse happens. I have no knowledge of the filmmakers' intentions in Un jeu d'enfants and Promenon-nous dans les bois; but whatever their intentions, one has turned out a decided assault upon the traditional Western family form and the other a fierce protector of its sanctity.

(These reviews contain some spoilers.)

The Conservative: Promenons-nous dans les bois

Promenons-nous concerns a group of young actors who are invited to the mid-forest chateau of a rich eccentric in order to put on a panto performance of Little Red Riding Hood. The fun-loving, attractive youths find him an uptight, wheelchair bound homosexual living alone with his nearly-catatonic grandson and gamekeeper. After the performance of the play, the sun sets and the group is targeted by murderer in a wolf costume.

What the film emphasises, in the midst of the unremarkable slasher material that ensues, is two very different but equally non-productive coupling forms. The company of actors is promiscuous, their relationships ephemeral. For lack of a better term, they're 'fornicators,' without a family form. The group, in fact, contains only a single heterosexual couple. One male is single and potentially bisexual, one female lesbian, another bisexual. It is a voluntarily non-productive group that directs its actions to pleasuring itself. Taking the group as a unit, it is essentially masturbatory.

On the other hand, the situation into which the group enters is a family consisting entirely of men: the grandfather and the little boy. The gamekeeper has a sometimes-submissive and sometimes-dominant role in relationship to the grandfather that at times flickers wife-like. So this unit is similarly non-productive, albeit for different reasons. If the group of youths are non-productive from an excess of Eros, the chateau denizens have a deficiency of Eros and instead embody Thanatos. The grandfather, indeed, compulsively repeats Little Red Riding Hood tropes from his own youth, but curiously treats the wolf as the protagonist, Hood as an invader. (The repetition of the past is, in psychoanalytic theory, a function of the death-drive, Thanatos.) The gamekeeper has a taxidermy hobby and is a rapist. The chateau is thus committed to merely subsisting, consuming but producing nothing.

The climactic reveal of information is, significantly, pertaining to the family situation of the chateau. The grandfather's daughter, while pregnant with the boy, tried to escape the family and, mid-flight, was caught by the grandfather and the gamekeeper; they cut the child from her womb and left her to die. So not only is the situation deprived of female presence, it is openly hostile to the necessary female presence in sexual reproduction, to the family situation that is ordered around sexual reproduction. It is as though she were killed for her productivity.

I mentioned James Whale above. The film can be compared, in subtext, to Whale's far superior film The Old Dark House. In The Old Dark House, a group of youths (or what passed for youths in the '30s) enter a non-productive family of old eccentrics, the women masculine and the men feminine. The only vital presence in the household is Boris Karloff's butler character, whose energies are devoted to one of the effeminate men. Whale went so far as to cast a woman as the family patriarch.

In Whale's film, normality is represented by the young crowd who enter the house seeking shelter and who ultimately leave the house in flames, normality restored. Whale's sympathies, however, seemed to lie in the titular Old Dark House, not with the sentimental young couples. Promenons-nous doesn't divide its sympathies from its results, going a step further than Whale in both restoring normality and approving. In Promenons both the family and the youths are abnormal; their collision results in both groups being destroyed and the remnants assembling into a makeshift family. Of the chateau only the boy survives, of the group one male and one female: the makings of a nuclear family. The boy, nearly-catatonic throughout the film, for the first time smiles as he drives home with the surrogate mom and dad; and on that the film ends, with happiness gained by destroying promiscuous heterosexuality and essentially non-productive homosexuality. In short, finding happiness is co-extensive with maintaining the ideological order as it pertains to sexuality and family forms.

The Subversive: Un jeu d'enfants

Un jeu d'enfants begins with an ideologically perfect family: a work-at-home mom, an office-worker dad, a son and a daughter, both around seven years of age. With their financial security they take an enormous apartment which may turn out to be their undoing. An elderly brother and sister pair arrive at the door one day requesting a tour of the apartment in which they grew up. The mother obliges the decidedly creepy couple, briefly loses track of them, and escorts them out without incident. However, once the couple leaves, strange things begin happening and the mother is convinced the old couple had something to do with it.

Jeu is not exactly a haunted house film, but the concept of place is important all the same; nor is it a possession film, but the loss of identity is also important. Somehow merely inhabiting this apartment, where an earlier family ended in tragedy, begins to tear at the fabric of the well-ordered family. The essence of the patriarch is to earn the money, so naturally the father, when he begins attacking an imaginary offender at work, loses his job. The essence of the wife is her fertility and fidelity, so naturally the mother begins having random sexual encounters with servicemen. The children, however, are the most affected, seemingly taking on the characteristics of the elderly pair and thus becoming independent beyond their years.

The ways in which the apartment effects these changes in its occupants remains mysterious. In fact, Jeu is so committed to ambiguity there's not much one can be certain of. The elderly pair seem not to exist outside of the wife's mind; the adulterous liaisons the wife engages in may not have occurred at all, given the bizarre way the servicemen are represented. The repairman, for instance, screws her as methodically as he works on the washer, calmly walks away when she tells him he's done. One wonders if there isn't a psychedelic fungus in the apartment. But the film gives no basis for this in the narrative, so we're left with a family disintegrating in their new apartment for no other reason than that a previous tragedy occurred there and some occult forces have determined the next must follow suit.

Ultimately Jeu is a nightmare of the middle-to-upper class nuclear family, the tensions of which arise from individuals resisting the roles the structure thrusts them into. In Jeu, the home, the central place of family life, perverts each individual into the opposite of the role they are expected to occupy: the patriarch becomes impotent and dependent, the mother a whore, and the children begin to dominate the family. When the fate of the family situation is decided by the children, it is inevitable that it is consumed.

Cubbyhouse (2001) - 2.5/4

In Cubbyhouse, a woman going through a messy divorce moves back home to the Australian suburbs. With her are her two young children, Ivan and Natalie, and her adult son Danny (Blair Witch Project's Joshua Leonard). An unscrupulous real estate agent has sold them a home where an alleged satanic cult murdered two children (seen in a harrowing introductory sequence)--in the cubbyhouse. Now strange things begin to happen as the two young children become increasingly obsessed with the demonically-possessed cubbyhouse and increasingly creepy.

Cubbyhouse has a 2.5/10 rating on imdb. This leads me to believe the majority of film-goers really just don't love movies, perhaps don't even like them. I find something to like in every film I see, whether I choose to emphasize the good or not. But there's actually a lot to like in Cubbyhouse. It is made with pure joy and that really shows. It is an unabashed '80s throw-back horror that owes a great deal to Evil Dead II, some to Celia, House, The Guardian, Poltergeist, The Blob (1988) and probably others. Prowling monster-cams, tree-vine attacks, bleeding vines, flying tools, a man pulled through a grate--it's all pure '80s supernatural horror. The main point of praise I can say about Cubbyhouse is that it's fun; probably more fun than it has any right to be.

The film is not without faults, of course. The characters can be frustrating. The mother never listens to anyone and generally only speaks to chastise. Danny twice physically assaults people who are actually trying to help him. The possessed children turn into know-it-all brats. Other characters are left undeveloped. On the other hand, the main character, Danny, is normally quite charming. Whatever Joshua Leonard brings to the role, it really works and sustains the film. I was impressed with his performance and his well-written character.

Then there's the CGI. Well, what's to be said? It's 2001 small budget CGI. Thankfully it's not overused and really appears only at the end. I suppose for what Fahey wanted to do with this film, it would have been difficult to do anything other than CGI, but not impossible. The presence of CGI is often a failure of creativity. Instead of trying to come up with an interesting solution, they hope the computer will magic it alright.

I got interested in Cubbyhouse because I had seen Murray Fahey's only other horror film, Encounters. I found his style so curious and his storytelling adept enough that I wanted to see more. Fahey, moreover, produces, writes, and directs his own films. Fahey's style still held my interest in Cubbyhouse. He has a very pleasant shooting style that yields fascinating and beautiful images.

So Cubbyhouse is not really a good movie, but it's a fun movie. If you like late '80s horror, you won't regret picking up Cubbyhouse.

Dagon (2001) - 3.5/4

There are three collective reasons I can imagine for someone not liking Stuart Gordon's Dagon:

1. Many H.P. Lovecraft fans are obsessive and pedantic about the Master's work, probably due to the esoteric feel one gets from knowing Lovecraft well when so few do.

2. Many think a film should be literally and/or thematically faithful to the literary work(s) it adapts.

3. Many Lovecraft fans thus have a very limited view of what a Lovecraftian film ought to be and reject as a failure any Lovecraft-based film that does not fit the preconceived mould.

And it's mostly going to be Lovecraft fans watching Dagon, an adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth (even though it did not contain Dagon, who is from Lovecraft's story "Dagon"). That alone gets stuck in the craw of the encyclopedic little Lovecraft-buff, and probably hinders his or her enjoyment from the get-go.

I, as it happens, have read very little of Lovecraft and what I have read was read ten years ago. I also happen to think a film has no duty to the work(s) it uses as source material, so even if I had read every word of Lovecraft I'd not judge the film on that basis. Therefore, I have little sympathy for the criteria of judgment the pedantic Lovecraftian indulges in.

With the film itself, we get, from within the first fifteen minutes, almost constant suspenseful action with an hour-long chase punctuated only by a flashback, all set in an exotic, spooky, highly atmospheric location that is perpetually dark and rainy, filled with well-designed monsters that hunt the hero at every step. This is how Resident Evil and Silent Hill should have been done; it reminds one of those games in feeling.

The plot concerns a young man--who has nightmares of a beautiful, black-haired mermaid--his girlfriend, and their two friends finding themselves at the mercy of a mysterious storm. The young man finds himself separated from his three companions in a town populated by fishy (pun intended) inhabitants: human-fish hybrids.

Gradually it is revealed that the inhabitants are worshipers of a being called Dagon. Dagon began by granting the villagers fish and gold from the sea, but soon claimed their souls as they began to mutate into human-hating fish-beasts.

In Dagon Gordon creates a location so evocative and so intensely creepy, it is as if he transposed it directly from his imagination. The labyrinthine Old World town is engulfed in dark, besieged by rain, and filled with fish-mutants with a hunger for our hero. They are everywhere and one never knows where one will come from or what the next one will appear like.

Gordon also creates one of the most suspenseful chases in horror cinema. The entire town pursues our hero as he hides in delapidated buildings, old churches, slimy alleyways. The pursuit continues for nearly the duration of the film. The only period of rest Gordon allows the audience is during an explanatory flashback by an old drunk (Francisco Rabal, no less!).

Needless to say, I found this film to be very impressive. I don't know or care how faithful it is to Lovecraft. Gordon has distilled horror, terror, and atmosphere into an intense, parsimonious 98 minutes of brilliant horror cinema. The images revolt, the monsters terrify, and the dark town overwhelms with atmosphere. I've never seen any other film like it. In fact, the only comparison is what one sees in the imagination while reading some old issues of Weird Tales.

A Chronicle of Corpses (2001)

REVIEW
The liner notes that come with the DVD suggest A Chronicle of Corpses is a period slasher film. The back of the box has blurb, "a Bresson-meets-Bergman-meets-Wes Craven suspenser." Except it's nowhere near as good as any of those on their own.

A Chronicle of Corpses is about a decaying family of wealthy landowners in New England (I think). The film tries hard to show us they are a decadent, sinful bunch, whose self-indulgent--and therefore, as in all decadent literature, self-destructive--tendencies have angered the gods. (Actually, just one God. There is a priest in this film, played by the most conspicuously Jewish-looking fellow I've seen in a while.)

The destined destruction for this family comes primarily in the form of a mysterious murderer in the woods, who begins by killing the servants and then the family members themselves. Who could that mysterious bald lady be?

You'll find out in a lengthy, tight medium-shot soliloquy by the family's matriarch. Yes, a genuine soliloquy. This film is extremely stagey. For anyone who's seen the BBC Shakespeare series, there's a family resemblance. The dialogue is highly stylized and you have to be willing to accept that, otherwise the film will anger you considerably. You'll be constantly yelling, "Nobody talks like that!" People's mouths move, but they don't speak: a gush of what they should be feeling and thinking is expressed in highly-contrived prose.

Similarly, the camera tends to focus on monologue-performances. I would call them dialogues, but even with two people in the shot, they are strangely detached. They rarely look at one another. The camera is rarely moving, but letting these characters, standing in their contrived positions, in abstract spaces, speak their monologues.

The 'slasher' scenes are not much more effective than the (melo)drama scenes. The killer bops people on the head, but we never see the blow. The most horrific scene, in which a baby is butchered, is mildly jarring, but with absolutely no blood and only a single thrust, it's over soon.

There are a few things I did like. The film's patience reminded me of the European directors the DVD box claims it does. Antonioni and Bergman come to mind, as does Jacques Rivette a bit. The character of the matriarch, in her final soliloquy, did intrigue me: I wanted to learn more about her, but alas, it's an 83 minute slasher film. The one thing the film gets right is a general atmosphere of decadence, decay, morbidity--a character even specifically remarks on this. Yet, overall, it is a failure, neither fish nor fowl.

So, why am I covering this film in my Strange Horror Discoveries series? Because this is certainly a strange horror film. I don't believe I've ever seen a horror film done quite like this before. It has some sizable flaws, in my view, and don't believe they'll disappear with rewatching. But for its effort, for what it's trying to do and be, I applaud it.

I would only recommend A Chronicle of Corpses for more adventurous viewers who want to try something different, who tend to like arthouse pictures, and who don't mind films slow as treacle, stagey as Shakespeare.

FACTS
Director - Andrew Repasky McElhinney
Writer - McElhinney
Starring - Marj Dusay, Ryan Foley
2001
83 min.

WHERE TO GET IT
It's an Alpha New Cinema release. You can get it for only $1.98 on their site.

TIDBITS
This is something you should know: The film seems to have been shot in 1:1 ratio, so it's perfectly square. You have black border on all sides on the DVD. It's very odd, but I didn't find it too distracting.

Star Marj Dusay is a veteran television actress, and was even in an episode of Star Trek:TOS. Not surprisingly, she's the best actor in the film.
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