Paranormal Activity 5: The Marked Ones (2013) - 3/4

I never enjoy the Paranormal Activity movies that much. Yet I find myself watching every time a new one comes out. I don’t know why I haven’t given up on the series yet. Probably for the few moments in each movie that’s actually quite good. At any rate, I’m glad I kept watching. Paranormal Activity 5 is the best of the series, mitigating some, though not all, of the series’ flaws. It’s actually a pretty good horror movie.

There are some issues with the Paranormal Activity films that vex me every time. The main issue is that, for the most part, nothing happens. I understand the intention. The films repeat banal, mundane non-events so often—when we know there’s more going on—that we’re supposed to be writhing with suspense during every pointless shot of the backyard pool. I was writhing, alright. And moaning, “Another shot of the pool!” And then, when you least expect it, you get an eruption of the supernatural. It’s a legitimate technique that’s just belabored to an extreme. Most of the movie isn’t movie at all.

The other issue that irritates me is that the protagonists really don’t ‘protag.’ This is worse than the boring non-events. The characters of the Paranormal Activity movies spend most of the time ensuring that something sinister is indeed afoot. Once they receive confirmation, they wait around until they die, tossed like ragdolls by forces they’re powerless against. Whether it’s the demonic entities or the coven that serves them, evil always triumphs over good. Because good doesn’t do jack shit.

I suppose it’s just the Paranormal Activity philosophy that passivity generates more fright for the viewer. The moment the hero or heroine starts fighting back, it’s more adrenaline than fear, more action than terror. I don’t think that’s true—High Tension and Dog Soldiers, amongst others, seem to prove otherwise—but Oren Peli seems to believe it.

Each film in the series does tend to betray Peli more and more, developing plots and vague attempts at action. Paranormal Activity 5 finally escapes the stifling atmosphere before going back into freefall. In this one, some Hispanic teens at an apartment complex get a video camera and decide to record the creepy, old lady downstairs. They find her prancing around a naked girl with big tits. Not long after this, the old lady is murdered and they think their class valedictorian was responsible. Before they can crack the case, one of the teenagers is suddenly gifted with supernatural powers and supernatural roid rage.

The style is a lot more dynamic than the previous Paranormal Activity movies. These kids move around instead of just setting up the camera for still shots of something that may or may not happen around the pool/closet/Playstation. With that comes the most obvious response of, “Why the hell don’t they put down the camera?” It may not make sense, but at least it makes a movie. They try to fight against their supernatural foes. And while it ultimately ends as every Paranormal Activity movie ends, at least one semi-automatic weapon has been fired before it gets there. Moreover, there’s a girl with big tits.

I also enjoyed the fact that the kids are Hispanic apartment dwellers instead of White yuppies with more money and picket fences than common sense. If I had to see another White guy thrown around a tastefully furnished middle class room by an invisible presence, I might’ve been done with the series. I don't think there's any real 'subtext' about apartment life or Hispanic American culture; it just revives the series with more energy and a fresh perspective.

What’s also kinda neat is how every Paranormal Activity movie builds on this mythos they have going on. It’s building at a snail’s pace, but a little more is invented with each movie. This one somehow ties into the previous movies. Rather than sticking in the same ‘family drama,’ the connection is a lot more creative. I actually enjoyed this one as a movie in its own right and as a Paranormal Activity movie.

The Hearse (1980) - 2.5/4

Inheriting something around Joseph Cotten is always a bad thing. Whether it’s the castle in Baron Blood or the Georgian country home in The Hearse, things won’t go well. Trish van Devere, sexy in an untouchable schoolteacher kinda way, plays Jane Hardy, a lady who inherits a whole lot more than she wanted in the neglected The Hearse.

Jane inherits the house at a vulnerable time in her life, when she really needs some change, solitude, and evil, demonic hearse stalking. Her therapist agrees—except with the last part. The townsfolk all seem to hate her. Joseph Cotten in particular, because he feels he should get the house for very vague reasons that never really make sense. The only friends she can make are teenage boys, because she looks good in jogging shorts and they’re teenage boys. Soon Jane finds herself stalked at a distance by a strange, black car. Could it be teenage boys looking to tap that, or is it that wily Joseph Cotten?

To retreat from the headaches of smalltown living, Jane begins reading her deceased aunt’s increasingly lurid diary. This aunt goes from pondering whether to keep her fiancée or go with her lover to engaging in satanic pacts with the lover. Somehow this soothes Jane. More helpful is the extremely suspicious ‘Tom Sullivan,’ a man who comes upon her on the road and decides to court her with all the charm and personality of a weather radio.

Although some suspicion is cast on the antagonistic townsfolk, there’s little doubt that the hearse is a denizen of hell and has some connection to her aunt. There are plenty of other mysteries that hold up for quite some way into the movie, nearly up to its surreal conclusion. The narrative is exceptionally well-paced and just keeps throwing enough stuff at you that it's hard to put it all together.

The Hearse plays most of the movie on a decidedly low key. We get a lot of Jane’s “me-time,” polite interactions, date nights, and arguments with Joseph Cotton. I happen to enjoy that as much as the more horrific aspect of the plots. There’s a quaintness to The Hearse, like a Victorian novel. Like Jane Austen corrupted by Poe. The themes of demonic passion are shared with Wuthering Heights and Melmoth the Wanderer. Trish van Devere’s almost aristocratic presence and husky voice only furthers this sensibility.

The Cinema of Repulsions from Suspiria to Satan's Playground

The following essay I originally wrote a few years ago as a sort of defense of Dante Tomaselli's films. When I wrote it, Tomaselli, an independent horror filmmaker, had made only three films, all competent, strange, and unique. Eventually, I had written so much preface and so little about Tomaselli, I realized the essay was in trouble. I also realized that while Tomaselli's films are inventive, I didn't want to exaggerate their value. Since I see no real future for this essay elsewhere, nor do I have any desire to re-read, let alone re-write it, I'm posting it now with some slipshod repairs to hide the seams. The writing is turgid, the references pretentious, my case pompously overstated, but I hope the ideas and facts prove interesting.

A new and peculiar approach to making horror films arose in 1970s Italy, an approach that placed its faith in the pure effect of horrific, terrifying, and otherworldly imagery. With this faith in imagery came increasingly illogical narratives, so thin they were but clotheslines for a series of horrifying images, movements, and sounds. Why one event happens when it happens, or why it happens at all, the source of a light and its colour, the source of sound: none of this is adequately explained within the narrative; one just accepts the incoherent order of things on the strength of the spectacle. It is a "cinema of attractions," as Tom Gunning calls it; a "cinema pur" in its abstraction from narrative, a purity devoted to the creation of horror, terror, revulsion. It's a cinema of repulsions.

One might suppose this category is unnecessary. Horror films, after all, generally are light on narrative. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) isn't so much plotted as it is experienced: it's a single event. Some youths arrive at a house and what follows is one instance of cruelty after another until Marilyn Burns finally escapes. What distinguishes Texas Chainsaw Massacre from a film like The Beyond (1981) is just the explainability of what you see. The remarkable set designs in TCM are certainly effective at creating horror and a horrible awe. But they're explained: the lunatics inhabiting the house keep lots of bones and fashion things out of them, and they do this just because they're lunatics. However, when spiders attack an archivist in The House by the Cemetery (1981), there is no explanation other than some abstract, malign influence that is itself in need of explanation. That explanation, of course, never comes, because the malign influence is in essence hand-waving. By its very nature it is an excuse to have whatever horrifying event one imagines on the screen. The events, then, happen for extra-narrative reasons: for the creation of the horrifying image, ultimately the creation of pure effect. There's no reason, in The Beyond, for the decaying body of the plumber to be in a bathtub, but the 'malign influence' allows us to excuse our normal requests for explanations, coherence, continuity, and accept he is indeed there; he's there so he can smash Veronica Lazar's eyeball out of her skull and make us recoil in so doing.

Perhaps someone will claim I'm cheating. The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery are both films involving the supernatural, whereas The Texas Chainsaw Massacre does not involve the supernatural. However, I could have just as readily chosen The Exorcist or The Omen in place of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Every horrific event in The Omen, also the product of a vague, malign influence, is explicable: we know why it's happening. The glass severs David Warner's head because he was poking his nose in Satan's business and because the glass's presence made a convenient tool of execution. Why the bookstore owner in Inferno must be assaulted by rats and finally sliced by a random hotdog vendor is considerably more mysterious--in fact, it defies explanation other than the vague, malign influence.

The need for the term 'Cinema of Repulsions' on the other hand is a little less defensible. Tom Gunning coined the term 'Cinema of Attractions' to define the pre-narrative film shorts that presented only a shocking image to the audience, then ended: a train enters a station as the camera points at it; Melies's head grows enormous then returns to normal; a train robber shoots directly at the audience (the camera). Gunning acknowledges that the Cinema of Attractions continues to appear amidst narrative, however, in avant-garde films and musicals. When these moments occur, "The spectator," he claims, "does not get lost in a fictional world and its drama, but remains aware of the act of looking, the excitement of curiosity and its fulfilment." It also appears in horror movies as murder set pieces. These set pieces, like musical numbers, exist for pure effect. They usually have some relevance or explanation within the narrative, however, and are at the service of the characters and the world they inhabit. But for the films in what I'm terming the Cinema of Repulsions, as I've noted, these set pieces don't have much to do with immersion in a fictional world or character psychology, but rather with "the film image engaging the viewer's curiosity" and the fictional world and characters are subordinated to that engagement. The emphasis is on thrill, as Gunning notes, "the immediate reaction of the viewer." So this term doesn't so much refer to a style of cinema in opposition to the cinema of attractions, but rather a subset that concerns a very specific sort of effect or viewer reaction, one might even say a particular type of curiosity: the fascination with death, abnormality, and other objects of revulsion safely viewed. If Gunning considers the traditional Cinema of Attractions akin to a rollercoaster ride, the Cinema of Repulsions is the Haunted House ride.

We've gone as far as we can with abstractions. Let's move on to the films themselves.

The inaugural film of this movement is, of course, Suspiria (1977). While obviously influenced by the films of the maestro Mario Bava, particularly Kill, Baby, Kill (1966) and his masterpiece Lisa and the Devil (1974), it was Suspiria's singleminded devotion to a sound-and-light show of horror at the expense of all reason that made this cinema of repulsions a movement. All the pieces were already in place with Kill, Baby, Kill, however. Kill, Baby, Kill concerns a town trapped in perpetual nightmare by the malign influence of a haunted villa and its resident ghost, the androgynous Melissa. Though the film ultimately explains most of its mysteries, the astounding Villa Grapps sequence, with its Maya Deren-esque twisting of reality through film language, contains all the seeds for Suspiria and its followers. Suspiria, like Kill, Baby, Kill functions on the premise of a vague, malign influence that perverts the world around it. In this case, the malign influence is an ancient witch inhabiting a prestigious, Isadora Duncan-style dance school. Her influence extends from violent, black-gloved murders to maggot rain and random dog attacks. The famously expressionistic lighting and atmosphere depicts not reality but that malign influence oozing everywhere in and around the school. (Ultimately these tropes can be traced back to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932). As usual, Dreyer is decades ahead of his time. Already in Vampyr we have the same tropes: in a small village, an evil vampiress exerts a vague, malign influence over the locals causing a whole host of inexplicable, supernatural events.)

With the success of Suspiria, Argento and his muse/co-writer Daria Nicolodi took the idea even further with Inferno (1980). The 'malign influence' of the two remaining witches creates a movie-length string of set-pieces, as Kim Newman argued(1). Rats and cats launch fatal attacks without reason, a hot dog vendor suddenly becomes murderous, a book binder chases a woman from a library--it all looks strange and horrifying, though it doesn't make a lick of sense other than, "Well, there's that malign influence..." On the strength of these two films alone, Daria Nicolodi can justly be regarded as one of the architects of this movement. Her screenplay for the third film in the series, while never actually adapted by Argento, became the source for two other films in the cinema of repulsions tradition: the interesting if very flawed Paganini Horror (1989) and Luigi Cozzi's The Black Cat (1989).

Picking up this trend and taking it in new directions is the other major architect of the movement, Dardano Sacchetti. Sacchetti, working with Lucio Fulci, created narratives that don't really go anywhere--in fact, they tend to loop in on themselves--but allow for maximum carnage. In this, Sacchetti follows Lisa and the Devil more than Kill, Baby, Kill. Lisa and the Devil provides a circular narrative about a woman unwittingly trapped in the land of the dead. She arrives in Rome, sees a painting of Satan carrying away a body, and through a series of bizarre events ends up carried away by Satan--piloting a Boeing 747! The point is not the narrative, but the disturbing and bizarre events, and their corresponding imagery, that occur along the way. Fulci's infamous gore trilogy, The City of the Living Dead (1980), The Beyond (1981), and The House by the Cemetery (1981), all penned by Sacchetti, follows much the same trajectory. In fact, The Beyond, like Lisa and the Devil, begins with a painting, in this case of hell, and ends with the protagonists trapped within it. The major difference from Bava is the notorious gore. Patricia MacCormack has argued these films are best understood as being "about intrinsic quality, texture, consistency...they affect sense rather than intellect – confusion, disgust, suffering, delight at the pangs of horror are the qualities these films evoke." Because "[t]he narratives are there but they don't matter, what matters is the very matter of the images, their materiality." I think she's exactly right. The carnage in Fulci's gore films is cognate to the expressionistic lighting in Suspiria: it exists to shock, revolt, horrify. And the narratives, which replace the 'malign influence' of a supernatural being with the sudden opening of a 'gate to hell' and which does very little work as narrative, does great work at making room for increasingly revolting, disturbing, and disorienting images.

Sacchetti's work didn't stop with Fulci's gore trilogy. Together they made Manhattan Baby (1982), an interesting failure for being less logical but also less substantiated by horrifying imagery. Still, the film oozes the mystique of Egypt, not so much the real Egypt but the movie Egypt that has yielded us such horrors as Karl Freund's The Mummy. The film readily fits within the cinema of repulsions. Sacchetti then moved on to write The Church for Michele Soavi, of which I'll say more later, and for Lamberto Bava the minor masterpiece that is Demons and The Ogre. The Ogre very much resembles Fulci's gore films minus the gore; the gore is replaced, instead, by otherworldly fluids, the visceral horror by psychosexual terror, making the film more about semen than blood. Yet the film is no less a string of repulsions held together by the thinnest and most ethereal of narratives.

Fulci himself continued his cinema of repulsions without Sacchetti in Ghosts of Sodom, a haunted house film that only makes sense on a visual level where vaginas and pool balls can equal real bombings. And in Demonia, an awkward nunsploitation film that fuses the 'malign influence' tradition with Fulci's gore aesthetic. Neither of these films are anywhere near as good as Fulci's work with Sacchetti, although Ghosts of Sodom offers some fascinating images. The same energy and invention just isn't invested in creating repulsion, revulsion, terror.

Argento's disciple, Michele Soavi, took over the cinema of repulsions throne once Argento had returned to the familiar territory of his gialli. If this movement has always been a self-indulgent one, Soavi's films are entirely decadent. The Church, written by Dardano Sacchetti, concerns itself with nothing but stylishly strange events and images on the grounds that a massacre once occurred upon the grounds where the church was built. The Sect, Soavi's next film, is one of the most incoherent horror films ever made and yet its seemingly-endless flow of disturbing, terrifying, and confusing images--such as a thief finding a human heart in his mark's pocket, a rabbit watching television, and a face-removal sequence--more than makes up for its chaotic narrative.

Outside of Italy this movement had few proponents. At the time the only filmmaker out of Italy to seriously and consciously attempt to work in the cinema of repulsions was the British director, Norman J. Warren. He had already made a film in the style of Hammer and Amicus, albeit considerably gorier, called Satan's Slave when he saw Suspiria and had a revelation: for pure shock and terror, narrative could be foregone. He then made Terror (1978), a deliberate attempt to emulate what Argento did in Suspiria. The film concerns a burnt witch whose curse haunts her archnemesis's bloodline to the present with no apparent limits. The best and most abstract moment of this film is when a producer is attacked and killed by celuloid amidst green-gelled lights. The film is something of a failure if only due to Warren's inability to really commit to leaving logic aside. He wants his witch to adequately explain everything, even if she thankfully doesn't.

Warren tried to develop this approach with his, as of now, final film, Bloody New Year (1987), and, despite producer interference, did quite well. A group of youths are trapped on an island where, due to an experimental time-distorting device having accidentally been dropped, the dead, the buildings, the very order of reality assaults them. Why? How? Who cares? There is no narrative. There's only the desire to escape the island and the island's incessant and morbid toying with its victims. We're treated to such images as a burnt man crumbling into ash, a woman being consumed by an elevator wall, and an attack by a staircase post, amongst other things. A strange film that, by 1987, had become difficult to appreciate as the cinema of repulsions style had already lost its public appeal.


The cinema of repulsion's loss of public appeal has been most unfortunate for a young, dedicated American filmmaker named Dante Tomaselli, the latest and perhaps only active practitioner of the cinema of repulsions. He has made three films to date and every one of them is firmly and deliberately in the cinema of repulsions style. All of them have had a poor reception, despite being some of the most fascinating independent horror films of the past fifteen years. Desecration (1999), his first feature, about the malign influence of a dead mother/nun reaching from the grave to capture her son, is at present his highest rating film on Internet Movie Database with a whopping 3.1. His second film is Horror (2002), a title that recalls Warren's Terror. It concerns a group of juvenile detention escapees who take refuge in a house perverted by Satanic rituals. Horror is rated 2.8. His latest film, Satan's Playground (2006), mixes the ideas of Desecration and Horror with the legend of the Jersey Devil, creating a phantasmagoria of inexplicable horror set-pieces around a shack in the woods. Satan's Playground is rated 2.6. If those who rate Tomaselli's films are to be believed, his films have only been getting worse. In fact, they've been getting better; but each film reaches a wider audience that, unfortunately, does not appreciate what Tomaselli's films have to offer.

(1) - "Previously, the murders in Argento's films (particularly the first death in Suspiria) have been set pieces; Inferno is all set pieces, and thus all of a piece." - Nightmare Movies

Sinister (2012) - 3/4

Sinister is proof that you can take a handful of the Same Old Materials and, with some skilful weaving, produce a good, very creepy horror movie. With Sinister, you get unsettling 8mm footage of disturbing events, unsolved disappearances of several children, the horrific deaths of whole families, a mysterious killer, occult symbols, and a lone protagonist’s descent into the overwhelming depths of the mystery and the madness. Classic horror-thriller elements. Director Scott Derrickson, whose Hellraiser: Inferno I enjoyed more than most—I only wished it hadn't been forcibly made a Hellraiser movie—just puts them in the right order so that they work.

I wonder if the concept of ‘pace’ isn’t overused. Some of the best recent horror films don’t work by ‘pace.’ They work by rhythm. The Mothman Prophecies has an eerie rhythm—screw the pace. Sinister, likewise, has a rhythm. Ethan Hawke plays Ellison Oswalt, a true crime writer who finds the material for his next book in the eradication of a family save one missing child. When he moves his family to the very house of the crime, he finds a box of Super 8 footage in the attic that reveals the staggering extent of the crime(s) he’s investigating. Each of the crimes consists in the recorded murder of a whole family, except one child that always goes missing. They are dated about a decade apart. Oswalt watches a film each night. As unsettling film ends, a creepy event takes place in the house. This rhythm is repeated over and over.

The unnaturalness of this pattern can be distancing. You can predict, by the third time, that something will happen after he watches the film. Yet, the Super 8 footage is so compellingly disturbing that the subsequent scares remain effective. The rhythm pulls the viewer, much as Oswalt, onward into the disorienting horrors of the mystery.

The intrusion of the supernatural into the mystery is where Sinister begins to lose some of its potency. In a story as eerie and mysterious as Sinister, the otherworldly must be involved in some sense. But take, again, The Mothman Prophecies as an example of how the otherworldly can be eerily incorporated without overexplaining. You can skim the unnatural; you don’t have to cannonball into it. Derrickson cannonballs. Ghostly ballet and a mythological explanation for all that’s happened lead to the clever but disappointing climax.

Sinister's haunted rhythm is necessarily lost as Oswalt is forced by this trajectory into taking action, an inevitability in the conflict-resolution model but a disruption in a film like this. A potentially great horror film becomes a good one. The creepiness of the first half of Sinister nevertheless remains some of the best horror filmmaking of the past few years.

Forget Me Not (2009) - 2.5/4

After a mildly mysterious, but not particularly encouraging pre-title sequence, Forget Me Not introduces us to a menagerie of tedious high school seniors and their sad little lives of fucking and drinking. Quite nice camera movements are wasted on a student house party that looks like the student house parties you see in every high school comedy or drama since the '90s, with lots of attractive, half-naked teens drinking and writhing, "having fun". I don't make a point of describing this lifestyle in a deliberately contemptous tone because I was never invited to these parties, but because I think the director, and co-writer, Tyler Oliver, purposely sets up a 'normal' (as defined by movies) group of high school buddies to disarm us. Then he starts to screw with it--and that's when it gets fun.

In the middle of a round of "tell your first time" the responsible Final Girl character, Sandy, decides to tell her first kiss instead, which took place during The Game. "The Game!" everyone says, "let's play!" Their banal existences suddenly take on some meaning, a tinge of mystery. What is this bizarre game these bland people play? Well, they chant a creepy chant about ceasing to exist and going to hell, pronounce one person "The Ghost" and then the rest hide. The Ghost touches each one, making them ghosts, until there's only one non-ghost left. When they play this game again, a strange girl joins in. After she appears to commit suicide and then disappear, despite having won The Game, each participant starts disappearing in real life. The catch is that the only one who remembers the ghosted participant is the Final Girl. Everyone else forgets that person existed. The whole world changes, as though that person never existed.

Forget Me Not plays out as a fun metaphysical mystery, not unlike one of those episodes of Star Trek where they'd get trapped in a time loop or some godlike being's anus. And the drive to crack the mystery, the full solution to which Oliver manages to hold out of reach for a good while, is what kept me engaged. Even after the mystery is cracked, there are some metaphysical shenanigans that will keep the intellectually-engaged viewer interested. For instance, the pattern of The Game played in the first act dictates much of what will happen for the rest of the movie. What is the significance of that?

Of course, interest does not equal plausibility. One wonders just how a person can be erased from the time-space continuum. The most superficial answer provided is strongly inadequate. And the other possible answer, suggested by the final shots, isn't explored in quite enough detail, tantalizing as it is. As allegory, however, it presents an interested interplay of how individual lives vie to be remembered, how our lives are valuable after death mostly for the way we impact the living, whether a close friend or the whole world. Death is frightening, but being forgotten may be even worse. You have to do something worthwhile to be remembered. And when we watch the first ten minutes of the movie, we wonder how many of these young people will really deserve to be remembered, and how many will go the way of the third eunuch in the Court of Tiglath-Pilesar?

Forget Me Not does also contain some proper ghost-monster action that is not as successful as the rest of the film. For horror zonks, the gittery, fast-moving ghost-monster, with its 'crick'-'crick' body sounds and large-mouthed roar, will be mildly annoying, because we see this monster in every low-budget supernatural horror movie, sometimes even on youtube. Otherwise, they're fairly creepy creations out of which Oliver gets some good mileage. Forget Me Not has a good many creepy, spooky moments, the best of which are, naturally, of a more metaphysical variety.

We're All Perverts: Viewing Incubus (1982)

The very first shot of Incubus, over which the opening credits appear, begins in total black; the camera pulls out gradually revealing that we are looking into the iris of a brown eye; the eye blinks twice. Why are we beginning a film about a sex-demon in an eye? Perhaps we are being promised that we will see, in what follows, what this eye has seen; but that would only be a valuable promise if we could detect that the eye had seen something horrible. Since the eye could be said to look entranced or in love just as well as horrified, something else must be communicated in this choice. Other films use similar techniques: Blue Velvet (1986), after a brief prologue, takes us into the severed ear for a devious nightmare until we emerge from the protagonist's ear at the coda. In Blue Velvet, we understand we are being taken into the mind for a cinematic nightmare. In Incubus, rather than entering an eye in the first shot, we are in fact emerging from the eye. Only in the final shot do we re-enter the eye. The procession isn't into a subjective realm and back into an objective one, but rather a projection of the interior, subjective onto the exterior, objective world. What we witness in this film, the first and final shots seem to tell us, is a drama of projection: what happens when minds project their dreams onto the real world. Let's see if this interpretation bears out.

The plot of Incubus concerns a young man named Tim who has begun to have nightmares about a woman being tortured by hooded men in a dungeon demanding 'Tell us!' He screams, "Leave her alone!" and awakes in a sweat. Each time he has one of these dreams, a local girl or woman is brutally raped, sometimes to death, and any man interfering is murdered. Tim gradually begins to worry that he's responsible for the deaths, though he doesn't know how. His mysterious grandmother (Helen Hughes) seems to suspect him as well. Meanwhile, a recently-moved surgeon, Sam (John Cassavetes), tries to protect his 18-year-old daughter, Tim's girlfriend, from the menace and work with the sheriff (John Ireland) to find the culprit.

The first, and most obvious, case of 'projectionism' in this plot description is Tim's dreams. His dreams are of a sadomasochistic nature. Later in the film he describes the procedure as a 'battle of wills', with the tortured woman laughing and the torturers amping it up to break her. Both parties involved are taking some sort of pleasure from the proceedings. The full nature of Tim's dreams remains nebulous throughout the film, however. At times he seems to see the victims in his dreams, but later the 'players' of the dream are identified as his grandmother's family and his mother; at other times the dreams seem to be unrelated to the victims other than always occurring in conjunction with a rape. Whatever the case, the cruel and slightly incestuous sexuality of Tim's dreams are projected onto real people in the real world through the incubus.

The brutality of the rapes is exceptional: each woman's uterus is ruptured by the force of the rape and (it is implied, though not stated) the size of the creature's penis; one woman's windpipe is split, suggesting she was both vaginally and orally raped; and in some cases the woman are filled with what Cassavetes calls an "incredible" amount of semen, so much "even the hemorrhaging couldn’t get rid of it"; and nearly all of the women die as a result of the rape alone. Though we never see any actual rape, the shots of the women screaming, in one case rendered in a relishing slow motion, along with Cassavetes's solemn descriptions of ruptured uteruses and gallons of sperm, are disturbing enough.

The key to Tim's projectionism, and perhaps to the whole film, is, of course, his relationship to the incubus. The incubus never does, and perhaps isn't even capable, of attacking until Tim has one of his dreams. The dreams themselves come upon Tim uninvited, leaving open the question (as far as the narrative goes) of who is having the greater influence over who. Either way, Tim's conscious participation in the world must cease before the incubus can begin its rapes. While Tim is conscious, the incubus is an earnest newspaper editor named Laura Kincaide. She seems to be entirely unaware that she is the incubus and is capable of leading a fairly normal life. Tim's consciousness keeps her in balance, as it were; he's like a superego operating on an id. When he is overtaken by his dreams, the intelligent and thoughtful woman becomes a demonic rapist: pure, uninhibited desire is set loose. If consciousness is participating in the world as it is, without imposing our fantasies upon it, then when Tim becomes unconscious, he loses his grasp between his dream world and the real world and the incubus is free to enact his masochistic dreams/desires upon the world--particularly upon women, as they are the locus of his erotic urges. Therefore, the template this relationship between Tim and Laura sets up is one of latent, perverse desires becoming active without limit.

What we want to see now is whether this template has any repetition amongst the film's characters. I think it does. There is a shot during the first rape-murder scene where a young man goes to his truck. We see on his front bumper a sign reading, "Galen: 150 years of boredom." Galen is the name of the small town. Apparently its occupants view the town as very uneventful. What's curious and important about this silly bumper sticker is what it reveals about the distinction between the surface and what's hidden. Everyone in Galen has secrets. Again, much like in Blue Velvet, beneath the pleasant surface of the small town are hideous perversions and secrets we normally never acknowledge. Every character we spend significant time with is shown to have some secret. Tim has his dreams. Agatha Galen (Tim's grandmother) has both the secret of Tim's origin and her family history. Her family, the Galen's, were witch-hunters and when they went a-hunting during the last slew of incubus attacks, they killed a supposed witch who give birth to Tim. She also give birth to a girl, Laura, who was sent out for adoption elsewhere. Laura's big secret is, of course, being the incubus. Even the sheriff is hiding the unsolved slew of incubus attacks and that the source of his appointment as sheriff is Agatha.

The biggest surprise, however, is the secret harbored by Sam and his daughter Jenny. Sam hints, though never confesses, that he murdered his last girlfriend, Julie. After his wife died, he got an 18-year-old girlfriend and began neglecting his daughter. When he caught Julie cheating on him, he fought with her. He said she 'managed' to get away, so he chased her down and feels guilty over it. He never states the results, but we get teasing flashbacks of a woman lying on the ground in the rain, covered in blood. He later tells Laura that Julie is dead. Presumably he murdered the girl, then moved to a small town in hiding. That Sam murdered a young woman would be bad enough, but there is also a creepily incestuous tone to his relationship with Jenny. The very first scene in which we meet Sam, not knowing who he is, he is entering his home, going upstairs, and looking at a woman exiting a shower totally naked. We realize only later that the girl he looked at is actually his daughter. He doesn't want her to have a boyfriend. She promises to never leave him. They kiss on the lips. This doesn't mean he's ever molested his daughter; it just means that, like Tim's dreams, Sam has this perversion in his hidden life.

Everyone in Galen does have a perverse hidden life. 'Galen' is, in fact, Swedish for 'crazy'. And in the Freudian sense, this is correct: everyone in Galen is crazy. To be perverse is to veer from normality, to be crazy to some degree. Ordinarily we moderate our perversions, inhibit which of them we allow to enter into the world. What this all amounts to is a sort of vision of the world (with Galen standing in for the whole world) as perverse. Everyone is a pervert. There is no-one alive who does not have perverse desires of one sort or another--whether incestuous, masochistic, sadistic, or anything else--usually beneath the surface. We inhibit them out of a sense of dignity, propriety, morality, spirituality, or any number of other values.

Complementing this vision is the moral: what happens if we uncheck those perversions, let them reign uninhibited? It is through and in the character of the incubus that hidden, perverse desires become revealed and even actualized in the world of the film. And through the incubus, we find sex, cruelty, and death inextricably bound. The distinction between eros and thanatos, as it were, depends upon the distinction between our fantasy life (which may be as perverse as we like) and our real lives (which must be inhibited). Sex without limitation consumes its participants; infinite sex is death. Sexuality has its creative power when limited, ordered by form.

The most powerful moment in Incubus, the finale, illustrates this point very well. Sam has Laura, Jenny, and Tim in his house. He's preparing to induce Tim's dream in order to interrogate him and learn its secrets. Before starting, Jenny approaches him and tells him she's going to get some rest. Here director John Hough gives us an important and intricate shot: as Jenny heads to her room upstairs, the camera tracks and pans to follow her progress up to and into her room at the top of the stairs; the camera then pans to Sam and tracks back toward him; Sam looks toward the kitchen, leading the camera to pan toward the kitchen in time to see Laura emerge with a trey of coffee; Laura enters a doorway near the kitchen and the camera pans to look past Sam into the living room; Laura meets the camera's focus in the living room and exits the doorway Sam is looking through to talk to Sam; Sam tells her he would like her to go upstairs to see Jenny and she agrees to do so. This could have been handled much more easily with editing. Hough chose to choreograph the shot for a reason, namely, to link Jenny's and Laura's destinations. Both are going to end up in her room. Laura is sent to Jenny's room by Jenny's father. He has a desire to protect her, yes. But he also has that subtly incestuous relationship with Jenny. It is the tension between the surface desire (protective father) and perverse desire (sexual interest) that leads to the film's great tragedy.

As Sam interrogates Tim, he urges Tim to "Bring it through the door. Let it come through the door." This suggestion of penetration coincides with the incubus's penetration of its final victim. Tim sees the victim in his dream, finally; instead of his mother's face, he sees Jenny's. Tim rushes upstairs with a knife Agatha gave him and tries to kill Laura, but Sam interferes and Tim stabs himself. Laura hugs Sam, asking him to never leave her. As they embrace, he sees over her shoulder Jenny's body lying in bed, bleeding profusely from between her legs. Laura, the incubus, raped her as he was interrogating Tim. He sent Laura to the room; he induced Tim's dream; he's responsible for his daughter's death.

Sam's hidden desire to fuck his daughter was brought into the real world by the incubus. Despite all his conscious efforts to protect his daughter from all harm and, for that matter, sex, his activities resulted in her being raped to death. The tragedy is of Greek proportions, with bodies littering the stage, piercing dramatic irony, and disturbing sexuality haunting the spectator long after.

The final shot is a zoom into Sam's eye. He blinks twice, then the camera zooms into the black of his iris until we see nothing but black: the black of our hidden, perverse desires. The vision the film expresses is a moralistic one, viewing unrestrained sexuality is inherently deadly. We may all be perverts, but we have fantasies for a reason and they should remain fantasies. In the sexual free-for-all of the early '80s, these notions would have seemed very reactionary; it's not surprising the film was loathed by critics upon release. A case of bad timing, I suppose: had Incubus been released when the AIDS epidemic gained enormous attention in the mid-'80s, it may have struck the same critics as an insightful critique of uninhibited sexuality. AIDS, after all, did much as the incubus did insofar as equating limitless sex with death.

Just because Incubus has a strong vision underlying its artistic choices does not mean its a perfect film, of course. Some of the film's creative decisions are questionable. Particularly the repetitive, cruel rapes. The first rape shows only the result: a traumatized girl. The second rape doesn't just show, but dwells upon the terror and agony of the rape victim, a 40-something museum curator with children. The point, by now, is already made. The third rape is at least dramatically justified, as Hough constructs the film so as to make the audience believe Tim is the incubus. (He's always running out of a scene just before a rape.) However, the fourth rape is unnecessary and, being so near the climax, only interferes with the film's pacing. Perhaps realizing this, Hough tries some virtuosity with the final rape setpiece to make it more exciting. Particularly, he amps up the gore. But there's also a stylish shot in which the camera is attached to the bottom of a wheelchair, so we see a body through the gap of a bathroom door before the girl in the wheelchair does. I have a suspicion that Hough was influenced by Argento's gialli films, where stylish murders punctuate the detective action. But in those films, the murders can continue throughout the film because the characters murdered are related to the plot. These rape-murder scenes are of previously unknown characters. They add horror to the film, but never suspense. We have no idea who the rape victims are. A couple playing around a lake, a museum curator, some girl visiting a Bruce Dickinson concert in town (!), and finally a man and his two daughters at a farmhouse.

Still, one could argue that the final rape of a girl in a wheelchair is an act of particular perversion. One could also argue that each rape victim had someone who desired to rape her. The first victim was called a 'bitch' by her boyfriend before the rape. The second victim had a wimpy husband. The third victim was at a metal concert; the stage performance was an enactment of Samson and Delilah with a song about a 'two-timing' woman. And the fourth victims were, like Sam and Jenny, daughters with a single father. Though the rapes might not be dramatically ideal, they can be seen as adding to the picture of a perverse Galen.

Overall, whether one agrees with the main thrust of the vision in Incubus, the film's vision is certainly consistent and interesting. Hough, whose horror films are generally underrated, has made a fascinating work of art with this film, magically managing both very sleazy subject matter with a very serous, diginified tone.

Husk (2011) - 2.5/4

Remember that magnificent story by Jorge Luis Borges where a spy is summoned to a mansion; there he finds himself trapped in an infinite labyrinth inside a novel and he shoots a detective to prove it? Well Husk has nothing to do with that. Husk is about killer scarecrows.

Husk is actually a sort of magic realist fantasy as much as it is a horror. Yes, it's about killer scarecrows. But it's also about a complex and inscrutable mechanism that creates, controls, and maintains the scarecrows, as well as the various instruments of the mechanism. It functions as follows: whenever humans enter the cornfield, they are attacked and crucified by a scarecrow; the victim is then entranced and summoned to a room in the farmhouse containing nothing but an Olde Tyme sewing machine; the zombie-like victim then stitches together a scarecrow mask and wears it; with that the victim is forever a scarecrow controlled by the mechanism, ready to assault more humans.

There are other rules governing the mechanism. For one, the scarecrows can't leave the cornfield once they're in it. They can't even return to the farmhouse. Also, only one scarecrow can be mobile at any given time. The mechanism can't control two scarecrows at once. And perhaps the most peculiar of all the mechanism's activities is the visions it grants to one of the victims, revealing the past.

The film tries to explain these rules by means of, as is so often the case, a past tragedy (fratricide); but the explanation is deeply inadequate for explaining the whole mechanism. Tragedy is not trauma; there's no reason a personal trauma like murder should become a cosmic trauma, unless of course the cosmos is within a dream. But even granting that Freudian premise, still only a few pieces of the mechanism are explained. Really, the rules are arbitrary. Whether that's a good or bad thing comes down to the individual viewer. Some will no doubt find it frustrating. I personally enjoyed the lack of explanation. It was much more interesting to me to see the characters struggling, like scientists, to figure out how this anomalous portion of the universe works rather than asking the more theological question of, "Why?".

The plot of Husk is that a group of 20-somethings are driving to wherever a group of 20-somethings would drive to when they crash right outside the farmhouse of the scarecrows. Naturally they gravitate toward the farmhouse seeking help. One-by-one the scarecrows whittle them down and convert them into scarecrows while the survivors, especially the young man gifted with visions of the farmhouse's past (Devon Graye), try to figure out the mechanism and fight back.

A difficulty many viewers will have with Husk is the plot holes, and just about all of these plot holes come from the arbitrary rules of the mechanism. For instance, if the sewing is so integral to the creation of the scarecrows, why not simply destroy the sewing machine? Or, for that matter, burn down the house? Several options appear open to them to interfere with the mechanism one way or another, either to stop the mechanism or at least render the scarecrows ineffectual. But, as we must always say of plot holes, "If they did that, there'd be no movie."

For anyone who wishes to dig further, there arealso some Freudian implications to enjoy. Following trauma, the sufferer represses the memory and the repressed trauma bubbles up as compulsive repetition. The Freudian ideal is to face the trauma and no longer repress it. In Husk, the mechanism is about as clear a representation of repetition-compulsion as one could hope for. The trauma is the fratricide that is too much for, well, the cosmos? the ghost of the murderer? or for the dreamer of this nightmare, namely the audience? Whomever it may be, it is through the character of the visionary that we begin to face the trauma. This parallel with psychoanalytic theory could well have been intentional, as so many young filmmakers are acquainted with film theory. If not, it's still a fruitful area of inquiry.

The main pleasure of Husk, however, is to just enjoy the killer scarecrows and the young adults kicking scarecrow ass. Killer scarecrows just aren't that common a movie monster. In fact, the best killer scarecrow before this film is in an episode of Friday the 13th: The Series. So as far as killer scarecrow action goes, Husk is an excellent update for the 2010s.

The Shrine (2010) - 3/4

The Shrine , the latest film from Canadian filmmaker Jon Knautz (Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer) centers on two curious, headstrong women. Carmen (Cindy Simpson), a journalist, and her assistant Sara (Meghan Heffern), defy their editor's orders and, with Carmen's boyfriend Marcus (Aaron Ashmore) tagging along, decide to investigate a series of disappearances centered in a Polish hamlet. The investigation leads them to a barn/church in the middle of a field where thugs chase them off, and to a mysterious fog over a stretch of woods. After both women enter the woods, one after the other, and stare at the demonic statue at the center, they must run for their lives from a local cult.

What makes The Shrine work so well is that it continues to evade anticipation throughout and does so without cheating. From beginning to end, it's difficult to predict just where the film is going. The fog, the statue, and the cult are obviously all linked in some fashion; but since all three are equally mysterious, there's no guessing just what's going on. Many films rely on some form of cheating to keep the viewer confused. The most infamous example of this may be High Tension. The Shrine pulls some sleight-of-hand, particularly in its use of subjective camera-work, but it never cheats; it earns our continued absorption in its mysteries and this interest is paid off as the mysteries are sufficiently dealt with.

If there's any major problem with The Shrine, it's an over-reliance upon these mysteries. The characters seem to spend the majority of the film walking or running from one location to another. The intervening confrontations and/or set-pieces are either non-events or very brief. As a result, there is more atmosphere than suspense. This isn't necessarily a problem, of course. Many great horror films, like Mario Bava's or Peter Weir's, are almost all atmosphere and mystery. The problem for The Shrine is that it does appear to strive for suspense, moments of tension, and when they work--and occasionally work quite well--they just aren't sustained long enough. For suspense to work patience is required.

To get deeper into The Shrine, though, I want to talk a little about about theory. Particularly, Linda Williams's famous article, "When the Woman Looks." The basic thesis of the article is twofold. The first point is that "In the classical narrative cinema, to see is to desire" and "The woman’s gaze is punished...by narrative processes that transform curiosity and desire into masochistic fantasy. " Any time a woman in a horror film grants herself the privilege of fulfilling her desire to see, to know, what she shouldn't--like Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil--she is punished. The second point is that the reason female curiosity must be so punished is that "the woman’s look at the monster offers at least a potentially subversive recognition of the power and potency of a non-phallic sexuality," namely the monster's. The woman sees herself in the monster, or the monster in herself: both are an alternative to male sovereignty and thus both must be oppressed by males to retain that sovereignty. Horror films are a way of representing the eruption and repression of these threats (monsters and women), however subconsciously, to the satisfaction of male viewers.

This is where I find The Shrine most interesting. Because, if Williams is right, The Shrine should be extraordinarily satisfying to male viewers--and as a male viewer, I confess it sort of is. The character of Carmen, firstly, is a strong, defiant, stubborn, and curious woman. There's no question that she's the leader of her little group. Whatever objections her boyfriend brings up, she doesn't just disagree with him in discussion, she totally plows over him and speaks for everyone: "We're going!" This character trait, in fact, makes her rather annoying. It would be just as annoying in a man. Dictatorships are never really pleasant. This only makes it all the more satisfying when she's finally broken and forced to realize all the wrong she's done. But first, let's look at the wrong.

What Carmen and Sara do is enter the fog and gaze upon the demon statue. It's telling that Knautz has only the female characters do this. The man stays outside. In the Williams paradigm, what the women are doing is (1) becoming curious, (2) satisfying their curiosity by taking control of the gaze and (3) finding in the gaze the monstrous alternative to phallic sexual power. And most importantly, (4) they are punished for satisfying their curiosity in this way. Both emerge from the fog traumatized and disoriented. Then the subsequent events of the film befall them.

Spoilers Begin Here

The 'subsequent' events of the film are also very telling, and even suggest Knautz intentionally rather than subconsciously pursued this theme. The first is Sara's death, which occurs at the hands of the cult. The cult, which struggles to subdue those possessed by the demon statue, holds her down and pounds a mask onto her face. As the mask comes down, we see on the inside of the mask two spikes that will pierce her eyes. What's important about this is that the eyes are particularly being punished, the eyes that were used in the gaze upon the demon. In the fate of Carmen, we see what the all-male cult is frightened of: the powers of the demon overcoming the powers of men. Carmen slaughters (1) a traditional family of father, mother, and child and (2) the priest of the cult. The demonic power is a non-phallic potency that threatens to destroy male power just as Carmen herself bulldozed over her boyfriend's part in decision-making. Carmen, then, is given the same treatment as Sara, with the participation of her boyfriend.

There are a lot of other details in The Shrine that can be explored in relation to this theme. For one, the demonic statue doesn't stay still when the women gaze upon it. As Carmen moves to the side of the statue to take a second photograph (and photography is a fitting motif) she's startled to find the statue's head has moved and the hollow sockets are staring right at her. She gazes into its eyes for a long time, in the film's most haunting and frightening moment, and it gazes back, like a hypnotism sequence from a Dracula or Svengali film, until its eyes bleed. Also of interest is the masculinity of the demon statue. Its body is large and muscular, its brow heavy. Also noteworthy is that the editor Carmen works for is male. It all amounts to a statement, however intentional or not, against the modern, liberated woman who presumes to know too much and, even worse, to take charge.

Spoilers End Here

While this aspect of The Shrine is interesting, it's not a message I can entirely get behind. A less pronounced idea is a statement against idle tourists, male or female. Ever since I saw a picture of Newgrange and spotted a stainless steel handrail installed into the stone for accessibility I've marveled at how tourism can totally exploit a region and its history for idle curiosity: "just to see." The tourists who happen by the demon statue in the fog are aptly punished for their idle curiosity. Had they taken the time to consult some locals, get to know and respect the area, they'd have saved themselves the trouble of dying.

Whatever Knautz's intention in making The Shrine so misogynistic, his efforts resulted in a fascinating and unique film with a good share of surprising moments. A little shy on the gore, this is just some smart and effective atmospheric horror--an increasingly rare approach. In fact, The Shrine is one of the best atmospheric horror films of the last few years.