Behind the Wall (2008) - 2/4

The ghost-story horror film nearly always has at its root the notion of trauma. Despite there being no credited scientific evidence for the existence of ghosts, there has always been a consensus among spiritualists and paranormal investigators that a ghost is present only at the site of trauma. Some event must have precipitated the lingering spiritual energies. This is especially true in the case of malevolent spiritual energies. This bias is a Platonic one. Because Plato thought reality is structured by the realization of intellectual forms in a physical world, he thought all similar structures are the product of a single form. So for Plato the right order of the mind, the right order of society, and the right order of the material world are all a product of a single form. Plato's holism suggests that whatever is capable of causing disorder on a psychological level is thus capable of causing disorder on other levels. As a psychological trauma is capable of causing disorder of the mind, a sufficiently traumatic incident is thus capable of causing metaphysical disorder. This metaphysical disorder, the imbalance in physical reality, is manifested as or perhaps just is the ghost. The solution of many ghost movies is thus to uncover the source of the trauma. Psychoanalysis prescribes the uncovering of a trauma's source in order to restore psychological balance. So the Platonic bias extends this psycholanalytic hypothesis to the metaphysical order. The ghost, which is the metaphysical disorder, can only be eliminated by uncovering the trauma's source. Either the uncovering of the trauma's source is itself the solution or it is co-extensive with the solution. In The Legend of Hell House, for instance, the discovery of the true source of the trauma behind the haunting and the solution to the haunting occur at the same time. Opening the lead door and discovering the short body of Belasco occur together. They had to occur at the same time. They are thus co-extensive. This is the way narrative can distinguish the tasks of discovery and solution, though they are formally the same task of restoring balance.

Behind the Wall is a classical ghost movie. It has the malevolent ghost; it has the trauma that caused the ghost; it has the unerring flow toward the discovery of the trauma and with that the elimination of the ghost. There is in fact more than one trauma in Behind the Wall. The first trauma is the cause of the ghost and the second is caused by the ghost when it murders a woman. The first trauma causes the metaphysical disorder of the haunting and psychological imbalance in retired priest Father Hendry (Lawrence Dane). The second trauma causes social disorder and psychological imbalance in the murdered woman's daughter Katelyn (Lindy Booth). Katelyn lived with her parents in the town lighthouse. One night her mother was brutally murdered and her father convicted of the murder. After years away, she is summoned back to the town by Father Hendry. The town's deputy mayor (James Thomas) and a banker (Brad HOdder) from New York are turning the long-abandoned lighthouse into a tourist attraction to earn money for the economically challenged town. Fearing that probing the lighthouse will aggitate the site of trauma, Hendry requests the help of Katelyn to stop the work. As Hendry's fears are confirmed and the ghost begins killing again, Hendry and Katelyn are both led on the painful path toward uncovering the source of both traumata.

As is often the case with a ghost movie, the uncovering of the trauma is both anticlimactic and fascinating. In Hell House, for instance, the trauma could be summed up as an extreme case of 'Little Man Syndrome.' On the one hand, it's silly that so much horror could be the product of one man's insecurity about his short legs. On the other hand, it's revealing of human psychology. Both the cause and the effects of the trauma are revealing. That we are able to accept that a man's shortness can lead to malevolent spiritual activity suggests that we credit to men such narcissism, megalomania, and insecurity at the deficiencies of the body. That much of the spirit's malevolence is sexual in nature suggests much about repression, inhibition, and guilt. It suggests, for instance, the way guilt and shame can transform love to sadism in sexual relationships.

In Behind the Wall the traumata are the result of female curiosity. The first trauma is brought about through jealous rage over a wife's unfaithful sexual curiosity. The second trauma is brought about by a woman's investigation of the walled-up site of the first trauma. It is as though the first trauma causes the second by its need to punish its own cause, by the compulsion for repetition. There are two other women in the film, Katelyn and the banker's marketing guru, Monica (Suzie Pollard). Where Katelyn is a meek, pale waif, Monica is a sophisticated and independent woman. She knows what she wants and tries to get it. The film presents her as predatory. The handsome deputy mayor is attracted to Katelyn, but preyed upon by the sexually-interested Monica. Monica must therefore by punished by the ghost. Katelyn on the other hand never seems to be in any real danger. Female passivity is rewarded, female curiosity dangerous and punishable in Behind the Wall.

Monica and the banker are also targeted on account of the ideology for which they stand. They are capitalists who see the traumatic history of the lighthouse as exploitable. The film does seem to be making a plea for preserving historical buildings. However, it doesn't make this point very well. For one, capitalism is the social order that is disrupted by the trauma. So uncovering the trauma and restoring order should ultimately restore the capitalist order. Moreover, it is the activity of the capitalists that ultimately leads to the uncovering of the hidden trauma and with it the restoration of order metaphysically and psychologically. Hendry's initial goal was to leave the trauma hidden. The capitalist imperative to exploitation is also an impetus for the growth of knowledge. Hence some analyses that consider science a capitalistic manifestation. In the ghost movie, since trauma is co-extensively solved by knowledge of the trauma the value of capitalism and science is often affirmed.

That is what I found most interesting in Behind the Wall. But in execution it has more in common with The House by the Cemetery than with The Legend of Hell House. Just like House by the Cemetery, Behind the Wall comes across as a series of arbitrary supernatural events. The ghost is supposed to be bound in the walled-up room, yet once free it is as liberated from physics as any ghost. It is clearly shown to be non-physical, yet it seems to have physical bounds. For instance, the characters seem able to time its progress as it chases them and to lock it behind doors. Yet other times it seems almost omnipotent as it transports from one character to another and induces hallucinations. During assaults it is usually an invisible force or a hand attached to an offscreen body. The assaults are always weapon-less violence: pushes, pulls, and lacerations. If one is going to use violence in a horror film, one should at least strive for creativity. This is what elevates The House by the Cemetery. It too has senseless violence, but a senseless violence rescued by Fulci's perverse creativity. In Behind the Wall there is neither creativity nor consistency in the ghost's activities.

It's also unclear why the spirit is attacking anyone at all. Hell House offers an explanation and a tone to the violence consonant with that explanation. Behind the Wall offers no real explanation other than the fact of the trauma and the fact that the film is in the horror genre. This is a film that would have profited by withholding violence and focusing on the investigation. The ghostly sound effects are quite eerie. They are much more effective than the anticlimactic assaults. The film's adherence to formula prevents it take any such narrative risks.

Behind the Wall is the case of a potentially interesting story marred by a lack of cinematic imagination. The ghost story structure, the attractive actors, the ethereal screen presence of Lindy Booth, the Newfoundland location and the spooky lighthouse setting all offered many opportunities for crafting a superior ghost film.

Penance (2009) - 2.5/4

Have you ever heard of Pete Walker? Walker is a British director of exploitation pictures. He was the first to bring sexploitation films to the UK. As the public lost interest in the output of Hammer Studios, Pete Walker filled the gap by writing and directing violent, bloody horror films. They also happen to be very good films. One of those films is House of Whipcord, made in 1974. It's a classic exploitation film, far more intelligent than the women-in-prison material would suggest. Penance is an unofficial remake of House of Whipcord. Walker is given no credit. But the story and characters are too similar to House of Whipcord to dismiss the similarity as a coincidence. Official or not, horror remakes generally purpose to make the original material scarier and more horrifying. Penance does just that. Walker's film is more intelligent than Penance, but it's not scary nor is it as lurid as one would expect. Penance is a lurid, disturbing film with some scary moments.

There are of course some creative changes from Whipcord. I think going through some of them will be illuminating. In Whipcord, a young woman who consented to a single nude photograph for an art photographer is seduced and brought to an abandoned clinic. There a judge, his female warden, and their two female assistants have established a court and penal system based not on legality but morality. They want to rehabilitate immoral women. In Penance, writer-director Jack Kennedy changes the target from just generally 'immoral' women to strippers. Amelia, an employee at the battered women's shelter trying to raise money for her daughter's medical bills takes a single high-paying stripping job her sister secured. The job turns out to be a trap set by a doctor/general and his two female assistants. In his abandoned clinic he tries to rehabilitate by violent means the women he deems impure.

Walker's focus is on the moral elite who believe they can legislate and enforce their personal morality on those who don't share their values. Whipcord emphasizes the generational gap. All of Whipcord's prisoners are attractive young women and the administrators are all elderly. The moral laxity perceived in these young women is pretty tame by today's standards, but shocking to these elderly prudes. But Kennedy, by focusing on strippers, is calling attention to sexual objectification. During a practice stripping gig, Amelia (Marieh Delfino) is almost raped. Her sister is later given a black eye. Kennedy calls attention to this peculiar phenomenon in which strippers are treated as non-persons. Both those who are excited by strippers and those who are indignant toward strippers share this point of convergance. When someone is taken to be a sexual object, one is permitted to do to her what one pleases. Sexual objectification is shown to have dangers far beyond mere degradation. The removal of one's status as a person worthy of respect means no moral duty is owed that person. That is Immanuel Kant's contention. Sartre also explored this issue. In Being and Nothingness, he argues that there are many possible attitudes with which we try to preserve our subjectivity from the objectifying gaze of other people. Sexual desire is one of those. But the failure to objectify the other through sexual desire leads into sadism and ultimately desiring someone's death. The process Sartre describes is exactly the process at work in Penance. As women who are taken to be objects of sexual desire prove to be real people and thus resistant to objectification the attitude taken toward them is sadism. The captors whip these women and stun them with electricity. As sadism, too, fails to reduce them to objects or non-persons, they must be killed.

Walker's House of Whipcord, consequently, takes particular interest in how the prison is run, from the point of view of both administrators and prisoners. The plight of the heroine and a few other girls gives the audience a sympathetic center with which to observe. We follow their treatment, their escape attempts, their beatings and sometimes deaths. Penance begins similarly, but quickly abandons exposition of the prison's processes in favour of Amelia's ingenuity, abuse, and escape attempts. The film is a series of suspenseful, lurid, and downright cringe-inducing moments. Whipcord had surprisingly little nudity. Even the whippings were eroticized more by the perverse characters than by Walker's camera. Kennedy has no scruples. When Amelia is whipped, she's strapped naked to a spring bedframe so we see her large breasts pressed up against the latticework. There are, moreover, scenes of genital mutilation. Kennedy is gentle enough to leave the actual mutilation offscreen. Yet they are certainly uncomfortable moments. If anything leaving the mutilation offscreen made the scenes more effective. Genital mutilation on women remains a widespread activity in the world. The focus on the abuse of women and the resentment of female sexual desire in Penance elevates what could have been mean-spirited torture scenes to some degree of seriousness. It is there for a purpose; Kennedy earns those scenes, however unpleasant they may be. A little of the maturity Walker brought to House of Whipcord has carried over to Penance.

The major departure from House of Whipcord is the format. Penance, against all odds for what is essentially a women-in-prison film, is also a mockumentary horror. The whole film is supposed to be footage recorded on a miniDV camcorder. This restricts the film in ways Whipcord isn't. Walker was free to show any action he wished from any angle and with any camera movements. Kennedy is bound to a few camcorders. To make this work the administrators of the prison must be comfortable allowing Amelia to film everything. This is odd. They even have their own camcorder that they use on themselves. To Kennedy's credit, he perceives the peculiarity of the captors allowing themselves to be filmed and compensates. He makes the doctor a narcissist, frequently looking in an ornate hand mirror. Where credulity is strained the most is the scenes of suspense. To peer around a corner exposes a part of one's head. To peer around a corner with a camcorder exposes hand, head, and camera. Whenever Amelia escapes and spies on her captors, even from a mere three feet away, they are somehow oblivious to her presence. They are the least observant people in cinematic history.

The restriction to camcorder footage limits the nuance available to Kennedy as well. The captors in Penance are not permitted to be the complex individuals we find in House of Whipcord. The only one we get to know is the doctor (Graham McTavish). That's too bad. I was fascinated by Alice Amter's performance as the sadistic and sexually repressed assistant with the stun gun. But the doctor keeps the cameras on himself. He is a grotesque. His motivation is pure religious mania, as the film's title indicates. He believes he is making the path to heaven easier for the women he tortures and murders. He's consistant enough to take penances himself. Yet he does have a few subtle contradictions. He drinks wine while taking an ice bath, for instance. In Whipcord, Walker gave us real people with monstrous minds: Barbara Markham's warden is fury of sexual repression; the judge is a confused old man who believes the girls are being released cured of their immorality; the aides are clearly closeted lesbians and sadists. In Penance, we're given one-sided monsters. One of them, "The Man" (an excellent cameo by Michael Rooker), is particularly frightening.

By limiting his characters, Kennedy unwittingly undermines his social commentary and expresses the very attitude he's condemning. Just like his grotesque characters, Kennedy too is contemptuous of his sexually liberal strippers. As the film progresses through the third and fourth acts, the strippers are never seen. It is implied that they've all been killed offscreen. Only Amelia, the non-stripper, goes on fighting. He could have made Amelia a stripper. But he chose to make her a non-stripper. She's a victim because she's a 'good girl.' The implication is that the other women had it coming. He offers the abuse of the women to the audience for enjoyment. Their breasts are pressed up against latticework. When they fall from electric shocks, we see the perineal panties scrunched between their thighs. While Amelia shows sympathy for the abused strippers, Kennedy is content to forget them. I doubt this was his conscious attitude. However, in losing the nuance of Walker's film and simply presenting the captors as bad prudes and Amelia as a good girl in the wrong place at the wrong time he opens himself to the same charge he levels against his captors. At the end of the film we've seen our own perverse desires to punish women who earn a living exploiting male sexual drive and seen those perverse desires themselves punished. It's a cathartic repression that leaves us secure in our attitudes toward sexually objectified women and in our bad faith.

I can't deny my contempt for Kennedy's dishonesty. Some credit should have been given to Pete Walker. I also can't deny that Penance is an effective update of House of Whipcord. It goes places Walker couldn't or wouldn't go and does so legitimately. There are no stretches of logic, only stretches of taste. It manages to maintain a level of maturity in the midst of the torture and terror. And it uses the subject matter to explore different issues. That's much of what a successful update ought to do. A successful update should also give credit where credit is due.

The Raven (2007) - 2/4

In David DeCoteau's two subsequent Poe adaptations, House of Usher (2008) and The Pit and the Pendulum (2009), I was impressed by how DeCoteau mined Poe's wealth of symbols for psychosexual horror. The best Poe adaptations have exploited Poe's symbols, from Jean Epstein through Roger Corman up to DeCoteau. Both of those films were written by Simon Savory, who lends the films a playful creativity. The Raven, which was written by DeCoteau himself, lacks that playfulness. Poe's source material provides not symbols with which to explore the subconscious, but merely some motifs with which to decorate a mostly unremarkable '90s-style slasher.

What is remarkable about The Raven is how its slasher qualities seem to be a development out of a certain kind of drama pushed to its extremity. This is not to say DeCoteau set out to make a drama and accidentally made a horror film. DeCoteau's niche is horror. Though the horror precedes the drama actually, logically the drama precedes and erupts into horror in The Raven. The kind of drama The Raven pushes is what be called the bitch drama. This is not intended to be facetious. Nor is it intended to single out females. A bitch drama is a drama that consists entirely in the escalation of bitchiness between at least two people. The setting is usually a college, prep school, or high school. Moral ambiguity thrives in the bitch drama, as most characters perform some morally censurable acts. The film Jawbreaker is a good instance of a bitch drama. The film revolves around the three most popular high school seniors covering up a case of involuntary manslaughter. As one of the three has a conscience and as an outsider discovers what they've done, increasing acts of bitchiness exchange, mostly from the hands of Rose McGowan's character. Election and Cruel Intentions offer different and more mature forms of bitch drama. The essence is cruel scheming amongst young, proud, passionate people.

The Raven, too, is a bitch drama, even a homosexual bitch drama. But to be more accurate, it is the aftermath of a bitch drama. What happens to people like the Rose McGowan character of Jawbreaker if they never receive any formal discipline for their actions? What happens if the bitch drama is not resolved, but merely buried and ignored? The neat wrap-ups of bitch dramas make of their conclusions a false bottom. The Raven concerns two unpleasant young men, Roderick and Drake, who had one such bitch drama in prep school. Then they moved on, hoping to part ways perhaps. By unfortunate coincidence, they end up at the same college. What was buried bubbles up more vindictive and violent than ever: the bitch drama festers into a slasher horror. The catalyst is Roderick's graduation party, a masque ball he's hosting at a mansion famous for having been the site of a massacre during a masque ball years ago. Drake believes Roderick is hosting the party as an insult to him, though we only figure out why near the end. Now guests at the mansion are being murdered by a man in a raven mask with a blade shaped like a raven's talons. So this is the culmination of the bitch drama. Drake wants to ruin Roderick's party and issues death threats; Roderick is throwing a macabre, sinister party to offend Drake. Where bitch dramas sometimes include a death, The Raven is far beyond that. The cruelty has become a compulsion to kill all. The climactic reveal is a reveal of a bitchiness of truly perverse extremes.

The manner in which the slasher plays out is, however, unremarkable. There is a limited collection of attractive young men and a single female to be dispatched. Their personalities are scarcely if at all distinguished. And the raven is a most efficient killer. The protracted and aestheticized violence found in Italian slashers is not present here. The raven dispatches of each victim with a slash or two before they even have an opportunity to try running. The longest setpiece is also the most explicitly Poe-related sequence. The raven plays a recording of "The Raven" on phonograph while rapping on the victim's door. The possibility of an elegant setpiece proves as much a tease as the sex scenes.

DeCoteau's approach to softcore sex scenes, incidentally, is to always climax with the semi-removal of underwear. At least one of the men in the scene will have the back of his underwear flipped down to reveal his buttocks, but the front remains covering the genitals. This maneuver replaces penetration and orgasm in DeCoteau's films. This is peculiar, because it is unlikely sexually active people would be satisfied with this maneuver when it is just as easy to remove the underwear. DeCoteau's sexual setpieces, just like his violence setpieces, seem to end too soon and never engage the possibilities they raise.

There is very little of Poe left in the film. The raven itself is transformed into a psychopathological artifact of guilt that manifests itself physically in the raven costume. If there's anything linking The Raven with DeCoteau's House of Usher, it's the use of Poe's writing as a remedy for a character's psychological damage. But where House of Usher captured the rich subconscious of Poe's writings, The Raven remains mostly superficial. When one adapts a short poem like "The Raven", screenwriting invention is a necessity, of course. But one would expect an adaptation of a poem to at least be poetic. The most poetic aspect of The Raven is in the art design including all of the mansion's decor, the raven's costume and weapon, and the lovely, gothic matte that serves as establishing shot. There is also some poetry and some Poe in giving the raven the last word: nevermore.

House of Usher (2008) - 3/4

David DeCoteau's House of Usher falls in a long tradition of "The Fall of the House of Usher"-adaptations. Jean Epstein's La chute de la maison Usher and Watson and Webber's The Fall of the House of Usher are both avant-garde classics that take advantage of the non-narrative aspects in Poe's writing. Roger Corman's House of Usher is a classic of horror cinema that follows Poe's narrative to mine its symbols for their psychoanalytic connotations. DeCoteau's Usher, written by Simon Savory, falls somewhere in between Corman's and Epstein's visions. DeCoteau's Usher is a deliberate attempt to put the potentially therapeutic nightmare of a psychologically damaged mind on screen, making narrative superficial and subordinate to the psychological symbolism.

It's worth looking at how DeCoteau's Usher is distinguished from previous adaptations. In Epstein's Usher, the visitor to the house of Usher is an elderly acquaintance of Roderick's who is not even named. He is merely a witness to the events surrounding the fall of the house. Complementing his role as witness is the variety of sensory malfunctions Epstein gives him: he uses an ear trumpet to hear and suffers presbyopia. He's not only a witness, but a bad witness to a distinctly Usher world. None of the visitor's personality enters that world, but his flaws of perception alter how we receive it. In Corman's Usher, the visitor is named and while he too is a witness to the Usher world, he's too indignant to witness it passively. He is not a friend of Roderick and in fact only meets him in the first act. It is rather with Madeline that he has a relationship, a romantic one as it happens. To save Madeline, he actively effects change in that world. In DeCoteau's Usher, the visitor, Victor Reynolds (Michael Cardelle), takes priority over the Ushers themselves. The world he enters is distinctly his nightmare and not a nightmare he has entered by accident. Not only are his senses sharp, but the Ushers tell one another that he has the power of "sight," a sort of psychic vision into the house's otherworldly aspects. His power of sight is not that of a detached observer, but of a creator. The house of Usher is a Reynolds world populated by Ushers.

So, where Corman was able to leave the supernaturalism of the house ambiguous and merely a manifestation of Roderick's troubled mind, DeCoteau doesn't have that recourse. There is no objective witness. If the house is a manifestation of a troubled mind, it is Reynolds's mind. However, it is also through Reynolds's mind that the whole film is seen. The house of DeCoteau's Usher really is a vampiric entity in symbiotic relationship with the Ushers. They and the house grow weaker until the house is able to consume victims. Thus is Reynolds summoned to the house in capacity as both saviour and victim of the Ushers. It is by Roderick (Frank Mentier) that Reynolds is invited, not merely an old friend but his former lover in a relationship that ended when he enlisted in the military. Both Roderick and Madeline (Jaimyse Haft) tell Reynolds in private how much he's needed, making his importance very clear; yet it is nebulous just why exactly he is important. While it initially seems he is there to liberate the Ushers from the house, they eventually decide he must be sacrificed. Their decision doesn't proceed so much from any narrative or character developments as much as by the dream logic at work.

The nightmare Reynolds finds himself in is interesting for being more sexual than violent. I referred to DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum, made a year later, as a psychosexual horror. House of Usher, while not as pure, falls in the same category. On Reynolds's first night in the house, Roderick wastes no time stripping and making out with him for a few minutes. Reynolds ends the session when the moment of penetration comes dangerously near. He is molested by the hands of ghosts in a bathtub. He has visions of ghostly muscular men in underwear warning him to flee. Each of them were victims of the house, yes, but also of Roderick's camera. It is as if Roderick's look of sexual desire captured their souls. Madeline also attempts to seduce Reynolds with some ferocity, but falls into a cataleptic state before she can get his pants down to fellate him. It is as though Reynolds is forever approaching sexual moments, but being prevented or preventing himself from fulfilling them. Or rather he is being both tantalized and reproved with fruitless sexual relationships. Madeline is given a speech about a ghost child she believes haunts the house. It's not the ghost of a child that died, but the ghost of the potential child her barren womb can never realize, "For every woman there is a child waiting to be born," she says. This is an expression of conventional sexuality: the idea that we must "be fruitful and multiply." She adds, "I fear the unborn far more than I fear the dead." So both Roderick and Madeline are viewed as haunted, Roderick by male sexual conquests he's sacrificed to the house and Madeline by her infertility. Both are haunted, then, by their fruitlessness. Reynolds's importance to the Usher's therefore seems to be the possibility of fruitfulness, but ultimately the vampiric barrenness of Usher means he can only be a saviour through sacrifice.

Reynolds's sexual reticence and his status as sacrificial victim has mystical connotations. From early in the film he can be seen wearing a cross. Roderick draws explicit attention to it. His role as both saviour and victim makes him Christ-like. The Ushers, however, have a distinctly pagan quality. They must continue to sacrifice victims to the house. The relationship of Roderick and Madeline to the house is an interesting one. Despite their concern for Reynolds, they compulsively perform the sacrificial ritual. They have no fruitfulness outside of the destruction of others. Where Corman deliberately shot the exteriors for his Usher where there had recently been a forest fire, the grounds of DeCoteau's Usher contain a lovely garden. Madeline explains the garden is over the family burial grounds. There is no growth without death for the Ushers. But the house is insatiable. Their sacrifices must be endlessly repeated. They are held captive to it, but it's not clear why. Freud considered compulsive repetition to be a particularly destruction reaction to feelings of guilt. In this case, it is Reynolds's own feelings of guilt about his fruitless sexuality. One is reminded of how Pope John Paul II referred to birth control and pro-choice as a "culture of death." Reynolds is able to deny his own sexuality and project it onto the pagan, parasitic Ushers while he remains a Christ-like victim.

A distracting aspect of the film is that it's just a little too precious and fresh. The house itself is a newly-built modern manor. One would expect a grotesque and delapidated old mansion. It is implausible that this house is in the process of falling to pieces. The actors are also too young for the roles they are asked to portray, with the exception of Madeline's Jaimyse Haft, who gives the film's best performance. Roderick looks like he would still get carded at a pub. They are also all extraordinarily attractive. Even the butler and the ghosts are studly young men. I can't deny the pleasure of looking at these faces and bodies. It is an enjoyable part of the film, of course. But in DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum there is a good reason for having only attractive people and the pleasure of looking at them integrates with the content of the film. In House of Usher, there is no internal reason for the attractive cast. Nor does the enjoyment of these bodies integrate with the film's content.

House of Usher is the second of DeCoteau's Poe films I've seen, though it was made before The Pit and the Pendulum. He also adapted The Raven in 2007, which I have yet to see. In the two I have seen, I've been impressed by DeCoteau's and Savory's experiments in sexualizing Poe's narratives. From the expressionistic and symbol-rich material of Poe's stories, they've created nightmares with which to explore psychosexual depths. The narrative-light content of Poe's stories allow the space to make such explorations. The Pit and the Pendulum is something of a masterpiece. House of Usher is not as sure-footed, but is still a fascinating psychosexual nightmare from which we might experience a little catharsis. In following its own unique path with the many permutations Poe's story permits, House of Usher proves a worthy entry in the grand tradition of House of Usher films.

The Pit and the Pendulum (2009) - 4/4

Poe this is not. But then, what Poe adaptation ever is? From Jean Epstein's La Chute de la maison Usher (1928) through Roger Corman's classic Poe films, Poe has been to cinema what he was to the Symbolist poets: a wealth of symbols with which to manifest the subconscious. David DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum is perhaps the farthest of all incarnations from Poe's original narrative, but it falls in that same tradition of manifesting the subconscious.

Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" is a very short story about a man strapped beneath a bladed pendulum on a platform surrounded by pit. He reflects upon the mechanism as it swings gradually closer until he is rescued by soldiers in the last moment. Corman's The Pit and the Pendulum involves the mechanism, but locates it in the neglected family torture chamber around which the melodramatic story is constructed. DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum just about dispenses with the mechanism altogether. The pendulum is a pocket watch in the hands of the mad hypnotist Jo-Beth Divay. She's experimenting with the permanent removal of all pain and fear through hypnosis. Unfortunately, her techniques involve causing extreme pain while under hypnosis. She leaves that part out of her ads, however, which promise superior physical performance in athletic endeavours. Hence the collection of beautiful bodies, both male and female, that submit to her experiments.

To some extent, the point of The Pit and the Pendulum is the enjoyment of beautiful bodies. A nearly five-minute scene of two exquisite male bodies wrestling in tight, black underwear makes this point clear. One of this men has a shaved head and larger muscles, whereas the other is more lithe and 'cute.' Another attractive man strips to his underwear to lift weights. He resembles a figure from an El Greco painting, elongated and darkly beautiful. The two gorgeous young ladies never strip, but their scant clothing and beautiful faces offer plenty to the eyes. One is a model blond beauty. The other is a porcelain-skinned redhead with one eye seemingly smaller than the other; the quirk, easily perceived as an imperfection, makes her all the more stunning. Jo Beth as well has a sophisticated beauty, not to mention cheekbones you could chop vegetables on. She strips down to just her panties and boots, offering a slightly older woman's tight, dainty body for display. There is also a callow blond man and his handsome suitor, both of whom can be seen in underwear. Their appearances are more boyish, particularly the blond. These people are nice to look at. They give visual pleasure. And all in different ways. There should be a body for everyone to appreciate in this cast. The connoisseur should appreciate them all. As they are all athletes, there is a good reason they are all toned. So one needn't feel manipulated. One is free to enjoy the forms.

The reason enjoying the bodies is important is because The Pit and the Pendulum is a psychosexual horror film that significantly involves taking pleasure in beautiful bodies. DeCoteau sublimates violence and horror into sexual pathology. The title of Poe's story, after all, can just as easily be able the female and male genitalia. The vagina is a pit and the penis is a pendulum. The young athletes of the film enjoy and appreciate one another's bodies as much as the audience. Just about everyone in the film "swings both ways" like a pendulum. In the two-day stay at Jo-Beth's manor, most do end up exploring at least one other person's body or expressing a desire to do so. The two young women engage each other sexually, two of the young men engage each other, and two other men get to have physical contact with the women. It is only Jo-Beth who is unable to enjoy the bodies. She is either absent or at a distance.

The vagina becomes a dangerous pit and the penis a dangerous pendulum only in the face of repression and oppression. Jo-Beth is trying to remove the experience of pain from her subjects and is herself unable to experience pain; but the experience of pain and the experience of pleasure are intimately linked. They are two sides of the pendulum. Jo-Beth thus becomes the monstrous center of the psychosexual horror. While she watches the muscular men wrestling, she begins to strip and fondle herself. She does so not out of enjoyment of the bodies or the erotic value of their grappling, but from the increasing violence and the potential for death. Her only sexual satisfaction comes from inflicting extreme pain in hypnotic sessions. She suffers from loneliness as she seeks a partner who can take infinite punishment, but finds there is no such being, no-one like her or no-one like she imagines herself to be at any rate. She is, in some sense, the patriarchal standard of female desire, without pleasure of her own; her desires are perceived as dangerous and destructive. As Linda Williams argued, horror films permit female desire only to "demonstrate how monstrous female desire can be." (1) At the same time, her sadism is a masochism. The fulfillment of her desire is co-extensive with the destruction of her desire. She desires most of all a man who is like her, but realizing that man destroys him. Her only pleasure is therefore in the destruction of her own potential source of pleasure. Denying herself gratification compulsively is the only means to gratification she has. It is an endless cycle of masochism and from the masochism comes the sadism.

Jo-Beth is a generally fascinating character. She's the only character really more than just body. Her personality is large, her subjects' small; her sexual persona dwarfs them. When they first meet her they line up in her den obediently, awaiting their turn to speak. One would expect these beautiful bodies to be totally confident, but they are strangely childlike before her, like Guildenstern and Rosenkrantz before Hamlet. Sexuality oozes from her as they do from a sexy schoolmistress. Her sexual energies dominate them. Yet she herself is unable to enjoy her own sexual potency except through sadism. She has a number of terrific monologues that reveal something of her depths, particularly a lollipop-aided speech about the glory of mechanical clocks and a discourse about cactii. Like Vincent Price in Corman's Poe films, she has these odd quirks, like collecting cactii and clocks. Though actress Lorielle New is not the thespian Vincent Price was, she has great screen presence and sexily channels Price in the peculiar role with success.

Besides Jo-Beth's monologue, the clock motif carries on throughout the film. Clock faces are superimposed over each hypnosis scene. Jo-Beth explains that each person has an interior pendulum, like the pendulum of a mechanical clock, that is continually moving one toward the pit of death. Poe's story is thus interpreted as not just about sex, but about mortality. Jo-Beth sees her project as being about conquering death, as if she can stop the internal pendulum and thus hold off the pit indefinitely. Many of the characters, moreover, engage in risk-taking behaviour, such as storm chasing; this is what in psychoanalytic terms is death drive behaviour. Sex is the recourse for immortality. While these beautiful people can and do have recourse in sex, Jo-Beth, only finds sexual gratification in death.

The hypnotism in The Pit and the Pendulum is also interesting in its own right. The mad hypnotist is a cinematic villain that goes back to the first horror film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Dr. Caligari himself keeps Cesare the Somnambulist in a perpetual hypnotic trance. Each adaptation of Trilby also includes the evil hypnotist Svengali. In Karl Freund's The Mummy, Imhotep uses hypnosis. In Preminger's noir thriller Whirlpool, Jose Ferrer plays a fiendish hypnotist. Pit, however, is the first film I've seen to postulate an out-of-body experience for the hypnotized subject. The 'soul' under hypnosis descends. We see the 'soul' walk downstairs, descend into some catacombs presumably beneath the manor. This may be the titular pit. It also gives the sense of a descent into the subconscious and a bubbling up of subconscious desires, uninhibited by moral concerns. Perhaps freedom from pain and fear is a sort soullessness.

If you want a straight-forward narrative, DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum is not offering it. DeCoteau isn't even trying to give a classical narrative. An extremely prolific director, not unlike Takashi Miike and Jess Franco, he can afford to make offbeat titles as he has done with this screenplay from Simon Savory. The Pit and the Pendulum is a descent into the subconscious, into psychosexual terror. Had this film been made in the silent era, with only necessary dialogue and the offbeat monologues retained for intertitles, it would be regarded as a classic today. Made in 2009, it is a good example of what interesting work is being done in low-budget, independent horror.

(1) Linda Williams, "When the Woman Looks."