Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)

directed by Roy William Neill

USA

74 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Some friends took me into Atlanta to catch the afternoon Silver Scream Spookshow presentation of this film last weekend, which was an all-around great time. The danger with seeing a movie in a theater is that I usually don't have my brain powered up enough to review it since I'm more focused on the overall experience of being in a theater; doubly so if I just watched a 30-minute live stage show with puppetry and antics and skits and whatnot. But Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man kind of crept up on me, so I want to get some thoughts about it down in writing.

(Also please note that I basically have never watched a Universal monster movie so I might say some things here that would be "Well, yeah, duh" territory to anyone who has.)

The thing that really struck me about this movie was the incredibly sympathetic portrayal of the Wolf Man. At the beginning of the film he is dug up from his grave by tomb robbers looking for fresh-ish corpses with money on them, and despite having "died" four years ago, the man who in life was known as Larry Talbot somehow remains alive - very much against his will. Talbot is immediately, horrifyingly aware of his situation - of his status of a lycanthrope - but no one around him will take him seriously. There is something so deeply tragic about seeing Talbot plead, essentially, "I have no control over my own actions, when the full moon strikes I am a passenger in my own body, I am committing acts that are reprehensible to me and I desperately need to die because there is no other way for me to stop myself" and having no one listen to him.

The practical effects makeup here is obviously ahead of its time and an enormous amount of effort was put into what amounts to probably about 0.15% of the running time of an already quite short movie - our (g)host Professor Morte mentioned that the initial transformation scene was done over the course of eight hours and that Lon Chaney Jr. had to stay in the same pose on a pillow that was made out of plaster because a real pillow would have shifted around too much and ruined the real-time transformation effect. That is all remarkable, but what I think really cinched this movie was Chaney's performance as Talbot. Not as the Wolf Man - as Talbot. He has this forlorn expression on most of the time, and carries himself with the body language of a man heavily burdened, who knows that he doesn't belong among the vibrant, carefree living humans around him. Although this is a short, simple film, the true horror of being the Wolf Man is conveyed in a way that I found extremely compelling.

I haven't mentioned Bela Lugosi in heavy makeup as Frankenstein's Monster because he was somewhat of a weak point in the film to me, which from what I understand had a lot to do with behind-the-scenes decisions to cut a lot of his lines. I also think that every other character besides the two monsters could basically have been an NPC with the exception of Maleva, whose genuine care and compassion for the Wolf Man and total acceptance of him as a being did move me deeply.

One of the friends I was with pointed out the "economy of storytelling" in this film, which I agree is definitely one of its strong points; the plot moves along very quickly and doesn't get stuck on any one point or another for longer than feels necessary. It is a pleasure to watch a 74-minute film that feels like it got its entire message across and couldn't have been longer if it tried. I'm attempting to muster the effort to say that there's also something about this simplicity that is a detriment to the film, because although any more length would probably have drawn the plot out further than it could handle, in the end, instead of a satisfying conclusion, we basically get... nothing. Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolf Man fight, the dam possibly gets blown up, we see some great practical effects, and then the "The End" card hits and we all left the theater. Just another ten minutes could have made that ending feel like an actual ending.

Jigoku (1960)

directed by Nobuo Nakagawa

Japan

99 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I have returned from my hiatus to kick off the spooky season with a film that I could superlatively describe with an awful pun¹ but am consciously choosing not to.

I happen to be in the middle of reading The Penguin Book of Hell at the moment, and that combined with my overall interest in religious studies makes for a mindset that is intensely receptive of everything Jigoku lays on its viewers. Something that I think any secular observer (and probably a good deal of non-secular observers) will begin to notice once they've been exposed to enough visions of various religions' underworlds is that after a while it really feels like concepts of an afterlife full of torment say more about the god or gods who created such a place than they do about the people who have been sentenced to live in them for eternity.

Case in point: the main character of Jigoku, Shiro Shimizu (played by Shigeru Amachi). An extremely normal person, guilty of essentially nothing by his own hand and by the standards of today's society, who ends up damned to hell alongside a crowd of his family, friends, and vague acquaintances, all of whom are objectively more "sinful" than him. Things seem to go very wrong whenever Shimizu is around, but again, none of it is his fault: his first "crime" is simply being the passenger during a hit-and-run that ends up claiming the life of a supposedly big-cheese yakuza, whose girlfriend and mother immediately begin plotting revenge not just on Tamura (we'll get to him in a moment - oh, boy, will we ever), the man driving the car, but on Shimizu, who happened to be in that place at that time because he wanted to take a different route than Tamura did.

Very shortly after the first car accident, before Shimizu has really had time to recover, he finds himself in another accident that ends up taking the life of his fiancée, Yukiko (the lovely Utako Mitsuya). Again, it is not directly his fault, but he is in the situation because he insisted on taking a taxi when Yukiko wanted to walk. He could justifiably walk away from both incidents carrying no blame whatsoever, but instead he chooses to take the burden on himself - therefore damning himself even before his death to a life in which he deems himself a murderer.

While Shimizu is the protagonist, arguably the most fascinating character in Jigoku is Shimizu's "friend" Tamura (Yōichi Numata). Every time I rewatch this, I spend the entire movie wondering if Tamura was ever human at all. He shows up out of nowhere accompanied by a sound (whether diegetic or not is hard to tell) like an onrushing train and seems to goad Shimizu further into believing life is nothing but sin and degeneration until you inevitably die and suffer for all eternity. He revels in others' suffering, and is oftentimes the cause of it: Tamura is the one who should logically be held accountable for the first accident, but instead he ropes Shimizu into sharing the blame, and later snipes at him for trying to "sell him out" - as if he is not the one actually culpable for a crime. We don't ever find anything out about Tamura as a person: where he's from, why he's attracted to Shimizu, what his overall problem is. Even Shimizu wonders "who is this guy?" at one point. When Tamura dies, he's no less of a bizarre psychopomp - he is, in fact, more of one. Numata's sudden shift into full kabuki actor mode when Tamura visits Shimizu in hell (only to be chastised by a force even more evil than himself, leading one to believe that Tamura was perhaps human all along) is one of my favorite moments in the latter part of the film.

The world is faintly hellish even while Shimizu is still alive. The disquieting atmosphere is so similar to Nakagawa's later film Yotsuya Kaidan that I looked up the cinematographer for Jigoku, expecting to see them credited for that film as well, only to find that Yotsuya Kaidan and Jigoku share no crew members aside from composer Chumei Watanabe. I think the nightmarish imagery is largely carried by both Nakagawa and art director Haruyasu Kurosawa, who worked on numerous other horror movies, but Watanabe's score certainly does a lot to help the sense of a deeply haunted world that we feel while watching the film as well.

So, arguably, the most horrifying thing about Jigoku is not the elaborately staged underworld scenes, featuring people being flayed, decapitated, boiled, reduced to skeletons, bashed in the teeth with hammers &c, it's the fact that, like, there's a baby down there, dude. If Shimizu can get damned not only by himself but along with his girlfriend, his unborn child, his sister, and his parents for things that he was both not really guilty of and in one case was not even aware he was doing - if there are gods who will damn a baby to eternal torment to that - then those gods are infinitely more frightening than the demons bashing people's teeth in with hammers. And maybe even more frightening than that is the idea that maybe Shiro only went there because he felt like he deserved to be there.

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1 It is, in point of fact, one hell of a movie.

Celia (1989)

directed by Ann Turner

Australia

97 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Note: I am still extremely busy and haven't had the time to write anything new, so this is an old review that I've dug up from my archives and reworked for quality. My apologies - by hook or by crook I will be back to writing new reviews next week.

Celia is a horror movie (if it can be called a horror movie at all) where the horror is experienced through a child's perspective, it's also a movie that presents that horror as part of the experience of being a child. The horror here is inextricable from personal experience instead of existing as an external force that can be corroborated by an outside observer. What this movie is really about is how the worlds of children and the worlds of adults are often totally incompatible and incomprehensible to each other. The title character is a nine-year-old girl who has a relatively normal childhood (insofar as any childhood can be called "normal"), with all of life's mysteries still yet to be revealed, and to her - and, arguably, objectively - all of the adults in her life act against what she believes to be morally correct. 

A really good example of this last point is the way the film deals with politics. A running theme is the ruling by the then-PM of Australia that all rabbits, including those belonging to children as pets, are to be rounded up and killed, as they are considered vermin. Celia has to cope with this despite not having the capacity to understand it the way adults do. At one point she draws devil features on a picture of the PM in class and is told off for it by the teacher. While the adults view this as extremely disrespectful, they don't see that Celia is interpreting the PM's actions according to the rules of engagement that govern her and her peers: it does not follow that this man should be above recourse, he's a stranger who is telling Celia that her beloved pet is to be surrendered and killed, what is she supposed to do? Not fight back? Celia has no internalized concept of politics or the idea of respecting someone solely based on their office: she treats the PM the same way she would treat her own contemporaries.

Another running theme is the adults around Celia attempting to force her into cutting off relationships based on their own fears of communism. Celia also deals with this the same way she'd deal with a contemporary: you tell me they're communists, and that they're bad people, but they've never hurt me or my friends, and they're always kind to me, so how can they be bad people just because you say they are? The logic the adults follow is the strange stuff here, not what Celia does - the fallacy of shunning some people because of their beliefs and blindly following the rule of others - of strangers - simply because they hold the highest office in the land is presented as a more childish belief than the rituals and games Celia involves herself with.

The way Celia's most heinous act (not spoiling it) is dealt with is also interesting because I think a lot of other movies would make that the thing that ends the film. Other movies wouldn't show, afterwards, her doing something else that could have ended in a similarly disastrous fashion, but didn't. They would make it a black-and-white issue: as soon as Celia did it, she would have been established as being in the wrong. But the mock hanging of her friend afterwards shows that the balance between life and death, justice and injustice, and the definition of what is and isn't a violent act does not hold constant between the worldviews of children and those of adults. It doesn't cast judgement on Celia for what she did or place blame on the people in her life for not teaching her right; it presents her as someone with agency who made a logical choice according to the way she understood justice and reciprocity.

I very much enjoyed this movie and despite it not turning out to be what I'd call "horror" without reservations, I thought it was one of the better films to explore the unique anxiety of being a child. I intended to watch it as a Christmas movie but that didn't really work out.

Your intrepid author needs a break again this week.

We shall return next week with horror movie reviews for the spooky season.

I don't like skipping weeks, and I don't like that I've done it twice now, but I'm taking on a lot of subtitling projects and 100% of my energy is currently going into that, so I do not have time to do things such as sleep or watch movies and focus on them enough to have coherent thoughts that I can turn into a review.

May I offer a mediocre group portrait of the Ultra Q crew in compensation?

Ju-on: The Curse (2000)

directed by Takashi Shimizu

Japan

70 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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As I mentioned last week, I've been reading David Kalat's J-Horror book, and his treatment of movies that I had seen before but was well overdue to give a second look to has been compelling me to go back and revisit some old favorites. In particular, I enjoy his enthusiasm for V-Cin, seeing it not as a wasteland full of trashy splatter flicks but a breeding ground for creative freedom that spawned some of the scariest and most original films in J-Horror.

Ju-on: The Curse is about the house. Shimizu himself has stated that if he had to posit a main character for this strange, free-floating, non-linear film, it would be the house wherein the horror unfolds. As Kalat says, this is a real house, not a constructed set, but the cinematography (Nobuhito Kitsugi) and the lighting (Hideo Oka) manage to transform a normal house into a Skinamarink-esque labyrinth of pain and misery. There's a shot early on in the film where one of the house's unwitting inhabitants starts hearing the tell-tale moans that signify her doom is close at hand, and when she runs out of the room she's in, the hallway outside is dark and she is framed in a classic Dutch angle - the house transformed, all of a sudden, the house itself conveying the ghosts to her, not content simply to let itself be haunted but insisting that it plays a hand in the horror continuously playing out within it. There's something oppressive about the interior of the house - we see characters throw open windows to daylight; look outside; enter and exit, but as long as they're physically inside the house, it could be as dark or as light as the house wants it to be.

It feels like there's too many stairs, too many angles. Not in an obtrusive way - just subtly. I kept catching scenes where the actors were framed inside doors or windows, boxed in by the house (perhaps, if I may be allowed to risk committing the sin of unforgivable pretentiousness, by the house). During that most famous scene at the end of the film I had a thought that somehow hadn't occurred to me before: "oh, wow, the house is giving birth to Kayako". Sliding down the stairs, wet and blood-matted, there's something disturbingly biological about the whole affair.

It kind of feels like one of those dreams where you're in a house that you used to live in, but something is not right about it.

The plot of Ju-on is deliberately told as a disjointed collection of scenes that aren't arranged in chronological order. When Kobayashi (the appropriately-named Yūrei Yanagi) discusses his missing student Toshio (Ryōta Kayama) with his pregnant wife Manami (Yue), the narrative flashes to a memory - whether it's of the past or of the future, we don't exactly know - that foretells the rest of the film. Kayako bows to him slowly, itself not an unusual action but disconcerting in the way it allows her long hair to fall in front of her face as she advances, out-of-focus, towards Kobayashi. It's not clear what the timeline is here: we see Toshio variously alive and dead at different points as the movie progresses. It's not that we never figure out what events set other events in motion - it's that everything seems to be happening at once.

Aside from how effective this movie is, what's also impressive is the influence it had. From the way Kalat describes it, the film garnered a reputation essentially through people spreading it around Ring cursed videotape style and telling all their friends "Have you seen this? It's the scariest thing I've ever watched". While it is not a perfect film and some aspects of it do still manage to feel superfluous despite its short running time, there's a core of pure, unrefined architectural horror goodness here that went on to have a ripple effect on horror as a whole down the line - much like the violent deaths of Kayako and Toshio Saeki would forever curse the space around where it happened, reaching out and touching any and all who come too close.

Long Dream (2000)

directed by Higuchinsky

Japan

58 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I originally watched Long Dream a while ago but decided to give it another look since I'm in the middle of David Kalat's J-Horror book and it's making me nostalgic for movies I haven't seen in a decade. I have very fond memories of being in less-than-ideal situations during which I spent my free time reading volumes and volumes of Junji Ito - wasting an entire day reading Hellstar Remina in the spare room of my grandmother's apartment was a formative time for me. That being said, I don't remember Long Dream well enough to compare it to this film, so I'm going to leave that aside and focus on the movie alone.

Conceptually - and this is where it does owe a debt to the original Ito manga, of course - you can't really get more unsettling than this. The idea of people having "long dreams" where they live enormous chunks of time somewhere outside of physical reality while their bodies appear asleep to outside observers is downright horrifying. It starts with relatively small spans - a week, a month, a year - but then devolves into scenarios of unimaginable torture. Spending eight years of objective time searching for a bathroom. Experiencing every second of a dream in which you're a soldier hiding out in the jungle forced to auto-cannibalize to stay alive. And all the while gradually mutating into some other form of humanity the further into the future you go, becoming unrecognizable, a thing from another time, another place, alienated from everyone you may once have known.

While Long Dream does get the point of this scenario's implications across quite well, I think it fumbles a bit in trying to stretch out the manga to even the short length of the film. Dr. Kuroda's (weird-ass) personal life isn't a part of the original manga, although his questionable medical ethics were, and while it does provide more depth to the story and a slightly disquieting sense that the "long dreams" cannot be contained to one person, it's also just kinda your run-of-the-mill Dead Wife Backstory that I didn't feel particularly engaged with, capped off with an ending that in anything else would have been an unforgivable cliche but actually kind of works here.

But isn't it spooky? The little details are where the movie really gets you. If I may be allowed to get into the weeds a bit here, I think the reason why watching Mukouda slowly mutate as he experiences jaunts further and further into the future is the same reason why séances and Victorian spirit mediums were so effective (setting aside the overwhelming need people felt to contact their deceased loved ones). You, an outsider (Mukouda's medical team), are witnessing a medium (Mukouda) engage not bodily but mentally with another place or another plane of existence that is forbidden to you, and the only testament to what that place is like is the medium's reaction. Us normal people cannot go there, but we can watch someone else go there. But because Mukouda's mental state eventually begins to deteriorate, we don't really even get clear testimony of where he's going, and that makes it scarier. All we can tell is that it's someplace where humans have become very, very different from what they are now.

After this, I think Uzumaki is due for a rewatch and possibly a re-read as well, although based on other people's accounts, the anime adaptation was so profoundly disappointing that it will not be part of my Uzumaki experience going forward.

Earth Defense Girl Iko-chan (1987)

directed by Minoru Kawasaki

Japan

47 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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The last movie I watched before this one was Hideo Gosha's Goyokin. Only real cinema for me, thank you.

It's easy to put on Earth Defense Girl Iko-chan and just think "oh, this is bad". I admit I thought that at the start. This is compounded by the fact that I still haven't quite figured Minoru Kawasaki out, despite how many of his films I've watched; I'm never entirely sure when he intends for us to laugh at something and when we're meant to be laughing with it. But the further Iko-chan goes, the clearer things become: Kawasaki understands tokusatsu intimately. I don't think - and I could be wrong here, because I still haven't read any statements from the director himself - any of this is intended in a mean-spirited way. Tokusatsu is the kind of thing where even though us fans love it dearly and defend its genuine artistic merit wholeheartedly, we are, at least every once in a while, guilty of laughing at it a little when it's not trying to be funny.

The protagonist of the film is Iko Kawai, a schoolgirl of no particular importance until she chances upon an alien who gives her a magical pink headset that can give her special powers and grant wishes. Iko, being possessed of a pure heart, uses the headset to stop a rampaging kaiju by communicating with it and finding out that it's not really mad or hateful, it just doesn't like living in a monstrous body that it never asked to be born in. (So right off the bat there's your transgender subtext.) She shrinks it down to a smaller size and it eventually repays the favor later on in the film. From there, as a matter of course, Iko finds herself drawn to the obligatory vaguely useless defense team, which counts among their members a very useless kyodai hero. Tension ramps up when Iko helps out two wounded Martians who tell her that their planet has been taken over by an evil dictator who plans on deploying a bomb that kills all humans but leaves everything else untouched.

If this sounds goofy, it's because it is. And it's meant to be. Akiko Isozaki, who plays Iko, is very obviously not a great actress, but she does feel like she's trying, and that authentically amateur performance accounts for a lot of Iko's charm. The kaiju suits and puppets are inordinately good for something this low-budget (I genuinely thought they'd managed to commandeer a Baragon suit for a few seconds) and the acting behind them is also top-notch - god, those Martians, the puppeteers really knew how to get emotion out of a face that has about as much expression as Kermit the Frog when someone's hand is up him. This movie is silly but it isn't cynical. It's exactly what the people who made it wanted it to be.

I can't really put my finger on exactly what it is about this movie that makes it so good, but it is So Good. I'm going to quote from its current top review on Letterboxd by the eloquent and well-stated "PeepeeDoodooBitch ?" to make up for my lack of insight: "[...]pure and unadulterated passion that manifests in the form of over ambitious props and special effects, fast little story lines carefully crafted to utilize all of the film’s minuscule budget, and gloriously weird moments and plots that are absent of studio interference. "