Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

directed by Jack Clayton
USA
95 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

I was, and still am, of the opinion that the original Something Wicked This Way Comes book, in its full form as it was originally published, is wholly un-adaptable to film. The screenplay of the movie version having been written by Ray Bradbury himself does a lot for its authenticity, but it still doesn't even touch how uniquely atmospheric and lyrical the original book was. Given that and my distaste for Disney, I knew that the film version would probably be an interesting watch, but I was expecting to nitpick it as I always do because I am an annoying and petty person.

The two are pretty different in tone, but the film version doesn't have any huge differences or anything I could say about it that I couldn't say for the original book, so that takes a lot of my criticisms away right there. Perhaps it's a bit lighter in tone than the book, only touching upon deepest evil where the book establishes it as an influential and tangible force, but again, Disney meddled in it, so that's to be expected.

The thing that's so entrancing about this movie is that it isn't realistic. Even when it was made, the era of its setting had already passed and remained only in the nostalgia of minds such as those that produced this film. This is a little ceramic Halloween village, a miniature-scale town set up around a sinister model train in a shop window that we're allowed to press our faces against. It's idealism of an America that may never have existed, and it gets right to the heart of what nearly every human being finds inherently comforting in small-town living. It is to Halloween and autumn what A Christmas Carol is to the Christmas season, for those that celebrate it.

Although the scope of Mr. Dark's sinisterness is slightly dampened, at its heart this story is essentially about grappling with death. So much of its central themes revolve around losing touch with the people you love due to the effects of time passing, and losing some vital part of yourself as your body ages faster than your mind. Charles Halloway's continual despair at being so much older than the son he wishes to connect with feels genuine because it's probably taken from Bradbury's own experiences and fears, and the final message of the film may seem Disney-saccharine at first- and it is; again, this is something only touched upon in the book- but in the end, the thing the little makeshift family finds isn't everlasting life, or a cure for all the world's ills. It's that love can make even two years with somebody feel like a million, and that there's no sense living out the rest of your life in worry when you can spend it with people who make you happy.

...I still recommend reading the book first.

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)

directed by Mike Flanagan
USA
99 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

I trudged through the first Ouija movie recently, knowing full well its bland reputation, because I had learned that Mike Flanagan was directing the sequel. I kind of wish I hadn't done that now, because the sequel has little to do with the first. But the thing that makes me admire Flanagan all the more is that he apparently was not too much of a fan of the first one either, but he went ahead and worked with the concept to create something that is far and away the better of the two movies.

We are introduced, in the first few minutes of Ouija: Origin of Evil, to a warm, rich palette of 1960s colors at their most authentic. Period pieces set in the recent past run the risk of becoming trite, especially since it seems to have become a bandwagon many people have jumped on lately, but this one hits it right on the head and looks genuine, comfy and personal. Until it's not, of course.

I want to expand on how personal and intimate it is for a moment, though: Thinking about this in comparison to its predecessor, the first thing that jumps out at me is how firmly the family dynamic is established. Almost the entire first half is spent getting the viewers acquainted with the main characters, a widowed mother and her two daughters, and the time we spend with them is not time that could have been sacrificed in lieu of anything gory or titillating. This is something Mike Flanagan has proven to be a master of, even in Before I Wake which was, to be blunt, a trash fire: Actual loving relationships between characters that get you to care for these people and fear their endangerment. Lulu Wilson is a wonderful disruption of the awfulness of the creepy-little-kid trope, playing her haunted child's story out with talent beyond her years.

The tenderness with which it approaches its characters' daily lives does not mean it isn't scary. In the second half it moves onto more traditional (sometimes a little too traditional) scares, using the occasional jump scare but not really forcing anything on us that makes us feel used, and also not fumbling with the CGI too badly. The shift from a family trying to keep themselves together and keep the memory of their father and husband close at hand to a family desperately trying to escape a force that brings to light some terrifying revelations about the sanctity of their home is palpable. The one thing that gives me pause is that Flanagan just seems unable to stop using that "scary mental patient" trope. It's so frustrating because he builds these faceted, emotional worlds, and then he rams headfirst into the most stereotypical and useless of horror tropes. It's still not quite as bad as the upcoming Split, though- there was a preview before the movie, and good lord, I will not be going within 100 feet of that one.

So is this a masterpiece? Not quite. It still has its flaws, and somewhat disappointing ones at that. But it is a vast improvement upon the first, and I wish more directors had the audacity to step in and change the course of franchises they saw as having initially wasted their potential.

Viy 3D: Forbidden Kingdom (2014)

directed by Oleg Stepchenko
Russia
127 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

This is the updated, 3D remake of the original 1967 movie Viy, which I am tremendously fond of, and which is a movie that really can't be separated from its era, though the 3D version does try.

As I mentioned when I reviewed the first Viy, most of the movie's charm comes from the fact that it doesn't look like anything made today and that it's pretty clunky and rough around the edges. With 46 years and millions of dollars between the two, they hardly resemble each other at all. Viy 3D is massive, so huge that, if viewed in its original 3D, you could probably get physically lost in it. And yet I still find that the original is better at worldbuilding, because the practical (and very sparingly used special) effects it contains are more believable due to their simplicity. In the era it takes place in, I would expect magic to look more along the lines of men being hoisted by fishing wire and set pieces constructed out of plywood and tape than immense, fantastical, hallucinatory visions of seven-horned demons and evil wraiths. It is extremely obvious that the remake was intended to be viewed in 3D; so obvious that it almost impedes enjoyment of it without that enhancement.

I have to give credit where it's due, though, because somehow, even with the obvious difference in scale, Viy 3D hasn't entirely lost that unique folkloric charm. It's an unrealistic vision of a long-gone era with too many bells and whistles on, but it still transports you right into the heart of middle-of-nowhere Russia where the villages are so remote and the people so accustomed to living in the wilderness that you can't be surprised if half the population really are witches. It's probably the most ridiculously Slavic movie I've ever seen, and the feeling of proudness and history is still there, if in a boiled-down, digitally-enhanced form.

The remake also has almost a full hour on the original, which gives it much, much more time to become bogged down with filler and extraneous material. Most notably there is a fairly annoying Englishman as the hero (sort of?) who isn't even remotely present in the first film, and whose presence is so weirdly shoehorned in that it almost gets to be offensive after a while of watching him cavort around. With an entirely Russian team of writers and director, I wondered why they felt the need to insert a foreign hero into the mix? All his presence does is force a kind of nature vs. culture dichotomy where the "civilized man" must bring his knowledge to the impoverished rural population. Although, I do quite like the idea proposed by having a couple of the villagers also declare themselves to be scientists alongside this classically trained idealist model of a "scientist". I feel that calling oneself a scientist does not require any special classification.

I would also be remiss not to mention how unkind this film is to women. Of the five remotely prominent women characters, two are evil- three if you count the fact that one is just a sexier alter ego of a nasty old witch- one spends a lot of time mute and defenseless, and the other is the homebody wife of the scientist, only there to have a baby and fight with her father.

These things aside, Viy 3D certainly isn't without its fun moments, and at two hours, if you end up enjoying it, you've got a lot to enjoy. But I can't get past the overly-embellished look of it. It's very much like Harry Potter- if memory serves, all the HP films are very visually appealing, but it can't be described as authentic by any stretch of the imagination; it's a faceted world you can pretend to live in, but it's not like anything you could ever see in real life.

I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House (2016)

directed by Osgood Perkins
USA
89 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

I haven't known about I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House for long, considering it wasn't announced until fairly recently, but based on early reviews and plot details it immediately grabbed me and I've been waiting impatiently for its release on Netflix.

The outstanding feature of this movie is that from beginning to end, first words to last frame, it is a powerfully scary experience. How it manages to be so foreboding in the beginning, before any of the real darkness has had time to settle in our minds, is thanks to deep, inherent fears: The fact that none of the things we're afraid of- ghosts; death; growing old and dying, in this instance- ever really go away, even in the sunlight. Even when the day streams through the windows in the background of a shot and the titular house is illuminated in its whiteness, it is still haunted. And so the main character sees something innocent, a bubble in the wallpaper or a kink in the carpet, and it's not what it is, it's actually a projection of all of her- and by extension all of the viewers'- innermost fears.

Despite the quietness with which this movie approaches the deep-seated fear propelling it, one of the most charming things about it is that it also seems keenly aware of its place as a horror movie. It reinvents the genre in many ways, but it also pays tribute- the references to the cliffhanger-ending trope, the relish it takes in cornering its main character a la classic, gothic horror, and most of all, the fact that the old woman who owns the house has the surname Blum- making her house a Blum House, like Blumhouse studios, one of the leading names in indie horror today.

I may have been making connections where there weren't any, but I kept catching bits and pieces in this that seem to allude to a lot of the horror being somehow inherently feminine, which is something interesting that I don't often see. There are only two men in this film and they could have been replaced with hints and implications. The very, very slight yellow wallpaper motif, the recurring emphasis on physical beauty, the horror that being held and holding yourself up to an impossible societal standard produces, as well as the horror of having even the slightest shadow of a threatening man in your home, as a woman... I felt that there was a language this movie uses that spoke to some deeper psychological element of stress produced by being a woman. I'd like to see these themes explored further in a horror film that didn't have such a predominantly man-filled crew as this.

There's been a movement lately- though I'm not sure if "movement" is the right term- of horror movies that refuse to play themselves out according to the standards of classic horror while not discarding the lessons of those older films entirely, and it seems like Netflix is helping to facilitate that movement a lot. Ultimately it's up to the filmmakers where and how they choose to distribute their work, and it remains that the further away from any type of studio something gets, the freer its parameters will be, but Netflix ushering in a new, extremely unique wave of genre films is something that excites me.

In so many words, I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House is an engaging and original experience that also happens to be a complete nightmare from start to finish. It will get under your skin, even your breathing will seem too loud and intrusive during its most suspenseful scenes. There's something bubbling under the surface of this film- something macabre enough to sustain it through every minute of its runtime.

Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary (2002)

directed by Guy Maddin
Canada
74 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

The distinguishing factor about this is that it's a ballet performance filmed as an antique silent movie, in the fashion of all of Guy Maddin's other silent works. It works well as a movie and it works well as a ballet, but I think this is one of the only times where Maddin's signature style of filmmaking actually gets in the way of the experience of it as a whole, because it uses a lot of narrow lenses with blurred edges and quick, edgy cuts in order to look older, and most of the time that works fine, but this time there's such a wealth of visual information that I wanted to have a moment or two to appreciate the sets but that moment never came. I suppose focusing on the dancers/actors was basically the point of this whole thing, but I could tell that there were nice backdrops that we never really got to explore.

Although I guess that particular narrow lens is Maddin's trademark thing. Like you've found a time machine but all it is is an old telescope through which you can see the past, and you're restricted to what you can see through the tiny, dirty peephole.

Zhang Wei-Qiang gives one of the most unique and charismatic performances as Dracula that I've seen thus far (largely due to the fact that he's a ballet dancer) and him and Tara Birtwhistle make up a power couple who absolutely dominate the screen. Birtwhistle only has the first half to herself before her character exits as per the original Bram Stoker story, but she's such a commanding presence and plays her role- one traditionally played out as a helpless, preyed-upon waif- with such power that I wished she could have stayed the whole film. There's good things abound in the second half as well, but the first is definitely more entertaining, even if it does dawdle a bit.

Speaking of dawdling and potentially unnecessary things, I'm hoping the xenophobia in this was meant as tongue-in-cheek, because if it was, it does a good job of throwing the spotlight on how the majority of horror tropes since the beginning of time have stemmed from our fear of the "other", but if it wasn't... well, you don't have to be a professional film critic to see the issues there. Given the drama with which it's presented ("IMMIGRANTS / OTHERS"), though, I find it difficult to imagine it being serious.

This is unusual for a Guy Maddin film, not just because of the ballet but because Maddin directing something based off of an already-established set of rules doesn't seem like his style. Which is why there seemed to be a good deal of fudging around the edges- I'm not sure if 100% of the original material was followed here, but if it wasn't, it's all the more fun for it. I definitely wouldn't recommend this to anybody only just starting to get into this director, but for a completionist or just an enthusiast of offbeat vampire films, it's pretty essential viewing in my opinion.

The Windmill Massacre (2016)

directed by Nick Jongerius
Netherlands
85 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
----

I wasn't expecting too much from The Windmill Massacre, and what I expected was more or less what I got. It takes its sweet time introducing us to the busload of tourists we are to spend the rest of the movie with (excepting those who get killed, of course) and it pushes a message that everybody's got flaws, but it doesn't have to mean we're bad people. Which... yeah, I'm thinking it too, "why is a random slasher trying to give us this lesson in philosophy". I didn't mind the backstories that much, but it's just that they're all written in the easiest way possible, the way that required the least effort when thinking up some facet or flaw to give these characters so that they feel more human. Knowing that these people have garbage in their past just like all of us do has the effect of making it even more upsetting whenever one of them gets killed, but I think I'd have preferred one or two characters with original backstories as opposed to our bus full of archetypes.

Several of the characters also have mental health issues, and I don't think this movie handles that quite as badly as it could have, and I appreciate the way it shows how any given busload of people can and probably do have mental problems and it's nothing to be ashamed of, but I was left wondering why they chose to introduce that aspect of it in the first place. Plus, it's not pushy in saying this, but there's a creeping feeling in my mind that this movie was trying to make acting out of trauma and fear out to be as bad as willfully killing the mother of your child, and there's some obvious issues with that.

Even though this wasn't all that it could have been, the fact remains that nobody has really touched the Netherlands (specifically Holland) as a backdrop for a horror film. If this is the film to usher in a wave of Dutchsploitation, I'm ready and willing to watch it. I'm sure that the first thing on anybody's mind when they saw this is how it basically isn't possible to make windmills scary, and thankfully that's not what this movie was going for. I think there's a lot of tongue-in-cheek intended by putting evil into the least likely place ever, and this is actually a good example of how to make a place-specific horror movie without really making fun of the place itself; just utilizing elements of local lore to create something that feels like it has genuine fondness for that particular area.

It's got problems with ableism as well as casual racism, and there's no excusing that, and overall, this wasn't even that great of a movie. But it's got good practical effects and a novelty to it that sets the table for further exploration. If you do end up watching this, though, do yourself a favor and shut it off before those last seven minutes hit, because the end is atrocious and I'd rather pretend it didn't happen that way.

The Booth (2005)

directed by Yoshihiro Nakamura
Japan
74 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

Starting with this, Pontypool, and its illegitimate child Dead Air, how many movies can we think of about radio DJs being menaced by the supernatural? It's still a fairly niche subject, but I personally am a big fan of ghosts over the airwaves or really ghosts inhabiting any form of technology- but specifically radios, because I find something extremely frightening in being able to hear a ghost speak loud and clear.

The Booth isn't any huge departure from the norm, but for a film industry that, in the public eye, still struggles to get past the typical onryō of The Ring and Ju-on, it's a breath of fresh air. It takes place during one night, when a radio host and his production crew are forced to broadcast from an old, creepy set while their current one is renovated, and of course this set turns out to be haunted. It's not your average ghost, though, it's got it out for the DJ personally and it's extremely unwilling to give up its (their?) grudge(s). There's a lot of different angles to the story, but all of them tie back somehow to the DJ himself, and it's really Ryutâ Satô's performance as this DJ that pulls the whole movie together, because he makes the main character interesting to watch despite the fact that this character is really kind of a terrible guy.

This took imagination and foresight, it's not just a cut-and-dry "somebody died here, now it's haunted" story. It almost seems to have to do more with the people who enter the building than the building itself, but that doesn't explain the full extent of it. It's a really interesting exploration of the divide between haunted place/haunted person and whether or not there actually is a divide between the two; whether one can cause the other or whether one influences the other, et cetera. It may not seem that deep at first blush but it's got weight behind it, a genuine story concerning the place of the paranormal in a fiercely modern age. Maybe a little too modern, because the rapid-fire pace made my head hurt after a while.

Overall it's just a good way to structure a movie. Introduce the main character slowly, but eventually have his backstory gel with an outside influence to become the driving force behind the plot. Make us interested in him not because he's any saint, but because things are happening to him that we inherently fear: Old mistakes come back to haunt us, retribution for crimes we committed with a clean conscience. I also like this because in the end it essentially comes down to women getting revenge on the men who brushed them aside like furniture, saying that no, you can't just insult your girlfriend or wife offhand and expect her to shut up and take it, these things build up. I guess that's a good way to put it. Supernatural buildup. Not one ghost but many co-conspirators.

Event Horizon (1997)

directed by Paul W. S. Anderson
USA
96 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

Event Horizon is the perfect movie to argue the case for a distinction between "scary" and "creepy", if you subscribe to the notion that the difference between the two isn't just a matter of semantics. "Creepy" films are ones that are too real, too suspenseful; they make you feel like something is behind you. But "scary" is much more visceral. The kind of visceral that Event Horizon specializes in, a level of brutality so far out there that it would seem totally ridiculous if we weren't too busy contemplating the implications of such a ferocious evil existing. Scary isn't blood and guts, or I guess a better way to put it would be that scary isn't just blood and guts: It's this movie, it's blood and guts to the tune of eternal cosmic doom.

I don't want to say that I'm surprised that it works so well, because it's not like it has anything to work for- it's got a budget of $60,000,000, it's one of the most famous sci-fi horror movies out there- but it's got such a disparity in the people who like it that it's kind of amazing. People like me who enjoy more subtle horror love it, people who aren't into horror movies at all love it, and of course it's gained a lot of popularity among Warhammer 50k fans. But for all the fame it's garnered today, it just barely fell short of making back its budget during its original theatrical run. 

In comparison to "better" movies, Event Horizon is clunky, rough-hewn; the dated CGI gets in the way whenever it's leaned on more heavily than practical effects. But it also has a strange beauty, like a lesser version of the intricacies of Alien, more metal than flesh. W. S. Anderson continually places his characters in the middle of unfeeling twisted steel and industrial parts, dwarfed by machinery. He creates an isolation in the shots of the gigantic, empty hallways of the Event Horizon as well as in the brutal expanse of space. The constant refrain is that the crew is not alone, and will never be alone again; but they still drift beyond salvation in the blind cosmos, their rescuers oblivious and incapable of fathoming their fates.

I think everybody can agree that the first two quarters of the film are the best, and once it hits the eyeball bits the quality begins to degrade, but it remains that for such a mainstream film this goes further into the depths of discomfort than most other films would dare to. It's always a good watch for when you feel open to giving yourself the willies in a way that won't actually make you afraid of anything in real life.

Medusa (1998)

directed by George Lazopolous
Greece
87 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

Despite coming first in... practically everything else, Greece does not have very many entries into the horror canon, unless you count some of Yorgos Lanthimos' stuff. They've got so much in the way of new weird cinema, but none of it ever bridges the gap into being what we'd typically call a horror film. So I had to look to the past to find Medusa, and even this feels like it's technically not horror, more just belonging to that wide wide umbrella of "genre film" as in "something that has fantastical elements and isn't a drama".

As the title implies, this is a modern retelling of the ancient Medusa myth. Without any knowledge of the myth, or if you separate it from the source material, it's actually a lot more interesting: A street tough and his weird friends investigate a rash of mysterious occurrences across Greece where statues of men are found wearing clothes, frozen into strange positions. Meanwhile another group of weirdos- vaguely bureaucratic weirdos, this time- seem to know something about the statues as well. Bad science is utilized to form the hypothesis that these statues are somehow living beings, and both groups of characters are On The Case™.

Unfortunately, like all modern-day retellings are doomed to eventually become, the movie is also ridiculously goofy. Greek dudes in leather jackets and tight blue jeans getting into bar brawls. Drinking and driving, like, literally drinking while driving the world's ugliest orange van. Perseus in this instance is an angsty young man with a bunch of earrings and some hangups about his childhood that don't have a purpose in the overall plot. There's a conspiracy of women, because there's always a conspiracy of women. I mean, at least the misogyny isn't at its most stomach-churning, but it's still fairly blatant how restricted the standard for women is- there's men of widely varying body types, they get into fights and act like standoffish louts and have backstories, but the women come in two flavors (evil and good) and one body type (skinny and conventionally attractive).

It wouldn't be so bad if anything happened that was remotely interesting, but this movie doesn't really do anything. I'm unfamiliar with the mythology, but is the original Perseus this much of an annoying brat? Because he's essentially useless in the film. Maaaaaybe he solves a mystery or two, but he comes upon them practically by accident, completely ambivalent about what path he takes. All he does is smoke cigarettes and brood. I get that the exaggeration inherent in mythology would translate weirdly to the screen- nobody can be a flawless, rock-solid hero the way men are in myth- but the main character sucks so much of the life out of this.

Still, though, against all odds, it's the tiniest bit endearing. Not through warm and fuzzy characters or fascinating plotlines or representation of anybody/anything that you don't typically see, but just through the fact that somebody took the time to turn an ages-old myth into a modern fantasy filled with the kind of flawed people you meet in everyday life. It's effortlessly good-looking, Greece's cracked plaster walls and dusty works of art providing a backdrop that would still be pretty even if it wasn't trying. All in all I can't say this was a good movie, but there's something in it that had potential.

A Page of Madness (1926)

directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa
Japan
anywhere from 58 to 78 minutes depending on who you ask
5 stars out of 5
----

The film industry of Japan, like everything else, obviously took some hits during WWII, and many films that could very well have been great were lost. Thankfully, even though it could use some cleaning up, a print of A Page of Madness survives, and shows that there was an excellent film wave present in in Japan during the 20s and 30s.

Other countries slathered actresses in white makeup with black around the eyes and called that emotional acting. They directed people in as dramatic a fashion as was humanly possible, removing some key element of relatability in the process and giving antique films that quality that makes them look "antique". But meanwhile, A Page of Madness has acting that's at a level even some films today can't reach. It is genuine, emotive, subtle, and so evocative that I found myself relating to characters despite them never having spoken a word, not even through title cards (that I wouldn't have been able to read anyway). Other countries focused on archetypes and what was relatable, while Teinosuke Kinugasa gave this movie depth through supremely unsettling imagery and a murky plotline.

I'm not even sure if it could technically be called horror- at least not at the time of its release- but it's easy to see how influential this has been on cinema across the world. It predates most of the aesthetic concepts that take after it and it stands with its feet firmly planted in the avant-garde; somehow expressive through the use of brutalism, concrete, metal, rain, flesh. The plot is notoriously nebulous and hard to pin down, probably because it seems to dwell at least partially in the unreality of the main character (or characters?)'s mind and takes a more symbolic approach to things. What's for certain is that even though the meaning may be lost on some viewers- myself included- this movie has a soul to express and it does an amazing job.

In a conceptual way, it feels appropriate to call this movie haunted, but not because of the years that have gone by since its production. This was haunted when it was made, somehow a thousand different specters have hitched a ride on it and come out whenever it's watched for the first or even the second, third, fourth, etc. time. The shadowy, shifty, nightmarish vision behind whatever message this movie was trying to express, and the sheer originality in it during a time when other countries were still unsteadily taking to their ability to produce movies, makes this one of my very favorite movies of the 1920s.

Coming Soon (2008)

directed by Sophon Sakdaphisit
Thailand
80 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

Coming Soon has a synopsis that seems to offer an entirely "different" horror film, claiming to eschew typical genre tropes and instead bring us a feeling of "arriving home alone and being struck by deja vu". I'm not too sure how much of this it actually delivers on, but it is somewhat better than your average horror; although that requires you to have a really, really low opinion of average horror.

The film opens within another film called "Revengeful Ghost" that's almost as good as the real movie itself. Perhaps better. It lays the groundwork for the main movie, explaining that it's a vaguely The Ring-type deal with a cursed film and a ghost who can come and get you when you watch it. I think the synopsis is purposefully vague in order to trick the viewer into not knowing what to expect, and it works- going in blind made me feel like the movie was less cliched than it actually was upon closer examination. Still, I'm surprised to see a lot of other reviewers say that the plot is overused, because even though it does seem to pull heavily from The Ring, there wasn't any point during the film where I thought "Oh, this is this type of movie". It remained basically unclassifiable for the majority of its runtime.

The mechanics of the haunting are really what made it interesting enough for me to confidently call it original. It isn't that great at following any set parameters in regards to how ghosts work or how curses work or how anything works, and that's a good thing. Sometimes somebody watches the film and then ends up inside it. Sometimes the ghost comes to menace people miles and miles away from her "point of origin". Sometimes things happen that are entirely within the main character's head. Maybe the overall shape of it got a little predictable, but the finer details evade expectations.

Just because it's unusual doesn't make it that great of a movie, though. It felt like either the director had a lot of really good ideas but no way to make them work together, and just threw them all in without regards to linearity, or they had no good ideas and scrambled so much to come up with things that it came out like this: Weird, disjointed, but unlike anything I've seen, occasionally not in a good way. The practical effects are good (though the CGI is not), but it lacks any ambiance due to a cheap and cheesy soundtrack and shoves jump scares in your face whenever the quality hits a lull. It has its merits and I don't feel confident completely trashing the thing, but I don't know if the good quite made it to outweighing the bad.

Byzantium (2012)

directed by Neil Jordan
Ireland
118 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

I've been watching a lot of atypical vampire movies this month, which is unintentional, but I always enjoy seeing old mythology turned on its head and poked at with a stick.

Byzantium certainly does poke the myth with a stick (no fangs!), and it takes the viewers on a tour of a place they can't navigate in the way the characters do. It exists in the underbelly of an underbelly, the underground hiding in plain sight mingled with the burnouts and the unfortunates and the grime and rust, where only the two main characters know their way around. It also takes these two characters to a place that not too many women are afforded access to- generally with women characters there's a lot of giving and no taking, even if it's unintentional; the role of women in society has been as a care-giver and never an independent for so long, and most media reinforces that point by default. But in this movie, Eleanor and Clara become something different, having total control over their lives, being able to traverse the city at night without fear for their safety because they harbor a secret that makes them stronger than most men.

The most impressive thing about this is that it's really two or even three movies all playing out at the same time depending on whose perspective you look at it from. Eleanor is living a life in hiding, head stuck firmly and deeply in the past, seeking out the things every 16-year-old girl wants but unable to grasp hold of them. Clara is the protector, on the run, living in modernity often too much for comfort. And then there's their backstory, the elaborately-designed period piece complete with vague allusions to romanticized consumption and other such illnesses that affected poor, pretty girls in the 19th century. That all of these come together with mostly the same aesthetic is surprising- its antique sensibilities somehow transfer over into the gilt wallpapers and floral carpets of the (dingy) 21st century Ireland (?) that the film calls its present day.

It's got leaps and bounds to go before it could become the feminist masterpiece that everybody seems to applaud it for being, but its depiction of women taking control of their own lives within an atmosphere that's strictly dominated by men is nuanced and powerful enough to be rare. I had a lot of problems with a lot of it, mostly with how the method of conversion to vampirism is something that had to be revealed to Clara by men, so that even though it liberates her, she wouldn't have been able to do it without men... it's nit-picking, but I wasn't fond of that. Although the way she takes what was unintentionally given to her by her captors and just absolutely runs with it, makes it her whole life, that's a pretty interesting portrayal of bucking the norms of a patriarchal society (of vampires).

I don't know. It's a movie. A good movie. It's not a feminist manifesto by any means, but parts of it are refreshing. Both Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan play their roles with subtle charisma and charm, and it's two hours that I was happy to spend within this little fantasy world.

Black Sheep (2006)

directed by Jonathan King
New Zealand
86 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

Sheep are not naturally frightening creatures. They are cute and the right size that even though they're wild animals, they don't quite read as predatory the way cows (also cute, though) or large deer (cute as well) can. Black Sheep understands this: It doesn't aim to make sheep scary, it aims to poke fun at the idea that sheep could ever be scary.

I think its poking fun might have actually gone a bit far, though, seeing as ridiculing somebody for their phobia the way this movie does with the main character and his phobia of sheep is never funny, and ridiculing animal rights activists also tends to rub me the wrong way. I never like to see a horror movie become even vaguely malicious towards anybody who's not doing anything wrong.

But anyway. The first thing I noticed about Black Sheep is that it's got unusually beautiful visuals for what I expected to be a schlocky cheesefest. I was wrong about the cheese and mostly about the schlock as well; it's still got a lot of comedic gore but it all somehow fits. If there is ever an appropriate time during a movie for multiple people to be dismembered and disemboweled by mutated sheep, this movie finds and takes advantage of that time. But the color palette all throughout was this kind of nostalgic yellowy-gold, which, coupled with the strangely playful soundtrack, created an atmosphere of... almost whimsy? I hesitate to say that because it's so subtle that it could very well have been a passing mental association on my part, but there's something about it that evokes memories of playing in fields in warm weather and enjoying the natural splendor of farmlands and countrysides the world over. Just try to tell all that to the demon sheep, though.

It's got pros and it's got cons, like anything. There's backstory to all of the characters, and they're portrayed using multiple angles that establish them as real people! But some of them are still caricatures. There's a girl in the main cast who never gets leered at or has her clothes removed! But she's the product of the screenwriters not taking feminism and environmental activism seriously. It flip-flops a lot, back and forth between the good and the "eh", but overall, it's actually far better than I'd expected, and the pros do outweigh the cons in the end. I suppose the best way I can sum up why this movie works where some others do not is this:

The horror-comedy is the favorite genre of low-budget productions and filmmakers with ideas but no resources because it's very easy to pretend that a film's shoddy appearance is intentional. It's easy to cover up cheapness with buckets of fake blood and slapstick humor. And a lot of those movies work, a lot of the really classic horror-comedies are these off-the-wall indie productions made for less than it costs to buy a DVD off Amazon, but where Black Sheep figures into the canon of low-budget horror comedy is something else: It actually tries to be a good movie, it incorporates everything it possibly can to create an end product that doesn't feel like it stoops to the gross-out due to a lack of other ideas. The special effects are amazing and there was clearly effort put into the thing as a whole. I'll always love trash cinema, but if you want to pretend for a moment that you have highbrow sensibilities and care about how your goofball mutant-animal flicks look, this is a good choice.

The Hands of Orlac (1924)

directed by Robert Wiene
Austria
115 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

The Hands of Orlac is a very interesting film because it provides possibly the first example of true body horror, as well as combining that aspect with other specific flavors of horror to create something as unique as the most creative horror films we praise today. It might be nestled into a particular film "wave", in a particular decade, using a particular style of filming, but this is really one of the earliest examples of a movie feeling totally new and independent that I can think of.

The body horror comes from the main plot, where Paul Orlac, a renowned concert pianist, loses his hands in a horrible car accident and has them replaced with the hands of a newly-deceased criminal. He begins to feel as though he's haunted by the previous owner of those hands, and the intrinsic horror of having a vital part of yourself replaced by something that isn't yours, combined with the horror of losing a part of your body in the first place, is where we get the body horror vibe from. It's not the kind of oozing, sticky, grotesque body horror as pioneered by Cronenberg and Yuzna and other directors who would come much later, but the psychological toll of Orlac's trauma makes for an experience of one's own body that is too foreign, and therefore panic- and horror-inducing, for comfort.

I'm intrigued by the concept of human body as haunted house, the idea that one part of yourself or even multiple parts can become infested with ghosts the way a structure can if its occupants suffer enough misfortune to imprint their spirits onto it. While exploring this particular niche, I am very aware that it could easily slide over into stigma against amputees and transplant recipients, however.

Being borne of the German Expressionist movement that was alive in the 1920s, the doomy-gloomy attitudes of The Hands of Orlac's various characters bleed into its aesthetic. It goes the route of depicting human fear and isolation through architecture- using repeated shots of a very small person surrounded by a very large space to enforce a sort of spectral presence, even when that presence is nothing more than anxiety manifested. This movie contains one of the most gorgeous examples of what we could probably call pre-CGI where a gigantic disembodied head looms over Orlac in his hospital bed, then becomes a grasping hand coming down to menace him. It may not have the outstanding costuming of Metropolis or the elaborate setpieces of Caligari, but it's something like the impending doom of Nosferatu with a vaguely neo-Victorian bent.

Conrad Veidt gets most of the credit due to being one of the most famous actors of his time, but for the first twenty or so minutes of the film, Alexandra Sorina shoulders a good deal of the action as Orlac's wife. She's not free by any means from the trappings of vintage misogyny, but seeing a woman in a relatively dynamic role was refreshing and surprising for this time period.

All in all, the length does present a bit of an issue, seeing as it literally drags out the slightest movements as long as humanly possible and could easily have been shaved down to 80-ish minutes, but this is an early masterwork as far as I'm concerned. With the soundtrack that accompanies the public-domain version of it available on archive.org, this is a movie that stands the test of time and remains foreboding and engaging.

La Casa Muda (2010)

directed by Gustavo Hernández
Uruguay
76 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

This is what the 2011 American film Silent House is a remake of. The big difference between the two- there really aren't many overall, the remake is practically shot-for-shot- is that while the remake claims to be "real time", the original actually is. It's all one single take, just a rolling chronicle of one fearful night (or 76 minutes of a night) full of danger and darkness. Supposedly it's based on a true story, and while there's not any actual evidence to prove that the initial events ever happened, can you imagine if every historical film was shot like this? Imagine a single-take movie about any political assassination, or any high-profile bombing, or any other famous historical event. This style has a lot of promise and I'm surprised more people don't go this route, although the technical difficulties involved may explain that.

Your enjoyment of this one is pretty much going to hinge, as it often does, on how much crying and whimpering you can tolerate. If you're one of the rather vocal subgroup of horror fans who can't handle girls running around dark houses screaming and crying and whining, this one is going to lose you about ten minutes in. I'm fine with all the running and screaming, but I also have an awful attention span, so this one did try my patience a little- but for what payoff? The ending, without spoiling anything, is unsatisfactory at best.

This might actually be one of the only times where I'm of the opinion that the American remake is better. When I weighed them against each other in my head, the original was more interesting and unique given the style of filming, and definitely much more genuine and raw, but the American version is better in a technical sense, yet can't escape that huge letdown of the ending. The original is better at pushing that feeling of something being terribly wrong in the house it takes place in, but when you get to the ending all that foreboding and terror is essentially a moot point.

I know it sounds like a cop-out to just say "Well they're different movies" when asked which is better, but I can't come up with a better answer than that. The authenticity of the original might trump its imitator, especially considering one is faking being a single take and one is not, but the unusual and relatively new format doesn't convey a story that's at all original, surprising, or particularly smart. Preferring the remake over the original isn't too severe of a cinematic crime considering that it was written and directed by the exact same people as the original, so I wouldn't feel that bad if the real deal didn't do anything for you. Definitely looking forward to this director's upcoming film Local God/Dios Local, though.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014)

directed by Ana Lily Amirpour
Iran
101 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

Bad City: A city entirely composed of underbelly, where the nights seem far longer than the days and the shadows provide excellent cover for shady dealings. No profession is an honest profession, everybody gets by as best they can and no one asks questions. This is where A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is set. Garnering praise upon its release for embodying a number of either firsts or almost-firsts- first vampire film to come out of Iran, one of the first if not the first Iranian horror film directed by a woman, and all-in-all a refreshing amount of mainstream overseas popularity.

I admire it first and foremost for being so unashamed to put style over substance occasionally. It obviously takes after noir films visually and a little bit in tone as well, but it doesn't solidly feel like 100% noir; more like something made by somebody who really, really loves noir. You can feel that there's genuine enthusiasm propelling it forward, and that almost matters more than overall quality in the end. It's a little bit ridiculous sometimes- the place is called "Bad City" which is undoubtedly a little bit cheesy- but it's hard to care when you're knee-deep in one of its many entrancing slow-mo dance scenes that are perfectly choreo- and photographed.

It deals very plainly with women's issues in both Iran specifically and all over the world, highlighting the sort of micro-aggressions men enforce every day and might not even be aware of, like assuming all women want to have children and simultaneously shaming women for being sexual while constantly expecting them to please men at the drop of a hat. The main character, billed only as The Girl, is the subversion to all this- she swoops in, dominating Bad City and taking down men when she wills it, going in the direction of her choosing and occasionally liberating other women from the confines of the men who seek to own them. It seems like it fumbles this concept a bit by including The Girl's romance with a man, but ultimately it's still markedly different from the traditional narrative, seeing as she still has total control in her relationship- when she allows herself to open up, good things happen, and everything is under her permission.

It's not The Deepest Film Ever, so I'm not going to analyze every last second of it and how it relates to women's rights, but just its existence and its defiant narrative is pretty triumphant, I feel. It still feels pretty first-time-director-y, but that's actually the best thing about it; how it feels like Ana Lily Amirpour was playing with ideas close to her heart and the first priority was getting those ideas out there whether it pleased critics or not. Any roughness around the edges adds to the punkish vibe and I hope that her future endeavors don't trade in freedom to abide by filmmaking conventions. I'm not too worried about that, though. Refusing to play by the rules and redefining those rules at their roots is the defining, defiant quality of A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night.

30 Days of Night (2007)

directed by David Slade
USA
113 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

The vampire hater's vampire movie, or more accurately the vampire lover-who-wants-to-see-the-genre-be-all-that-it-can-be's vampire movie.

I've noticed that the more atmospheric and tense any form of media within a certain subgenre gets (usually zombie, vampire, or werewolf), the further it's perceived as diverging from the concept of a "standard model" zombie/vampire/werewolf film, which is interesting because it seems to imply that there's something about these particular tropes that's inherently not atmospheric and tense. Is there some apex of violence/gore necessary to classify something as belonging solidly to the zombie/vampire/werewolf genre? Why is our perception of these movies linked to blood and guts? Why are more cerebral, slow films always seen as a divergence from the norm?

Someday I'm going to make a separate post about this. But for now:

30 Days of Night does indeed ramp up the "atmospheric and tense" factor while also keeping the vampires vampires- although it could be argued that these aren't vampires at all, since there's verbal acknowledgement from one of the characters that vampires "don't exist". Whatever you call these creatures, they're preying on the citizens of Barrow, Alaska, who are greatly mismatched. In fact, the end message of this film basically implies that humans are just physically incapable of fighting them. The approach to eliminating them once and for all is very interesting.

More than anything else, this movie is extremely elegant. There's something about it that speaks of enormous restraint and choreography, even in the smallest and most unconscious of movements- the drawing and usage of a sword (which, now that I'm thinking about it, why did anybody have a sword in the first place?), the color of the blood against the snow, the implications of some fundamental physical otherness in the body language of the vampires... it's all so tightly-made that I can tell this will stick in my mind for a long time as possibly one of the best vampire movies I've ever seen. I haven't read the source material, but I can imagine that the kind of violence usually found in graphic novels is not compatible with the kind of deliberate violence in this movie, so I can only take that to mean the film's gorgeous aesthetic is totally original.

And the vampires- the vampires. Good lord, these are some of the best vampires I've ever seen put to film. There's an uncanniness to them that you rarely ever see in your typical pointy-fangs, pale-skin vampires. Those vampires were somebody once- these may have been people at one point, but something in the conversion process sucked all the human elements out of them so that at the end they resemble nothing but a monster wearing people clothes. And their language, that got me enthusiastic as well: Its resemblance to native Alaskan languages, implying perhaps that they mutated into having their own dialect due to hunting native peoples so much, and just the syntax and the fact that it actually sounds like a legitimate language instead of gobbeldigook... these actors were very well-directed but also frighteningly good at creating mannerisms and motions not attributable to anything found naturally in humans. This is a vampire movie for when you want to geek out about vampire taxonomy. Very very satisfying to watch.

The Strange World of Coffin Joe (1968)

directed by José Mojica Marins (Zé de Caixão)
Brazil
76 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
----

I have a complicated relationship with Coffin Joe's movies, because his entire schtick is that he's an awful, immoral, misogynistic, bigoted, repulsive person, and I hate him, but I still keep watching his films. It's obviously a deliberate persona he puts on, since if there was a dude going around laughing in the face of everything that's good and righteous and also just straight-up torturing and murdering people, we'd probably know, but a lot gets lost in the translation from Portuguese to English and thus I think his whole thing comes off more serious than it's probably intended to be.

The Strange World of Coffin Joe is actually one of his better movies, which is probably tied directly to the fact that he's not in it all that much. It's an anthology, and in the first two segments he's not there at all, he only makes an appearance in the introduction and in the final segment. The second is particularly good, although still nasty thematically- from the looks of it, somebody should have told Coffin Joe to shut up once in a while and perhaps his movies would have been overall better.

I guess the thing that keeps me coming back is that his campaigns against everything wholesome and nice just don't work. It's obvious from the things his cult following says about his movies that nobody actually buys into his philosophy, they just like his movies because they're as sleazy as possible and it's kind of amusing to watch that. You never see detailed take-downs of his opinions because they are their own take-downs. I mean, his ego is so huge that this movie opens with an honest-to-god hymn about how Coffin Joe is the baddest dude to have ever lived.

As far as niches go, Zé's pretty much got his cornered, but I don't know if his message is as potent as he thinks it is. People do want to see the things he puts in his films (to an extent), and for somebody who claims to be the very definition of a non-conformist, giving people what they want to see sounds suspiciously like conforming to expectations.

So, is there any value whatsoever in his extensive and homogenic filmography? Not really. They're not good movies, plain and simple, and for whatever reason the only surviving prints of them seem to be in the worst possible quality a film (not from the 1920s or earlier) could be in. You're probably better off staying away from these, but I think I can at least partially understand why people are so fascinated with Coffin Joe's particular brand of awfulness.

Witchfinder General (1968)

directed by Michael Reeves
UK
86 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

I've always been fond of Witchfinder General's tagline: "LEAVE THE CHILDREN HOME ...and if YOU are SQUEAMISH STAY HOME WITH THEM!!!!!!" Along with the image of a gruesome-looking skull on the poster, it promises the viewer a certain kind of gore that is never actually shown onscreen, as was the fashion during this era; taglines that scream at you, posters that gross you out, and movies that are just kind of boring.

Witchfinder General is a fairly brutal film about a very brutal period in English history in which the "proper authorities" could just go ahead and torture anybody they wanted if they insisted that person was a witch. In this film anybody of any gender can be a witch, but in reality and in 99.9% of all witch-burning-related media, the problem is a solely misogynistic one, falling back on nothing more than the reassurance that any woman seen veering out of the territory of her "womanly duties" is a problem, and must be dealt with.

I don't want to spoil anything, but just so everyone else knows what I didn't- this isn't a movie about witches in the way that you might think, it's got no supernatural elements. It's about the character Matthew Hopkins, a man so pompous and above it all that his wish spells instant death for whomever happens to cross his path. In the true inquisitorial style, one doubts strongly whether he actually has grounds to believe any of his victims are witches, or whether he simply derives pleasure from torturing folks.

Despite its content, it's not a particularly effecting film. It doesn't have that feeling of being harrowing, you don't really get absorbed in it too much, it's just the kind of thing you look at and think "yuck". It doesn't have the cheesiness that the majority of period films dating from the 60s and 70s had, which was surprising, but there's not quite enough content to really sink your teeth into

The majority of the misogyny depicted was purposeful; I think the film was very aware of how against women the whole witch-burning craze was. But it itself has a problem with misogyny, because even though it attempts to depict women as the wronged party, it also doesn't do anything to uplift them from the roles they typically play in any film, TV show, book, and the collective imagination of the general public. Their roles are to fall in love with men, maybe have sex, maybe tend to some animals or a garden or cook food or something, and eventually die horribly while screaming in agony. Yeah. This doesn't take its women anywhere that could remotely lead to their uplifting or liberation, despite making a case against witch trials.

Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty good film- handsomely photographed, very nicely costumed, and, again, not cheesy. But the wow factor isn't there. By the end I was pretty bored. I enjoy films set during this particular time period and this was one of the better ones in terms of visual style, but it doesn't portray its characters with much nuance or grace.

What We Become (2015)

directed by Bo Mikkelsen
Denmark
85 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

The zombie movie is dead. It's been dead for a long time now, and it's only appropriate that this death means filmmakers who are genuinely interested in the genre, genuinely have new ideas for it, can bring it back to life. What I mean by this is that the "typical" zombie movie, the one with no distinguishing features other than the presence of the undead, the one that never gives you any kind of background or any reason to care at all- that's dead. Something like What We Become that inserts enough intrigue back into the genre to make it worth watching, that's resurrecting it.

What We Become takes place in a small, sophisticated, upper-class Danish community. I got some vibes like what Romero was doing in '78 with Dawn of the Dead- zombies as the byproduct of capitalism, all the fear of outsiders and the dirt and grime the people in the little community were fighting against coming back to rear its ugly head. The illusion of safety that affluence brings, the feeling of being above it all, all of this brought to its knees and forced to fight for its life. Even I'm not sure if I actually believe this interpretation, though- it seems too sympathetic towards the characters to have been making fun of them like this, but the symbolism is there even if it isn't direct.

What surprised me- in a good way- was the almost total absence of blood up until the very ending. That's another part of the "dead" side of the zombie genre: Buckets and buckets of totally unnecessary blood, limbs ripping and heads rolling and shots fired and all of that mess. I am not opposed to gore at all, I can enjoy some nastiness; my reason for applauding the restraint of What We Become is boredom, not squeamishness. I'm just glad to see a movie that knows it can be potent without resorting to flinging gore everywhere before it absolutely has to.

It isn't a deconstruction, it's not a total re-invention, it's somebody with an idea and a mastery of pacing out your film and giving your characters a reason to live. The establishment of a good family dynamic among the main characters- well, not a good one, they're pretty dysfunctional- and the weight behind them, the little motifs like the skateboard, the fireworks, the parents' different ways of showing love for their youngest daughter- that's what I want to see in the meantime, before the zombies invade. I want to see characters that feel like real people, even if their development takes a long time and is what some would consider "boring". The majority of movies show ten minutes of characters kissing to make the audience feel like they have something to live for, but that's so played out by now that it just feels empty. Could have definitely done without the eldest son wooing his girlfriend by spying on her (hint: no girl will ever go for this in real life, nor anyone of any gender for that matter) but I guess that's still some added depth to his and her characters.

Also, huge epilepsy warning for the opening and closing credits, which are filled with flashing lights. If you skip ahead to about 2:15 in the beginning and then turn it off at the end right at the final shot of the city, you won't miss anything at all.

Los Inocentes (2013)

directed by Miguel S. Marín, Laura García, Marc Pujolar, Gerard Martí, Marc Martínez
Spain
68 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
----

A note about the name again: This is not an April Fool's-themed movie at all, I think it's just titled that way to be more understandable to a non-Spanish audience. It takes place on the 28th of December, which is the Spanish equivalent of April Fool's. For this reason I'll be going by its original title of Los Inocentes since it seems silly to call it something it's not related to.

I can't say my hopes were all too high for this one, seeing as it's one of those horror movies where a bunch of unrealistically attractive teens get themselves into trouble. The best I can say about it is that it isn't quite as terrible as it could have been. Objectivity comes into play there, too- since I'm about the same age as the people in this movie, I can probably tolerate them better than older people, and I'm just bad at watching movies in general because I come at them from a place of automatically feeling sympathetic towards the characters and most of the time with things like this I just want to see the dumb happy teenagers all make it out in one piece.

The best way to describe this is "inept". There's a scene where a character gets swarmed by bees (ghost bees?) that is obviously, obviously the same image (or maybe same one or two images) of a bee repeatedly copy/pasted over everything. There's a scene where a girl takes the shirt someone else has given her off of her bloody leg wound, removes her own shirt, and places it on the wound for no reason whatsoever. It's full of these little things, just this ridiculous cliches that get on your nerves after having seen them a thousand times and yet somehow don't seem as bad as outright badness. It's just ineptitude, just a lack of knowledge or resources or probably both.

Unfortunately, though, see all those names up there? It took five people to direct this mess. Five people to direct 68 minutes of teens getting killed and making sex jokes. And besides the lack of talent, it has a plot I hate- I hate the "bullying victim comes back from the grave for revenge" rhetoric, because it implies that there's a threshold for this stuff; that there's a point where the bullies become as innocent as the victim, and it implies through that that there's no threshold for "it was just a prank, bro!"- that everything is a joke and, if someone ends up getting killed, well, it was an innocent accident. There's a way that the amateurish quality of this film could have become endearing, but the plot squanders all that disappointingly fast.

Dracula in Pakistan (1967)

directed by Khwaja Sarfraz
Pakistan
103 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----
A quick note on the title- "Dracula in Pakistan" seems to be colloquial, as Zinda Laash translates to "living corpse", but as it's better known by its English title, that's what I'll keep using.

Some background: This is is often cited as Pakistan's first horror film, and due to heavy censorship laws, it was pulled from distribution for a while, then given Pakistan's equivalent of an X-rating. It's shockingly tame in comparison to what we're used to over here in the US and in other countries, with even the neck-biting absent due to regulations, but it's still a lot of fun.

Introducing the film is a title card ruminating on the place of humankind in regards to immortality, basically chastising us for daring to seek eternal life, et cetera. From this you might have already guessed that this bears very little resemblance to Bram Stoker's grandaddy book, source of all Dracula-related films, yet in the title cards it is attributed to Stoker nonetheless. Possibly some kind of weird copyright law could have demanded that they stuck that in there, despite heavy deviations from the story? You could take it further and say that this has no relation to the core of Dracula mythology at all, since Vlad Dracul/Vlad Tepeš is not a plot element, but in the end it's semantics. This is a film of its own and I really can't find any fault with it, seeing as it seems like it accomplishes exactly what it set out to do.

Our story begins with a typical mad scientist in his lab-slash-house (?) toiling away at discovering the elixir of life. He eventually mixes it correctly, and after some fizzing and popping, imbibes of it himself- as you do- and dies for a moment or two before coming back as a bona-fide vampire. What happened to him while he was dead to turn him into a vampire is a mystery, but there's no turning back for him or for any of his victims- unless, of course, they can be taken care of before he bites them a second time. Gotta figure out some way to save those pretty girls he bites, right?

This might not be the most nuanced film, or the most frightening film, or even the truest it could have been to the source material. But how many Dracula movies have Dracula get into a high-speed car chase, feature the song "La Cucaracha" for no apparent reason, and have a full-on interlude with girls dancing and singing on a beach? The dance sequences are not just restricted to the interlude, either- the whole thing is rife with musical numbers, and I wouldn't change it for the world. It might get to be a bit overlong by the time all is said and done, but shaving anything off that runtime would inevitably mean shortening the singing and dancing, and this movie just wouldn't be what it is without all that.

I find multicultural Dracula to be a spectacular idea: Have somebody from every willing country re-interpret the myth, throw in as many traditional songs and dances as they can, really put their own spin on it. Regional folklore is always the most entertaining horror fodder, but myths like that of the vampire that may have had an originator but that have grown so large now that every country can lay claim to them if they wish, that's what I want to see different countries take on.

The Canal (2014)

directed by Ivan Kavanagh
Ireland
92 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

It's easy for a horror movie to have an atmosphere. Even the cheapest slasher flick can have a cohesive "vibe" to it by utilizing the same tropes every other slasher uses. It's much more difficult to find a movie like The Canal here where not only is it dripping with atmosphere, but that atmosphere feels like nothing that's been done before. This is genuinely scary around every turn, it grabs you and gets under your skin and doesn't go away easily, even after you've finished watching.

If you've ever lain awake in bed at night staring up at your ceiling, you know how after a while you can sort of psych yourself out and start thinking you're seeing shadows and movement that isn't really there. That's exactly how this entire movie feels. It's being sure you heard a noise, turning your head to look at where it came from, and seeing nothing. It's hearing the murderer's footsteps and waiting in fear for him to come around the corner, sure that any second now he'll jump out at you, but he never comes. This isn't to say the movie feels like it's lacking a payoff, or that it keeps you waiting for something that doesn't end up happening, it's just that that's the whole thing; it feels like those moments of tension before a jump scare captured and stretched out for 90 minutes.

As much as I love movies that try to redefine what a ghost is, sometimes I'm just in the mood for a more "traditional" ghost story. This movie blends old and new themes, clearly establishing that the ghosts are ghosts in the classical sense of the word, but also establishing that they can go beyond the capabilities they're usually shown as having. They can hurt people and manipulate them to hurt others as well. These aren't ghosts that are content with staying in the background and banging pots and pans together, nor are they ghosts with something to prove, they're ghosts that know that they have power over the living and are fully aware how influential that power makes them. Victorian post-mortem photographs and other such antique atrocities have become popular as of late (Miss Peregrine's, anyone?) and as such have lost some element of their inherent sadness and scariness, but The Canal brings that feeling back even though a lot of the post-mortem material used is most likely staged.

I don't think I've seen any horror movie use sound so effectively since Berberian Sound Studio. The score is absent in the most frightening moments, leaving only inhuman whispers and the distorted squeaks and squeals of projection equipment as a backdrop to its scares. Quietness in this film is as punishing as a sudden loud musical sting, and though soundtrack can sometimes be the most important thing in a horror film, I do wish more horror directors would dare to just shut things up once in a while.

It's got its problems, even though I know it sounds like I'm basically blindly praising it here- it edges towards gratuitousness and pointlessness occasionally- but all in all it was refreshing. This is actually my second or third time watching it because I always felt like I missed something about it that others seemed to be seeing, and this time I finally understand what makes it such a potent film. As a tribute to antique ghost stories and primal parental fears, this feels new and exciting.

Genuine (1920)

directed by Robert Wiene
Germany
44 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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I feel like whenever I review a silent horror film, I always end up talking more about the era as a whole than the movie in specific. Normally I'd feel bad about that, but in the case of Genuine it doesn't bother me too much, considering that the whole plot is... pretty gross, to say the least.

It's a bit difficult to discern the finer details given that the original print of the film was supposedly 88 minutes long and the surviving print is half that, but it's still crystal-clear how racist it is. At the fringes of the storyline, not given names or even the vaguest of redeeming traits, are some random black and sort of Middle Eastern-ish men who only serve to briefly get in the way of our protagonists, those knights and ladies in shining, white armor. The title character (yes, her name is Genuine) was apparently a high priestess of some also unnamed religion, kidnapped and sold at a slave market until a tottering old white man who looks like Nosferatu came to rescue her. The original title of the film alludes to her being some sort of vampire, but that must have been addressed further in the missing 46 minutes of film, because what we see of her is just this weird childlike seductress whose only "magic" appears to be attributed to her "feminine wiles".

This is a dispatch from the dustier depths of German Expressionism, meaning the sets are extravagantly gorgeous and the costuming is twice that. This was actually made by the same director as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari at the same time, but somehow that got famous while this got lost. It's disappointing to learn that the director of one of the earliest horror movies was also a big old racist, but I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, considering. So, yes, this is half the size of Caligari fitted with no less of the aesthetic, but no matter how pretty it is, everything comes back to the fact that it's racist. It's not the kind of thing that can be brushed aside as a product of its time- it's all central to the plot.

The motive behind this seems to be along the lines of old-timey circus sideshows with some woman dressed in rags kept in a cage and advertised with "See! The Very Last Voodoo Priestess- Young Men Beware!! She May Enchant Your Minds!!!!!" or something similarly hokey. It's interesting just how little remains in today's cinema from this particular period in time, although the deliberacy and slowness of the actors' gestures and movements call to mind the puppet-like quality found in many of the films of my very favorite director, Sergei Parajanov. We've mostly moved towards a goal of perfect realism in film, whereas during this time period sets were painted so as to be as unrealistic as possible. It would be interesting to see a full-scale revival of German Expressionism but I don't think the same things can be done today as were done in the 20s.

The Woman in Black (2012)

directed by James Watkins
UK
95 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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I didn't have high hopes for The Woman in Black seeing as it lays on several themes that I am not fond of, specifically the treatment of the Victorian era as creepy by default, which is why I was pleasantly surprised that this is a very good movie that evaded my expectations at nearly every turn.

It is dripping with Victorian-ness, but I can't say that it mishandles it at all. The era depicted in this movie is one of trauma, one where little girls die tragically from swallowing lye, where random fires break out, where any number of poor, innocent peoples' children die because of terrible accidents. No one in this movie looks well. It's fraught with the kind of vaguely romanticised English tragedy that translates to film so well. The most pivotal death in the movie and the driving force behind the titular Woman (which is not a spoiler, because like I said, titular) occurs when a family's carriage sinks into a marsh as the tide comes in over a causeway, and that carriage being swallowed up in the muck is such a uniquely dreadful image that it really sticks with you for the whole of the film.

For a very mainstream, big-budgeted movie, it actually has a lot of nuance and depth to it that I didn't expect. The driving force behind virtually every horror story in existence is fear of the unknown, but that fear can come with a multitude of variations, most often either the unknown of the past or the unknown of the future. This particular story deals with both of those "unknowns"- what could happen once the past reaches the future, e.g. how the memory of a deceased loved one will transform with the passage of time. Time is such an important factor in this movie in more ways than one- not only is it a period piece, but inside the movie itself the villain lurking in the shadows is the ravages of time, the endless forward surge of that force which pulls children from their parents and settles dust on deaths that, though they exist in the past, we may not yet have accepted.

The second factor in the horror of this film is guilt. Guilt in this context is almost as strong an emotion as fear, because it's also about as subjective as fear is; no matter the reality of a situation, if you've placed blame, especially on yourself, there is nothing that can get you to change your mind. I wasn't expecting these plot points to be here, I was expecting sets that were pretty yet empty and cheap costumes that were only there to get a rise out of viewers. I imagine a good deal of this depth is due to the quality of the source material, which I admit I haven't read yet, and I'm curious about whether or not the original 1989 TV movie adaptation has the same tone and atmosphere.

I just keep coming back to the image of that carriage sinking in the mud. It's so horrific and it's something that we never even consider today given how far technology has progressed since the days of carriages. I guess it instills the same instinctive fear that being submerged underwater in a car does, a mixture of claustrophobia and the immediate, urgent panic of being able to physically see the place that could potentially become your coffin.

The only reason I wouldn't give this movie five stars is the repeated use of jump scares. Honestly, this was way too good to keep relying on such cheap tactics, and it was more than certainly scary enough to get by without them.

Mystics in Bali (1981)

directed by H. Tjut Djalil
Indonesia
86 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

And so we have come to Mystics in Bali.

For anyone who doesn't know, this movie is notorious for being poorly made and extremely bizarre. To say there are discrepancies in the plot is being generous, but in an ideal world where everything is comprehensible, it goes like this: An American woman travels to Indonesia with her Indonesian boyfriend and seeks to learn the local black magic, called Leák. Why she thinks it's a great idea to mess around with this stuff isn't clear, but she makes mention of having learned Haitian voudou already, so this girl obviously has some issues with self-preservation instincts. Eventually, to absolutely no one's surprise, the Leák Queen tricks her with her own agenda in mind, and turns her into a Penanggalan against her will.

You could fill books by describing exactly how ridiculous this movie is. During the scenes that needed assistance from rudimentary 1981 CGI (which are few, thankfully), the video quality is blatantly mismatched to the rest of the film. The American actress doesn't know how to make facial expressions. At one point there seems to be police car sirens offscreen despite the fact that they're in the jungle. The dialogue is probably the funniest thing about it and this is one of the only instances where dubbing makes it better. "But- this means I am now a murderer!" "Yeah."

Despite all this, despite it being so bizarre and outlandish and not well-made at all, this is a movie that I immediately loved with all my heart upon watching it. Because even with its failures, even with its awful characters, poor pacing, and rubbery (though awesome!) practical effects, you- or at least I, and hopefully you- cannot in any good conscience call this movie bad, and here is my reasoning as to why:

With American genre cinema constantly churning out films by white, US-born directors that mangle and misrepresent the myths and traditions of the larger world, Mystics in Bali is one of the rare good ones. It might not have the nuance or aestheticism of films that Western audiences are used to seeing, but there's tons of culture wrapped up in an endearingly weird package. It's one of the most well-realized films about folklore that I've ever seen, too- you can imagine that there's some movies where people sit down and say "Man, there's really no way we could pull that off on camera", but that concept seems to be foreign to the filmmakers behind Mystics in Bali. Women turning into hogs and snakes in 1981, when the special effects tools of the day were barely enough to create realistic blood? Why not? A floating head with internal organs dangling from its neck, going around menacing random people? We can do that too. Even the opening credits are a rich display of traditional Indonesian monster costumes, and the entirety of the film is backed by a soundtrack that makes me wish this movie had been taken care of more instead of banned and shoved in a metaphorical shoebox for 35 years.

Please, with all the cultural appropriation in horror, watch this movie. Get the mythology right from its source. It's in the public domain, so it's on archive.org for free.

Wilczyca (1983)

directed by Marek Piestrak
Poland
98 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Wilczyca is one of Poland's most famous horror movies, and for good reason. I was expecting it to come with all the trappings of the 80s, but evidently the embarrassment of that decade failed to reach Poland, or perhaps didn't impact it as hard as it did other places. I've mentioned this before, and I know it's not a good bias to have, but as somebody born well after the 80s I can't really connect with older films and I tend to not be able to judge them on the same criteria as modern ones.

That being said, Wilczyca is unusually good for its era. There's such effort and depth to it that the only thing I can compare it to is more recent releases. I can see it alongside shifty, shadowy, psychological horror films that have come out this year; the obvious lack of resources w/r/t fake blood and gore does hinder the realism a bit but it's more than solid enough to hold its own in spite of that. It's got such an aesthetic to it, such gothicism, but mixed with something more, something unique to 19th-century Poland... a country smothered in both snow and politics, alcohol and Hussars, riding horses through the stark and endlessly white landscape and trying to keep away from the things that lurk in the night. Folktales and the lightest hint of sorcery. This kind of deep dark doomed atmosphere breeds horror particularly well.

You do have to wait a while to get to the actual werewolf bits, and in the meanwhile it can be a bit of a chore to get through because it's got a pretty heavy focus on politics and whatnot. 98 minutes does seem a little much for something that's approx. 35% werewolves, 65% men with extremely thick mustaches talking about patriotism. But eventually I found that I was 66 minutes in and it was like the movie was enveloping me, it was like I was in the middle of this frosty Polish landscape with characters who I knew personally and who I could relate to, despite never having experienced (and there not even being anybody left alive today who has) that era and climate.

The backbone of the whole thing is unfortunately rooted in misogyny, but there's a peculiar sort of power that comes if you take things out of context and assign a viewpoint to them that is separate from what the filmmakers intended. Through its original lens, the main character is made out to be an innocent man whose dead wife- whom he fully admits to calling a bitch and essentially forcing to have a shoddy, 19th-century self-abortion- is hounding (heh) for no reason. The film wants you to forget this- it wants you to forget what he did to her, that in her eyes he's nothing more than a villain. But it is possible not to forget, and to apply your own perspective to this that evokes a kind of strength that can only come from a woman.

She may die within the first ~10 minutes, but Maryna is a spectre that haunts the entirety of the film. The further the main character runs, the less distance is left between him and her revenge. In being depicted as this evil, vengeful character, she gets a freedom that women in horror are hardly ever afforded. Because of this it is nearly impossible to actually lay blame on her as the film would have you do. And "Not a bitch, but a she-wolf is what I'll be to you" is a potent line that doesn't deserve to be forgotten by the rest of the cinematic canon.

Dominium (2013)

directed by ??? (I can't find the name of the director anywhere! If you know, feel free to comment)
Puerto Rico
75 minutes
2 stars out of 5
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Nearly all of Dominium's problems (aside from it having little to no plot whatsoever) can be traced back to the fact that its three main characters are awful teenage boys doing awful teenage boy things. There are ways it could have deflected this; awful MCs don't always have to make for an awful movie, but there's no attempt made to rectify all the lost quality that gets sucked away by the leads. Just the casual misogyny alone is hard to stomach- you kind of get used to seeing it after watching enough movies, you barely even register when somebody makes an offhanded comment about a woman because it's so prevalent in media, but there's so much of it in this movie that it's nauseating after a while.

The film centers around three friends who make a paranormal documentary as a school assignment. It's introduced in Blair Witch "this footage has been cut to film length" style, though there's no mention of who did the editing and why, and that opening screen when it introduces itself is the beginning of a barrage of found-footage clichés, gripes, and grievances that make me tired of defending the subgenre as often as I do.

As with most things, the movie gets much better when they put a girl in a lead role. The difference between when it's three teen boys horsing around and when the girl comes in is ridiculous: She gives everything structure, she directs where and how the documentary should be made, and she's not the greatest actress, but good lord, at least she can say a sentence without getting into a fight or making sex jokes. Unfortunately her presence leads to a weird love triangle later on down the line which is... not exactly an essential tool when you want to make a movie that seems the slightest bit realistic.

There's the tiniest gleam of a good movie in here somewhere, mostly because of the saving grace that is that girl character, but the three guys bury that gleam so far in the ground it might as well be lost. For all of its misogyny and unoriginality, though, I do have to give it credit for being one of the only horror movies I've ever seen that acknowledges how terrible it is to go stomping around in abandoned buildings that are the only shelters homeless addicts have.

Modus Anomali (2012)

directed by Joko Anwar
Indonesia
87 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I've actually tried to watch this movie once before, but I fell asleep a bunch of times and ended up missing the vital parts so it was pretty much a lost cause. I wish I could say I understood it better the second time around, but I didn't- objectively it makes no sense whatsoever, it's not my fault for not getting it, it's genuinely weird and puzzling beyond what it needed to be.

It's not like I didn't like it, because I did. There was something about how unconventional it is that appealed to me, it was refreshing to see something completely dispense with the trappings of whatever genre it aims for (honestly, I can't tell what that genre was with this one) and go a totally original route. And it's not "weird" in a surreal sense, like the way that a David Lynch film is weird; it has a somewhat linear narrative and the things that happen aren't physically impossible or improbable, it's just... put together wrong. Like the director was trying for something but missed the mark and ended up with this instead.

The film opens in possibly the most dynamic way a film can open: Our main character punches his way out of the ground, emerging from the earth into a jungle somewhere with no idea how he got buried alive or where he is. Most of the first half (maybe first 3/4ths) of the film is spent following him running around this jungle, half looking for clues and half avoiding what seems to be a mysterious pursuant. That first half-to-three-quarters is good, it's got a good thing going with the way it subverts typical home invasion tropes, but after a while it wears out its welcome, and a while after that.... Something should have happened about thirty minutes into this movie that never happened, and any action is delayed until the finale, by which time the viewer is left totally confused and expecting a scenario that doesn't end up playing out the way they thought.

I mean, the main character literally receives a box with "THE TRUTH" written on it and it doesn't give us any answers.

Somewhere in here is a very good film, with good acting and handsome outdoorsy cinematography, but I don't know where that film may be. Writing this all out is making me feel like I'm being overly harsh, so I want to emphasize that this isn't bad at all- just confusing. Other movies, I might up and quit after getting most of the way through them and not getting any clues as to what in the world was happening, but something about this one made me want to stick with it. That I did stick with it may not have amounted to any payoff at the end, but hey, it's about the journey, not the destination. Especially when the destination turns out to be a bit of a cop-out.

Wolfblood (1925)

directed by George Chesebro, Bruce Mitchell
USA
68 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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Wolfblood: It's not the most well-known film, it's not the most well-loved film, and it's hardly even horror, but it is the oldest surviving werewolf movie. However, unless you're either interested in cinema of the 1920s or a werewolf completionist, I don't think I could recommend this, because to be blunt it's very, very boring.

To expand on it barely being horror- The state of the horror genre was pretty different in the 20s, largely governed by period pieces and gothicism, but all of the movies that have survived since then and garnered a reputation for being solidly in the genre have been... well, solidly in the genre. Wolfblood is, for the most part, about a love triangle between a city girl and two men working at logging companies in the forests of Canada, and the werewolf stuff is just kind of a weird aside used when the writers felt it necessary to put one of the main men in peril so the woman could have somebody to fret over. I'm not sure how this was marketed to audiences back when it was first released, but it probably took people quite off-guard since it's essentially a very dry romance until suddenly some guy gets a blood transfusion from a wolf.

I don't think it's easy for movies from the early days of film to be really, definitely "bad", because due to the fact that making a movie took a lot of money and effort back then, the only people who had access to the equipment tended to be people with big ideas and clear visions as well as deep pockets with which to execute their concepts. It's not like it is today where people can rent cameras and make awful movies with their awful bros. But for those same reasons, Wolfblood and its ilk lack a lot of authenticity- Everything is exaggerated and staged, there's none of the fluidity and nuance that marks what we would call a good acting performance today. You have to put it all in context, though, because these are most likely not points that were at the forefront of anybody's mind in 1925.

I will say that this is a particularly promising candidate for a modern remake, which is not something I think too often. It touches on some things towards the end that get really close to making it a deeper and more interesting film than it was; the horror of the lead character upon realizing he is now essentially half-feral, those handsomely-shot double exposure scenes of phantom wolves, other very light body horror... if this had been done today with the right equipment and staging, I could see it being an uncomfortable psychological thriller. And maybe if somebody remade it, they could get rid of all that weird derogatory nonsense against French-Canadians and Native Americans.