Shock (1977)

directed by Mario Bava
Italy
95 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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This movie feels very little like other giallo films from its era, or even like other films Mario Bava had directed. This is mostly because the plot is much less over-the-top as opposed to the norm for giallo, which is plots about sixteen different murder mysteries going on at once accompanied by the ghost of a mummy and a psychic girl. Shock instead has a fairly simple storyline about a haunted house and a possessed child. The cinematography is also far less lurid and even slightly boring at times- no neon to be found, just the calm and drab tones of beige dresses and unremarkable suburban houses. Neither is the acting as egregiously dramatic as it typically is, although it's certainly not not dramatic.

I watched this mostly because Daria Nicolodi is so beautiful and it ended up being her that mostly saved the film, thanks to being an actually decent actress. Although credit has to be given to the kid who plays her possessed son as well; he's young enough that I'm not sure he comprehended the gravity of his role, but that may have been what made him so good at it. Depicting a child encountering malevolence with childish mannerisms and a childlike understanding of the world can, at times, be more frightening to adults than someone of our own age encountering such a thing. But if you're irredeemably bored of the "creepy haunted child" trope, there's plenty of poltergeist activity and knives floating in mid-air and whatnot to see in Shock as well.

It's just weird. I'm still not very knowledgeable about giallo, I don't know if the term specifically only applies to films as instantly recognizable as Suspiria, The Beyond, Deep Red, and other such stylish endeavors, or if any Italian horror film from their "Golden Age" falls under the umbrella. But if it were me, I'd say that Shock is not giallo at all, bereft as it is of all the movement's trademarks. It's just a strange story told in a relatively straightforward fashion about a haunted house and its inhabitants.

I was hoping that the way Nicolodi's character was dismissed as being a "harried housewife" would be played up intentionally for social commentary, but it seems like she's just... a harried housewife, with no deeper exploration of that stereotype. I think maybe her character has a bit of Shelley Duvall-in-The Shining syndrome, where she's written off as overreacting by both people within the movie and critics alike when in reality all she's doing is reacting to terrible events the way a normal human would. One thing I am disappointed about is that they mention buying a German Shepherd for the little boy at the beginning and it's never, ever brought up again. Every giallo film has a German Shepherd in it, this I have learned by now. If you wanna be deep about it maybe you (or I) could suggest that bringing up the iconic dog and forgetting about it is a symbol of Shock acknowledging its contemporaries in film, and then going down a totally different path from them.

Prospect (2018)

directed by Zeek Earl, Christopher Caldwell
Canada/USA
98 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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This was apparently a short film first, and I have to give it props for managing to stretch out the concept of the short into a 98-minute film. It isn't easy to do that and not have the longer film be boring. Prospect does lend itself to a sort of exploratory, take-in-the-scenery type of sci-fi, though, which makes it feel more natural to have stretches where not a lot of action happens, but it still never feels tedious. I would almost categorize this as mumblecore but I think it feels too sophisticated for that.

"Sophisticated" is a weird word to associate with this because it's genuinely one of the most "lived-in"-looking science fiction films I've seen. It hits on just a ton of things I'm always looking for in sci-fi but never seem to find. The number one thing that made me love this movie is that it feels like it was made by and for the people in it- it's not aggressive about its futurism or its advanced technology, and it makes everything out to be accessible enough that I found myself imagining it was filmed, acted & produced by people living in the same future it's set in. Maybe this is just what dramas are like in the future. This also satisfies a desire I've had for a long time to see more "everymen" piloting spaceships. I've long felt like spaceships in sci-fi are too dominated by military organizations and official, by-the-books usage, and I really want to see people using spaceships the way they drive cars.

Something else I found interesting about Prospect is that it doesn't have an overabundance of "heart". I'm truly using that word for lack of a better term, because this film does utilize emotion heavily, you feel for the characters and you can empathize with them and everything, it just never gets into weepy, "space is lonely" territory. Some films do that, and they do it really well, and I like that! But it is also nice to see such a visually stunning, gentle sci-fi movie that keeps everything relatively light. That arm amputation scene was incredible in a way I can't wholly put into words.

I love this film because it is the direct descendant of the cardboard-and-tinfoil sci-fi films of the 70s and 80s. There's a difference between ingenuity born out of lack of funds and ingenuity born out of a tiredness of seeing glossy CGI, and both are equally able to produce films with amazingly creative practical effects, whatever the reasons behind them. Actively choosing to root a sci-fi film in the physical world, using model spaceships and actual Earth scenery for its alien worlds, is admirable, difficult, and something I'll always love to see. The world of Prospect is a future I feel like I could live in if I don't end up dying in a climate change-related crisis a couple decades down the line. And any film that uses Ros Sereysothea's music gets an automatic thumbs-up from me.

Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018)

directed by Jung Bum-shik
South Korea
95 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I tried to watch this back in October but I was too sleepy. I'm glad I gave it another go because it's one of the scariest Korean horror films I've seen.

Gonjiam is another of the millions of horror films in the format of a live ghost-hunting broadcast that turns into something genuinely paranormal. As with most of these, it starts out with the producers of the broadcast faking everything for views, but slowly becomes a situation that puts people in real danger. For a long time, nothing much happens; footage of a door slamming shut is replayed over and over as the only concrete evidence of strange goings-on in the asylum. And even when things do start happening, they're nothing we haven't seen before, but because of the one-two punch of being made to wait so long and being made to watch people react to them in (what feels like) real-time, they have more impact than they would in a regular, non-found-footage film. People tend to criticize found-footage actors for not having the same skills as actors in normal films, but it takes real talent to act like you aren't acting.

I want to talk for a second about one of the scares, because even though it was fleeting it delved into something I don't see a lot of horror movies do. At one point the producer is watching the livestream remotely and he counts all of the people onscreen, and says to himself "...who's shooting?" because everybody with a camera is already accounted for. That's terrifying to me because it's messing with the narrative. It's not just a jump scare or a shadowy thing behind you. That meant one of the spirits had the ability to capture and broadcast images through some will of its own, since like I said, every camera was accounted for. That's a level of autonomy that's extremely unsettling, because not only is it a ghost interacting with the physical world, it's a ghost that can control and disseminate information.

Something about the ghosts in this movie feels more inherently menacing than usual. The ghosts look good when we do see them- they look pretty cliche, honestly- but they're not shoved in the viewer's face so much that we get bored of them, and they're reserved for scenes where their appearance causes genuine tension and fear. Now that I'm thinking about it, invasion of personal space and autonomy is a huge recurring theme in this: possession occurs several times, with ghosts sneaking up behind people and placing their hands over their eyes to render them into yammering black-eyed ghouls. Many of the most tense moments involve a ghost physically brushing up against a person and making them afraid to either look directly at the ghost or stop looking directly at them. All of this speaks to a horror that's very personal and smashes right into our comfort zones.

Gonjiam is essentially a very average set-up executed with well-above-average skill and care by people who really get what makes something scary. Everything is shot so that the viewer can't help but imagine themselves alongside the characters. I could take or leave- but preferably leave- the choice of setting, seeing as "haunted asylum" films carry a large stigma against mentally ill people, but this would totally work with any creepy old abandoned building in which a lot of people died.

Body Melt (1993)

directed by Philip Brophy
Australia
81 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I'd been meaning to watch this for a while and yet I still somehow had no idea it was Australian, nor did I know much else about it. Nor, as it turns out, did I really need to know much about it: the title explains it all, and if it wasn't clear enough for you, the alternate title, "Body Trash", completes the explanation. This is a goopy, trashy B-movie where a lot of peoples' organs explode and/or they drip slime until they collapse. That's essentially the beginning and end of it.

However, judging Body Melt by its plot alone does an injustice to how aesthetically perfect it is. I can't even say "aesthetically pleasing" because it's so eye-burning and distinctively early-90s that it's kind of hideous, but it's also kind of beautiful. It's like they set out to make a film where no colors go together, even the skin tones of the actors stand out as obnoxiously pink and weird against a backdrop of turned-up blues, reds, yellows, and every ugly color under the sun. The set design is the real hero, working in the background to create a world that feels jam-packed with clutter and slime. It tries so hard to have all its characters look obsessively "modern" that it hardly even feels dated, because even though no reasonable human being would wear the clothes people wear in this film today, it's recognizable in any era as the costume of people attempting to look "current".

Considering that the point of the film seems to be taking faddish health crazes and obsessions to their logical extreme and making fun of the search for the "perfect" body, the presence of a subplot that basically amounts to "look at these gross disgusting hillbillies" is confusing. I thought that the idea was to show how ridiculous it is when people attempt to achieve bodily perfection, and to show us, gleefully, yuppies and capitalists injecting themselves with bizarre substances and then rupturing open in their ravenous desire to be better than the common people. So why would the film also make fun of those "common people" so viciously? I was honestly pretty disgusted by this stereotype of an incestuous, almost mutated family living in squalor in the boonies- it felt like regression to prejudice against economically disadvantaged and mentally disabled people, whereas I was hoping the only people being ridiculed in Body Melt would be those who prop themselves up as being above ridicule.

I'll give my usual disclaimer and say that this film is only enjoyable if you don't take it seriously. Sometimes we all need to take a break from our three-hour-long Oscar season darlings and watch a silly romp through piles of goo and ick, like Body Melt. It's really not perfect, but you can tell that care was put into making every character distinct and doing other things that the film really didn't have to do considering that it's intentionally supposed to be trashy.

Atrapados (1981)

directed by Matthew Patrick
Puerto Rico
92 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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This is an undeservedly obscure movie that's really hard to pin down. Various film sites seem to throw up their hands and tag it as "sci-fi" when the reality of it is much more nebulous. I'm in a book group, so I'm a bit tired of hearing people say things are allegories, but I think the only way to view Atrapados is as an allegory: for what, I'm not entirely sure, but it seems to be saying something about the soul, or about existence, or about human nature, or maybe all of the three.

The only way this can be considered sci-fi is if you pretend the undisclosed cause of the building collapse that leads to the two main characters being in their titular situation is of some futuristic origin, like an alien death ray or nuclear disaster or something like that. Calling this science fiction is missing the point, because a large part of it pertains to one of the main characters' self-invented discipline, "macro-micrology", which is emphasized to be science fact. It's a blend of philosophy and hard science creating something entirely new, a way of looking at the universe from the perspective of a little tiny human and trying to work out where everything fits into everything else. I'm also skeptical of synopses that refer to this character as a mystic, because again, science fact. Her studies resemble mysticism in that they incorporate a trance-like oneness with the larger universe, but it's used as a research method.

I'm guessing that the reason why this isn't more popular is because its style of storytelling doesn't lend itself to being easily understood. There's a very organic, line-of-sight feeling to the camera's movements, tracking oftentimes random elements and emphasizing them in a way that no "professional" filmmaker would typically do. As a result everything feels like it's inside a dream, with sounds that are too loud, lights that are too bright and come from nowhere, chaos in every direction, et cetera. Random access filmmaking. Whether or not anything about Atrapados is real is almost a matter best looked at through the imaginary lens of macro-micrology.

As a whole Atrapados is a really inventive and unique film, unlike anything I've seen before, but considering all that, it is still somehow full of cliches, which is its only downside. The two characters are so clearly intended to represent a divide between "civilized"/"savage"- they say so themselves. And of course, the path is always the savage headed towards civilization; if the civilized party ever learns anything from the savage, it's always related to a perceived closeness to nature that the civilized party regrets having "lost". 

This movie is, to sum it all up, a "thinker". I may revise my rating later once my brain has chewed it up and digested it a little more. It's included in a letterboxd list entitled "If You Inhaled Burning Plastic I Guess" which is probably the most accurate description we're going to get of it.

The Stepfather (1987)

directed by Joseph Ruben
UK/USA/Canada
87 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I've never been a huge fan of horror movies about murderers, because I've always felt like the true creativity of the genre lies in films where the danger is far removed from being human. Oft-repeated phrases reminding us that other people are the real monsters are probably true in real life, but I've never felt like they applied when I'm looking for a really creepy movie. There's been a minor resurgence in movies about serial killers lately, and in turn there's also been a resurgence in people raising the point that there's no real reason to make movies about men who kill women, which is a discourse that's been absent from discussion about slashers for far too long.

The Stepfather doesn't have the sensationalism that usually marks so many 80s slashers. It doesn't make its killer look glamorous, and it certainly doesn't make him sympathetic in the slightest. The majority of the reason why this movie stands out so much from others of its era is because Terry O'Quinn is positively awful in it- and by "awful" I mean his performance is so good that it made me reflexively loathe him a little bit. I'm not used to seeing actually nuanced acting in horror movies of this era, because most films are marred by being outdated. I'm not saying this one isn't, but O'Quinn's performance as the killer is so deeply malevolent and inherently disgusting that it transcends datedness and is much better than half the serial killer acting I've seen recently.

But the thing that's almost more terrifying than having a horrible human being out in plain sight as the main character of the film is the way the women he targets are conditioned to accept and overlook his erratic behavior. The daughter is the only girl who sees something off about him, and she's repeatedly told by everyone around her that it's her fault for having hang-ups about him due to not being her birth father. Her mother is pretty much past the point of questioning any of his behavior, and without realizing it, is heading towards enabling her daughter to reach that stage as well. I'm not saying this is a perfect film for women but its portrayal- perhaps unintentional- of the dangers that women are conditioned to ignore in favor of politeness and desirability is unsettlingly realistic.

I really don't think The Stepfather set out to prove a feminist point or do anything like that. I think most likely it was made to be another shock film of the 80s. I believe it does embody some criticism of the "nuclear family" idea and the heavy societal push to be a perfect white-picket-fence family, but that's about it. But it ended up being better quality-wise than its predecessors and many of its descendants, although the whole point is that it's disturbing and uncomfortable. 

One Cut of the Dead (2017)

directed by Shinichiro Ueda
Japan
97 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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So this is basically two different films, or one film that has a film within it, depending on how you want to look at it. For the first half-hour, it's played straight as a movie about real zombies attacking a film crew while they're in the middle of shooting a zombie movie. By "played straight" I mean that the opener is genuinely a decent film. Sure, the effects are bad and nothing about it is believable- save for the actors' reactions, which are surprisingly realistic, and if you were expecting the first half-hour to be the basis for the rest of the film like I was, it's easy to get involved with it despite the bad effects. Like I said, I didn't know where this was going, so when the credits rolled after thirty minutes, I thought maybe I had made a mistake about the runtime. Then somebody yells "Cut!" and the real movie begins.

It may be a little awkward to start the actual film a full half-an-hour after the film "starts", but I thought that the world's longest cold opening was a great idea and showed a lot of creativity on the part of the real-life filmmakers. What One Cut of the Dead is actually about is the process of making a movie on incredibly short notice: it's supposed to be live, all in one single take, with no room for error or disappointment. Naturally this is absurdly hard to achieve, and the fun of the "real" parts of One Cut of the Dead is seeing everybody scrambling to complete a nearly impossible task. The characters were all really well written and acted, and the parts that took place outside the studio made me feel for them because of how down-to-earth and realistic they were. Once you got into the studio, seeing all the mishaps and connecting them to things you saw in the cold open was a ton of fun. It shows how well this was made that I disregarded all the idiosyncrasies in the opener that were later revealed to have been mistakes.

I do consider this a horror movie even though it has no actual zombies in it because I feel like it captures everything that us horror fans love about the genre. Horror can be totally off-the-cuff, you can shoot something flying by the seat of your pants with just barely enough money for a gallon or two of fake blood and some drugstore makeup, and it can turn out great. There's snobs in every film community; I'm sure there's people out there who argue that horror films made by big-name directors with lots of money are the only "true" horror films. But the thing I've always loved about horror is that it's so easy for a horror fan to become a horror director. All you have to do is have a camera and an idea.

Sound of Horror (1966)

directed by José Antonio Nieves Conde
Spain
91 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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I've wanted to watch this for a long time because its premise sounds so ridiculous that it's kind of amazing: Some people excavating a cave accidentally release an invisible screaming dinosaur, or maybe a dinosaur ghost, which personally I think is a better idea because the concept of ghosts from millions of years ago is fascinating to me. You spend eons trapped up in a cave with no company, only to be released by strange, tiny monkey-creatures, and you find that every member of your species is dead and the environment is ruined, so what do you do? You screech.

I want to stress that this isn't a scary movie at all, because it's so absurdly slow and has such long stretches of people truly doing nothing that it's nearly impossible to stay awake during it, and besides that the makeup effects and death scenes are silly. Plus, you know, it's hard to genuinely be frightened of an invisible dinosaur. But in the YouTube comments somebody mentioned being terrified of it as a kid, and I think that captures perfectly what kind of horror it is: it's horror that can only be recognized by somebody without pretenses, somebody who can take an idea such as an invisible shrieking dinosaur at face value and realize the weight of it, the sheer surreality of being menaced by not only a beast that should be extinct but a beast that has no business being invisible. It's just such a bizarre plot that it becomes somehow brilliant.

What isn't brilliant, of course, is the rampant misogyny. I probably shouldn't even bother mentioning it because it's the 60s and every mainstream movie has a bunch of garbage men subjugating women. But within the first five minutes a girl is called "an amateur, and a woman" and it's repeatedly implied that women basically can't do anything requiring force or strength, and are best left to entertain guests at home with elaborate dancing.

But I just think that at its core this touches upon concepts that are never talked about. Like the possibility of a pent-up wellspring of sheer living energy remaining trapped within a cave for millennia. The impossible-to-erase signature all living creatures leave on the world, and the injustice of being destroyed by a meteor, by climate change, by predation, by entropy itself. Maybe that's why our invisible shrieking dinosaur is such a potent force- it is a force against entropy, its cry ringing out through the ages and registering in the deepest lizard parts of our brains as something that Should Not Be. We as humans attempt to throw axes at it, to put down flour so we can see its footprints. Such puny measures to stop something that we know subconsciously signals a truth about the nature of death that we don't want to know.