The Blair Witch Project (1999)

directed by Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez
USA
81 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

This was one of the first horror movies I watched as a young teenager when I realized "hey, I can watch horror movies when I'm alone and no one can stop me". I was in a pretty temporary living situation, and absconding off to a corner of the house to be alone for an hour and a half and watching The Blair Witch Project was fun. I know people are of many opinions on this film, but to me it's a dear favorite.

Claiming that this movie was the first to do most of the things it does isn't fair to the found-footage movies that came before it, but I do think it has to be recognized how innovative this still was. Even though it wasn't the first found-footage movie, it's one of the best ones I've seen in terms of feeling really real. This was achieved, so the story goes, by keeping the actors somewhat in the dark: I haven't read every detail surrounding the production, but essentially they were given a limited script and not told what was going to happen around every turn, as well as (I believe) occasionally startled for real on set, so a lot of the fear you see in the film is genuine. It doesn't feel like the footage we see in this movie was for us. We're not privy to the details of the relationships between the characters. They don't give interviews that tell us of their intentions with the film or their personal hopes and dreams. Things get ugly, friends scream at each other and make each other cry. The footage we see was never meant to be released, except for maybe as behind-the-scenes snippets on Heather's forever unfinished Blair Witch documentary.

As everyone knows, we never see the witch. We don't even get a clear picture of what she looks like, or really nail down who she is or why she does what she does. This is both characteristic of a folk legend- the varying physical descriptions of the witch, the "well I heard" stories from everybody and their sister- and it serves to make her a much more frightening image in our minds. A lot of found-footage movies will show interviews with eyewitnesses where they say things like "I saw the witch and she was six feet tall with long craggly nails and grey hair!" and later in the film, lo and behold, we see a six-foot witch with craggly nails and grey hair. In Blair Witch, we're told the witch is many things: covered in coarse hair from head to toe, nonexistent, a grey mist rising up over a river. People don't really claim to have seen her personally, it's always secondhand or in legend only. Few, if any, other horror movies have come close to touching this kind of strategic restriction-of-information-as-development, and it's probably the most crucial part of making this such an iconic and terrifying movie.

I know I've mentioned this before when referencing this movie, but you really can't do this stuff today. We're all far too good at the internet now. I'm not trying to make it out like people in 1999 were living in caves, getting their news off of shadows on the walls, but it was easier to present somebody with a VHS tape and say "this is real" than it is today. I love The Blair Witch Project for being a 1999 time capsule, something that probably won't be done again- I don't lament this, I don't disparage new horror movies, I just appreciate the rarity of this one.

Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel (2018)

directed by Stephen Cognetti
USA
89 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
----

The first Hell House LLC was good, possibly even great, which is why I've been so reluctant to touch any of the sequels. I was dismayed by the thought of such a solid movie heading in the direction of becoming one of those series that just crank out increasingly incoherent films year after year. I was mildly surprised by Abaddon Hotel, but please keep in mind that I am a garbage-lover with a high tolerance for found-footage horror, so the objective truth is probably closer to the many one-star reviews than my take on it.

Abaddon Hotel is a very mixed bag- it almost feels like two different people were at the wheel the whole time, which is unusual seeing as the same director has remained on for all three Hell House LLC movies thus far. Sometimes it's genuinely really creepy, and sometimes it's "aaaaah everybody run from the life-sized clown doll". This second entry into the series leans more towards "aaah clown" scares, but there is one moment that for some reason was really freaky to me, to the point where I had to look away: Toward the beginning, they show several videos from social media accounts whose owners disappeared after going into the hotel, and in one of them, the cameraman rounds a corner to see nothing but a pair of legs, only visible from the waist down, standing on a staircase. He says "Sorry. I'll go now." in an unnaturally flat voice, but the talk show host presenting the footage tells us that the camera remained on, stationary, all night, until the battery ran out. The legs never move. They just stand there. This is a completely unnerving moment because there is no musical sting whatsoever; it's the polar opposite of a jump scare and that's why it works. For something so deeply disquieting to exist in a movie where getting chased by clown mannequins is a huge plot point gives me whiplash.

This is how the rest of the movie proceeds, for the most part. I feel like it's much better at explaining the horror as opposed to showing it to us. Single lines- "they're all in the dining room" "they have no eyes"- create images in our head that are much creepier than anything we could see on screen. 

The narrative timeline switches back and forth between a couple of characters being interviewed on the morning news, as in the beginning, and footage of the characters going into the house. In addition, a couple minutes of "police interview" after the final girl is found bloodied and traumatized are tacked on at various points. This all is as confusing as it sounds. Having the news interview remain throughout the movie didn't feel like it had any purpose; I don't see why there were all the jumps back and forth when it would have been more coherent and kept us viewers more focused to dispose of the interview first and then get to the meat of the story.

And that ending really fell off a cliff. This movie combines leaving stuff to our imagination with showing way too much right there in front of us in a way that, again, is whiplash-inducing. I gave it a tentatively higher rating than a lot of other people because some of the scares are genuinely effective, but overall the movie seems to be too enthusiastic about shoving them in our faces sometimes.

Wounds (2019)

directed by Babak Anvari
UK
94 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

I'm genuinely confused. I had heard nothing but negative opinions of this movie. Every time I saw it mentioned online, it was always followed by a reply like "I heard that one wasn't looking too good". Did everyone see a different movie than I did, or am I just a big fan of awful things? Because the Wounds I just watched is one of the best movies to come out all year.

Where I think some people might be getting tripped up is if they lack context from the source material. "Wounds" is a short story surrounded by other stories that expand upon its central theme- Hell- in various ways. Nathan Ballingrud's Hell is ancient and alchemical, inhabited by Hieronymus Bosch demons. This Hell is accessible through our world; dying isn't necessary. Ballingrud doesn't trivialize Hell with the same characteristics that many writers do, simply trotting out the old standards about a lake of fire and evil things that are essentially shaped like humans with horns; he creates a place that is utterly anathema to everything we hope to be, that operates on a logic not intrinsically good or bad but simply there. It's like a scientific description of a horrifying predatory fish living at the bottom of the ocean: while humans, up here on land, may recognize these things as creatures out of a nightmare, in objective reality they're only functioning the way evolution guided them to function. However, this doesn't rid us of our instinctual fear of big-fanged monsters with huge white eyes lurking in the darkness.

This movie sticks exactly to the story. It is a 1:1 translation. The things I was imagining in my head while reading the story were right there on screen. When we first see the main character's girlfriend watching that video of the tunnel, I was startled by how much it matched the description in the book, and how incredibly menacing it was. It's exactly as described- that inexorably slow movement through an unnatural space. I haven't seen something look so blatantly cursed since The Ring.

Even though this is an incredibly dark movie, I feel like I'm making it out to seem heavier than it is. The remarkable thing about Ballingrud's writings about Hell is that they don't feel excessively brutal, like- and I hesitate to make this comparison because this is another author whose work I enjoy, just for different reasons- Clive Barker's explorations into ultraviolence. It doesn't draw overly on religious tradition, or emphasize the importance of good/bad morality. The people who seem to be in control of the game all the other characters are unwillingly dragged into playing are just a bunch of soft-looking college kids. The idea is that Hell is, literally and metaphorically, around the corner.

There's something about the poster for this movie that led me to believe maybe the bad reviews would be true: Armie Hammer holds a cell phone to his ear, screaming, as the back of his head dissolves into mist, presumably in horror at whatever is on the other end. It's overly graphic and almost entirely unrelated to any scene in the movie in the way that I'm used to hand-painted posters for schlocky movies of the 80s being, and it set me up for something corny. Instead I got a movie that so closely matched the tone of the original material that it was deeply, deeply disturbing.

In the Tall Grass (2019)

directed by Vincenzo Natali
Canada
101 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

I had just finished reading the short story this was adapted from a couple of hours beforehand and decided it would be fun to watch the film while it was still fresh in my mind. I'll try to keep this review relevant to the movie and avoid slipping into talking about how good I thought the story was. Even with the necessity of adding material to make a sub-100-page story into a 101-minute movie, I was surprised at how much was changed up in this film, although to its credit I suppose it did mostly keep the same spirit. Or maybe the spirit was entirely in my head due to having read the story so recently.

There's a lot I liked and a lot I didn't like about this. Dislikes come first just to get it all out of the way. After about the first fifteen minutes, the film feels like it departs from the story entirely to become this sort of vaguely action-y romp through the titular grass. The issue I had with this is that it went too far- I'm not talking in any way about gore or violence here, it's just that it takes something that was horrifying because there were so few real, tangible elements of it (the grass/Tobin/the Man/the rock) and throws in stuff like weird CGI grass people that really didn't need to be there. The original story felt so hopeless. Generally I am not one to like horror movies more when they're devoid of the possibility of a happy ending (which is why I enjoyed the ending to the film), but the true and pure malevolence of the other people the main characters encounter in the field was chilling and largely absent in the film.

Some of the things that were added in made it better, however. If they'd totally gotten rid of all the CGI it would have made a huge improvement, but certain plot elements were very interesting. They added in a point about the rock supposedly being the exact center of the contiguous United States and that was fascinating to me because it creates almost a nesting doll of liminal spaces. First, the field is inside the liminal space of the imagined Exact Center, a point that's impossible to be at and not be conscious of your position in the world. But at the same time it's impossible to be conscious of your position inside the field, which itself is liminal- you're nowhere when you're inside it; you move but you go nowhere. I almost wish that line about being the center of the continent was elaborated upon a little more because I found it added a lot. The aspect of time dilation is a huge, almost the most important, element in the film as well, where it was barely an aside in the story.

I really chafed at the grass-faced people because the scariest thing about the original story was that the field was the monster, it wasn't that it had monsters in it. Stephen King and Joe Hill both have always been good at imbuing places with a sinister energy without the need for a humanoid persona to represent it (though they do that well, too). Vincenzo Natali's thing is futuristic horror with large dollops of CGI. Those two styles don't necessarily play well together. I really did enjoy this movie for what it was, and I think it's worth your time and was worth mine as well, but there's a lot of things that beg to be pointed out about it.

The Dead Center (2019)

directed by Billy Senese
USA
93 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

I was anticipating this movie for a long time, because in this house we love Shane Carruth and watch anything he has anything to do with. I wasn't certain what it was about, and when I found out it involved a psychiatric hospital, my immediate concern was that it would have a reductive, cliched idea of mental illness- but this is not the case at all, and I found myself feeling like I had to apologise for my own assumptions that nobody is capable of handling mental illness without being offensive.

People with a whole range of different personalities are shown in The Dead Center, there's no monolithic idea of the screaming or laughing "maniac" as depicted in most horror movies: a girl quietly but emphatically complains about her bed being too close to the door, a woman worriedly says she doesn't want to go home, a man insists that he isn't getting better and he's going to die, and one old woman seems to be there simply because of dementia, but none of these things are presented as frightening or making them lesser people. It isn't perfect, but it's a far more nuanced understanding of mental health than I often see.

Apart from that, I also wasn't sure whether or not this would be a horror movie, but it definitely, definitely is, and it has a very unique way of going about being horror. It's about a man who comes back to life and escapes the morgue he was in, becoming a living patient of that hospital instead, and the doctor who becomes interested in treating him and finds out eventually that both of them- the undead man and the doctor who got wrapped up in his life- are involved in something unearthly. I think this is a very intelligent movie because it really feels like it knows where others have gone wrong in presenting the concepts it wants to present. It's very cautious, it doesn't hit us right off the bat with the whole "wooo what if there were spooky monsters waiting for us when we die" thing; it spends a lot of time building up the concept that the dead man is trying to convey, unfolding it mostly through an outsider's perspective, piecing it all together. One not-so-great side effect of the patient way The Dead Center establishes the things it's saying is that it can feel like it's grasping for something and never reaching it- sometimes you want to say, okay, but what is it? Why is it scary? But you just have to wait. Because you do find out.

It seems like this was a short film with some of the same actors before it was a movie, and the director also made Closer To God, a very middling film with some similar themes of a mixture of medical science and the supernatural. For years and years the only thing I've wanted was for Shane Carruth to direct a horror movie, and I guess technically that hasn't happened yet, but he's starred in and produced one now, so I'm pretty happy. The one issue I had with it is the repeated association of dying with your mouth open as automatically implying that your death was traumatic- that's just how a lot of us die. It takes muscle tone to hold your mouth shut, dude! Muscle tone you lose when you, y'know, stop being alive! 

Luz (2018)

directed by Tilman Singer
Germany
70 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

I think this is one of those movies that will inspire some debate about whether it's horror, "horror", or not horror at all. It is too brightly-lit and artsy to be immediately recognizable as the same kind of horror that people who may not be frequent fliers with the genre define "horror" as. But there's something really dark in Luz, although it might not be as dark in the literal sense as it could be. Things linger in shadows and fog and, most importantly, in memory. The individual characters are less focused on than the things possessing them.

Aside from that there is an entity and it takes hold of several people over the course of the film, I couldn't figure out a whole lot of what was happening here. Just when I thought I had the timeline figured out, I got messed up again. But the ambiance and the way I got sucked into every scene, especially when the actors were so good and could exert such a gravitational pull over the entire movie, more than made up for some blurry details. There's something about the opening scene with the man and the woman in the bar that I really loved, because it felt to me like she was embodying the archetypical "crazy woman" but that that wasn't necessarily being cast in a bad light. And it made it all the more interesting that she transmits the thing inside her to him- instead of the usual course of things where the crazy woman has to be taught, has to be made right by a man, she indoctrinates him to herself. It's a situation where her craziness is power instead of an impairment.

Although this is definitely a movie about possession, it's obtuse and vague about it. Strangely, it follows some conventions about the trope- particularly, the summoning of the demon by a couple of rebellious Catholic-school girls via the chanting of an extremely profane altered version of a prayer- but discards almost everything else. There was one line in particular that hit me because it was one of those lines that's so succinct but conveys so much deep menace that it single-handedly tells us a lot about whatever creature is speaking it: when the psychiatrist is possessed and his assistant asks "Since when can you speak Spanish?" and he answers "Since it was invented." Really good demons or other ageless entities don't need to give the whole blah-puny-humans spiel, they don't need to tout their might and fearsomeness, they just have to give small lines like that which reveal the length and depth of their existence.

There's something just so solid about this movie. A lot of possession-themed films could take cues from this. It's hard to describe how it constructs its world, how the grainy film and vacant, late-night locations create a place where nobody is safe, where nothing feels real. It's amazing that this was a thesis film. 

The Death Wheelers (1973)

directed by Don Sharp
UK
85 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

The Death Wheelers, AKA Psychomania, is a movie that doesn't quite seem to know how ridiculous it comes off and is all the more endearing for it. It's about a group of terribly British, motorcycle-riding youths who basically just ride around being delinquents and scaring mothers pushing babies in prams. And they also happen to come back from the dead. After one of them discovers, courtesy of his mystically-inclined mother, that weird powers running in his family allow him to commit suicide and come back invincible, he convinces the other gang members to off themselves as well, giving them all the time in the world to continue knocking over stacks of cereal boxes and antagonizing the local police force.

Yes, this is a movie where, for all the airs of menace the bikers put on, all the unashamedly dreadful things they do, all their leather jackets (sidenote: I love any gang that has members calling themselves stuff like "Chopped Meat" and "Hatchet" alongside some guy named Bertram) and suicides, it still feels somehow quaint. The violence is fleeting and almost entirely directed inward- there's no actual gore in this, just a lot of people getting knocked over by bikes. It feels so utterly non-punk that it's kind of adorable. When the leader of the gang dies for the first time, before he comes back, his compatriots have a nice little funeral for him where they sing folk songs and make flower garlands. Then they immediately go back to trying to make old women crash their cars on the highway.

I'm kind of... a little weirded out by the whole concept behind killing yourself and coming back immortal. Mostly I'm weirded out that nobody else in the movie itself was weirded out by it. I would expect that police and probably some scientists would be scrambling to make sure this secret never came out, because if the general populace learned that all it took to become immune to death was to die and just, like, cross your fingers really hard that you'd come back to life after, there would be mass panic in the streets, I assume. Another thing about this movie is that it does operate on a loose string of logic, whereas a lot of movies dealing with similar topics would just wave their hands and say ~magic~. You need certain charms and rituals to make the coming-back-to-life happen. And those charms and rituals involve frogs, for reasons that are never revealed.

I'm assuming this would be a little more frightening to an audience used to a steady diet of Hammer horror in the early 70s, but it feels totally tame and a little bucolic to me now. The coloring is gorgeous if you can get a good copy of it and the score suits it so well. It's a movie that perfectly fills out its 90 minutes, and though a lot about it should be cheesy- and arguably is, really- there's also something genuine about it.

Occult (2009)

directed by Kôji Shiraishi
Japan
110 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

I find it difficult to describe the tone of Occult, despite it being one of my favorite movies. It has a lot in common with Kôji Shiraishi's more well-liked movie Noroi, but it goes off into an altogether weirder direction while still carrying many of the same ideas. You kind of necessarily have to be open to weird conspiracy theories and listening to people talk about them- no matter if you believe them or not- because that's basically what Occult is; a succession of people talking about miracles and UFOs with 100% confidence. It's just weird. It's all surreal and doesn't make any sense. It doesn't fall back on any typical format like UFO abductees telling their stories or any other recognizable trope. It's its own thing and I'm very fond of it.

More than anything else, it cultivates an overwhelming feeling that something is coming. Over the unsuspecting people of Japan, in fast food restaurants and cafeterias and bus stops, things loom. Things that can drive people to commit violent acts, things that we can't seem to touch, but that touch us, even if we can't see them. Occult is a document chronicling these creatures, but never explaining them. We can't know their motives. That's why it manages to be so creepy even though the filmmakers' chosen method of depicting these creatures is via wiggly CGI. It's their presence, not necessarily their appearance, that's so unnerving. But their appearance does lend a lot to the vibe too- it's scarier that they're undefined, that they're just blurry squirming masses of ???? instead of little green men or ghosts with people faces. This is one of my favorite depictions of beings that are arguably "extra-dimensional" because I feel like it at least approaches their incomprehensibility in a way that feels genuine.

There's no strong characters in this, which is both a good and bad thing, because on one hand it makes the whole film feel exceptionally organic and real, but also makes it very boring to watch. Kôji Shiraishi plays himself, but he mostly stays behind the camera and does stuff that any regular non-director character would do. The guy he's following around with a camera is a boorish, entitled drifter who keeps imposing more and more on other people throughout the film, eventually escalating to verbally abusing the only woman character. There's really no reason for him to have been like this, it doesn't serve a purpose or make the movie easier to watch, it's sort of just another element of realism, I guess- sometimes, the people who bear witness to bizarre events turn out to be real jerks, and that has nothing to do with their credibility or the truth of their experiences.

This movie has an extremely controversial ending which I will defend forever. It's funny how much of a defining moment of the movie it is for a lot of people- you watch the whole thing, it's excellent, keeps the same tone throughout, and then the very last ten seconds smacks you in the face and either makes it or ruins it. I love it because of the same reason why I love the rest of the movie: it's undefinable, it's not explained, and it's so just plain weird that it feels like a genuine depiction of either Hell or somewhere else. I love Kôji Shiraishi, but I don't understand how he can make uncanny masterpieces like this and Noroi and then make mainstream, commercial-feeling stuff like Teketeke and Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman.