The Thing (1982)

directed by John Carpenter

USA

109 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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Not even considering its massive cultural impact, this is one of my favorite movies. I think it's also objectively one of the best horror movies ever made, with one of the most interesting and well-executed concepts for a monster. Even though that concept is not original, having been adapted from another film that was itself adapted from a book, it's done so uniquely in this iteration that it stands out as being very clearly the best at what it does.

The first time I watched this was when I was only just getting into movies, and I wasn't "good at" watching them: stuff just didn't occur to me, I would miss huge parts of the plot because I wasn't paying attention to anything. I don't know if it's because of that or just because it's been a while since I saw it, but so much in The Thing jumped out at me that didn't the first time. The film's opening scene follows a dog across the frozen white Antarctic landscape as a helicopter tries desperately to track and shoot it, for reasons as yet unknown to us viewers, and it has to be one of the best openings to any horror film. The Norwegians' desperate attempts to kill the dog and warn the U.S. base, attempts that fail, but may have been in vain anyway, are the frontispiece to what will become a building of dread that never stops throughout the whole movie. It really struck me upon this rewatch that this movie is just that- dreadful. It has an ominousness to it that maybe can only be understood when you've seen it and you know what's coming, which might seem counterintuitive given the anticipatory nature of dread, but somehow watching capable people encounter an entity that they don't (and can't) understand gives off such a strong feeling of wrongness that it fills the whole atmosphere with dread.

I also did not know how to appreciate practical effects the first time I saw this. I didn't recognize that besides the very obvious fact that the effects in this are some of the best ever put to film, they're also used to perfection, at the perfect times; enough is shown that we feel like the alien- or, technically, the organisms the alien possesses and attempts to imitate- is flesh, a real creature. I can't really say that it doesn't tip over the line into being excessive, because the whole thing is an excess of blood and guts; entrails whipping around to find purchase and dragging itself along by its organs, body parts sprouting new, horrible limbs never glimpsed by any Earthly creature. But it's one of the only times where such a liberal application of grossery is needed, where it's used as real, genuine horror instead of a cheap attempt to shock.

I want to talk about the alien. I could talk about it all day and all night if I was given the chance. Because like I said, this is one of the most enduringly frightening concepts in horror that I've ever had the pleasure of giving space in my brain to. It is something that has no physical body itself or has a physical body that can be discarded at will, something that exists only as a possessing spirit. The Nostromo crew references the Xenomorph as the "perfect organism", engineered for pure hostility and survival, but that title belongs to the transformative entity that hides in The Thing. It is an organism that is only concerned with survival, and it has the ability to alter its body plan in the blink of an eye to do whatever it can do evade injury and continue its goal of infecting as many indigenous life forms as possible. There is something so uncanny about the concept of a being that can just sprout new appendages if needed, it doesn't have to conform to evolution's idea of an ideal body plan honed over millions of years because it can reach out a coil of intestine as a grasping limb or grow a new mouth full of teeth on whatever spot its body needs one. And all of this is depicted with what I'm calling accuracy- it may be a misnomer considering that such a creature (thankfully) does not exist and so there isn't a way to depict it "accurately", but the practical effects team created what felt like a true-to-life depiction of the concept.

That scene where one of the infected men tries to run from the others but is found half-mutated, his hands horrifically misshapen and a blank alien look in his eyes. The noise he makes. That's fodder for a thousand nightmares. I can see how that single scene echoes in my favorite horror film of all time, Banshee Chapter.

I could go on even longer about this movie- how Jed the dog is one of the best canine actors of all time, managing to convey not the obvious snarling threat that an angry dog would, but cunning. Malice. Granted, a lot of that is more a credit to good editing than the dog himself, but I want to point out another specific scene, and then I'll close this review: Towards the beginning, when Nauls is told to turn down his Stevie Wonder, refuses, and then the camera explores empty corridors with the sounds of "Superstition" playing muffled in the background. We see the husky silently slip his nose in the door, silently pad down the hallway until he finds a room with a human, and enter, as the human's shadow on the wall turns toward him, and then the scene cuts. I felt like I was watching a wolf, a mountain lion, some predator that stalks and hunts, but driven by an actual evil, not the natural prey drive of an Earthly animal. I think maybe it's the segue from light humor to that vision of dread that does it. That you can still hear humanity in the background while you watch the beginning of its downfall on four legs. That scene and every other in this film is why it's one of my favorite movies of all time.

The Funhouse (1981)

directed by Tobe Hooper

USA

96 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I wasn't expecting to like this as much as I did, being as it's a "lesser" Tobe Hooper film without the immediate name recognition of Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The poster is also somewhat misleading as it falls victim to the tendency a lot of slasher posters have to depict women wearing clothing (or, I should say, not wearing clothing) that they never wear for even a single scene in the actual film. But I guess you can't really complain about posters when Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of the best movies ever made and all of its posters are, well, advertising a movie called Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But I digress: The Funhouse is a sobering and intensely atmospheric movie, and I believe it holds up against Hooper's more widely-regarded work.

Towards the beginning of the film, Amy, the closest thing we get to a protagonist, responds to her jockish boyfriend's teasing about how her father is surely just trying to scare her into believing everyone is out to get her with "How could you say that? You don't even know my father," and the way she delivers that line is so earnest and sounds so genuinely hurt that it took me off guard. One of the most crucial things you can do when making a slasher movie is give your characters brains. I'm not saying that they should be geniuses, because then they would never get into a slashing situation in the first place, but the teenagers in The Funhouse really don't make any decisions that are too outlandishly stupid in the long run. Deciding to sneak off and stay in a haunted house overnight is inadvisable, but people have done worse; same thing with snatching money from a carnie's lockbox, which is probably overall the dumbest thing anyone in the film does. Creating these characters who don't go out of their way to get into trouble but instead just try to live their lives as wild and free as they can, as American teens in a more lawless period of the preceding century, means that nothing that happens to them is inherently their fault. And if nothing that happens is their fault, the events of the film take on a kind of cosmic cruelty- how can people be decent and still end up at the mercy of horrific killers? How can the world harbor such dangerous people that even in the course of a semi-normal life, one can come face-to-face with them?

I'd say at least half of the movie's running time, if not more, is spent just following the teens around this increasingly sinister carnival and revealing more and more details of its darkness to the audience while the teens remain oblivious. I know I've complained before about how a lot of the time in movies where we know something bad will eventually happen, the period of time between the start of the movie and whenever the bad thing comes in feels forced, like the creators set out to do one thing: make a horror movie, and they didn't put any effort whatsoever into the parts that were not horror. That's the opposite of The Funhouse. I lost track of time because I was just so enveloped in this dark underbelly of the carnival- except you can't even call it an underbelly, because everything horrible is just there, in the open, masquerading as itself. The family of killers who runs the carnival have found a place where they can hint at their weirdness in public and not be found out for what they are.

The aesthetic is immaculately grimy and distinctly of its time. Nothing like this could ever happen today. The Funhouse was born out of an era where safety was a minor concern and it looks and feels every bit as dingy and fake as a real cut-rate carnival slapped together to make money off of young people who want to go there to smoke weed and maybe see a two-headed cow (there are actual deformed cows in this film and they're adorable).

The trouble starts when the characters decide to sneak off beyond the bounds of where the public is supposed to go and find out what's beneath all the slapdash paint and wooden stages. One of the most common reasons I've heard for why people are afraid of clowns is that they think their makeup is hiding something- I find that an interesting concept, and it comes into play in The Funhouse as well. The fear is not of the clown's makeup itself, no matter how terrifying and uncanny that might be, it's of the chance that there might be something worse underneath it. The carnival in this film is chock-full of dingy animatronics, uncanny animals, weird people doing weird things, blatant prostitution and exploitation, and choppy mannequins that jump out at you on dark rides. But while those things are scary themselves, they're only the surface level of something that goes much deeper. We're supposed to be afraid of creepy carnival rides, but it's only supposed to last the duration of the ride- if the horror doesn't stop once we get off, it violates everything we held true about our safety, and it hits something deep in our psyche.

I have to admit that the best part of the film is the percentage of it that takes place before anybody is aware of being in physical danger. Once it gets down to slicing and dicing, it becomes more of a typical slasher film and you can predict where everything is going. But before the killers are revealed there's a genuine air of possibility, that anything could happen and you're just waiting to see what awful exhibition is behind the tent flaps. The world The Funhouse constructs is one where old women screech that God is watching us, where carnival barkers exclaim "Alive, alive, alive" as if taunting us to see how long we can remain that way inside their house of horrors. I don't see why this isn't more highly-rated. It's methodical in its use of atmosphere and has aged incredibly well despite being a time capsule of its era. Ideal for dark, stormy nights in October.

Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

directed by Roy Ward Baker

UK

97 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Now we get to the good stuff. This is an entirely different Quatermass film and an entirely different Quatermass, not just because he has a beard this time but because he genuinely cares about people and is very upset at the prospect of his research being used for weaponry- a plight of all rocket scientists. It feels like Val Guest's preceding two films, while more than worthwhile, were nothing but study material for Roy Ward Baker's ultimate creation of a Quatermass film that's creepy in a lasting way. I can only compare this and the serial a little, because the film follows the serial almost exactly, literally word-for-word at times. Keeping so faithfully to the original concept and tone guarantees that this is a tense, cerebral horror with an impact.

A quick plot refresher: This time, Quatermass becomes embroiled in the situation after workers digging a new tube (subway) tunnel in a storied area of London strike what they first presume to be a lost, unexploded WWII missile, but then they discover the remains of both archaic hominins and alien remains within the "missile". I will spoil this outright because I don't think there's anyone waiting with bated breath to find out the grand secret of this 1967 film. The hominins are our direct ancestors and are revealed to have been the product of a long-extinct Martian civilization. The ape-people are intimately tied to these insectoids, whose society was so bloody and brutal that it left a permanent psychic imprint on us. This imprint ends up causing total destruction and chaos, leading crowds of people in a blind, instinctual panic to destroy other people who are not susceptible to the ancient Martians' psychic influence- a difference which is invisible to the naked eye but can be sensed somehow as an "otherness". I love the idea that this missile being buried in the same place for millions of years has caused people to experience bizarre and inexplicable paranormal activity in its vicinity that's leaked into folklore since the beginning of time- that's very Nigel Kneale, exploring the concept of what a ghost can be.

There's a lot to unpack here. The concept alone is fascinating, but I want to talk for a second about the metaphorical and philosophical implications of it, because I think that's fascinating too. A common, though possibly unintentional, theme in these Quatermass films and serials has been the British fear of their own colonial past being reflected back upon themselves. I don't think that's ever been more apparent than in this film. The immediate reaction to Quatermass' discovery that humans owe their present existence to the influence of, essentially, giant locusts is one of utter disgust to the point of disbelief. The thought process is: how can we, the finest and most sophisticated people, be the product of outside influence? How can we owe any part of our society to the influence of things lower than ourselves? It causes deep cognitive dissonance when British society is forced to reckon with the idea that they don't exist in a bubble outside of the influence of other beings. Not to mention one which engaged in such practices- surely, foreign to their great Empire, surely- of genocide, racial hatred, and blind violence.

The overarching theme of Quatermass, especially the 1979 version, is that the world is somehow getting worse. Most of the time this is shown as being due to aliens, which I think is a fairly starry-eyed look at the world and reeks of pre-millennium optimism that humans would eventually get our act together and that the blame for the destruction of nature could be shifted onto something other than ourselves. This decay of society is definitely visible in the final act of Quatermass and the Pit, and it's far more direct about it than the theme of colonialism. An attempt is made to include a message about prejudices, but it's neutered in this film version, unlike the end of the serial when Quatermass makes his big "tolerance for everyone" appeal on TV.

While it feels a little boring if you've literally just watched the serial the other day and know the story already, this is a great movie (and it's a novelty to see the story retold in color!) The horror is insidious, strange, and lingering, and executed with technical prowess, except, ironically, for the Martian genocide tape, which I felt was somehow done better on a shoestring budget in the serial. They don't really leave out anything from the original serial in this so choose whichever one you want to watch depending on which you have time for- they're both practically equal in quality, except that I like Nigel Kneale the best and always will. Colonel Breen is thankfully toned down just a bit in this version and also appears to be hitting on Quatermass? I support their relationship.

Quatermass II (1957)

directed by Val Guest

UK

85 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Like Xperiment, Quatermass II is a Hammer production based off of the serial of the same name. We have more material by which to compare the two this time since all episodes of the original serial are safe from the dustbin of history. It follows the plot very neatly and exactly, and the plot is thus: Professor Quatermass discovers that plans for his experimental moon colony have been stolen and recreated on Earth, and the base is being used for the purpose of terraforming the planet to suit the physical needs of sludge monsters from outer space. The base is staffed by people who are under the control of the aliens but maintain human exteriors, unlike the unfortunate astronaut from Xperiment. They all claim that the base is simply manufacturing synthetic food.

(Even in the original serial, the phrase "synthetic food" eventually became inexplicably very funny to me. Hey, whatcha got goin' on in that moon base? Synthetic food. What's with all the weird domes? Synthetic food. Why can't we see it? The synthetic food is very sensitive. Why do you all wear boiler suits? Synthetic food can be dangerous. Why do you all have weird burn marks on your faces? S Y N T H E T I C F O O D.)

But anyway, I was surprised by just how quickly this movie gets us introduced to the story- within the first fifteen to twenty minutes, the entire plot of the show is laid out with no folderol. I can't honestly say what happens between the beginning and the climax because somehow they crammed an entire movie in there while not really doing anything at all. I'm not complaining; I'm a big fan of the "nothing actually happens" style of the early Quatermass affairs, I'm just trying to figure out how they packed in so much filler without me realizing it.

On all measures I think this is a better movie than its predecessor. It feels far more tense and the stakes feel higher, even if Quatermass is still as unconcerned as ever. I'm also a fan of the trope of an alien species terraforming Earth, maybe because of how well it was depicted in the BBC's most recent War of the Worlds series- there's something distinctly unnerving about the idea of familiar landmarks and contours of the planet still being intact but being covered over with alien biology. Our hills and our cities but hidden under a layer of something we can't understand. Where Xperiment was body horror, Quatermass II is planet horror. Country horror, more like, since the base of operations for the aliens is a small rural English town with a lot of rural English people working at the "synthetic food factory" who get very pissed off at the idea of their being employed in such an evil plot without their knowledge. The perennial British fear is, I think, of invasion by Others- the possibility that their land may be colonized and claimed by an outside force the way they sought to colonize and claim the entire world.

Although there's less body horror in this, the effects are much better. Even the non-effects stuff felt better too, the sets have more of that classic posh and tidy Hammer look and it just generally feels like a more pulled-together production this time. But the best parts are the parts with the aliens. It's a long time before we get to see them, but this bests the original serials in all ways, sorry to say. The serials did what they could on a limited budget and they do it well, and I still much prefer those to these films, but they leave you wanting to see creatures, a want that can be satisfied by Quatermass II. I absolutely love the climax when we see three towering slime-monsters looming over the fake moon base. This is faithful enough to the original, while adding in things it may have missed, that it can definitely rival or even exceed it in quality. Quatermass is still pretty grating but the added tension makes it fairly easy to forget about him and get involved in the plot. They also included the blocked pipe scene and good gracious it's as upsetting to think about as the first time. I'm surprised they ever put something like that on TV.

The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)

directed by Val Guest

UK

82 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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To celebrate Halloween, I've been having a month-long Quatermass marathon in which I watch all of the serials and now am just starting on the films. I'm a huge fan of Nigel Kneale, and I can tell that he's what makes the serials so interesting and original, because even though it was good, this Hammer version of the Quatermass story lacks some of the magic of its forefather.

It's hard to compare this and the series that came immediately before it, however, because all but two of that serial's episodes have been lost to the BBC's poor preservation practices. The film follows the same story and elaborates on it where the missing episodes would have: An experimental manned rocket crashes back to Earth containing only one of its original three astronauts, and the one remaining man is obviously under the influence of something not of this world. Now, the interesting thing about the Quatermass collection, to me, is that Quatermass has little to no personality. He's a bit better in the 1979 version, but before that, having the whole thing named after him is kind of a head-scratcher because he does nothing worthy of it- he doesn't really save the day, he doesn't have infinite knowledge or charisma or act like a typical protagonist, he's honestly not even the protagonist in anything other than name. And I like that. A lot of people compare Quatermass to Doctor Who because it was a huge inspiration to it and because Quatermass is always played by a different actor, but the Doctor is mostly the central focus of his own show, and Professor Quatermass just... happens to be in the series a lot.

I say this because Nigel Kneale apparently hated the depiction of his professor in The Quatermass Xperiment, and for good reason. For no good reason, in this film he's an insufferable rude bully. Television Quatermass has very few personality traits but at least he wasn't just unbearably grumpy the way he is in this. To be fair, though, all the men have that gruff 50s bravado; there's a whole lot of talking down to the film's one or two women characters and running around looking important being done both by Quatermass and all the other men he works with.

As a horror movie, this is objectively better than the serial it's directly inspired by because it shows a lot more, but that's not fair to say due to the serial's missing episodes. This movie is definitely of the typical sci-fi horror trend that was big in the 50s, and if you're into that you'll definitely be into this, but it's better than its peers because it takes on body horror, which 50s sci-fi seldom did. The state of the genre at that time in Western countries was mostly just using people in rubber monster suits rather than exploring the way alien contamination might influence us, other than exploring it in a metaphorical way usually employed as a reminder to watch out for communism. The slow transformation of the surviving astronaut into some shambling approximation of a person and then eventually not even that is genuinely upsetting to think about and, again, is depicted in an unusually graphic way for the time. There's not a whole lot of explanation, they don't really science this over too much, it's just a linear progression from the rocket going wrong somehow to alien scum invading the Earth. So we're left with a space in which we can imagine the horror of Carroon's spaceship being attacked by something other, his crewmates being killed, him witnessing something incomprehensible, and him being taken prisoner within his own body, but we never get to see these things onscreen. That was the best choice to create something more frightening without shoving it in our faces.

I can't really say this knocked my socks off because I know how good Quatermass can be and I know this ain't it, but the horror of it is interesting and the practical effects are a lot of fun. The title is spelled that way to reflect how proud they were of receiving an X certificate, which is laughable considering the dearth of actual gore- this would probably barely even get a PG-13 these days, and there's no nudity or swearing to be seen so you know they saw the creature and just went "oh yeah, that's too icky for fine British sensibilities". Which means it's worth watching for anybody with a less delicate constitution than British film review boards in the 50s.

Dead Ringers (1988)

directed by David Cronenberg

Canada

115 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I guess this might not be considered horror to some, because technically nothing that happens in it is supernatural or even implausible (substitute "dude your friend knows with a 3D printer in his garage" for "artsy metalsmith" and even the weird surgical instruments are possible), but it's psychologically disturbing and aesthetically weird enough that I can't see it as anything but horror. This is a somewhat difficult movie to review because your (or at least my) first impulse is to talk about the bizarre psychological profile of its main character/s, as opposed to anything else about the actual movie. Which is not a thing I particularly want to do because Jeremy Irons' portrayal of two twins in a parasitic relationship with each other and the way they consume women like objects is highly disturbing and gross. But the movie feels like it's mainly a vehicle for presenting these two to an audience.

I'm surprised that the misogyny of this film isn't talked about more- I guess it's not the main focus, but a big part of the twins' worldview is their objectification of women and I think there's some interesting points raised about misogyny in the medical industry although they may be presented in a more-than-real style. Right from the opening credits, it's there: a Re-Animator-like montage of antique medical images, mostly either of pregnant women with their bellies dissected or of medical tools, showing women's bodies as elaborate cages containing a child, empty without one, created only to uphold a second life. That sentiment- of one life intended solely to support another- is very reminiscent of the twins' orbit around each other, but it also reflects the attitude of the twins' medical practice towards women. When one of them tries to operate on a woman with an instrument that's not meant for her body, he gets frustrated and proclaims that "the woman is all wrong" rather than the instrument. These doctors see women as the problem and their instruments- and themselves- as the tool to fix them, and if the tools aren't working, there must be something wrong with the body, because the tools cannot possibly be broken, perfect as they are. I also find it amusing that they become so fixated on describing a woman as "mutant" because of her trifurcated uterus, because it's rich coming from twins, whose process of formation in the womb could also very easily be described as a mutation.

All of this plays into, like I said, a really disturbing psychology of two people who clearly went wrong somewhere along the way. What we see of them as kids is really just normal and even kind of funny- somebody should have stepped in and guided that curiosity about the human body towards a place where it could eventually end up beneficial, but instead when we see the twins as adults, there's a heavy vibe of people who were raised with no outside intervention besides each other. None of this comes into play, mind you; we don't ever see their parents or anybody else around them, it just feels impossible that two people could turn out this twisted without some serious neglect during a time when they should have been supported by the adults nearest them.

The thing that really didn't work for me was the drug addiction subplot. Maybe it's specific to the time this film came out, but I felt like the mental breakdown one of the twins has could have been portrayed without turning it into some kind of anti-drug PSA, and that it would have even been better for it because it would have been more evidence of how unhealthy the bond between the two was. But that could also be a personal opinion, drug addition storylines very rarely work for me (it's why Netflix's Haunting of Hill House rubbed me the wrong way).

I do also kind of wonder what this would have been like if it had been at 100% Cronenberg. Not that it's not, because it does feel like his work, but... maybe a better way to put it would be that I wonder about the film that could have been if this had been more Cronenbergian. More flesh, more sinister buildings, more unethical laboratory experiments. His signature brutalism is largely absent in this one but the detachment from signifiers of wealth is here in spades, and is one of the most interesting things about the atmosphere of the film: both twins are obviously very rich, and they move in circles with people who are also obviously very rich, but the elaborate decoration of the interiors that they exist within feels more like tumors on a corpse. Outward displays of wealth are unacknowledged and all the fancy furniture hanging around just looks like it's bogging everyone down. I can't say that this is my favorite Cronenberg, because I'm a horror fan and Videodrome is my one true love, but it's an interesting side of him between his more dramatic films and his horror output.

The Hill and the Hole (2020)

directed by Christopher Ernst, Bill Darmon

USA

80 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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After stumbling upon one of the co-directors' previous work, a King in Yellow adaptation called "Corpse", I was more than excited to find this newer second film, adapted from a Fritz Leiber story. Since I'm not familiar with the original story, I'm purely going to be talking about the movie here, so I might say some things that are irrelevant. When the library sees fit to give me my hold on a Fritz Leiber collection, then I shall learn.

Immediately I was relieved to see that The Hill and the Hole looks like a proper movie with an adequate budget for camera equipment and editing, as opposed to Corpse, which is a good movie regardless of the way it looked... but it didn't look very good. This time it looks real, and not like somebody's art school passion project (which isn't a bad thing). The acting and dialogue are still great, there was never any problem there, but now it's one-upped because the actors finally reside in an environment that matches the quality of their script. It seems like really the only thing they had to do was go outside- contrasting this against Corpse made me realize that the characters in that film all seemed trapped in stuffy apartments and the same couple feet of alleyway, which could have been a stylistic choice considering the suffocating tone of the story as adapted to a modern city setting, but just having The Hill and the Hole take place out-of-doors makes it feel so much more realistic.

From the start of the film it never stops feeling like it's on the move, like it's somehow never at rest. This is probably because the main character is being actively pursued by other people, but there's something else making it feel that way that I can't put my finger on, and I don't know if I entirely liked it. I felt like I couldn't relax into the movie at any point, and again, this could have been a stylistic choice given the paranoid and dangerous tone, but I don't think it was. Either way, I didn't find it to be a big enough deal to really bother me. The only other thing I disliked about it- and this is something that may be irrelevant because it could be an issue with the original story as well- is that I felt like the hill/hole should have been a larger presence. I feel like this movie is more about the man who gets sucked into the mystery of the hill/hole rather than the hill/hole itself, and I just wanted to see more about that weird mound in the desert. I was into that mound. But again, this is not a terribly big deal and doesn't take away from how happy I am to see people adapting cosmic horror the way it feels like it should be adapted, instead of forcing an aesthetic onto it that fits with what people are comfortable with, as opposed to what's interesting and new.

I love the daylight horror of this. The hallucinatory, intrusive menace of the thing that should not be, encapsulated so well in something that you can see but not measure: the hill that reads as a hole on all equipment other than the eyes in your head. The part where I feel like this movie really proves itself to be something impressive is the scenes at the end with the reveal of the mound builders- the special effects there were just so good. I know those were probably plastic Halloween skeletons but combined with the deeply ominous distorted voices and their flickery, looming presence above the hill/hole, they became the perfect visual for what they represented. If these people adapted The House on the Borderland I'd die. Or William Hope Hodgson's short story "The Hog".

There is an issue that should be addressed in depicting the builders of large earthworks in the Americas as aliens, because that idea feeds into the conspiracy theory that Native Americans weren't the ones who built ancient cities, it was really aliens. That's a product of Fritz Leiber's era, and it's contextualized differently when adapted to the modern era, where a weird hill built by aliens in the desert can kind of pass as just a weird hill built by aliens in the desert, and most reasonable people don't subscribe to the "it was aliens and not Native Americans" thing. But it does deserve to be mentioned that the source of this story was (probably) racism.

By Our Selves (2015)

directed by Andrew Kötting
UK
80 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I've wanted to see this more than practically any other movie for a very long time but only just now found the means to do so. It's been something I always try and fail to obtain around Halloween as during the autumn season I usually like to watch films that have something to do with hauntology or folk horror (or both). It's a vibe.

By Our Selves is a film about the journey of John Clare from the asylum where he'd been living to Northamptonshire as recounted in the book he wrote about said journey. I say this film is "about" this because there's no neat way to describe how the movie relates to its own subject matter. It isn't an autobiography, it isn't a documentary, it isn't quite a fictional narrative. It just is itself. The hauntological aspect of it is definitely clear in the way that the camera is trained on "John Clare" (played really well, yet somehow without saying a word, by Toby Jones) in what is intended to be 1841, while all around him modern things like cars, security cameras, guys with boom mics, and new buildings are present. Clare is his own slice of 1841 bleeding through the map to the present day. By Our Selves is a collapsing of time, a flat panel where everything is happening at once. There's one scene where the director is interviewing Alan Moore about the psychogeography of Northamptonshire and why all the bizarre stuff in England seems to pool in the middle of the country, and although it's ostensibly "documentary" footage, in the background we can still see a character from John Clare's 19th century walking by.

I think that there may be something to be said about whether or not this movie romanticizes mental illness, because there seems to be a kind of feeling of like... schizophrenic people and other people who experience delusions being used by non-mentally-ill people the same way psychedelic drugs are used; to create a new perspective on reality, only the difference between those two things is drugs aren't living people who should have a say in how their stories are told. There's definitely merit to a new perspective if the mentally ill people in question have a hand in it, but taking delusions and making them an aesthetic if you don't personally experience them kind of stinks of fetishizing.

That isn't really a hallmark of folk horror, though, in my experience, so I'm inclined to think this is a one-off thing, and of course John Clare's story is tied up in his being schizophrenic, so obviously that plays a large part in By Our Selves. And it definitely isn't portrayed in a "look how WEIRD this guy was" way. I love how this movie seems to capture so many different aspects of history- somehow without traveling further back than the 19th century it touches upon a continuous thread of wyrd Britain, which one could argue is because many of the ideas we think of as British tradition today were excavated and revived in the 19th century. I've never seen a movie like this that seems to be trying so hard not to be a movie and it's a really fascinating thing.

The Reptile (1966)

directed by John Gilling

UK

91 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I'm not a big fan of most Hammer horror films, but that tends to change when October rolls around. Though the style is too stuffy for me at any other time of year, something about the weather turning cool and my thoughts turning to "how many horror movies can I shove directly into my eyeballs this month?" makes these films perfect for the kind of thing I'm craving. The Reptile is an excellent example of when Hammer was doing really well: the atmosphere, the perfectly linear and logical plot, the elaborate costuming all come together to make something eminently watchable and perfect for a chilly autumn night.

The film begins with a classic set-up: After a brief cold open in which we see a man die mysteriously, said man's brother is willed a small, run-down cottage in a small, run-down Cornish village and subsequently tries to move in with his wife and make it their own, only for his brother's mysterious death to mysteriously haunt him. The circumstances of this death are pretty interesting and not at all like what I'd typically see in a horror movie of this era because it's just so weird. The victims are bitten by an as-yet-unseen humanoid creature which then quickly retreats into the shadows before we can see its face, and then they're taken by violent epileptic fits and severe bruising and swelling of the face until eventually they choke out and die. (Except for our main character, of course, who has plot armor.) Maybe it's the makeup effects that make this so weird- the venom facepaint just looks kind of off. It doesn't look like someone who's been snake-bitten, and it doesn't really look like anything else, either; you can hardly tell what's happening to the people who are dying because their symptoms are acted out so strangely. There's also no mention whatsoever of reptiles, snakes, animal attacks, or anything of that sort until as late in the film as possible, so without foreknowledge (like the film's title, obviously) you really can't link the deaths to a snake bite. It's kind of bizarre.

This probably doesn't need to be said, because horror of the era and horror through to today is often inspired by ideas of the "savage" Other, but this movie is pretty damn racist. I can't really talk about how without spoiling it, but I'm going to go ahead because I assume no one out there is waiting with bated breath to see this film. The racism is that typical British horror of the far East, and the titular monster was created out of the corruption of a lovely innocent girl by primitive rituals from somewhere in the jungles of Borneo. There's a really heavy motif of Indian mysticism in this and the primary antagonist's house is decorated with trophies of his far-off explorations, up to and including his daughter, who wears a Sari and plays a sitar just, you know, because she's so mysterious and exotic. The villain is simply referred to as "Malay", no name, no nothing. It doesn’t really matter who he is or where he’s from, because to Brits of the 1960s, brown was brown, and more importantly, brown was not British, and therefore untrustworthy.

I was sort of expecting this kind of thing from a Hammer film, so I didn't really rate this lower than the average solely for that reason, even though it is of course very off-putting. I rated it lowish because even though it's a commendable production and, like I said, the aesthetic of it is charming and especially the costumes are very well done, it's not that interesting to me as a specific film. It's not very unique or engaging, doesn't have a lot of "staying power" outside of its monster, which is cool-looking, but doesn't hold up well. It's a cozy film to watch because instead of appearing immaculate and unsullied the whole thing looks lived-in, which I assume is because it was shot at least partially on location as opposed to on a soundstage. It deserves recognition because a lot of people have childhood memories of being freaked out by the lizard-creature (apparently the actress who plays it was pretty freaked out as well- she was claustrophobic, and the makeup was so uncomfortable she never played a creature role again) but I personally don't feel much warmth towards it.

Alien (1979)

directed by Ridley Scott

USA, UK

117 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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For a long time I had only sort of danced around the Alien franchise, I'd seen Prometheus and Alien: Covenant but I never went near the original films because I felt like they had so much lore. I felt like they were so cemented in culture that I couldn't, as a casual viewer, just drop in any time and watch one. Not sure what I was thinking of as an alternative- go to college and take their "Alien Franchise 102" class?- but it turns out Alien is a movie just like any other movie and can be watched with as much or as little context as you want.

It's strange to see something like this devoid of the emphasis that pop culture has placed on its most famous scenes. The chest-burster is just a chest-burster, it is not present in the form of a hilarious gif, it happens and then it's done. The Xenomorph is there for as long as it's there, and no more; it's not present as an action figure or a handmade plush or any of the other merchandise that bears its image. When taken out of the context of its pop culture identity, Alien is just a movie. I was actually surprised by how much it's just a movie, because its reputation makes it into something so monumental, but it feels like all of the other sci-fi movies of its era that I've seen. It has that strong DIY aesthetic where everything has hard edges, paint streaks, dents & scratches, and the long list of imperfections- likely intentional- in the interior of the Nostromo make it look far more like a giant outdated military facility floating through space than a top-of-the-line spaceship. Which is my very favorite flavor of spaceship: I don't like the glossy Netflix 4K ships constructed with an ounce of practical effects and ten tons of CGI, I like the ones like Nostromo where they genuinely appear to be lived in. The crew dynamic is like this as well- everybody feels like coworkers, some of them like each other (well, Brett and Parker seemed to like each other, everybody else was just short of openly hostile) but mostly they just work together. Altogether it feels like a lot of work was done to make this look so unassuming and hum-drum, and it comes out looking like an extremely realistic picture of its crew and environs.

Sigourney Weaver, who is pretty much the indelible face of Alien now, also takes more of a backseat than one might expect if one is only familiar with her role in this film through the lens of its reputation. Maybe she's a bigger figure in the later films, but she spends a lot of her time in this one as just another member of the crew, and even when she ends up as the only survivor, the Final Girl In Space, she never really stops feeling like just a member of the crew. I think it's a testament to good acting and a subtly effective script that her coworkers/crewmates' influence on her remains even after they've all been killed. I actually like her role this way a lot more than I would have if she had been painted as the indestructible hero from minute one- this way she's not pre-destined to win, her fate is never certain. She's just the one who managed to evade the alien long enough and enough times to survive. She's the winner of the game of chance, the slim percentage of survival.

And enough has been said about the aesthetics of this that I probably don't have to say any more, but I will. The structure the crew finds on the hellish planet that the initial distress beacon calls them to is probably one of my favorite abandoned alien artifacts in film. I got a sense of this from Prometheus, and while a lot of people really hated that film, I do think it expands upon the dead aliens' backstory in an interesting manner. The corpse of that massive humanoid alien makes you want to know so much more about it, but we don't- that makes it more terrifying. The unknown of it, the black coils and fearful symmetry of the structure, the decaying corpse of something that might have looked a lot like us once- that's what gets you. That's why this holds up as a scary movie. I can't ever be afraid of the Xenomorph now, I've seen it de-contextualized too many times. But I can still be haunted by the implications of such a being and the destruction that it must have visited upon the ruins of that ring-like structure.

I'm getting long-winded now, so I'll stop here, but I want to emphasize again what I said at the beginning about how this is just a movie. The story is nothing terribly inventive and it's got the same ideas in it as a ton of other sci-fi horror flicks, but everything about it is pulled off so well that it'll make you forget about all those other movies. It seems to me that this is a film that has gotten famous off how perfectly it all comes together to make something visually interesting and tense. It's not like the story is the first of its kind or anything. It's just how it's told that's so masterful. It really does feel like there's a kind of magic at work here, it feels like this movie is a glimpse into a future or an alternate past. Even with the foreknowledge of what all the creatures looked like, it still felt like I was watching something that was actually happening. It hits all the beats. It's just a Good Film.