Blood Beat (1983)

directed by Fabrice A. Zaphiratos

USA

85 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is a hard one to review because it is so unique and has an almost non-linear narrative (which I'm not sure was intentional), and also because I personally love it so much that it's difficult to explain why. A lot of people like it because it's familiar to them; it's from Wisconsin and apparently that fact is very obvious if you know the area. So it's got that charm that exists only in extremely low-budget, shot-on-video horror movies that make no attempt to hide their regional roots, but there's something else about it that makes it compelling that's harder to put a finger on.

This was my second watch because I barely remembered anything from the first time other than that I couldn't hear what anybody was saying. I think this requires two or more watches because, while it may seem so nonsensical that it's easy to dismiss as simply being bonkers with no logic, it actually becomes a whole different thing if you watch it already being at least vaguely familiar with it. For one thing, the plot makes sense in its own way. Or I guess I should say that on second viewing one notices that it has a plot, which is something. It's at its most conventional at the beginning, when it sets up the general idea, and from there it devolves slowly into stuff that you just have to go with because it's not going to even attempt to explain them in the slightest.

I was struck by my own love for this specific type of unique, non-traditional horror film upon rewatching Blood Beat because I could tell exactly where things would have changed if this was made today. The boyfriend's daughter and his mom, the two characters whose intensely clashing vibes basically set off the entire storyline, would have been introduced much more gradually, with flashbacks showing us snippets of their past and giving us context for their apparent psychic abilities. If this movie cared about convention, we would be given backstory about this guy's mom's extra-sensory abilities and why she immediately gets such a bad vibe from his girlfriend, and vice versa. But I love this movie still, even though it doesn't provide any of those aspects of a normal narrative, because we do understand these people, possibly even better than we would had the film gone through the requisite motions to introduce us to them the way most movies do. The mother paints these weird paintings and it's just something she does, we don't need to be introduced to it delicately; we just know that she's a painter and that's an accepted fact. Everybody is exactly as they are, like the cameras just showed up in their lives one day. A somewhat notorious scene, where a couple who eventually get murdered by the ghost samurai (we'll get to that) bicker inconsequentially, him bitching at her from a waterbed to make him a Tang and her muttering to herself while fixing generic Tang in an ugly kitchen, shows what feel like real people doing real things, even though it is scripted. These two have no plot relevance and both end up knifed, but that look into their boring life is shot and set up so well.

So, yeah, there's a samurai ghost. No, I don't know why. There is a war flashback that appears to show some generic bombings and chaos, so if one of the characters had some professed connection to the bombing of Japan, then maybe we would be able to make the link between this archetypical Japanese spirit and its need for revenge on these specific people. But none of that is ever made clear. When the samurai speaks, it/he/whatever just boasts about its own power (in a super racist accent - no one in this movie is Japanese, by the way). The reason why there's a samurai wandering around stabbing folks at random in rural Wisconsin is never disclosed, but, like the way the characters aren't set up but instead just exist in the here and now, the samurai is a fact that Just Is.

The mother and the girlfriend, in addition to having some connection to each other, also have some connection to the samurai ghost. The mother's is stronger, as she’s able to directly communicate with it, but the girlfriend seems to be able to awaken the ghost through, uh, orgasms? Or maybe her orgasms and the ghost weren't connected and the director just chose to show the two at the same time as a stylistic choice? It remains unclear. But regardless, the two women are entangled in a strange triangle with the murderous ghost of a samurai in Wisconsin. The depiction of psychic power is what I loved most about this movie because something about it does feel so raw and eerie even in a low-rent film such as this. It could have just been that I was really into the vibe, but there's something so good about those dated glowing hands effects, and the way the psychic aura overwhelms people, the way it grows more and more powerful until not just the mom but also everyone around her who's blood, and eventually just everyone around her, is psychically awake. Honestly, the only thing keeping this from being a psychedelic masterpiece in the vein of recent hits such as Mandy or Possessor is that it never explains anything. I love this movie, and it's a Christmas movie too - I think it's going to be a yearly tradition for me. This is more of a niche cult film with little mainstream respect, but I don't even think it's bad objectively or subjectively. It's just one of those movies that uses a different language.

Silent Night Deadly Night 4: Initiation (1990)

directed by Brian Yuzna

USA

90 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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If you like your Christmas movies slightly unhinged and only vaguely about Christmas, this is the one for you. I've never seen the first Silent Night Deadly Night because it always struck me as being kind of mean-spirited, but I think it's pretty safe to say that this entry into the series (which I had no idea was a series until recently) has little to nothing to do with it, unless there's more grubs in the first three movies than I had imagined. I think the original Silent Night Deadly Night is partly to blame for how difficult it is to find Christmas horror movies that don't involve a mentally ill person dressing up as Santa Claus and killing people, or some variation thereupon, so it's a little ironic that an entry belonging to the same series is so wildly unconventional and carefree.

Its Christmas vibe is, as I said, quite minimal; the main character is actually Jewish so what little Christmas ambiance there is kind of exists in the background as something that other people are involved in. This is ideal for the current time: 'tis the season, but I don't want to be, like, smacked in the face with it. But something about the overall atmosphere of SNDN4, as we'll call it, feels strangely cozy nonetheless. There's a realness to it that only belongs to movies from the past, a deliberately unpolished tone that reflects how things look in a more honest way than mainstream film today tends to portray it. This version of LA looks grubby and sort of run-down, everything is a little bit dirty and looks like it really is, not how we want it to be. The main character moves around in a world that looks like she belongs in it - the office she works in, the used bookstore that is really a front for a coven, even the interior of her apartment all look like real places that a camera crew just walked into one day. Everything felt recognizable, which only makes the overall mood all the more wacky, because the hyperreal backdrop contrasts sharply with all the bizarre stuff going on.

The plot is really all over the place, and kept switching lanes so fast I couldn't always figure out what tone it was going for. I genuinely love the main character - she's the driving force behind everything, a pissed-off reporter who gets fed up with struggling to make her voice heard in the boys' club of a newspaper she works for, not listening to nothing or nobody when it comes to how she's going to live her life. The movie itself seems to be in support of her, which is why I'm not so sure how I felt about the role played by the urban coven she gets involved with. With the presence of both a bunch of misogynistic guys and a cult of militant feminists who don't value men's lives, there was a kind of undertone of "but both sides are wrong!!!!" to this that is frequently deployed by bigots to shift blame away from themselves and back onto the target of their bigotry. But I truly don't think this is an anti-feminist movie or anything; the main character remains independent throughout it, and the film never punishes her for not fitting into roles and stereotypes. Like I said, everything that happens is so weird that I struggle to find any message in it. I thought the bug cult would take more precedence over everything, but then next thing I knew somebody was pulling larvae out of a vent shaft, and then the main character was birthing a grub, and then there was some kidnapping... this movie just does what it wants. It's best not to pin your expectations on any one avenue of the storyline.

This is one of those things that I'd recommend to anybody who is into practical effects, even if it's something you think you'd hate and you have to suffer through the movie attached just to get to the effects. There's so much slime and goop and the giant bug puppets are so good that I at times forgot I wasn't looking at a real creature. Screaming Mad George is at the helm of it all, so you know what you're going to get. I really appreciate how unafraid this whole movie is to get its characters down in the sludge and the gunk and have their bodies become gross and weird. This is an ugly film and it wears it with pride.

The Tower (2012)

directed by Kim Ji-hoon

South Korea

121 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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It's debatable whether or not this is technically a Christmas movie, even though it takes place on Christmas Day. The holiday is essentially just a backdrop, which is actually something I'll touch upon later because I felt that it could have been used much more effectively. This is mainly a disaster movie, something South Korea's film industry seems to do pretty well, and even though it doesn't diverge too far from the standard model of a disaster film, it's still good for casual viewing, if not an in-depth, critical watch.

There's a whole lot of characters in this bad boy and the first half-hour is dedicated to making sure you know who all of them are. The set-up is fairly typical for disaster movies in that a lot, if not all, of the characters are established as having something (usually someone) left hanging; a promise that they must go back and fulfill. They make a vow to someone they love, whether literal or unspoken, and that hangs over them for the entirety of the film, so that whenever they're in mortal peril we think of who or whatever they would be leaving behind. It's a pretty standard grab for our heartstrings, but nearly every film with high stakes does it at some point, so it's just a spectrum with one end being bland and emotionless and the other end being the handful of movies in which the trope is pulled off well (Train to Busan, for one other South Korean example). It does feel obvious that the romantic connections and family obligations here are being set up from the start, but in this instance I think it's done pretty well and manages to hit the emotional beats without feeling too forced.

The film takes place in a massive apartment complex consisting of two glass towers connected by a sky bridge, housing something like 5700 people as well as fine dining and everything else that typically comes with a luxury apartment. Most of the people who live and work there are extremely rich, but there are some less wealthy who can get in by winning a lottery, as well as many underpaid and overworked cleaning and kitchen staff. To create the most dazzling experience possible for the residents, who by now expect a high standard of living, a squadron of helicopters is called in to drop synthetic snow over the area of the towers so that everyone can have a white Christmas. This hubris is what leads to the literal downfall of the towers when a helicopter crashes in the high winds and sets one of the towers on fire, trapping and killing many of the residents, who must now fight their way to the bottom and try to survive.

I guess there's supposed to be a point being made about inequality here, but to me the movie didn't push it strongly enough. The mayor of Seoul is as out-of-touch as the rich residents of the towers and is behind the decisions that repeatedly ignore the people still trapped and struggling in the building and categorize them as beyond rescue without even trying. He's presented with a list of people inside the building ordered according to "priority" and asked for his word on who to save and who to leave behind like some of them don't matter. The people inside the building must continually fight against measures taken to save the few in favor of the many, such as firewalls that isolate them from any hope of exit and eventually the full demolition of the building.

But there's just no real emphasis behind it. Yes, a lot of the rich people are shown as annoying and bullying anyone they view as weaker than them. But for the most part, no fault is established. In my opinion the most horrible part of this movie was the reason behind the fire, not because the elites who ordered a fancy fake snow display were innocent, but because they wrapped people who were innocent up into their egotism. This parallels real life, somewhat, in that the super-wealthy will continue to do things for their own enjoyment or because it's more convenient to keep doing them even though they're actively dangerous and destroying the environment, and it's not them who suffer, it's all of us who they drag along for the ride. The movie doesn't really acknowledge this, though, and we never see anybody get held accountable or anything like that.

The reason why I felt like the Christmas motif was underused is because a lot of the time Christmas movies are used to highlight inequality: the end message of A Christmas Carol might be basically to not be a dick, but it also explicitly involves treating everyone right and not hoarding wealth for yourself. The Tower just kind of happens to be set on Christmas for no particular reason other than aesthetics. To be fair, Christmas is not, at least originally, a Korean holiday, so the use of it as a soapbox to talk about inequality doesn't have as much (or any) history there as it might in the West. But I'm certain that by now most people are familiar with A Christmas Carol as well as other similar media, and maybe this is too optimistic of me, but even if they weren't, I would hope that any holiday centered around giving and togetherness would inspire feelings of empathy for all humans.

In the end this movie probably isn't worth how much I'm talking about it. It is just fine as an action/disaster movie, and some parts do get a little emotional, particularly the end. The CGI seemed pretty solid but the file I was watching was in such poor quality that those flames could have been orange tissue paper and they still would have looked real to me. I am surprised that this isn't more popular, but I guess it just feels a little too generic next to the other, better Korean disaster films out there. You could do much worse, though, and I definitely got involved in the characters and the lengths they had to go to keep themselves alive. Good one for if you, like me, live in a place where it snows on Christmas maybe one year out of every ten.

Black Friday (2021)

directed by Casey Tebo

USA

84 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I watched this on Black Friday when it came out, but - despite it being right there in the title - this makes for a seasonally appropriate watch anytime between Thanksgiving and the week of Christmas. I think "pre-Christmas" movies such as this one, that take place during the holiday season but don't actually feature any scenes on Christmas, are my preferred type of holiday movie. Everyone celebrates differently, and some don't celebrate at all, but we can all get behind how much Christmas shopping sucks. And while the inherent fun of watching a movie on the day the movie takes place adds something to the mix even for a sub-par film, Black Friday holds up anyway, at least for the most part.

What I'm going to call "Customer Service Revenge" has been experiencing somewhat of a renaissance in recent years, and like most things, the sub-genre's strength lies solely in how relatable it is. There's a very fine line between empathizing and patronizing when it comes to this kind of thing: It's usually easy to tell if something was made or written by someone who hasn't actually had to deal with demon customers a day in their life. But I can't really tell where Black Friday falls on that spectrum, because to me it felt almost messageless - I don't mean that it's bland, but it doesn't quite rise to the heights of stuff like 2017's Mayhem or the more obscure Redd Inc. The concept here is just a sort of broadly relatable "we hate our jobs" with no deeper dive into the systems that make those jobs so horrible (and low-paying, physically harmful, psychologically damaging, et cetera). It doesn't go after anybody. It doesn't look at why things are, it just gets mad that they are. I'm not saying it really needs to do that; not every film has to hash out its stance on capitalism, but I felt like in this case Black Friday was being oddly restrained and I would have loved to see it get even crazier than it did.

The plot is a generic alien mutation affair, not terribly concerned with the specifics, people just sorta get all melty and weird after coming into the proximity of an unexplained ball of goo that fell from the sky. Personally I love that - don't explain the mystery meteor that turns people into goop zombies and summons a towering amalgam of Karens from the ninth circle of hell. It's enough to know that it came from outer space and is making people go berserk. Like a lot of people, I watched this for Bruce Campbell first and foremost, but after that I watched it for the practical effects, and oh boy, I wasn't disappointed. This is a perfect example of time-tested practical effects goodness in the year of our germy lord 2021: The same methods, the same materials, but even more artistry behind it, and the ability to supplement - not supplant - it with CGI. What results from that is a glorious cesspool of clumpy space flesh, exploding heads, purply ooze, and all your favorites. Even though it really goes all-out with the aforementioned mega-Karen in the last act, Black Friday still uses a light enough touch that I feel good calling this a Practical Effects Movie™.

But it's really not, like, super great. There's something off about the characters, and I read somebody speculating that a lot of the dialogue may have been improvised, which could have explained it. The dialogue itself isn't bad, but nobody feels as defined as they should have - it's a smattering of personality traits distributed unevenly across the board, with some people getting backstory and others getting virtually none, even if they had relatively large roles. I'm kind of uncomfortable with the joke that gets brought up once or twice about "Corporate says Black Friday was racist, so it's Green Friday now". The fact that the movie is called Black Friday and all signage and dialogue within the film itself refers to Black Friday as Black Friday makes it very apparent that the film views attempts at anti-racism as a joke, at least a little bit. That just felt really unnecessary and I'm not sure where it was coming from. It didn't have to be brought up at all.

I don't know if it has rewatch value, but it's one of the better holiday-type movies I've seen recently as we prepare for the onslaught of abysmal Christmas films that always pop up around now. Bruce Campbell is genuinely great, although he's not in it that much, and while, as I said, I felt like this movie was playing it safe a little too much, it's still a pretty good time.

The Feast (Gwyledd) (2021)

directed by Lee Haven Jones

UK

93 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm always excited about new Welsh-language films, even more so when they're genre films. For that reason I have had The Feast on my watchlist for a long time without actually knowing much about it, and I think that's the best way to go into it. Because I ended up being so fond of it, though, I really want to talk about things that would spoil the plot, so I'd recommend not reading any further if you haven't watched the film yet. Suffice to say it's an extremely slow burner that isn't afraid to take all the time it needs to establish itself, and the way it goes about being a horror movie is admirable at a time when a lot of movies seem to be obsessed with constantly checking behind themselves to make sure the viewer is still following them.

I noticed right away that Annes Elwy's character, Cadi, was wet when we first saw her. I didn't know why, I just kind of filed it away as something that might be significant later. I equated it with the overall aesthetic of cleanliness that the first quarter of the film has - her having washed her hair right before she came to the house could have been another signifier of the need to maintain a perfect appearance that many of the characters have. But, while her hair being wet did turn out to be an enormously significant clue to who she was, I was wrong about the cleanliness aspect. I wanted to bring this tiny detail up anyway because it's just a taste of how meticulous The Feast is in building itself up using things that are so small you barely realize they're important.

Because I didn't know anything about the underlying story, for a while Elwy's character felt very alienating. There is a slow transition, at least for anyone unaware of the trajectory the film is headed on, from just watching someone do strange things to becoming aware that something bigger is going on, and during that transition the film requires some trust. I have seen movies where the end message is just that somebody is a freak; unkind films about an interloper whose behavior is visibly "abnormal" and who is cast as inherently untrustworthy for it up until a reveal where they turn out to inevitably be some murderer or something, because murderers are always maladjusted creeps according to the popular narrative, so that's where I thought this was going. Don't be like me; stick with this. Have faith that it's not trying to demonize anybody - nothing so simple as that. Elwy does a brilliant job portraying an almost entirely unreadable character, right up until and beyond when her true nature is revealed. I hesitate to even use the word "revealed", though, because it was being shown to us all along - from the second she shows up and is inexplicably wet.

The cinematography is nigh on flawless and perfectly suited to the kind of film this is and the kind of message it gets across. We spend a lot of time inside this house that could be a model home, with nothing out of place, perfectly color-coordinated and magazine-ready until Cadi comes and mismatches the glasses and leaves just a tiny bit of dirt here and there, just to remind the family where they are. Even though the set decoration looks Insta-worthy, I think that kind of fakeness and impossibly clean aestheticism was deliberately meant to look unsustainable rather than be a backdrop for the film that was incidental. It doesn't feel intended to compliment the look of the film so much as it serves as a point being made: Look at what these rich people do, look at how foreign to nature it is.

The other characters may not be as much of a central force to the narrative as Cadi is, but they make up important parts that complete it. Their individual roles are really interesting and I still don't know if I fully understand them. They each seem to end up with a fate that reflects something of the role they played in the environmental destruction that brought Cadi (or the thing wearing Cadi)'s wrath upon them, and the most striking of them all, I think, was the mother and wife's final scene. All throughout the film you get the sense that she's very preoccupied with keeping up appearances, very intent on being a certain kind of person and coming off a certain way, but - and I know tons of women like this in real life, it is something that society can force on a person - you also get the sense that some core part of her disagrees with it all. But she pushes it down, even though all the while she's aware of what she's responsible for and it tears her up inside. She builds a quiet spa room and goes in and does face masks. She nervously evangelizes the benefits of letting people onto your land to rip out the profitable parts and leave a lifeless slurry behind. And finally she admits what she's done, takes revenge on the hand that coerced her, and removes herself from the equation too, the only repentance she can see.

The Feast manages to tell a mythic story that does not feel at all out of place with the so-called "modern" world. There's a sense of, like, "nobody still believes that, how can you believe that?" Characters chide each other for having so much faith in old legends but everyone knows, whether they profess to believe or not, that it's true. A ruthless certainty pervades The Feast, as inevitable as the course of nature. Able to be delayed for a while, but it always comes back in the end. I'm a bit surprised to see so many people calling this "heavy-handed" because of its ecological-horror message - yes, it eventually becomes unambiguous, but it's such a slow burn that it almost feels like the film is trying to be as gradual with its message as it can. I would hope that there are not so many people who see any hint at an environmentalist agenda as heavy-handed; it is justified as there's a generation or two who grew up with after-school specials drilling vague and ultimately unhelpful personal responsibility for pollution into us, but films like The Feast aren't part of that trite preaching.

Station (1981)

directed by Yasuo Furuhata

Japan

132 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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Good lord. I will try to talk about this movie, but it's impossible for me to put into words the feeling of watching something at just the right time while in exactly the right mood and having it hit me somewhere deep and lasting. I typically mention that my reviews tend more towards me simply getting my thoughts about something out as opposed to looking critically at it, and I'm going to invoke that disclaimer again here, because something about Station had me hooked and I couldn't think about it with any particular angle while I was watching it, although I can do that more easily now after it's over.

There is not much plot to this, and what there is could be easily explained within a few sentences, maybe a short paragraph if we're being eloquent. It's not the type of thing that breaks boundaries in terms of the story it tells. But the tone of the film is what makes it resonate so hard. This movie has such a heavy feeling of loneliness and melancholy without resorting to much of the usual visual code for depicting these things. It's Ken Takakura in the lead role who does most of the work in portraying his character's burden of isolation, regret, and sorrow, and imparts those feelings onto the film as a whole. He shows little to no emotion for most of his time on screen, executing his duties as a policeman and as a member of society to the best of his ability, but the shape of those duties and his struggle to fit into it is what forms the core of Station itself. Despite not being outwardly expressive, we as viewers know what he's going through.

I think the major underlying theme of this film is a sense of duty, expectation, and shame. The first portion takes place in 1968 during the Olympics when they were hosted in Mexico, and there's a sense of national disappointment that Japan is not the host country, which is compounded when a runner representing Japan injures himself and subsequently commits suicide. His long goodbye letter is read aloud in full and it's brutal, hashing out his feelings of inadequacy, of his perceived failure to every person in his family. Towards the end of the film, the main character, as his crisis of self-doubt comes to a head, composes a resignation letter to the police department he worked for, and this letter is read out in full in a direct parallel to the suicide letter at the beginning. Although he remains living, the sense of sundering from what one is expected to do that he expresses in his resignation letter feels tantamount to a kind of suicide. Again, although this is never directly expressed, the character's feelings of not living up to what he's expected to do are a weight that builds through the whole film. It comes out once or twice in scenes where he gets into random fights; useless, unmotivated scraps that reveal the tip of the iceberg of his personal turmoil.

There's just a kind of "cut and run" mentality here: The self-imposed idea that if you feel you've screwed something up beyond fixing, or if you believe you're unworthy or unable to carry something out, you have no choice other than to abandon it and never look back. This comes up multiple times, from the opening scene where the main character leaves behind his wife and child to the entire second act which is him trying to put his past behind him and become someone else, someone he's comfortable being - but of course, it's not that easy to forget.

It is absolutely wild to me that this was made in 1981. It was doing my head in to look at some of the actors and think "If they're 40 here, they're in their 80s today". I hate that I'm saying this about a movie from the 80s, because it still feels like that was about twenty years ago at most, but this really goes to show that if a movie is good, it's good forever. The cinematography is so simple but it feels like so much - the deep snowdrifts dwarfing the human characters, the liminality of a bar with only two people in it late at night, people going about their daily business along the tracks that life has set them on. It's overwhelmingly real sometimes.

And the writing and acting are both such that the characters feel real as well - I don't feel like I have the best perspective on the strength of the script, because I only know a very tiny bit of Japanese and was watching this with subtitles, but I could still tell that every actor put in a near-perfect performance. Chieko Baisho, who plays the bar owner that the main character becomes involved with, somehow managed to capture the feeling of just... looking at somebody else, of seeing someone and talking to them and getting the sense that this is a person who has an entire inner life, who has songs that make them cry, who enjoys particular foods, who has lived and carries experiences with them that make them simultaneously more human but also completely alien, because no one can truly read another person. I know that this is all fictional, that the characters only exist as lines on a page, but the way they're brought to life and the way each person works to compliment and create the overall atmosphere of this film blew me away. You can impart a true and real message through a story that is fictional. Fiction is made up of broken pieces of reality.

I will stop talking about this now, because there's not much more I can say about how this made me feel. This is just one of those things that makes me feel the joy of film as art, storytelling as art. It's just... it just made me feel. If you can interact with and respond to a movie like this, if you can find something that really hits you, it's a very singular feeling. God, this was just so good. I apologize if I seem hyperbolic but it is important to me to be earnest about things that I like.

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021)

directed by William Eubank

USA

98 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I don't know if this came out of nowhere as much as it seemed to me that it did, or if I was just not paying attention, but a new Paranormal Activity movie was not on my radar this year. Much less one directed by William Eubank, who has been on my "people who I'd throw money at to see make a pure horror movie" shortlist. I appreciate him as a director because although he doesn't have many films to his name thus far, each one of them is distinct from the others in terms of subject matter and general vibe. And now he's contributed an entry to one of the most popular horror franchise of the 2000s, although the screenplay was written by someone else.

The Paranormal Activity series is heading in a weird direction, I guess, and I definitely don't dislike it. I've seen nearly all of them so far and I can say with confidence that all but the first one are pretty terrible. But maybe this is what can rescue the series: Divorcing itself almost entirely from the blueprint of the original, because sustaining that specific tone for close to fifteen years and in the hands of a multitude of different filmmakers is next to impossible. Turning into something like what Cloverfield seems to be edging towards could be great for the series. Maybe making this into an anthology series is what needs to happen to keep it fresh. Next of Kin resembles the previous PA films in essentially no way whatsoever, and it doesn't even have ghosts in it, if you can believe that.

Probably the biggest reason why this didn't feel like any of the other entries in the series is because it isn't strictly found-footage. Typically this would have annoyed me - either stick with being found-footage or abandon it altogether, you can't just do a hybrid of the two - but in this case, a departure from the norm is a breath of fresh air. The majority of it is filmed through cameras that the characters are holding, but here and there are a few complementary shots from a "fictional" perspective, showing the characters from the outside rather than as if they're interacting with one another. A small moment that I really loved was when Eubank seemed to be poking fun at his own signature slow-mo shots by having the cameraman explain how slow-motion filming works to a couple of small children in the background during one. I'm not sure if that was him lightly lampooning his own technique or if it was totally not meant as a joke, but if it was meant as a joke at his own expense, it makes me admire Eubank even more - to be able to say "I know this thing I always do is a little ridiculous, but I like doing it, so I'm going to keep doing it". Further slow-mo shots later in the movie confirm that he is still putting them in there remorselessly, even though it causes the found-footage facade to crumble a little more.

I was afraid that this movie was going to be all about how "weird" Amish people are, and would caricature them at best as backwards yokels and at worst as religious nutjobs with something to hide. I don't know why, but poor or comedic depictions of Amish people piss me off a lot. They don't deserve to be pointed and laughed at. But - and I can't fully explain why without spoiling the whole movie a little bit - the bizarre goings-on around the farm and cultish behavior the Amish family engages in is presented as markedly not the actions of real Amish people. That they are visibly Amish and known as being Amish to outsiders who would accept that as fact due to their ignorance about the community is important to certain elements of the plot.

Speaking of the plot... I feel like anybody watching this would be hard-pressed not to realize that literally everything that happens is thanks to the main characters all acting like unsupervised two-year-olds. Granted, nothing would progress the story if they didn't go snooping around where they were explicitly told not to and getting themselves into trouble by ignoring common sense, but especially at the end, the big picture becomes clearer and clearer, and that picture is that while the Amish were up to some suspicious stuff, a whole lot less people would have died if they'd been left to their own machinations and not spied on by some naïve twenty-somethings with no respect for boundaries. I personally liked the characters, because they had that vibe of casual camaraderie that the characters in The Signal also had, where they felt believable as friends (or at least friendly acquaintances) on a road trip. But your mileage may vary depending on how high your tolerance for people doing the exact opposite of what they're told is.

I guess my most damning criticism of this is that I definitely wouldn't have thought as much of it if it wasn't branded as a Paranormal Activity film. I liked it, but the interesting part comes from the fact that it's so different from what came before it. I enjoyed the chaotic last twenty minutes, which is somewhat of a trademark of the series, and the source of the horror is, like I said, not ghosts but something else older and more vicious. I would love to see the baton handed off to somebody new for the next entry and to have it be unrelated to this or any of the previous films, but a constant churning-out of PA-branded films could ruin the franchise as fast as this has renewed it.

The Medium (2021)

directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun

Thailand, South Korea

131 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I was extremely excited for this. It seemed like every mention of it I saw online was someone calling it the scariest movie they'd ever seen, and I'd heard so much high praise for it that it became one of my most anticipated of the year. And... well. I definitely won't say it disappointed me, but with hype like that, I guess it's hard to meet expectations. This was a good movie, but not the non-stop thrill ride I was hoping it might be. That might just be personal preference, because possession horror doesn't do anything for me. And before I start, I want to be clear: Scariness is not the metric by which I measure a horror film's quality. It never will be. But in this case, I'm focusing on the scare factor because that's specifically what The Medium is getting so much buzz for.

So the movie starts slowly, with a documentary crew introducing their subject, a woman living in the rural hills of Thailand who is the village's main shaman, possessed bodily by a god called Bayan. The place where she lives is rife with gods, they inhabit every little object and represent any and every occasion, and the villagers live with this as part of daily life, it's a neutral fact. I enjoyed how low-key this was, because in many films that focus on folk religion or tradition, they kind of invent an aesthetic that's so far removed from actual practice that it's like that awful Annabelle doll: So obviously creepy-looking that it can't pass for anything anybody ever created on purpose. The wide and inscrutable pantheon is left opaque, and although I don't believe spirituality is supposed to be the antagonist of The Medium, the way the villagers seem to be entirely at the whim of whatever forces they pray to is an unsettling takeaway.

It's quite a long movie, and it feels like it's divided into two distinct halves. Because of the length, you spend a lot of time getting acquainted with each of those halves, and when the first shifts into the second, it's genuinely great; the feeling of going into unfamiliar territory is disquieting and only gets worse as the film goes on. But at the same time, you start getting used to the film repeatedly reaching for new levels of horror, and so it becomes what feels like a contest with itself to see how over-the-top it can get. The first half of the movie is, in my opinion, the best, because it's not trying too hard and it's still eerie: The possession is subtle and, above all, relatable, because what's happening to Mink, the possessed girl, isn't the neck-swiveling, white-eyed melodrama of a typical possession film - it's shown as a bodily thing. It almost appears like she's having a miscarriage despite not being pregnant. She goes through horrific pain in her stomach and other areas, she bleeds heavily and vomits, but worst of all are the behavioral changes, horribly public and extremely embarrassing actions that she isn't in control of. This is one of the most frightening parts of the film because it's uncomfortable to imagine losing control of your body and your personality in such a fast and unstoppable way.

But like I said, this is a movie that ramps up and then keeps ramping up and doesn't stop. The possession goes from blood and pain to a state where nothing of the girl's original self remains. During the tail end of the second half, night vision is used heavily, and this is about where the film started losing me. It tries so hard to show things that are repulsive, disgusting acts that could only be done by a demon or somebody with no humanity left, that it almost becomes boring. Again, it is not so bad as many a possession film. The horrible acts committed by the girl under the influence of whatever that was aren't played up with cheesy evil laughter and overly-long speeches about the demon's loathing for puny humans. But it is sustained for so long and without stopping that I became used to it and then it was no longer interesting.

The found-footage element is by far the weakest aspect of the whole thing. I was really hoping it would play a bigger part, because I love found-footage films and the good ones are some of the creepiest horror movies I know. But it's woefully underused, and flat-out illogical considering the events of the end; there's not even a "these people all died and then we found their tapes blah blah" title card, the narrative just flouts logic without notice. There is also B-roll that looks far more professional than the rest of the film, and background music during tense scenes, two things that take away any real purpose to having a found-footage aesthetic.

The strongest point is that everybody in this is a really good actor. All the things I said about the ways that this differs from lesser possession films are mostly down to Narilya Gulmongkolpech, the actress who plays Mink, doing such an unbroken and relentless job portraying her. It's hard to believe she's a first-time actress, but I think maybe her "normal girl" vibe makes her spiral into possession more palpable. She shifts from being an average, somewhat bored-seeming young girl to something deeply evil so well that it's believable even while much of the rest of the film is not. And the people around her, although they don't have to shoulder the task of playing a possession victim, also feel real, and their sadness and fear feels real too.

All in all, I don't think there's that much wrong with this movie. It's very good and it's unlike a lot of other Thai horror I've seen. I usually don't like to generalize like that, but I'm doing it to make a point in this case, because not that many Thai horror films make it out of the country and into the international spotlight, and those that do are not like this one. I definitely picked up on influences from The Wailing, especially in the big finale exorcism scene, which could have been even longer and more intense in my opinion. I loved this as a horror movie and as a movie in general but I was let down by believing it would be far more frightening than it was.

Shutter (2004)

directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun & Parkpoom Wongpoom

Thailand

97 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This was one of the first horror movies I ever watched a long, long time ago, but I've been meaning to rewatch it because I first saw it under less-than-ideal circumstances. I'm not an evangelist for the theater-going experience, but no movie deserves to be watched on an iPad 2 (on portrait mode) in an uncomfortable desk chair in somebody else's crowded office. I also very recently saw Banjung Pisanthanakun's latest movie The Medium, but to be honest I see few similarities between the two films, and this one had a different screenwriter as well.

As I've mentioned before, analog horror is my favorite thing. Any film where the haunting or otherwise supernatural event central to the plot has to do with the physical medium of film, or any technology that has now been streamlined out of existence, is inherently fascinating to me. You (or at least I) don't notice it that much when you're watching Shutter, because it really feels like a movie that could have come out this year, but it hinges on technology that, while not entirely defunct yet, is slowly disappearing. The protagonist can't immediately see that he's captured a ghost on film; he has to physically go to a print shop and get his pictures developed (or otherwise develop them himself in his home darkroom). This, to me, is infinitely more terrifying than waving your phone around and being able to instantly see ghosts through the screen. The element of waiting and being uncertain if there's things around you that you can't perceive, but can perceive and possibly harm you, is much more potent than the instant gratification of digital photography.

This is one of those movies that has such a stellar concept that I feel like it would have made an amazing short film, but a lot gets added in to make it a normal runtime, and while the depth of the plot doesn't ruin the movie, it does make the central idea - capturing ghosts on film - less central. We know from the start that the protagonist is not the best guy, but for a while we're still able to put ourselves in his shoes, and that alone is upsetting - who can say what they would do if they ran somebody down on the road by accident? We all hope that we would stay and help, and most of us probably would, but people are unpredictable when their panic instinct kicks in. It's oft-used horror fodder to have somebody become haunted for a one-time mistake that eventually overtakes their life, no matter how big or small. But as the story unfolds we gradually become more and more aware that the main character is not just somebody who did the wrong thing under pressure, he's been actively making bad choices and hurting people in the events that happened before the start of the film. This is not a movie where the horrific message comes from the possibility that any small mistake could cause you to become haunted. This is a movie that shows the awful side of humanity, that follows the descent of a terrible person into the depths of the retribution he deserves.

The only conceivable way I could compare this to The Medium would be that they both get much more intense in their second halves, but like The Medium, Shutter is way better when it's more subtle. There's a vibe to this. It's very laid-back when it's not being terrifying, and the easygoing way that the non-involved characters (like the print shop guy) interact with the protagonist show us there's a world that exists outside of the crises the film's characters are having, which is something horror movies don't do a lot. When I think about this movie, even before this last rewatch, the thing that has always stuck in my mind isn't the end, when the protagonist is finally able to see his ghost without the aid of a camera, but his lingering neck pain throughout the film. I don't know what it is about that small sideline of the story, executed with no real need for CGI, that is so lastingly creepy. Feeling something and knowing it's there but not being able to get anyone else to corroborate it or gather enough proof to show it to someone else is something I feel like we've all experienced at some point, not just in the context of a haunting.

There's a reason why this is a cult classic. It's a good movie. Despite one baffling and totally unnecessary scene of comedy relief that felt like I'd stopped watching the movie and started watching a parody of it, Shutter manages to keep up the scare factor steadily and even work in a "plot twist" (some call it a twist, but I think it's more like a slow reveal). It doesn't do a thorough, academic-level deep dive into any one subject, but its themes of personal responsibility, character, and ghosts on film all work together to make something that still stands out as unique today.

Ghostwatch (1992)

directed by Lesley Manning

UK

91 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I tried to watch this some years ago but was too impatient at the time to sit through it, so I turned it off. This was a huge mistake on my part and it's a travesty that it took me so long to revisit it. Ghostwatch was an event as much as it was a movie, and knowing the background behind its original broadcast enhances your experience: I am not familiar with the general pantheon of '90s British TV presenters, but apparently the people in this faux documentary were faces the audience would know and trust; not ghost hunters, not no-name actors dressed up as newscasters. So the result was a kind of War of the Worlds situation, except a lot of stories about the panic surrounding War of the Worlds were fabricated, and the panic around Ghostwatch was real - so real, at least one death has been attributed to it.

So what is it that got audiences so worked up on Halloween 1992 that it became an infamous television event? A mostly quiet, extremely droll fake TV broadcast where you barely see any ghosts unless you're glued to the screen. People have tried to pull this off, and the whole genre of found-footage is based off of this concept, with varying degrees of commitment to the bit, but the people who made Ghostwatch knew that if they were going to make something that really scared people, they had to work with an audience that was not expecting to see a ghost show up in front of the camera and shout "Boo!" Nearly everything about this movie is believable, with people reacting to things in what feels for all the world like an unscripted broadcast. The acting is as amateurish as it needs to be (which is in itself good acting) and no one seems to hog the screen or be played as the main character, even the people whose house is being investigated. Besides the subtle visual tricks, there's also subtle tricks of writing and editing that I can't even describe here because I still haven't caught all of them.

Upon reflection, one of the things Ghostwatch is best at and one of the biggest reasons why it feels so authentic is because the reveal of information doesn't feel like a typical film narrative. I imagine that this couldn't have been easy to pull off: To show us things and give us backstory on the haunting in a way that feels like everybody involved is genuinely discovering it in real-time, and had no idea what was going to happen beforehand. Ironically, this is also the only part where I personally felt like the film faltered, because giving Pipes (our ghost) a sort of macabre generic backstory in which he's a twisted criminal is... well, generic. But even with that backstory, Pipes gets elevated after death into something far more sinister than simply the ghost of a bad man.

And despite almost never showing up directly, always requiring you to stop and rewind or have him pointed out to you by somebody else, Pipes is scary. Pipes is not just a knocking-sounds-and-cold-spots ghost. Pipes is not even a throwing-stuff-and-touching-you ghost. Pipes is something else. You get the feeling that he, or it, could manifest fully if desired. That feeling of only seeing a little bit of what's actually there is what makes the really creepy "authentic" ghost photos and videos out there so unsettling. And when the people start calling into the station saying that they're experiencing weird phenomena in their own homes, it becomes something personal - you start to fear, or at least the people watching in 1992 probably did, that you might be the next person to have to place a call.

It seems from other reviews that the very end is what lost some people (new viewers, I'm not sure what the original response to it was, or if it broke the authenticity for people back in the day too). It may have lost me as well if I was looking to feel completely convinced throughout 100% of the film, but I wasn't, not truly - I was looking at Ghostwatch as more of a concept, and the ending was the capstone on that concept. The ending tells us that this isn't just people following one idea and that idea is "make a fake broadcast that looks like a real one"; the ending says that there's something this movie wants to say about the nature of haunting in the age of television. It's the idea that television can become a seance. That line from Doctor Who is cemented in my head forever since the first time I watched "Blink" - "The image of an Angel itself becomes an Angel". That's what this is, an accidental summoning. It's an in-built human fear to feel a little like talking too much about something can bring it to you, and we may try to tamp that down as we become more "civilized", but Ghostwatch reveals that it's still in us.

The Deep House (2021)

directed by Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury

Belgium, France

82 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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The concept of exploring a house, or in some cases a whole town, that has been flooded either by natural or manmade causes is one of the smallest identifiable niches in horror that I can still point to and call out as a defined Thing™. It's not always horror that utilizes that idea, but it very frequently is because of the inherent eerieness of such a scenario. And it's something that I love. It's hard to do it wrong, but The Deep House definitely does it right.

While the characters come second to the setting, I was expecting the main couple in this film to be much more insufferable due to the synopsis promising me (fictional) "YouTubers" for main characters. But I was surprised at a scene early on in the film where the boyfriend pulls out his camera and begins narrating to his audience while his girlfriend goes to ask directions. Surprised, because instead of saying corny and typical YouTuber stuff like "Uhhhh what's up guys here I am in this SCARY abandoned village, ooooh I think I heard a noise, aaahh I'm so scared", he gives insightful comments in a respectful manner. I was expecting this to be one of those movies where you're encouraged to hate the main characters, but these people are no worse, and certainly a great deal better, than your average adventure-loving horror protagonists. Again, though, their character is not that important - it's just refreshing to see two people who aren't bumbling idiots, although they may be a bit naïve.

What is important about this movie is the location. Relatively little of it takes place on dry land, and the above-water action is modestly beautiful - not over-the-top, but a lovely display of semi-rural French greenery that makes one pine for a vacation. Once they enter the water, that's where the movie stays for the rest of its running time. Some suspension of disbelief is required to smooth out some of the details, such as how anybody is audible to each other underwater or how they can possibly be playing music, but as long as you're a scrub like me who doesn't know the first thing about scuba diving other than it gets you wet, you probably won't get your immersion (sorry) broken. It is interesting that the actors' faces are, out of necessity, covered almost entirely by masks throughout their entire time underwater, because being able to see reactions and expressions is half of what makes a movie, especially a horror movie. Instead we have to rely on their voiceovers, which, again, are only clearly audible for the viewers' benefit and would probably not be that easy to hear in reality. The film also doesn't make use of the oxygen limit as a gimmick, which I appreciated; the situation was tense enough without being reminded of how much or little time the characters had left every two minutes.

I genuinely don't know how they filmed most of this. I doubt the whole thing was filmed on an underwater set, but no matter which way I looked at it, this had to be a tremendously difficult and uncomfortable shoot. I assume some scenes were shot on dry land with a filter applied to them, and occasionally when an object is floating, its movements don't look quite like they would if it were really drifting through water, but the amount of shots that couldn't have been done any other way than by actually filming underwater seemed to outweigh the stuff that could have been accomplished with trickery. This movie feels completely realistic, to the point where it almost overshadows the horror aspect of it. You could watch this even as a non-horror fan just for the novelty of basically watching a very dark and ominous exploration of what feels like a real underwater ruin. There is something so universally fascinating about the idea of swimming through a house - I used to have dreams like that as a kid, and I don't think I'm the only one. When the couple enters the grounds of the underwater house and they float over the locked front gates instead of walking through them, I had flashbacks to those surreal dreams.

There's something perfectly horrible about that house. Like I said, this concept doesn't have to be horror, but it lends itself well to it, and with the way Bustillo & Maury flesh out their plot with other stuff that makes the house more perilous than simply a drowned wreck, The Deep House uses every angle of its setting for the scare factor. I don't want to spoil too much of this because I know it's barely even technically out yet and a lot of people haven't seen it, but I enjoyed that the plot was sparse and that the setting was allowed to take center stage, as it should. The end introduces some backstory, but doesn't fall all over itself trying to throw in more padding for a plot that did not have to be groundbreaking.

I mostly know Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury as makers of extremely violent movies. The Deep House is practically PG-13 compared to what they've done before, and while saying that that's "refreshing" implies that their gore is tiresome or that they're not good at it (which isn't true), I don't know how else to describe this. It is refreshing. The scenery is gorgeous, like I said, and not only is the concept interesting but the way it's executed is unique too, and so in comparison with a splattery slasher - even the best splattery slasher - this feels like a breath of fresh air. There is some violence in this, mostly towards the end, and it maintains an atmosphere of foreboding throughout that can get genuinely creepy, but I guess you can't render gouts of blood and guts underwater as well as you could on land. Some movies come out at just the right time - a beautiful, sunny shot-on-location horror movie with a good balance of aesthetics and ideas just as we all prepare to hunker down for another pandemic winter.

Bloody Muscle Body Builder In Hell (2012)

directed by Shinichi Fukazawa

Japan

62 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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You have to admire a movie that is this up-front about what you're gonna get when you watch it. While it might not be word-for-word literal, I.E. nobody in the film actually goes to hell (or the equivalent concept in any religion), the tone is captured perfectly by that title. The main character is buff and goes through a pretty hard time involving some evil ghosts. That's all you gotta know.

The descriptor attached to this movie in fan circles is "the Japanese 'Evil Dead'", which to my understanding is both the popular conception of it and what the movie itself was going for. I don't actually see that many similarities in terms of the plot, but it's clearly inspired by the shot-on-video cheapness of Evil Dead. It's one of those films that took an incredibly long time to get released after it was shot, which was all the way back in 1995, so a lot of the way it looks is probably not 100% intentional, but you could definitely do better than this in 1995 if you wanted to, so at least some of it has to be. Also, I think the lead (the titular bodybuilder) bears more than a passing resemblance to Bruce Campbell. I would be surprised if his hairstyle was not a deliberate attempt to replicate Ash's look in Evil Dead.

Speaking of surprises, there's a lot of them in this movie, and I'm not talking about jump scares. With a title that hints at gore and terrors, you might not expect any more than that, but there are one or two moments that are genuinely scary - much like the original Evil Dead combines some eerie scenes with the DIY gore that is enshrined in all of our hearts. The reason why this is, I think, is because of how this movie differs from what it's supposed to be a love letter to. Evil Dead has supernatural stuff, sure, but Bloody Muscle is more ghostly-supernatural, and to convey that it uses tropes that crop up in Japanese horror. The ghosts that appear are typical pale-skinned, yūrei-looking things with bloody mouths, and they show up in photos and in the static on a dead television. I wasn't expecting anything but practical effects in this, and I thought they would be used solely for body horror. That part definitely outweighs everything else, but there's snatches here and there of a more typical J-horror aesthetic. The first picture we see of the haunted house caught me off-guard because it looked so jarringly different from a standard ghost photo: instead of just a smudged shape at the corner of the frame, one whole panel of the house's door is replaced with a huge apparition of the ghost's entire face. Something about that was genuinely really unsettling.

I think the key thing about this is that it is a haunted house movie - I don't feel like Evil Dead can be pigeonholed into being described as such, but this is a story about people investigating a house that is inhabited by a very angry ghost. No matter how weird it gets along the way, that's the basic idea of it.

The pacing of this movie is really strange, and I'm not complaining about this, because I loved the whole thing and I can't think of anything I'd change about it, but it does have to be said that most of it is basically an extended fight scene. It's almost real-time at some points. It opens with a flashback that establishes why the house is cursed: an accidental death caused by the main character's father in the late '60s has attached the vengeful ghost of his ex to the property, emanating from where her body was dumped in the basement. Then the main character and his friend and his friend's friend arrive, the friend's friend gets possessed, they find out via spectral messaging that to escape they need to chop the friend's friend into little pieces, and practically the entire movie is spent trying to do that. I'm impressed at how well this scant idea is stretched out into an hour. You'd think "how hard is it to chop a person's limbs off?" Significantly harder, it would appear, when the limbs don't want to stay chopped. I don't want to disappoint anyone, but the main character being a bodybuilder actually doesn't have any relevance whatsoever until about ten minutes from the end of the film, when I was beginning to wonder if it would ever be brought up at all. It takes the horrific death and possession of an acquaintance and the near-death and possession of his friend for him to realize "Wait a minute, I'm so jacked, I can pummel this ghost into a fine red mist". But when he does, boy, things get interesting.

I will end this review by talking about the centerpiece of this film: the practical effects. Despite also containing fairly typical ghost imagery, this movie is also packed wall-to-wall with such things as: floor skeletons, flailing torsos, crawling meat, oozing meat, exploding meat, writhing meat, foot hands, foot heads, and other assorted delights. It's such a wonderful expression of love for the craft that I was stuck to the screen the whole time. CGI is used very lightly here and there as well and always compliments the practical effects rather than being used as a shortcut, which makes the whole thing look unique. This is a very original movie, and it's definitely not without substance as one might assume. It's worth spending an hour on if only for the appreciation of some excellent gore and body horror.

Broadcast Signal Intrusion (2021)

directed by Jacob Gentry

USA

103 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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There's absolutely nothing about this movie that didn't appeal to me, so as soon as I heard about it I was anxiously awaiting its release. I've mentioned this before, but I devour anything related to video horror, real-life broadcast signal intrusions, cursed/haunted tapes, &c. Analog horror is my favorite thing ever. But to be honest, while I did like Broadcast Signal Intrusion, I realized partway through that the way I think of broadcast signal intrusions is fundamentally different from the way this film approaches them, and for that (entirely personal and subjective) reason, this wasn't all that I thought it would be. It's still pretty great though.

I won't spend a ton of time explaining this, because it's personal and has nothing to do with the movie itself, but the reason why it differed from my expectations was because broadcast signal intrusions are shelved alongside paranormal phenomena in my brain. No, I don't mean that I think ghosts did the Max Headroom Incident, or anything like that. But the deep mystery of unsolved pirate broadcasts, their clandestine nature, the way they use such bizarre and intentionally scary imagery instead of a simple demand for money or fame, means that when I think of them, they're inextricably tied to supernatural horror. Broadcast Signal Intrusion the movie is hardly a horror film. It definitely has horror DNA, and I could feel a love for the genre, but it is a dark thriller with nothing supernatural to be seen.

Let no one say that this movie does not speak the language, though. It's clear to me that the people who made this are very familiar with the history of pirate broadcasts, and everything involved in the film's lore is a reference to real events. I absolutely adored this. This film goes deep - it doesn't just mention television, it creates at least two whole fictional series that felt and sounded like things that could really have aired in the 80s. "Doc Cronos" is a clear nod to the fact that the Max Headroom Incident occurred during a broadcast of Doctor Who. And the intrusions themselves are works of horror art. They're obvious references to I Feel Fantastic (Hey Hey Hey), which, while not a pirate broadcast, is a classic example of Weird Internet that I've watched more times than I can count. Because of the way it uses these references to legends of unexplained video weirdness, I fell in love with Broadcast Signal Intrusion even though it didn't approach its subject matter the same way I think of it. There's a deep admiration for horror woven into this film's aesthetic, and it groks the details of what it depicts, even if it doesn't attribute anything otherworldly to them.

As much as it physically and psychically pains me that "retro" movies are now set within a year or two of my birth, the late-90s setting of this film is pretty on point. I like first-generation analog horror more - stuff that was actually made when people were using VHS tapes - but that feels like an unfair statement given movies like this and others akin to it that have such an obvious love for the dead format. Now that VHS tapes are largely vanished, we can examine what they meant to us and how they could have been used for specific purposes that they never really were. This film doesn't "pass" as something made in 1999, but it doesn't have to. It's about that time period, not a 1:1 imitation of it.

The only place where I felt like this faltered a bit was in its depiction of the protagonist's interpersonal relationships and, I guess, its characterization of the protagonist himself. Essentially: the people are the weak part. I realized after I'd finished the movie that there was little to nothing distinguishing the main character's deceased wife from being a sister or a friend. This isn't necessarily a complaint, because at least it skipped any kind of saccharine, forced-feeling flashback sequences, but also I was left not able to relate that well to the main character's desperate need to find her, because all I knew of her was a few shots in which her face isn't even visible. And the protag himself is a bit of a blank slate - again, not a big deal, and Harry Shum Jr. plays him with enough weight that he does feel like a real person, but knowing even just a little more about this guy would have helped me get more immersed in his story.

But this movie gets a pass for that and a lot of other things because, like I said, it speaks the language. It is a little messy on the technical side of things, but not too bad. It doesn't feel like it's just co-opting the aesthetic without having done its research. The climax was a little disappointing because it was the culmination of what I had realized early on about it basically being a crime movie with a taste for analog horror, and the tease of true weirdness (that one last shot of the masked figure) that only served to enforce the main character's drifting mental state was the cherry on top of that. However I still have a high opinion of this movie because it is very good at what it does outside of my personal preferences. It is actually impressive how much Jacob Gentry has grown as a filmmaker.

Phenomena (1985)

directed by Dario Argento

Italy, Switzerland

116 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I've mostly been neutral on wanting to watch other Dario Argento films, to be honest, because Suspiria is such a powerhouse that even something made by the same person can't possibly come close to reaching its heights. I've yet to prove myself wrong there, but Phenomena is an extremely close second. Both films share the same beginnings - a young girl arrives, alone, at a prestigious all-girls school where strange deaths have been occurring - but differ entirely in terms of their aesthetic. Where Suspiria is absolutely lurid, Phenomena trades color for a more realistic, blandly fashionable environment. But somehow both have the same vibe, the same dreamlike feeling of drifting through and being presented with images and events sans explanation.

Jennifer Connelly plays a girl, also named Jennifer, who becomes a student of this supposedly well-regarded girls' school in Switzerland. She's the daughter of a rich, famous, and unseen movie star, and this plus her sleepwalking and her affinity for insects gets her ostracized by all the other girls. Nobody likes her except Donald Pleasance and his terrifying trained chimpanzee. Because of the poor dubbing, every single person in this movie feels kind of disconnected from reality; Connelly probably puts in the most decent performance, but because everybody around her is acting so weird, she comes off weird too. You think her ability to commune with insects is going to possibly lead to some larger plot twist, but although it does play into the ending, this is mostly just yet another thing that remains unexplained. It's not really that she intentionally tries to use her power to help solve the string of murders that's been happening, she just kind of... stumbles into things repeatedly until the real killer has no choice but to reveal themself.

Really nothing here makes any sense. The film is set in a school, but it feels more like a vague idea of what school is like as dreamt up by somebody who's either never been to school or got out of school so long ago they forgot about it. There's only one actual classroom scene, where a girl in a Bee Gees shirt answers a question with a Bee Gees joke and is lectured for about five minutes straight in the background while the main characters are talking. This is never referenced again, and is this girl's only appearance. Other than that, we don't ever find out what exactly they teach or do at this school - it's just a lot of girls milling about in the halls, girls gossiping in their dorms at night, girls bullying each other, girls getting killed. For a movie with a killer hiding somewhere in it, everybody is just extraordinarily honest in their actions. I kind of envy how nobody in this seems to be trying to repress or hide anything about themselves, saying whatever comes into their mind, acting however they want without regard for social compunction. This equals a lot of bullying, though. Jennifer quickly gets disillusioned with the cruelty of her schoolmates and repeatedly begs her dad's agent to come pick her up even though in any other context such actions would brand her as a poor-little-rich-girl type.

The soundtrack is solidly about half of why this movie is so great. I respect Argento as a director for his ability on its own, but imagining the scenes in this movie where music plays a key part if they were silent and un-soundtracked made me realize how agonizingly slow some of it would be without music. Goblin provides tension and weight to times where otherwise there would be little to none. I generally try not to let music choices influence my opinion on a film too much, because while it's important, it's not typically the most important thing, but in this case the soundtrack is a huge part of why this is such a formidable movie.

I think the thing about giallo is that the question of why a person would be entertained by seeing a dead body or watching a flamboyant murder is dispensed with entirely. Like, giallo says that murder is entertaining, we do want to see new heights in blood spatter, new lurid colors of flesh, new wild methods of killing somebody, and we don't want to see it because we're depraved and jotting down ideas in a clandestine notepad, we want to see it because death and violence can be made into art. Anything can be made into art.

Like I said, nothing here makes sense and nothing is explained, but there seem to be hints at something weird going on that Argento refuses to outright tell us about. A lot of giallo at the time was experimenting with Lovecraftian motifs but putting its own unique spin on it, which often meant showing us some cultists and a tentacle monster but not caring too much to delve into the nihilism and existential disgust that Lovecraft was so fond of. I would not call Phenomena an outright Lovecraftian film, but Jennifer's familiarity with insects gave me this feeling that there was something much bigger than humankind going on. Wind also plays a big part in the atmosphere of this film - people acknowledge it as something maddening, something that influences human behavior. How can wind make people lose their grip? How can a lone firefly summon the humanlike capacity to lead a girl to an important clue to catch a killer? How can a swarm of bugs be called down from the heavens by sheer force of will to save someone's life? These bizarre divergences of nature from its typical course made me feel like at the heart of Phenomena was something much more powerful than was ever explicitly shown.

The climax is as genuinely nuts as the rest of the film. I would explain it, but I don't want to spoil it and anyway I think I'm actually not capable of explaining it with words. After Suspiria, it struck me how Argento was still able to create such a deeply bizarre and wacky climax here without the use of psychedelic colors - everything is ugly when it gets to the end, just covered in maggots, oozing, writhing, bug-infested, nightmarish and weird. Suspiria and Phenomena feel like two movies inspired by the same dream. I'm glad that these movies exist the way they are. As I've said about a lot of things, this is one that I can talk about, but I can't impress upon you how bonkers it really is to watch it. Movies like this inspire me to be a little more bold in my own art, a little more creative and honest.

V/H/S 94 (2021)

directed by Simon Barrett, Timo Tjahjanto, Steven Kostanski, Jennifer Reeder, Chloe Okuno, Ryan Prows

USA, Canada, Indonesia

102 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I don't know if I can honestly call myself a "fan" of the V/H/S films, because their quality varies so wildly, but the concept behind them is something that I'm very enthusiastic about. Even if it's bad, I'll watch anything involving a cursed tape. And I genuinely appreciate that the series is bold enough to make explicit the supernatural status of the tapes; even if a solid mythos is never established, in every film - if I recall correctly - it's more than just a clandestine network of trading snuff videos, which would itself probably be interesting enough - it's something weirder and harder to define going on.

But I think where the problem lies is that every single V/H/S film seems to have all these really cool ideas and somehow every single one of them falls just barely short of capturing them to their full potential. I mean, they definitely do something right, because even though they're not perfect films, I've seen all of them multiple times and can talk about each segment from memory. But the thing is that I haven't seen them all multiple times because they're flawless, but because I feel like that's as good as I can get. If I want to watch a movie about a guy who gets a camera installed in his eye and starts seeing ghosts, I don't have anywhere else to go. If I want to watch something where a slumber party is interrupted by aliens, nobody else has done that yet. Timo Tjahjanto's goat satan baby could have been in a better film, but it's not, so that's what I have to deal with. It's not that the V/H/S films are so great, it's that I have to settle for their not-quite-fully-fleshed-out ideas because these films are the only place to find them.

V/H/S 94 continues this tradition of getting really close to a cool concept, or even having a cool concept, but botching the execution just a tiny bit. In this case, the most egregious part is the wrap-around story, which has to do with possibly supernatural tapes and the wild cult that distributes/worships them. Great story, but who wrote the dialogue, a machine intelligence fed nothing but episodes of COPS and scripts from Call of Duty? I don't make a habit of watching movies featuring the police/military, but the acting and dialogue in the wrap-around story was every awful military hardass cliche combined. It's no better when the cultists get to speak - "We are the final girls, and this is our final kill!" Spare me. If you asked me if I wanted a short film about girls in a VHS death cult who turn the tables on a police raid, I'd be all over it, but if you told me it'd be like this, I'd say no thanks.

I think my favorite segment might have been the first one, which takes place mostly in a sewer, with two reporters stumbling on a different kind of cult built around a strange creature who lives down there. I enjoyed this almost entirely because of the well-placed practical effects (something this series has always done great with, and I'll talk more about that in a minute) that were neither overused nor skimped on. There's a classic facemelting scene with exposed skull that made me smile and looked like something that genuinely would have come from the time period this film sets itself in, but the sewer god itself also looks pretty decent.

I was most excited for Timo Tjahjanto's segment, and within the first minute it had hooked me due to the tone and subject matter being so different from everything else in V/H/S 94. All the other segments are pretty fleshy, but Tjahjanto shows us a man's head attached to a mechanical spider body within thirty seconds of his segment starting up, and it only gets weirder from there. This could have been my favorite if it hadn't gone on for what felt like far longer than it needed to - with the first-person POV, it felt like watching somebody play a first-person shooter, dying, and then just... continuing to play even after their character should have been dead. There's something interesting about the idea of merging human with camera, and I think a found-footage film series is the perfect place to explore that, but as usual, something fell a little short for me with this. I love the vibe of it and the effects are done well but it could have been much shorter and benefited from it.

It actually seems like each segment in this is ordered in descending quality from best to worst. The final one is where this lost me, and then the wrap-around segment is completed and it all goes further down the drain. From the start I was uninterested in the last segment, with the militia who try to weaponize something they don't understand, but I totally checked out as soon as the rabbit exploded. You cannot put exploding rabbits in something and then play the rest of the thing straight. I love seeing white supremacists get decimated, and if they explode - hey, that's great too! But I think something about that concept didn't quite stick the landing, and I'm not sure if it's just that physically depicting a person or animal exploding has some weird inherent humor to it, or if I felt like this segment never quite got as extreme as it could have.

I really feel like the gore effects are what made this any kind of an enjoyable film. Even though every segment was made by a different person or persons, they all have that same theme of chunky, frequent blood and guts - though never so frequent as to feel overused, as it has in the series in the past. The skull exposure in the rat god segment, the animate body parts in the funeral home one, the scrap-and-junk half-people in Tjahjanto's piece, that absolutely wonderful vampire creature in the otherwise middling last segment - things like that feel innovative and original and are what I love seeing when I watch a V/H/S film. The culture of collaboration that this series presents is a great thing for modern horror filmmaking, and that is another reason why, even though I don't love them, I keep coming back to these things: It's just pure fun to see people who love the genre doing original work together.

Noroi: The Curse (2005)

directed by Kôji Shiraishi

Japan

114 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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This is going to be less of a review and more of a small treatise on why this is one of my favorite movies ever. I've seen it many times, but it had been much too long since my last viewing, so I decided to kick off the spooky month with it. Even though I know everything that's going to happen, there's still something so potently creepy about Noroi that keeps me coming back. Nothing ever gets explained or becomes clearer to me than it was the first or second time I watched it, but there's a magnetism to the film that makes me not care.

Shot in a faux-documentary format, Noroi opens with a short introduction by the cameraman, who ostensibly picked up his friend's film project after his disappearance. As I touched upon in my review of 1998's Ringu, much if not all of the overall tone of Noroi has to do with the presence of analogue media. In the U.S., at least from my own memories, VHS was pretty moribund by 2005, but it's held out far longer in Japan, and there's not a single disc to be found in Noroi. Everything is circulated on VHS tapes, sometimes containing footage that was transferred to them from some even older format like film. The physical object is integral to creating the effect of a cursed film, and although interesting things have been done with the idea of a curse attached to the more intangible domain of the internet, to me nothing will ever be scarier than the perennial haunted VHS tape.

It's not the tapes themselves that are haunted in Noroi, but much of what we see relies on literal "found footage" - recorded TV broadcasts that show authentic paranormal activity, that were incorporated into the finished product presumably by the cameraman to provide a clearer picture. Something about these television segments hit me harder this time around than the previous times, I think just because I was paying more attention to them - the variety TV shows and awkward, half-finished interviews are not the filler between more important moments, they're some of the most important moments in establishing the dread-filled atmosphere of the movie. There is something so powerfully unnerving about the thought of chancing upon genuine paranormal footage on late night TV, being one of only a handful of people who are both awake and watching whatever no-budget variety show is on in the ungodly hours of the morning, and being rewarded for that with actual recordings of unexplainable events. Ghosts caught on film by ghost hunters can be compelling, but what's much scarier is what happens in Noroi: a stumbling-upon, a rabbit hole, an uncovering of connected events that lead to a terrifying and unknowable whole.

One of the more interesting things I was picking up on during this most recent watch was the character of Hori, the psychic, and how his role complicates the plot. I'll get to that in a minute, but first I feel the need to provide some context. This is definitely a movie that has become much more famous than the person who made it; although Kôji Shiraishi is one of my personal favorite directors, Noroi is by far his best-known work and many people who are familiar with it are not familiar with his other films at all. So Hori's rants about "ectoplasmic worms" might read as nothing but the obsession of a severely mentally ill person to anybody who's unfamiliar with the rest of Shiraishi's output, but the concept of these worms, and of intangible creatures that exist all around us but are not visible to the average person, is something that comes up very frequently in his films. Because I had this in mind while I was watching Noroi, I was automatically giving a weight to what Hori was saying that other viewers might not. His talk about the worms has nothing - and I cannot believe this is the first time I'm actually realizing this - to do with the overarching concept of Noroi as a film, the Kagutaba ritual and the sacrificed embryos. But I believed that what he was talking about was a real part of the plot because I knew that Shiraishi was no stranger to involving it in the plots of his other work.

And I still choose to believe that, to be honest, because another thing that happened since the last time I saw this is that I watched From Beyond. I instantly made the connection between the creatures only visible to a jacked-up pineal gland that Lovecraft introduces in that story, and Stuart Gordon elaborates upon in that film, and the ectoplasmic worms that only Hori can see. Even though it is difficult to draw a connection between the worms and Kagutaba, I think the Kagutaba ritual is in some way an interpretation of or an explanation for the presence of other-dimensional creatures that the people of the flooded village became involved with.

Even though I'm a fan of everything this director has done, there's no question that Noroi stands alone. There's a reason why it's become so famous, divorced from his other output, though it's all pretty good to great. This is one of those movies that is its own entity. It's unembellished, the interviewees are soft-spoken and awkward, and no one is particularly "likeable" in the typical sense. The characters only exist as pawns in the cyclical, consuming course of events just under the surface of reality. But although it may seem shabby and unrehearsed, a ton of work had to have been put in to make the film look that way. Certain sets, like the interior of Hori's apartment and the possessed woman's hideout, were so crammed full of clutter that you almost miss the fact that somebody's job was to set all of that up from scratch. There's also a fire stunt at the end that is genuinely insane and upsetting to watch, but again, your brain reads it as so authentic that it takes a minute to remember somebody had to do that and get paid for it. I said I'd explain why I love this movie so much, but I really can't, when you get down to it - it's just one of those things with an atmosphere all of its own, that never gets old no matter how many times I watch it.

(Fitting that my first post of October should also be my 666th post - to me, at least; I've got some drafts you wouldn't know about that bring the post count up a bit. To you, though, number 666 will be coming soon.)

Zëiram (1991)

directed by Keita Amemiya

Japan

92 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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This is one of those movies that comes right out the gates swinging, with a pre-credits scene introducing not our heroes, but our fearsome alien antagonist. It's black-and-white and almost avant-garde, with deep chanting accompanying the first glimpse we get of the alien fugitive's incredible might and heavy footfalls as he seemingly wipes out an entire army of attackers just by walking in their midst. And if his design looks good in grainy monochrome, you're in for a real treat once the light hits it. Although the plot is mildly interesting, this film is memorable for one thing over all others: aesthetics.

To sum up the plot quickly: An alien bounty hunter, Iria, and her formless AI friend Bob come to Earth in pursuit of the aforementioned overpowered fugitive. In the opening it's mentioned that they beat out several others for the contract, which gives us a tantalizing glimpse of alien bounty hunter procedure that I wish was expanded upon. In order to capture Zëiram they construct a virtual arena comprised of a slice of the town of Mikasa, digitally walled off and turned into an isolated playing field so that the bounty hunters can do their thing without inevitably turning the whole surrounding area into collateral damage. Of course, two bumbling employees of an electronics-parts distributor accidentally end up trapped in the simulation as well, with their unbelievably hip pastel work uniforms. Surprisingly, having two inept guys in the way doesn't take anything away from how cool the action is. I understand this is an unpopular opinion from reading other reviews, but the comic relief only served to enhance the rest of everything for me, personally.

Everything about this movie is heavily tied to cybernetics and speculative tech. It's very Neal Stephenson, very analog-having-a-Franz-Kafka-dream-that-it-is-digital. Technology just doesn't look like this anymore - but in this case, that's why this movie is so utterly perfect. Electronics were entering what was really the last great era for bulkiness; silhouettes were beginning to slim down and become more streamlined, to evolve into the obsession with creating something as thin as possible, often at the expense of a way to vent waste heat. But for the moment, actual physical circuitboards bigger than an ant were thriving. Everything still has to be plugged in, thick bundles of cables descend from the walls, and the film's bounty-hunter protagonist's DIY home base, while not the size of the multi-ton abominations of early computing, still takes up the better part of a whole room between its various components. How accustomed are we to seeing the high-tech protagonist of our sci-fi films dial up a hologram on her smart watch that handles anything her heart desires? It's lamentable that with the introduction of things like that, we've lost things like Zëiram, deliciously chunky slices of technological perfection where you were still in control as a user.

To continue this tangent for just another second, I really think that's the crux of why nothing feels like Zëiram does anymore: At this point in time, concepts like virtual reality were still fairly new, and the flood of sci-fi literature and film speculating about how it might integrate into our lives shows a view that in hindsight is vastly more optimistic than what we ended up getting. We see stories where we can manipulate our surroundings to enhance our own lives, where we can make art and expand ourselves into a second frontier by mastering new technology as a medium for old ideas. But what actually happened was that, as is always the case, the wrong people got ahold of it. We were taken out of our fantasies of a new world to explore, and we were instead made into a commodity. Instead of being able to mold and shape technology with the skill of an artist, we got roped into being surveilled and monetized. Zëiram is a glimpse into a possible future that never came to pass because, under capitalism, the distribution of its futuristic technology could never have been so egalitarian as it dreams it might have been.

The creature design wizardry is used mostly on the alien-looking alien, but it doesn't neglect our humanoid alien either - it's never made clear if Iria just looks like that or if she was able to choose a human body to fit in with Earthlings, but even though she stays looking humanly for the whole film, she still looks cool too. She gets utilitarian power armor and a neat cloak and culturally important hair accessories. Bob the AI is also neat, for his part: he isn't a digital watch face or spunky robot companion but instead is depicted as a strange geometric shape spinning on a CRT monitor. Maybe that's what Iria's people really look like as well? Maybe Iria's civilization is a post-singularity one, and she's just made herself flesh enough to catch Zëiram and then be done with it.

As you might be able to tell, I'm totally in love with every inch of this movie. It might be dated, but people knew what the hell they were doing in 1991. It holds up. It looks better than almost anything produced now. When the alien throws off his clothing and reveals the amalgamation that his body is, the weird, unknowable, gooey horror of him shoved into a vaguely humanoid form, it's just so good. The implication that the core of him is actually very small and the rest is just organisms he's absorbed and molded to fit his environment. So good. And it's good because this is pretty much what Keita Amemiya does - his whole filmography is made of things exactly like this one. It's a movie where you can feel that all of what you're seeing is what the filmmakers intended for you to see. I wish I could describe everything about it but it's really something you need to see for yourself. Even the soundtrack is perfect.