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.)