Daikaiju Varan (1958)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

87 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I feel like this film tends to be overlooked both when considering the kaiju film canon as a whole and also when thinking about what kaiju themselves mean, and have meant, from the earliest instances to today. It feels wrong to start a review of a film that I love by mentioning an inferior version of it, but I think some of this overlooking might be because it received a re-cut into Varan the Unbelievable four years after its release that is widely acknowledged as completely awful (I've never seen it, but boy have I seen some bad dubs in my day, so I can imagine). Looking at Daikaiju Varan on its own presents us with a story that has a solid place in this corner of history.

The film opens with a shot of a rocket ascending into space. This is early days for kaiju cinema - Godzilla came out only four years previously, Rodan only two, but Toho had already put out several other kaiju films between those bigger names that are less widely acclaimed outside of Japan, and Varan is one of them. Godzilla, as we all know, is a movie that has its origins in the potential for new technology to do harm to humanity, and for humanity to do harm to itself by bringing about increasingly powerful weapons in response to any new threat. This is also largely what Varan is about, but with a little more nuance in some places and much less in others. As the rocket goes up, the narration brings us into the story by telling us what audiences at the time were undoubtedly all feeling in the backs of their minds: We are in a new age, we're reaching further and further out beyond our own planet, into space, inventing new things and uncovering secrets of the natural world that we never could have imagined just a few years ago. But what the narration doesn't talk about, and yet what the film itself will go on to show us, is that there are secrets in virtually our own backyard that exist and have existed for eons that we have been blind to.

I think that the presence of Varan as a creature is a message about how there is more than one way of seeing things. Even in the space age, the physical and "supernatural" world overlap. Varan is interpreted by the scientists who catch wind of it as an ancient reptile, living secluded at the bottom of a lake for millions of years. But Varan is also literally a god. Varan is worshipped as the God of Baradagi by the inhabitants of an isolated village where things that modern society has tried to move on from still exist - this is foreshadowed by the sighting in the village of a butterfly thought only to exist in Siberia at the beginning of the film. Varan is both of these things at once. I truly believe this is what the film itself intends to convey, even though its main characters all vocally take the stance that such things as local gods and rituals to appease them are nonsense that it's hard to believe anyone still puts stock in. I love this movie because it leaves Varan to exist on both of those levels: To be named, quantified, taxonified, and seen as Enemy #1, and to be placated, respected, prayed to.

This is a good movie to remind people that tokusatsu is not only monster movies and sci-fi. The term just means "special effects", and a lot - a LOT - of that is war miniatures. Tanks, planes, boats, weapons, all of that. This is an area that Toho had been extremely prolific in (I've seen a lot of these films - some of them are very good!), and it really shows in Varan. I can't stress enough how good the miniatures are. The military response to Varan's arising pretty much takes up the whole of the film and is nearly nonstop, with little room for considering implications the way it's done in Godzilla - although that is an element of this, and I don't want to overlook it. There definitely is a reluctance and fear about using more powerful weapons than anything created before on Varan, and I think the production restraints that I'll get into in a minute are a big part of why this is not delved into further.

I also want to talk about Varan itself, because as far as kaiju go it is under-appreciated. Haruo Nakajima is in the suit and gives easily as good of a performance as he did as Godzilla or any of the other many, many suits he piloted. (Katsumi Tezuka also filmed the water scenes, which should not be ignored because kaiju water scenes suck to do.) I love the design of Varan and I love how the camera seems to love it too: We get so many close-up shots of its face, and a lot of opportunity to study how distinctive and deliberate its sculpting is. It looks mythical, ancient, and unparalleled. Varan is intended to be reptilian, but its posture and bearing feel like something else entirely its own. Nakajima has said that he looked to real animals to inspire his kaiju performances, and that's definitely there in Varan, but there's also something more mysterious about it that I really enjoy. There was a big push to get Varan into the Heisei era in the initial drafts for what eventually became Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, and unfortunately none of it ever came to fruition, but it did produce some gorgeous concept art including this maquette which I've always thought was beautiful.

There's this really great moment where, after an already-significant barrage of attacks against it, Varan suddenly decides it's had enough of the village and literally spreads its wings to fly out of the lake and towards the wider world. Everyone stands by, stunned, because neither we the viewers nor any of the scientists or worshippers knew until then that Varan could fly. In the same way that the rocket presents laypeople unaware of just how advanced science had gotten with a new view of reality, a Varan capable of flight presents all bystanders with a re-alignment of where they are in, for lack of a better term, the food chain. There are many other "great moments" in this film, too many to individually mention, but I also love every time we get a close-up shot of Varan crushing a tank - such an explicit depiction of "modern" technology failing against nature and time.

There are also many faults to this, mostly due to a rushed production that was the result of those earlier films such as Godzilla and Rodan being such international hits. This was intended to be a three-part TV series (god, can you imagine?) but the time and budget were not there, so it got smashed together into one feature-length film. It is visually muddy in the way of even slightly earlier films, as it was filmed in black-and-white instead of color, but I personally tend to enjoy that, especially in genre film; it gives a feeling of melancholy and sometimes foreboding that color does not. I think the lackluster ending - the only part of this I really disliked - was more than likely also a result of the less-than-ideal production. I've heard that Ishirō Honda wishes he could re-do this one and I can only daydream about what this could have been like with even more resources and flexibility behind it.

Violent Night (2022)

directed by Timmy Wirkola

USA

112 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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This is still playing in theaters at the time of writing, but I didn't see it in a theater due to the plague. I don't watch many movies that get a theatrical release, so it's always a weird experience to watch something on the small screen that I know was intended to wow a theater audience, with all the conceits that that entails - all the glossiness, the stuff meant to look good Huge with a capital H. Watching any blockbuster nowadays feels like how watching a 3D movie in 2D used to feel: You notice all the things that are meant to stick out, and they look awkward because you're not watching it how it's intended. Overall this movie has an über-polished vibe that I'm not used to seeing and am not big on. This is a personal opinion, though, and it's coming from someone whose perspective is super skewed - most of the stuff I watch is like 50 years old.

So those are most of my misgivings. I enjoyed this for the most part, and I appreciate how thoroughly it commits to the bit. This is a nearly two-hour-long movie; something I've noticed about Christmas horror films is that they tend to be really short, because there's not much idea to go around. The goal is usually to A. be a horror movie and B. be set near Christmas, and that's all. So the bar is not very high, but Violent Night still manages to inject creativity into an area that's getting fairly old. I do consider this a horror film, although it is stretching my definition a little and would more comfortably be called a plain old action movie. In my opinion, the level of gore in this and the specific nature of the gore fits better in a horror film than anything else.

There's not much about this that is particularly original plotwise. You could stick the storyline into any movie. A man comes back to his incredibly wealthy family's home (it's a compound, actually) for the holidays, with his wife and daughter in tow, but they get home-invaded by a large group of mercenaries who happen to know there's an absurd amount of cash in a safe in the basement. Really, you do not have to care about the plot at all. The only factor that's getting anybody interested in this is that it's a Christmas movie. I noticed that this does not feel like a movie for people who hate Christmas or one for people who love it, it just kind of is what it is, but it is that so emphatically that I appreciate it. It does have a little bit of that cliche "true meaning of Christmas" message, but it doesn't try to beat you over the head with it. It's not trying to move you over to one camp or another. It's just accepting that Christmas, despite being over-commercialized and exhausting, happens every year, and boy, wouldn't it be fun to make a movie with a bunch of gory fight scenes about it.

The real centerpiece of this is David Harbour's Santa. I don't know how I feel about Harbour as an actor in general or on a technical level, but one thing I do know about him is that I believe him in any and every role he plays. Maybe he does end up kind of playing a specific kind of guy a lot, but he plays that guy so well that he manages to bring his "that guy"-ness to Santa Claus and have it come off genuine. Violent Night's Santa is tired of it all, tired of bringing gifts to billions of ungrateful children, tired of the work, tired of having done the same thing for thousands of years. He doesn't mean to be a hero, but he gets drawn into the interrupted family drama going down at the compound and ends up being one anyway. I did get a little (okay, maybe a lot) tired of the juvenile humor; there's a lot of drunk jokes and shit jokes and just a very lowbrow tone that I don't think this movie needed. But again - Harbour does this all very un-self-consciously.

This portrayal of Santa is what makes the whole film stick out from others that have done similar things. Again I really feel like the key word here is "wholehearted". This IS Santa, and he's not just the jolly, perpetually smiling Santa on greeting cards and soda ads, he's an ancient, pre-Christian being who at some point was a man but is something different now. This Santa carries with him a deep history. We see this in brief flashbacks as well as in the extensive tattoos he has, which I thought were a really neat touch. Tommy Wirkola is Norwegian, so that kind of vaguely Scandinavian-flavored Santa is definitely done better than he would have been in a different director's hands, but I'm still not going to go into historical analysis. I'll just leave it at saying that I enjoy the nuance very much. Santa's costume echoes some of that nuance as well; again, it doesn't attempt to be a historical piece, but when you look closely there's something fine about it. It's made out of red leather, instead of cloth, and the fur trimming doesn't look cheap and ratty. It makes him look like he could be an unusually well-dressed department store Santa, or he could be the real thing, the thing that all other department store Santas are parodying. And of course there is the sledgehammer.

There's... not really much more I can find to say about this one, which is ironic for a movie that is one of the more original and interesting Christmas horror films I've seen in recent years. It was good but I can't muster up a lot of enthusiasm about it. A lot of the jokes fail to hit, or at least they did for me, your mileage may vary. Arguably the grossest scene in the whole film happens within about two minutes of the opening, so it weeds out the people who can't stomach its brand of humor pretty fast. Nobody in this is the kind of person you really care about except for the little girl, which is probably by design. It's visually smooth and spotless and in so many words just has that "big movie" feel, except applied to a subject matter that is fairly niche. I actually am surprised this is getting such a wide theatrical run. I have a feeling that few people are going to end up seeing this, despite its presence in so many cinemas, but you could do worse than this if you are willing to risk going to see a movie at this moment in time. Or you could watch Dead Snow. You should probably watch Dead Snow.

The Killing Tree (2022)

directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield

UK

73 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I wasn't planning on reviewing this at all but it turned out to be such an insane movie that I have to get my thoughts about it out in some format other than just a couple of notes. This will probably be a shorter review, mostly because you absolutely cannot take this movie seriously and therefore I don't have much real analysis of it to do.

The crop of godawful Christmas horror movies is one of the things I look forward to the most every December. I've gone through most of the Christmas horror considered to be "classics" and so every season I get to watch whatever brand-new trash people came up with over the past year. The vast majority of these films can be put into one of two categories: Either they're just bad and nobody tried to make them good; they're low-effort, low-rent affairs that look bad and feel bad to watch. Or they're bad, but the idea behind them is so bonkers that the end product is something like The Killing Tree. Before going into it, all I knew was that this movie was about a guy who gets reincarnated as a Christmas tree with a grudge, and as it turns out that's literally all it's about. At 73 minutes it's mercifully short and gets everything done that it needs to do. Basically: A man, years prior to the film, committed several spree killings along with his wife in the name of somehow bringing attention to "the true meaning of Christmas" in a society that they see as corrupt and full of sin. He is executed for this, and in the present day, his wife, grief-stricken and bitter, performs a ritual to bring him back to life and get revenge on the living relatives of those they both murdered, who are, to her, responsible for his death. For this ritual she apparently needs an object of "similar mass" to her late husband, and for whatever reason this ends up being a plastic Christmas tree. The ritual goes haywire somewhere along the line, and her husband ends up in the body of an animate, murderous Christmas tree. (I'd like to note that the first Christmas tree I found online at Walmart says it weighs seventeen pounds. Similar mass?)

The tree is far and away the best thing about this movie. I feel a deep sympathy for whoever was stuffed inside the tree suit because it looks like the most uncomfortable thing ever invented. As far as I can tell it looks like they took a morph suit and wrapped it in fake fir garland and lights until it resembled, very authentically, a Christmas tree that is shuffling around and complaining at people. You can't see a face hole or anything of the human inside the suit - the density of the foliage is quite impressive (certainly more than most artificial trees in real life). For more strenuous scenes, a CGI model is used, and it's not even worth mentioning how obvious it is that this is CGI; the pattern of the lights is completely different, they're not fooling anyone at all, I'm not even sure they were trying. We'll move on from that, it's not a big deal. The tree also has tentacles, for some reason, that I guess are extensions of its bark; it/he uses these to ambulate sometimes but mostly just to rip people in half. If nothing else, this movie is worth a watch for how whole-hog it goes with the concept of a sentient and hateful Christmas tree.

Other than that, it's... really not good. Surprisingly the acting is not entirely terrible, but the script leaves much to be desired, and you can't actually hear half of what anyone is saying in this movie. It sounds like they clipped everyone's mic to their socks. The main character is the daughter of two of the treeman's victims, still troubled by the murder of her parents in the house that she's living (and partying) in. The peripheral cast consists of her friends, all of whom get a decent amount of backstory for literally having nothing at all to do with the plot. I do commend this, because I think it would probably have been worse if the main character had felt like she existed in a vacuum with no other people around her, but I wonder if there might have been a slightly more subtle way to go about it. Each character is introduced along with their Designated Character Trait: One of them is a sex worker! Two of them are a couple! One of them is really weirdly insistent that one half of said couple is cheating! Despite all being friends, the main character really has a vibe of just wanting to be left alone, so the characters don't interact in much of a meaningful way. They just kind of all exist with their own problems.

This is a poorly made film in almost every respect, mostly in the pacing, which feels awkward due to the jumps back and forth between the present day and the past that don't feel necessary. Like I said, everything that doesn't take place in the past takes place entirely at a holiday party in what seems like an absolutely huge and labyrinthine house. There's serious issues with the audio, and the color grading changes so much from scene to scene that it feels like they had two different cinematographers who were feuding with each other about how the movie should look. The script is a meandering mess, and the villain falls victim to that thing where he spends so much time vocally relishing being evil and explaining all his evil plans that it leaves him open to attack while he's pontificating. His and his wife's motive for killing a bunch of people is never elaborated upon besides sort of a generic loathing for modern society. That's not the only thing about this movie that's disjointed and badly put together. But there's something I still really like about it. I can't quite pin down its vibe. I don't know if it's trying to play itself seriously and is just so bad that it looks goofy or if it was meant to be a little silly, but I liked it, or at least I think I did. I'm just grateful to see a new Christmas-themed horror movie that isn't somebody dressed as Santa killing people.

Skinamarink (2022)

directed by Kyle Edward Ball

Canada

100 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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When I started hearing about Skinamarink from places outside of where I usually check for information on upcoming horror, I didn't hesitate to see it as soon as I could. I've been severely out of the loop with recent horror, so I hadn't heard anything about it until I started suddenly seeing people call it the scariest thing they'd ever seen. You can tell that someone is a seasoned horror fan when they're talking about a movie that scared them and their tone is incredulous rather than matter-of-fact; that's what I was getting from the mentions of this movie that I'd read.

This movie is made in a way that is probably unlike anything you've seen before. The first thing you notice as soon as it begins is that the entire thing is shot with a grainy, fuzzy overlay, like watching something on an old CRT TV before the switchover to digital. (Old televisions do in fact play a part in this which I will try to address later.) The other two distinctive things about it are that it is (mostly - later in the film, the perspective gets looser and less concrete) shot from the perspective of a young child, which is in keeping with the fact that the "main characters" are both very young children, and that a lot of it is composed of just static shots. The camera doesn't "follow" the children around much; usually it's either filming from their point of view or sitting still while we see their lower legs walk across the frame. The visual fuzz combined with the growing darkness means that it's almost impossible to stop seeing things where there might not actually be anything there, creating patterns out of swirls in the static that can look like anything. This is definitely a movie that is situated at a specific point of time, because for viewers any younger than myself, their childhood memories might not necessarily be so tied to this kind of dated, grainy picture quality. If you're fairly young, your childhood pictures and videos might be in as good a quality as you could take on your cell phone today. It's a vanishing feeling, the way the warm, indistinct-around-the-edges aspect of home videos shot on camcorder somehow embeds itself in our memories of ourselves as children. Skinamarink captures that feeling and uses it to both comfort and disorient.

For a movie with such a simple idea behind it, where it starts and where it ends up are vastly different in tone. So what is it about? From what I've gathered, it was inspired by an actual dream that the director had as a child. At the beginning of the film the two child protagonists wake up to find that their parents are gone and their house has changed. The doors and windows are gone (also the toilet). As they explore the new topography of their house, other things begin to happen, increasingly unsettling and increasingly unmoored from familiarity. I think "familiarity" and its destruction is the most central tenet of this film, and is the reason why it's so deeply discomfiting. When the film begins, I had trouble feeling like I was going to be as scared by it at all, because personally I have a lot of nostalgia for my childhood, and the way things looked - the perspective of a small person, the grain of the picture, the warm light in the middle of the night when it's dark out and the only illumination in the house are lamps - made me think about what it was like to be a kid awake in the night. But the pleasure of that nostalgic feeling comes from knowing you are safe. Gradually, in Skinamarink, any hope of safety wears off until the once-comfortable home becomes something twisted and claustrophobic. A space that should be cozy becomes alien. Over the course of the film the lights grow dimmer until the kids are navigating places that they should be familiar with by flashlight. The scope contracts; eventually all that exists is what can be seen in front of you. The presence within the house tightens its grip until it feels like the walls start closing in.

I feel like without a doubt Skinamarink is much more deeply frightening when it is doing virtually nothing. The dimming of the light, the perspective of a child, the ultimate fear of your protectors being gone and then later reappearing but not acting like themselves - all of that is horrible enough. The second half of this movie is when it seems to think that isn't enough and begins trying to create a clearer picture of the thing inside the house. And it is a "thing", it is a boogeyman; it isn't just the sense of disorientation that's the only scary part of this film. Something is in the house with the children and it's doing things for no apparent reason. Whether or not a creature is more frightening to you than an unending general sense of unease is a matter of personal taste, and in the moment this mattered to me, but afterwards, now, thinking about the film, I really don't have a problem with anything in it. It's the same way when we first see blood and the implication that something physically traumatic is happening, instead of just creeping dread. Watching the film, I thought "oh, this isn't a film where there should be any violence, this has to all be implied and subtle" but now I see that all fears are sort of linked back to the fear of bodily harm, so the presence of blood is still in keeping with the overall atmosphere.

The use of public-domain cartoons and sounds also bothered me initially because it's something that always bothers me when I'm watching a movie and it's not otherwise brought up - I just feel like somebody sitting down and watching a Flesicher-esque cartoon and laughing at it like any children's show is an unrealistic scenario. It always feels really obvious to me when someone is using copyright-free sounds or images to get around paying royalties (even though I understand why they'd do that). Here, though, it fits. The stretchy, often disturbing quality of old cartoons works perfectly with how malleable reality feels in this film. Late in the film, one moment in a cartoon is played over and over, a Bugs Bunny ripoff shrinking itself into nothing with an up-slide sound effect. Something about that is so striking. Sometimes as a kid you're watching TV and you see something, just a line or a few seconds of animation, and it feels wrong somehow and stays with you for years. It could be a normal moment or scrap of dialogue, but you misinterpret it and it hits you in a particular way that doesn't let your brain let go of it. That's what that felt like.

As the film goes on it loses all semblance of narrative and becomes a collection of images of a house where something is very wrong. Dimensions don't make sense like they used to and all light gets swallowed up by what seems like a miasmic malignance. There are strong shades of House of Leaves. At one point the camera becomes seemingly trapped in a warping, endless, inverted closet along with a heap of toys, and the subtitle on the screen reads "576 days" - this I could not figure out, and it's still bothering me. Was that meant to imply how long the remaining child had been trapped in the house? It could not have been his age, because we can guesstimate (and we hear him say) that he's about four years old. That little detail was a curiosity that I would love to know the real meaning behind. I'm also not sure what the point was of including a conversation the kids' father has where we hear him talking about one of the kids falling down the stairs and hitting his head - was that meant to cast doubt on anything that happens afterward, implying that it could have been a hallucination? I certainly hope not, because that would be disappointingly cliched.

This is getting long, so to sum it up I'll just say that Skinamarink truly is incredibly eerie in a way that I don't know that I've ever seen a movie be before. Examining it is rewarding in that we can see references to earlier films and figure out why exactly it frightens us, but it's really something that, if you're seeing it for the first time, you have to sit and absorb and not let yourself think too hard about to get the full experience. It feels like watching a home movie that was shot inside of a nightmare. The intimate, personal nature of it, the universality of the childhood experience of having a bad dream that you wake up from and believe was true for a little while, brings this out of the realm of fiction to an unsettling degree. I don't think another movie in this style could be made again, but I would love to see where else this director goes. At the moment it's not available anywhere but the small screen, but I have heard that it is getting a limited theater release in January and I would highly, highly recommend everybody who can goes to see it that way. I watched this directly before going to bed (inadvisable!) and walking around my dark house afterwards felt so strange.

Legend of the Cat Monster / Reibyo Densetsu (1983)

directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi

Japan

95 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I watched this without subtitles when it was uploaded to the internet for the first time in September, and said to myself that if anybody ever fansubbed it, I would watch it again and give it the proper review it deserves, but I didn't seriously expect that to happen... until it did. I can't even express how happy I am that this film, which I had been searching for for ages, is finally available online and easy to find. It gives me hope that other obscure films I'm after will eventually see the light of day too. After a second viewing with more context, I'm bumping my rating up from four to five stars because I truly can't find anything wrong with this film at all.

I think Nobuhiko Obayashi is probably at his best when he's making movies about cinema. A good portion of his work involves elements of metafiction, and when he uses that to talk about cinema and the role of film in our lives and our memories, his usual style becomes a reflection on the nature of fiction and memory itself that is really inimitable. This is a movie all about how cinema works to freeze a moment in time so that we can go back to it over and over, living in it forever if we want to - to our detriment, ultimately, if we lose ourselves in it. But it's also about how seductive it is to lose ourselves in it.

The story of the film is about a scenario writer, Ryohei, who is determined to create something really great and attaches himself to a studio that was once magnificent but now is just plugging along, riding the wave of its earlier success for as long as it can - which doesn't seem to be able to last. It is also about a once-famous, now reclusive actress who has gone into seclusion on a private island she owns, along with the director who made her career. Once the studio gets wind that she's still living there and learns that somehow she remains unnaturally young, stuck the way she looked at the height of her career and subsequent disappearance from the public eye, they see a scoop, a way to take advantage of her one last time. They send the writer to the island - which he doesn't do against his will, it should be noted; he falls as quickly in love with the actress as the studio execs do with the idea of the paycheck she could bring in - where initially he's regarded as just one of many tourists who come seeking a glimpse of the forever starlet, but eventually is taken in by her personally after they meet in a dreamlike chance encounter at a restaurant and she gives him a necklace.

The film itself echoes the themes that its story presents. A lot of the actors in it are actually people who were active in Japan's film industry during its golden age, and at the time of its release had been acting (many of them together) for thirty years or more. There's people in this who you will definitely recognize if you've seen pretty much any Toho film ever, and casting them changes this from just a movie about filmmaking to something that has an element of truth. (I really love when Makoto Satô shows up inexplicably dressed like a cowboy.) Possibly the most important casting choice was Wakaba Irie playing the starlet and Takako Irie, her real-life mother, playing the older version of herself. The elder Irie did a stint of bakeneko films early on in her career, and her/her daughter's role in this film is an actress who also made a name playing in bakeneko film. Wakaba Irie is quite striking and looks remarkably like her mother, so having the two of them switch roles depending on the scene creates an effect that is almost uncanny.

So like I said, the main theme of this is the deep sense of nostalgia that cinema fosters in us. The actress Ryuzoji exits her role in society to forever play a role alone on her island, to forever be who she was at that one moment, her best film. She's obsessed with a man from her past, her co-star, who left to become a Hollywood actor and whose leaving she could never fully accept - this is why she takes in Ryohei, the writer; his resemblance to her former lover (they are both played by the same actor) means she can't let him go either, and draws him into the pocket of frozen time she's created on the island. The film studio itself is also a place where time acts strangely; clocks stop, everyone who lives around it seems arrested in a perpetual single moment. Almost everybody who works there except for Ryohei is dressed anachronistically or just strangely, which makes it feel like Ryohei himself is in a movie where everyone around him is playing their specific part. Legend of the Cat Monster is full of in-between spaces created by the influence of filmmaking on the world around it, places where everything stays the same and you can revisit it as many times as you like. But of course, while a film may never age, the viewer inevitably will. The idyllic, pastoral feeling of the first half of this film comes up harshly against the realization that a person cannot exist forever in the same moment of time that the second half brings, but it's never without melancholy, a feeling that even though being stuck in the past hurts us in the long run, doesn't the hurt feel good, a little bit?

Ryohei, before he becomes ensnared in the actress' aura, is also in love with his coworker Yoko, who eventually follows him to the island to try to break through whatever's drawn him there. She is rebuked, physically, from the actress and director's home, chased off the island, because she represents the re-starting of time: A younger woman, a woman living in the modern world, moving forward, can't be tolerated. She reminds everyone too much that they're aging and will eventually be replaced by a new generation. This is also brought up, but not cast in such a negative light, by a small boy hanging around with a tiny camera, playing director - he says he's the director, and he is the director. He's the generation that will grow up to become new directors, new filmmakers, doing everything over again but with a fresh eye. The breaking of the spell by Yoko has disastrous consequences for nearly everyone involved who is unable to overcome the cognitive dissonance of having her there. When we finally see what Ryohei spent all this time writing, the screenplay that's supposed to make him, and all it is is pages and pages of him writing his own name over and over, desperately trying to remember who he is while Ryuzoji desperately tries to make him into the man she wishes he was... there's something so potent about that.

I'm having a much harder time talking about this film than I thought I would because I'm trying to assume no real familiarity with Obayashi and his particular style. I can tell you that I love this movie and it means a lot to me and it's one of my favorites of his and it makes me sad in a very specific way, but I can't really tell you why, because everyone experiences a film differently. All I can do is recommend it to everyone, and maybe you'll get what I got out of it, maybe not. But I think that everyone can understand that feeling of (sometimes painful) nostalgia that comes with watching an old film and recognizing an era that is gone forever for you now. It doesn't even have to be a fictional film, it can be a home movie. This is more about how the act of capturing something on camera places it in a different register in our minds, one where it exists forever in that one moment. The addition of a fictional storyline to that creates an end product that is forever slightly better than reality - something we can never quite go back to, no matter how much we try.

Matriarch (2022)

directed by Ben Steiner

UK

85 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Since a lot of us are probably still reeling a little from visiting family on Thanksgiving, I thought that now might be a good time to post a review of a film about coming back home. I wasn't planning on reviewing this, because I had seen some other reviewers seem to take a pretty dim view of it, so I was expecting something not worth mentioning, but to my surprise I actually got a lot more out of this than other people seem to have. This may still be a short review, but honestly I'm struggling to find reasons not to rate this even higher than I already did.

I guess some people might see a flaw in this if they're used to watching movies with characters who they can empathize with or understand. Our main character is not terribly heroic or easy to root for, not because her life is in shambles or because of who she is as a person but just because she doesn't have many traits in general. Her friendships and romances are the brightest spot in her life, and even those she seems to view as of secondary importance. This feels like watching somebody right before she realizes that other people in the world might care about her and like to see her be alive and happy, like watching a person who's been so traumatized by the way her mother treated her in childhood that she's categorized all other people besides herself as not worthwhile because she assumes they don't care. And aside from that, she's generally kind of bland. It's not that she doesn't have an engaging backstory, it's that she doesn't have much else outside of that backstory. Jemima Rooper is not terrible at playing this character, and certainly has a lot of acting experience to draw upon, but she becomes someone forgettable, without many facets. This is not very important to me, personally, but I can see where it might bog down the movie for others.

What this is above most other things, to me, was an aesthetics-based film. It is probably a personal fault that I can be so satisfied with something that just looks good and not worry too much about the deeper content, but in terms of film, I think the outward appearance of a thing can, sometimes, be enough to make up for not much plot. As long as it really is "not much" plot and not bad plot, and in Matriarch's case I believe it's the former. I'm extending "aesthetic" to include sound design as well, which is where I feel like this movie really excels; from minute one that score of sparse, eerie, was-that-the-wind noises provides a perfectly unsettling backdrop to an already unsettling chain of events. IMDb credits the music to Suvi-Eeva Äikäs, who also did the music for Hanna and Devs, two television series that have garnered praise for their soundtracks. Also, I believe that Finnish people are just inherently better at music. But anyway, in terms of the visual, this is a far cry from what I was thinking of when I was expecting this to be a folk horror movie - I guess there isn't one singular unified folk horror look, but you do expect some greenery and whatnot in a film like that, not the desolation and parched, freezing landscape we get here. The fertility of the Earth is a central theme - in fact, it may be the most central theme - but everything looks like the end of days, black and cold and withered. This deeply foreboding atmosphere and how well it was carried through all aspects of the film made up for a lot of other areas where it was lacking.

I want to talk a bit more about this in relation to the folk horror subgenre because I feel like where this succeeds is in how differently it approaches that whole motif. "Folk horror" is kind of a loose descriptor; it gets applied to a lot of different things, but a commonality that most of these things have is Pagan or "heretic" religious belief (or lack of belief) that exists outside of, or in direct opposition to, Christian religion. Typically this involves worship of the Earth or of some kind of nature spirit. There may not be too much depth to Matriarch, but there is something really interesting about the situation it presents, and the activity in the main character's home village is established as a very long-standing and intricate tradition. When you think about it, there really isn't anything else in the film - this is all about what's going on in the village. We see that tradition through the lens of how it has affected the main character's entire life. The fact that the story more than adequately (in my opinion) sets that up and shows us that it's a full belief system with a long history means that whatever else it does, this movie at least successfully pulls off the folk horror bit.

While the focus of the film is heavily on non-Christian ritual, there is one character, a priest, who represents the opposition to that. By his being so elderly I assume it's implied that he's been in the village since before the main character's mother discovered its secret, and is the last holdout against something he sees as antithetic to his beliefs. But... is this really about God as we're assuming it is? Maybe this is just because the movie lacks certain details, but I created my own headcanon where when the priest is talking about the activities of the villagers as "against God", he's not talking about the Christian God, but the god that they are worshipping - he believes in it and serves it too, and he sees what they're doing to her as an abomination. Imagining that that old priest has always known about the thing the villagers are connected to makes their tradition appear to be even older - the only innovation, paralleling the rapid exploitation of the planet by humans, is that now they've appropriated its power for themselves.

And, back to aesthetics for a moment, I just loved the look of... that. Her. I'm struggling not to completely spoil this, but if you've seen it, you know who I'm talking about. The CGI is a little dodgy but I've started to not care about that too much. It's more important to me that I can tell the idea is there, even if it's rough around the edges. The entity I'm talking about looks so striking and otherworldly (well, technically it's very worldly, but you get it). There was such a strong idea here, the black mud and the worms and the life of the soil, the ground, leeching into the villagers, them dabbling in things that they didn't understand. It's so... I don't know, poetic? I think "striking" is the best word. Can you appreciate a movie based on a single image alone, rather than the bigger picture? Sometimes I can, at least.

Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989)

directed by Kazuki Ōmori

Japan

105 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Last week, Kazuki Ōmori passed away. I wanted to post a review I did some months ago of vs. Biollante that I considered too long-winded to make public. Ōmori was a part of some of my favorite Godzilla films of the Heisei era and I know I'm not alone in saying that.

Picking up where Return of Godzilla left off in 1984, vs. Biollante begins with a newscast showing the scale of devastation that Godzilla left after the Super X and the military drove him into Mt. Mihara. The aftermath of a kaiju's visit to a populated area is something that doesn't always get shown onscreen, but here we get a taste of it and it's basically as bad as you might imagine: a near-total loss, just fathomless destruction, but still with survivors picking up the pieces. I particularly liked how we're shown that one building had its façade reconstructed into a skylight around a perfect Godzilla footprint that nearly destroyed it and has been renamed as "Godzilla Memorial Lounge". After the newscast, the first thing we see is some soldiers trying to loot cast-off Godzilla biological material from the scene to bring back to their country for use in nefarious scientific developments. This lays out humanity's incredibly short memory and outright refusal to learn from our mistakes - something that will become the main theme in this film.

Because this takes place in the same continuity as Return of Godzilla, this is a version of Japan that has only experienced two - soon to be three - confrontations with Godzilla: the first, in 1954, the second in 1984, and now the developing situation that starts off this film. I personally think this is one of the most interesting of the many Godzilla timelines because no one has fully had the time to get used to Godzilla. There's a heavy focus on scientific research and the preparation of advanced-warning systems in the event that Godzilla or another of the species comes ashore, but with only two previous encounters to go off of, the country is largely in a state of nail-biting. No one is quite sure what to do with Godzilla when he does appear, but they are certain that sooner or later, he will come back. It's also implied, in other films but here as well, that Godzilla's more frequent appearances herald some fundamental change in human society, that as newer and more devastating weaponry is invented by rapid advances in science, the fabric of society breaks down quicker and quicker, and the increasing frequency of Godzilla attacks is tied somehow to the oncoming collapse of civilization.

It's not directly stated, but the whole of vs. Biollante seems to find the country in a sort of twilight era where, despite superficially being able to recover from their two previous attacks, the lack of any unified learning from past mistakes is slowly sliding humanity into our ultimate downfall. No one seems to really grasp what they're supposed to be doing, and so instead are flailing around clutching at whatever they think can give them bigger, better guns to fend off imagined "enemies" who they assume to be doing the same thing simultaneously. The core principle of Godzilla is that you cannot keep inventing a superweapon over and over and expecting that this time, maybe, you'll be smart enough or good enough that the worst won't happen to you. You can't, like both the Japanese government and the fictional country of Saradia attempt to do in vs. Biollante, essentially recycle the worst manmade disaster ever created into a new weapon without the past repeating itself. Professor Shiragami also proves that you really just can't mess with that in general, for any reason - his motivations may have come from a place of sorrow and loss, but he ignores precedent as well, and makes the mistake of thinking he can somehow logic his way into eliminating the part of Godzilla that inevitably proves fatal for humanity. The professor isn't a bad person - the point of his story isn't to paint him as ignorant or uncaring; it's an example of how history isn't always changed for the worse by evil people, but by good people who don't recognize that they too bear the weight of mistakes made by those before them.

The relationship between Biollante and Godzilla is an interesting one. Artificially created, Biollante is a genetic chimera incorporating cells from a human, a rosebush, and Godzilla. In the film it's established that they are the same thing, that they see each other as the same thing, and have some fundamental connection because of their shared genetic material. This relationship between the two creatures as well as Biollante's nature in and of itself was something I was thinking about a lot on my third rewatch. I didn't realize until now how long it takes for Biollante to reach her final, monstrous form, and how anti-climactic the fight between her and Godzilla is when it finally does happen. Biollante isn't vicious like a lot of Godzilla's opponents have been; she seems to lash out mostly from fear and anguish rather than a genuine desire to hurt Godzilla. She begins life out in the middle of a lake and never approaches civilization, and the fight between her and Godzilla doesn't hit the same beats as a typical kaiju smash does. There's no real winner between the two, in the end. It's just a short, seemingly agonizing battle between two creatures who have humans to blame for their existence. It's morbid, really, when you think of it like that; like putting two beetles in a jar and making them fight to the death, except you're the one who created the beetles.

It's also really interesting how visibly bewildered Godzilla is when he sees Biollante for the first time. Is this, perhaps, because when Godzilla sensed Biollante calling out to him, he expected, upon arriving at her location, to find another Godzilla?

This film also introduces us to Miki Saegusa, who is one of my favorites out of the few recurring characters in the series. Psychic research seems to have arisen out of the wake of the 1984 attack - not specifically for the purpose of communicating with Godzilla, but that's how it ends up being used. Saegusa is a young but extremely powerful psychic whose presence I always appreciate because she's an alternative to the knee-jerk military response most typically seen in these films. In vs. Biollante, she provides one of my favorite scenes in the whole Heisei era, and I feel one of the most crucial moments in developing Godzilla as a character: when she attempts to confront him directly, standing on a dock only a short distance away as he wades through the sea, for a moment they each have the other's attention, observing each other directly, and when Saegusa establishes a psychic link with Godzilla she is immediately overwhelmed and loses consciousness. This is why, when people bring up the question of Godzilla's intellect relative to a human, I always say that I personally imagine him operating "at or above" a human level. Saegusa's physical response to linking up with him hints that there's an aspect to him that is incomprehensible to us. Also, that great scene where the kids in the psyonics institute are asked to draw what they dreamt about and they all simultaneously draw Godzilla - like Godzilla stirring inside Mt. Mihara is somehow sending out waves of psychic energy that blanket the surrounding area.

In general, this movie lacks a lot of the showiness that the franchise's other entries surrounding it have. It has an overarching feeling of slow decay for society, a dim premonition that we're going to continue down the path that leads to our own destruction because we keep our backs turned when we should be looking behind us to learn from the past. I think Saegusa is a ray of hope - a young person exploring alternative ways of communicating with the threat instead of just killing it - which is what makes her role in the later Godzilla vs. Destoroyah so heartrending. vs. Biollante is one of the best examples of why this franchise has remained so relevant throughout the years, and also an example of how it's survived for so long: by continually reinventing itself and playing off of the same themes to different ends.

Gamera vs. Barugon (1966)

directed by Shigeo Tanaka

Japan

106 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Full disclosure: I was drifting in and out of sleep pretty heavily for about the last half-hour of this movie, so this review may have some gaps where I could not stay awake. I highly, highly recommend watching this on archive.org if you're looking for it; they have the Blu-Ray rip which is in absolutely beautiful quality.

Anyway. After quickly recapping the events at the end of Gamera, we're told that midway through its journey to Mars, Gamera was hit by a random asteroid and knocked off-course, spiraling back to Earth. Convenient for us puny humans, who are in more need of rescue than we had cockily assumed, but probably very confusing for Gamera. There is a marked difference in tone between this film and its predecessor, which is partially due to this one being in (quite vivid) color, but also this somehow just feels more like a movie. Gamera was all about Gamera, and it felt like a slightly unsteady step into the world of kaiju film from a studio hoping to capitalize on the booming popularity of Godzilla and tokusatsu on television. It was both visually dark and had a tone of mild dread, though nothing near as suffocating as Gojira. This second entry rolls onto the scene well-rounded; fully equipped with subplots, a grip of different characters all prepared to backstab each other, nice cinematography, and, as the title gives away, a second kaiju.

For a long time, this does not feel like a monster movie at all. I'm used to this from the Godzilla series, which is fond of introducing Godzilla in a very roundabout and sometimes even completely unrelated way: We have to follow people doing other stuff before anything interesting happens just to get some plot so that the movie isn't 20 minutes of epic kaiju battle and no substance whatsoever. Oddly, though, and maybe this is just because I wasn't sitting there waiting impatiently for my beloved Godzilla to show up, it feels like vs. Barugon does this better. I was perfectly satisfied with the story, which concerns a couple of would-be jewel thieves trying to steal what they think is a huge, priceless opal but is actually the egg of a dangerous creature. I wasn't waiting for the action to arrive - this movie does non-action things perfectly fine.

The amount of blackface here just can't not be addressed, though. It casts a shadow over what is otherwise a really good film. The first movie had this same issue, with fake Arctic natives trying and failing to warn the main characters about Gamera, but where the people in brownface in that film were at least treated as intelligent and made part of the plot, in this one they're nothing but shield-toting stereotypes. It is quite disgusting, and tokusatsu at this period in time was rife with it. There's no excuse for it, and unfortunately when we remember the Gamera series for everything great that it is, we do have to remember that it had some moments that were, at best, ill-conceived.

After some time and a lot of people ignoring the advice of fake natives, the "opal" hatches. I was so impressed by the hatching sequence that I wanted to make sure I mentioned it, because it was done with such delicacy that I was immensely thankful for a beautifully clear picture so I could see it well. The steam rising from the inside of the egg, the way the infant Barugon looks slick and newborn... I thought it was all amazing. (Wikizilla says that the coating on the newborn Barugon was made of "special material imported from the United States", which... just sounds kind of ominous, honestly.) It's not 1:1 realistic; it doesn't look like documentary footage of a hatching egg, and it shouldn't. What makes practical effects scenes like this unique and admirable is that we can see the work that went into depicting a real-life event, and instead of criticizing it where it might not resemble real life, we should appreciate the skill that it takes to execute it. This goes for everything else effects-related in this film as well. Adult Barugon doesn't in any way resemble a real creature, and for that matter neither does Gamera, but it's the manufacturing of such elaborate, fantastical things that makes them beautiful, not whether or not they fool us into thinking they're real.

Longtime Gamera fans will probably read this and think "duh", but what is interesting to me about Gamera as a creature is that it really does feel like a large, confused animal. I've said this before, but my personal headcanon for Godzilla is that he operates at a level of cognition incomparable to humans, and while he is, like Gamera, also ultimately an animal who is not at fault for his destructive nature, he does feel like he has more agency. Gamera is pure instinct, at least in these early installments. Gamera wants to eat and is afraid of being awake in a world that is hostile to it. The same goes for Barugon. Barugon fights Gamera not as a hateful enemy but as a more aggressive animal versus a usually docile one. And this is where I lose the plot a bit, because I had fallen asleep by this point, but I don't remember Gamera even having that much of a role in defeating Barugon - from what I can recall, Gamera gets frozen by Barugon's rainbow beam (yeah) and spends a lot of the battle out of commission while the humans' defense and military forces try to figure out how to stop a huge lizard who can shoot rainbows out of its back.

This is getting lengthy, so I'll stop soon, but what also stuck out to me about this movie is that it is so much about greed - personal greed, not the kind of societal hubris and blindness that leads to Godzilla. Although I suppose the greed of individuals in this film suggests the presence of greed in all individuals, so maybe it's not so personal after all. But at least one (again, apologies, I was exhausted and not fully observant) of the characters who steal the "opal" spends the aftermath deeply regretting what he's done and taking basically the whole brunt of the responsibility for Barugon leveling Osaka. He's disgusted with himself and can't believe that he was so focused on his potential gains in the short term without considering anything else. There are a lot of moments I'm familiar with as a Godzilla fan where the nature of humanity itself is brought to light in all its occasional ugliness, but not since the very first film have we really seen someone personally saying "I am responsible for this, alone" and then dealing with the guilt of that.

There's an interesting mix of elements here, of things that we'd see more and less of in future Showa-era Gamera films; it's brighter and more colorful than the first but also carries a slight soberness to it. It has that weird in-between feeling where it's not quite a children's movie but could at any moment become one. I don't think this is one of the best of the series, but it is an integral one.

Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003)

directed by Masaaki Tezuka

Japan

91 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I had to go some distance, but I managed to catch a screening of Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla on 11/3 for Godzilla Day and it was one of the best theater experiences I've had. My first time seeing any Godzilla movie on a true big screen, and my first time watching the Kiryu Saga in a while. It of course made me want to watch its sequel (notably, this is the only film in the franchise that is a direct sequel to its predecessor), and doing so last night only reaffirmed, and possibly even bolstered, my feelings about the Kiryu Saga being one of the most compelling parts of the entire franchise. It also must be mentioned that it has an incredible soundtrack.

I'm going to assume a basic familiarity with Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla and not re-tread the storyline too much, but for some quick background: The timeline here is that there was only one Godzilla, who was killed in 1954, until a second member of the species appears in 2003. The government, along with a special quasi-military division created for the sole purpose of defending against Godzilla (and other kaiju), develops a robotic replica of Godzilla, called Kiryu, using the bones and DNA of the original Godzilla, salvaged from the bottom of the sea. I have heard some people who are unfamiliar with the franchise assuming that these two films are remakes of the Mechagodzilla films from the 1970s, which is entirely untrue. Kiryu is a wholly different entity than that Mechagodzilla, who, while still having some interesting implications, is not tied to Godzilla itself in the way that Kiryu is. Watching Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla made me realize something that I have no better way of putting than to say that Kiryu is severely haunted. They built basically the world's largest ghost. Kiryu is essentially possessed by the spirit of the '54 Godzilla.

It was already a complicated and tacitly horrifying situation in the previous film to have Kiryu resurrected and forced to fight something that is as close to it as a brother, but now we see that somehow the implications of that have failed to reach humanity and we're still relying on - and upgrading, no less - Kiryu in case we have to force it into battle once again. Nobody seems to exactly be happy about this, and Kiryu is treated as kind of a weapon of last resort, but there are definitely people who see it as the newest, shiniest warplane, and their entire careers are based around the maintenance, enhancement, and piloting of it as a machine. Kiryu's "consciousness" has also apparently been fixed so that it no longer has trauma flashbacks when hearing Godzilla's roar, and for much of Tokyo S.O.S., it seems like Kiryu is pretty much stripped of its association with its kin, serving as a good war robot and not much more. But Kiryu remembers, in the end. Kiryu always remembers.

The human side of things is far less interesting here than in the prior film. Akane was a faceted character with emotional depth, whose reasons for doing things were understandable and who, despite the strength of her convictions, did undergo a small change once she started to see Kiryu as a living entity. Chûjō, it must be said, is, unfortunately, just some guy. It is really great that they got somebody back from the first Mothra film forty-some years later, but aside from that, there's nobody in this who's even half as well-developed as Akane or the little girl she befriends in the first film. I'm also not too fond of the emphasis on militarization in these two films.

I also want to take a minute to talk about suit design, as I generally always do. There were two separate Godzilla suits made for both of these two movies, although they are both very similar to each other. I am a fan of the Millennium-era designs, because I particularly like the more streamlined, almost catlike look of the head and face, and also the changes to the way Godzilla uses its atomic breath, how there's a moment or two where it has to "charge" before it can be fired. Although the color scheme overall is back to charcoal gray, the bright blue of its dorsal plates and the subtle shading in its eyes makes this Godzilla look much more than monochrome. I also think Kiryu's damaged right eye is very significant. And I admit that having noticed this puts me in as-yet-uncharted nerd territory, but the amount of detail put into sculpting the suit meant that I could clearly see in at least one shot that Godzilla has palatine rugae - these are the ridges in the mouth of a mammal, on the hard palate. This has interesting implications for Godzilla as a species because the primary function of the palatine rugae is to assist in swallowing food. Personally I've always assumed that Godzilla does not actually need to eat and just feeds off of radioactivity for energy, but if Godzilla is evolved (or mutated) from an already extant species, it would make sense that it might have them as a vestigial trait. The other reason why this is very interesting is because lizards are not mammals and therefore I don't know if they have palatine rugae in real life, pointing to Godzilla as some kind of weird, new, hybridized species, existing somewhere between amphibian and mammal.

It's generally true that by the time Mothra arrives to warn humanity that we're going down the wrong course, things are already pretty dire. This is the case again in Tokyo S.O.S. when the Shobijin pick up on the whole Kiryu situation and come to give us a warning that we're messing with forces beyond our control in trying to force-awaken a ghost to pilot a robot as a superweapon. Mothra herself is treated with suspicion, as our sole encounter with her in this timeline was when she destroyed much of Tokyo after her devotees, the Shobijin, were stolen, but ultimately she's recognized as an ally. Mothra in this film represents the continual renewal of nature and the need to learn from past mistakes and use them to develop a more interconnected way of living.

As I said, Kiryu spends most of this film as an upgraded mecha with not much in the way of independent thought. But the film still ends with what I personally believe to be one of the most powerful images in the whole franchise. Seeing Godzilla, or a Godzilla, so stripped of power after being beaten down by Kiryu and then restrained by the Mothra larvae is already very strange, but when Kiryu takes over and makes its own decision to return itself and the second Godzilla to the bottom of the sea where they both should have remained in the first place, it really hits me. I mean it really hits me. The establishment of Kiryu as a conscious entity with the soul of the '54 Godzilla inhabiting it just has such resonance in all of its implications. That Kiryu recognizes itself as something that should never have been born, and that after lying at the bottom of the sea for 50 years, all it wants to do is not fight. It wants to end things, to put things back the way they should have been. I've thought constantly about Kiryu picking up the almost-dead second Godzilla and plunging them both into the ocean since the first time I saw this movie and I will probably continue thinking about it for a long time. I think its display screen changing to read "Sayonara Chûjō" as its pilot ejects himself from it is also a last, fascinating detail as it can be argued that this is, for the first time ever, the real, actual 1954 Godzilla directly speaking to a human.

Barbarian (2022)

directed by Zach Cregger

USA

103 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm fairly certain that this is still in theaters as of the time of this writing, and the only thing I've seen anybody say about it is that it's "good but overhyped". I've somehow managed to avoid 100% of whatever hype for this is out there, so I'm not sure what the overall response has been, and I'm not sure if I'll be going against the grain when I say that keeping myself in the dark for this made me see it as a really excellent, unexpected horror film. I would highly recommend not looking at reviews or even watching trailers if you're planning on seeing this.

We start out thinking we probably know where the story is going: A woman arrives at her Airbnb to find it's been double-booked, and although us viewers have alarm bells going off about the whole situation, after some deliberation she decides to stay in the house anyway with the man who had already been renting it out. The casting of Bill Skarsgård in this role as well as his name being fairly highly billed was a great choice, because we've seen him be incredibly creepy so many times that we may, perhaps subconsciously, be expecting to see him be creepy again. Little things are off about the house itself, besides the obvious risk of a single woman staying in the same house as an unfamiliar man, and at any minute it seems likely to crescendo into the reveal of him as a killer. It also, strangely, seems like we might be headed for a meet-somewhat-less-than-cute scenario, as the two temporary cohabitators are actually having a nice time and getting to like each other, but it's hard to tell if this is deliberate misdirection or not. All we know is that something is wrong about the house, and although we think we know from genre conventions what it is, we can't be certain - until we are.

In short, what this movie does and why it is so effective is that it presents us with situations where our nerves are instinctually on edge, like seeing a single woman and a strange man together, and then it says "Oh no, you thought that was what you had to be afraid of?" It's not so much that it leads the viewer towards thinking the wrong thing, with red herrings or false starts; it's more that it makes us feel like we're already unsafe and then shows us that things can always get worse. Like, you trap a spider in a jar and then look slightly to your left and there's an even bigger spider, and you only have one jar.

Barbarian is also incredibly good at establishing a creepy atmosphere by reeling things out so slowly and with such care for pacing that I could almost imagine the plot as a physical line that kept branching out further and further. And further and further and further. Nothing whatsoever is as it seems in this film, there's always an underground beneath the underground, always something worse no matter how bad things have already gotten. As we see the main character descend into the space beneath her rental, the sense of unease mounts and mounts until it's almost unbearable. She just keeps finding more doors and passageways and it would almost be funny if it wasn't so thoroughly terrifying - it's labyrinthine, this cavernous space under the house, and like many, many things in the film it implies a length of time spent down there that only gets more disturbing the longer you think about it. One of the scariest moments in the film for me wasn't even a moment where anything bad was happening - it's when Tess is exploring the tunnels with only very scant light to guide her, and Keith, who she's gone in after, suddenly comes crawling out of the dark on all fours. Again, he's actually the one in trouble, there's nothing sinister about him in the end, but seeing something that wasn't immediately identifiable as moving like a person made me almost jump out of my chair. And then when he says that they have to get out because something "bit me" - just awful. That's about where things start taking a sharp downward turn and don't stop.

I wanted to call this movie "relentless", but the truth of it is that it does quite frequently relent, and that's why it works so well. There are three major transitions over the running time of the film, and each time, the sudden shift into something completely different is so jarring that it feels like whiplash. We go from the absolute depths, a dark and horrible cavern where goodness and light go to die, to watching some chucklehead singing in his fancy roll-top car. The timing is comedic, but in the moment it doesn't feel comedic; all we can think of is what we saw just moments ago. This happens again closer to the end of the film, when we get to see some backstory on the house, which leads me to another thing I thought was really impressive about Barbarian: That it does the same thing over and over and manages not to feel stale. It never lets us get used to things becoming steadily worse. I had the pleasure of seeing Hereditary in theaters when it first came out and I remember feeling the same way during that as I did during this; I actually laughed out loud at one point because I was just thinking "How much worse can it get?"

I think it's also important to note that this is not a strictly realistic movie, and I don't think it was trying to be. It has the trappings of the horror genre and it dials up the intensity on many things that simply would not be that way in real life (I.E. I don't think inbred people actually look like that, nor can they rip people's heads open with their bare hands). It's good that it does these things, it's good that it puts us in these situations that beggar belief, because when a horror movie is not going to involve supernatural events, it sometimes feels like it has to lean more towards gritty realism, and more often than not the end product is a movie that is just gory and brutal but not scary, not creepy. This is all of those things and it's even a little funny, in a dark way. It's not content to have viewers sympathize with Tess, who as far as we know is entirely innocent, it also has to give us A.J., the aforementioned chucklehead(/rapist), who we really kind of hope gets dragged off into the darkness while he obliviously tries to figure out if he can include the chud tunnel under his house as extra square footage. Again, I really don't know what most people think of this, so I could be making myself look foolish by having enjoyed it and been so receptive to its twists and turns while everybody else is calling it lazy and uncreative, but I genuinely thought this was a great film. As a last note, the title makes a whole lot of sense if you know the supposed etymology of the word "Barbarian", and I thought that was a brilliant small touch as well.

Actually, there is one last thing I want to talk about, and it happens at the very end of the film. I just thought that there was a very compelling parallel between how A.J. keeps invoking excuses like "I had no choice! It was me or you!" to justify actions that he takes where there is indeed a choice [the choice to not be a massive asshole] and what Tess has to do to defend herself. Her act was a real case of "me or you". If the film has been successful at impressing the horror of what was going on beneath the Airbnb on its viewers, then they really should feel at least some kind of sympathetic response to Tess' attacker. I think there's a real deep tragedy in having no choice other than to kill someone who is so far beyond being culpable for their actions due to the circumstances of their birth and life.

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

directed by Eugène Lourié

USA

80 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Although it's more than good enough to stand on its own merits, this movie is often known for being at least part of the inspiration for Gojira. Visually, the unnamed titular beast (it's just kind of "a dinosaur", not too specific) does bear a very strong resemblance to Godzilla, especially in the head, though the body is much more Komodo Dragon-ish and certainly not bipedal. The story itself also shares similar themes, but I am forcing myself not to compare the two overmuch as I am too biased to do that fairly. I will try to talk about this on its own.

There's also a direct link to Gojira in that the creature here is awakened and perhaps mutated by atomic testing. The film opens at a research base in the Canadian arctic, and the stark black-and-white does nothing to remove the stomach-churning grandeur of the nuclear explosions. In fact, there is something interesting about seeing the clouds and debris in black-and-white, because it blends so well with the already monochrome landscape of the arctic that in some way the effect is to make it look like part of nature, instead of what it is, which is the opposite. Seeing mushroom clouds in vivid, angry reds and oranges the way they're usually depicted clearly demarcates them as something manmade, but setting them against a landscape where everything is so white as to blend the horizon into the skyline makes it so that the mushroom cloud could easily be the flume from a glacier calving or another natural event in the arctic.

The scientists are quite pleased with themselves after conducting a successful test, and much is made of humanity's evolving grasp of science. I can't say this film goes too deep with any kind of statement about hubris or taking responsibility for our actions, but I do love the underlying message here: We get too full of ourselves, too proud to be uncovering the last secrets of science, thinking we know everything that's out there, and now look what's coming up over that hill. The dinosaur is a physical representation of the unmapped areas of our knowledge and the fact that no matter how comfortable we get, we can't predict nature's course, especially once we start messing with things like nuclear energy. I think the terror here is supposed to come more from the possibility of an undiscovered, ancient lifeform that could wreak havoc on our civilization, as opposed to the possibility of a new superweapon we could invent that would wreak havoc on our civilization, but sometimes that's nice. Sometimes we do just want to see a dinosaur wreck things.

I knew, of course, that this was a fairly old film, but it still surprised me that it's so... quaint, for lack of a better term. I think a lot of what I expected out of it simply didn't exist yet at the time this had been released. Much of the genre conventions were indeed invented by this film and would go on to be developed further later. I wonder how many films at the time had done scenes of large crowds in a city running in mass panic as buildings around them were destroyed by some monster. But the thing I wasn't expecting was that 99% of the action is restricted to the last twenty minutes or so. The main character, a scientist who narrowly escapes a brush with the dinosaur at the beginning of the film, returns to the States and spends the majority of the film trying to convince people around him to believe what he saw. Very few do, and even those willing to go along with him are doing just that - going along with him; half for fun, half out of genuine scientific curiosity. Nobody really takes anything seriously except for our protagonist, who for his part is quite earnest, charming, and softspoken about his wacky dinosaur tales. Until the latter part of the film, nothing has much weight. The jolly older paleontologist who agrees to go diving for evidence to support the protag's wild claims remains lighthearted as he descends in a diving bell to his death. People go about their lives with no inkling of the giant thing advancing down towards them.

It's to be expected from something of this era, but there really is a dearth of women here. If I recall correctly there were three with any kind of speaking role: One was a secretary of some kind, another was a nun, and the most important role played by a woman was the paleontologist's assistant, who is the only person to put stock in the main character's story, and encourages him to look into it further. No women are in this film who are not in some way in service to a man (possibly excepting the nun, but, well... I'm not going to get into theology here). I know a lot of people would say that there's no point in complaining about something that's been and gone already, but I do think it is important to acknowledge the gender inequality in films like this and how it still pervades cinema today, lest we slip back into a situation where women are not onscreen unless they're doing something for a man.

I've somehow gotten this far without talking about the practical effects. Pioneering, ahead of its time, a masterpiece; this and much more has already been said but I could say it again and it would still be deserved. The dinosaur really looks almost more like taxidermy in some scenes than an artificial object. I swear that when it roared I could see its sides expanding from its breath. Another thing we're not going to go into here is how much our image of dinosaurs has progressed since this film, except to say that this is probably a fairly inaccurate dinosaur, but that doesn't even matter to me because although it might not look like a "good" dinosaur, it looks like a real creature. It doesn't just have an appearance. It has a personality. I looked at it and it felt like it had interiority and a will of its own the way I would watch lizards in the pet store when I was a kid. Its movements are incredibly well choreographed and animalistic, and the detail in its skin and face doesn't lack much if anything at all. This really is the movie that set the standard, the one that everybody would try to imitate.

There is a beautifully sharp print on archive.org and I would go so far as to be a little snobbish and say that if you can't find this in good quality, maybe don't watch it at all, since the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion practical effects are the highlight of the show and it would be doing them a disservice not to be able to see them perfectly clearly. You can kind of take or leave the story because to be honest it is a little bit dull, sort of a standard "oh no a monster is coming - but we can firebomb it and then we'll all be okay!" situation, but again, that thing hadn't been done to death the way it has now. I think this is an important film in the history of practical effects and is, generally, also just a fun watch anyway.

DeepStar Six (1989)

directed by Sean S. Cunningham

USA

105 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I think I might have mentioned before that I'm strangely fond of big mainstream sci-fi films (especially SF/horror hybrids) from the late 1980s and 1990s. I'm not quite sure what it is about them, because I normally favor indie film most of the time, but a lot of movies like this have an inherent competency to their production that I don't find in mainstream film today. I try to avoid being a purist and/or curmudgeon as much as I can, but cinema is one area where I think that the adage "they don't make 'em like they used to" is absolutely true, and I don't care how it makes me sound. Today's blockbusters and those of the late 20th century may be the same in that they're intended to make money and fill seats, but older movies just feel like they have more soul to them because you can tell that they were made by hand instead of by an overworked computer-effects team figuring out how to make actors talking to green-screened ping-pong balls look authentic.

So it's no surprise that what stuck out to me most about DeepStar Six is the practical effects. There's surprisingly little creature in this feature, at least up until the final act, but the miniature work used on the undersea bases and equipment is no less impressive, both internal shots and external. I love nothing more than a good analog-era space (or deep sea) ship console with as many knobs and switches as you can fit on there. I'm fully aware that the dated look of the base's and the submersibles' internals is not intentional and that it was simply the level that technology was at at the time, but I still find it significant that the set designers chose not to look forward in time and create an environment that was more futuristic than recognizable. They didn't make everything sleek, lightweight, and transparent; they didn't imagine how technology might look once improved upon. They used CRT televisions; monitors that still have "degauss" buttons next to them. This is equipment that (generally - there is of course some embellishment, but it's not unrealistic) would be familiar to audiences at the time. The film takes existing technology and applies it in such a way that it still sparks the imagination without depicting anything "new".

A lot of time is spent watching the crew go about their operations in the deep-sea base, so it's good that the miniatures and internals look so believable. Your mileage may vary, but I didn't find myself getting bored in this time before things started to significantly go downhill, since the cast seems to work well together and have been well-chosen for their roles (except for Nia Peeples, who was getting on my nerves because for some reason she sounded like an audiobook narrator on fast-forward). There's a large enough group in the base that interpersonal conflicts are not too much of a focus; one or two members don't get along, but infighting isn't a big thing, thankfully. I think it was recognized that this was not the type of movie where watching people bicker among themselves would be at all beneficial to the sense of tension or fear. For whatever reason, it stuck out to me that the women among the crew seemed to have the least to do with one another - I don't know if this was a deliberate choice to counteract the stereotype of women being competitive and catty, but it almost felt like an Alien situation where the characters weren't written with an assigned gender until an actor was found for that role.

Sean S. Cunningham is probably best known for Friday the 13th, which is interesting because in a lot of ways this movie really does follow the slasher format, just underwater, and with a huge prehistoric bug as the killer instead of Jason. People get picked off one by one, but in a subversion of the tropes that Friday the 13th would set out for slasherdom forevermore, the people who have sex are the ones who survive. And for a while it's actually things unrelated to the creature that claim lives: Mechanical failures, accidents of timing, etc. In my opinion it adds to the mystique of the creature that the fallout from it barely brushing against the human sphere is so devastating, even well before it makes a physical appearance. McBride's drastic act at the end to kill a single creature might feel like overkill, but with the damage it did to one deep-sea base, it's not hard to imagine the ramifications if that creature had managed to escape to the surface and the world at large.

And oh boy, what a creature. Again, this is where older movies have the upper hand against the modern. There are CGI-based monsters that I am tremendously fond of, and that I feel exist as fleshed-out entities thanks to the lore surrounding them (the creatures from the A Quiet Place and Cloverfield films, just to name two), but few, if any, computer-rendered monsters achieve that sense of physicality that a practical-effects monster can. The thing in DeepStar Six feels - and looks - like an animal, a predator, a living thinking being with a will and intent that stalks the crew, yes, like a serial killer picking them off. There are scary things about a creature that is not intelligent, operating solely on instinct and god forgive anything and anybody that gets in its way, but there are also scary things about a creature that is cognizant of its surroundings, and our arthropod friend marries both aspects. Ultimately its instinct to follow light is its doom, but despite it being enormous and looking unwieldy when contained in the confined space of an airlock, it also is able to be stealthy and elude a room full of humans who are actively looking for it.

I don't know what else to say about this movie, really, other than it just feels like something that hits all the right beats. It's not unconventional at all and delivers an ending that is predictable and safe, but from beginning to end I was never bored even though I watched this because I wanted to watch a monster movie and the monster takes up maybe 10% of the running time. I'm not sure what the audience reaction was to this at the time, and it's entirely possible that people could have lamented how contentless modern sci-fi was in the same way that I am now, but if anything came out today with even remotely the same level of technical mastery behind the effects, that released widely instead of being relegated to art-house cinemas or streaming services, I would be blown away.

Black Cat Mansion (1958)

directed by Nobuo Nakagawa

Japan

67 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I have not seen as many bakeneko movies as I should, so I decided to watch a few of them this month to fix that. This particular one is directed by Nobuo Nakagawa, who's best known for Jigoku, which is regarded as one of the best Japanese horror films of all time, but he's also a prolific director of other horror and mystery titles (as well as some episodes of Ultraman Leo, which is... weird). At a little under 70 minutes, I was thinking I wouldn't have enough to say about this to warrant a full review, but to my surprise Black Cat Mansion is so good that I do have some things I want to talk about.

I was immediately taken in by the first post-opening-credits scene because I was honestly not expecting anything about this film to be so creepy in such a specific way. A review that I had glanced at mentioned Hammer horror, and so I was set up for something gothic and maybe slightly overwrought, but above all not truly creepy - just an embellished, deliberately showy type of horror, which itself is enjoyable, but is not what I saw. We watch masked doctors slowly wheel a presumably deceased body across the frame as the camera drifts up stairs, down a hallway, and towards an office, its field of vision illuminated only by the circle of a flashlight beam. This is so arrestingly eerie that it feels like something out of Silent Hill. And none of this is ever brought up again - the doctor from this scene is one of the main characters, but we don't see him actually practicing in a hospital setting outside of that first scene. So that whole sequence was almost like this non sequitur that let me know I was in for something with some real atmosphere.

After that, the film begins with a husband and wife in the process of moving to a derelict mansion, belonging in some distant way to their family line, that had sat abandoned for some time. The wife has tuberculosis and has to relocate to somewhere with a better climate. There's no kind of overly dramatic "I hate it here, this house is scary" whining like there usually is in horror movies (the myriad of them) that start when a family moves into a new, old house, but the wife obviously doesn't like it, and for good reason: It is scary. The shoji screens are all broken, it's covered in cobwebs, and everything looks out of place. It's still standing, and the shell of it is supposedly sturdy, but it's a place that from the first glance you can tell is filled with bad emotions and troubled history. The film is too economical to spend a lot of time on giving us any kind of elaborate tour of the house, but the shots that we do see are enough to establish the hauntedness of the mansion.

The entire reason why I wanted to review this film is because I'm obsessed with the camerawork and I want to talk about it. For many scenes, the camera doesn't remain static as the actors perform in front of it in a confined space, like a stage play. Instead, it drifts around fluidly, as if it's floating in midair, and the viewer watches the backs of the actors' heads, voyeuristically, like we're unwilling co-conspirators to the ghosts that haunt them. The "monster POV" shot is by no means unconventional or rare in horror cinema, but the slow and methodical way the camera moves around the frame, subtly fluctuating height between head-level and looking down on the actors, adds something deeply sinister.

Despite its scant running time, half or more of Black Cat Mansion is taken up by a period-piece drama that explains the macabre history of the mansion. This diversion into history is so important that, in the opening credits, the cast is actually broken up into "Present Day" and "Historical Drama". The historical drama is no less interesting than the present-day situation, and this is where the excellent camerawork and cinematography comes in again: While the present is either in black-and-white or a muddy, nearly monochrome greyish-blue, the parts of the film that take place in the past are in vivid color. This is an absolutely fascinating choice because I'm used to the past being depicted in black-and-white to get the message across that it is the past - but the message here is that when a story is told over and over again it becomes somehow more real than real, all the details become sharp, the colors bright and lurid. The modern-day characters trudge through the screen bogged down by health problems and a looming cat spirit, but in the past, people were ruled by hatred, desire, anger, and vengeance. In the world's tensest game of gō, the camera pushes in and moves back, pushes in and moves back, rhythmically, giving the scene a feeling of stress in a physical way instead of just letting the actors carry the whole of it. This kind of inclusion of the motion of the camera into the overall framing of the film is really inventive and not something I see often at all.

There is a sense of deep gothic horror to this that makes it all just so ghastly, I love it. The story of what happened in the house is such classic horror stuff because this is classic horror. You see in this a ton of tropes that would be carried through to Japanese horror in the present. Spoilers for a 64-year-old movie: Someone getting murdered and then walled up in a house, his mother cursing the family line of his killer for all time, transmitting the curse down the ages through the grudgeful spirit of a cat - that's all so good. It's not a complicated story and it's not hard to understand it or see where it's going, but it's executed so well, so artfully, and with such a real feeling of weightiness and proper drama that it hits in just the right way. Like I said, I haven't seen many bakeneko films yet, but I think this is probably one of the better among them.

Savageland (2015)

directed by Phil Guidry, Simon Herbert, David Whelan

USA

81 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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To kick off October, I decided to rewatch something that became one of my favorite horror movies immediately after I saw it for the first time. Despite the love I have for it, I only ever managed to see it once until now, because it was hard to find for several years after its release, even though it was decently popular at the time. I still feel the love I had for it the first time around, but I did see something about it that bothered me, which I will address in this review. That being said, I do still feel comfortable calling this a five-star film.

The story Savageland tells is of a very small fictional town on the U.S.-Mexico border called Sangre de Cristo, where in a single night all 57 of its inhabitants were slaughtered by an unknown force, save one migrant worker living just outside town who escaped the bloodbath. This might not technically be a found-footage movie, since its presentation is mostly as a collection of interviews and graphics explaining the events, but the most crucial parts of the film (the interview with the survivor, Francisco Salazar, and his photographs) are literally footage that was found, so I suppose you can call it that. Salazar is quickly blamed for every single thing that happened in the town that night, despite the fact that it would be physically impossible for one person to commit every murder and in as brutal a fashion as we're told it happened. He describes uncanny, unnatural things; people dying and then coming back to life as inhuman creatures. But all evidence pointing to his innocence is deliberately dismissed in favor of the convenient explanation that someone who the police want to paint as a violent criminal is indeed behind everything.

Racism is one hundred percent the core of this film. It is unapologetic about the way it depicts the attitude of southwestern white Americans towards the perceived plague of "illegals" moving up out of Mexico. Salazar only gave a single interview, which was not widely disseminated, if at all, during his trial, and we're told he became catatonic from trauma afterwards. So all of the inferences given by the white interviewees about his motives, his physical abilities, his psychological profile, the minutiae of what supposedly happened that night - all of this is invented, the projection of a terrified white populace on a brown face who they see as their enemy.

Savageland is no simple racial allegory. It is also the story of an event which, isolated from all context, is one of the most deeply unsettling things I've seen in a horror film. A clearer, less biased picture of what Salazar went through on the night of the killings unfolds throughout the film, aided by maps of the route he took as well as his own photographs of the event. You can tell that the people who made this film must have had a completely fleshed-out scenario in their heads, and a lot of detail and planning went into making this feel like a real recounting of something that happened in a real place. The film itself was obviously made on the cheap - I'm pretty sure stock photos were used for a lot of the pictures of the victims and other instances where a name and face was needed but not a live actor. But at least they had the money to buy the stock photos without the watermark. And when it's important, like the pictures of Salazar as a child, you can also tell that they do actually use childhood pictures of the actors. The rough edges fit with this as an unpolished, "the truth must be told"-type documentary, and really it's the concept that matters here, not the aesthetic.

To me, absolutely the most integral part of this movie is Salazar's photographs. They made a deep impression on me the first time I watched this and I never forgot them. I'm not sure I can explain why they affected me so much. During the night, Salazar had a camera with him as he ran through Sangre de Cristo, with which he got 36 shots that, combined with his single interview, show what was really happening while he was supposedly on a murderous rampage. We are told early on that he was a photographer, and not just a casual one but someone with a dedication and a focus on the odd and macabre; pictures of roadkill frequently come up and we're given an anecdote where he apparently took a picture of a sandwich a friend dropped on the ground. This is important to establish because we know that he already had an eye for strangeness, and it gives us more of an idea why he might have held his camera so close during such an unbelievable experience. The white-majority media of course tries to turn this against him as well, saying that entirely normal photos he took of the daughter of a family he was close to were somehow evidence that he was a pervert, even though the pictures are totally innocent.

So, the photos. We as viewers know they are obviously photoshopped, but it doesn't matter. They have this surreal, hallucinatory quality to them. You know that joke about how pictures of Bigfoot aren't blurry, it's just Bigfoot itself looks like that? That's the feeling I get looking at Salazar's photographs. I feel like if I were witnessing what was depicted in them, all the motion blur and artifacts from the film would be there in real life. Like there's something so awful in them that the eye can't choose any one thing to focus on. They show people bent into forms that leave humanity behind and begin to shift into something demonic. Glowing eyes, teeth like shards of glass, distorted expressions, grasping arms tearing people apart. Every single photo in itself is some of the best horror artwork I've ever seen. There are no cliches here, just a singular expression of complete terror that I've really never seen achieved.

I'm very emphatic that this is not a zombie movie. Salazar tells us that the things in his photographs are people he knew who were dead but walking. But the bits of context we glean through forensic reports and Salazar's interview and photographs point to something that, I feel, goes far beyond what a zombie outbreak has ever been depicted as on film. One of the interviewees keeps saying that something "moved through" Sangre de Cristo - I particularly like that as a description of what happened, because it puts in mind this force that came over a whole town, something otherworldly, that drove them all to cause such chaos. I realize that this may come off as a little corny but I think about the Bible passage where Jesus casts a demon into a herd of pigs and they run themselves off a cliff. That's what this felt like. Just evil in a way that horror film doesn't usually show it. "Something primal and horrible" is how it's described. "It was like hell". Even Salazar didn't witness the full scope of the pandemonium, but we learn from forensics that whatever the non-affected townspeople were seeing was so horrible that some of them chose to jump off a water tower rather than endure any more of it.

Now... I didn't see this the first time I watched the film, and I don't even want to talk about it because, selfishly, I don't want anything to put a damper on one of the best and scariest horror films I've ever seen. The exact cause of the town tearing itself apart is never elaborated upon, but there are hints, in the form of further reports of unexplained, supernatural violence spreading "north" as well as a border patrol agent saying that he sees increasingly strange things, that imply that the source of the phenomenon is indeed somewhere in the south. I think at one point they even try to imply that some of the wounds on the undead bodies may come from having ripped themselves apart scaling the border wall. I really just hate this in a childish and petulant way. I don't want this to ultimately be a story about dark forces from the evil, mystical country to our south overtaking red-blooded American life. With all it has to say about racism and how viciously, unflinchingly real its depictions of racist media and police are, I don't want the end message to be "but something evil came up out of Mexico anyway". I would love to hear the filmmaker's intent here because I'm left wondering and it is unpleasant.

But just the story of that one night in Sangre de Cristo, the documentary evidence, the sheer ghastliness of it, that on its own is one of the most unique and horrific scenarios behind a horror film that I've yet seen. The soundtrack by :zoviet*france: does wonders for it. The acting all feels authentic as well; the spirit of everyone who is interviewed being just regular people is captured perfectly. I hate that I now have qualifications when I call this an incredibly good movie but that's just how it is. I would still recommend this to anybody who likes horror, but I would recommend knowing that there's questionable things about it too.