Something BOOOOO

Humanoids from the Deep is a brilliant deconstruction of cinema itself. I could spend hours waxing poetic about its depth, trumpeting florid prose about its meaning, all the while invoking its soulful plumbing of the deepest reaches of satirical wit. A true humor, delivering bemused chuckles for the arched-eyebrows set. Unfortunately, none of this is true. As much as we all want to make lemonade from lemons, sometimes a lemon is just a lemon. 

I watched the film based on the recommendation of a friend who told me that it was based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft, in particular his story of ancient fish-like creatures that mate with the local population to create hideous half-breeds, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” This is somewhat akin to saying that the smart-sharks horror film Deep Blue Sea is based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. And yet the film has its staunch defenders - Den of Geek seems to think its pretty great (you can read their defense here if you so choose) - and any number of Corman acolytes will proclaim it one of the few truly original and inventive films of his entire 1980s oeuvre. Yet the combination of a dozen slavish imitations and direct ripoffs of other films dos not always make you a Tarantino; sometimes it just makes you derivative. And every element of this film feels derivative, and not in a good way. Barbara Peeters is a competent director, she just doesn’t have much to work with. 

In a nutshell, Humanoids From the Deep tells the story of Piranha-meets-Swamp Thing. We’ve got the plot of Piranha lifted wholesale (Corman had no bones about stealing from himself), up to and including the female scientist who’s been monitoring the strange changes in the local aquatic biosphere. Here it’s the fishermen, and the local economy based off their labor, that’s in danger from a greedy corporation who seems to be responsible for the mutant creatures terrorizing the town, specifically the young women they target to mate with. (Yuck.) There’s a standard big business baddies versus good Native Americans trope, yet even here the film doesn’t want to choose sides, making our protagonist the noble white man who nobly refuses to take sides (what?), and this fence-straddling eventully turns even the vilains into heroes, as everyone bands together at the end to fend off an all-out assault by the creatures. (Though not everyone is redeemable - some of the  antagonist’s douchey henchmen blow up the Native American’s house in a weird display of racism/corporate malfeasance. Yay?) 

What works: Rob Bottin’s f/x work is a precursor to the kind of greatness he would go on to perform for John Carpenter, with some fun, old-school monsters and cleverly designed gore. At times there’s a nice retro vibe to the proceedings, as the feel of a drive-in 50s movie seeps into the proceedings and lightens things up. There’s a delightful sequence during the climax when the monsters rampage across a merry-go-round, and we hear the cheery music and up-and-down horses whiz by as people get shredded to pieces to the upbeat ride. But honestly, there were more than a few unintentional laughs - at the dialogue, the acting, the lots of uncomfortable-looking girls in bikinis who REALLY seem like they’d rather be anywhere else - typical elements of bad-to-good transmutation. But sadly, not enough to make it worth it. Even the ending, a blatantly miserable ripoff of Alien, has one of the girls raped by a mutant fish-beast giving birth, and the stomach distends until it’s ripped open, and a little fish head (I shit you not) pops out and emits a grumpy squeal. 

There’s something inherently interesting when a film that a lot of others seem to really enjoy just doesn’t connect with you. There can be any number of reasons; as I’ve noted before, despite our protestations to the contrary, those of us who really try to make a go of being honest critics are just as vulnerable to the biases and mood swings of any given day as anyone else. If I’m in a bad mood when I sit down to watch a film, it’s going to impact my reception of said film, whether I want it to or not. Part of the critic’s job is to try and block out these outside influences to the best of one’s ability, but it simply isn’t always possible. Who knows? Maybe upon further review this film won’t feel quite as much a failure as it does now. The fact that it’s got me reconsidering its merits even as I write this holds out that possibility more than many of the cinematic errors I’ve viewed while writing this blog. But at the end of the day, I just don’t think Humanoids From the Deep works, as a cult pleasure, a so-bad-its-good treat, or a retro throwback creature feature. Hang in there, H.P. Lovecraft: people are still doing good things with your work. 

What I like about the picture on the left (as always, click to enlarge) is that there’s nothing inherently horrific about it, at least upon first glance. A family stands upon a frozen lake, father kneeling over a hole in the ice. Man and woman look at each other over his right shoulder, wife stands supportively over his left, leaning in to denote a connection. They could be looking for fish, or having a moment of contemplation before heading in to dinner. What requires closer inspection is what the painter Hans Holbein referred to as the “blot,” a stain that does not reveal itself in a normal viewing - but a stain that, once grasped, completely rearranges the understanding of the image. In this, it’s just below the father’s knee: barely visible, coming out of the hole in the frozen river, is a small, deep red pool of blood. In this minor aspect, we have the entire meaning of the image: something unsettling, uncanny, and deeply disturbing, that, once seen, cannot be separated from the reception of the entire frame. It gives the whole scene meaning. If the minor pleasures of Hypothermia amount to anything, it’s something like this; an understanding that the smallest aspect of it can stand in for the whole, that precisely the quiet moments of the film structure the whole thing, regardless of how successful it ultimately feels. For good or ill, this film is determined by the lack of horror, not the horrific element. And to its credit, that’s the only reason the film lingers in the mind.

It’s not meant as a disservice to call the movie a minor thing: the whole structure points you towards that conclusion (not least of which being the fact that it’s only 77 minutes long). In this film, we have the story of the Pelletiers, a family that goes to their northwoods cabin several times a year to go ice fishing. This year, their son David has brought along his girlfriend Gina, along with the less-than-beatifically-received news that the two of them have joined the Peace Corps, and will be moving to Africa for two years immediately upon their graduation. Their mother Helen informs them that Ray, David’s father, will be crushed - he had expected to spend the summer with his son. Though during their time ice fishing out on the frozen lake next to the cabin, the arrival of a loud, brash man and his son - along with their top-of-the-line equipment and anti-“roughing it” attitude - causes a temporary distraction from the family’s issues. Yet, it quickly becomes apparent that there’s a bigger issue under the water - a large, dangerous creature that seems intent on not just disrupting the fishing trip, but causing harm to the humans on the lake, if it can. As the two families’ attempts to catch the thing quickly spiral out of control, it becomes apparent that they aren’t hunting the creature - it’s hunting them. 

Despite the almost comically generic description of the movie given above (and, honestly, I’m not leaving anything out - it’s a down-the-line standard trope, top to bottom), Hypothermia is such a quiet, restrained film that one could be forgiven for repeatedly thinking they’re actually watching a dramatic short about life in the tundra. Truly, there is such a sense of quiet that pervades this film that when the monster intrudes upon the diagetic reality of the screen, we’re almost indignant that it had the temerity to interrupt such a gentle, slice-of-life scenario. For the first half hour, the only indication that there’s a monster in the film (besides the delightful opening credits tease of “and Asa Liebmann as The Monster”) is a sort of heat-vision goggle camera effect meant to indicate we’re getting a “monster p.o.v.” shot. And even those are counterposed with idyllic family moments - gathered around a fire, passing a hot thermos of coffee between themselves over a fishing hole - in such a way that it all but defangs any sense of unease. 

This is what I’m genuinely uncertain about: I think the loss of unease may have even been an honest effort on the part of the director, despite flying in the face of time-honored horror-film tradition. See, when the monster makes its presence felt - attacking first the family fishing lures, next the brash man’s son, until finally launching a full-scale assault upon the family - it feels like a somewhat awkward disruption of a moody piece of family turmoil, a fight in which the arguments are all unspoken. This is emphasized by the monster’s appareance, an almost comically… wait, scratch the “almost”: a comically absurd costume that almost telegraphs its retro-“Swamp Thing” vibe from a million miles away, with its foam teeth, smooth kevlar surface, and frozen mask of a face. It frankly comes across like a 50s-era drive-in creature feature moment, something to be smiled at in gentle nostalgic recognition, rather then feared. Here, let me show you: 

And yet, the effects it generates when it attacks are plenty gruesome. The son of the gruff and belligerent father has his arm shredded from wrist to elbow; the Pelletier’s son gets his throat ripped apart; these are well-done shots that don’t skimp on the realistic-looking blood. As a result, I can’t help but feel that the old-school getup of the monster is a deliberate attempt to instill some sense of a bygone era - not camp, necessarily, but certainly not fear. If anything, it comes across as curious: a relic intruding upon a modern era, something out of place that nonetheless does damage far beyond its seeming place in the world. This is also telegraphed by the (sadly) anticlimactic climax, in which the mother and girlfriend (the only surviving members of our story) make a tear-stricken plea to be left alone, as they didn’t intend to intrude upon the creature’s habitat; in turn, the creature wanders off and lets them live. This is meant to be a comment upon some recognition of humanity and submission that transfers across species (“it must be some long-lost missing link between humans and amphibians,” theorizes the son, right before he’s turned into a Filet-o-Fish), yet comes across as feeling like the film simply ran out of steam. 

Not every film has to be a masterpiece, and Hypothermia offers some quiet pleasures in its own right. Watching Michael Rooker play a warm, loving husband and father - completely devoid of crazy - is a rare treat in itself. The numerous moments of silence, in which members of this comfortable and loving family share knowing glances of love, questioning, or empathy, is uncommon enough in horror cinema that I found myself welcoming the dynamic. This movie gives us the unusual sight of a small, intimate family that cares about each other, deals with their issues with grace and good humor, and most importantly in this genre, nobody is a huge asshole. Honestly, think about it: when was the last time you saw a horror film in which a family member lacked someone obviously designated as “the dick”? It’s great! Even the competing family, meant to represent the raging id to Ray’s sober ego, ultimately comes across as loving and understandable, even as we get irritated with the alpha-male posturing of the father. 

Hypothermia may be far from great, but it’s also far from poor. I admire the simple, minimalist storytelling, the solid performances, and the character-study sensibility, even as I find myself somewhat bemused by the campy and awkward monster that ostensibly forms the purpose for the proceedings. There’s something interesting in the clash of old and new in the movie’s struggle between modernist family narrative and campy drive-in antagonist; this question may occupy my thoughts for awhile, which is all the compliment a film like this needs. 

Surely, at some point in your life you’ve met one of those people that wants to be all things to all people. That person who tries to be cool around their younger relatives, tries to be sagacious around their elders, tries to be impressively businesslike with their higher-ups, just plain tries. It can be fun for brief periods to be around them, just to see what they’ll try next, but most of the time, it feels a bit exhausting; more than that, it rings a bit false. The Awakening isn’t quite that level of breadth - there’s a bit more going on here than just that - but oftentimes it strains a bit like that, the seams showing as it tries to shoehorn four or five different archetypal narratives into one story. It feels as though it doesn’t trust you as an audience to accept what it wants to do, so it has to keep throwing things out there, hoping and assuming you’ll hook into at least one of them, because with all the things they’ve thrown at the wall to try and make stick, surely one of them will. 

Rather than the usual recap of the overall plot, let me first attempt to enumerate all the tropes that this film struggles to cram into an hour and forty-five minutes. As usual, spoilers from here on out - today’s caveat will be: if you have an interest in seeing a supernatural-themed period piece from the twenties with a British prep school setting and a cast of essentially five, with quite old-fashioned scares and a “what’s real?” tone throughout, stop reading now and check out The Awakening. Okay, for the rest of you, it’s quite a cornucopia of standards. We have 1) the “haunted house where a person was killed many years ago, and the ghost is still there” trope; 2) the “is it really a ghost story or is it all in her head?” psychodrama; 3) the “professional supernatural debunker who finally confronts something they can’t explain away” reality-TV arc; 4) the “was it an elaborate ruse to conceal all-too-human murder or was it a monster?” story; 5) the “repressed trauma from the past is gradually unlocked via clues in the present” narrative; 6) the Sixth Sense “they’ve been dead the whole time” reveal; 7) the “human sympathetic supporting character has been secretly working at cross purposes the entire time to bring down the protagonist” plot; honestly, I think there may even be a couple more squirreled away in there. Still with me? I swear, that’s not even a full list. 

All of that should be the first clue that this film is overstuffed, and can’t quite make up it’s mind about what it wants to be. As a result, everything gets short shrift to an extent, and moments that would be effective and powerful in a leaner narrative feel rushed and cramped, given so little time to breathe that eventually you’re emotionally pulled out of the events and instead just let them keep unfolding, rather like the continuous plot machinations of a well-crafted soap opera; every five minutes we’ve got something new, so you better not touch that dial! Except, that’s what remains so great about film, and, if you like the medium, separates it from the other great dominant art form of our time, the TV series: in a film, nothing is allowed to happen, often for great stretches of minutes. The audience knows it’s a set period of time, they don’t need teases, or pre-credits tags, or anything of the sort - they just need a well-constructed piece of work. The long-form of a TV show is the master key to plot: you can keep it unspooling as long as you like, in as many variants as seems fitting. A film gives you no such luxury. It needs focus, laser-like precision, and a commitment to an overarching concept. It can be entertaining, or it can be sublime, or, very rarely, it can be both. (No Country For Old Men was probably the last Oscar film to fulfill both roles.) In its wheezing effort to cover all the bases, The Awakening ends up being sadly neither. 

A brief summation: The Awakening (again, not to be confused with The Awakening, one of the very first films I ever recapped as part of my “30 Horror Films In 30 Days” three years ago, and the definition of A-for-effort-but-not-really, please do not see that film) recounts the story of Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall, looking far too glamorous for comfort here), a professional ghost debunker (already it’s anachronistic - nationally famous female ghost debunker in 1920s Britain? - and the film knows it, and creaks against the tension between period piece trappings and narrative setup) who is called to a boys’ boarding school by one of the teachers (Dominic West) in an effort to solve the mystery of why a young orphan boy died there under mysterious circumstances two weeks earlier. When Florence arrives, she sets up all the tricks of her trade in an effort to catch the presumably-human culprit behind these shenanigans. In so doing, she befriends a lonely young boy; entrances the old woman who’s worked there for twenty years, since it switched from being a private residence (sold as a result of rumored death); begins a love affair with West; confronts bizarre clues that triggers long-dormant memories; and eventually begins to realize she has a personal connection with the manor, with the boy who died there twenty years before and seems to haunt it; with the old woman; and so on. Again, even just explaining it, I’m getting drained from trying to point out all of the many, MANY narrative arcs it wants to press and unite into a cohesive story. Long story short: it doesn’t quite manage to. 

It’s not for lack of trying, Lord knows. As I said, it’s ten films in one, and the actors do their best to sell every single one. Imelda Staunton is overqualified to be the maid who takes a shine to Hall’s character and does her best to help her unravel the mystery. Hall and West, for their part, try like hell to keep the characters grounded in some sense of reality while the story sails ten beats past them, weighing them down with so many giant reveals of character and unaddressed tensions that the actors can only shrug and try to maintain grounding whilst delivering unbelievable amounts of plot (NOT exposition, mind you - plot. The film embarks on such broad tropes that almost no explanation is needed of any of them, while leaving the impression that maybe SOME commitment on ONE of them may have been advisable). There are some gorgeous shots, and I never felt bored; I just felt uncomfortably deprived, like snacking on empty calories. The film lifts so unapologetically from better movies (there are just straight-up stolen shots from The Others, The Woman in White, and The Orphanage to name but a few) that you can’t help but spend half the time playing “Hey! I know that!” while wishing you were watching those films instead. I don’t enjoy saying this; parts of The Awakening are very well done, and I admire its throwback to very old-school chills (nary a moment of gore nor even jump scare), but much like the title itself, everything feels recycled and jarring at once, both too-familiar and awkwardly anachronistic. 

Ultimately, the problem really does feel like one of “too much of everything, not enough of any one thing.” Had it chosen a story or two and stuck to it, rather than trying to be every familiar supernatural/horror archetype of the past forty years, they may have been able to solidify something. But as it was, it couldn’t ever pace itself and locate a singular source material long enough to breathe and establish what’s important. Not to be a broken record, but Slavoj Zizek’s injunction that if you want to know what a horror movie is really about, simply “take away the supernatural element, and whatever is left is the real story” works both ways: if you take away the supernatural element and what’s left is a jarring and tonally awkward mishmash of seven competing themes, you don’t have a heart - you have a framework, and the difference between the two is all the difference in the world. 

On a semi-regular basis, one of the things that strikes me when I sit down to watch a horror film is the feeling, usually 5-10 minutes into the film, of a strong sense of deja vu, followed by the thought “Oh, Sigmund Freud would  LOVE this movie. Textbook!” Citadel is such a movie. Unsurprising, I guess, given the fact that our protagonist suffers from a crippling psychological condition, but an emotion that gives me a sense of élan just the same. When you have a background in something, that little flicker of recognition, that sense of the uncanny, that erstwhile Spidey-sense that tingles when you happen upon a work of art that connects in that new/old way, it just never gets old. Horror works that reflex for me more than most art, which is one of the things I love about it. And Citadel, well, it may as well be a luminescent pulsing alarm for all the ways it gooses that intellectual tripwire. This, in case you’re wondering, is one of the sources of wicked fun in this movie. The other sources spring from the fact that it doesn’t suck. 

Citadel is quite good, in fact. It tells the tale of Tommy, a twenty-something Irish bloke (that’s the term, right? I always get tripped up in the Scottish/Irish/British slang lexicon) who we first see getting ready to head out of town in a taxi, as his very pregnant wife waits with his bags just outside their apartment, a dumpy-looking place on the eleventh floor of a run-down tenement building. As he takes the elevator back up, the elevator jams on his floor, and as he’s trapped inside, staring through the door window at his wife smiling down the hall at him, he gets to witness three youths, concealed by hoodies, round the corner and attack his wife. Screaming and pounding as the elevator refuses to open, instead taking him back downstairs, he runs up just in time to yank a mysterious syringe out of her stomach, and the next thing we know, his wife is in a coma, and Tommy is a single father trying to care for a young baby they managed to save. Only it’s nine months later, Tommy just agreed to take his wife off of life support, and - cue the symbolic hand-wringing - Tommy has developed a brutal case of agoraphobia as a result of the attack on his wife. 

This agoraphobia is the most unsettling and realistic part of the movie - apparently the writer/director, Ciaran Foy, is all too familiar with the disease - but we’ll return to that in a moment. See, a whacked-out former priest tells Tommy “They’ll come for her”, in an apparent reference to his daughter, Elsa; sure enough, that evening, the same hoodied young brats turn up, breaking into Tommy’s house, and tearing the place apart, though lucky Tommy manages to hold onto Elsa. Soon enough, he’s discovering that these “kids” are barely even human, the result of some sort of virus or genetic alteration that they infect other young kids with (hence the desire to kidnap Elsa), and Tommy joins forces with the priest to set fire to their building of origin and put an end to these monstrous creatures. However, to do so, Tommy must deal with his paralyzing fear (need I explain? FIne, agoraphobia means you suffer from attacks of intense fear and anxiety, often connected with the idea of being unable to escape from certain places) that prevents him from being at all able to leave his apartment with any sense of ease, and it takes his life-or-death situation to push him to overcome his phobia. With the help of the priest and a young blind child, Tommy manages to enter the lion’s den, save his daughter, and take out the monsters. Happily ever after?

There’s a number of smart moves director Ciaran Foy makes, and the first smart move is in the casting. Aneurin Barnard portrays Tommy as a nearly hopeless wreck, and while some might argue that this makes the film less fun, Barnard’s commitment to making the lead character such a pitiful victim, consumed by his own fears, lends a sense of both realism and frustration to the story, as your empathy for Tommy combats your desire to slap him and say “snap out of it, man!”. Wunmi Mosaku, as the hospice nurse who tries to allay his fears (and gets murdered for her efforts), offers a nice version of the standard horror trope of the “friend who tries to explain why the events are normal and gets straight-up killed for their kindness”, providing a textured counterpoint to the film’s paranoia. Everyone is quite good, in fact - so let’s get right to the good stuff. 

I decided to read some other reviews of this film after I watched it, and before I wrote this, something I rarely do - mostly because horror is such a wildly subjective genre, often provoking far more varied responses than just about any other category of film I can think of - but that I indulged this time around, just to see whether others got the same impressions I did. To some extant, they did, but WOW, did it lead them down a different path. See, most of the critics who panned this film - and there were more than a few of them - did so, as near as I can tell, on the basis on its politics. Now, I have waded into this morass of no-win arguments before, but as you know, this drives me more or less bonkers. The idea that a film’s politics dictate whether or not it is good art makes me absolutely crazy. Unless you’re willing to argue that On the Waterfront is garbage, please don’t try and convince me that the aesthetic value of a film is determined by whether or not it adheres to a political viewpoint you already agree with. As others have noted, one of the biggest problems with most political art is that it depends upon you always-already agreeing with its point of view. This is why so much political art seems so trite when compared with other, less overtly political art. But the fact is, I’ve encountered so much great work whose implicit thematic content repulsed me, that I nevertheless couldn’t deny was a work of brilliance, that this sort of critique no longer holds any water with me. So if these people want to claim that Citadel is some sort of appalling political commentary on lower-class irish youth and the fact that many believe they should all be killed, have at it - but don’t expect me to join in your hate-parade. Good cinema is good cinema, and an ugly political analogy isn’t going to change that, any more than the appalling authoritarian politics of Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan are going to magically transform Dirty Harry into a bad movie. 

For me, one of the most inspired choices of the narrative was to provide a young boy who acts as both a McGuffin and magical mentor to Tommy. Early on, Tommy notices a young boy at the hospice staring at him - a young boy who we soon learn is blind, and the gruff priest has taken on as a sort of apprentice. It turns out, the priest rescued the boy from the monsters before he was turned, and as a result, the boy has the same sight as the creatures. See, the monsters can sense fear - they can see it, or smell it, or invoke some sort of sixth-sense appreciation for it, perhaps like a particularly fine vintage of Cote d’Rhone 1976 - and as a result Tommy is like a blinking red beacon of alarm to them. But get this - Danny, the blind young boy, can take hold of Tommy and make him invisible to the monsters, as the priest helpfully explains in a surprisingly un-clunky exposition speech. Danny is a talisman of sorts, a big Other (I’ll come back to this) who can guide Tommy through the terrors of the monsters without his being exposed. 

This is great on several levels. See, first of all, Danny’s existence operates as a kind of innoculation to Tommy: take my hand, have faith (the notion of believing in yourself as a way to combat the terrors, a sort of Joseph Campbell-esque inner God), and you will be safe. This outside force is what gives Tommy the initial strength to get through his fear, and enter the haunted apartment complex to help the priest set fire to it while the monsters are away in the night. If we consider the notion of anxiety in its strict psychoanalytic sense, it is defined as “the affect which registers the subject’s panic reaction to the overproximity of the object-cause of desire.” Let’s put that in English: Tommy is a newly single father; his kid won’t stop crying, maybe because Tommy is always scared; the fact that Tommy cannot escape his responsibility as father leads him to a traumatic encounter with that which he both secretly desires (an unstoppable force that will take his child away from him, removing his responsibility and taking it out of his hands) and ultimately cannot accept (Tommy wants to assume the role of the good father, and needs an encounter with something to shake him out of his fear and force him to accept his paternal role). This may all sound very nerdy, but I assure you that it gets to the heart of the narrative. Cool, right?

In addition, Danny’s role is ultimately that of the big Other: i.e. the thing which you allow to believe FOR you, so that you can do what you have to do. Another way to put it would be that Danny believes they’re invisible to the monsters precisely so that Tommy doesn’t have to; Tommy’s worry is alleviated, because he has someone else to believe it for him. What I loved is that the movie straight-up admits this: see, halfway through their raid on the monsters’ building, the priest starts having a coughing fit, and as a result, gets afraid: suddenly Danny can see him, which means the monsters can, too. As Tommy tries to hold him back, saying “Danny can hide both of us!”, the priest gives him a sly look, and says “Danny can’t protect anyone.” See, it was all a lie: the priest and Danny tricked Tommy into thinking Danny had a special power that could hide Tommy’s fear; the fact that Tommy thought his fear was no longer a weakness made him lose his fear; once he realizes that his fear was precisely what was holding him back, he can transverse this fear on his own, without the false support of Danny. It’s a beautiful concept, perfectly executed, and if nothing else, Citadel deserves credit for being smarter than 90% of the horror films out there about how fear functions, why it cripples us, and why horror films are SO crucial to our psyche (much like the Grimm’s fables of old) in order to allow us to adjust our minds to the horrors of the world. 

Because, as Citadel once again reminds us, film (and television, I’m no idiot) are our modern fables, passed down through time, to teach us morality, and to acquaint us with the notions of death, horror, and all the cruelty of human existence, in order to (hopefully) give us a system of dealing with it when the shit goes down. Some people have religion; others have, you know, booze. But the rest of us need something to allow us to come to grips with the beyond; hell, fuck the beyond, we need something to explain why everyday life is so horrifying. Horror, at its best, does this. It gives us a sublimated means of interpellating the monstrosities of this world, and showing us that the things we THINK are monstrous are nothing more (nor less) than the everyday ordeals that put us through the wringer. (Having a child is a great example of this, which is why it’s the source of so much great horror.) Often, the things that we fear most are the same sources of so much pleasure and reward. As David Lynch is so fond of reminding us, it’s not that you have to go THROUGH hell to get to heaven; it’s that hell is right there with us, everyday, contained in the same packages as the good stuff. You don’t get one or the other; the one necessitates the other. Citadel tells the story of accepting the brutality of life to embrace the basic stuff that IS life. That’s good horror. 

Whenever an indie horror film comes around that really knocks our socks off here at Something Booo, we like to see if the creator of the film wouldn’t be kind enough to answer us a few questions about their movie, and about horror film in particular. As was noted in the review, Bereavement is a true auteurist vision, brought to us by writer, director, music composer, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink creator Stevan Mena. If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favor and check it out now (it’s predecessor, Malevolence, is also readily available for your viewing pleasure), and if you like what you see, you can head over to his Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for Malevolence 3. Stevan was kind enough to take a few minutes and answer a couple questions about his film, and, of course, talk about our bread and butter on this site, namely, what it is about horror that he finds something compelling. Without further ado, we present the exclusive Something Booo feature FIVE QUESTIONS FOR STEVAN MENA:

Something Booo: Do you remember the first horror film or films that turned you on to the genre? The ones that scared you and got you excited about it as a cinematic universe that spoke to you? 

Stevan Mena (SM): My favorite first horror films were Halloween and Friday the 13th. Also The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Alien. The Shining also was a big one for me, and of course Psycho.

Something Booo: One of the great things about Bereavement is that, while technically a “prequel,” it completely stands on its own as a film. What steps did you take to make certain someone could come into this with no prior knowledge (or even knowing the previous film exists) and fully enjoy it on its own terms, while still trying to service the original film and deepen and expand that narrative universe?

SM: Well, it was based on a book I wrote. And Bereavement was always the beginning of the story, so I knew it would of course lead into Malevolence easily, and also present the backstory for Martin and Graham. Plus I think it services both it’s own narrative and Malevolence because it expands on the first story, rather than just rehashing it.

Something Booo: Bereavement hearkens back stylistically to some of the great late seventies/early eighties horror, but unlike many other current horror films, who simply try to superficially ape the old “grainy” aesthetic and/or story beats, your film smartly draws inspiration from the shot composition, framing, and editing styles of some of the greats. Are there any films or directors in particular that you drew from structurally? 

SM: Yes, I have studied all the films of Hitchcock, Kubrick, Carpenter and Cameron. I’m also a big fan of David Fincher. But of all of them, Hitchcock’s understanding that suspense was an artform that needed careful planning was a huge influence on me. Scaring the audience doesn’t happen by accident, which is why there are so very few truly frightening films.

Something Booo: I’m so impressed by your commitment to embracing black in the shots, to actually have darkness BE darkness for a change. What is it, do you think, that scares so many others directors away from really utilizing lack of light as a tool in their toolbox? Is it just the difficulty of technically pulling it off effectively?

SM: Well, using shadows and darkness is a stylistic choice, and I think often it’s what you don’t see that scares you. But that being said, I hope you did not watch Bereavement on Netflix, as their transfer is abysmal, and often low light styled films become black mush with their “nobody at the wheel” video transfer. I highly recommend the Blu Ray :)

Bereavement is one of the darkest movies I’ve seen in a long time. Let me clarify: I don’t mean mood, story, or ending - although those are all certainly dark as well - no, I mean it quite literally. Lighting-wise, the images that fill your screen for almost two hours are some of the darkest I’ve come across in a long while. This is both the most symptomatically interesting and idiosyncratically unique aspect of the film, a film about which I have an awful lot to say, I want to add at the outset. For reasons passing understanding (well, maybe not passing understanding, we’ll get to that later, but in the idiomatic sense of the phrase) this movie currently holds a 44% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. By now you may be getting the impression that I find this to be a wildly unjustified rating, and you would be right. You may also think that I’m about to launch into a tirade against those who misunderstood the film and thus gave it a poor rating. You would be wrong: I think these people understood all too well what Bereavement was going for, and simply didn’t like what it had to say. 

First things first: Bereavement is, on one level, the standard-issue Lifetime made-for-TV movie tale of Allison, a teenage girl whose parents die, and is sent to live with her quiet, gruff, no-nonsense uncle and his wife and daughter on a farm in a small town. She’s from Chicago! She’s used to the big city! He doesn’t know what to do with this girl - he can barely handle the young daughter his new wife brought along from her first marriage! Can these two somehow figure out a way to be a family? Oh, also, she likes the local guy who became an auto mechanic, but (uh oh!) her uncle thinks he’s a ne’er-do-well! Can they work it out? She loves to run long distance track, but all they have at the local school is a cheerleader team! (Sad trombone!) Will she ever…..you get the idea.

Except, here’s the thing: before the credits are even done, we see a girl kidnapped by a mysterious man, hung up in a basement somewhere, and murdered with a knife in front of a young boy (who has his own issues - again, later). At first, when it moved from this to the post-credits introduction of Allison and the small-town life she’s about to begin, complete with generic whatta-backwards-life theme music, I thought the opening gambit was a brutally ill-conceived mistake; it graphically showed the seedy underbelly of this film, laying out more or less the entire notion of a young boy being taught the ways of serial murder, before we even have a protagonist. “Way to give up the game, indie horror film,” I said to no one in particular, with a puckish and downturned mouth. “You may as well be Prom Night, or some other garbage mini-major, PG-13, conform to all the rules piece of trash.” For even considering that, Bereavement, I heartily apologize. 

See, the weirdest fucking thing happens in this film: for the first forty-five minutes, we simply cut back and forth, with a jarringly abrupt tonal and visual shift, from the typical drama-rama, cut-rate story of a teen girl making a life change, to a grim, pitch-black, visually and diagetically grim hack-n-slash murder pic. Allison, her uncle, his family, and the town, are all painted in sepia-toned colors so pedestrian, it only takes awhile before you begin to realize the sui generis approach on display here is entirely intentional. The director (and editor, and writer, and musician, and 2nd unit director - this was a real labor of love, and a film that embodies the auteurist theory of movies) Stevan Mena is going after something strange - an upending of cinematic conventions. Not merely a genre mashup, or some pull-the-rug-out-from-under-you shock a la Audition, Mena is trying to see what happens when you literally combine a two-hankie weepie with a brutal Saw-esque slasher, and ends up with something entirely different in the process. 

The wicked fun here is in seeing the ways in which the conventions of these different narratives end up pulling the story in unexpected directions. Now, stay with me, because this gets astoundingly unexpected, not to mention unremittingly grim. (As per usual, and the regular readers know this, I now tell you that if this sounds up your alley so far, STOP READING NOW, because it’s about to get crazy spoilery up in here, and also as usual, I HEARTILY RECOMMEND you see this one: it’s incredibly fascinating. I found it to be very good, and even if you don’t like it, I think the reasons people seem to not like it are not because it isn’t smart and effective, but rather because they simply don’t like the intention behind it. It goes places that I think, quite honestly, people would rather not movies go. They don’t enjoy it when this happens. And, weird as it may seem for me to say, I find this totally valid. If I were in a different mood, perhaps this movie would’ve bugged the shit out of me. It really violates a few core rules of storytelling, especially if you - like me - think Joseph Campbell really knew what the fuck he was talking about. But I digress.) SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT, PLEASE WATCH THE FILM AND THEN REJOIN US AT THIS POINT. 

As is inevitable, Allison gets pulled into the world of the murderous killer and his young protege. Only, we’re not so sure the kid actually IS a protege. See, the boy, as we learn in the pre-credits beginning, has congenital analgesia - a very rare, but very real condition in which the body is unable to feel pain. When he is kidnapped, the killer uses this to his advantage, saying “See? It doesn’t hurt,” as he slides a knife across the boy’s cheek, drawing blood, right before said knife is plunged right into the stomach of a kidnapped young woman eight feet away. The boy runs, is caught, and punished by the killer. He seems to not like this whole stabby-stabby, blood-and-guts thing. Cut to: Allison, running by the abandoned factory in which this gruesome narrative plays out, when she sees the boy in one of the smashed-out windows. Shortly thereafter, she sees the boy again on one of her runs, whereupon she takes the initiative, heads into the house (and down into the catacombs of the factory that connect to the house), and tries to find the boy and bring him to safety. She uncovers the standard “check out my scrapbook of abductions and murders!” tome that seems de rigeur for any paint-by-numbers serial killler flick, and learns that the boy, Martin, was taken five years ago. She tries to get him home, and ends up tied up and ready to be murdered by our antagonist, the psychotic owner of the abandoned factory. Since she never comes home, our gruff-but-protective uncle (did I mention he’s played by the great Michael Biehn?) comes to find her, going right up to the murderer’s house - only to immediately be shot and killed for his troubles. 

Oh, hey, at this point, there’s still forty minutes left to go. What? 

Let’s get to the meat of it: Allison, with Martin’s help, escapes, though the boy she likes comes to help and is also murdered for his efforts. The killer drives ahead of them, back to Allison’s house, and stabs the mother and sets fire to the house. Allison returns to stab HIM before he can kill the little girl, except -  ruh-roh Shaggy - Martin reveals his true colors and stabs her! (Shocked trombone!) Then Martin heads upstairs and kills the little girl! Before returning to his abandoned-factory-cum-home-sweet-home and finishes off the serial killer Allison stabbed ten minutes earlier! See, everyone dies. Horribly. And the little boy who showed some ambivalence about the fine art of serial killing turns out to not be so ambivalent about it after all. He embraces his instruction and lives up to his stab-stab potential. (Just in case you had any doubts about whether or not he really does, the end credits have a stinger announcing “FIVE YEARS LATER,” the whole point of which is just to show a random young girl run up to the ramshackle house, asking for help, so we can see the now-teenage Martin, still wearing a bloodied sweater, slowly turn around and regard the girl with a look that all but announces he will be filleting her in roughly an hour.) 

The cinematography is quite lovely, really, once you realize that in certain shots they’re going for a very filtered look intentionally. The beginning shots in particular have some great tracking work, that hearkens back to the great Carpenter films of the 70s and 80s, as well as some of the better Wes Craven pulls. Although, honestly, when the final shot does the exact same thing, showing young Martin at the window, as we pull back in what must be a smartly-executed crane shot, it reminded me of Bob Clark’s underrated Black Christmas as much as anything, which longtime readers will know I would count as high praise indeed. Mena has a real way with his camera - I was honestly impressed by his tightly-wound use of space. He almost never includes more than he needs to in any shot - the economy of diagetic reality is admirable, and something rarely noted by many young horror directors today. In addition, I want to single out his use of black as noteworthy. The common refrain today is for the “like I’m looking right through a window!” image of truemotion TV adjusters and the foolhardy thought that brighter is better. (The Onion had a great piece recently that dealt with precisely this plague.) I’m pleased to report that Mena has given a hearty middle finger to this change in cinematography, preferring to embrace the uncertainty and blindness of deep blacks in the frame. So many minutes are illuminated by the barest light, you find yourself straining, uncomfortably, for any glimpse of incandescence - this is exactly what good horror should force you to do. The anxiety of not-seeing, as always, is the most effective tool in the box, and Mena employs this to profound effect.

Not only that, but it serves a deeper purpose, story-wise. Bereavement is about the triumph of nurture over nature, the practice of ideology as successfully shaping any soul. A useful quote to kick off the film would be Pascal’s wager: “kneel, move your lips in prayer, and belief will come.” You don’t have to start off with faith in God, Pascal argues; you can just go through the motions, and eventually, faith will come all on its own, because you’ll need to justify your own actions so profoundly that the impetus will arrive via mere repetition. This is not a popular view, especially in today’s society, where personal enlightenment is so prized, the very idea that you could be doing something for less-than-acknolwedged reasons is tantamount to admitting that you’re not a genius. In this era, when everyone is taught what a special and unique snowflake they are, how could this possibly be true? Stevan Mena has crafted a devilishly smart, but by definition equally unappealing for most people, answer. 

Though unappealing does not even come into the equation when it comes to the aesthetic choices in this film. Well-shot, well-acted, and not only do we get the magic of Michael Biehn, but I have been introduced to the gorgeous and raw nerve acting of one Ms. Alexandra Daddario, whom I will be seeking out performances by in the future. Mr. Mena knew what he was doing in casting. Speaking of which, he seemed to know what he was doing in almost every aspect of this film. He wrote, shot, edited…basically did everything but craft services for this film. I look forward to his next work. Movies like this are why doing this site is such a joy for me: the unexpected pleasures that pop up when you least expect them. Here’s hoping everyone sees this film, and has the temerity to stomach a story and message they will find profoundly upsetting and unappealing. And that, my friends, is a recommendation.

(Addendum: the film is technically a prequel to the 2003 film Malevolence, though I think that has no bearing on it. Any film should be able to stand on its own merits, as Pauline Kael said, and this is a case of a “prequel” that trumps its predecessor.)

There’s a lot I want to say about The Stuff. However, I’m not all that certain there’s a lot that The Stuff has to say about itself. But if you’ll direct your attention to the picture on your left, you may notice that, if we’re going simply by mouth size alone, there’s an awful lot that Garrett Morris would like to say about The Stuff. 

The Stuff, for those of you unfamiliar, is a rather muddled but simple fable of consumerism run amok. After discovering a bubbling cauldron of white stuff rising to the surface, some enterprising gentlemen begin mass-marketing a new dessert, posited as an alternative to ice cream, simply called “The Stuff.” Best of all? It’s low in calories! As more and more people start devouring the stuff, their capitalist competitors get nervous, and hire Mo Rutherford, a dirty tricks expert (the always-dependable Michael Moriarty) to figure out the secret ingredients, so they can put it out of business. As Rutherford gradually realizes that the Stuff is actually a living entity that slowly takes over human bodies, devouring them from the inside out, he teams up with the original marketer of the stuff (it’s telling that one of the heroes of the film is the woman who sold the product in the first place - her powers of financial compulsion are held up as near-godlike throughout the movie) and a young boy who “caught the stuff moving” in order to warn the world. Did I say “world”? I meant “United States.” This is a nationalist film, make no mistake - but it’s nationalism is of the scornful variety. 

See, The Stuff has satire on its mind - and for the first half of the film, it more or less succeeds in its mission. There are some crushingly effective commercials that richly send up the mid-80s advertising vibe, with dancing folks in headbands and workout gear front and center. There’s a wonderful moment when the film implies that the Stuff has been studying human behavior, and does its best to replicate the attitude of humanity as its seen in TV commercials, when put to the test. What’s especially good is the way that the film reduces behavior to whatever justifies ideology. In short, it takes the old saw of Pascal’s wager to heart: Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century mathematician and philosopher, made the following argument (in very rough form): either God exists, or he doesn’t. Ergo, you should behave AS THOUGH he exists. If he doesn’t, well, then, you’ve simply lived life according to a morally upright set of rules, done good, helped your fellow man, and can be proud of your behavior. And if he does exist, well, then congratulations, because you’re going to heaven! It’s a reverse take on this old saw that The Stuff utilizes to such wonderful effect. In the filmic universe of this movie, one should behave as though every product is trying to devour them and their soul. If it isn’t, no harm, you’ve simply indoctrinated yourself against the milk of magnesia that constitutes capitalism; if it IS trying to kill you, then good on you for looking out for yourself! 

There are a few ironies that really hammer this point home. During the final 20 minutes, Rutherford recruits the help of a crazed right-wing militia nut (played to the hilt by Paul Sorvino) whose fight against communism leads him to join Rutherford in the mistaken belief that The Stuff is a communist plot designed to capture our minds, rather than a capitalist plot to capture our minds. There are numerous points throughout the film that suggest the standard mixed-messages, don’t-offend-people “satire” that passed for a lot of eighties cultural critique. The film received wildly mixed reviews ( not that we ever talk about that sort of thing here, as regular readers know, and those of you just joining us should hear, we try to make a virtue out of going into these things blind, because cultural ideology is a far too powerful force when seeing art), and watching it now, I can truly say that a lot of it feels garbled. Coming from Larry Cohen, a man I respect for It’s Alive (among other successes), I will say that a number of the edits feel like studio meddling. Cohen is no  auteur, but even by his standards, several transitions feel slapdash and lazy, with some exposition or other scenes missing. 

I could offer an entire other, psychoanalytic reading of the film, one based on Jacques Lacan’s theory that “a letter always reaches its destination”, but I’ll leave that for the fanatics who email me and demand such things. To the rest, I would say that this is worth your time: it’s funny, with some knockout practical effects, even if they are fairly sparing with the good stuff (no pun intended), and Moriarty delivers another gonzo lead performance, where you’re honestly not sure if he just decided to pretend as though he were in another movie or WHAT. Horror fans, check it out. Poli Sci fans, check it out. Everyone else - eh, six of one, a half dozen of the other. 

In case you hadn’t noticed, horror anthology films are having a “moment.” 

Honestly, I’m actually a little surprised this didn’t happen sooner. Sometime around 2006, I remember watching a particularly effective little shocker called Them, and thinking to myself, “God, cheap cameras have gotten so good, the Internet is a great distribution basis - why aren’t more genre directors banding together to get their shorts seen on a larger scale?” It only took a few more years (were Little Deaths and V/H/S really the beginning of this wave? Because that wasn’t particularly long ago), but here we are. It’s no coincidence, I don’t think, that the last two films I’ve reveiewed here have been horror anthologies: it really is an excellent strategy for lesser-known genre directors who want to get their work out there. You hook in a couple of the bigger names - here that would be Ti West, Nacho Vigalondo, Adam Wingard, to name a few - and you have more or less the perfect launching pad. We genre fans tend to be more open-minded than the usual viewer (read: we’ll put up with more crap in our pursuit of the good stuff), and most of us revel in the niche market of our passion, meaning we’re always on the lookout for new names and talents. Much like the devoted fan of music on vinyl, we seek out the fetishistic elements of our chosen interest, investing particular directors, DPs, actors, and even producers with a line of goodwill credit that can often exceed the offerings they’ve completed thus far. Really, this is a good thing, on the whole. It’s why Fangoria magazine can still exist. It’s why some of you will send me multiple emails explaining why the film Triangle has deeper roots in Greek myth than I gave it credit for. It’s why the show Community is still on the air. Let’s hear it for the passionate geeks. 

So The ABCs of Death capitalizes on this with the particular gimmick of providing a VERY short (usually 1-3 minutes) film for each letter of the alphabet, with the title appearing on screen at the end of each segment. This should already give you a sense of whether or not you have any interest in seeing this film. It’s short attention span theatre for the gorehound set. It’s ADHD-style Creepshow. The film moves so fast, I honestly didn’t believe two hours had passed. This is the model that made MTV their money, back in the day: if you throw enough candy-colored nonsense at the screen in short enough bursts, nobody will realize how much time has elapsed. This can be both a blessing and a curse. If you’re awake by yourself at 1am, with a scotch in one hand and a sleepy, purring cat in the other, this kind of thing is your bread and butter. 

I shouldn’t have to say this, but I will anyway: the segments are wildly uneven. As in just about any situation wherein 26 different artists cook up a miniature hyper-speed version of their art, some of the macaroni sticks to the wall, and some of it is just undercooked. Let’s review a couple of low points, shall we? First off: the heavy hitters, in my opinion, disappoint: Nacho Vigalondo’s “A is for Apocalypse” is little more than a scene devoid of context; Ti West’s “M is for Miscarriage” passes by so quickly that honestly, if you sneeze, you might miss half of it; Simon Rumley’s “P is for Pressure” is less a short film than it is an attempt to elicit an appalled stare from a woman stepping on a cat’s head for money; and so on. The shorts that entertain and dazzle are the ones from lesser-known artists, by and large. (This is not a hard-and-fast rule: Ben Wheatley’s “U is for Unearthed” is a clever, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it take on a zombie story from the point of view of the undead.) 

Now, how about we move to the good stuff. By far the most affecting (and disturbing) of the bunch was Xavier Gens’s “X is for XXL,” a vignette detailing the horrifying evening of an overweight woman, whose constant bombardment by rail-thin women in ads and the mockery of the world around her results in a truly unnerving decision. Marcel Sarmiento’s “D is for Dogfight” is a well-crafted, if perhaps too MTV-slick, tale of a ring where dogfighting literally means man fighting dog. My longtime crush Angela Bettis directs “E is for Exterminate,” a witty little story of what a spider REALLY wants from the man he bites during the night. Anders Morgenthaler makes a fun cartoon out of “K is for Klutz,” the story of a woman and the poop she takes that just. won’t. flush. Animation and toilets reappear again, to great effect, in Lee Hardcastle’s “T is for Toilet,” in which claymation (CLAYMATION!) gives us the tale of a boy learning to use the toilet that gives him nightmares. These are played for laughs, not scares, but that’s likely for the best; the most successful segments come from the directors who realize that two minutes isn’t enough time to build suspense, but it is just enough time to tell a joke.

And, lastly, we have the memorable-but-not-necessarily-in-a-good-way category: the shorts that certainly made an impression, but not necessarily in a good way. Thomas Malling’s “H is for Hydro-Electric Diffusion” is a furry’s dream, the WWII tale of a dog (with human body, of course) in a strip club, where the dancer dog-cum-female turns into a Nazi who tries to kill him with an electric submarine periscope, until he gets the drop on her. You read that right, and I wish it were half as entertaining as its description. Given that Malling only other credit is a practically nonexistent Norwegian film called “Norwegian Ninja” that he made despite having no experience in the movie industry or behind the camera, I honestly have no idea how he got this gig. Andrew Traucki’s “G is for Gravity” is the first-person perspective of a guy who gets on his surfboard, paddles out, and immediately drowns. Honestly, it’s even more boring than it sounds. But the grossest award almost certainly goes to “L is for Libido,” which is comprised of a masturbation contest in which men must be the first to come after being displayed a series of increasingly depraved and unsettled mise-en-scenes. I guess I give it credit for grossing me out; but frankly, Divine did that when she ate dog poo thirty years ago in Pink Flamingos, so I wouldn’t be too impressed with that achievement. 

Look, it’s a fun little experiment. I enjoyed watching it, and half of it was almost imstantly forgettable. This was the horror anthology equivalent of a fast food meal: it goes by fast, it’s cheap, and it asks almost nothing of you. You don’t feel that satisfied when it’s over, but it has its small pleasures. I will say this: it was fascinating how many of the shorts allowed me to guess the director before it told me. That should come as a compliment to Ben Wheatley and the others I recognized ahead of being told; they have a distinctive visual style that recommends their talents. 

Next up: the furthest thing from a horror anthology I can find. Perhaps a three-hour long conversation in which no one dies? Have I reviewed My Dinner With Andre yet?

Gross.

That’s the long and the short of it - this film is gross. Let’s be forthright: I don’t mean that in the disparaging way it would normally be taken. I don’t mean gross in terms of its images - when it comes to graphic horror, I’m not particularly squeamish, to put it mildly, and the images in Little Deaths are not, in and of themselves, particularly traumatic or nightmare-inducing. But they are GROSS. And I also don’t mean it in the sense of “yucky,” which I think is how “gross” most often gets translated these days. Gross, to me, means something else. Something unsettling. Something trashy. Something icky, to be sure, but perhaps above all it is about conveying a sense of disgust, of the need for a shower, of things base and malformed and a cut below the propriety that normally governs even the most gruesome horror films. The most horrifying cinema need not be (and actually rarely is) gross. One of the greatest film experiences I’ve ever had, Martyrs, is depraved and appalling and transcendent, and not in the slightest bit gross. Audition might make you look away from the screen, cringing, repeatedly during its final twenty minutes, but I would never in a millions years call it gross. Gross is not necessarily a bad way to describe the oeuvre of Rob Zombie. That last one might actually be the best descriptor yet. So when I say that Little Deaths is something that made me say “gross” at multiple points during its screening, I want you to take my meaning.  

Little Deaths is an anthology film, part of the new resurgence of horror anthologies that seem to be having a zeigeist-y kind of moment. I can’t really account for what the cultural trigger was for this return to the anthology form - certainly part of it was economics, part of it was cyclical, but I think part of it may have stemmed from the fact of our living in a moment of mini-narratives being reborn via the ubiquity of Youtube, a saturation of fleeting episodic artforms that, once established, needed to make the obvious and inevitable jump to a more “acceptable” placeholder in cultural consciousness. Enter the anthology film: mini-movies with none of the budget, expectations, or headaches that attend the longer form, but that can often reap the financial benefits of much more ambitious undertakings. (See: V/H/S/.)

This particular film, aptly named after the French analogy for an orgasm (petit morte - the little death), concerns horror shorts that concern themselves with the obvious and uncomfortable overlap between sex and death. Most of the time, this relationship is left implicit but important in horror. To wit: No one ever says it in the film, but anyone who’s ever watched Psycho knows there’s something sexual and creepy going on with Norman Bates. This movie takes that underlying tension and makes it the raison d’etre of every single narrative and frame of reference. The theme is the only thing tying these individual pieces together, so let’s go ahead and break them down separately. 

“House and Home”, the first part, is a twist (though that may be too generous) on the recent wave of what I still HATE to call the “torture porn” genre. The story is obviously meant to be a rejoinder to the past decade’s embrace of all-too-human narratives in horror, wherein awful people do terrible things to to other people, often for no rhyme or reason save some explanation of sadistic urges. Here, a bourgeois couple invites a young homeless woman into their home, only to drug her, tie her up, and rape her - sorry, “perform sick sexual games” upon her. This rape scene made me very uncomfortable. I know, it’s the needed windup to the twist: (SPOILER ALERT) the young woman is a rough approximation of a vampire, who breaks free, and with her fellow homeless vampire brethren, takes brutal revenge upon this unholy couple. That doesn’t mean I need to like it. Rape in film is a dicey proposition, to put it mildly. If you’re going for a classic exploitation revenge scenario (see: Thriller: A Cruel Picture, I Spit On Your Grave, a million other B-movies up to and including the “high-class” Jodie Foster vehicle The Accused), then the horrific act that kicks it off needs to be contextualized and and shown it all its horror, all the better for the second half of the film to pack a greater emotional wallop when the victim turns the tables on her victimizers. I’m starting to think that may not be possible within the limited time frame of a short film. When the rape in this started, I immediately was creeped out, repulsed, and wanted to turn off the film. Maybe that’s to the good, narrative wise; but it certainly doesn’t make me eager to watch it again, or even endorse it. There’s an unfortunate soft-lighting tease to the scene that makes it seem as though the film diagetically supports it, even as it bends over backwards to stress that no, it really doesn’t. That’s a problem that could’ve been solved by better direction. Whoops. 

The second feature, “Mutant Tool,” is genuinely weird, which I’m still debating whether to represent as a good or bad thing. Argument for it being a good thing: I’m not likely to forget this anytime soon. The story of a malevolent doctor, who has found mutants that possess abnormallly enormous members (REALLY enormous) that secrete a substance which can be molded into a wildly powerful drug, is something so bizarre, yet so appropriate for B-movie adoption, that I found myself regretting at several points that it wasn’t a Troma film. I honestly think it could’ve benefitted from a little less seriousness. Con: Yuck. Like, really. Yuck. The narrative revolves around a “mutant” whose whole mutation seems to be a gigantic, leg-long cock. That secretes a drug. That a woman consumes and slowly mutates into the next long cock-posssessing mutant. Honestly, that’s about it. I could delve more into the specificity of it, but I’m not sure it would answer any more of the (quite understandable) questions you harbor regarding this narrative. It’s a real mindfuck. I want to admit a “kudos” is probably in order for the director - in an interview, he admits that this is primarily what he was going for - but I’m not sure I enjoyed it, or have any desire to revisit the experience. 

The final story, “Bitch”, is both the most fascinating and the most problematic, in more ways than one. It’s a story of a sadomasochistic relationship gone bad: a young woman and her boyfriend seem to consist on an exciting but unstable diet of exotic sexual encounters, predicated on dominance, submission, and a profound lack of understanding regarding where those concepts should meet. After being humiliated one step past the point of what he considers acceptable, the boyfriend concocts an appallingly unjustified revenge, involving his bound, gagged, and naked girlfriend, a pack of wild dogs, and my total lack of acceptance of the premise. Think a little harder, next time, “Bitch.” Bumming me out in this whole scenario is the fact that the director, Simon Rumley, directed one of the best films of the past five years, Red, White, and Blue, and seems to have cast aside most of what made his previous work great in this grim exploration of unpleasantness. 

Look, two things simultaneously. None of these are bad films. They were all well-shot, well-acted, well-written (for what they were), and I couldn’t fault them in any of the usual categories of competency or execution. Instead, I find myself having to deal with an aspect of the film that I usually find no quarrel with in horror, for reasons of a Henry Miller-ish variety: the politics. As I’ve said on more than one occasion, I’m happy to investigate the politics of a film - it’s usually rewarding, and often interesting - but has little bearing on whether or not I find it to be a good movie. As I think it should be; you’d have to be the dumbest kind of liberal to reject On the Waterfront based on its politics, or push aside There Will Be Blood based on some idiotic Ayn Rand conception of the universe. But there was a streak of awkward misogyny running through this anthology that made me uncomfortable. Not in some straightforward way: I tend to agree with Alfred Hitchcock’s maxim, “Torture the women,” because it’s the quickest way of cutting to what he actually meant, which was, “Torture the audience.” But that assumes a certain level of co-conspirator behavior with your viewing public. These films seemed to be more about purely women as objects, forgetting the whole reclamation of subjectivity narrative that made their 70s precursors so effective. I get it; they wanted to push boundaries, maybe that was the point. But it didn’t work. For me, anyway. I wanted these stories to go away. Some things simply don’t work well outside the confines of the imagination. Little Deaths wanted to unsettle me - it worked. I’m just not certain it did so quite in the way it meant to, and I’m VERY not certain that’s for the good. 

Well, I said this one might make me change my mind about the best horror films I saw this year, and while I’m not yet positive it cracks the top five - I need to ruminate further - it sure as hell comes close. 

Part of the reason, I freely admit, is that this film hits most of my sweet spots, cinematically speaking. Lonely, misunderstood girl going through the pains of adolescence? Check. Arty, impressionistic dream sequences? Check. Inventive-yet-minimalist storyline? Check. Gore that is impressive without being excessive? Check. Character study rather than plot-driven? SUPERCHECK. Honestly, they may as well have just dangled a candy bar in front of me. I’m a sucker for tales of woebegone teenage girls who alleviate their alienation in the most awkward, uncomfortable ways possible. This movie does that to the nth degree. 

Excision, for most of its running time, tells the story of Pauline, a sixteen year old living a quiet life of frustration and clinical observation of the average suburban tracts and lives around her. She’s a deeply socially introverted weirdo, the kind of person who raises her hand in sex-ed class to ask whether or not people can legally have sex with dead bodies without giving the slightest thought to the fact that everyone else in class is going to be super creeped out and (as high-schoolers are wont to do) mock her mercilessly for it after the fact. Her family is embarrassed by her strange behavior and status as neighborhood social pariah - save for her sister, who despite her cystic fibrosis and desire to fit in as a normal teen, seems to understand and want to protect her sister from the gibes of others. Pauline has a fascination with the human body as object, a sack of blood and guts, and this object fascination is mixing in with her awakening sexual impulses, leading to a rather insanguinated fantasy life. (Apparently there is no official antonym for exsanguinate, so, as a horror fan, I have been forced to create one. I chose the obvious. Sue me.) 

Let’s get the obvious comparison out of the way right away: yes, there are a number of similarities to May. Lucky McKee’s masterpiece can’t help but be referenced when dealing with such similar subject matter. Young women discovering their own bodies as well as the messy complexities of other bodies is fertile ground for horror, as Henry James could attest to. And the narratives do cover similar ground, in a number of ways. However, the execution of the concepts is - happily - quite different. Whereas May took an up-close-and-personal, naturalist tack when approaching the conflicting emotions and hungry appetites of its erstwhile protagonist, Excision has more than a little Kubrick envy going on; the detachment Pauline feels towards the bodies around her is shared by the camera. To put it another way, whereas May was interested in what can be done with the squishy bodies around her, Pauline is interested in the fact that they are squishy. 

This is off-putting, to a degree, but intentionally so. Excision delves deeply into Pauline’s rich fantasy life - the film begins in the middle of one of her bloody erotic dreams, and we’re never far from being flung back into these unsettling scenarios. They pepper the film with a discomfort meant to both distance us from our lead while lending an aura of tragedy to her; with such grisly notions of intimacy and sex, the film wants us to understand, you can’t help but feel a little badly for the girl helpless to change what she finds erotic. If anything, the film beats you over the head a little too much with this theme - at times there’s a bit of a nagging Oliver Stone-like feeling that the film doesn’t trust the audience to fully get what it’s trying to do. That is often the death knell for sustain tone in a movie like this; luckily, Excision pulls itself back from the brink whenever it wanders too far into this territory. 

I could easily see others for faulting the surrounding characters as being a little too thinly drawn, the story for pulling its abrupt climax a little too from left field, or Pauline herself for seeming a little too pat in her approach to the world. Her almost Asperger’s-like persona at times seems combined with a slightly-too-clever-by-half Juno-ification of her character. For me, her self-possession works, as these moments of biting wit always seem as much self-directed as they aware of the results they’ll garner from those around her. Pauline is both a puppet master and a solipsist; she sets up people around her to say or do certain things just so she can respond, and yet can get so lost in her own wants and desires as to be completely oblivious as to the effect her actions will have on others, eventually to disastrous effect. Yet throughout it all, I found myself engrossed in her plight. Pauline is a spectacular creation, and Anna-Lynne McCord (in a shocking transformation from her usual 90210 glamazon persona) imbues her with a fragility that is deeply affecting, and fully inhabited. The supporting cast here is overqualified, with Roger Bart, Traci Lords, Malcolm McDowell, and Ray Wise all making the most of their miniscule roles. Everyone shows up with their A game, and the director (a first-timer who I am now eagerly awaiting more from) elicits a strange, funereal beauty from tightly composed shots of generic green lawns and strip malls. And not in an obnoxious, liberal pandering way a la American Beauty, but rather the quiet suffocation of a Jane Campion or David Fincher. 

Excision may not be everyone’s cup of whisky, but it commands a power and effect that demands to be seen. Run, don’t walk, to your Netflix queue or Amazon Instant and make this a priority. You may not love it as I did, but you certainly won’t forget it.