Entries tagged with “Horror”

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(As much as I'd love for you to enter blindly and leave scarred, one cannot talk around the premise of Teeth, so heed the Spoiler's Creed. And beware of dirty talk. And bad wordplay.)

Dawn is afraid of her body, but it's the boys who are in trouble.

She is a star in a local abstinence program — a heartfelt, eloquent advocate for preserving virginity — but she's not immune to the temptations of the flesh. One night, while fantasizing about the cute boy she just met, her hand creeps down ... but she can't do it.

Perhaps she knows instinctively what a handful of boys and men are about to discover in Teeth: She has a bloodthirsty vagina.

The Orphanage has one indelible image, and that's plenty. It also has a sly current of grief and healing that hits home mostly on reflection, after cold recognitions and resonances sink in.

Directed by Spaniard J.A. Bayona and written by Sergio G. Sánchez, The Orphanage arrived in the United States under the banner of producer Guillermo del Toro, and it suffers from the expectations that name carries. Del Toro's Spanish-language films are compact, textured, and rich with meaning. Cronos (1993) is an alluring, lethal metaphor-dispensing machine, while Pan's Labyrinth (2006) has the ageless authenticity of a folk tale, among its many other merits. The Devil's Backbone (2001) most closely resembles The Orphanage in his oeuvre, but with so much attention paid to milieu — physical, social, historical — it transcends its obvious genre; its spectral elements become nearly secondary.

Bayona's movie is merely a good ghost story, which is no small thing, but it ain't Guillermo del Toro. While the acclaimed Mexican writer/director is fundamentally a symbolist, The Orphanage approaches its story through the emotional prism of its lead character.

The turning point in The Shining comes when Jack Torrance encounters a woman in Room 237. Naked, lithe, and beautiful, she gets out of the bathtub and wordlessly approaches Jack. They kiss, but when Jack looks in the mirror, his arms are embracing a decaying old woman, flabby and with patches of her skin missing.

It's not your typical turning point. A heretofore pedestrian movie doesn't begin to redeem itself, and a previously engaging work doesn't go off the rails.

Instead, things start to get muddled. The movie becomes instantly less creepy — actually uncreepy in my eyes. The horror turns mundane. As Jack goes insane — or more insane, as Jack Nicholson's performance starts somewhere south of healthy — the casual, drunken violence of his past floods out furiously, dammed up for too long. It becomes clear that an abusive husband and father poses a graver physical danger than the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel.

More importantly, this juncture befuddles the audience's understanding of the supernatural elements — a confusion that's reinforced as the story progresses. And most critically, it expands the film's scope from a haunted-hotel and haunted-child narrative to something messier and richer.

Candyman is an A movie desperately trying to break out of its B-movie body, like a 12-year-old boy wanting to prove his manhood. It is a slasher film, but it pushes and tugs and stretches to become something more. That it succeeds at all is pretty amazing.

As a horror movie, its primary strength is its conceit: putting a monster from urban folklore ("Candyman ... Candyman ... Candyman ... ") into a genuinely urban setting. There's a sense of danger and dread everywhere, created by the evocative photography of the Cabrini Green public-housing complex and the cold, culturally out-of-place Philip Glass score. The polished and carefully constructed academic music clashes with the palpable poverty and decay of the setting, revealing an unexpected rigor.

Under the movie's trashy surface, writer/director Bernard Rose (working from a story by executive producer Clive Barker) has crafted an honest meditation on race and fear in contemporary society — from both the white and black perspectives. The unease between well-to-do whites and poor blacks envelops nearly every relationship.

It was summer 1969, in southern Illinois. The father of Bride of Culture Snob took the mother of Bride of Culture Snob to the movies to escape the heat. She was pregnant, carrying Bride of Culture Snob.

His choice? Rosemary's Baby.

So on Saturday, two days (or four, depending on whom you believe) before her due date, Spawn of Culture Snob was similarly treated to Rosemary's Baby.

(And this followed viewings of Eastern Promises and There Will Be Blood within the previous 24 hours.)

Contact me if you'd like to contribute to Spawn's therapy fund.

(I've also annotated my ballot.)

The results are in.

The top five:

1. The Shining (1980)
2. Night of the Living Dead (1968)
3. Halloween (1978)
4. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
5. Psycho (1960)

Despite complaints in the comments, it's a pretty damned respectable list.

Ballots for Ed Hardy Jr.'s 31 Flicks That Give You the Willies are due by the end of October 28. Remember: Your movies can't win if you don't play.

Here's my ballot, sent without consulting my nominations.

(And, as of November 2, the list is fully annotated.)

More than a half-century separates these two movies, and they obviously live in different parts of town. Tod Browning's horror classic Freaks was controversial upon its release in 1932 and hasn't lost much shock value, with its use of real sideshow performers and the uncomfortable mixture of exploitation and sympathy. Peter Weir's Witness is a mild drama about the Amish that masquerades as a cop thriller. (Or is a cop thriller disguised as an Amish drama?)

Yet the two have much in common.

Writer/director Michael Haneke's 1997 film Funny Games feels like a response to something that hadn't happened yet. Sure, we'd had Natural Born Killers and other ultra-violent movies, but the fetishism of agony hadn't yet become a crass trend.

The prospect of Haneke's English-language remake — due in theaters in late winter and starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth — is worrisome. (George Sluizer's American botch of his own The Vanishing comes to mind.) But it's also necessary; as unpleasant as it is, Funny Games deserves to be seen more widely because it forces introspection. I doubt you can watch it without seriously considering why you watch movies of this sort, and how you react to them.

And it's more timely now than it was upon its initial release a decade ago.

For me, the film is most striking in the scene in which Anna (Susanne Lothar) is forced by white-clad, white-gloved psychopathic visitors Peter and Paul to remove her clothes, while her helpless husband (The Lives of Others' Ulrich Mühe) casts his eyes down and her young son sits on a couch with a bag over his head.

In David Cronenberg's The Brood, the monsters have the size and shape (and snowsuits) of little children, but everything else about them is off. You could point to their foreheads, or their noses, or their skin tone, or the color of their hair, or the way they move, but that misses the bigger picture. There's no single element that makes these creatures grotesque. It's the collection of features and details that approach being normally human without ever getting there.

The discomfiting effect is related to the uncanny valley, which suggests that people are repulsed by things (robots, computer animation) that too closely approximate reality.

"Repulsed" is the key word. These little children might scare you, but your reaction as a viewer isn't based on fear for the safety of the movie's characters. (These little buggers are nasty, but they're also pretty ridiculous as assassins.) Rather, these near-children make you queasy, disgusted.

You've been horrified.

Among cinematic monsters with any staying power, is there any quite as pathetic as the zombie?

They have no special powers. They have minimal identity or personality. Up until 2002, when 28 Days Later and (I'm told) Resident Evil made them fleet of foot, they lumbered around. In most conceptions, they merely hunger for human flesh.

A single zombie is an easy target. A single shot to the brain kills it — permanently, for good this time — in George A. Romero's world.

It is only their easy, efficient reproduction that gives them any power — the exponential way that four become eight become 16 become 32 become 64 etc. if each only munches on or infects one other person.

At Shoot the Projectionist, Ed Hardy Jr. is accepting nominations for "31 Flicks That Give You the Willies." Although he's not explicit about it, we can safely assume that we're naming our favorite horror movies. The deadline for nominations is Saturday, October 13.

Mine follow, and an explanation is probably in order.

First, I excluded from my nominations obvious choices that nearly everybody will choose.

Second, there's an important distinction in my mind between something that "gives me the willies" and something that's a great horror movie. Horror doesn't have to scare me or creep me out to be great in my book. Conversely, something that does give me the willies isn't by definition a great horror movie. I am abiding by the spirit of the prompt rather than the letter.

Last, some of my choices are more comfortably associated with a genre other than horror. But while Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream might be an explicit after-school special on drug addiction, it's still a horrifying experience.

Sick sick sick movies.
Eat some people, fuck the dead.
It's time for haiku!

Are you Ravenous?
Do you see the potency
That human meat gives?

Guy Pearce, his cheekbones,
Gold-rush cannibalism —
What's there not to like?

With Rob Zombie's remake in theaters this weekend, I thought it would be a good opportunity to explore why Michael Myers (or "The Shape") worked so well in John Carpenter's 1978 movie Halloween.

In this commentary track, part of Culture Snob's Five Minutes series, I use the movie's ending to discuss the transformation of Michael Myers from troubled child into bogeyman — from human to supernatural.

The deaths last week of movie writers and directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni have incited all sorts of commentary about the "art" films of yesteryear and the people who made them.

Tied up in these discussions is one key assumption: that everyday people think these movies are boring, whether they've actually seen them or not. "Boring" is a reaction separate from claiming something is "good" or "bad," of course, but it's almost more important. If something bores a viewer, it becomes irredeemably irrelevant. So people arguing for the importance of Bergman and Antonioni must first make their movies sexy.

The contradictions of director/co-writer/composer Tom Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer start in the title, with the onomatopoeic softness and ether of a single word paired with a morbid, blunt descriptive subtitle.

Both components are drawn from the novel by Patrick Süskind, but the associations that pile up and pull at each other during the movie's opening scenes are equally Tykwer's, cinematic and lovingly ambiguous. The main character is introduced by his nose emerging from the darkness, deeply but measuredly drawing in all that the air carries. There's something refined in the control of the gesture, yet it recalls vermin assessing its surroundings. Normal humans treat smell as a secondary sense.

With its dismal first-weekend performance at the box office, Captivity offers an opportunity to bemoan (or cheer) the diminished commercial prospects for that genre we're no longer allowed to call "torture porn."

At The Exploding Kinetoscope, Chris Stangl recently argued (in the context of Hostel: Part II) that labeling something "torture porn"

"is a non-position that allows a critic not to engage the work. It's critical name-calling."

There are some interesting arguments here, but I reject the assertion that "torture porn" isn't an appropriate and meaningful tag for the genre. And I don't think the phrase is a dismissive put-down.

Sometimes the biggest gift a film can give us is to force us back into the real world rather than letting us escape.

Many people watch movies as a respite from the stresses of life, but that often has a trivializing effect. When film is used primarily as a medium for entertainment, it follows that we derive pleasure from crime, violence, human suffering, and the like.

The German movie Requiem is about demonic possession, yet in spite of its subject matter, it's a serious, wrenching piece. And because of its subject matter, it's all the more effective, as the audience isn't expecting to be challenged.

In the opening of 28 Weeks Later, Don (Robert Carlyle) faces a dilemma: He can leave his wife to die and run like hell on the off chance that he might outrun the "infected," or he can stay with her and face a gruesome end.

He runs like hell, and looks back to see his wife attacked.

This is the movie writ small, laying the groundwork for more impossible choices.

I have no problem
choosing films of morbid love
from our Netflix queue.

Trouble Every Day
on the recommendation
of The House Next Door.

A film of few words,
buzzing with a quiet dread,
demands haiku squared.

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