I love the ominousness of October, the ever-earlier darkness catching me off guard, as if God was wiping the world away with a black eraser, saving me for last. Hurrying inside like a napping sunbather awakened suddenly by said sun's absence; my grateful sweater weather skin cold with the relentless tick-tock approach of Halloween, as if the entire month was rolled up into a cone, draining the hours towards that hallowed eve. Neighbors in the distance take on a sinister shadowy shimmer in the dimming day and the black decorative window shutters of suburban houses seem like cartoon eyebrows fronting a devil's skull. House interiors become extra dark as twilight tricks us out of turning on the table lamps earlier and earlier; pumpkins and wood panelling; orange shag rug and black witch hats; talking low and quiet to as not wake the sleeping behemoth, or irate parents--these are a few of my favorite things. I love when eerie horror movies capture that eerie uncanny chill, can find the ambiguity in autumn leaves swirling around under gnarled bare trunks. So few movies get that feeling right, that mood of giddy doom, the inexorable tick-tockality of looming daylight savings.
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Halloween (watching The Thing)
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To this mix Carpenter invented a whole new cool kind of synthesizer score, avoiding the overbearing orchestras of John Williams or Howard Shore, the steady ominous notes that entraining a kind of rapid heartbeat and slow footsteps and capture the unnerving but delightful feeling of ominous October, the darkness coming earlier and earlier, the chill immediate...
Luckily, other filmmakers got that vibe right too... sometimes they've been hard to find, but lately, I saw two!
SOLE SURVIVOR
(1983) Dir. Thom Eberhardt
***1/2
In the annals of the modern horror/sci fi genre auteurs there are recognizable names (Argento, Craven, Carpenter), up and comers (West, Fessenden, Wingard) and then... well... no one. But with DVD making it impossible for them to disappear, we horror fans find here and there, ready to be exhumed and dusted, also-ran auteurs of no small class and quality no matter how few horror films they've made, like Herk Harvey who brought fly-over state of unconscious poetics (Carnival of Souls) Michael Almereyda, who brings coolness to reflexive homage (The Eternal, Nadja), and Thom Eberhardt, who made two 80s sleepers that have stood the test of time: 1984's Night of the Comet, and a 1983 bit of crafty low budget bit of Final Destination-prefiguring ominousness called Sole Survivor.
After a schismatic opening with some psychic crank (Caren Larkey, who also co-produced) on the phone and doing automatic writing we have the heroine Denise or "Dee Dee" (Anita Skinner) sitting in her seat (in the upright position) amidst the best looking plane wreckage a low budget film allows. The sole survivor of a terrible plane crash; she's lucky to be alive but something's not right and beginning with her release from the hospital the recently dead seem to be following her around, or maybe it's that she's mixing alcohol with her discontinued antidepressants.
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| ask not for whom, kitty-kitty |
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| It Follows (my clock radio at middle right) |
There's also the exact 70s clock radio I had as a kid (from which I listened to The Shadow and Suspense reruns every night on local PBS radio) and which is also in It Follows. There's a dripping faucet, an almost Twin Peaks empty road stop light at night ominous as the action shuffles back and forth between Denise's house and the house next door where she presumably babysat when they were both a lot younger; the relationship has left them somewhere between surrogate authority figure and partner in crime. Both houses are great relics of the 70s style, with all the exposed faux stone and dark wood panelling, the deep reds and dark oranges shag carpets and walls offsetting Denise's red hair and blue vein pale skin look. I can relate to hanging out with younger people; going over and drinking Cristy's parents' booze and falling asleep on their couch while she sneaks off to a party? Another uniquely real relationship in this quietly amazing film.
The romance is fascinating- Dr. Brian's a catch, handsome a bit shy, a doctor... and he can cook. And Dee-Dee's a TV producer with the redhead gene making the purple of her facial blood vessels almost visible, pale makeup covering blemishes (not too many) all go with her powder blue bows and sweaters to make her the color of blue blood - which make her busting the first move cool and all very Howard Hawks right down to two lines of dialogue lifted wholesale (along with her hip beret) from To Have and Have Not: "it's even better when you help" and later Cristy's "what are you trying to do, guess her weight?" at a strip poker game--indicating the two may have seen the film together one night earlier.
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| "read the label - maybe you'll believe me then" |
IT FOLLOWS
(2015) Dir. David Robert Mitchell
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See also: A Clockwork Darkness: Subjectivity, Hawks, and Halloween
(2015) Dir. David Robert Mitchell
****
I used to wonder why filmmakers didn't do more adapting from the golden book of universal childhood nightmares -- the ones we all remember but usually move past once we learn the 'turn and face your fear rather than trying to run' trick; terrible powerless terrors of trying to escape relentlessly approaching figures only we could see, the adults around us ignoring our pleas for help, like they could see neither us nor our pursuer, the pursuer coming very slowly but faster than we, stuck in a slow motion drag trying to run away. For me it was an old woman, evil eyes, hunched over and staring right at me and smiling laughing but making no sound and extending her hands towards me as she tottered closer, not unlike a clothed version of the crone in The Shining's room 237.
Such an image, that slowly pursuing creature, is we realize now at the core of horror and very seldom used to the full uncanny shiver extent we find in It Follows. There have been surprisingly few such things, considering all of horror. In the Universal days--the Mummy--not the Karloff original, but the Chaney sequels where he stayed in his bandages and lumbered slowly but relentlessly forward; the slower, the quieter, the simpler, the more it tapped into the dread of this primordial figure, the being only sleeping children and the dead who don't know they're dead can see, The 'Shape' as Myers was billed in Carpenter's Halloween, was its ultimate expression... until now. Myers is outgunned for raw uncanny primordial dread in It Follows. I might go on a limb and say It Follows is the greatest horror movie ever made, for it is beautiful to look at, eloquent, sweet, and true even as it floats deep into a reverie that fully captures the mortal dread that sexual awakening brings with it like an inescapable shadow, of adulthood's chemical jolts revealing the evil sickening core of life, the eternal footman's snicker like a 'test positive for STD' report; the drowning caused by singing mermaids. I'll forgive Mitchell's film any dream logic inconsistency... for here is a movie that distills the purity of October, of teenage angst, the side effects of seasonal change, of the inevitability of not just old age and death, but bum trips, crushing loneliness even in a crowd. Along amongst all horror filmmakers (Kubrick, Polanski aside), Mitchell realizes the shocking power not only of old people in hospital gowns that no one else can see, but nudity.
Such an image, that slowly pursuing creature, is we realize now at the core of horror and very seldom used to the full uncanny shiver extent we find in It Follows. There have been surprisingly few such things, considering all of horror. In the Universal days--the Mummy--not the Karloff original, but the Chaney sequels where he stayed in his bandages and lumbered slowly but relentlessly forward; the slower, the quieter, the simpler, the more it tapped into the dread of this primordial figure, the being only sleeping children and the dead who don't know they're dead can see, The 'Shape' as Myers was billed in Carpenter's Halloween, was its ultimate expression... until now. Myers is outgunned for raw uncanny primordial dread in It Follows. I might go on a limb and say It Follows is the greatest horror movie ever made, for it is beautiful to look at, eloquent, sweet, and true even as it floats deep into a reverie that fully captures the mortal dread that sexual awakening brings with it like an inescapable shadow, of adulthood's chemical jolts revealing the evil sickening core of life, the eternal footman's snicker like a 'test positive for STD' report; the drowning caused by singing mermaids. I'll forgive Mitchell's film any dream logic inconsistency... for here is a movie that distills the purity of October, of teenage angst, the side effects of seasonal change, of the inevitability of not just old age and death, but bum trips, crushing loneliness even in a crowd. Along amongst all horror filmmakers (Kubrick, Polanski aside), Mitchell realizes the shocking power not only of old people in hospital gowns that no one else can see, but nudity.
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“I am Lazarus, come from the dead..." |
The most insidious aspect is the unspoken question hovering over these incarnations many forms, all implying some kind of past victim, a catalog of the curse's sexual history, like the drowned obscene often naked forms the thing adopts, moms with breasts exposed, sopping wet girls peeing themselves, old men on roofs, all exposing an Eric Fischl-style suburban surrealist obscene exposed flesh abundance (below), the idea that just a slight tweak can render a simple everyday Americana scene instantaneously perverse, hostile, uncanny. There's some maybe nods to modern J-Horror or something with darkened eyes and hissing and people getting yanked off their feet, but it's secondary to the disturbing scenes of sexual display, the sick flash of what Todd McGowan might call the traumatic real, or at any rate, the signifier of the gaze:
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Blue Velvet (naked figure middle left background) / compare w/below from It Follows"[Dorothy in Blue Velvet] seems to appear out of thin air, appearing at first as indecipherable blot that no one--including the spectator--initially notices. When the other characters do notice, they become completely disoriented. Her intrusion into the fantasmatic realm rips apart the fantasy structure.... Her body has no place in the fantasmatic public world, and the fantasy screen breaks down... She doesn't fit in the picture, which is why we become so uncomfortable watching her naked body in the middle of a suburban neighborhood" (McGowan, The Impossible David Lynch, p. 106-7) |
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| It Follows |
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| The Shining(my infinite trans-time-space collage version) |
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| Eric Fischl - Birth of Love (2nd Version) |
But the ingenious threat of It Follows is just one element of its greatness: The acting is uniformly great, the kids seeming to choke slightly when they talk, as if shy but sweet, confident but still coltish with their adult voices. I relate hugely. It's the sweet side of teenagerdom, the not the strident grating character played by PJ Soles (not that she's not great and perfect for the film) but the magic that happens when a cute girl is also nice to her kid sister and her friends, such as Jay (Maika Monroe) is to sister Kelly (Lili Serpe), bookish Annie (Bailey Spry) and Paul (Kier Gilchrist), who does his best to hide his crush on Jay. It's that sweetness that makes it understandable they all want to champion her, for when pretty girls who are nice to their little sister and her friends and the other kids in the neighborhood, the result is electric. It's natural then that they'd all take care of her, the boys all natural to endanger themselves in service of her even if only for a half hour's passion or that even though they may question the cause they don't deny the effect, and act to help without abandoning her to the fates. Or the way parents are but side players accorded nary a thought nor beseeched for aid; the only adult with any kind of real speaking part is a teacher and all she does is intone Alfred J. Prufrock. In a weird way the relationship between Jay and Kelly and her friends mirrors the one between Dee-Dee and Cristy in Sole Survivor (or Curtis and her babysitting charges in Halloween; Curtis and Tom Atkins in The Fog; or Mike and older brother Jody and pal Reggie in Phantasm).
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This relationship seems to underwrite the potency of the 'hushed' horror film, perhaps because the older sibling figure is a transition between actual adults who are worthless in a pinch because of their calcified dogma to known (there's no bogeyman therefore the kids are all liars). Those of us who were kids in the 70s certainly remember staying up all night watching old black and white films on local TV (I recognized the two films Paul has on: Killers from Space and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women) and it's the familiarity of the set-up (so few horror movies center the action around the TV showing old horror movies, yet it's the modern era's campfire).
This relationship seems to underwrite the potency of the 'hushed' horror film, perhaps because the older sibling figure is a transition between actual adults who are worthless in a pinch because of their calcified dogma to known (there's no bogeyman therefore the kids are all liars). Those of us who were kids in the 70s certainly remember staying up all night watching old black and white films on local TV (I recognized the two films Paul has on: Killers from Space and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women) and it's the familiarity of the set-up (so few horror movies center the action around the TV showing old horror movies, yet it's the modern era's campfire).
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| Jay's constantly exposed cute legs represent a more socially acceptable form of the grotesque nudity of the above; a tool she's not 100% consciously aware of will help save her life through sexual allure |
Lastly there is Mike Gioulakis' beautiful cinematography, each shot bathed in some kind of amniotic color, swimming pool light turquoise and pinks, and Disasterpiece's great retro synth score - illustrating once and again how vital and important pulsing amniotic electronic music is to horror - how a bad soundtrack can drag it down, just as Keith Emerson dragged down Goblin's Suspiria follow-up Inferno. It's like if someone said everything's great about Halloween except the score, why not swap it out with some Michael Bolton? Or Kubrick got rid of Wendy Carlos' Shining score and replaced it with some micro-managerial John Williams orchestral pomp and telegraphed circumstance. Like It Follows itself, Richard Vreeland AKA Disasterpiece's electronic score both evokes its dream era (70s) and looks forward and into the moment to become true myth.
For me I've seen it thrice already, I haven't watched a new film over and over since Silence of the Lambs and the best thing is to go out on my Brooklyn street to the store right after and everyone following me or walking towards me on the sidewalk seems like they're following me like a slow shambling silent killer; it's instant paranoia but of the delicious October kind, not the every man is an Illuminati-connected rapist and we're all living in hell kind of paranoia, but a distillation of pure urban legend horror, the ability to capture the resonant frequency of what being scared by whispered 'true' stories or watching while at a slumber party as kid feels like in the memory of an adult. The rosy glow of nostalgia for remembering the way safety in a group allows for indulging in ominous hushed dread we might avoid, thinking about something else to distract us, were we alone. Thus like Hawks'To Have and Have Not figures in Sole Survivor, so too theesprit de corps of Hawks' The Thing plays out in It Follows. And so it is that America has finally produced a horror film it can be proud of, amidst the myriad worthless zombie sieges, found footage asylum investigations gone awry, and torture/abduction (even Carpenter's last film fits that bill to an extent) flicks made and dumped onto Amazon and youtube every livelong day, here at last is the real deal, a thing of real beauty and urban legend potency. So a quick prayer: Mr. Mitchell, please become our new Carpenter and stay in the genre rather than going the way of the Eberhardt (i.e. TV drama and PBS docs). And forget about Ryan Murphy-crowned final girls and strident scream queens like the new Sarah Michelle Gellar Emma Roberts, Maika Monroe is the Empress of October Hush!
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From top: It Follows, Halloween -- Note odd camera placement - neither in the street or on the sidewalk, the 'impossible' POV of someone standing near the curb, neither close enough to the actors that the POV becomes 'invisible' or friendly rather than the killer's, but neither hiding from a distance like other shots. It's the POV of eerie dissipation - as if it could cohere into a figure and rush onto the sidewalk and attack the person as they pass, but is, at the moment, disincarnate. |
See also: A Clockwork Darkness: Subjectivity, Hawks, and Halloween