So much of what is weird or uncanny hinges on a particular facet of narrative craft and personal experience: perspective. The weirdness of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” comes from the eerie sentience of the landscape surrounding the explorers – or the imagination of the explorers working them over in the absence of discernable human presence. The weirdness of a story like H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Out of Time,” meanwhile, is generated in part by the collapse of perspective between a human being, Nathaniel Peaslee, and an alien being “possessing” the human’s mind, a Yithian; the human perceives what the alien perceives in its own world, with its own strange sights and sounds, which seem alien to the human – and to readers who belong to the same world as Nathaniel, no doubt. It’s a horrifying experience, but also capable of invoking awe. So much of what can be termed alien or inexplicable can also be explained or justified by the limits of our own decidedly anthropocentric perspectives: what we can see, what we can hear, etc., and ultimately what we can understand. One of the great strengths of weird fiction and art, then, is the potential to confront the human perspective with a nonhuman perspective. In that regard, Phase IV merits considerable admiration, if not at least exposure.

Phase IV occupies a unique place in cinematic history, for various reasons. The director, Saul Bass, never directed anything else after Phase IV. It was not successful with the movie-going public at large when it came out in 1974, which was likely a factor in the lack of Bass’s directorial career after the fact. Bass also had difficulty with the distributor of the film, which cut roughly six minutes of the original ending before Phase IV hit theaters, lending the resultant ending an unexpectedly clipped quality (more on that later). If the name Saul Bass sounds familiar to you, it’s likely because he was a legendary graphic designer and storyboard artist who made a Hollywood legend for himself with his iconic title sequences and film posters for movies like North by Northwest, Psycho, Anatomy of a Murder, Vertigo, and many more.

If you look at the original poster for the film, you might assume that Phase IV is an apocalyptic piece of sci-fi horror about killer ants coming after the human race with a vengeance. Note the screaming intensity of the image, the bloody hole in the palm, the fires raging in the background as a silhouetted couple flee for their lives from evil ants. The poster positively screams B‑movie. That said, while the movie does hinge on the conflict between ant and human, and there is an implied threat to humanity posed by the ants, it is certainly not a pure B‑movie. In reality, it’s a hybrid of science fiction thriller and art movie, in many respects.

Visually, the movie is obsessed with geometry, shapes, angles. A running theme through the movie is shots of the various geometric creations of both ant and human. For the ants, we have tall angular pillars rising out of the earth, reflective obelisks, vast crop circles, and what can only be described as reverse-anthills. Beyond what the ants create, meanwhile, there’s the geodesic dome that serves as the home base for the human protagonists, itself surrounded by metal globes attached to the dome with long piping. Before long, you’ll begin keeping track of every circle and globe, every angular obelisk and sharp corner. Human characters draw squares in the dust on a porch handrail. Ants fry a motherboard by holding together in the shape of a circle, sacrificing themselves. Our intrepid human scientists visualize the “language” of the ants on a computer screen in fluctuating parabolic arcs. Everyone, everything, is making and surrounded by tightly defined geometric shapes. Everyone is encircled by something and in turn encircling something.

A word about our human scientists: despite the fact they are tasked with studying the sudden uplift in ant intelligence, caused by ripple effects of vaguely defined cosmic events (not the “terror out in space” teased by the movie’s poster), they are not our heroes per se. They are certainly not our sole viewpoint characters, and the movie is not solely concerned with their situation. Rather, a significant chunk of the movie’s energies is invested in establishing the ants themselves as protagonists in this story. Phase IV starts with the ants and their evolution, their swarming, their collective will and identity and how they exert themselves in nature, mastering it. They descend on a spider, stripping it clean with a frightening, yet awe-inspiring, efficiency. But later in the movie, the ants also display traits of what we would consider higher consciousness – traits that viewers operating in an anthropocentric viewpoint would consider “human.” They sacrifice their lives to save one another. They mourn their brethren in what can only be considered as an ant graveyard. And, in the end, they have far different designs on humanity than the characters could have possibly understood in the course of the movie. It would be entirely possible to argue that the ants are in fact the most important viewpoint characters.

An ant’s-eye view of our human scientists.

Which brings us back around to the concept of perspective. Phase IV, evenly split (more or less) between the human protagonists and the ant forces makes us keenly aware of the fact that both sides have their own perspectives, limited by physiology, cognitive chemistry, and use of environment. The collective mind of the ants vs. the individualist minds of the humans could have made for more simplistic survivalist conflict, but in Phase IV this conflict illuminates startling similarities between the ants and humans. Besides the aforementioned similarities in emotional expression, both are capable of seemingly wanton destruction. For instance, in one of the most horrifying and beautiful scenes of the movie, the ant forces reduce a house to flaming splinters, chasing a human family to the geodesic dome. The scientists’ response to this apparent security breach? Activating the facility’s vast pesticide system, which has unfortunate effect for both the ants and the pursuant family.

The scene following – the immediate landscape, caked in dry yellow pesticide – looks like a little apocalypse in its own right. And in the wake of destruction like this, both sides are pushed to evolve, even if the ants are quite frankly better at it than humanity.

In such a movie, themes of survival undoubtedly arise, and they do in the case of Phase IV. The humans feel threatened by the development of the ants and what they could do to humanity. One of the scientists, Ernest Hubbs, is primarily concerned with survival, via control of the ant population. The other scientist, James Lesko, is similarly concerned, but his approach to survival is understanding the ants and communicating to them, sentient being to sentient beings. In the absence of an alphabet, however, Lesko turns to something more universal, with a little help from computer science: mathematics. Ergo, the computer generation of the ants’ language in parabolas, and the transmission of messages back and forth, manipulating shapes instead of letters.

The genius of this is that the geometry of the movie becomes the central focus. The obelisks and crop circles created by the ants aren’t just strange things meant to weird humans out, nor are they merely there to serve as visually arresting artifacts. They are honest attempts at communication, which humans have responded to with either bafflement or violence, which in turn prompts the ants into violence. Suffice it to say, the characters that fare best in this movie are the ones that understand the limitations of their own perspective, and the existence of the agency and motive of the ants, seeing them as more than just things to be crushed under heel. The endings of this movie – both the theatrical version and the extended version, only recently rediscovered and screened – bear this out, showing that the shared fate of ant and human is a remarkably psychedelic, visionary, and compassionate one, once perspectives are properly aligned and overlapped. Maybe someone can get to work on making a definitive home-video edition someday with the original ending restored. As decent as the theatrical ending is, the actual intended ending – currently available on YouTube – gives useful context for the film’s final images.

In retrospect, the failure of this movie at the box office may come down to poor marketing more than anything else. Who wouldn’t look at the poster for Phase IV and assume some kind of B‑movie creature feature? Not that such a movie wouldn’t offer its own visceral, fun thrills. But Phase IV is a different creature entirely. It’s a cerebral, challenging, visually stunning piece of 1970s American science fiction that enweirds the human perspective by challenging it with a nonhuman one. It asks a lot of tricky questions regarding sentience, culture, evolution, violence, communication, and the privilege that humanity often assumes in the environment at large and the great chain of being. At the very least, it’ll make you rethink every anthill you see.

The post Inhuman Geometries: Saul Bass’s “Phase IV” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

A coffin shivers and bursts its locks. An elegant dowager in scarlet and black invites a beautiful young teacher to a glass of wine and takes her home to her opulent, empty chateau. A well-dressed young man emerges from the shadows, as fair and shackled as a lion. A girl in her winding-sheet breaks from the earth as stiff and smiling as an archaic koure. No, these aren’t outtakes from The Bloody Chamber or a lost novel by Tanith Lee. These are some of the beautiful nightmares on offer in Terence Fisher’s The Brides of Dracula (1960), the second in Hammer’s Dracula series. It’s a strange film: full of reverses and lacunae, proceeding on assumptions the audience is never given grounds to share. It is above all a Gothic film, full of dreamily charged encounters and the shape-changing sexuality of fairy tales. Even the occasional narrative hiccup or clumsily executed bat effect cannot ruin the mood. It’s one of the weirder films I know.

On a practical level, the film’s mysterious qualities are partly the result of a troubled production history. Originally pitched as a starring reprise for Christopher Lee, Hammer’s sequel to its groundbreaking Dracula (Horror of Dracula in the U.S., 1958) had to be reconceived as the less Count-centric Disciple of Dracula when Lee proved reluctant to return to the role, retaining only a climactic cameo which was then itself exchanged for a Dracula-free finale when Lee’s pursuit of work outside the horror genre made him totally unavailable to the studio. Characters were split and recombined, motivations were reassigned, whole sequences reinterpreted or excised and the first film’s Dr. Van Helsing reintroduced after being previously dismissed as unnecessary with Dracula himself on board. The seduction which renamed the story The Brides of Dracula failed to survive the next draft, but the title stayed. Patch jobs created new plot holes. Deadlines loomed. The script as it stands gives most of the credit to Jimmy Sangster (a name so impeccably suited to a scribe of vampire stories that I was actively surprised to discover, on his death in 2011, that it was not a pseudonym), but there are two other names on the title card and that’s just the official rewrites. Director Terence Fisher, producer Anthony Hinds, and even eventual star Peter Cushing are acknowledged to have had a hand in the final version—following the substitution of Van Helsing for the original hero, the climax was once more rewritten when Cushing protested that a doctor whose weapons are science, stakes, and crosses would not invoke black magic to dispatch a monster he couldn’t handle himself. When the film finally made it to the screen, it did so retaining fragments and echoes of previous drafts, nothing ever quite ironed out or gone.

And yet what all these skips and flaws and divers hands add up to is something strangely more evocative than a straightforward adaptation like Dracula. Dreams are not logical. They do not proceed from point to point. They flicker and scar, freeze and recur; they are images and atmosphere and the taste they leave in the brain on waking. The Brides of Dracula is not the most dreamlike film I’ve seen, but it’s not an inappropriate place to start.

*

Before we plunge into the dark forests of Brides, a word on its predecessor seems instructive. Dracula is a great deal of fun; it’s nowhere near as weird. As an original script, it’s tight and fast-paced, taking less than ninety minutes from Harker’s arrival to Dracula’s demise. As a version of Stoker’s novel, it’s oddly telescoped and reshuffled, as though Terence Fisher reconstructed the plot from hearsay and a list of principal players—Jonathan Harker is a vampire hunter posing as a librarian to gain access to Dracula’s castle; Lucy Holmwood is his fiancée, whose brother Arthur is married to Mina; Van Helsing is his older and more experienced colleague, come to Karlstadt to investigate Harker’s disappearance. A middle-aged GP by the name of Dr. Seward ineffectively tries to treat Lucy’s undiagnosed vampirism. Quincey Morris is not missed, being often elided in adaptation, but there is a notable absence of Renfield. Its most striking departure from the novel—and its greatest innovation as far as the genre is concerned—is a function of changing the scene. Because none of the action strays outside an acidly Technicolor, handwavily nineteenth-century Mitteleuropa, the danger Hammer’s Dracula poses has nothing to do with foreigners and very little to do with plague. Boy, howdy, though, has it got to do with sex.

With the cautionary specter of Bela Lugosi behind him, it’s easy to understand Lee’s desire to avoid being typecast; it remains an equal fact that he’s one of the great Draculas. His Count is a gliding, courtly aristocrat whose moments of violence actually startle in a film where every sight of blood is a lurid carmine splash; he commands a room when he enters it, with none of the Byronic angst that attends on many a latter-day vampire. He rarely needs to overpower, because he can mesmerize. With Lucy and Mina, he barely even needs to speak. The results are potent and immediate. Lucy plays the greensick virgin to get her brother and sister-in-law out of her bedroom so she can let her lover in. We never see Mina’s first encounter with Dracula, only the telltale smile of the morning after (the exquisitely demure “Arthur, darling, don’t fuss. I feel perfectly well”), but the second plays out in an atmosphere of queasy bedroom farce—Holmwood and Van Helsing shiver the whole night through in the garden, while upstairs the Count takes his bloody pleasure with Holmwood’s wife. For a dead man, he’s arrestingly vital. The effect should be denaturing—isn’t the vampire above all a thing of graves and stolen blood, an indecently unburied corpse? It can only be a few fatal steps from a hot-blooded vampire to one that sparkles.

Instead, partly because the film insists on the genuine blasphemy of vampirism (otherwise that trick with the makeshift cross would never work) and partly because the Count’s erotic instincts never are allowed to overwrite his predatory ones (it’s not just the little death a tryst with him ends in), Lee’s Dracula remains a monster in one of the best senses, magnetic and bestial, a true daemon lover. Opposite him, Cushing’s Van Helsing is crisply etched, science-minded and springily athletic, the unusual force for good who can command as much attention from the audience as the monsters he fights. He and Lee make a Jungian pair, the cipher of sexuality and its ascetic opposition—there is something priestlike about Van Helsing in this neverwhere forest where crosses impel and repel like magnets and the sun crumbles evil like old rotten wood. His ice-boned leanness set against Lee’s saturnine gravity draws their characters as clearly as a pantomime, the one daylit and questing, the other a haunter of dark places.

For all this innovation, however—the explicit sensuality of the vampire, the vampire hunter as a professional archetype, the fight choreography that Douglas Fairbanks could have been proud of—Dracula remains more interesting for its reworkings of its source material than as a story in its own right. It set the scene for the films to follow. The Brides of Dracula is something else again.

*

I should make it clear that it’s not as though Brides’ production woes left the film without a story. It’s just that the story there is is composed first and foremost of symbols, so that it almost matters less how the narrative moves them about than that it has them all in the first place. The plot thrashes around a bit in the beginning, trying to get its characters all in the same danger. Once it has them, though, they are laid down for us as clearly as Tarot cards: the innocent abroad, the Oedipally locked mother and son, the cautionary bad girl, the backdrop villagers, and above all the magician who is the outsider, who stands against the monsters but never fits anywhere among the mortals; he knows the rules of both worlds and belongs to neither. More on him in a moment. In the meantime, let’s take a closer look at this configuration. If it’s messy, well, the insides of people’s heads generally are.

Appropriately, much of the film’s ambiguous tone can be sourced directly to its presiding vampire. It is established by the opening narration that no matter the alluring callback of the title, anyone who bought a ticket for Christopher Lee might as well go home and read a horror comic; he is important only in legacy, retconned as the Patient Zero of European vampirism: “Count Dracula, monarch of all vampires, is dead, but his disciples live on to spread the cult and corrupt the world.” The undead sensuality he so memorably introduced remains, as does the level of cleavage randomly on display in Hammer’s fin-de-siècle Transylvania. But if Lee’s Dracula was a fatal attractor, Liebestod walking, he never played for amusement with his prey: his sexual directness was the hallmark of his transgressiveness, not merely exploiting but openly satisfying the desires that none of the female characters in Dracula could get their menfolk to notice. (I have a soft spot for Michael Gough, but his Arthur Holmwood is not the hero of that movie. He frets laudably over his sister’s health, but his initial distrust of Van Helsing contributes more than a little to her undeath and as a husband he takes his wife so absently for granted, I kept wondering if the next tall dark stranger to move in on Karlstadt would be Ibsen.) David Peel’s Baron Meinster is a more calculating creature, cruelly seducing. He lingers as much over the power his bite affords as the nourishing blood itself, lazily wrapping his Cambridge vowels and his blond-browed toying charm around persuasive small talk and suddenly curt commands, as his initial appealing helplessness—chained like a prisoner in his mother’s chateau, pleading with her guests not to believe him mad—is revealed as no more than a decoy, the dog-teeth behind the boyish smile. The viewer cannot help but wonder whether he might not have turned out the same silkily deceptive predator even without the suggestive Dorian Gray-ish “wicked games” of his youth that left him “a beast of the night.”

I would not write off the Wildean overtones as an accident of backstory, either. In the previous film, Van Helsing likened the effects of vampirism to drug addiction. Here the language is that of initiation, sexual and contagious: “The vampire by its kiss, the taking of blood from its victim, makes of that victim another vampire. So the cult grows.” No wonder Badstein is up to its eyeballs in every kind of boundary-breaking Sangster et alii could get past the British Board of Film Censors. The Baron’s first act of freedom is to bite his mother, rendering her at once his progeny and his lover in passing. Their relationship is already over-intimate; she has acted for years as her son’s procurer, offering hospitality to easily missed travelers like Yvonne Monlaur’s Marianne only to play out the same game of sympathy-for-the-prisoner that ends each time in a meal. She is portrayed by Martita Hunt, David Lean’s Miss Havisham: an imperious, silver-haired aristocrat with haunted eyes who encourages her guest to dine and touches nothing herself.

Her scenes with the grateful, if slightly puzzled young woman play like a prelude to Báthory before we realize she is only the vampire’s enabler, his Renfield by more ordinary blood. (She is peculiarly more normal after her conversion. Her first postmortem encounter with Van Helsing even grants her true pathos, as she tries to converse with him without revealing her vampire’s teeth, the visible shame of what she bred and became and allowed to go on. Alone of the film’s undead, she is permitted a peaceful death; it is by her own request.) The vampire’s kiss is not only an orgasmic, but a procreative act. The grave is the new womb: a freshly turned girl is coaxed out of hers like an unsettling synonymy of mother and child, midwifed through her own undeath by the Baron’s old nurse. “Push, push! That’s right. Now, just one little effort more. You’ll soon be here. Come, my precious. That’s right. Come, my little love. The master’s waiting for you … There’s my clever one.” Her body in its lithe grave-clothes is neither infantile nor maternal; her fingers curl up from the dark earth like crocus roots, Kore-Persephone. The Baron proposes marriage to Marianne one moment, seduces and bites her friend and fellow-teacher Gina the next. And when Gina rises?

“Marianne, my darling Marianne. You haven’t forgotten your little Gina? Put your arms around me, please, I want to kiss you, Marianne. Please be kind to me. Say that you forgive me for letting him love me. We can both love him, my darling. He’s up at the old mill now. We can go there together. Come with me, Marianne.”

Even the film’s own sexual conventions are contravened, once they’ve run long enough for the audience to put stock in them. We know, because we have been following the body count, that the Baron turns women, kills men. Preempting anybody’s Yuletide request by at least four decades, the first confrontation between Dracula’s disciple and his killer ends with the homoeroticism cranked up to eleven as the Baron chokes out Van Helsing, throws him down on the mill’s hay bales and bites the good doctor while his undead brides watch wide-eyed, open-mouthed with delight. That Van Helsing is able to reverse the effects of his kiss by burning out the infection with hot iron and holy water is immaterial to the metaphor. But it is one more testament to Cushing’s extraordinary embodiment of a potentially offputting character that while the audience does trust him to find a way around the rules of vampirism as established by his own research over the last two movies, we are by no means sure how he’ll do it, and there’s no guarantee—if anything, we brace for the opposite—that it’ll be easy.

He’s the other presiding spirit of Brides, its real anchor to the first film. As previously hinted, I would watch Peter Cushing read the ingredients off a packet of cornflakes. Admiring an actor and liking a character, however, are two very different things. Going strictly by the position he occupies in Dracula and Brides of Dracula, I should find myself either bored with the Hammer Van Helsing or actively opposed to him. He stands against the forces of darkness when I am generally on the side of the monsters; he’s an avatar of order where I tend to favor subversion, drawing lines and holding them with the Enlightenment in one hand and the Church in the other; instead of an open-minded academic pulled into a situation too strange to explain away, he seems to be a monster slayer by self-appointment, making it his life’s work to study vampires so as to eradicate them all the more efficiently. The combination should be cracker-flat and fanatical, especially given the proven efficacy of Christian iconography in these films. Stoker’s professor employed holy water and wafers in his combat of the undead, but he was making it up as he went along. Straight off the page, Sangster’s Van Helsing has few such humanizing quirks. It is therefore up to Cushing to fill in the character with all the things the script doesn’t say and he does it splendidly.

Part of it is the quality alluded to earlier: that Cushing is, for lack of a better word, a very hurtable actor. Take the very last scene of Dracula. It’s a cold, desolate moment, with the sunlight paling through the hall and the rotten dust of Dracula blowing across the zodiac floor, and Van Helsing does not look righteous or triumphant, he looks tired and slightly bruised, wincing at the strain in his shoulder as he pulls his gloves back on. Not all the expressions on his face as he pinned the Count down with those two crossed candlesticks were hope or terror or resolve: Dracula’s pain appalled him and he knew no other way. He was alone then; he is alone now. Out in the daylight, never having entered Castle Dracula, the Holmwoods will heal without him. They have no blood on their hands. The same lonely poignancy characterizes the ending of The Brides of Dracula—regardless of whether one buys the shadowplay with the windmill (it works on the symbolic level, logical as a dream; it’s impossible to imagine it wouldn’t make life in a world even of lamps and moonshadows idiotically hard), it is a subdued and effective touch that Van Helsing closes the film holding on to Marianne, comforting her as the mill burns and the vampire corpses of her closest friend and her fiancé with it, drawing comfort from the fact that at least he was able to save her, and it is still night and they’re alone in it and there is no future for him in Badstein any more than there was in Karlstadt. He may behave like a knight-errant, but he has no illusions about his own invulnerability. Challenged by the new-turned Baroness—”Who is it that is not afraid?”—he gives a riddling, truthful answer: “Only God has no fear.” Keeping watch over her all night, he hunches his shoulders and chafes his hands in their fingerless gloves, no more impervious to cold than to pain or worry. He’s a driven man, not a complacent one.

There’s the other half of the character’s saving grace, Cushing’s sheer physicality—it is impossible to regard Van Helsing as a force for repression when he’s as flip on his feet as a fencer, as thoughtlessly agile in his body as he is flash-quick in his thoughts, and like anyone who possesses that degree of bodily grace, just beautiful to watch as he moves. If you are the sort of person who fantasizes about actors, you may wonder what else those lean clever hands are good for. If you prefer a more aesthetic appreciation, I rather like the way Van Helsing seems to have only the most academic understanding of stairs, taking them two or three at a time on the way up and more often than not just vaulting over the handrail on the way down. Either way, it’s a neat, nimble means of infusing the vampire hunter with as much charisma and invention as his prey, so that it doesn’t matter that we know nothing of him beyond the movie’s frame and his first name could be “Doctor” for all we’re told. That’s character acting. And he gets to do it as the protagonist. Packet of cornflakes, people.

And yet I am not sure, even as I write these words, that we need to know Van Helsing’s given name or the history of his dedication to vampire-hunting any more than we need the details of Baron Meinster’s youthful debaucheries. They are vivid as real people, but they’re not in a real world. They are dream-figures, swum up out of the shapeless forests through which Marianne runs, fainting, from the lie of a Gothic romance into an older folktale which she remembers like the fossil trace of the first time she came to Badstein, when she was the willing victim and accomplice of the handsome Baron who preyed on her students at the academy and Van Helsing was only a name to conjure with, a rumor around the death of his master Dracula. Stripped of her own history, she is even more the fairy-story innocent, not knowing to shiver in a world where terrible forces move beneath the surface of a smile, a familiar lure of narrative. Why does she accept the Baron’s proposal of marriage after all that occurred at the chateau? Why does the Baron abandon his ancestral home and nest in an abandoned windmill like an interloping Orlok? What does Marianne really remember of the night the Baroness fetched her from the inn? Is a giant cross made of shadows all that’s needed to defeat a vampire? Is there any point to the scenes with the apothecary? Why is that bat effect so dodgy, anyway? Another script might have answered all these questions seamlessly; I don’t know if it would linger so hauntingly in my mind, bright and dark instants fanned out like a hand of cards. They don’t tell a straight story, but they shuffle and deal a nightmare we know how to read. The whole night was like a bad dream, Marianne tells Van Helsing—I can hardly believe it happened. We dreamed it with her; we can.

The post I Can Hardly Believe It Happened: Terence Fisher’s The Brides of Dracula appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHE5YUNkssQ
Rodney Ascher’s 2012 documentary, Room 237, is, on the surface, an examination of some of the more outré readings of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The theorists involved are not only permitted ample time in which to present their readings, the documentary also seems to help them by way of animations, maps, and lengthy, even slowed-motion, scenes from the film in question. The piece has been (mis)read as a grab-bag of conspiracy theories, a mess of ultimately fruitless attempts to decode the original film, to discover its “true meaning.” This stance, however, that of expert analysis and map-making, is subtly undermined by Ascher’s techniques. Rather than fixing the “meaning” of The Shining, far from tracking down and identifying its elusive center, Room 237 destabilizes previously held assumptions about this film. By presenting a collage of interpretations in such a peculiar manner, this documentary casts doubt on the very possibility of finding such a center. Not only does the piece engage in this interpretive “free play,” it also hints at the very features of Kubrick’s film which encourage such an engagement.

In “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Jacques Derrida considers the structuring role of a center. Texts rely upon fixed points which “orient, balance, and organize the structure.”[1] In a work of fiction, such a center may be seen as either a represented object, relationship or situation, or (when the work is considered analytically) as a unifying theme, meaning or underlying code. Within the scope of narrative representation, for instance, an object such as Hitchcock’s “MacGuffin” (be it a buried treasure or a stolen formula) may serve as such a center. This item structures the narrative around it by providing motivation for characters and a definitive goal. A situation, while not so easily visualized, may still play a similar role in a structure. Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, for instance, is organized around what at first appears to be the simple case of a missing person. The film’s detective protagonist uncovers unpalatable and destabilizing facts throughout the course of that film, but he does so primarily by following the lines of inquiry suggested by the framework of a “missing person case.” The thematic center of a narrative is more difficult to identify, but is commonly thought to wait, like a pot of gold (or an Emerald City) at the end of a rainbow, for the arrival of the patient exegete. Derrida, in fact, refers to the center as a point which confers a certain stability upon the text. The assumption of the existence of such a center, he writes, promises “a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play.”[2] Even if every element of a given text is thought to mean something other than it presents itself to be, in other words, the existence of a “true” center, a final thematic core, promises to ground these elements in solid earth.

Room 237 examines several theories which attempt to perform such an interpretive grounding for The Shining. Based on everything from the model of typewriter Jack Torrance uses to the recurrence of the number forty-two, for instance, historian Geoffrey Cocks seeks to fix the Holocaust at the film’s dark heart. In a related effort, journalist Bill Blakemore argues for the centrality of the Native American genocide, pointing toward the Overlook Hotel’s placement atop an “Indian burial ground,” product placement involving Calumet baking powder, and the elevator’s bloody freight. Most amusing, though, is Jay Weidner’s theory that The Shining serves as Kubrick’s cryptic confession to having helped fake the moon landing. In a scene of bravura paranoid-critical reading, Weidner explains that Danny’s Apollo 11 sweatshirt and his entry into room 237 gives the entire game away.

A theoretically minded viewer may ultimately be surprised by the omission of even more obvious readings. Where is the Freudian gloss on The Shining, wherein a jealous Jack seeks to castrate his boy before Danny can consummate his relationship with his mother? How about the Marxist interpretation (after all, isn’t Jack supposed to retain his position until May first)? Derrida reminds us that “[s]uccessively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names.”[3] Although he was referring to the manner in which consecutive ontotheological epochs have sought to fix a center for Western thought (as the Logos, Will to Power, Being, etc.), this sentence could not more perfectly describe the struggle Room 237 depicts.[4] Each of these critics, however respectable or marginal their perspective, wishes to find in The Shining a stable center, a core which will unify the film’s often mysterious components. Many critics of the documentary have tended to read it as a straightforward presentation of these theories, as can be seen in the titles of some of these reviews (“Room 237 Claims Kubrick Faked the Apollo Moon Landing”), their references to “secret meanings” having been uncovered, and in their quickly fact-checked debunking of the facts adduced.[5]

Jacques Derrida, though, does not stop at the center, and his next move is one which sheds a different light on the game being played in Room 237. Once, he argues, the “structurality of structure had [begun] to be thought,”[6] once, that is, this role of the center was itself subjected to analysis, a rupture in interpretive discourse was opened which could not be easily closed. The center, heretofore thought of in terms of presence, “has never been itself, has always already been exiled from itself into its own substitute.”[7]

Rather than a transcendental signified, a core of indisputable meaning which radiates outward a stabilizing influence and a solid structure, the center must be seen as a vacant spot successively filled by place-holders. Instead of leading to stagnation, however, and a series of interpretive dead-ends, Derrida argues “[t]he absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely.”[8] Room 237 locates this “truth” in The Shining in such a subtle manner that its moves may easily be passed over as clever stylistics. These modes of presentation, though, precisely gesture towards what Derrida refers to as “freeplay” and not, as both the most confident theorists interviewed within the documentary and several of the critics outside it prefer, a roadmap to an ultimate meaning.

Room 237, unlike most critical works of its kind, radically foregrounds the cinematic text. Despite its apparent focus on the ways in which The Shining has been received, this documentary does not feature the talking heads typically on display in such a piece. While each of the theorists are given an onscreen introduction, Ascher does not once show their faces. Their words, instead, float across scenes from movies (primarily The Shining), as if they were recording a commentary track and not a documentary about their ideas. This movement displaces them from the authoritative role of the “expert,” that affixer of meaning whose presence is established and reasserted in each thoughtful portrait, each piercing glance. Had Room 237 stopped at such a gesture, though, some semblance of authority may have been retained. Instead, those bits of The Shining which are being examined are interrupted by scenes from other movies.

Kubrick’s movies are featured, of course, which is consonant with an auteur-theory driven piece. Regard a coherent body of cinematic work, they seem to say, thus implying another “ground” upon which interpretation may rest. These scenes, though, provide a silent, often ironic series of statements about the reception of film and thus, by extension, about Room 237’s featured theorists. While Jay Weidner, for instance, explains how his “uncovering” the truth about the faked moon landing has led to subtle persecution from the government, the viewer is treated to images of Tom Cruise wandering the lonely streets of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Cruise’s character (Bill) in that film is engaged in an act of ultimately fruitless hermeneutic disentanglement. Kubrick never explains whether Bill has indeed brushed up against a psychosexual conspiracy theory involving the highest classes of society or has merely run aground on his own paranoia, a neurosis born of his own sexual jealousy. This juxtaposition subtly suggests Weidner and his fellow theorists may be caught in the same bind. Another scene, this one lifted from A Clockwork Orange, implicitly compares Bill Blakemore’s need to write a piece about what The Shining is “about in larger senses”[9] with the character Frank Alexander’s attempts at writing. The latter is best known for not only being crippled by Alex and his “droogs,” but also for not being able to prevent his wife’s violation at their hands. Such a pairing suggests a similar impotence on the part of Room 237’s exegetes.

 Of even more relevance to Derrida’s critique are the scenes from non-Kubrickian cinema which are used to suture together Room 237’s narrative. Ascher interjects, several times throughout the documentary, bits of the Lamberto Bava-directed, Dario Argento-penned Demons series. These movies are reflexive, meta-cinematic pieces, and concern a horror film which infects the minds and bodies of those who watch it.

Significantly, Ascher does not use images of the violence and depravity which follows this infection, opting, instead, for seemingly benign scenes of people being seated in a theater (Demons) or watching the film on video (Demons 2). Aside from asserting Room 237’s place in the horrific canon, as well as gesturing humorously at the viewer’s position before infectious ideas, what might these scenes be meant to convey? Derrida reminds us that even the language with which the philosopher attempts to unseat the transcendental signified from its centrality is itself fatally compromised by the structuring influence of such presumed signifieds. Of such attempts, he writes “we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.”[10] Room 237’s use of Bava’s films suggests that not only does an audience find itself caught within the richly ambiguous The Shining, the critics are caught there as well. Had Ascher chosen scenes from another reflexive piece of horror cinema (Ringu, for instance, or Sinister), the implications may not have been so dire. The latter two movies-within-movies are decodable, structured: they relate messages which, interpreted correctly, yield either an escape from doom or, at the very least, some understanding of the fate which is to befall the viewer-character. Demons, however, offers no such exit. The best one can do is to survive the ride. Derrida argues that metaphysical “destructive discourses are trapped in a kind of circle.”[11] This circle is structured around whatever shiny new center the producer of the discourse has discovered, that which they believe has securely displaced the older, flawed one. Room 237’s featured interpreters, or at least those who have settled on an ultimate meaning hidden within Kubrick’s film, those who have “decoded” it, are caught most firmly in its grip, unable to escape. Critic John Fell Ryan, arguably the “post-modernist” of the bunch, makes this point explicit, while discussing the reasons Kubrick layered his film with so many complexities: “It’s a way of trapping someone like me… You’re like, ‘Man, I’ve been, I’ve been trapped in this hotel forever’.”[12] They are caught within a narrative discourse already deeply implicated by a missing center. These features within (or on the surface of) The Shining are what we must turn to next.

 Although Kubrick’s film is regularly described as being one about a haunting and a possession, the director was careful to maintain a sense of ambiguity comparable to that achieved by Henry James in his The Turn of the Screw. As with the latter piece, an attentive viewer is encouraged to hesitate between at least two interpretations of what happened to the central figures. Are the ghosts of the Overlook tearing the Torrance family apart, or are they being driven mad by isolation and the mere suggestion of the supernatural?

When not providing space for wilder flights of interpretation, Room 237 highlights this narrative tension and, in doing so, intensifies it. Ascher’s interviewees, for instance, point out what might otherwise be considered continuity errors (if these elements were even noticed). A chair behind Jack disappears and then reappears between takes, the carpet pattern on which Danny sits prior to his exploration of room 237 changes between shots, Jack’s view of the hedge maze switches to an overhead shot of that labyrinth in a disorientating manner, and etcetera. Room 237 even features an avant-garde experiment in which The Shining is shown backward and forward simultaneously, yielding several disturbing cases of synchronicity which in themselves seem to mutely argue for different interpretations. Kubrick never allows two characters to experience the supernatural at the same time, further problematizing any simple reading of the film. The doubling effects present throughout The Shining (in the form of the two Gradys, Danny and his invisible friend Tony, and, of course, those infamous twins) find an echo in much of its most memorable dialogue. Grady urges Jack to “correct”[13] his family, Jack’s drink is “on the house,”[14] and even Wendy engages in double-speak when trying to downplay Jack’s violence while speaking with Danny’s doctor. These ambiguities go even further to widen the gap between the most common readings, proposing, as it were, a doubled narrative, one laid wraith-like and all but invisible over the other. Most of these effects are clearly intended, but what role do they play in the film’s reception and interpretation?

 Centers of representation (in The Shining: whether or not the haunting is real) impinge on and help to determine thematic centers (here: what meanings can be presumed to lie behind the story). Representational closure is a center “which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions”[15], fixing a text and providing the materials necessary to derive a solid meaning from it. Unbound by a stable core, by that transcendental signified which might otherwise tie the disparate pieces of a discourse into a coherent meaning, a given text is opened up to Derridean freeplay. This freeplay, however, does not seem to exist within a text entirely given over to a welter of disconnected words or images. Derrida suggests as much when he writes (of the field within which freeplay can be engaged), “[t]his field permits these infinite substitutions only because it is finite … because instead of being an inexhaustible field … there is something missing from it.”[16]

The poststructuralist project, particularly as practiced by Derrida, does aim at un-centering (virtually) every text it examines, but some works lend themselves more readily to this effort than others. The Shining provides a framework, linear and tied (through the use of generic tropes) to a rich tradition of Western horror fictions, but this surface is deceptively coherent. Through his persistent use of ambiguity and the production of aporia in his cinematic text, Kubrick encourages the sort of interpretive moves illustrated in Room 237. That any of them may prove “true,” though, is unlikely, as the very ambiguities which stimulate such readings also undermine them. Any secret meaning (determined by Weidner, Blakemore or others) is an addition, and “this addition is a floating one because it comes to perform a vicarious function, to supplement a lack on the part of the signified.”[17] The mystery of the Overlook is one which The Shining refuses to see dissolved, even to the last shot.  Far from solving these enigmas, the photograph on which the film closes amplifies them, and possibly adds yet another potential reading.[18]

 When questioned by Danny on the contents of room 237, Hallorann tells him “Nothing. There ain’t nothing in room 237.”[19] Hallorann is, diegetically speaking, trying to dissuade Danny from entering the room, but his statement comes eerily close to describing The Shining’s lack of a coherent, organizing center. The “nothing” within 237 is not the banal lack of mystery Hallorann would like Danny to believe.[20] It is, rather, a horrific and productive emptiness. Despite these indications, however, it would be a mistake to see The Shining as itself limited to being a self-reflexive commentary on the absence of a transcendental signified. Were it so, this very lack would become a new center which would ground the piece, probably spoiling the entire effect.

The freeplay which the film encourages is, however, an important feature, one which no doubt plays a significant role in the affective response the film has provoked in several generations of film-goers. It also suggests brand new ways in which creators of dark fiction may disturb their audiences. These are productive ambiguities, stimulating lacunae. Their deliberate manufacture takes more thought, more aesthetic sensitivity than might be imagined by those who think this all a bit of smoke and mirrors. Such a labyrinth must be constructed with exquisite care and then, vitally, it must be hidden beneath the surface of a story with more conventional narrative pleasures. Room 237 brings this feature of The Shining into relief by exposing the text to a series of radical interpretations, while simultaneously positioning these readings within a more ambiguous narrative structure. Had the documentary privileged any one of these theories by way of direct address or by excluding all others, the piece could be seen as seeking to fill the lack at the heart of the Overlook with a new center.[21] Instead, it helps further open a text in which the doors have already been left slyly cracked, proving that (as the documentary’s subtitle would have it), there are indeed many ways in, but no way out.

The post Many Ways In, No Way Out: Rodney Ascher’s “Room 237” and the Overlook’s Empty Center appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

If you are a weird person (and the chances of that, considering you read Weird Fiction Review, are fairly high), then you most likely discovered this salient fact about yourself when you were young. Some discover this in preschool, but middle school, for many of us, was the moment we realized we fit in with our peers about as well as would an alien being. For others, though, high school is the lonely, garishly lit stage on which their oddities are exposed for the first time. Everyone, granted, feels to varying degrees that they do not fit in, particularly when caught in that rush of hormones, unfamiliar urges, peer pressure, nascent antagonism against adults, and general misery which characterizes the teen years. Let us grant further, however, that some people are (or feel) stranger than others. Whether this alienation arises from external differences (racial status, non-conformity with gender expectations, economic status, national origin, sexual orientation, physical disabilities or distinctions) or those of a more subtle “interior” sort (psychological/emotional peculiarities, for instance, or a divergence of aesthetic preferences) simply does not matter in the end: if you are made to feel weird, you will most likely become even weirder. Many of us come to embrace our oddity, to turn it into a strength, a solace, even a career. Plenty of us, though, do not, cannot, and fall. Excision, a searing, subversive horror film from first-time director Richard Bates, Jr., concerns one very weird teenage girl, Pauline. Her quest to make something useful out of the very qualities which drive people from her drives this narrative, but the film delivers a plethora of other delights as well.

Pauline is played with ferocity and undeniable talent by AnnaLynne McCord. Cult television viewers may know McCord from her stint as the conniving Eden Lord on Nip/Tuck or possibly from the new 90210, but it is in Excision that McCord really shines. Awkward, ungainly, and pimpled, Pauline, on paper, sounds like a character to be pitied. Her parents despair of her, her peers are repulsed, and her estimation of her own talents seems wildly out of proportion to her abilities. Pauline, however, has qualities which raise her to another category than that of the loser: the wretch. Comparisons between Excision and Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse are inevitable, but limited. Dawn Wiener, from the latter movie, or Napoleon Dynamite, from his eponymous film, arouse uneasy empathy in those of us who identify with them, and something closer to Schadenfreude in those of us who do not. Pauline is a stronger figure, drawn with a bolder brush. What has driven Pauline into the margins of human experience is never explained (though she herself tosses out a semi-mocking diagnosis), but it has charged her with an élan vital and a vision which are nearer magnificence than they are bathos. She is, in this, more akin to Donnie Darko (in the film of the same name) than any other teen outcast character. You may fear Pauline, throughout the trajectory of her story, or you may cheer her, but you will likely never sneer. I, for one, am heartened to see such a strong, self-contained role written for a young woman, and I hope Excision helps expand the field of female characters.

McCord’s portrayal of Pauline is aided and abetted by a cast culled from a broad range of cult television and film. Roger Bart (familiar to fans of Desperate Housewives, Hostel: Part II, and the chilling The Midnight Meat Train[1]) plays her bewildered father Bob in a role which would typically be comprised of a handful of clichés. Director-writer Bates, though, develops Bob and Pauline’s mother, Phyllis, more fully, more humanely. Traci Lords (known for her appearances in John Waters’ films as well as for a youthful career which is a story in itself) embodies Phyllis incredibly. Torn between suburban vanity, emotional blindness, and a faltering love for her daughter, Phyllis tries in all the worst ways to bring her daughter out of herself. Eluding, again, one-dimensional characterization, Bates and Lords invest Phyllis with depth which slowly but surely reveals itself over the course of the film. In a fair world (one in which The Silence of the Lambs was not one of only two horror movies ever to have been nominated for the Best Picture award), both McCord and Lords would have at least have been considered for Oscars. Excision is rounded out by a cast of cameos so pleasing, and so appropriate, they make their own thematic sense. As several other reviewers have argued, almost every recognizable actor/actress in this movie has weathered a life characterized by bad beginnings, trials, and/or weird reputations. Their very presence is a reminder that it is possible to come out the other side of a troubled youth a stronger, even productive person. I restrain myself from listing them all because I think the surprise is a real pleasure of the film (though the trailer posted below gives the whole game away). I will say that television’s worst and most loving father makes an appearance as a helpless principal, and that John Waters plays a straight-laced minister, which is hilarious and wrong on so many levels.

The world into which Excision thrusts its viewers from its first shot is one of surrealistic madness, a realm of depraved pleasures and irrational causation Luis Buñuel and Clive Barker may have dreamt up together, had we ever been so fortunate to see such a pairing. I have posted the first of these at the top of this review, as it is an appropriate introduction to this film. This is Pauline’s dream-world, an oddly clinical space in which the most gruesome, and puzzling, of tableaux play out. Eros and Thanatos, gods of sex and death, seem to rule this realm in amicable partnership. Sensuality, here, is married to cruelty, and orgasms entwined with mutilations. Bates only rarely slips into this space, but it slyly contaminates the film. This bright-line drawn between fantasy and banality contributes to the mystery of Pauline and the film overall, rather than serving as a cop-out. The vivid nature of these visions as well as their symbolic opacity brings to mind the work of avant-garde filmmaker Matthew Barney. In Excision, however, unlike in Barney’s Cremaster Cycle, the narrative grounds these visions, gives them a context. Pauline’s own relationship with them seems primarily enthusiastic, even erotic. They drive her onwards, yet despite her snarling and semi-sociopathic manner, she is also motivated by love and the desire for acceptance. One question the film subtly poses: how far apart are our exterior selves, those masks we wear in public, those masks with which we often fool even ourselves, and the teeming, anarchic, bizarre life within? Pauline’s case may be extreme, but somewhere inside the most placid of people lies a strange world of unresolved tensions, opaque nightmares, and unspeakable desires. Deep inside, everyone is weird. Our fundamentally strange subjectivity may be repressed, disguised, or sublimated, but can it ever really be removed? Be excised? Should it be? This question becomes ever more urgent as Excision moves towards its climax precisely because the distance between Pauline’s worlds is shrinking. Every adult in her life seems incapable of recognizing what is happening to this girl, and they miss opportunities in which they could have helped channel her raw vision. The more one empathizes with Pauline, even comes to admire her for her headstrong will to be herself and no one else, the more one winces at every such missed chance.

As dark and full of heartache as I am making this sound, though, I do want to point out just how funny Excision is. Bart and Waters, in particular, as well as the other cameo appearances, provide much needed relief from the potency of Pauline’s struggles. Phyllis, in her completely clueless attempts to tame her daughter, ends up orchestrating a disastrous (and hilarious) evening at the cotillion. Pauline herself, far from being grim or melancholy, is a smart-ass, a prankster. Her struggles with faith, popularity, and parental pressures are a rich source of humor Bates mines effortlessly. She delivers all the best one-liners, many of which take on added weight when one re-watches the movie. If one of Judy Blume’s characters had opened the Lament Configuration (in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser) and spent a season with the sadomasochistic Cenobites, she may have come out looking a lot like Excision’s heroine. Her attitude towards menses, for instance, while inevitably shocking to those of us living in gynophobic societies, is somehow refreshing, serving as a counterpoint to the self-loathing shown by one of her cinematic cousins, the lovely Carrie White. Rather than clashing with the darker, unhappy, even nightmarish qualities of the film, these moments of wit and absurdity serve to underscore them, to invest them with a humanity often lacking from horror movies.

Excision, alongside other relatively recent female-centric horror movies such as The Descent, May, Haute Tension and Triangle, points the genre in some fruitful directions. While antagonistic interpretations could certainly be made of the film, I think it serves as a great example of a horror movie which does not rely on women being victims or sexual predators. Excision instead foregrounds its female characters to such a degree that most of the male figures merely hover in the background. The movie passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. More generally, as a depiction of what it is like to be a weird teenager struggling with the acceptance of oneself and others, I found it to be truthful. Pauline is ultimately an endearing character (definitely an unforgettable one) despite her flaws and some of the dark places to which it takes her. Richard Bates Jr., with the indispensable help of AnnaLynne McCord and Traci Lords, has created a movie which fearlessly tackles taboos and the weird and wrings a surprisingly moving tale from it.

The post The World Within Her: A Review of Richard Bates Jr.‘s “Excision” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

[Editor’s Note: The following embedded video is not a trailer, but in fact the entire film of Stalker. Many of Tarkovsky’s films are in the public domain and can now be viewed for free online and elsewhere.]

http://youtu.be/MUoog4wd8j8

In Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, three men leave the confines of a rotting Eastern European city and walk through a pleasant-looking rural setting. Their destination is a room which sits at the center of this countryside, a room in which dreams are rumored to be fulfilled. This strange landscape is the Zone, the site of a metaphysical trauma around which armed guards patrol. Twenty years ago, an object thought to be a meteorite crashed here, and countless people went missing in the vicinity. The Zone was cordoned off, and is now protected with such zealotry that people are shot down rather than be permitted to slip into it. Despite looking benign, even cheerful (next to the grim realities of the city), the Zone is said to be protected by obscure traps, all but unpredictable dangers which have destroyed careless questers for years. As a result of this situation, a new profession has arisen, that of the Stalkers. Part tour guide, part coyote, part spiritual advisor, these people bring their customers into and through the beautiful, perilous Zone, offering counsel on what might be accomplished in the wish-granting room all the while. Tarkovsky works all this material into a profound, eerily quiet meditation on faith, nihilism and hope. Had Ingmar Bergman decided to tackle science fiction, he may have produced a film equally fascinating, but Tarkovsky’s vision was, and remains, a unique entry in weird cinema.

Stalker is visually quite arresting. Tarkovsky uses color to set apart the different worlds, filming the scenes set in Stalker’s home city in gloriously dismal sepia and those in the Zone in color. That city is a grim glimpse of a thoroughly industrialized and poverty-stricken future. Everything seems to be leaking or cracked and the sounds of machinery predominate. The people are as exhausted and worn down as their surroundings. The Zone, however, is lush and green, an organic profusion of growth and chaos which creates a stark contrast to the decaying rigidity of the city. Old and abandoned mechanisms litter the fields of the Zone, remains of the human habitation which were displaced by the bizarre catastrophe two decades ago. Clearly, the authorities attempted to evacuate as many people as possible: what look like tanks and other implements of war are strewn throughout the Zone. Oddly, though, the sight of these hunks of metal rotting in bucolic glades and valleys is serene, even calming, rather than dispiriting. An undercurrent of eeriness underlies these scenes, certainly, as we do not know what sort of force could have turned back such power. And yet, the impression of nature absorbing back into itself the most brutal of devices dreamt up by humanity lends a peaceful aura to the Zone. Deeper inside, as the film’s protagonists approach that mysterious room, this world takes on a more cryptic air. Shortly before they reach it, Tarkovsky’s camera glides across images of drowned detritus, a strange two-minute floating gaze which seems to herald their arrival at the heart of the mystery. Within a warren of rooms, they find one covered in sand dunes, a sight simultaneously creepy and beautiful. Stalker unfolds itself in these small, still ways, content to suggest far more than it will show, possibly far more than other movies even try to show.

This succession of dreamlike images has a cumulative effect, one out of reach to movies in which the weird is presented in a more straightforward, heavy special-effects manner. Stalker has inspired later movies as well as literature with its evocative setup. Cube, for instance, with its enigmatic setting and bizarre traps, seems to me a descendant of Tarkovsky’s film, as does YellowBrickRoad. This film, however, takes a radically different path than most of those in “genre cinema,” which may explain why it is rarely cited as a great “SciFi” movie when it in fact is. Andrei Tarkovsky was a prime example of the filmmaker as poet, and that is precisely how Stalker is best approached: as a poem. The premise of the film, baldly stated, may mislead viewers into expecting something closer to a monster movie, or a travel through alien territories. That is unfortunate, as disappointment and confusion may obscure an appreciation for what Stalker has to offer. This film is a cousin to such stories, but a subtler, dreamier and, in the end, more puzzling one. At two-and-a-half hours, Stalker means to immerse you in its spell. Tarkovsky uses this time not to introduce lots of plot convolutions or fast-paced set-pieces, but rather as a way to dwell on the encounter between three men and their interactions, as well as on their intentions in seeking out the room at the center of the Zone. While his camera meditates on the quiet, potentially doom-laden landscapes of the Zone, Tarkovsky’s characters engage in a series of increasingly contentious philosophical arguments and personal attacks.

The Stalker on which the film centers (who bears an amusing resemblance to Woody Harrelson) is drawn to the Zone like an addict to a fix. At the beginning of the movie his wife angrily tries talking him out of going back to his precious Zone, but he calmly rejects her pleas. They have a daughter together, a crippled girl named Monkey, who suffers from disabilities apparently brought on by her father’s repeated visits to the Zone. He has been recently released from prison for his excursions into the forbidden area, and she fears he will get an even longer sentence. The Stalker, however, feels his everyday life is already a prison. From the beginning, we see signs that he regards the Zone as an oasis in his gritty, down-trodden life, as a salvation from the position of non-entity in which he finds himself in the city. What we cannot be sure of is just how much his psychological bond with the alien space informs his explanations of it. This is an ambiguity which his customers will recognize and verbalize. Is the Stalker preternaturally attuned to the dangers of the Zone, to its muted voice? Or is it merely a space in which this working-class schmuck gets to play sherpa and guru to clients wealthier and more respected than he? The Stalker is weary of the clichéd and low-minded desires of his charges. They enter this miracle, this space which is virtually holy to someone such as himself, all motivated by venal desires for revenge, for money, for professional advancement. One of these clients is the Writer, a shabby, talkative man who despairs of ever writing anything of lasting worth. He treats the Zone carelessly, at least at first, as his cynicism barely lets him conceive of anything beyond his own tired comprehension. While he grows more wary of the dangers this place may pose, the Writer’s nihilism just seems to grow more rank. His literary output is little more than “squeezing out hemorrhoids,” and even the production of a deathless work of literature may not be enough to wish for. The Professor, the third of this merry bunch, claims to have a more objective purpose in his visit to the Zone. He wishes to study this space, a region fascinating to scientists but one which has been inaccessible since the government closed off the area. He comes to disdain the Stalker’s superstitious fears regarding the traps in the Zone and he despises the Writer’s endless palaver. As they move deeper into the Zone, he more confidently strides across barriers the Stalker insists must be respected, and he behaves as if he is on nothing more than a field trip. But is he actually indifferent to the Zone’s ominous reputation, or does he have secret intentions of his own?

The arguments between these men slowly close in upon Stalker’s central concerns: the relationship between hope and reality, the vagaries of human intentions, the need for mystery. The Professor seems intent on measuring the forces at work within the Zone. He is, the Writer claims, “putting miracles to an algebra test.” Even the seemingly supernatural granting of wishes, this materialist believes, will leave some physical trace, something which can be measured (or annihilated, for that matter). A disappointed idealist (that is, a nihilist), the Writer expects little good to come of hope. He would agree with Friedrich Nietzsche, that great enemy of nihilism, in one respect, when the philosopher wrote of Pandora’s Box and the final horror it conceals: “Hope: in reality it is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of Man” (Human All Too Human). While the Writer seems to be searching for new inspiration, his journey into the Zone may actually be the act of a doom-eager man, a man hoping to lose hope. If he can only see this last great mystery demystified and proven to be worthless, then how can he owe the world anything more than the filth he has already given it? The nature of the Zone may even be amenable to this cynical desire. According to the Stalker, the wretched have a better chance of surviving a trip through it, while hopeful people seem to fall prey more easily to its dangers.

For the Stalker, though, the Zone is itself a last hope. It gives him a meaning along with a profession, a vision of greater purpose than any afforded in the depressing world outside. More pragmatically, he is tempted to use the room to wish away the ill effects his genes have conferred on his daughter. He is frightened, though, to ask for something. His mentor in Stalking, a man named Porcupine, once broke the rule that admonishes Stalkers not to use their travels for their own selfish ends. Porcupine retired from Stalking, became rich, then hung himself. The succession of causes which produced these effects are only explained when the group reaches the room, but they explain much of the Stalker’s ambivalence over asking the Zone for what he desires the most, the healing of his daughter Monkey. Finally, though, it is the effect the Zone has as a mystery on these characters that reveals not only the depths of their characters, but also one potential meaning the alien space may hold in Tarkovsky’s film.

In the claustrophobic world Stalker presents to us, the Zone is the only open space, it is a clearing in which the new can become manifest. In it, the laws of nature are supposedly suspended, ready to shift with little notice. Flowers are scentless in the Zone, as if they form part of a façade just barely maintained. The room brings out the hidden desires of those who reach it, fulfilling not those daydreams which people carry around in their conscious minds, but rather the deeper wishes, even those which are horrid. The Zone works like the imagination, and that is where I see the focus of this film. Tarkovsky seems to be wrestling with, among other things, his artistry, the very eye through which we are seeing this story. Going into the Zone involves trying to be attuned to a shifting landscape, a world which changes in accord with its visitors. Every work of art which transcends mere didacticism or advertising changes in similar ways based on its reader, its listener, its viewer. The imagination poses a threat to the most literal and materialistic of worldviews, as it threatens to disrupt all those tidy little categories into which the world is supposed to fit. Creativity threatens, as the Professor seems to intuit, not only the established order but also the very way in which order comes to be established. Lest that sound like an empty platitude, consider the role charisma and the use and abuse of art has played in movements from Nazism to the struggle for human rights. What sort of threat could imagination pose to members of the intelligentsia, though, or to artists? The Writer, for one, may represent a nihilistic strand of the same. This sort of creature, whether affecting ennui or the endlessly parodic manner of the thorough-going “post-modernist,” depends on the perception of the imagination as being exhausted. You can only declare “The Novel (or Poetry or Film or etc.) is Dead” if you can successfully avoid a brush with creativity. If Tarkovsky identifies with anyone in this film, it is obviously the Stalker: a frustrated poet, a man haunted by what he is leaving future generations and how much better a job he could have done. The Stalker stands vulnerable to the Zone, respectful of it, yet also aware of its treacherous and changeable nature. He knows this realm cannot be wrestled into stable categories and he knows a reckless, cynical approach will yield nothing but ashes. That the Zone, as interpreted in this way, could be seen as a threat to ardent materialists and burnt-out intellects should come as no surprise.

The threat such a space presents totalitarian governments is more obvious. Tyrannical regimes, be they based on extreme political ideologies, fanatic religious interpretations, or simply on the cult of some personality, all depend on the suppression of the imaginations of their subjects. After all, the imagination may enable the public to envision a better system of governance than the utopian system under which they slave; creativity may strip orthodoxies of their thin veneer of verisimilitude, exposing the myths hiding beneath the claim of absolute truth. The creative imagination can be particularly troublesome to hero cults, be it through the sort of de-idealization at work in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (in which the heroes of the Iliad are exposed as drunken louts, fame-hungry fools, and sociopaths) or in the more humanizing, though admiring, portraits we see in films such as Spielberg’s recent Lincoln. Creativity, be it political, imaginative, metaphysical or even erotic, is a constant threat to those who would impose rigid systems on humanity. The Zone is patrolled for a reason, and not simply that suggested by the Professor at the end of the film.

Whatever the Zone may be said to “stand for,” Tarkovsky lays down a striking hint at the end of the film that it has not finished having its say. In the last two minutes of Stalker, he not only upends many of the conclusions viewers may have reached, he does so with a casual, rather self-assured gesture. I first saw this movie when I was 17, and I must admit I missed it at first. I had to rewind and watch those two minutes again. I still remember the goosebumps which accompanied that sight. I imagine for many viewers, as it did for me, that ending retroactively changed the mood of everything I had just watched. Give it a try and see what the Zone provokes in you.

The post In the Zone: An Excursion into Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film “Stalker” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

You’ve seen this story before, or so you think.

Seven schoolgirls encounter a malevolent force in an isolated old mansion. As this entity picks them off, one by one, the survivors struggle to unearth a mystery which stretches back decades, hoping they may find a way to live through what was supposed to be an idyllic weekend in the country. Cue the inventive death scenes, cue the gore. Any simplified plot summary of Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 film Hausu is bound to sound this commonplace, this trite. What such a bare synopsis fails to capture, though, is the sheer weirdness of this movie, the cinematic anarchy Obayashi unleashed on audiences in the guise of a spooky tale. Hausu is equal parts goofy kids’ movie and gory horror flick. Imagine The Evil Dead as written by a ten-year girl, and you may get close to the heart of this amazing little movie. That Hausu preceded Sam Raimi’s seminal work by four years makes this work even more impressive. That this movie actually sustains its bifurcated tone throughout, sensitively treading an all too lightly explored boundary between childish fantasy and bloody nightmare, is almost miraculous.

In the late seventies, Japanese director Obayashi was asked to dream up a movie which would capitalize on the success of the recently released Jaws. Eschewing the giant animal trope which was already becoming cliché, Obayashi sought a more private vision of fear. His cracked genius revealed itself in his choice of a co-creator. Rather than analyzing industry trends to get an idea of what was scary, Obayashi asked his daughter, Chigumi, what she found frightening. His grade-school daughter. The film which resulted from this strange collaboration is a bizarrely tender testament to just how seriously he must have taken her fears. Piano lessons, grim old clocks, fluffy cats, that sweet yet eerie old relative you are forced to visit: Hausu manages to capture some of those strange fears to which children seem prey. The style with which Obayashi presents these nightmares is serious, rather bloodily so (I would not recommend this movie for the viewing of nervous kids), yet is also strangely naïve, even cute.

Our heroine, Gorgeous, and her friends Prof, Sweet, Mac, Fantasy, Melody and Kung Fu (one guess as to just how descriptive these names are of the characters who bear them), go on a road trip to visit her aunt. Along the way, they pick up an oddly persistent white cat and meet a creepy watermelon salesman whom one can only imagine must be the rural Japanese equivalent of those leering hillbillies teens run across in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and its cinematic descendants. Auntie, though, seems to be a sweetheart. She quickly engages the girls with stories and games, and urges them to make her home their own. Her life was spoiled by tragedy and the Japanese involvement in World War II, but her memories strike her visitors as more romantic than ominous. It is only as night falls that the girls realize there is something wrong with this bucolic setting. One of them goes missing, and another finds herself forced to do battle with a severed head. The girls come across hideous traps disguised as the most banal, even pleasant facets of domesticity. Their pluck and wit, the energy with which they confront these dangers, is a welcome surprise in a film created when the second wave of feminism had only just begun to find its footing. Kung Fu, in particular, is (surprise, surprise) a badass girl who made her debut when Joss Whedon was only 13 years old. The girls’ nightmare adventure builds to a blood-soaked climax which more than justifies comparison with the later works of Raimi.

Punctuating this creepy narrative, though, are scenes of shameless silliness. An entirely unmotivated (but amusing) pratfall heralds this aspect of the movie before the girls even set off on their trip. This slapstick moment (complete with sped-up footage and a posterior stuck in a bucket) seems to aggressively challenge the viewer. “You came prepared for the gore,” the director seems to ask, “but are you ready for this too?” The girls are drawn with broad strokes, their most memorable characteristics not only captured in their names but also etched into almost every line of dialogue. For all that, though, they are more interesting than the average teen brought to the slaughtering floor in most slasher flicks. When they arrive in the country, Obayashi reveals the surrounding landscape with the cinematic equivalent of a pun, another indication that Hausu is operating simultaneously in two registers. These visual hijinks continue even as the tone of the film darkens. An abortive rescue attempt ends in an encounter presented as though filmed through a View-Master (ask your parents), and in possibly the most bizarre transformation in horrific cinema. Another character dances with a skeleton in a scene ripped from some lost and deranged Disney movie. The death sequences themselves often combine the ludicrous and the disturbing. One such set-piece, involving a piano, is already on its way to becoming a part of cult film history.

Despite the violence and the goofiness (or perhaps precisely because of their combination), Hausu bears a strangely melancholy core. Before the film slips into its scary gear, we learn that Gorgeous lost her mother fairly recently. Her father has begun seeing an ethereal young woman, Ryoko, whose long hair and white scarf billow dreamily about her even when unaccompanied by wind. Just before her trip, Gorgeous finds she is to have a new step-mom, a revelation which crushes her cheerful spirit. Auntie’s own tale is a rather sad one, a story which spoke, one imagines, even more loudly in the seventies, when plenty of Japan’s wartime soldiers and their families were still alive and struggling with those lost years of Empire and atomic bombs. And, once more, some of the fates met by the girls are characterized by competing emotional tones. One death, which involves a clock, struck this viewer as simultaneously the most haunting and the saddest scene in the film, and for reasons which are hard to analyze.

In fact, the latter clause sums up a great deal of my own experience of this movie. Hausu’s genre-blending style, as well as its outlandish palette of emotional colors, defies most analysis. Perhaps, if this movie finds itself a place in the eyes of future movie-watchers, it will eventually seem more readable. As for now, the most obvious theme that presents itself is one familiar to most critiques of horror film: sexual maturation. Boys are entirely absent from this film, and men make only the most fleeting, ridiculous appearances, but Gorgeous and her friends are posed on the cusp of growing up. That a sad tale of young love gone awry precedes the horrors they face seems more than incidental. Many of the girls dream of future romance, but they are equally concerned with maintaining their identity. The climax of the film certainly seems to suggest the onset of menses, as do some of the ways the girls die. Even when watched with this in mind, though, Hausu does not necessarily sing that same sick old Puritanical song suggested by so many other movies in which sexual awakening and death are relentlessly equated. Growing into a sexual persona does mean death to much that is childish in us, but the film implies that this needs not mean extinction.

Regardless of subtext and potential meanings, Hausu is a relentlessly entertaining movie for anyone who can accept its peculiar blend of genres. This mixture of the absurd, the grotesque, and the pathetic (in that old sense of “pathos-laden”) will leave viewers with any number of reactions. Plenty will find it too weird to countenance, while others find it hilarious, endearing, and even fairly disturbing. As weird a film as it is, Hausu is nicely situated for a future in cinematic history: this strange flick, deadly pianos, pratfalls and all, has not been released on DVD through Troma Entertainment or a similar purveyor of fun-yet-trashy movies. It has instead found a home in the Criterion Collection, the current home of most of Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa’s pieces. While Hausu will likely not be mentioned very often in the same breath as these filmmakers, it may prove influential now that it has finally found widespread release. Takashi Miike’s wonderful Happiness of the Katakuris (2001) must be considered one of Hausu’s descendants, whether directly or not, and if you enjoyed the latter you will find plenty to entertain you in Obayashi’s film. By turns silly, horrific, cartoonish, melancholy, and, at times, sublime, Hausu is always a surreal and unpredictable experience.

The post The Cutest Nightmare You Ever Did See: A Review of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s “Hausu” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

A father and his daughter, while strolling through a field, come across a tiny orphaned creature. The poor thing’s mother has just been killed by a callous group of children and the girl takes pity on it, asking if she can keep it as a pet. After a lecture on responsibility, her father agrees to let her bring it home with them. The girl plays games with this little stray, chases it around the house, and even cradles it while she does her homework. Their bond seems only threatened by her animal’s disinclination to wear the costumes she picks out for it, as well as her father’s increasing doubts as to the suitability of this new animal.    This is a scenario familiar from any number of “pet” narratives, but we are in the world of René Laloux’s cult classic Fantastic Planet (1973): the girl and her father are massive, blue-skinned members of the Draag species and their new pet is a baby human boy.

Fantastic Planet follows this boy, Terr, through his childhood and into a rebellious adolescence. The girl, Tiva, telepathically absorbs her school lessons through a headset device, lessons in which she innocently allows Terr to participate. All the trivia a reluctant student may be expected to memorize (geography, biology, philosophy) acts as a primer in discontent for the young human. Laloux presents this information in disorientating chunks, a pleasantly realistic depiction of what it would really be like to be exposed to an alien world. Terr comes to resent his treatment as a pet, to yearn for a freedom he can only find outside this gilded cage. Humans (known to the Draag as “Om”) age far more rapidly than their giant keepers, setting the stage for strange conflicts between this boy and his owner. Not much more than a season passes for her, while Terr grows into a headstrong youth. Tiva’s father, one of the leaders of the Draag, shows more and more distrust of his daughter’s pet, and is inclined to see the Om as more a pest than anything else. Eventually, Terr sees his chance and takes it: he escapes the dubious comforts of Tiva’s care and flees into the wilderness beyond this Draag city. Beyond, he will find a rough-hewn tribe of free humans, as well as a world filled with bizarre and dangerous creatures. This community faces the possibility of genocide by way of pesticide, as many of the Draag wish to rid their planet of this nuisance species forever. The newest member of the Om society, however, may bring them their salvation in an unexpected form. The struggles of this tiny society, and the attempts the Draag make to squelch it, form the majority of this tale.

Though such a brief summary may make Fantastic Planet sound like any number of dystopian/revolutionary movies, a number of factors converge to make this one unique in the history of Weird cinema. The animation, to begin with the most obvious component, is unlike anything an audience is likely to have seen before. Laloux used a cutout technique now made more familiar to American audiences by the series South Park; in Fantastic Planet, though, this process lends a dreamy cast to the story, and not simply a silly one. The sensation it gives is one of watching a bizarrely illustrated storybook coming to life. Humans, here, resemble gaunt, often haunted paper dolls, scrambling through a world too massive to take much notice of them. On this weird planet, humanity occupies a place not much higher than ants do in ours. Giant birds, insects and even plants threaten their existence. Watching tiny humans picked off, swallowed whole, or crushed by massive aliens disorients Laloux’s audience, reminding us that our own ecological niche, secure as it so often seems to be, is far more fragile than we’d like to think. In an environment abounding in surrealistic grotesques, the Om seem oddly out of place. The landscape itself resembles something like a collaboration between Jonathan Swift and Salvador Dali, somehow simultaneously stark and horrifically lush. Laloux, though, gives us a world more complex than a hellscape. The Draag, for instance, with their blue skin and wide red eyes, are ethereal beings, beautiful and not simple monstrosities. Crystal dew forms in the mornings and even temporarily encases a terrified Terr. We see animals trapping and devouring one another in surprising, often funny little vignettes. These visions, as well as others, may remind one of the works of the great Weird author Clark Ashton Smith. This “savage planet” (a more accurate translation of the film’s title) certainly would not have been out of place in his tales of the Earth in the far future. And the world beyond that occupied by the Draag? That moon to which the Om dream of escaping? Well, that proves to be even more mysterious…

Early on, Terr witnesses strange meditative practices somehow central to Draag society, in a sequence rendered in psychedelic imagery. The out-of-body trips these meditations send the aliens on mark them as a fascinating, spiritually complex species, a fact vital not only to the climax of the movie, but also as an indicator that they are more than the genocidal monsters they might otherwise appear to be. This spiritual component is no doubt one reason Fantastic Planet attained, and retains, a place in cult film history. After the mechanisms of the plot have been resolved, after the fate of these two species has been decided, the image of the Draag and their metaphysical journeys persists. Laloux, as well as Stefan Wul (author of the novel, Oms en série, upon which the film was based), clearly have more to say than “Fight the Power,” that simplistic motto of so many dystopian narratives. As has been mentioned, Terr absorbs weird knowledge from Tiva’s learning device. The function this serves is far more than a matter of simple, useful information. This knowledge helps him awaken to consciousness, to a reality not immediately perceptible from the confines of his comfy prison house. It is gnosis, divine wisdom which enables not only salvation, but also the ability to rise psychically above his place as an alternately beloved and pesky pet. It is, as several of the ancient Gnostic sects interpreted the story of Genesis, the fruit of knowledge which spells the end to innocence and which introduces the possibility of greater spiritual growth. It would be a spoiler to say anything more direct about this facet of the plot, but suffice it to say the Om find they must bring their struggle to another level if they are to win anything more than a temporary reprieve from the cruelties of the Draag.

Fantastic Planet was made during a time of cultural tumult. It is hard not to read any number of themes into this film, as it seems to invite so many. A post-colonial reading would not be far off the mark, as evidenced by the mixture of paternalism and sadism the Draag show the tiny Om. The peoples of Africa, Asia and the Middle East found they needed more than weapons to combat the weight of European hegemony, and the Western powers learned (and are still learning) a great deal about themselves from their colonial adventures. Counter-cultural identification with Fantastic Planet has also been persistent in the forty years since it was made, and may be an echo of institutional conflicts within both European and American societies at the time. The Om, with their wild, natural lifestyles and their dogged resistance to an industrial civilization determined to either tame or annihilate them, sometimes resemble the 60’s counter culture which was already, in 1973, collapsing beneath its own weight. The arms race which develops between the Om and the Draag may even be a gesture toward the Cold War, though it is hard to imagine either the Soviet Union or the United States in the position of the brutalized Om. Those mystical elements, both Gnostic and vaguely Eastern, encourage interpretations more internal, as well as ideological. An understanding deeper than that necessitated by strictly physical survival has proven vital down through history, a need to fulfill psycho-spiritual yearnings without which society can become a horrible simulation of itself. The clash between the cold, yet mystical Draag and the wild, vital Om may be meant to say something about a conflict deeply embedded within our own civilization.

However one interprets this film, this plasticity of meaning, far from being a detriment, is a strength the film possesses. Where many anti-authoritarian fantasies of its era have suffered with the passage of time, have come to seem too utopian or naïve, Fantastic Planet retains an essential weirdness which protects it from simplistic analysis. The bizarre set-pieces with which the film is filled are not easy to forget, nor are they easy to explain away as facile allegories. The film veers close to being a dream, at times, threatening to lose coherence and dissolve into mere sequences of phantasmagoria. Fantastic Planet does, however, speak some message, be it theological, political, internal, or even ecological. That it does so in such an alien tongue is only fitting in a tale about being lost in such a strange world.

The post Knowing the Alien: René Laloux’s “Fantastic Planet” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Absentia, a horror film from director Mike Flanagan, opens on a pregnant woman walking the streets of a serene suburban neighborhood. This is Tricia, and we watch as she pulls down tattered flyers from telephone poles only to replace them with fresh copies. These are missing person posters, and they bear the likeness of her absent husband. Daniel vanished seven years ago, without a note or an argument or the least signs of struggle. Now, however reluctantly, his wife is ready to declare him legally dead. The question of his fate still bothers her, and Flanagan gives us a few, rapid-fire fantasies in which Tricia imagines what may have happened to her husband, but she has mostly come to terms with this mystery. Her little sister, on the run from some demons of her own, arrives to help Tricia pack the man’s things. In these quiet streets, though, the sisters will discover an answer of sorts to the riddle of Daniel’s disappearance. Despite their desire to know why this kind man would have just walked out on his life one evening, they will find that there are some questions better left unanswered.

The vocabulary of grief is chiefly one of loss. This observation is all but a tautology, but it bears paying some attention to. Whether they are taken by death or vanish from our lives due to relational or geographic alienation, we lose our loved ones. How much more terrible is this absence when we are left with no answers, no knowledge of where they have gone, not to mention why they were lost to us? “I just want to know,” say lovers and friends and family members of the missing, “I just want to know what happened to her, to him.” Anything, we hear, would be better than never knowing where they went, if they are out there still or not, if they suffered. While most horror movies focus on the suffering of characters or the events which lead to pain and death, most do not devote much time to the emotional wreckage left behind. And if they deal with this lack of crucial knowledge, it is usually only in order that the full revelation of the loved one’s fate will carry more weight.  In Absentia, this enigma forms the very center of a story about love, loss, and unfathomable horror. It is to the filmmakers’ credit that they recognize that such a story must be composed of as many parts grief as it is of terror.

Absentia is a fine example, perhaps one of the best in decades, of what has been labeled quiet horror. This is a tradition which has seen far more success in horror literature than in cinema as it relies on moods, ideas, and implication, all difficult to catch on the screen if not actually “unfilmable.” This movie does an incredible job of communicating the spiritual unease in which Daniel’s family has been left, a malaise which is, in the opening sequences, more bittersweet than terrifying. When this disquiet breaks through into the film, it initially does so in quick, hard to parse moments. Nightmares, hallucinations, eerie encounters: what Tricia and her sister Callie initially experience may be a psychological response to their need to say goodbye without having any real answers. They, certainly, think so, at least at first… They will find, though, that this neighborhood hides secrets darker than those a sudden disappearance typically calls to mind. Absentia draws its audience into its mysteries with subtlety and a grace not often associated with horror film. An early shot, in which Callie jogs through the neighborhood, into a dark underpass, and out to a view of the city, establishes a beautiful note on which the rest of the film will elaborate. Twisted truths lurk just beneath the mundane world: this is the promise of much quiet horror, and the technique is one of a most careful, almost glancing delineation of these disturbing realities.

Though there are a few moments of violence, these are quick and oblique. Rather than depend on extended torture sequences and explicit gore, which are perfectly acceptable devices in other sorts of horror narratives, Absentia relies on flashes of the bizarre and a carefully enunciated mood. Slowly but so effectively, Tricia’s house and the street on which it sits are invested with an ambiance of sad dread. One of the film’s many excellences is the way in which it sustains this emotional dimension while slowly broadening the scope of the piece. This is aided by the strong performances of the film’s two leads, Courtney Bell and Katie Parker, both of whom bring naturalistic, understated responses to such a strange situation. Absentia is an odd horror movie, in that an unwary viewer who watches only every other scene would be justified in considering it a powerful, yet realistic, “dramedy” about characters learning to deal with the loss of a loved one. This makes their plight, when they finally get a clear sight of its scope, all the more devastating.

This attention to psychological details is one way in which the film builds an environment of subdued dread. Another way in which it does so is in its slow, deliberate parceling out of its revelations. While one character, toward the end, tries to put the pieces of this puzzle together, Flanagan is wise to leave this solution cursory at best, an updated fairy tale with the most awful questions unanswered. In this, Absentia resembles the best stories of Ramsey Campbell and Robert Aickman, two authors who excel in crafting uneasy mysteries and delightfully ambiguous resolutions. The movies to which it is most closely related must include Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and George Sluizer’s Dutch masterpiece The Vanishing. These films both dealt with the sudden loss of a beloved, as well as the maddening uncertainty which often follows such devastation.  Absentia does not leave its audience frustrated: we are given an answer as to Daniel’s disappearance. The film does not, however, fully outline its horrors, leaving most of the details to our own imagination. It gives us just enough information to make us glad we do not have more. That, or, for connoisseurs of terror, enough to make us wish we had so much more. And speaking of devastating: Absentia springs at least two “twists” which I, for one, never saw coming. Far from arbitrary or contrived, these sudden turns in the plot make perfect sense, particularly in retrospect. This movie earns its surprises. They do not only add the luster of shock to the experience, they lend a strangely “realistic” sense to an increasingly weird situation. Tragedy, despite the shape we eventually give to it, usually springs on us in this way: without foreshadowing, without warning.

What gives these narrative strategies an added layer of significance in Absentia is the way in which they reflect the subject. Horror stories often give a rather full account of the nightmares with which they are concerned. They use familiar monsters from folklore, give serial killers warped backstories meant to explain their deviations, and outline the supernatural origins of monsters, or at least the “rules” which they follow. In general, they give audiences the comforting sense that while the darkness may not always be fought successfully, it can at least be understood. Even their twists usually serve the purpose of making more intelligible what has seemed opaque until then. The killer is revealed to be the one person you never suspected, the hero was a ghost all along, etcetera. Real terrors, however, rarely yield such satisfactory answers. As we are reminded almost daily, the world is filled with hideous tragedies we may never fully comprehend. The adjective “senseless” is regularly applied to such situations, but how often is this an evasion on our parts? The thought that some nightmares are simply beyond our ken may simply be more tolerable than the notion that there are answers, but they slip the nets of our understanding. Capturing this sense, that an ultimate explanation may be possible but just out of reach, is notoriously hard for artists (though they stand a better chance of communicating such an idea, arguably, than do scientists and others restricted to the use of reason). Absentia not only conveys this horror of the unknown (and of unknowing), it does so in ways perfectly in line with its theme.

Tricia and Callie hazard plenty of guesses as to what has happened to Daniel, as does Detective Mallory (who has gone from investigating this case to getting rather close to one of its principals) and other policemen. One of them may even get close to what has really happened. The awful truth, though, lies beyond anything but direct experience (a lesson also brought across in The Vanishing). Absentia drops hints, here and there, and even gestures toward an underlying logic to the situation, but in the end reason recedes before the darkness. For all too many people who have lost their loved ones to a sudden disappearance, there will never be an acceptable answer.

Absentia deserves praise for its skillful development of tension, its luminous, yet eerie direction, and the unique nightmare it unfolds. What makes the film stick in my mind, though, and what I think will make it outlast many of its bigger-budgeted cousins, is the emotional truth at its core. Our beloved lost do not usually just vanish, fade with time and healing: they reside in some dark place within us. Making peace with their absence may be up to us, but such closure does not always accompany whatever answers we may uncover. To quote the book of Ecclesiastes, “with much knowledge comes much sorrow.” I resist the thesis (argued by plenty of authors I admire) that horror is necessarily recuperative or reassuring in nature, that its essence lies in summoning fears and then banishing them. Absentia banishes few, if any, of its shadows. Its outlining of grief, though, and the manner in which it symbolizes our experience of the lost, speaks more truth than many consoling narratives ever accomplish. That we can also experience Absentia as a finely wrought piece of entertainment is a testimony to the potentials of the genre and, more particularly, to the talents of these gifted filmmakers.

The post An Awful Truth: Mike Flanagan’s “Absentia” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

In our search for optimal ways to use natural resources, human beings have discovered subtle connections between the ecosphere, the raw materials comprising our world, and the fate of our own species. The fragility of this planet’s living environment was a concept all but undreamt a mere century ago, when the Earth promised to supply an endless stream of resources for our use. Now, horrific possibilities beckon to us in the shape of global ecological catastrophes. Recent big-tent disaster movies such as The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 have taken these threats and turned them into cartoonish spectacles of special effects and easily parsed danger. The sight of a ruined, post-catastrophic landscape has of course been a common trope in science fiction for decades, and films such as The Road and The Book of Eli explore familiar ground. Floods, earthquakes, a land parched of water: these may seem to be potent figurations of the doom which may be coming to our little world, but in their extremity they also offer a false consolation of sorts. “Whatever is coming,” these movies seem to say, “we will understand it, even be able to predict it, though we may be able to do nothing to stop the process.”[1] We may ineradicably alter our world for the worse, but by gum we will know what hits us. Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter takes a different approach, one predicated on the knowledge that we still know so little about the forces which gave birth to our species, those which (as of yet) still sustain it. How can we assume we will understand the consequences of our actions, this film seems to ask, when we have only recently begun to understand that there will be (indeed already are) consequences at all? In a world (to borrow that famous, over-used phrase of the movie-trailer business) increasingly rocked by tsunamis, droughts, earthquakes, and other natural disasters which may have direct ties to our own actions, we need stories such as The Last Winter. We need to be reminded that actions have consequences and some of those consequences may not only be unintended, they may also be inexplicable.

The Last Winter opens with a cheery promotional video for the KIK Corporation, an oil company which has recently secured the right to drill in a wildlife preserve in the snowy depths of Alaska. A confident voice explains this situation over footage of industrial works, maps and the image of a site where the oil was discovered, jauntily describing the venture as one taken in concert with the local Native population and overseen by environmentalists. Immediately afterwards, we are given a view of this place without the optimistic commentary. Silence hangs over this frozen landscape, miles of snow and sparse forests which (preceded by corporate blather) seem to pose a quiet challenge to the breezy ambitions of humankind. The Last Winter processes this material, which may have otherwise served as the grist for a relevant (if sleepy) documentary, through the lens of the fantastic. It does so without forsaking the troubling questions this sort of work raises and manages to raise other, less easily resolved issues in the process.

Fessenden’s first breakthrough in genre film was the more intimate Wendigo, a simpler horror tale about the mythical beast of Native American lore. The director has also made a name for himself as what one might describe as a perennial cameo actor, particularly well known for how ill-fated his characters prove to be. He played such a role in the classic-in-the-making Session 9, Neil Jordan’s The Brave One and, in a part so quick one can easily miss it, in The Last Winter as well. This film is more ambitious than his first, boasting a talented cast, a more complex story and some truly stunning landscapes. The movies do, however, share some themes in common. Wintery settings, conflicted protagonists and an interest in Native American culture appear in both, but The Last Winter develops its themes more directly.

While The Last Winter’s setting (the frigid and lonely plains of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) and isolated cast of researchers may bring to mind The Thing, this movie presents a trickier situation. Fessenden takes some risks in the presentation of this film’s horrors: not only does the movie engage with a contentious debate plenty of his viewers will not wish to see addressed, he does so in a sometimes oblique, sometimes argumentative manner. The audience is quickly thrust into the midst of an ongoing conflict between business interests and the concerns of environmentalists. James LeGroff stars as James Hoffman, an environmentalist working to assure this new oil well will not negatively impact the mostly untouched landscape. The always-entertaining Ron Perlman, here playing gruff oilman Ed Pollack, runs the station. Kevin Corrigan, best known, perhaps, as Fringe’s mysterious Sam Weiss as well as roles in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed and the brilliant sitcom Community, also makes a welcome appearance as the mechanic, Motor. The simmering tensions between Pollack and Hoffman are not only political in nature: Pollack has been nursing an attraction for fellow researcher Sellers (Connie Britton of American Horror Story fame) for some time, and he is dismayed to find she has become the environmentalist’s lover. When Hoffman poses a threat to Pollack’s plans for drilling[2] for oil, their enmity is locked firmly in place. Between these personal resentments and arguments over just how far nature can be pushed before it pushes back, the researchers are slow to notice a more insidious danger creeping up on them.

Starting with what are either mild hallucinations or visions of some strange and dark force (or, possibly, both), and proceeding toward delirium, suicide and violence, the research station is beset by problems their carefully wrought plans and rationalizations collapse before. The endless miles of whiteness around them present a perfect palette to go mad by, as Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe argued years ago. Is this blank landscape driving them insane, or are their troubles a harbinger of something far worse than mental collapse? Fessenden complicates the situation by giving us cause to doubt the sanity of most everyone involved. Many of them offer explanations, but as the body count rises every solution begins to look too simplistic. It seems to be a rule in movies (particularly in the science fiction and horror genres) that “The environmentalist, like the psychic, is always right.”[3] Even Hoffman’s naturalistic theory, however, proves inadequate to explain what is happening to them. As Hoffman, Sellers, Pollack and everyone else trapped in this bleak yet curiously beautiful land will discover, the land from which they have wrested a living may hold mysteries with which their rational philosophies (whether economically or ecologically driven) are not coped to deal.

The Last Winter nicely mixes the foreboding presence of those white, silent surroundings with the noisy conflicts of human beings. Sudden scares are here largely restrained in favor of weird, inexplicable events. Fessenden keeps his audience off balance by not allowing these disturbing events to coagulate around an easily foreseeable agent or situation. Instead, events unfold according to a strange logic all their own. Characters, well known to one another, reveal unsuspected cracks in their psyches. Catastrophe springs upon the researchers at the moment they think their salvation is at hand. The location of one body even serves as something like a “locked room” mystery, a mystery which is explained only partially in the film’s finale. This finale, by the way, opens onto a larger danger than that the researchers have had to face, but it does not do so gratuitously. Although many of the dangers this film considers find their genesis in the outside world, they are also shaped by what the characters bring with them. Had the movie employed a more traditional “stalk and kill” method to destroy its characters, it would have left a less ambiguous impression than it does and this would have been a loss. The complex nature of the threat these researchers face is (as will become obvious after all those discussions about the impact of the business of drilling for oil) bound up with the interactions of our species and our physical world.

If the movie has a flaw, it is that its message is hammered home a little too directly. This “lesson” is at some variance with the intelligent, spiritually complex manner in which The Last Winter unfolds its catastrophes. A slightly more oblique approach to the material may have had greater impact, leaving the audience to make the realizations some of Fessenden’s characters state so baldly. As the current, disturbing trend in climate-change denial (and its implicit rejection of the validity of scientific research) indicates, however, the direct approach may be what is necessary. The Last Winter will most likely not convince anyone of the dangers of environmental catastrophe, but it is one of the better genre pieces on the subject. In addition to careful direction and strong performances, it also presents a psycho-spiritual dimension to our misuse of nature all but entirely unexplored by most movies based on this theme. The various fates met by these researchers, for instance, suggest a more subtle message than one of simple doom-saying. What this viewer was left with, at the end of The Last Winter, was a sense of having brought near something elementally numinous, as well as an appreciation for the gifts of Larry Fessenden and his talented cast.

The post Cold Comfort: Larry Fessenden’s “The Last Winter” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Seventy years ago, the entire population of a New Hampshire town left their homes and vanished into the woods. The bodies of nearly 300 of these missing people were later discovered, mutilated corpses which bore the signs of murder and exposure to the elements. The rest of the townsfolk were never recovered, lost to the eerie and still unexplored environs of New Hampshire. This much, YellowBrickRoad tells us in an opening montage filled with black and white pictures of the search teams and the abandoned town of Friar. Accompanying these shots, along with brief glimpses of those savaged bodies, is an audio recording of the sole survivor found walking through the forest, a man apparently still caught in whatever delirium gripped the rest of his fellow citizens. Images of that forest beckon to the viewer throughout this sequence, a wild, dark place so easily romanticized from a distance and still so full of secrets, even after ages of scientific inquiry and industrial development. YellowBrickRoad focuses on a group of young explorers who now, over half a century after this disappearance, manage to secure the coordinates of the spot from which the doomed inhabitants of Friar set out on their voyage into the dark. Confident, bursting with excitement and hubris, these researchers will seek out that same path with the intention of solving one of history’s mysteries, intending to deconstruct a modern legend with all the glossy-eyed exuberance and irreverence of the MythBusters crew. If there is, however, to be a successful act of deconstruction, it will not be the heart of the forest which will be plucked out…

Teddy Barnes has been obsessed with the case of Friar for quite some time, but has been stymied in his attempts to discover the location of the trailhead. Now, though, we find him in a dusty lobby where an over-solicitous and apologetic clerk hands him the coordinates for which he has been searching. We are then introduced to Teddy’s wife, Melissa, as well as the couple’s close friend, a therapist named Walter. These three assemble a team and the film moves to Friar. At the very outset of their expedition, unfortunately, Teddy and his friends hit what seems to be a major obstacle: the coordinates they’ve been given match the town’s movie theater. Frustrated by this absurdity (what path begins in a cinema?) and increasingly put-off by the hostility of Friar’s citizens, the team is almost ready to abort their mission and go home. Teddy, desperate over this collapse of his dream, is then drawn into the confidence of one of the theater’s ushers. The townspeople did make their departure from this theater, she says, though they entered the forest at another spot. She paints a quick picture of that generation, a populace ground down by difficulties, struggling with the Great Depression as well as a looming war overseas. Their abandonment of the town, she suggests, may have had less to do with what they were walking towards and more to do with the grey, sad existence they were leaving behind. She claims her grandfather visited Friar often prior to the strange exodus of its citizens and that he has shown her the real trailhead. Following her lead, the team finds their way into the forest.

What follows is a disturbing plunge into madness and inexplicable events, as these explorers fall prey to the forces of the forest as well as the unexplored chasms within themselves. This is “character-centered” horror, wherein psychological instabilities prove to be equally as dangerous as supernatural entities. The latter force is certainly real in the film, but it serves as a prompt more than a centerpiece, a horrific MacGuffin, to borrow Alfred Hitchcock’s terminology. This strategy has been used successfully in horror film before YellowBrickRoad and it serves as a fine addition to the sub-genre. The Haunting (1963), for instance, presents a riddle which is never actually solved, creating more questions than answers. Session 9 would prove to be a better companion piece for YellowBrickRoad than The Blair Witch Project, to which it has often been compared. Blair Witch announces the metaphysical nature of its central monster at the outset and moves on to deliver it as promised, building its tensions through relatively simple emotional displays and ominous teasing.[1] In this sense, it works like an amusement park ride, all adrenaline and atmosphere. YellowBrickRoad, on the other hand, like the woods through which it makes its way, refuses to relinquish its secrets at the end of the path… I believe a word of warning concerning its enigmatic quality will enhance first-time viewer’s experience and not “ruin” the film. Moreover, this aspect of the film is thoroughly tied to one of its major themes: the search for understanding, the yearning for definitive explanation, and the pitfalls into which these desires often lead us.

Teddy’s team comes to the forest equipped with the best navigational technology their research money can buy. These are young people who have grown up surrounded by GPS and cell phones, and their attitude toward their journey reflects an assumption of easy mastery of the elements. Walter the therapist brings a camcorder so he can keep track of their emotional states and he periodically submits the team members to amusing little tests designed to ferret out any pesky psychological disturbances. One by one, however, these tools prove inadequate for dealing with the forest path. Almost immediately, the navigational devices go haywire, insisting the team has somehow wandered thousands of miles off course. All their measurements are swiftly rendered nonsensical, suggesting they have strayed into a realm wherein space moves like liquid and nothing is fixed. When some try to turn back, they will discover there may be no way off the path. Similarly, Walter’s confident psychological testing proves useless in the face of the emotional disintegration which takes hold of every member of the team. One person seems to be losing all memories of a life before the path, while another goes inexplicably, and horrifically, mad. In fact, the last use to which Walter’s camera is put is a denial of its power as a cold eye of objectivity. Every step of the way the team is shown that their exuberant rational inquiry is doomed to fail. Some mysteries are determined to remain opaque, and only serve as walls against which people can destroy themselves.

Whatever the meaning of the final scene of YellowBrickRoad (and there certainly does seem to be a message there), this last point is an important one. When this movie refuses to explain itself, it does so for reasons which are perfectly consistent with its theme. Had it ended with a tidy explanation, or even a slightly more detailed one, it would have been betraying itself on a fundamental level. Teddy at one point argues that they cannot turn back because they are now implicated in the mystery of Friar’s woods. “These questions,” he insists, “will kill us.” The movie suggests that this statement can be taken in at least two ways: as he means it, a lack of solutions may prove deadly, a horrific itch in the brain left there by what they have undergone which could metastasize into madness. Unfortunately, though, the very asking of these questions may be what will destroy them. From the flippant and calculative attitudes the team brings to their exploration, we may believe it is the manner in which those questions are asked that is the problem. Aside from the obsessive nature of Teddy’s interest, though, we are not shown another style in which the path could have been travelled. In the end, this threatens to make the message of YellowBrickRoad a nihilistic one, but it is not the job of every work of horror to suggest a way out of the danger. Sometimes merely pointing out where it lies is difficult enough. Here, the danger seems wrapped up in questions of escapism and salvation, and that is where The Wizard of Oz may be playing a central role in this more disturbing film.

The people of Friar were particularly entranced by The Wizard of Oz and watched their copy until it was in tatters. It was after one such viewing that nearly 600 people left the town and headed into the forest. While the team members do not waste much time on film analysis, they do speculate that these desperate people may have been seeking an Emerald City of their own, following the siren call of prosperity and happiness. They even joke about a god being at the end of this path, some wish-fulfilling, meaning-dispensing wizard. Perhaps this would explain why the people of Friar wore their best clothing on their trek. The Wizard of Oz was released towards the end of the Depression, just as the Nazis began the hostilities of World War II and Americans were faced with the dilemma of joining the conflict or watching fascism eat Europe. This is the world people sought to leave behind on the Yellow Brick Road. Oz promises a strange sort of homecoming, in that moving away from her place of departure actually brings Dorothy closer to a return to her world. It also presents an easily destroyed enemy, capable of being melted away with a bit of water. Presiding over the shining Emerald City is the Wizard himself, who proves to be a largely benevolent, even silly figure. Compared with the dismal and disappointing reality of Friar, of course this looked attractive. As a piece of pop culture, Oz offered healing, tolerance and progress. While the world (America in particular) was to see a great deal of improvement and growth in the post-War climate, the road it was travelling in 1940 was blood-soaked, not golden, and it led not to an Emerald City but to Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Whatever other answers they may have received in those woods, the citizens of Friar discovered the dark heart which lurks even within escapist fantasies.

The world revealed by the birth of the atomic bomb seems particularly relevant to YellowBrickRoad. With that weapon came some of the first intuitions that human beings could significantly impact the Earth’s environment. This sense was strengthened in the following decades as the effects of pollution began to be recognized. Teddy’s team is not an especially destructive one, but their technologically dependant encounter with the wild may shed some light on the largely inscrutable climax of the film. Without going into details, the ending seems to point toward the worst of our post-industrial nightmares. As we are reminded, “This is our home,” and it will carry every scar we inflict upon it long after we have learned our lesson (one way or another). This interpretation is backed up by just a few slivers of dialogue, I must confess, but they are enough to suggest YellowBrickRoad may be meant as a warning. In our endless search for answers and the mastery of the mysterious world with which we are surrounded, we may be in the process of irreversibly poisoning it. Most films centered on travel touch at least peripherally on the adage “The journey is the destination,” but now we find that by following certain paths, we find the journey shapes the destination. Our obsessions not only form our characters, they may even distort whatever goals we eventually reach. Whether these distortions come in the shape of blighted landscapes or corrupted souls, surrealistic nightmares or acts of hideous betrayal against loved ones (and this movie is filled with all of the above), they should give us pause in the questions we seek to answer and the manner in which we do so.

YellowBrickRoad is a film which asks viewers to participate with it, in that it demands an interpretive stance in ways other pieces do not. Not only is the final nature of that toward which the town of Friar and Teddy’s team left undefined, but viewers are left to judge the actions of those who walked the path. Every soul on this trip will respond to the call of the path in ways particular to them: nihilistic abandonment to violence, greedy groping for sensory pleasures (never has candy seemed as important as in this world), passive despair or an unrelenting (and unforgivable) determination to see things through to the end. Whether their responses are implanted by an alien power or culled from everyday human weakness is also up to the viewer to decide, and provides another disturbing element to an already nightmarish scenario. Many theorists have argued that while we read texts, they read us in return. The path the team follows is most certainly reading them. Passive viewership in this sort of piece is not as rewarding as it may be in other movies, though the YellowBrickRoad does contain plenty of surface pleasures. The supernatural effects the team encounters are subtle, by and large, but eerily effective. A scarecrow is one of only two figures from The Wizard of Oz to visit this story, but its appearance is gruesome in a film largely devoted to unseen terrors. Though the movie implies more violence than it shows, one particular act caught this reviewer entirely off guard, an event all too rare in an age of telegraphed and heavily prepared-for brutalities.

The movie is the first effort from Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton. I cannot wait to see where they go next. While there are some minor deficiencies with the plot (particularly in how fast the team passes from excitement to anxiety) and some jarring special effects (the final image, wonderfully horrific in both its shape and implications, is still a bit too artificial looking), YellowBrickRoad is a fascinating, unique journey into the dark hearts of its characters. Those woods loom in the imagination even as the credits roll and, if you are open to the unresolved nature of its mystery, that path and what you see at its end will haunt you too.

The post At the End of the Path: A Review of “YellowBrickRoad” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.