Horror goes back-to-back -- or does it?

If there is anything stranger than a horror movie taking my #1 spot in 2023, it's a second horror movie taking my #1 spot in 2024 -- when no movie with that genre tag had ever accomplished that feat before.

But is The Substance really a horror movie?

Skinamarink was/is, there's no doubt about that. But is it possible for a movie that's discussed by almost everyone as body horror, to not actually be part of the larger genre assignment in which body horror is presumably a subset? 

I think it's not only possible, but probable. 

Now, we know that at least for the purposes of Golden Globes consideration, The Substance was considered a comedy. I've always thought it was useful that the Globes breaks down its nominees between drama and musical/comedy, since it broadens the number of types of film on which they can shine the light of praise, beyond the five films that might fit into a single category. The Substance almost certainly would not have been recognised if there were only one category.

We can be snooty and cast serious doubt on whether we should grant the Globes any legitimacy whatsoever, but they do provide a useful role in helping us understand how we should think about a movie like The Substance. Although it is not "ha ha" funny in more than a few individual moments -- I think of that great moment where the already gnarled version of Elizabeth Sparkle storms out of her apartment and tells her neighbor to fuck off -- there is no doubt Coralie Fargeat's film is wicked in its intentions, and is a full-on satire even if it not a full-on comedy.

That does leave space for horror, and believe me, IMDB does assign that category to it. In fact, The Substance has a ridiculous number of categories assigned to it, four of which include the word "horror." In order of how they're listed, these are:

Body Horror
Dark Comedy
Monster Horror
Psychological Horror
Drama
Horror 
Sci-Fi

We can't necessarily trust whoever assigns the categories in IMDB, but the number of genre assignments alone -- more than I have seen for any other film -- probably indicates why this movie was such a fabulous success for me. After all, I've gone on the record saying I wanted my #1 movie to push the limits of an easy genre association, and The Substance passes that test with flying colors.

And despite the mention of horror four times in those categories, I still wonder if it is actually a horror movie.

Let's consider what makes a movie a horror movie. I'll start with the most obvious two:

1) It attempts to scare you by establishing a sense of dread, a sense of not knowing what might happen but knowing it will be bad.

2) It attempts to then spring that scary thing on you with a suddenness that makes you jump, which is why we call it a jump scare. 

These primary two building blocks of a horror more are, I would argue, not even present in The Substance.

Although Fargeat's film establishes a sense of eeriness, supported primarily through the facelessness of the company that provides Elizabeth the drug, nothing about what happens to Elizabeth Sparkle is supposed to be establishing a sense of dread. We might be discomfited by the grossness of it, but there are no things we can't see, hiding in the shadows, that might make the scenario more frightening. In fact, we are directly confronted with the things that happen to Elizabeth in so open a way that it is almost a case of over-sharing, while horror fundamentally relies on under-sharing.

Since there is nothing hiding in the shadows, there is nothing to jump out of those shadows. Therefore, no jump scares either.

Of course, to limit horror to those two basic components is to be rather reductive. I also, however, find it fairly useful in terms of deciding whether something is a horror movie or not. If you can think of any true horror movie that does not contain one or the other of these elements, I'd like to know what it is.

"Body horror," though, is absolutely an appropriate genre classification for The Substance, given how much body horror there is in this movie. Interestingly, this leads us to a distinction between the genre called "body horror" and the use of that phrase to describe something you specifically see within any movie. You can say that a movie contains body horror without actually being part of that genre. As a good example, there is body horror of a sort in the Deadpool movies in that the main character is always having awful things happen to his person. Yet you would not for a moment consider putting that as a genre tag on Deadpool & Wolverine. 

And yet if you were to say that The Substance contained body horror and yet was not part of the body horror genre, well that would be incorrect, now wouldn't it? I think it might have to do with the quantity of body horror. The Substance exceeds that standard by a country mile.

Then the question is, can a movie be in the body horror genre without being in the larger horror genre that surrounds it? 

I don't know if I have an answer to that, but then I can look back on the evidence of The Substance and how little effort it makes to "scare" us in the conventional ways that a standard horror movie scares us. Being a cautionary tale is not the same thing as being scary.

When it comes to the subject of body horror, you should always come back to David Cronenberg. The grandfather of body horror, the genre, includes body horror, the cinematic component, in almost every one of his films. Even A History of Violence has a knack for body horror -- remember seeing the close-up of that guy's face after Viggo Mortensen stomps it? 

Cronenberg's movie Existenz seems like a good example. Although I don't remember a lot of this movie, it is one of the first movies I think of when I think of the concept of body horror in the abstract. My memory of this film, though, is that it uses body horror more for the purposes of science fiction -- like The Matrix did -- than for anything that would truly be categorized as horror. And that provides a good template for what The Substance is, though in this case that primary genre might be satire.

Or it might be science fiction. Or it might be drama. Or it might be dark comedy. These are all possible genre associations for The Substance.

All these questions are to the good of Fargeat's movie. When trying to pick apart why a movie is my #1, our very inability to pigeonhole it is a strong asset in its favor. 

The only thing I know for sure -- and the only thing that really matters -- is that a really awesome movie has gone back-to-back with another really awesome movie.

I can't wait to see what awesome movie succeeds it in 2025. 

Horror's long and steady road to #1

One reason I was actively looking for some movie to supplant Skinamarink as my #1 of 2023 was a bias against horror movies.

Not a bias against what I wish horror was. A bias against the low ceiling of what horror, in my own personal experience, has any realistic potential of being. 

Don't confuse what I'm saying. I love horror. In fact, if you told me that a movie was guaranteed to scare me to death -- I guess not literally -- I would probably stop what I'm writing mid-sentence and go watch it. I'd be so excited to feel that rare feeling of being utterly chilled by something -- possibly the rarest feeling we get at the movies -- that I wouldn't want to wait a moment longer.

(Okay, maybe until it was dark out.)

Because that so rarely happens, I never imagined horror would have any chance to finish at the top of the heap in any year, what with at least 150 other movies competing for that same spot. 

In fact, any genre film has a tough row to hoe in that regard. Because you are making such a statement with a #1 movie, usually it has to tick a lot of different boxes to get there. Most of my #1s have been a mixture of a couple genres, or in a genre that is not consider a genre, in the sense of our term "genre film." For example, a drama is not a genre film. A horror movie is. 

But maybe I should have expected horror to make this big leap at some point, because it's gotten close in the past. Today, in my final piece about 2023 movies (I think), as I reflect on possibly my unlikeliest #1 movie of all time, I want to consider just how close.

So I'm going to go back all the way to 1996, when this whole thing started, to see what my highest-ranked horror movie was each year, and whether it had any realistic chance of scaling the heights that Skinamarink just scaled. I'll also tell you how many horror movies I ranked each year, just to get a sense of how my relationship with horror has changed over the years.

Also: For a movie to count as horror, IMDB has to include horror as one of the maximum three genres that are listed for each movie. 

1996 - The Craft (#33 out of 43, 22%) - And we're off to an inauspicious start. The Craft wasn't only the highest horror movie I ranked that year, it was the only horror movie I ranked -- and I think it was really more of a coming-of-age movie than a horror movie. But horror is indeed the third genre listed on IMDB after "drama" and "fantasy." This gives you an indication of the fact that I didn't, at first, flock to horror. It took time and I had to develop my skills. 1 horror movie seen (2% of total). 

1997 - Scream 2 (#22 out of 39, 44%) - Getting slightly better, up to three horror movies for the year. The explanation why the original Scream did not appear in my 1996 rankings is that I didn't see it until after my ranking deadline, which must have meant I saw Scream 2 fairly soon after that. And then didn't see another Scream movie until two years ago when they rebooted it. 3 horror movies seen (8% of total).

1998 - None. Wow. Were horror movies that bad or was I just that unlikely to seek them out? For the record, that's 58 movies without a single horror movie. 0 horror movies seen (0% of total).

1999 - The Blair Witch Project (#8 out of 57, 86%). Was this the moment it was all unlocked for me? First top ten horror, and still one of my all-time most memorable trips to the movie theater. I suspect that if I had had more courage, I would have ranked this higher. Sleepy Hollow and The Sixth Sense also made my top 20 at 12th and 14th, respectively, though today The Sixth Sense would be top ranked out of those three. Oddly, they were the only three. 3 horror movies seen (5% of total).

2000 - American Psycho (#16 out of 58, 72%). I will have to accept IMDB's definition of this as a horror movie. It's a horror movie that crosses several genres if it's a horror movie at all, which is what I said earlier in this piece I might need for a #1. Though this was not all that close to being #1. (Interestingly, The Cell came one spot later, and today it is close to the top of all my horror rankings on Flickchart -- though again this straddles several genres.)  4 horror movies seen (7% of total).

2001 - From Hell (#35 out of 73, 48%). I was getting desperate for my first horror so I checked IMDB and yes, they think this is horror. Fine. But I think I'm going in the wrong direction here. Only three and one of them is Scary Movie 2. So much for 1999 unlocking things. 3 horror movies seen (4% of total).

2002 - Resident Evil (#59 out of 80, 26%). I'm not sure what to make of all this. 1 horror movie seen (1% of total).

Maybe I should have started this exercise more recently.

I'll keep plugging away.

2003 - 28 Days Later (#16 out of 58, 72%). Rebounding a little bit here with a sigh of relief. 4 horror movies seen (7% of total). 

2004 - Shaun of the Dead (#17 out of 59, 71%). A classic that would be higher today compared with the rest of these movies. In fact, when I reranked them according to my current rankings on Flickchart in this post, it was my 7th overall from 2004. 3 horror movies seen (5% of total).

2005 - Constantine (#43 out of 73, 42%). Why did I start this exercise again? At least the total is getting decent ... -ish. 5 horror movies seen (7% of total).

2006 - Night Watch (#17 out of 77, 78%). This stylish Russian vampire movie from Timur Bekmambetov has the makings of a contender, but when I tried to watch it a few years ago without the stylized subtitles being available, I found myself stopped before the movie was even two minutes old. Most total horror so far and highest percent of total. 6 horror movies seen (8% of total).

2007 - I Am Legend (#10 out of 82, 88%). Second top ten, even if horror is only the third genre listed for this on IMDB and certainly not the first that comes to mind for me. Last place this year was also a horror (Captivity). Hey, look at that total grow! 8 horror movies seen (10% of total). 

2008 - Let the Right One In (#4 out of 87, 95%). Most credible bid yet and a movie I still cherish 15 years later. Cloverfield was also in my top ten and that is also considered a horror. Plus: double digits! 10 horror movies seen (11% of total). 

2009 - Zombieland (#14 out of 113, 88%). It's mostly comedy but there's some good horror. Finally over 100 movies watched (never to drop back below), nine of which were horror. 9 horror movies seen (8% of total).

2010 - The Human Centipede (#14 out of 109, 87%). Still love it. 9 horror movies seen (8% of total).

2011 - Red State (#2 out of 121, 98%). Well this is the closest any movie has gotten, I can already tell you that without doing the other 11 years. Horror may be a stretch as a genre for this, but I wouldn't have looked it up if I hadn't thought it was a possibility. Take Shelter at #3, tied for the second best bid, is also a bit of a stretch as a horror. And Tucker and Dale vs. Evil at #10 made three in my top ten. I'm sensing a real change here ... 8 horror movies seen (7% of total).

2012 - The Cabin in the Woods (#17 out of 119, 86%). It's encouraging how well some of these choices hold up, even if they were not realistic contenders for the top spot. 9 horror movies seen (8% of total).

2013 - Berberian Sound Studio (#5 out of 128, 96%). Another really credible run, especially by percentage, but I can tell you this wouldn't have had made it that year. Highest total yet by number. 11 horror movies seen (9% of total).

2014 - Enemy (#9 out of 136, 93%). To think this finished one ahead of Under the Skin, which was my #10 of the whole decade five years later. Still a pretty good movie I think. Big jump forward in numbers! 15 horror movies seen (11% of total).

2016 - The Nightmare (#18 out of 143, 87%). I can say for certain that this is my highest ranked horror documentary ever -- and possibly the only one I've ever seen. It's actually scary! 15 horror movies seen (10% of total).

2017 - The Blackcoat's Daughter (#3 out of 145, 98%). This is the title I really think of when I think of horror movies that almost made it. It got five stars and was my highest ranked horror movie of the whole decade, coming in at #8 overall. Not too shabby. Another new record in quantity and percentage. (For a moment I thought my #1, A Ghost Story, might have been classified as a horror, blowing the whole theme of this post out of the water. Fortunately, its three genres are drama, fantasy and mystery.) 18 horror movies seen (12% of total).

2018 - Climax (#5 out of 149, 97%). It's certainly horrifying, I just wasn't sure IMDB would classify it as such. Another 18 here. 18 horror movies seen (12% of total).

2019 - Vivarium (#3 out of 146, 98%). Another movie with multiple genres, Vivarium certainly has some horror images you can't get out of your head. As with The Blackcoat's Daughter, I gave this five stars -- the only two on this list that got that many, other than Skinamarink. And blowing past 20 in easily the highest by total number and by percentage. 23 horror movies seen (16% of total). 

2020 - The Platform (#10 out of 149, 93%). That's a top ten movie in four straight years now. With more to come I think. 17 horror movies seen (11% of total). 

2021 - Saint Maud (#8 out of 170, 95%). I've already watched this again and am thinking of it as an early contender for my top 25 of the decade. That's five in a row. And approaching 30 total horrors ranked, though not quite a record percentage. 28 horror movies seen (16% of total). 

2022 - Nope (#14 out of 175, 92%). Not quite a sixth straight top ten for horror, but a very respectable showing nonetheless. All year I have been desperate to show this to my wife and she's never in the mood. 28 horror movies seen (16% of total). 

2023 - Skinamarink (#1 out of 168, 100%). And we finally get there. But let's still see how many total I saw: 23 horror movies seen (14% of total). 

So what does all this reader unfriendly numbers crunching tell us?

Well it shows how far I've come as a horror fan in 27 years. Back from my meager beginnings when I saw one or zero horror movies a year, and the top one could be ranked as low as 59th with as low as a 26th percentile in that year's rankings, now it's been more than a decade since I've ranked fewer than 15 horror movies, and nearly 20 years since my top-ranked horror movie was outside my top 20. I've ranked as many as 28 horror movies in a single year, representing as high as 16% of my total viewings.

Of course, part of this can be explained by my huge increase in the number of movies I've ranked over the years, with as few as 39 back in the 1990s to as high as 175 in 2022. While that has a clear impact on the total number of horror movies ranked, you can't argue with the great equalizer: the percentile of the top-ranked horror movie out of all the movies ranked that year. While only one top finisher in the 1990s exceeded the 50th percentile (though other lower movies also exceeded it that year), you have to go back to 2016 to find a top horror movie that did not break the 90th percentile of my rankings.

This also includes 12 top ten finishes for horror in those 27 years. Wait, that's only 12 years where the highest ranked horror was a top ten. There were some years where more than one movie classifiable as horror, and as many as three in at least one year, finished in my top ten. So it's actually closer to 20 top ten finishes for horror movies in those 27 years.

Maybe I was too quick to talk about the low ceiling for what horror could possibly accomplish at the beginning of this piece.

All this is to say is that although it was a long time coming, there were definite indicators that this day would eventually arrive.

What genre is next to claim its first #1? Action? (I may already have one of those.) Musical? (Don't think I have one yet.) Torture porn? (Okay now we're getting ridiculous.)

Before I leave you and I leave 2023 behind until it's time to start talking about the Oscars telecast, I did want to give you a final word about Skinamarink in particular -- which functions as a final validation of horror's first #1.

There was another reason why Skinamarink was very unlikely to claim this spot in my 2023 rankings, and it has to do with the mood I was in when I started watching it.

Just a few minutes before I started watching back on June 22nd, I made a very insensitive remark to my wife. I didn't belittle her, I didn't make fun of her, I didn't undermine her or anything like that. But I did make a comment about a sensitive topic that I should have known was timed incorrectly, if there was ever any good timing for it at all. I tried to apologize but she was furious. I knew I had to give her time to recover, and nothing I said would immediately fix it, but the exchange left me shaken.

And then I started watching Skinamarink.

I should have been totally distracted and failed to get on this movie's wavelength, especially with its slow start that arguably never gets any less slow. Instead, I just got sucked into its world and basically had chills going down my spine for 50% of the running time.

You could say that having had an "argument" -- not really an argument in the sense that I said something insensitive and she stormed out of the room -- only put me in a more perfectly vulnerable headspace for Skinamarink. What greater horror can there be than your wife leaving you? (Which would of course be the catastrophist's worry about the worst possible consequences of such an exchange.)

But I don't know if that holds water. I think what's more likely is that thinking about this exchange would prevent me from paying attention to what was happening in the movie, which in this case is not much, so there's not a lot to grab onto -- at least at the start. I'd be rewinding and rewinding and wondering if I weren't just better off giving this a proper chance on another night.

Nope. I sat there rigid with fear, and it left an indelible impression that carried Skinamarink all the way to the top.

1970s horror movie round-up

You may remember that an early October repeat viewing of Let's Scare Jessica to Death inspired me to see what other unseen 70s horror movies were out there that would give me a similar vibe. 

Well, unfortunately, I came up short on this -- not for lack of follow through or effort, but for lack of results. 

But on the second-to-last day I was watching these movies -- having known I planned to watch new horror on both the 30th and 31st -- I did finally hit.

My methodology in determining candidates was to google a variety of relevant search terms and see what came up that I hadn't seen. This produced a list of the following 21 titles on Letterboxd.

Blacula (1972)
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)
The Cat and the Canary (1978)
Scream and Scream Again (1970)
Phase IV (1974)
Prophecy (1979)
Shivers (1975)
Empire of the Ants (1977)
Day of the Animals (1979)
The Swarm (1978)
A Knife for the Ladies (1974)
Piranha (1978)
Coma (1978)
See No Evil (1971)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977)
The Legend of Hell House (1973)
Trog (1970)
Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
Jaws 2 (1978)
Theatre of Blood (1973)

Each 70s release year appears at least once on this list, and you would have thought this should have been more than enough to go on. 

I picked from this list in some cases out of pure interest, which meant a rental from iTunes, and in other cases because of availability, meaning it was streaming for free on one of my services. The latter opportunistic approach left me watching some candidates that were decidedly imperfect fits for what I was looking for ... but as it happens, I was mostly striking out with the hand-picked rentals as well. 

As I was considering my final few options, I began really scrutinizing the remaining movies on the list to try to pre-empt my disappointment. I'm sure some of the remaining candidates would have been fine, but when diving deeper into them on Wikipedia, they struck me either as too hokey, too associated with a genre other than horror, or too similar to something I had already watched. I also wanted to get variety from my movies, not just all slasher films or all monster movies. 

So as I was gearing up for the final two viewings on Thursday and Friday, I called an audible and went off the Letterboxd list. One of my final two choices was uncovered in a more traditional countdown of the best 1970s horror movies, and one was found by sheer happenstance among the list of rentals currently priced at 99 cents on iTunes. And one of these two proved to be my saving grace.

Alas, the sum total of my new 1970s horror viewings for the month was only eight. That's even with watching probably the most horror movies overall that I've ever watched in October. This can be attributed in part to getting a late start (October 8th was my first viewing), in part to saving most of my viewings for weekend nights (Thursday to Sunday), and in part because I was also trying to keep up with 2021 horror, five of which I reviewed on ReelGood. At least because the cinemas have been closed here due to lockdown, I didn't have any normal new theatrical releases providing additional competition for my finite number of available viewing hours. (Cinemas just reopened Friday night. Probably a topic to expound on at greater length in a different post.)

That's plenty of preamble. Why don't I take you through what I watched?

Shivers (1975, David Cronenberg)
Watched: October 8, iTunes rental

I have a bit of a hit-and-miss history with David Cronenberg, but I generally consider his early period to be his best work, including the likes of Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone and The Fly. I thought investigating the beginnings of his obsession with body horror (which he has abandoned in his later career, to his detriment) would be a fruitful launching point for my 70s horror. Perhaps I should have gone with 1979's The Brood instead, because Shivers was a mild thumbs down for me. The setup seems to have everything I might want, as a parasite infests a state-of-the-art Montreal apartment complex and enters and exits its victims through various orifices, some of which did not previously exist. I'm not sure if I can put my finger exactly on what held me back about this one, as it does have individual moments of good body horror and even some weird deviant behavior, which I can get behind. (The parasite makes you a sex-craved lunatic. There is probably some social commentary here that doesn't translate as well 45 years later.) In the end though I felt a bit disappointed.

Blacula (1972, William Crain)
Watched: October 15, iTunes rental

Perhaps sensing that I was falling behind, it already being the middle of the month and only my second viewing, I snuck this one in on a Friday afternoon after I finished work. There was a bit of a necessary sacrifice in that, as I decided I didn't want something that would really give me the creeps, it being the afternoon at all. Blacula was perfect in that sense: It was a cool bit of period history that I probably should have made time to watch before now, and it was better than just a blaxploitation movie whose cheeky title has given it more of a humorous than frightening reputation. But as I anticipated, it wasn't scary. That's not a problem unique to Blacula -- I realize that I don't find most vampire movies very scary. Because the vampire has a sexy and urbane alternate persona, which was no less the case with William Marshall's Prince Mamuwalde, he is fundamentally more knowable than most other ghouls and goblins we might meet, leaving a deficit in his ability to terrify us. I'm really glad I saw Blacula and it might make an interesting discussion in a post unto itself, but as an attempt to give me the kind of willies I get in Let's Scare Jessica to Death, it did not scratch that itch.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976, Nicolas Gessner) 
Watched: October 15, streaming on Amazon Prime

This was a course corrective in a number of ways: 1) Time to get a 1970s horror for free, and 2) Time to see something that seemed to exist in the same world as Let's Scare Jessica, in that it represents a realistic depiction of the 1970s and contains horror elements that are more subtle than a parasite or a vampire. Unfortunately, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane was subtle enough in its horror elements that I'm not even sure it qualifies as a horror movie. As I wrote about in this post, probably the creepiest thing about it is the sexual advances an adult Martin Sheen makes toward a 13-year-old Jodie Foster, and in a way, that was the kind of insidious thing I was looking for as a more psychological form of horror -- which we get in Jessica. But while Jessica does turn to the supernatural, this film remains in the purely realistic realm of a girl living by herself around whom people turn up dead, in some cases by accident and in some cases intentionally. Since this character is also our protagonist, the film is an odd duck that defies easy categorization. That said, as a movie itself, it earned one of the highest ratings for a movie in this series, 3.5 stars on Letterboxd. (And I should mention there's also something creepy about the thing that's in the cellar that you never see.)

The Cat and the Canary (1978, Radley Metzger)
Watched: October 17, streaming on Amazon Prime

And again watching a movie that was available to me for free steered me wrong. Although there are some loosely defined horror elements in this latest cinematic adaptation of a story that goes all the way back to the 1920s, this is a lot more of a comedy or a murder mystery in the same vein as something like Clue: The Movie than it is something that even has the stated ambition of scaring its audience. (I also wrote about this film here, in the context of an anachronism that appears in it.) As with The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, I liked the movie a fair bit for what it was -- 3.5 stars on Letterbox -- but what it was was not a horror movie. (I was fooled by a very convincing poster that wanted to have it both ways.) That said, there is obviously a desired connection to horror here, as the film features an actress who has been introduced to me as an iconic "scream queen" over the course of this series: Barbara Steele. They wouldn't have used her if they weren't trying to leverage her horror bonafides. (She also appears in not the next movie on this list, but the one after that.)

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977, John Boorman)
Watched: October 22, iTunes rental

After a couple missteps the previous weekend -- a whole weekend of missteps, in a way -- I decided to course correct again. What better jumping off point than my favorite horror movie of the entire decade? The Exorcist is a stone-cold classic that makes my blood run cold every time I watch it. Its sequel is ... not. But I didn't realize until afterward how great disliked it actually is. When I went on Wikipedia, I found that audiences howled with laughter when they watched it and it had come in as high as #2 on certain prominent lists of worst movies of all time. That's right -- not worst horror movies, but worst movies period. I certainly didn't like Exorcist II but I didn't find it anywhere near that bad. It's more misguided than anything, though it's true that Richard Burton's performance as the central priest is laughable in certain spots, including one bizarre moment where he turns to speak directly to the camera. It's just kind of a dumb story in which Linda Blair does appear again, but she doesn't get twisted into a pretzel like she did in the first film, and in fact, the film doesn't seem to benefit at all from four years of progress in visual effects. Instead it focuses on the purported horror value of a swarm of locusts. Yawn.

Piranha (1978, Joe Dante) 
Watched: October 23, streaming on Stan

I'm forever course-correcting it seems. I'm back to movies I can watch for free, and since I didn't get the blood and guts I was hoping for in Exorcist II, I was hoping there would be some good gore in the original Piranha -- which also seemed promising given how much I liked the 2010 remake. Wrong again! There are only very few shots of maimed and mutilated bodies in this movie, as the mayhem wreaked by these swarms of fish is mostly viewed by blurry closeups accompanied by frenzied teeth-gnashing noises, and the reactions of the people above the surface of the water as their lower halves are devoured. At worst I was hoping for some good camp in this movie, but I found it lacking in that respect as well. I was glad to watch it given the careers its collaborators would go on to have, not only Dante the director but, get this, screenwriter John Sayles as well. It fits in pretty well with Dante's later work, but given the respect accorded to Sayles for a very different sort of movie down the road, I expected to find something quite literate or clever about the script. Really, I couldn't tell the difference between this and any other creature feature. Another drawback I realized only after watching: Just because a movie features (or at least promises) blood and guts, doesn't necessarily make it a good Halloween viewing. A lot of this takes place during the day and there's no "spooky" vibe at all. (Incidentally, this is the other movie that features Barbara Steele.)

Phantasm (1979, Don Coscarelli)
Watched: October 28, iTunes rental

At last! The movie that saved the whole project. (You might have already guessed from my use of its poster as the artwork.) I was reminded of Phantasm from a list of 1970s greatest horror movies that I found on the very day that I watched it. This was a movie that was on my radar from when I was younger, but I haven't thought about it in years -- I think I lumped it in with Hellraiser back in the day, which I also didn't see until about ten years ago. It's not that type of movie really although I suppose the vibe is not dissimilar. In mining the recesses of my brain, the thing I would have remembered from this was the flying silver disk that impales people's heads and drills into their brains. That would have been the thing kids talked about on the playground. Phantasm is a lot more than that, combining a variety of bizarre horror iconography that could only come from the mind of Coscarelli (Bubba Ho-Tep). There's Angus Scrimm's The Tall Man, always striding and staring in discomfiting ways as he stalks our heroes. There's the dwarves who seem a bit like demented Jawas, and are particularly chilling when we see only flashes of them, as when they scamper behind gravestones in the opening, and we get little more than the signs of their movement. Then of course there's the animated severed finger with its milky yellow blood, which transforms into a nasty little insect. I can't believe it's taken me this long to see Phantasm, and am pleased there are a handful of sequels of surely lesser quality. 

Deep Red (1975, Dario Argento)
Watched: October 29, iTunes rental

Given how I worship Argento's Suspiria, I have no idea how I've never seen another of his movies (he has quite a few). It took randomly seeing Deep Red priced down to 99 cents for an iTunes rental to finally break that drought. Since Suspiria itself has some pretty blah passages, I wonder if part of my delay was a suspicion that the rest of Argento's filmography would be of uneven quality. Deep Red is only one other example of his work, but it does confirm that notion. There are origins here of the visual ideas I love in Suspiria, which came two years later, but they have far lesser impact. As just one example, both films contain imagery of female attack victims with their heads thrust through glass, and the bloodletting that results as their necks are pierced. As both films are obviously shot in Italy (though Suspiria is set in Germany), there's a similar reliance on piazzas to try to create an air of mystery. Plus I got a definite chill from a few signature moments, such as Argento's use of disembodied eyes hanging against a black background, and a reflection of a woman's face in a mirror that scared the shit out of me. Plot-wise, though, I found it pretty banal by comparison, maybe even a bit boring. Suspiria's highs are enough to sustain it through its own more ordinary passages; not so much for Deep Red.

Okay, this took longer to write up than I expected, as I actually intended to have this up yesterday.

While I'm here I might as well mention a few near misses that were available on streaming but I just didn't have time to see, or opted specifically not to see when I wasn't sure how well they'd fit the theme or how much bang for my buck they'd provide. Only two, actually: A Knife for the Ladies on Amazon and The Island of Dr. Moreau on Stan. Even though the former involves something plenty salacious sounding, the murder of prostitutes in a small town, it seems like more of a western than a horror, which is not the genre you would expect from the first part of that sentence. The latter seems like ... well I'm not really sure, but the image of Michael York beaming on the still they chose on Stan just put me off. I'd like to see both this and its disastrous 1996 remake (which the Val Kilmer documentary reminded me of), but maybe not in conjunction with Halloween.

I've taken up way too much of your time already (congratulations if you've gotten this far!), but I thought I'd close by giving you a small bit of context for the previously expressed opinions. This might also double as a list of recommendations, if you are looking for 1970s horror options for your Halloween night viewing.

The following are my top ten 1970s horror movies as determined by Flickchart:

10. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978, Philip Kaufman)
9. Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971, John D. Hancock)
8. Don't Look Now (1973, Nicolas Roeg)
7. Halloween (1978, John Carpenter)
6. Eraserhead (1977, David Lynch)
5. Alien (1979, Ridley Scott)
4. Suspiria (1977, Dario Argento)
3. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975, Jim Sharman) - ha!
2. Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg)
1. The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin)

Honorable mention: The Wicker Man (1973, Robin Hardy)

If you have any must-see 1970s horror movies not mentioned in this post, leave 'em in the comments. I've still got 15 more titles in my Lettrboxd list and I could definitely see myself giving this another whirl in a future October.

Happy Halloween everyone!

Let's Scare Jessica to Death turns 50

That subject is a bit of a joke. When using the wording "turns xx," where xx equals some number of years, in a headline about a movie, you're usually talking about something much more central to cinema history, whether it's a Star Wars or a Casablanca or a Titanic or a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. A semi-obscure horror movie from the early 1970s does not fit the bill.

But I've been wanting to rewatch this movie ever since I first saw it on Halloween of 2009, and it was just a coincidence that that desire reached critical mass in October of 2021, when John D. Hancock's 1971 film turns half a century old.

We're actually six weeks past the 50th birthday. While nowadays it would be smart to release a movie like Let's Scare Jessica to Death at the beginning of October, to capitalize on viewers' newly reawakened desire for horror content, August 27th seemed to Paramount the best date to release it back in 1971. Of course, this was still four years before Jaws codified some of our modern understandings about when to release big films to maximize their impact on the audience and at the box office.

Saturday night, twelve years after my first viewing, it still scared the shit out of me. This is not a horror movie of big gestures or grand guignol kills. It's eerie in the little details, only occasionally building toward something more graphic, and it's all the better for it. It's soaking in glorious 1970s atmosphere and has some really chilling performances at its center -- from both the sinister characters and the innocent ones, making it confronting and complex as well.

As I was watching, and thinking generally about the great horror of 1970s cinema, I asked myself the following question: What other Let's Scare Jessica to Deaths are there out there?

Surely there are other semi-obscure 1970s horror movies I could name that I've already seen, but for the purposes of this exercise, I'm interested in those I haven't.

So I'm going to use the 26 remaining days before Halloween to try to dig up some great gems that might give me that Jessica vibe. Even if it means -- gasp -- renting them on iTunes, rather than just relying on what's available on streaming. (Kanopy would probably be the best resource for this but it can be a bit hit or miss.)

At first I thought I would watch only 1970s horror to scratch this October's horror itch, but since then, I've already noticed at least one new release that I want to watch within the next few weeks. So instead I'll just lean toward that goal, which will be easier to do, given that I've already scraped the bottom of the streamer barrel for horror movies worth watching from the past decade.

I can't wait to see what movies I find. I hope they scare me to death as much as Jessica did.

Who's ready for Halloween?

It occurred to me very belatedly that it's almost October -- which, in a typical year, is when I try to watch five to ten scary movies to quench my thirst for horror leading up to Halloween.

But in a year as scary as this, when the whole year has been one big horror movie, such a horror binge really feels besides the point. 

Add to that a real uncertainty about whether there will be a Halloween this year, and the idea of my usual October horror marathon feels particularly purposeless. 

Halloween has become a bigger and bigger thing here in Australia. In the seven Halloweens I've been here -- well, six, since I was in the U.S. for Halloween in 2018 -- I've been able to watch it grow with my own eyes. From the early days, when flustered candy givers could be seen giving out sleeves of cookies as a desperate cover for their lack of resources, to last year, when hundreds of kids gathered in a neighborhood courtyard after collecting their bounty, it's really become beloved, especially in my neighborhood. 

But we're only just coming out of Stage 4 restrictions here in Victoria, the worst-hit part of Australia. Only three days ago did we drop the 9 p.m. curfew, which had been 8 p.m. until just a week before that. The playgrounds are open, but non-essential stores are not. Who knows when movie theaters will open again. It may not be until 2021. 

So yeah, if I want a local taste of Halloween in 2020, I may be limited to carving my own jack o'lantern and letting it burn on the 31st, as a silent vigil to what we've lost.

As for movies, I guess I need to make a decision more quickly about that. Tomorow is the 1st. And while I don't usually start on the 1st, you can bet your bottom dollar that I've watched at least one horror movie by the 5th. 

I guess I'll just see how I feel.

In 2020, is there anything else you can do?

Horror: The only genre where originality doesn't matter

The most successful horror movie this year, and one of the most successful box office stories of the year, period, is James Wan's The Conjuring.

Which doesn't have an original bone in its body.

Which, as it turns out, is okay.

I saw The Conjuring last night, and had chills going down my spine for a good number of its 107 minutes. This despite the fact that there literally was not a single thing in the movie I hadn't already seen in another movie. Even star Patrick Wilson was in Wan's own Insidious -- another very enjoyable, very unoriginal horror movie, which in fact shares many thematic elements in common with The Conjuring.

It made me realize that horror is not a what genre, it's a how genre.

What happens in a horror movie is not nearly as important as how it happens. Why else could we sit through yet another movie where an evil spirit is haunting either a house or a person (the person angle answers the question "Why don't they just move?")? Yet another movie where you can see reflections of figures in mirrors who aren't really there? Yet another movie where an unseen force drags a character around a room?

I could name you ten films with these essential elements in them, and I wouldn't even have to go back three years. The entire Paranormal Activity series is basically this exact premise, served up somewhat fresh because it's done in the found footage genre.

See, found footage is a how, not a what.

However, a horror movie needn't even have a high concept how to set it apart. The Conjuring doesn't have a high concept how. If you were stretching, you'd say that it was based on a true story (the characters played by Wilson and Vera Farmiga were real people), or that it was set in the 1970s, which is a bit different. But it's really just the same stuff we're seeing in half the horror movies that get made these days.

So then why is The Conjuring, like, actually good?

Well, you can't deny the biological reality of your own goosebumps. And while watching The Conjuring, I had 'em. It's as simple as that. Something Wan and company were doing was just right to give me those goosebumps, and that meant I was scared.

There's some good camera work in The Conjuring, but beyond that, there aren't even really any new techniques on display here. It's just the right proportions of all the familiar horror tropes, used in the right combination with each other. A little creepy music here, a little quiet there. A drawn-out sense of anticipation of what's going to fill the screen here, a startle scare there. None of it -- and I mean none of it -- is new. But it still works.

The thing I think is funny is that it makes a person wonder why the studio would have even greenlit the movie in the first place. On the one hand, it's easy to understand why a risk-averse studio would give something the go-ahead if it resembles other films that have been hits for that studio or other studios before. But on the other, conventional wisdom is that an idea for a movie needs to have some hook, some bit of originality that makes the pitched executive sit up in his or her seat a little bit.

Can you just imagine Wan pitching the idea? "It's about this family who moves into this old house, and strange things start happening to them. At first they dismiss the events as acts of nature or tricks on their mind, but before long they can no longer ignore the truth of their senses. They bring in a team of paranormal investigators, and things just get crazier from there. Oh, and it turns out that someone once killed themselves in this house, and then all the subsequent owners have suffered tragedies of one kind or another."

That is about the least distinctive idea you have ever heard in the history of Hollywood, yet that's The Conjuring, and it was a huge hit.

I'd blame dumb American audiences (or dumb Australian audiences, or dumb French audiences, etc.), except that I watched the movie and I liked it too. Even though one of the things I specifically ask for from movies is to show me something I haven't seen before.

The Conjuring shows me things I've seen before, lots of times before, in almost this exact combination. Yet it still works.

This wouldn't fly in a comedy. When was the last time you laughed hard at the exact same joke you'd seen in a different movie? This wouldn't fly in an action movie. When was the last time you oohed and ahhed at a set piece ripped straight from an older action movie?

The difference, I suppose, is that horror movies are all about creating a mood. And that mood makes us feel a certain way -- it gives us goosebumps, for example. And you can't deny the biological reality of your own goosebumps.

Yet the ability to do this is so tricky that horror remains pretty much the least successful of any genre. Oh, I'm not talking about financial success, as most horror movies can achieve that without too much of a problem. I'm talking about really creating that mood, about really scaring its audience. I have so little faith in a horror movie's ability to do that, that I don't even watch many of them, even though being scared is one of the most exhilarating sensations I seek out from movies.

That how isn't there in the script. It's intangible. So maybe a studio just looks at someone like James Wan and says "You've done the how before. I've seen you do the how. So, I don't even care what your movie is about. Just get that how right and we'll be all set."

And in The Conjuring, by golly, Wan shows us how it's done.

Misunderstanding Evil Dead

I can't tell you how many times I've had pretty much this exact exchange with people since the first footage of the Evil Dead was revealed:

Me: "I can't believe they're remaking Evil Dead as a straight horror."

Other Person: "But the original was a straight horror movie. They're remaking the original."

Factually, this is true. But that ignores the fact that the legacy of the Evil Dead series -- which includes The Evil Dead (1981), Evil Dead II (1987) and Army of Darkness (1992) -- is horror comedy. In fact, the third movie almost entirely abandons horror in favor of comedy. If you had to choose a second genre for Army of Darkness, you'd probably choose fantasy before you'd choose horror.

So that raises the question: If you are rebooting a series, do you want to capture its essence, or do you want to be literal about it?

It's probably clear that I think it should be the essence. Maybe I'm the only one who thinks this way, but when I think of the most Evil Dead-ish Evil Dead movie, I think of Evil Dead II. I think of Bruce Campbell treating his disembodied hand as an adversary and dropping the single-word adjective to describe any situation: "Groovy."

If you have a different experience, that's fine. Perhaps you saw the movies in order. Me, I saw Evil Dead II first, followed by Army of Darkness and then by The Evil Dead itself only two or three years ago, 17 or 18 years after I saw Army of Darkness. That's a pretty logical explanation for coming to know this as a comedy series, not a horror series.

But I'm talking to people around my age, age 39, most of whom would not have seen The Evil Dead in 1981 when they were seven going on eight. In many ways it seems like mine was the more likely experience, with Evil Dead II being slightly more age appropriate (13 going on 14) and Army of Darkness even more so. Me, I was introduced to Evil Dead II in college, probably around 1993 or 1994. There was a reason my friends chose to show me this, followed quickly by Army of Darkness, and not the original movie: They thought it was funny as hell.

In case you think this is some kind of indictment of The Evil Dead, I assure you it isn't. I couldn't believe how much I loved Sam Raimi's original film, even seeing it at the late date of 2010 or 2011. I am a big champion of that film.

But it seems to me that if you are looking to attract the original audience of a series, at least as a secondary goal, you need to make a new film that's a tribute to our lingering impression of that original series. (The primary goal, of course, being to appeal to today's teens.) Especially if you are going to make it a rebooted franchise. If that's your goal, you have to get it right the first time. Otherwise, you won't have the chance to remake Evil Dead II as a comedy. 

Not that this is how they would be going with future Evil Dead movies, if there are to be some. Now that you've established this new series as a horror series, you run the risk of turning off whatever your new fan base is by shifting tone so radically for the second or third movies.

Especially when you have attempted to make -- and believe you've succeeded at making -- "the most terrifying film you will ever experience." So not only is this not a comedy, it's more frightening than The Exorcist or Poltergeist or Suspiria. What's more, it's more frightening than any movie anybody will ever make. To quote John Travolta from Pulp Fiction, "Das a bold statement."

It strikes me as very odd that a studio would consider a movie series worth rebooting, but also run so completely away from what made that series distinctive. It's not that horror comedy has utterly no traction with today's youth, either. Though it may not have been a box office smash, The Cabin in the Woods was certainly a cultural phenomenon, indicating that teens like their horror movies funny and self-aware. You can fit some legitimate scares in there as well without them being any less legitimate. As currently constructed, Evil Dead 2013 seems like just another attempt to scare the bejesus out of the audience. It could end up feeling -- gasp -- generic.

In a way, though, perhaps this is the best way to serve Evil Dead II. When we talk about movies being sacred and not wanting to see them remade, that's because we think the remake will dilute the ongoing value or our lingering memories of the original. If the makers of this reboot had spent a bunch of time on trying to cast a square-jawed leading man who could be as funny as Bruce Campbell was, that's a sure recipe for failure. Campbell was an unexpected comic genius who did his thing perfectly, and any attempt to duplicate that would probably fall flat.

I will take all of these questions out of the realm of the theoretical when I go to see Evil Dead on Tuesday night. At the very least, I'm curious to see what somebody's hyperbolic notion of "the most terrifying film [I] will ever experience" is.

It has to be good for at least one or two disturbing moments -- even if not any funny ones.

The Unoriginal

I was planning to write this post about a year ago.

Last January, two horrors with similar titles were released -- The Unborn on January 9th, The Uninvited on January 30th. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans was also released on January 23rd, making it a very Unusual January, but it's the two straightforward horrors, rather than the werewolf-vampire-fantasy horror, I really wanted to write about.

I didn't write about them at the time, because it was the first month of the blog and my head was practically exploding with things to write about, whether good ideas or not. I guess I'm still in the same boat a year later, as I sit here updating my blog for the sixth straight day. The difference now is that I've seen both of these movies in the past week, part of my mad dash to the finish line of ranking movies before my Tuesday deadline to close off my 2009 list. I'm happy enough to write about films in the abstract, but actually seeing them gives your perspective a bit more validity.

A viewing of each hasn't changed that perspective, though: These movies could both be re-titled The Unoriginal.

The fact that they both have titles beginning with the letters "Un" is really more of a cute detail, the kind of thing that inspires you to write a post like this in the first place. But both The Unborn and The Uninvited could be swapped out for a hundred other generic, interchangeable horrors that come out of Hollywood these days, all with more or less the same look, and many of which follow the same structure for their titles: The definite article (The) followed by some vaguely chilling or abstract concept (Unborn, Uninvited).

Consider, just from the last decade:

The Forsaken (2001, J.S. Cardone)
The Others (2001, Alejandro Amenabar)
The Ring (2002, Gore Verbinski)
The Grudge (2004, Takashi Shimizu)
The Forgotten (2004, Joseph Ruben)
The Cave (2005, Bruce Hunt)
The Fog (2005, Rupert Wainwright)
The Breed (2006, Nicholas Mastandrea)
The Reaping (2007, Stephen Hopkins)
The Invisible (2007, David S. Goyer)
The Eye (2008, David Moreau & Xavier Palud)
The Strangers (2008, Bryan Bertino)

And those are just the big Hollywood releases, the ones that most film fans would immediately recognize. The trend runs much deeper when you go straight-to-video -- not surprising, since straight-to-video takes its cues from (to put it generously) and/or rips off (to put it more truthfully) the Hollywood releases.

Also, this is to say nothing of the horrors that are this kind of movie, but don't fit the title scheme, such as One Missed Call (2008, Eric Valette) and Shutter (2008, Masayuki Ochiai).

Also, I'm listing only American remakes here. Half these movies were originally made somewhere in Asia, and you'd think those versions were a lot better, but in many cases, they're pretty much just as bad.

It's not a very surprising revelation that Hollywood likes to follow successful trends, even rehash cookie cutter versions of earlier movies with different actors and a different title. But it's fun sometimes to accumulate the evidence of just how similar they are.

The movies listed above are, of course, individual movies, some of which have actual merit. All of them, however, have at least one thing that I found in either The Unborn or The Uninvited:

1) Creepy child with voice that shouldn't be coming out of that child;
2) Person standing in the distance, visible to frightened victim looking out the window;
3) Image of bizarre creature that doesn't have anything to do, per se, with the plot;
4) Human body twisted in a way that violates the laws of nature;
5) Startle scare from thing that isn't there when the person looks again or tries to show it to someone else;
6) Image of person momentarily warps and becomes vaguely ghoulish;
7) Wide array of disturbing visual motifs that can't be thematically linked to each other, making them unable to justify their inclusion in the film beyond the director's interest to see what that thing looks like on film;
8) Major plot twist in third act of film.

I could go on.

Even the things that seem like they might be interesting in The Uninvited or The Unborn -- and there are a few -- are blatant rip-offs. For example, the poster I chose for The Unborn was one of three that were immediately available through Google images, and is not the one that's most commonly associated with that film. Perhaps I shouldn't have chosen it, because it gives a false sense of that film's value that flies in the face of the argument I'm trying to make. But it actually makes my argument for me, in a way, because the grotesque human who walks like a spider dates all the way back to The Exorcist in 1973. In fact, maybe we can date this whole trend back to the 1970s, when films like The Exorcist, The Omen and The Brood -- all films that fit the title pattern, in fact -- were released. (I'm conveniently ignoring the fact that titles like The Thing and The Blob came out decades earlier.)

Yet it's funny -- I don't think I watched either of these films just for a laugh. I genuinely thought there was a chance they might scare me. And I'd be lying if I said they didn't, sometimes, give me the creeps. The Unborn was the most effective in that regard, giving me chills on more occasions than I like to admit (some of the images were exquisitely bizarre, even if they didn't amount to a hill of beans). And I saved The Uninvited until late in the night on Saturday, in the hopes of increasing the potential scare factor.

I had my primary reasons for seeing these films -- namely, that they were released in 2009 and were easily available through passive means (The Uninvited through OnDemand, The Unborn from the library). I also had my secondary reasons, arising from an academic curiosity about whether Elizabeth Banks would make an effective villain (The Uninvited), or what the hell an actor like Gary Oldman was doing in such an uninspired genre film (The Unborn), or whether David S. Goyer (who also directed The Invisible, listed above, which I found sort of interesting) might be able to make The Unborn less of an uninspired genre film (only by a smidgen, if at all).

The third reason? Maybe, just maybe, these movies would scare me. As I've discussed before, fear is my favorite thing to feel during a movie, but I so rarely get it that I've become jaded about the very possibility.

Not so jaded, however, that I won't occasionally see a movie like The Unoriginal.