The horror ... the horror

Just a few thoughts and a not very clever post title related to our Halloween night viewing ... though when I say "our," I am stretching the definition of that. (More on that in a moment.) I'm falling asleep on the night after Halloween as I write this, but I can't let Halloween completely leave us without telling you what we watched. (Again, "we" is not entirely accurate.)

The movie scheduled was The Amityville Horror, and it was the comparatively rare instance of a movie my wife had seen and I hadn't. It was playing on Stan, and she selected that over a contender that I had seen but she hadn't, Berberian Sound Studio.

The viewing got off to an inauspicious start when our children repeatedly interrupted our first 20 minutes, that crucial period when the mood of a movie is set, by running up and down the hallway and shrieking at the tops of their lungs. This was at least slightly better than the other thing they did, which was the older one getting up to some unspecified naughtiness, which would later be explained to us by the younger one, semi-unintelligibly, through tears. It wasn't the naughtiness that was the big distraction; it was the tears. And though in these troubled times you never want to blame the victim, I couldn't help thinking that if the younger one would just shut up we could watch this damn movie. I suppose we couldn't fully blame them, as Halloween does tend to be an exciting time, and the sugar they'd consumed excited their blood even more.

Well, all the pausing makes Stan a little cantankerous, and whether the pausing itself was to blame in this particular instance, we started having streaming issues on our TV. A number of resets of the device that manages the streaming later, it still had not significantly improved, and my wife, who was far more sleepy and far more reclined on the couch than I was, finally gave up on it, especially considered that it was now 9:30 and we had at least 90 minutes left in the movie.

I could have done the same, but could not tolerate the idea of not completing a viewing of a horror movie on Halloween. So I proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was the device connected to the TV, and not our internet itself, that was to blame for the performance issues by connecting up my laptop with an HDMI cable and playing it through there. At which point it played fine for the rest of the movie. (My wife was only a few minutes removed from having given up, but she could not be drawn back in at this point, already mentally checked into bed.)

The first substantive comment I want to make about this movie is how much of a debt The Shining owed to it a year later. Now, the actual novels on which the two films were based were both written in 1977, but Amityville made it to the screen sooner than the King novel, so the influence of one film on the other film is something that can reasonably be posited, though just barely. Both are films about families taking up residence in a building that had been the site of numerous previous murders at intervals throughout their histories. Both involve a dad slowly and surely going insane and threatening the safety of the rest of his family. And both dads even wield an axe to give themselves additional menace, even both using it on a door to the horror of the family member on the other side. Superficial similarities they may be in some way, but I couldn't help noticing them. (There's even a helpful outsider coming to bad ends in both films, played by Rod Stieger in Amityville and Scatman Crothers in The Shining.) The endings of the films diverge from one another in a fairly significant way, though that's all I'll say for those who may not have seen one or the other or both.

The other comment I wanted to make was how damn much James Brolin reminded me of Christian Bale in this movie. It was uncanny. The internet is of course well aware of this, so here, I've included one of literally dozens of side-by-side pictures of the two that someone else has gone to the trouble of constructing, even though this is not how Brolin looks in this movie:

Was that a "substantive" comment? I doubt it.

Okay, then I'll give you a few quick more.

How much of a knockout is Margot Kidder in this movie? I guess I always thought of her as attractive when she played Lois Lane, but I had never previously felt personally attracted to her before this film. There are some rather sultry still images of her available from this movie, but let's just keep it on the low end of the sleaziness scale by posting a picture where she's just plain darn cute:

Lastly, I should probably tell you how much or little this movie scared me. Well, I'm glad to say: much. I got the chills repeatedly watching this movie, from the opening shots of the famous house with its eye-like windows (and the gun shots ringing out during that stormy night), to the accumulation of flies nauseating the true believers, to the isolated strange noises and voices, to that flash of sinister red eyes by the window in that one scene (reminded me a bit of Suspiria).

This is one of the true granddaddies of horror, and it did not disappoint me, even though I too was succumbing to sleep near the end because of the aforementioned streaming delays and a couple of late nights in a row carving jack-o-lanterns and sewing Halloween costumes.

I'm glad to have finally seen it, and to have ended the month traditionally devoted to horror viewing on a good note.

Cat's Away: The order I decided on

This is the third-to-last night (I'm starting to count down rather than count up now -- a telling sign) of yada yada yada film festival.

I hadn't yet seen Room 237, which has existed for nearly five years now, because I had long been torn on when to watch it relative to a rewatch of The Shining, and which one I would watch first. The argument was almost academic a couple years ago, when I started to watch the copy of The Shining in our collection during a pre-Halloween horror fest. But I promptly stop watching it upon discovering that the copy my wife had acquired was not letterboxed. Simple, simple girl.

The idea of which movie to watch first, which would have been settled had I gone through with that viewing, reemerged when I got the idea to use the extra viewing hours accorded me during my wife's trip to do the two films as a double feature.
My initial instinct was to watch Room 237 first. If there were going to be some oddball theories presented in it, I wanted to have them fresh in my mind to see if they held water as I watched the movie. It was only logical.

What ultimately caused me to reverse myself was the desire to have a "pure" rewatch of The Shining, rather than possibly being sick of the movie after a documentary devoted to it and just deciding to forego the viewing altogether. Besides, I was sure Room 237 would do a good enough job contextualizing its crackpot theories that I wouldn't have to do my own work trying to locate them. I was sure the documentary would spend ample time providing every bit of possible context for me, no matter how strained.

That settled, the next task was to determine how much of my evening this double feature would consume. Which led to the following statement on my part:

"WHO THE HELL MADE THE SHINING TWO GODDAMN HOURS AND 26 GODDAMN MINUTES???"

The answer is, of course, Stanley Kubrick. And it shouldn't surprise me, as his movies tend to be long.

But with the movie taking up nearly 150 minutes, and with me already being exhausted from a series of nights of shitty sleep, it was the documentary itself -- the main excuse for the double feature in the first place -- that threatened to fall by the wayside. Despite clocking in at a much more reasonable 104 minutes.

Of course, I could have just postponed the whole thing, but I'd already had both of the movies out from the library for a couple weeks (I even renewed Room 237), so I kind of wanted to just get this taken care of.

So what ended up happening? Well, I'll tell you.

I fit them both in. I was up until 1 a.m. on a school night, but I fit them both in.

And I cherished every minute of The Shining, not wanting it to be even a minute shorter than its 146. I suppose I knew I would, but I hadn't seen the movie in maybe 15 years and I had forgotten quite how much it had gripped me. Plus, the BluRay -- on which the aspect ratio was certainly correct -- looked crisp and magnificent. Hallelujah.

One thing I was really taken with on this viewing was the score. I hadn't remembered that being such an indispensable component of the movie's many expert elements, but indeed it's ethereal and haunting and moldering and dread-inducing. Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind should be applauded.

I don't have a lot of additional takeaways of note to mention here, but maybe that means it's a good time to shift to Room 237 -- a movie whose whole purpose for existing is to take away extra-textual meanings from The Shining.

And in short, I didn't find that a very useful purpose. Oh, it could have been -- I'm not opposed to the idea at all. But the fools who have been given a soap box in this movie present some of the flimsiest alternate readings of this movie I could imagine someone producing. Most of them hold about as much water as if you decided to sit down with any random movie and compile a stack of circumstantial evidence that would support some given reading. In short, I think you could do this for almost any movie, and in those other instances the evidence would be no more or less compelling than it is for The Shining. It's like in that movie The Number 23 -- that number is everywhere if the number 23 is all you are looking for, and are willing to squint and twist logic in order to see it.

It's a shame, as I am on record saying that Rodney Ascher's follow-up film, The Nightmare, is the scariest documentary I have ever seen, and among the scariest films I've seen, period, in the past ten years. And to be fair, some useful stuff does come out of Room 237. For example, I think it was this film that first introduced us to the idea that the Overlook Hotel has an impossible floor plan, which I find kind of interesting -- even if it's just as likely to be a continuity error as a conscious choice. For the purposes of argument I'm willing to believe it's part of Kubrick's master plan to give the space a dreamy, surreal quality. I did know about that before seeing this film, however, so it wasn't a discovery of last night's viewing.

The majority of things that I found interesting were not philosophies on the themes the movie was trying to explore, which I almost always found unconvincing -- sometimes extremely so. (The whole thing where that woman talks about seeing a minotaur in the poster of a skier -- WTF. And the bit about Kubrick's face appearing in the clouds? No, didn't see that.) Most of the bits I found worthwhile involved people just pointing out cool techniques that were being used, things that I may not have appreciated but which have only a single interpretation that everyone would observe just by doing a close reading of the film. Anything that deviated from that -- like, the stuff about Native Americans and Kubrick's involvement in faking the moon landing -- just seemed like clutching at straws. And the stuff I found worthwhile I could have gotten from any 12-minute video essay on YouTube.

I did also find the experience of watching them consecutively interesting. It was a bit like watching the movie, then watching its DVD extras.

And yes, my choice for the sequence of watching them also proved to be the way to go.

Now that this festival finally includes a documentary, I think I've ticked all the usual film festival boxes, and will promptly begin my stagger to the finish line. Two more nights to go. Come home, my dear wife!

The sacrificial sleuth

 
SPOILER WARNING: The following post freely discusses plot details from The Loved Ones, Misery and The Shining. If you haven't seen those movies and don't want elements of their plots spoiled, stop reading now.

After sitting on our disc from Netflix for about two weeks, my wife and I finally watched The Loved Ones this weekend. Since my wife's Australian and so is this movie, I figured it would be a slam dunk for her. Unfortunately, I made a bad assessment of what type of movie it was. This poster made me think it was a campy horror comedy, maybe a Mean Girls meets Shawn of the Dead kind of thing. A bunch of kids at the prom have to fight off zombies, or something like that.

Uh uh.

This movie is straight up torture porn. Okay, not really -- the term "torture porn" is usually employed negatively, suggesting a movie that exists only for the purpose of tapping into that reprehensible part of our id that wants to see all the ways a human being might be made to suffer. The Loved Ones has much more of a brain than that.

But it is shocking in all the ways that torture porn is shocking, and that's what made me regret showing it to my wife, who would probably have preferred cinematic comfort food when she was sick, rather than seeing knives hammered into feet and power drills entering skulls.

What I really want to talk about related to The Loved Ones, however, is a cinematic trope it made me aware of, which I'm labeling "the sacrificial sleuth."

Since you bypassed the spoiler warning and presumably have seen this movie, you know that Lola Stone (Robin McLeavy, pictured in the poster) and her father (John Brumpton) have a hobby of kidnapping beautiful teenage boys, torturing them and then lobotomizing them. They store these lobotomized creatures in a dungeon under the floor boards of their living room. The film's protagonist, Brent (Xavier Samuel), manages to interrupt the process on the verge of his own lobotomy, and a chain of events leads to him being pushed into this dungeon, where the lobotomized creatures intend to make him their next meal. He wards off that threat (rather too easily, if you ask me), but he's still trapped down there.

Fortunately for him, there's a sleuth on his trail. The father of his best friend's prom date (Andrew S. Gilbert) is a police officer, and has pieced together enough clues to determine that Lola may have been responsible for kidnapping Brent. The police officer (Paul by name) drives to Lola's house, sees a bunch of blood on the floor, and breaks in with his gun drawn.

When I saw what was happening next, I was overcome by a sense of deja vu.

As the trap door to the dungeon has been left open following Lola and Brent's most recent skirmish, Paul is naturally drawn to the edge of the opening. He's barely had time to register a bloodied Brent standing among zombie corpses before he gets a cleaver to the head, falls in and takes his place among the bodies. Meaning Brent will have to find another (rather convenient and frankly improbable) way of escaping.

I've seen this kind of red herring savior before.

The first example that occurred to me was Rob Reiner's Misery. For much of the movie's running time, we see Richard Farnsworth's local sheriff (Buster by name) slowly and steadily investigating the disappearance of novelist Paul Sheldon (James Caan). He's doing it almost as a hobby, going on hunches and a sense that something isn't right, where we're led to believe that a lesser investigative mind would just assume (as most people do) that Paul is dead. Buster's sleuthing eventually leads him to the house of Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), which is indeed where Paul is being held captive. As in The Loved Ones, Buster has only seconds to realize that he has, indeed, found Paul, before Annie shoots him in the back, killing him. 

But as I thought about it more, I thought of another example, also from the work of Stephen King. For the whole of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, we follow Scatman Crothers' Dick Hallorann during his winter-time retreat to Florida. (In fact, Filmspotting recently revisited The Shining, and the hosts noted just how much we check in with Dick, down to the minute details of his life that don't seem to be important.) Because Dick and Danny Torrance share "the shining," Dick steadily becomes aware that things are not going well back at the Overlook Hotel. Thus begins Dick's long trek back to the hotel -- another journey that is covered in minute detail. He arrives just in time to get an axe in the lower back.

It made me wonder how many other times in movies (or stories in general) we see this trope -- the secondary character who comes to save the day, only to die instantly.

The reasons for the near-immediate death of this character are sort of obvious. He can't save the hero, because the hero has to find his own way out of the mess he's in. The hero is the hero precisely because he summons a kind of inhuman ingenuity to save himself from a seemingly impossible situation.

So then why have this secondary character at all?

My guess is that the audience needs a red herring savior, needs this sense of a possible outside force who will arrive to save the day when it seems unlikely that the hero will be able to do it himself. Since Paul Sheldon has two destroyed ankles and a total lack of mobility, there's no way he's going to be able to overcome Annie Wilkes and crawl through a snowy Rocky Mountain winter to safety, right? So we need to feel like Sheriff Buster is going to put together the clues to rescue Paul. We need to feel the hope that Paul himself does not feel.

When this sleuth is sacrificed, it creates an even greater crisis for the hero. How will he escape now? And so he must be the master of his own destiny. He must find the strength to make a daring play that should never work, but does, because he's used his intellect to outsmart the villain in the end.

While the resolutions to The Loved Ones and Misery are far more similar, including the gender dynamic between the torturer and the tortured (and the fact that there are people being tortured in both films to begin with), The Shining differs a bit from those two. Dick Hallorann isn't really a detective putting together clues, and the hero is Danny, the boy, who only passively kills his father by continue to run away from him. But the dynamic of the outsider arriving to save the day, only to be cut down immediately, is the same in all three.

Can you think of other films that use this same trope? I'd love to hear about it. And let's just hope I've seen the movie you're mentioning, so you don't have to give me a spoiler warning.