Horror

dir: Flying Lotus

2025

This looks like a sci fi flick, but it’s very much a horror flick, just in case the pretty colours and funky music lured you in.

Someone wakes up in some kind of facility, with lots of dead bodies around, and she doesn’t remember what happened, who she is, or what anything is.

What would screenwriters do without amnesia as a plot device? Would they have to actually write cool screenplays that didn’t resort to crutches and timeworn tropes?

That sounds more derisive than I intend it to be. This might be somewhat familiar, and crib certain elements from the Alien films, and probably Carpenter’s The Thing, and elsewhere as well, but it’s well done for what it is. It’s not, to my eye, just an extended film clip from someone who makes music and film clips. There are a number of (predictable) twists, but that doesn’t at all detract from the back half of the flick when shit gets impossibly graphic.

This is a very violent, very gory film, in service of a plot where for the longest time, we, like Riya (Eiza Gonzalez) don’t really get what’s happening. But then we do, and oh gods it’s so awful.

There’s this facility on some planet where humans were hoping they could either relocate the humans from a dying Earth, or find some kind of advancement / technology that could help them back home. The facility would look suspiciously like a New Zealand door factory were it not for the really sexy looking underground bar-like lighting. I didn’t come up with this line, so I can’t take credit for it, but another reviewer referred to it as being the most bisexual lighting ever committed to film. I don’t entirely get what it means but I get what they mean. There are scenes with Aaron Paul’s character of Brion where half his face is bathed in blue gel light, and the other half in red, and you think “wow, this director / cinematographer’s game is really on point”. Or at least that they watched a lot of Dario Argento’s early flicks.

It feels a bit unusual for this kind of flick to feel so carefully crafted. There are times when I regret the level of craft put into some of the horrific imagery and designs. I regret seeing some of that stuff, because it is cosmic horror, the worst kind, and it is now engraved upon my poor brain.

dir: Robert Eggers

2024

I… am scared of this film.

I’ve always found the Nosferatu version of the vampire story far scarier and far more off-putting than the sexy – sparkly – romantic versions. And, yeah, like most people of a certain age, I watched the original playing at a repertory cinema like the Astor or the old Valhalla, back in the day, and once with a live orchestra or band playing either the score or their own score for it. Might have been the Blue Grassy Knoll, if I recall.

It’s just the kind of thing we did back in the 1990s – early 2000s, if you were a film lover / film wanker.

I still find the image of Max Schreck as Count Orlok walking around in his stilted manner as the essence of cinematic horror. Fast hot vampires zipping around faster than the eye can see like The Flash I guess is scary conceptually, because it means you can’t outrun them, but there’s something viscerally horribly about some dread creature slowing coming towards you, as you cower in terror, knowing that you can’t get away.

That’s not to ignore the sexual aspect of these stories, but the Nosferatu version has the creature being a mostly dead being that brings with it pestilence and plague. There’s no threat / promise of eternal life – eternal sexiness, like with Anne Rice’s vampires: there’s just putrescent death wanting to consume everything that is alive.

And, yes, belabouring the point further (of not talking about the present film, and talking around all other sorts of nonsense), there is the Werner Herzog remake Nosferatu the Vampyre from the 1970s, which also had an actual monster playing the vampire, being Klaus Kinski, and I’ve seen that version too, and laughed a fair bit through it, though I think that was unintentional on Herzog’s part. That flick is not as well respected, though it deserves some credit, since you will I hope never see that many live rats in one place again as long as you live, and it uses some of Wagner’s Ring cycle music in superb ways as the plague sweeps across the city.

Last pre-digression – there’s also the superb film Shadow of the Vampire from 2000 that conspires to be a ‘making-of’ of the making of the original Nosferatu, but the sting in the tail is that the director, F.W. Murnau, played with the insanity that we used to admire in John Malkovich, actually found a monster to play Orlok onscreen, and happily lets him eat away at cast and crew in order to get the perfect shots he needs to make the classic that would be still be known a hundred years hence. Nothing says “Hollywood will chew you up and spit you out” more than a movie where none (except the studio executives) are safe.

dirs: Jay Cheel, Jordan Downey, Virat Pal, Justin Martinez, Justin & Christian Long, Kate Siegel and probably a few other people from a bus that was just passing through the neighbourhood…

2024

The latest in a long line of V/H/S horrorish anthologies, this is this year’s instalment, I guess. Let’s hope it’s an annual thing.

There is a whole lot of fuckery going on here. Some good, some not so good, but that is the nature of anthologies. If what you’re watching isn’t thrilling you, wait a few minutes, and something else will be playing soon. You’d think this would be the way to capture the attention of people with short attention spans, but let’s be honest none of “the youth” are watching a “movie” or this “movie”: they’d rather be watching 30 two minute vids in a row on Youtube instead.

So, these are presumably made for old horror heads like me. I greeted the new instalment in this series, after having really enjoyed the most recent one V/H/S 1985 with interest, as that one struck me as a strong uptick in quality (compared to earlier instalments).

When you get your hopes up, you’re inevitably setting yourself up for a fall. The moral of the story is, you’re a fool for getting your hopes up, so never get your hopes up, ever. You’re climbing a tree of anticipation and then sawing off branches you settled upon, because the universe remains supremely indifferent to your hopes and dreams.

The tack they took here was about having something more of a sci-fi focus, as in, the boogieman / thing that kills a bunch of people in almost every instance is an alien of some description, or a robot, or both. Not everything is as cut and dried as having a Big Bad that eats people’s faces that happens to be from elsewhere in the cosmos: but in practice it doesn’t amount to that much of a difference.

If something is chomping on your brains, I guess it doesn’t matter much if it’s a dinosaur, an armadillo, a cyborg, a zombie or a grey skinned alien, the end result is pretty much the same.

dir: Coralie Fargeat

2024

What a year of wonders 2024 is turning out to be. I’m not even talking about all the insanity outside of the world of cinema. Now is not the time for that conversation.

No, I’m just talking about within the realm of films. This here film The Substance has to be about the most bonkers thing I’ve seen in a good long while, yet it also manages to be one of the funniest films of the year. Solely from a filmmaking point of view, it’s an incredibly well put together, intricately constructed, horrifically grotesque and sickening movie. There are incredible scenes, immaculate shots piled on top of each other, with no concern, with no regard for our well being whatsoever.

Of course the focus will be on the flick’s purported all caps blankly stated feminist statements, but the flick is too subversive, too ambitious to be confined by such simplicity. And, honestly, this might sound like a deliberately ignorant thing to say, but beyond the assertion of certain ideas, the film is more interested in pushing the possible or the acceptable than it is in underlining its points.

This is a bit of a genre straddling colossus, because it doesn’t neatly fit into either the science fiction or the horror genres, though its premise is entirely dependent on a heavy sci fi concept, and it is monstrously horrific in its visual (and auditory) depictions. It has a level of set design that would have made the set designers and art directors that worked with Stanley Kubrick green with envy (and possibly litigious for having lifted so many of their designs). There are other elements that mirror the precise striking visuals of make-up and perfume commercials, aligned with an aesthetic that seems like it’s channelling a runway catwalk in Berlin during fashion week.

And then there’s the sound design. Watching a gross older man devouring prawns is one thing, but what if you get to hear it in such a way that scars your soul? What if the sound cues throughout the flick effectively demand your attention, and sometimes feel like a punch in the head, just for good measure?