Horror

dir: Zach Cregger

2022

You know, for a lot of this movie’s duration, I was kinda hooked. It’s a horror movie, so naturally there are some terrifying bits.

And then it all falls apart in the end. Which is okay. I can forgive that in many/most horror flicks because they’re notoriously difficult to end in a way which doesn’t either bamboozle the audience or leave it shrugging in a way that could imply the flick will be forgotten before the viewer has left the theatre.

Barbarian is tricky. You think it’s a flick about a certain kind of horror (turning up to an Airbnb you’ve booked correctly, but someone else is already staying there, which is like the most horrific thing I could possibly imagine), but then it digs two levels deeper into layers of hell you didn’t imagine were there, and will probably regret being told about.

If I could humbly suggest that this flick has maybe three distinct acts, the first act, which happens to be the one where we don’t know anything, is probably the best because it doesn’t hurry and it’s delightfully ambiguous.

Tess (Georgina Campbell) travels to Detroit, and has booked a stay at a house for the night because she has a job interview the next day. She arrives at night, struggles to get the key out of the lockbox, and then is shocked, shocked I say when the key’s not there. Calls to the help line are obviously ignored. And then she sees that someone is inside the place.

Keith (Bill Skarsgard) is in the place already, and wary as well, but tries to be gentlemanly and solicitous, and is well aware of how everything he says and does could look to someone. Tess is very tentative about coming in to sort everything out, and to figure out whether it’s genuinely a mistaken double booking, or whether something else that’s quite nefarious is going on.

The thing about Bill Skarsgard is, other than being the son of Swedish screen legend Stellan and brother to very famous other Skarsgard Alexander, is that while being a kinda handsome guy, his eyes bug out a bit, and one of them tends toward a slightly skewed direction, giving him, from certain angles, a very unsettling air.

It’s probably the key reason as to why they made him play the profoundly evil child-eating clown Pennywise in It Chapters 1 and 2. So here, in human form, it’s used to give him enough of a reason to keep the wary Tess wary, despite his polite and respectful patter.

Tess agrees that it’s probably not fair for either of them to have to find somewhere else to stay, and he helpfully points out that there’s some medical convention in town, and she’s unlikely to be able to find accommodation elsewhere. First red flag. He does everything to make her feel comfortable, and even insists that she take the bedroom, and washes the sheets and dries them. It’s just that it means, despite it being the middle of the night, she’s going to have to wait an hour and a half before she can crash out. Immense second red flag.

Then, after she uses the bathroom, he delivers an understandable but immensely awkward explanation of why he hasn’t opened a bottle of wine that sits on the table yet, so that she’d know that the bottle was sealed up to that moment and nothing’s been added to it, but that if she doesn’t want any wine he totally understands and maybe she wants a tea instead and…

dir: Sean Ellis

2022

When this was initially going to come out, probably pre-covid, it was going to be called Eight for Silver. When it played festivals and such it was still called that. But then someone had the brainstorm, the lightbulb moment, the epiphany, and thought "fuck that, that’s too complicated; let's just call it The Cursed".

I think they could have gone one better and called it "How's that Curse I Cursed You With, Cursedy?"

I have lines when it comes to horror flicks, that I am uncomfortable about when they get crossed. It's important to have boundaries, I feel. And while I am generally okay with all sorts of damage and dismemberment, I'm not at all comfortable with having kids as protagonists upon whom carnage is visited. Sure, kids are threatened all the time in action flicks and other horror flicks.

Rarely do they make good on that threat. I think that's partly why I felt a bit aggrieved watching this flick, because they "broke" the social contract of horror flicks that it's okay to put them in peril, but not to actually follow through.

Another of this flick's crimes is that a central part of its story depends on a massacre of a Roma clan, who have the temerity to be on some land that some landlord jerk believes is his. Of course, beyond the supernatural, it is right and proper to make landgrabbing murderers the true villains in anything, whether it's a film or a documentary, but haven't the Roma suffered enough? Such massacres happened for centuries prior to the main "last" time they were slaughtered en masse by the Nazis, but using such a scene - for mass entertainment - worries me a bit, especially with the rise in nationalism / fascism worldwide lately.

Just this week in Britain the Tories brought in legislation targeting the travelers / Roma communities, so can we stop giving them persecution ideas?

Not that I think a fuckwit of Boris Johnstonian proportions would have the time to sit through a deftly-made horror flick like this one.

Even though everyone except the so-called “gypsies” speaks in English and they’re all English (or in the lead’s case, American, I think this is set in France. No-one speaks French, though, which is a relief.

dir: Goran Stolevski

2022

Such a title, a phrase, like “you won’t be alone”, it can sound like reassurance, like trying to comfort someone who’s afraid of abandonment, of loneliness, that they won’t be as alone as they fear.

It also, unfortunately, sounds like a promise that’s more of a dark threat: You won’t be alone because I’ll always be around, making sure nothing goes right in your life, and that every time you get close to people, I’ll be there to snuff them out.

It is referred to as a horror film, but “horror” doesn’t really capture what this flick is about. It’s not trying to horrify or scare audiences. Horrible things do happen, but the horror isn’t the point.

In weird ways this is more like a micro-budget Terrence Malick flick with 1 per cent of the budget and 200 per cent of the ambition. There’s a lot told to us in whispered voiceover, because the main character cannot speak for herself. She never speaks for herself out loud, regardless of what form she’s in.

Even though I push back on the genre designation of “horror” in order to avoid pigeon-holing the flick, everything I’m going to write now is going to contradict that assertion.

In some non-descript peasant village in what these days is called Macedonia, but about 200 years ago, a young peasant mother is confronted by a strange sight: a blistered, tormented figure who wants to drink her crying newborn’s blood. This is a monster out of local myth, appearing to this woman, for reals, and all she can think to do is bargain for her child’s life.

This monster, though, who is known by one derisive name (Old Maid Maria), and one descriptor (Wolf-Eateress), sounds like she’s going to be bound by some kind of Rumpelstiltskin-type bullshit, but she really isn’t. And though she agrees to spare the child until she is 16, she commits the first of many horrors by stealing the girl’s voice. Permanently.

The mother, not being very bright, thinks to protect this child by shutting it in a cave, where it pretty much seems to grow alone, neglected, unloved and unmissed by anyone.

dirs: John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser

2022

If hell, as Jean Paul Sartre once opined in between abusing amphetamines and literary groupies, is other people, then families are a unique form of hell. And to be trapped with your family during a pandemic, well, we keep discovering lower and lower circles of hell all the time…

But imagine if your family, all its members, were immensely talented actors and filmmakers. Well, out of these despicable last few years, you could have made something quite special if you’d really tried.

When I mention that this flick is a family affair, it makes it sound like an amateurish set of home videos. It is nothing of the sort. Before I get carried away – I’m not implying this is the most heartwarming and uplifting movie made since Schindler’s List – I am however trying to say that this is a quite accomplished and pretty well put together horror film made by people who know what they’re doing, and they do it very well.

Yes, on the other hand you could see this as a director’s audition to try to convince metal bands to let the Adams – Poser family make all their next album’s film clips – I can see them making clips for Mastodon or Opeth or Baroness quite easily.

A lot of this flick has that vibe, and not only because the two main characters, Izzy (Zelda Adams) and her mother (Toby Poser) play doom-heavy music with lots of make-up on in their spare time.

They have a lot of spare time. They are a mother and daughter living in rural isolation. They play music, they do foraging stuff, they seem to get along okay, they do arty stuff. It seems like the perfect life if you like that sort of thing. The mum seems to fear… something. Either she’s worried about Izzy straying too far from the property, or she’s worried about something encroaching upon their hillbilly paradise.

Of course I’m leaving out the very beginning of the flick, which shows an array of women trying to hang and burn a woman that looks a lot like the mum, in those pilgrim / witchburning times, and yet it seems like they didn’t get their wish if she’s swanning about in the present age.

Izzy is a teenager, though, and bored, which is a dangerous combination. It seems like she’s never spent time with anyone else other than her mother. It could be because she has some kind of allergy or dangerous immunity condition, but like in real life that’s just some bullshit parents make up to keep their kids obedient.

As is inevitable, Izzy finds some teenagers doing some dumb stuff, and is drawn to them, and knows enough to keep this from her sainted mother. Of course a teenager would want to hang out with other teenagers. No matter how awesome one’s parent / parents are, you seek out peers, to compare, contrast, drink and have sex with etc.

I hesitate to say that it’s natural, as in a natural curiousity and urge, because this film is not about the natural urges all people might possess. It is, after all, a horror film.