Horror

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.

dir: Anthony Scott Burns

2020

This was… one of the most unsettling films that I saw last year, and it wasn’t just because it’s Canadian. It’s not the most horrific flick that I saw last year, or the most horrific Canadian film I saw last year (that would be Violation), but it’s without a doubt the most unsettling.

Up until a certain point. Then it pulls a M. Night Shyamalan, and makes you regret ever having heard of the film in the first place.

It’s not even really a twist so much as an explanation, that comes out of nowhere, that no-one asked for, that improves nothing, that instead makes you feel like you’ve wasted your entire time watching something that has such an appalling ending.

I don’t want to focus on that. I want to focus on what I feel the flick gets right, for most of it length, because that way it feels like I’m being fairer to the film, to the people involved.

Saying that this film, Come True has a nightmarish quality is kind of like describing Kafka’s The Trial as being Kafkaesque. It’s redundant phrasing, because it’s literally about nightmares.

A lot of the flick is passages of a camera swooping through monochrome landscapes and sets with imagery that disturbing, but you can’t quite put your finger on why. It’s not gory or violent (except for maybe a few seconds just before the ending), and there’s no monsters eating people or demons trying to tear people’s bodies or souls apart.

It’s about a person, Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone), who’s homeless, and she doesn’t sleep very well. When she does, she always seems to be approaching a motionless figure, someone who she feels she is terrified of, but doesn’t know why.

We don’t know why Sarah avoids her mother, or doesn’t feel safe at home. She tries to scrounge food, take showers where she can, get to school on time, but she’s always falling asleep during class. When she sees one of those tear-off fliers for a place, presumably a university, offering to pay people in order to conduct sleep studies on them, she thinks that maybe this will help her out and she’ll get some money for her troubles.

Two birds, one stone. The people running the study are friendly enough, but they have a weird boss Dr Meyer (Christopher Hetherington), with these massive glasses on his face, which are even more disturbing than anything else that happens in the flick. Also, they don’t answer many questions when asked.

dir: Julie Ducournau

2021

Well. That was. A film.

This won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the supreme French honour for cinema, for only the second time by a female director. I had heard that fact previous to watching this flick, but now I’m starting to wonder what it matters.

Prestigious films have won the Palme D’Or, but also some crappy ones that people have forgotten days after the award was awarded. I am pretty secretly sure that no awards actually amount to much in terms of the qualities a film possesses, but sometimes something is being said when certain films win. The last film that won the Palme D’Or was Parasite, and there has to be some reason why people on either side of the Atlantic were so enamoured with a South Korean flick about what scum poor people are and how they’ll do anything to extend their sad existences.

So what am I implying about Titane? Almost nothing. I can’t at all intuit what Titane winning says in a contemporary sense, in terms of a post-pandemic landscape, zeitgeist or any gender-political stuff relevant to France or Europe or the world.

The one thing I can say is that, scene to scene, second to second, there is almost nothing you can predict as this flick unfolds unless you’ve been forewarned, or read a bonkers synopsis.

A young girl called Alexia makes broom-broom noises in a car being driven by her irritated dad. It keeps escalating until there’s a serious accident, and the girl ends up with a titanium plate in her head. When she is eventually released from hospital, she hugs the car, not her parents.

As an adult (Agathe Rousselle), she still has the plate in her head, and a strange spiralish scar above her right ear, and she has an attitude that exudes zero fucks. She also, importantly, keeps her hair up with a metal knitting needle / chopstick or something similar, making sure people can see her scar at all times. Maybe it’s made of titanium. Not sure it matters.

Her job is to dance and writhe on top of cars at a car show. One of the cars she writhes lasciviously upon is like a Cadillac painted in flames, and it’s also a low-rider, with those bouncing hydraulics installed.

dir: Natasha Kermani

2021

I have, this past year, sat through so many takes on Groundhog Day that it was inevitable that there would be a horror take on it as well, and here it is.

May (Brea Grant) is a self-help author whose books seem to have the message that you’re on your own, no-one else is going to help you (including her) so get your shit together and look after yourself.

Why anyone would need to buy multiple books to realise such an obvious but cold fact is the only real mystery here. Her books don’t seem to be selling that well anymore, which, granted, means she needs to shift her message. She takes her box of remaindered copies to her car in some underground garage, and something happens, but the camera cuts away.

Later on, in the middle of the night she awakes to noises downstairs. Some man appears from nowhere and attacks her and her husband. She is really freaked out, her husband less so, who bizarrely seems to think this has happened forever, and will happen again. People are hurt. The assailant disappears. The cops are…unhelpful.

And the whole process repeats itself again and again.

Is it a loop? Is some supernatural force at play? Is May hallucinating everything? Is someone terrorising her, gaslighting her? It seems like people are dying, like people are being severely hurt. There’s blood on the carpets and the walls. But no bodies. Whenever she is lucky enough to stab, bash, throw down the stairs or otherwise do stuff to The Man (Hunter C. Smith) that would otherwise kill a mortal human being, no body is ever left behind.

It’s…perplexing. She is convinced something terrible and strange is happening to her, but the world doesn’t seem to agree. The cops especially are baffling. They return, every day and night, to the same house where windows have been smashed in and blood has splashed all over the place, and they seek to placate the alleged victim without believing or helping her in any way.

Cops can’t help you; you’ve got to help yourself.

May’s husband goes missing, for a long period of time, and most of the cops’ questions align around “So did you husband do it, why would your husband do it, what did you do to make your husband do it, it’s your fault your husband did it” etc. The disappearance is…strange. It points to something that happened, something that either May feels guilty about or that someone should feel guilty about.