Thirty Days of Fright (plus 1) – Halloween Recommendations: part 3…

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) Jaromil Jireš

In the 1960s there was an explosion in the cinema of Czechoslovakia that was heard around the world. Although the nation had a rich cinema prior to this period, and one I’d very much like to explore in the future, this period ushered in what became known as ‘The Czech New Wave’ and formed a Golden era whose influence still resounds. Though under the auspices of a repressive Soviet government, the artists of Czechoslovakia found themselves with an increased artistic freedoms compared with many of their neighbours, and pushed the boat out even further when they recognised that Communist censors had some difficulties spotting aberrant messages if they were veiled in the blackly comic or dressed as the absurd.

Many great talents grew out of this period, including a few who made it to Hollywood and helped shape their New Wave in the 70s (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest director, Milos Forman, for example) but for the season that’s in it, I’ll focus on Jaromil Jireš’ eerie vampire tale, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. Stating the obvious early on, Valerie has little to do with the legacy of Bram Stoker’s novel, or with vampire lore generally. It is, as we might expect, a number of different stories and sources intertwined and overlapped, creating an odd web of image, sound, and intimation.

Young Valerie finds herself the subject of much strange attention, her earrings stolen by a young man, a vampire potentially living in her yard, priests calling all the virgins of the town for a sermon, and her grandmother apparently in a pact for eternal youth sealed with blood. Gliding along on ethereal narrative strands, the film’s lush musical compositions meld with unusual visuals, hedged in the natural, flowers, water etc. that belie the rigorous composition behind them. The film creates multiple planes of interest, with Valerie’s own quest set against many unknowns- the weight of her family history, of the town’s own unnatural rhythms and so on. Reminiscent in part of the great Russian director, Andrei Tarkovsky, the film’s compositional sense creates tensions and allusions within the same frame, offering the eye many points to pursue.

Or to put it another way, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is probably the best film ever made about menstruation.

Suspiria (1977) Dario Argento

I know, I know, if there’s one name that keeps popping up again and again here, it’s that of Monsieur Argento. It can’t be helped really, he’s kind of a big deal in horror cinema and this will be my first, and only, pick which places him front and centre as the director. It’s an obvious choice I guess, Suspiria has carved out a pretty sizeable niche in the annals of cult cinema, but it’s a film that I have grown more and more fond of with each viewing. There’s plenty to enjoy here, but sometimes it’s easy to get hung up on the film’s great sense of surface and forget just how strange and provocative a heart lies underneath.

Argento got his start as a director popularizing the ‘giallo’ sub-genre of film. He pretty much made the genre what it is today, moving it into the semi-mainstream and providing what are widely regarded as the very best films of the entire scene (The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red, Tenebre and so on). Those films are not hinged on the supernatural though, so Suspiria represented something of a shift in his career. The film moved away from the recipe for most of Argento’s previous films: a belaboured protagonist seeking to unveil a murderer, the key to the mystery usually couched somewhere in his own memory, while all around him people die in horrific ways as the killer closes in. Instead Suspiria follows a young woman as she attends a ballet academy in Freiburg, Germany. That’s all very well, ballerinas must learn to ballet somewhere, I suppose, but it turns out this place is also the coven of a powerful and ancient witch and no amount of pliéing makes that okay.

Lovely (crystal) plumage. Must be a Norwegian Blue.

Sometimes, there’s even ballet

The film’s pitch is nothing less than delirious, from start to finish. The sets hang in abstract space, boasting décor, colours, and shapes that defy their nominal role as functional objects and the music, provided by prog-rock group Goblin, is cacophonous and unrelenting, often being given primacy over dialogue or other diagetic sounds. It’s easy to get caught up in this surface madness, the sheer titanic pull of Argento’s aesthetic, but there’s still a tendency to prescribe that the film works despite its narrative failing, rather than because of it. Argento’s earlier films, for all their outlandish content, maintained tight narrative controls, offering very explicit explanations for their every motion and gesture, with red herrings composed as carefully, or perhaps even more carefully, than the final denouement. Suspiria is the film where he let go of narrative, instead pursuing something more intangible and fractured.

Suspiria is a nightmare, unfolding in broad strokes of cinematic excess. It draws you in with its brazen swagger but its finale closes tight on the viewer, a fantastic success in wayward logic and casually outlandish special effects. While not everything works perfectly here, the odd childish whisperings of the ballet school’s student body, for example, would make sense were they all 12, but they’re all adults…Argento just never changed the script when he altered the girls’ age upward for casting, Suspiria remains a triumph of experimental form, demonstrating avenues of madness not yet explored by heavyweights of psychological horror and surrealism. If giallo largely depends on stunting audience perspective by only allowing us to see the hands of the killer, or their blade, until the final reveal, then Suspiria alternately denies us all of our various senses, reveling in switching on and off various functions of cinema to leave us swirling in its wake. The finale then clamps tight around us, a genuinely fearful spectacle that parlays the film’s fractured narrative into a deadly stand-off against illogic itself, a witch in our presence.

Suffice it to say, Suspiria remains one of the most visually and aurally insistent films ever made, but it is also one of the truest works of filmed horror we have.

Fiend Without a Face (1958) Arthur Crabtree

The 1950s was a glorious time for science-fiction and horror cinema. Sure, a lot of it is cheap hokum, but let’s be honest, a pig in a dress is still a pig, and once you’re on board with that fact, everyone can have a lot more fun. Which I guess, is my way of saying, most critically-acclaimed science-fiction and horror cinema is just a more expensive, shinier pig in a fancier, frillier frock. In any case, there’s a reason why people keep returning to these movies and that they are constantly being re-issued, moving from Laserdisc to DVD to Blu-Ray: because they’re just fun.

Originally paired as the B-side of the more lofty Boris Karloff picture, The Haunted Strangler, Fiend Without a Face is a monster-flick of almost unrivalled goofiness. Its plot is a thing of absurd beauty, involving leaked atomic energy that produces mental monsters that prey upon the spinal cords of their hapless human victims. At first they remain invisible – a hilarious cost-cutting exercise as much as anything – but later they become manifest as disembodied, flying brains with spinal-cord tails and insect antennae.

The special effects, involving impressive bouts of stop-motion animation, have a delightfully primitive feel and take flight in the film’s final third as the evil brains are dispatched left and right with bullets, axes, and whatever other instruments come to hand. The effects for this are so gleefully gory that questions were raised in the British Government about how such a film ever saw the light of day. There was some public outcry too, and the film had already been trimmed by the censors before if had been released anyway. Granted, by modern film standards Fiend Without a Face might seem tame, but it looks like little else of its time with its violent abandon, as if the director (Crabtree felt the project was beneath him from the get-go) was trying to mercilessly slay the stupidity of the whole thing right there on the screen.

Fiend Without a Face mischievously repels intellectual inquiry, despite the fact that half the cast are murdered by manifestations of the human mind. I mean, that’s gotta be at least kinda Freudian? Right? What’s more important is that it easily surpasses the limits of its financing and production to reign supreme as a work of absolute, unapologetic entertainment.

I Walked With a Zombie (1943) Jacques Tourneur

It’s amazing what you can do with a strong vision, some canny financing, and some talented cohorts. It certainly can be the recipe for great cinema and we need look no further than producer, Val Lewton as proof. Through the 40s he released a string of low-budget genre flicks that remain influential to this day. No one undoes the crass hierarchy of A and B movies better than Lewton, who helped shape a supremely cinematic group of films on topics and budgets that most others would only use to produce cynical filler. Of course it helps when you have the likes of director Jacques Tourneur and script-writer Curt Siodmak on your side, both established as talents in their field but not yet pegged as notable names in cinema history. Lewton would help them cement their case as they helped him do the same.

George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead brought the zombie movie into the modern, marrying a tense narrative with gory spectacle and critically, although perhaps accidentally, a racially charged subtext. Prior to that film, Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie stands as perhaps the greatest ‘classical’ zombie flick, although it is, in fact, something much more complex than that. Utilizing an exotic locale, weaved with voodoo folklore and Tourneur’s penchant for ambiguity, the film unfolds a very strange tale about a Canadian nurse, Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) who is brought to a small Caribbean island to care for a plantation owner’s wife. The wife is apparently the victim of a spinal injury that has left her bereft of identity and free will. A zombie? Perhaps? Investigating the inhabitants of the island, Betsy uncovers an illicit love triangle and a rich vein of voodoo practice, which may or may not be harnessed by elements on the island to shape the larger society.

The beauty of Tourneur’s film, as was his wont, was that he offers the viewer two parallel folds within the same narrative. I Walked With a Zombie may simply be a sweltering, fantastical soap-opera about an unusual medical event or it may be a portrait of Black Magic run amok. Either version suits, and the film supports both comfortably. The most interesting elements reside in between the rational and the supernatural, the question of identity and free will and of religion and folklore’s role in a rational society. Shot in high-contrast black-and-white, with the darks of the frame often clambering to suffocate all light, Tourneur’s film is a brilliant example of high-concept filmmaking, tackling seemingly outlandish subject matter to expose instead very real concerns and ideas.

As an interesting side-point, Portuguese director Pedro Costa states that his second feature, Casa de Lava, is a re-envisioning of Tourneur’s. It may be lighter on the portentous omens that inform this ongoing list’s sensibilities, but it remains an intriguing and rewarding film too. So feel free to track it down.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) Shinya Tsukamoto

No list of scary movies would be complete without something from David Lynch and, I admit, he’s on the way. In the meantime I’ll dwell on this particular oddity from Japan, Shinya Tsukamoto’s critical breakthrough, Tetsuo: The Iron Man. I mention Lynch because, when I first saw his feature debut, Eraserhead, I didn’t really think anything else out there could be much like it- its inky-black photography, its freeform narrative, its unyielding sense of anxiety etc. Although quite different when you get down into the (in this case, literal) nuts and bolts of it, Tsukamoto’s film is perhaps the closest relative we have to Lynch’s resolutely strange film.

Tsukamoto got his start in experimental theatre, which led him to experimental cinema in due course. That experimentation was hedged heavily in the burgeoning ‘cyberpunk’ aesthetic that was gaining popularity in the fringes of Japanese media culture throughout the 1980s. It’s little surprise that one of his cohorts was Sogo Ishii (now Gakuryū Ishii) who, in 1985, directed Halber Mensch, an hour-long film documenting a recent trip to Japan by Germany’s Einstürzende Neubauten. If you’re familiar with that musical group’s aesthetic, especially their work at this time, where clanging metal and the incessant whine of angle-grinders were integral parts of their soundscape, then you’ll have a good idea of what Tsukamoto’s film offers.

Ostensibly a portrait of urban alienation and man’s growing dependence on technology, Tetsuo follows a nondescript salary-man who finds that his body is slowly and agonizingly turning into metal. With little interest in a coherent narrative, the film resolves into a series of dizzying chases, paranoid asides, and gory transformations coupled with a booming soundtrack of chattering metal and pounding percussion. The editing is frantic, often used to create stop-motion effects or simply to create grander fractured motion and disconnect. Rather than elegantly and logically unifying disparate shots as classical editing theory dictates, Tsukamoto instead uses it as a whole other language separate of image and story, flinging the viewer about within the world. Given how insistent and ultimately how abstract, not to mention how unpleasant much of its content is, the film is unsurprisingly divisive. Suffice it to say, those who have seen Tetsuo will always remember it.

Fright Night (1985) Tom Holland

One night while Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) is making out with his girlfriend, Amy (Amanda Bearse), he gets distracted by events next door. Two men seem to be moving into the old, abandoned house there. That might not be so strange except that it’s night time and the first piece of furniture they bring with them is a coffin. A fan of old-school horror films, Charley knows what that must mean: there’s a vampire next door! Still, at least vampires need to be invited in to invade your home, so imagine Charley’s chagrin when his mom asks him in for a nice cup of tea. With all his friends thinking he’s nuts, and the neighbourhood vampire well aware that he’s been found out, Charley’s in quite a pickle.

Blending genuine thrills with effective comedy, Fright Night remains one of the most lovable of 80s Hollywood’s teenage horror outings. Tom Holland’s film is informed by a love of old-school horror cinema but brings it hurtling into the 1980s with grand aplomb. The special effects are excellent, admittedly picking clean the bones of Rick Baker’s trend-setting work in John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London, and the film gleefully ups the ante with not simply a vampire, but a bevy of other monsters too. Although crystalized in that way that 80s fashion and music can’t help to do, Holland’s film remains fresher and more fun than most of its peers. It relies little on star power or passing trends and instead harnesses the best timeless qualities of its material, marrying horror and comedy with young-adult rites of passage and friends-forever shenanigans.

For the first part of this series click here

For the second part of this series click here

Giallo and Dracula 3D or: How I Ended a Dario Argento Binge and All I Got Were These Lousy Films…

With these two films, I close out a tour through Dario Argento’s work I started early last year. It’s been a fun journey. Although admittedly it got a little less fun towards the end.

“Please let me come with you! I’m a civilian with no police training. Pleeeeaaaaassseeee!!?!”

Giallo (2009) Dario Argento – source: Maya Home Entertainment US DVD

I might say that Giallo achieves a rather unfortunate median, managing to not be Argento’s worst film but stepping forward as an easy candidate for his least interesting. It likely doesn’t help that he had no hand in the script, which shines through with a certain anonymity that permeates the project unfolding on screen- an accusation you could hardly make stick against his previous work, for better or for worse. Otherwise the film boasts an easy amalgamation of the elements that define the Italian’s career – a serial killer sending beautiful women to slaughter, a preference for blades, and a risible psychological foundation underpinning it all – but that misses all the beats that separate his work from the huddled masses.

Plot-wise, beautiful women are being kidnapped in Turin, only to be found days later, murdered and horribly mutilated. Trying to catch the killer is Inspector Enzo Avolfi, played by Adrien Brody (who also scores a co-producer credit). He has profiled the killer and reckons he’s someone who likes to destroy beautiful things because he is ugly but other than that he has little to go on. Luckily, his glib profile is 100% on point, which is terribly convenient. Otherwise he battles with (very cinematic) flashbacks to his mother’s brutal murder, a crime he witnessed as a young boy. When another young model goes missing, her sister (Emmanuelle Seigner) teams up with Avolfi to try and crack the case. She’s not a cop or anything, it’s just cool to bring civilians to hideous crime scenes.

Although seemingly business-as-usual for Argento, Giallo does boast a few unusual elements. Firstly, the murderer here is no disembodied set of hands, concealed until the final scene. No, the gloves are off, quite literally, with the villain working bare-handed and in plain sight of the audience. He’s deformed and mean and he’s played by Adrien Brody too. That may seem important but unfortunately, though obviously meant to load the film with overtures of darkness, it really just means they had to pay one less actor. With the villain apparent, weaknesses come to light that are not properly counterbalanced. Although generally saddled with a bit of pseudo-Freudian psycho-babble to define their motives, Argento’s killers maintain interest through their fastidious nature and lack of identity. The bloody work wrought by their hands defines them, with the audience always kept on the defensive as clues and red-herrings bob and weave before them. The general lack of credibility to their final motives is absolved by being paired with a big reveal that offers the audience a chance to compare their notes as invested viewers with the director’s work as master of ceremonies. This all slips by the wayside when the murderer is just ‘that guy’ who’s on screen a lot. At that point the murderer might need a slightly more plausible or at least dynamic raison d’être and we have no such luck here.

Additionally, the development, or perhaps degeneration of modern horror comes quickly into focus here, as compared to Argento’s earlier work. While that was transgressive, marrying an edge of violence with a popular appeal that was comparatively atypical in its day, the 1990s and 2000s have brought us into an era where on-screen violence has ultimately become an exercise in empty, gory grandstanding. Although so many of his greatest set-pieces were fundamentally about jabbing knives into the sexy bodies of sexy ladies, what made Argento’s best work so thrilling, and so influential, was that each scene came as a grandiose showcase in operatic fervor. It was certainly violent, but it was a fully developed aesthetic package too. Over the years, the spectacle gradually morphed from the details of the camera capturing the murder to the details of the special effects depicting the wounds. That shift is to something more intimate and ultimately more unsettling, but such a weighty topic can’t realistically be sustained in the endless replication of genre cinema. A slashed neck in Caché might shock but only because the film otherwise moved in greater circles of meaning. By the time we get to Saw and Hostel and a myriad other titles now circulating under the pejorative ‘Torture Porn’ label, a film requires a concept to back up its gore unless it wants to just sink down into the rest of the pack.

I’ll take, “Things that never happened to Mick Jagger for $500, please, Alex!”

To that end, Giallo is easily among Argento’s most brutish films, lacking the swagger to reframe the depiction of his murderer’s foul deeds as artistic flourish rather than grim, and thus rather rote, representation. The entire film is played unusually straight by the director, who seems quite happy to just let the basic ingredients, generic as they might be, unfold the tale with no need for addenda. One might wonder if that’s because the film looks to have a slightly higher budget than many of his more recent forays (a number of which, in the early 2000s, retreated to television) and so there was a preference to avoid rocking the boat with elements that might feel ‘untested’. It boasts some nice locations, shot in and around Turin, and even finds a grand setting or two to launch chase sequences although those are ultimately all the more disappointing because the obvious Hitchcockian intent invariably brings to mind, well, Hitchcock. The final chase then, feels like a retread of Argento’s own Cat O’ Nine Tails, which leads to a similar kind of disappointment. After all, I could just have watched that film again.

Trying to complicate things, or at least make things look less simplistic, the casting of Brody in dual roles as the protagonist and antagonist is supposed to fold back into some kind of comment on both characters being reflections of each other. On this point I’ll give Argento a pass since he didn’t write the script and, based on his final treatment in the film, he didn’t seem very convinced by this thread either. It’s best left as an afterthought since, after all, our protagonist once committed murder to attain a very real vengeance whilst the antagonist kidnaps, mutilates, and ultimately murders innocent women because he’s a self-loathing douchebag. Short of the jury being composed solely of Immanuel Kant, I’m pretty sure most people would consider the two acts to be quite separate matters.

Beautiful things

All of which just sums up the film really. Although well budgeted, and efficiently composed, no one seems at all convinced by the machinations of the script. It’s a thinly written piece without a hint of uniqueness that ostensibly repels serious inquiry. That it integrates the moniker of the sub-genre (giallo) that made Argento’s name into the meat of the script does not establish a credible relationship with the genre, and Argento looks to be keeping his distance too. This is just a by-the-numbers, gory, cops-n-robbers thriller. I mean, they didn’t even make the murderer a transvestite and that’s ‘Giallo 101’ right there.

Argento’s Dracula 3D (2012) Dario Argento – source: Netflix

There may be two kinds of Dario Argento fans: those who regard his Phantom of the Opera as his worst film and those who regard it as, ‘just one of his worst films’. I also think I might be the only person among the later camp as I actually quite enjoyed Phantom as a scatological comic-book romp. It’s certainly not the Argento film anyone needs to seek out but he has worse films, if only because they’re less interesting (see Giallo) or less enjoyable (see The Card Player). I only mention this because Argento’s most recent film, a 3D adaptation of Bram Stoker’s most famous tale, finds easiest comparison with his Phantom of the Opera. And I only mention that I kind of enjoyed that earlier film to serve as a caveat when I announce that Dracula 3D is worse. Your mileage may vary, I guess. If you really hated the scattershot pitch of Phantom then you may prefer this film for at least being more tonally consistent. One thing’s for sure, no one’s going to claim this as a return to form for Italy’s great maestro of horror.

I’ll mention up front that I did not see this in 3D, although I suspect doing so would not have added the dimensions required to render it as entertainment. The film is quite resplendently ugly, its period setting allowing it to wear its mid-budget limitations on its sleeve with an ever-present digital sheen affixing its garish palette to every frame. The technocratic veneer here means Argento’s visual style escapes comparison with previous vampire tales. The chiaroscuro of Nosferatu and Tod Browning’s Dracula; the oneiric bent of Herzog’s 70s recapitulation; the T&A exploits of Rollin and Franco; the lush, but muddled (but lush) surrounds of Coppola- no, if Dracula 3D is reminiscent of anything visually, it’s of those ‘Full Motion Video’ Adventure Games that were popular in the mid-nineties. Think Phantasmagoria and you’re in the ballpark. Now look for the exit. No one wants to be in this ball-park. It is a lonely and depressing place.

Phantasmagoria or Dracula 3D? Spot the Difference

Aside from looking ugly as sin, Argento’s film is short on other defining characteristics. Considering how much Stoker’s tale has been shaped and adapted over the years, there’s no change here that might be considered radical. The film never moves events to England, Dracula can shape-shift into a wider variety of different animals (all courtesy of clumsy CGI), and the body count is higher. That’s about it really. At heart, the film suggests it wants to move more in line with the fast-and-loose European adaptations of the 60s and 70s, maybe trying for a happy median between Hammer’s stateliness and Jean Rollin’s ‘clothing optional’ compass points. Unfortunately familiarity with those texts only further highlights deficiencies here. Unlike Hammer, the sow’s ear of the production budget never remotely resembles a silk purse, and the general tone never feels fun or experimental, and certainly never raunchy. Even with its pitched sense of violence it hits a wall of Blade, From Dusk Till Dawn, and John Carpenter’s gory Vampires. Aside from Argento’s name on the credits, this just seems devoid of any niche that might have it.

No caption required

Although I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone particularly herald an Argento film for its acting, things are notably mixed here. Playing Van Helsing, Rutger Hauer gives a typically refined performance, which makes it all the more unfortunate that he hardly appears until the final quarter. As the suave, and supposedly a little tragic Dracula, Thomas Kretschmann does surprisingly well with very little material and far too many special effects. Meanwhile the women of the piece generally look dazed. Which you might think was intentional but I’m pretty sure that’s not quite what they were going for. I’m still not entirely sure if Asia Argento can act, or if she just finds roles (like in Assayas’ Boarding Gate) where her slinky, sexual presence gels to the part so wholly as to make the question redundant. What I do know is that her performance here may help Keanu Reeves feel better about his work in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula. She generally seems terribly unsure of herself, as if maybe she was cast at the last minute or something. She does strip off for her dad again though, which almost seems like an Argento in-joke at this stage.

It’s the unfortunate feeling of cheapness that pervades everything here. This feels awfully like a bargain-bin vampire tale, best suited to the undiscerning eyes of children who hopefully also like their women to have big knockers. The 3D elements reek of gimmickry. No amount of things popping out of the screen could possibly rescue this from redundancy. Meanwhile the use of that same technology has rendered every frame a visual abomination while also limiting Argento’s choices with regards to camera movement and shot composition. It’s a shame then that he didn’t think to crank up the camp, or otherwise find a more ridiculous tone to offset these limitations. This needs more William Castle and less of whatever the heck it already has. Argento did so, whether on purpose or not, in Phantom of the Opera and it did help the film. There it felt more like we were in on a joke rather than witnessing something being made the butt of one.

Actual in-game graphics, I mean, um, in-movie footage. Oh, whatever!

Dracula 3D will likely not be the last film Dario Argento makes, but it represents a low ebb in his career. Currently there is a remake of his masterpiece, Suspiria, in the pipeline but he’s not actually attached to the project. Just thinking about that film being remade, it seems a ridiculous idea, one doomed to spectacular failure because there’s really no recreating what Argento achieved at the apogee of his career. Unfortunately, looking at films like Giallo and Dracula 3D, we might concede that it’s unlikely Argento himself is ever going to rekindle those glory days either.