Gate of Flesh (1963) Seijun Suzuki…

In brief: A powerful vision of Japanese post-World War 2 fallout, allying pulpy visuals and plot elements with an engaged voice *****

Source: Hulu+

The trope of post-war women, In Europe and Japan, turning to prostitution, is so well-worn that mere allusion to it can render even the most sensitive and well-meaning film utterly tedious. Luckily, Seijun Suzuki has very little interest in sensitivity and came into his own by specifically avoiding the dull checklists that typified the industry in which he worked. So when he makes a film about that very subject, a gang of plucky women eking out a living through prostitution, it quickly sets itself apart. It does not simply avoid the norm, it establishes its themes and concerns as if no one else had ever even considered them before.

Our “heroes” are a gang of young prostitutes, helpfully colour-coded, who use their numbers to fend off outside threats. With the intrusion of a man, a returning Japanese soldier (Jô Shishido, rising to a more demanding role), the women’s values begin to crumble as their own sexual longings begin to supplant the capitalist veneer they themselves imposed.

Gate of Flesh is a film of antagonisms, all straining in opposition, creating a radical space in which a vein of genuinely fresh drama emerges. Even as the film openly invokes sexploitation elements, an unsurprising mainstay of Nikkatsu’s 1960s roster – they specialised in cheap and plentiful productions, mainly aimed at the youth market, and by the 70s would switch exclusively to producing soft-core porn features – it uses them to underpin a caustic social message, cultivating an unusual counterpoint of content versus theme. The sight of naked flesh being whipped here is less pornographic and more aligned with a society debased to savagery.

The women utilize sex only for money but find pangs of their own innate sexual desires distracting them. They develop a code of rules for their gang, to try and root out these gnawing urges, but their own laws eventually undo them. The occupying Americans are reviled yet vital, providing law, order, but also paying customers. Even religion is sullied, destroyed under the weight of earthly want. Meanwhile Japan is both shamed by its defeat, condemned both for being too soft to win the war while also being too hard and rigid beforehand, prompting the war in the first place. Its returning soldiers share the same condemnation: fools who fought a pointless war and also cowards who lost it. Perched atop these oppositions, the film’s wildest, most rambunctious moments are also where it is most vulnerable- exposing raw nerves and providing a supremely humanist account of Japan’s post-war plight.

Suzuki further refines this template with clever use of superimpositions. They are no longer the muddled visions of the drug-addled, as in his previous Youth of the Beast, instead they are the intrusions of memories and pure ideals that are, by their illusory nature, now isolated and redundant amidst the cacophonous and terrible reality. That reality, built loud and gaudy with Suzuki’s preferred pulp inflections, is entirely consistent and perhaps the film’s greatest triumph. The art design, by Takeo Kimura (a major contributor in many of Suzuki’s best-loved films), is remarkable. Theatrical effects are often employed – in one indoor scene a spot-light follows a prostitute as she gets undressed – and they imbue an Expressionist edge. The sets zero in on the sweaty bustle of a defeated Japan and, in their intricate design, offer countless paths through which the actors can scurry. But despite fervent movement, they are all unknowing rats trapped in a cruel and suffocating maze. Under Kimura’s eye, every frame enshrines desolation and feral want.

Suzuki’s vision of post-war Japan, finds it greedily picking through and cannibalizing the tattered remnants of its former self. It is an eye filled with both sympathy and self-loathing, and it stands Gate of Flesh alongside the very best of war cinema. Needless to say, it may also stand as Suzuki’s own finest achievement.

Fourth Wall Festivities, Suzuki-style…

They say you’ve got to know the rules before you break them. Which would suggest that Japan’s Seijun Suzuki must have been some kind of prodigy at film-rule stuff before deciding to chuck all that nonsense and to just go and be awesome instead. 1963’s Youth of the Beast is generally considered his ‘break-out’ feature, introducing the ‘kaleidoscopic’ style that became his trademark- a brand of film less concerned with narrative cohesion and more with wringing the optimal quantity of “Hell yeah!” out of every scene.

So this isn’t really a review. Just a note that, when your film opens with the Nikkatsu logo…

…and your main character is this guy, the cheerfully chipmunk-cheeked Jō Shishido…

…it’s pretty amazing when, in an early scene, this happens…

So Youth of the Beast is a pretty cool tale of a solitary man using his wiles and a fair amount of ammunition to play two rival gangs off against each other. Yes, it’s basically like a Japanese incarnation of A Fistful of Dollars.* But I’m not sure how Shishido kept his cover while hanging out on cinema hoardings too.

Anyway, this isn’t really a review or anything, just me geeking out over a goofy film joke that’s about as delightfully self indulgent as that time in Jea-luc Godard’s Une femme est une femme where Jeanne Moreau shows up to let us know how filming is going on François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim.

But yeah, Youth of the Beast is generally pretty amazing. So rather than waxing lyrical about it with boring old words you could find in any reasonably-priced dictionary (and a few prohibitively expensive ones too), here’s a bunch more screen-caps instead, that more effectively capture Suzuki’s sense of odd-framing, vibrant mise-en-scene, and tasteful female nudity…

So yeah, go watch it or whatever.

 

 

* If you get this shitty film joke, you win absolutely nothing. Sorry.

 

 

 

Thirty Days of Fright (plus 1) – Halloween Recommendations: part 4…

For the first part of this series click here

For the second part of this series click here

For the third part of this series click here

Repulsion (1965) Roman Polanski

It was in 1968 that Roman Polanski really took hold of popular cinema, with the resources of Hollywood helping him to craft a horror film shot in broad daylight, intertwining the supernatural with mundane domesticity. That film was Rosemary’s Baby and although it was an introduction for many to Polanski’s work, it was not his first polished piece. Indeed that film formed the middle section of the so called ‘Apartment Trilogy’, each focusing on dreadful elements bubbling below the surface of the domestic. The first film in that series was Repulsion, made in the UK, which provided Polanski his first foray into English language cinema.

Providing the focal point for the film we have Carole (Catherine Deneuve), a young French girl currently living in London with her sister. She’s pretty but delicate, almost a wisp blown through the streets of the city. She works in a beauty salon and, despite her shy nature, all seems well. To a certain degree it’s difficult to provide a full account of the storyline beyond that. The details are apparent but the specific causality is far more difficult to grasp. Seemingly because of her sister’s lover, a married man, spending an increasing amount of time at the apartment, and perhaps also fuelled by another man’s attempts to court her, Carole begins to slowly lose grip of her sanity as deep-rooted sexual dread begins to surface. When her sister and lover vacation in Italy for a week they leave Carole to mind the apartment, and it grants her sanity just the seclusion it needs to crumble away entirely.

 

What marks Repulsion out as a truly superior psychological thriller is the refinement of Polanski’s direction. Not a shot or sequence seems out of place and the film maintains a steady, measured pace as we follow Carole’s nightmare- taking its time to grant us our bearings so that their loss will resound all the more. Behind the camera was Gilbert Taylor, a man who has worked with everyone from Alfred Hitchcock to Stanley Kubrick to George Lucas, and no other film better represents his mastery of black-and-white photography (no, not even Dr. Strangelove). His work lends a tactile dimension to the images that enhances both their inherently mundane quality and also the inexplicable air of threat they present to Carole. Minimal levels of special effects are used and, where they are employed, they are kept simple, usurping this sense of surface. The smooth walls turn to malleable clay in one scene, the walls crack violently, and a simple cutthroat razor never seemed more loaded with dreadful potential.

The violence here is perfectly measured, made potent by the investment we have in the characters. Coupled with the often explosive percussion score, mundane sound effects, such as a ticking clock, form the aural backdrop. Nothing here seems outlandish. It is Carole’s own dysfunction that colours the apartment with so much venom until we reach that closing shot; a textbook example of the cinema’s unique potential. It reminds me of the economy and power of the final shot of Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu– a world of suggestion and potential in a single move of the camera. Where so many psychological thrillers offer glib explanations for their antics, deflating the intensity of what preceded, Polanski opens the question to the audience. Should they dare, they may explore at their leisure.

The Night of the Hunted (1980) Jean Rollin

Do you enjoy episodes of The Twilight Zone but find yourself wishing there were more nude French women? Yes? Really? Well then I may have a movie recommendation for you. For those unfamiliar, Jean Rollin was a French director who made his name with surreal, erotic vampire films that were generally bereft of both funding and coherence. Still, he was a unique force, crafting films that, whether you enjoy them or not, you must concede could only be his. Although he seldom shifted away from vampires – albeit, like Jess Franco and other euro-trash stalwarts, he also dabbled in hardcore pornography to pay the bills – when he did it often resulted in his best work. The late-70s and early-80s stand out as a Belle Époque for Rollin and, coincidentally or not, overlaps with his casting of Brigitte Lahaie, one of the breakout stars in a freshly legalised French pornography industry.

The Night of the Hunted hosts a threadbare narrative but gives full voice to the Rollin’s romantic inclinations. Indeed, this is an unapologetically romantic film, with a man seeking to reconnect with a young woman held captive in a specialised facility. She is held here with others, all of whom deteriorate from the same, unnamed affliction. With an urban setting, a narrative hinging on degenerating humans, and a carnal undercurrent that occasionally bubbles to the surface, a surprising analog emerges in David Cronenberg’s formative cinema, primarily Shivers and Rabid. These works share a strong affiliation in both theme and atmosphere. It seems evident that Rollin took cues from the young Canadian. Another curious overlap is that Rabid also featured an actress who made her name in pornography, the late Marilyn Chambers (horror fans might also note that Chambers can be glimpsed in The Exorcist, on a box of Ivory Snow laundry detergent). Lahaie is undoubtedly the more charismatic performer and although the film opens with an extended sex-scene, her central role builds into a fully realised performance.

And they lived happily ever after?

What’s so unusual here is the melancholy Rollin finds within what might otherwise seem the typical horror milieu. As minds deteriorate, reducing human function to the bare necessities, Rollin finds his core romantic thesis, a kinship that pushes through the conscious and outlasts it. He offsets this against the doctors of the film, trying to cure this horrible malady, which intones that most terrifying of afflictions, Alzheimer’s, who, due to their inability to legitimately help, find themselves rationalising ever more heavy-handed intervention, up to and including euthanasia. It’s revealed that their motives stem from more than just medicine but from politics and subterfuge too. The world is all too brutal but Rollin, without a vampire in sight, still finds beauty to fill the film’s final moments.

Hellraiser (1987) Clive Barker

So I’ll admit Hellraiser might seem a bit obvious for a list like this. It’s haunted plenty of people in my age demographic since before we even saw it, on those days when you’d head to the videostore with your parents and inevitably wander over to the horror section to soak up the lurid VHS cover-art. You’d always find Doug Bradley’s Pinhead staring back at you, his bald head sectioned off with countless nails driven through: the perfect fuel to set alight young nightmares. You hardly even had to watch the film but I, of course, eventually did. I’ve always liked it but it’s only been in recent years that I have come to herald it as one of the finest of all horror films, a claim I don’t exactly make lightly. I guess that over the years it has bled under my skin and sunk its steel hooks into my brain.

This is not to say that Barker’s film is not without its flaws, it certainly has a few and some of them are significant. Exhibit one is the daughter, Kirsty Cotton (played by Ashley Laurence), who Barker uses as a stand-in for the audience, a vessel through which to give us viewers a peek inside an intensely private affair. It’s an understandable move, but misjudged, and it distracts in the later passages, where Kirsty’s actions become narrative fulcrums when we’d all rather wish she’d just not be there instead. It’s a problem specifically because Hellraiser is a tale of interiors, not least because almost its entire narrative is pinned not simply to a single house in bustling London, but to a single room within that house. There resides the final traces of a man whose deadly impulses destroyed him and, through an omission by forces he can scarcely understand, he sees the possibility to regenerate and rejoin the truly alive. For that he needs living flesh to consume, and to get that, he needs the help of his former lover, now married to his brother. Luckily for him, old passions die hard, and she reciprocates, driven by her own unfulfilled passion. But of course, it was the tenacity of passion that led him to his downfall to begin with, and so the cycle now begins anew, with unwary new players taking to the field.

Why are you in this damn movie?

It is the intensity of the core love-story, a tale of truest l’amour fou, which drives the film. Although surface details now look undesirably dated with the heady mistakes of 80s fashion excess, in a sense these are almost a boon, preserving the film in time as the period details of Poe serve to preserve his. When so steadfastly trapped in time, the stories assume a timelessness. It’s just that since many of us remember the 1980s and not the 1880s, the details may distract. Digging beneath, the intensity of the performances, the slow, levelled delivery of lines and the deadly deliberation of the central players all speak to a grand, fatalist romance- something entirely in line with the aforementioned Poe and classic tales of human folly. The Cenobites, of which Pinhead is merely the most outspoken, but certainly not the leader, remain a most brilliant visual invocation of carnal human desires- the titillating lust for experience and to sate deep-rooted desires. They are not villains, but contractual actors, opening the door for what humans already accommodate. Their suffering, in S&M-infused horror, is that their brief dalliances with some sweetly sexual agony have become their eternities. They now serve to wreak that hell on others, though only if they’re asked…an offer laced with irresistible potential that some will always indulge.

Barker’s original is a tragic tale of sullied romance first and a gory shock-fest second. It is a superb rendering of the dark linings of human sexuality, packaged as monster movie. It isn’t Barker’s fault that his schema was so alluring that it produced, indeed demanded, sequels. Making a sequel to Hellraiser is as absurd as penning a follow-up to The Raven (Hellraiser 2? Nevermore!) but of course it had to be done. The franchise is mostly daft, trying to fill in backstory and follow narrative inquiries that were of no relevance to begin with. While a few sequels managed, almost accidentally, to find small plateaus of success, the vast majority sink under the heavy stone of redundancy. I guess their failure only mirrors the deadly mechanics of the Puzzle Box that links our world with that of the Cenobites. A delicately constructed Trojan Horse, it’s alluring enough that you just have to keep going, even though your mind screams that you’re only going to make it worse.

And if you’d like to indulge in a Hellraiser sequel then I’ll still help you out.

The Wicker Man (1973) Robin Hardy

Another obvious choice, I suppose, for those to whom such a film is already a favourite. I have found though, since moving to the United States, that this film’s cult there is greatly reduced, and that for many casual film fans, even those with a penchant for horror cinema, the risible Neil LaBute remake is often what springs to mind. We’ll speak no more of that remake, other than to remark that it is entertaining, though not quite on purpose, and is otherwise so directionless that it hardly overlaps with the original’s immense shadow. The original remains one of the oddest, most effective, and impressive horror films of British cinema.

We open with a mystery: a policeman (Edward Woodward) arrives at a small, privately-owned island off the coast of Scotland. He is responding to an anonymous tip that a young girl has gone missing. The tightly-knit populace of the island offers him little assistance. At first they don’t recognise the girl in the photo and later they say she died a few months back. No one seems to remember just how she died. As the policeman continues his inquiries, growing increasingly frustrated with what appears to be an indifference to his case laced with conspiracy, he also becomes aware that this picturesque isle harbours some unusual traditions which chafe his staunch Christian faith. A meeting with the owner of the island, Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) confirms that the agrarian community is founded on the tenets of ‘The Old Gods’ and maintain a pagan way of life.

Shot mostly in daylight, and entirely devoid of spooky goings-on or shock cuts, The Wicker Man seems a world apart from what most of horror cinema claims as its own. Indeed, the film could almost claim status as a musical, stringing together a series of beautiful, bawdy folk tunes as the villagers enmesh the policeman in their rituals. This soundtrack, with the songs all embedded in the film’s events, not simply overlaid a-top the images, is not simply a pleasant adornment to the film but rather a central pillar of the whole project. With their heavily sexualized lyrics they recall age-old concerns of courting, procreation, and just plain fun, that served humankind as an early compass through life. It was only with later incarnations, Christianity and so forth, that sex became a matter of some impropriety, begrudgingly acknowledged but best not spoken of. This unease between Christian and pagan mores, writ larger as a showdown between the civilized and otherwise, sets the tone for the whole film and no matter how pretty the little town may be, as an outsider it is quickly veiled in uncertainty and threat.

The Wicker Man cleverly condenses various antagonisms of western history into a strange tale of a missing girl. It trades not on shocks or on violence but on the slow realisation of being truly at odds with your environment you bereft of control. Woven between are threads of music and humour which reward repeat visitors. There really is nothing else quite like it and the later American remake somehow managed to even more boldly highlight the original’s iconic status.

Death by Hanging (1968) Nagisa Oshima

Yes, Oshima actually has made a ghost story, the eerie Empire of Passion from 1978, but in a brilliant career, this is probably his scariest and indeed his most brilliant film. Granted, it’s not ghosts or ghouls or monsters or unsuccessfully aborted conjoined twins hell-bent on revenge. No, it’s much worse than that. It’s politics.

A showcase of Brechtian technique, Oshima’s film is highly experimental in tone and slips free of any constraints one might normally expect of narrative cinema. A man, a Korean, has been sentenced to death by hanging for the crime of murder. He is hanged but, somehow, he does not die. Instead he loses all memory of himself and his crimes. The presiding officials from the Japanese prison and government are left in a precarious position. They could try and hang him again but questions are raised about the ethics of hanging a man with no recollection of his crimes, and thus no guilt. Of course within this framework Oshima has his eyes on grander questions: the legitimacy of state violence; the nature of crime and guilt, both personally and nationally; and quite specifically, as was a long-time concern of his, the perceived mistreatment of Korea by Japan.

With the criminal unable to recall his crimes, the next step is to recreate them, with the various officials crudely acting out his crimes in front of him, so that he might rekindle at least enough memory that they could execute him. It’s absurd and deeply uncomfortable stuff, humour dyed in the deepest vein of black. As the law-abiding officials re-enact the prisoner’s crimes, emphasizing repeatedly his status as a Korean living in Japan, their own violent histories, again both personal and historical, bubble through to the surface.

Oshima’s film is a searing political document and a loaded gun that begs answers from anyone interested in political institutions and their mechanics. Although immersed in a very specific national identity, that of Japan, the questions of crime, guilt, punishment, and state action invariably concern us all. That I include it on a list of horror films is simply because the stakes could never be higher than here and Oshima’s film, with its overtures to Kafka (this would make an ideal double-bill with Orson Welles’ superb incarnation of The Trial) paints a troubling portrait of institutionalised violence and society’s very real tendency to ignore deep-rooted problems to instead focus on superficial punitive measures.

The Last House on the Left (1972) Wes Craven

There are a lot of revenge movies in the world. Thousands. Tens of thousands, even. I’ve seen my fair share. Some are good. Some are bad. Some are really bad. Most are slack-jawed entertainment, doused in authoritarian mores. Some are smart and look inward. Some are allegorical tales of inter-generational conflict and national identity. Okay, maybe that’s just Ermek Shinarbaev’s remarkable, Revenge. Anyway, out of all those films, only one is The Last House on the Left. And if you’re wondering if that film is good or bad, the truth is, it’s more complicated than that.

Introducing the world to writer/director Wes Craven, The Last House on the Left is a low-budget, grim re-envisioning of no less lofty a source material than Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. Now sure, I like A Nightmare on Elm Street as much as the next man, but what business has Craven got tackling Bergman? Actually, he has quite a bit of business, making a film that is, if not an unreserved triumph like Bergman’s, nonetheless a troubling little beast of the burgeoning American grindhouse movement. In the early-70s, independent American cinema was still struggling to define its boundaries, answering to market forces by pushing violence and sex freely in the wake of the recent dismissal of the censorious Hays Production Code. American filmmakers were free to go places they previously couldn’t and plenty of the films of that time feel quite a bit more unrestrained than contemporary cinema’s slicker, more market-oriented product. Above all of those, stands Craven’s film, with levels of transgression that feel dangerous even today.

The story is unremarkable, a young woman and her friend are heading to ‘the city’ for a concert when they are confronted by a trio of escaped convicts. The girls are kidnapped, sexually humiliated, raped, and ultimately murdered. The criminals move on only to later cross paths with the parents of one of the girls. Vengeance is meted out and all seems normal per the genre’s understood code. What is unusual is the severity of Craven’s representation of events and the film’s own uneven tone. These factors highlight difficult concerns in exploitation and violent cinema generally, leaving the audience with a whole heaping of discomfort and difficult questions. It’s neither here nor there that Craven probably didn’t intend it that way.

The final, horrific moments of the two girls are paraded in front of the audience with no distinction drawn between the base titillation of naked flesh and the supposed scenario which is unfolding; that of rape and butchery. There is nothing subversive at work here. The murderers’ wishes to sexually humiliate the girls are passed straight on to the audience. It’s a near unthinkable reality but it’s pretty riveting up there on the silver screen and Craven’s camera peers steadfastly onward as the horror slowly unfolds. What’s really odd is that Craven then intercuts those scenes of sexual sadism with slapstick details of bumbling cops and a genteel folk soundtrack. It’s likely these elements were designed to inject some levity into proceedings, with Craven conscious that the MPAA were going to bitch-slap this film for its gruesome content (and also for it not being a major studio production- a sin the MPAA never forgive, while cruelly dangling a rating in front of industry outsiders) but the balance is decidedly wrong.

Relentlessly vicious cinema can be taken simply as a bitter pill but Craven’s attempts to defuse the nastiness actually make the film harder to process. I seriously doubt that was his aim but it certainly makes his film stand out. And so this film seems genuinely dangerous. As if Craven knew he shouldn’t but couldn’t help himself. As if the camera in his hand made him do it. So all that is wrong is what is so right here. The breezy soundtrack, the idiot cops, the absurdity of its “justice”, and the genuine exploitation at the core of it all. I can’t say I like The Last House on the Left but it remains emblazoned in my memory when so many similar projects from the time have faded.

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

Thirty Days of Fright (plus 1) – Halloween Recommendations: part 2…

The Church (1989) Michele Soavi

The Italian horror circuit through the 70s and 80s was a pretty small troupe, but who could complain with such talent? The movement was on the decline through the 80s but it’s fair to say that Michele Soavi had been picked out as the front-runner to cut the path into the 90s. Alas, that never really came to pass, for reasons I’m unsure of. Soavi still works to this day but he’s not made a horror film in two decades now. Perhaps the industry’s downturn quashed too many avenues, perhaps he just grew disinterested in it, I don’t know. What I do know is that Soavi’s early career as a horror director is marked by a couple of fabulously entertaining features.

He started as an assistant to Dario Argento, sometimes even appearing in front of the camera too. You can find him in Bava’s A Blade in the Dark, for example. Eventually he graduated to helming feature films of his own and opened with the hyper-stylized StageFright. Despite a close overlap with a Hitchcock title, StageFright vs. Stage Fright, rest assured it would be impossible to mistake the two, what with the synth-pop soundtrack and an axe/drill-wielding killer who wears a giant owl-head for the whole thing. Yeah, it’s pretty great. Still, it’s Soavi’s second film that I’ve chosen, because it’s arguably his best.

Considering the people he trained with, the slow-burn aesthetic of The Church might feel surprising. In fact it was originally intended as a second sequel in the growing Demons franchise until Soavi wisely nixed the idea. He wanted to break free and craft something more reserved and atmospheric. The Demons films, the first two at least, are massively entertaining but they are not what we might call subtle. Indeed, if they were faced with subtlety, they would smash its head to a bloody mush against a wall while bopping along to a blaring heavy metal soundtrack.

The Church follows more in the footsteps of Argento’s free-form supernatural thriller, Inferno, although it does so with a much quieter, haunting aesthetic. And where Argento unhinges from narrative, assaulting viewers with a sensory barrage, Soavi remains engrossed in story, slowly ratcheting up the tension. The spectacle, ancient demons made manifest, is impressive and employed sparingly, heightening their effect. Meanwhile the soundtrack, a Keith Emerson score dotted with Goblin and Philip Glass compositions feels perfectly appropriate. Soavi’s sensibilities are, in many respects, more careful and mature than we could have any right to expect, and expand on the work of his formative influences, staking out his own place in the pantheon of Italian horror.

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue

Everyone seems to love zombie movies. They’re everywhere and everyone is touting their fandom. Discussions on the internet revolve around people imagining how they might survive a zombie outbreak and how excited they are that The Walking Dead is coming back on the air. While I’ve nothing against zombie movies, indeed I could count myself as a fan too, it always surprises me that, amidst this popular love of the genre, so few people seem to have seen anything outside of Romero’s original trilogy, a couple of other modern knock-offs, and the aforementioned The Walking Dead– each episode of which, based on my own cursory viewing, seems to be a 50/50 split between boring shots of people shooting zombies and those zombies then falling over, and irritating, whiny morons whining moronically about their irritations.

Without a shadow of a doubt, Romero looms large over the genre and his original trilogy of films, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead are the definitive texts of the modern genre, but his work also gave rise to a number of talented impersonators. The European zombie movement took off with a vengeance, in part fueled by Romero’s close work with Dario Argento. The Italian horror/exploitation scene was running wild in the 70s too, producing so many films it’s difficult to keep count. A few stand taller than the rest though, with Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters aka. Zombie aka. Zombi 2 (in Italy a ‘2’ was appended and it was marketed as an unofficial sequel to Dawn of the Dead) commanding a pretty good audiences. Less well known is an Italian/Spanish co-production, shot in the UK, that boasts so many varying titles I believe it actually may have set a record. We’ll call it The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue as that’s the one I’m most familiar with, although you may also find it listed as: The Living Dead; Let Sleeping Corpses Lie; Don’t Open the Window; Do Not Speak Ill of the Dead; and various variations on all of those.

There’s nothing particularly glaring about the film’s production to make it stand out amongst the throngs of other cheap, quickly produced movies of the era but, take my word for it, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue is easily one of the finest zombie movies ever made. It’s a fairly traditional affair, relying on the excitement of escaping from the zombies more than on dubious allegory to fluff up its ingredients. It finds our heroes desperately trying to stay alive as the living dead come to haunt rural England. What distinguishes the film is the quality of its set-pieces, which combine satisfying levels of gore with a strong sense of narrative tension and excitement. Unlike countless other zombies, there’s a real feeling of urgency to this one, coupled with strong design.

Also, it features the line, “You’re all the same the lot of you, with your long hair and faggot clothes,” which maybe my favourite line in all of movie-dom (you have to hear it in context). Doom Metal group Electric Wizard also liked it, sampling the line to open their song, Wizard In Black. Granted, this nugget of information will almost certainly never help anyone ever. But just in case, I thought I’d better include it anyway.

Bay of Blood (1971) Mario Bava

In the last article I did in this series I talked about the grand shadow cast by Mario Bava. He was a giant in Italian cinema and one of the most influential genre filmmakers around. First establishing himself as a cinematographer, he later became a director in his own right, presiding over a series of popular Gothic horror films including the brilliant Black Sunday (aka. Mask of Satan). As his career progressed, he helped to shape the tenets of what would be known as giallo, a sub-genre of films, distinctly Italian, that gelled mystery with gory, highly stylized murders- invariably involving blades and scantily-clad women. Growing weary of these films, and using his own money, Bava decided in the early 70s to try something a little new. So one day he kinda invented slasher films, as you do.

Bava’s film kinda set the tone for how skinny dippers get treated in all slasher flicks hence

Although it’s exact origins are tricky to pin down exactly, since bloody death had been a mainstay of cinema for a while already, there’s little doubt that without Bava, what would become known in the US as ‘slasher films’ simply would not exist. To that end, Bay of Blood was a formative start to the movement, defined by narrative so pared down that it frankly bordered on the abstract. Although the template is well set now, there was a time when a group of people showing up in an isolated place and all being summarily slaughtered in various different ways wasn’t justification enough for a film to unfold. Weird, right? It was Bava’s tale of a contentious inheritance in a small lakeside community that cheekily demonstrated that sometimes, killing’s all you need (The Beatles claimed it was ‘love’ but they hardly seem trustworthy).

Given its extreme violence and rudimentary narrative Bay of Blood was a shock to the system at the time, prompting many horror fans to discard it as a completely inane gore-fest. Sure, that’s what 99% of slashers are, but Bava’s film, brimming with paranoia, does build a legitimately interesting result, suggesting a pernicious fate which, in the film’s conclusion, transcends familial and generational lines. The slasher film as a kind of filmic ‘standard’ would be cemented in due course, but Bay of Blood is perhaps the earliest clear adherent to the format, supplanting narrative justification (a mainstay of giallo) with ever more brute force. The result remains one of the finest slasher films ever made. Indeed, maybe even the very best of them all. And in the US it got the rather fabulous title of Twitch of the Death Nerve.

Vampyr – Der Traum des Allan Grey (1932) Carl Theodor Dreyer

Dreyer is generally regarded as one of the finest directors in the history of cinema. That’s fairly understandable since that’s exactly what he is. However while much attention is lavished on the likes of The Passion of Joan of Arc (which is, to be fair, an easy contender for the title of greatest film ever) and Ordet, his bizarre 1932 horror film Vampyr is often forgotten. I say it’s a horror film but it’s altogether stranger than that: a kind of lucid dreamscape involving a man possibly encountering a vampire, being ensnared by it, or simply passing on to the other side himself. Pick your interpretation, the film remains intensely watchable regardless.

Although time is often unkind to films beyond a certain age, Vampyr’s washed-out look is partly by design. Discovering a light-leak in the lens early into the production, Dreyer asked the cameraman not to fix it because he liked the diffuse, hazy look it gave the film. Elsewhere he shot through gauze to texture the image, all of which only heightens the oneiric bent of the exercise. Disinterested in narrative logic, the film assembles a fabulous array of odd and intriguing visuals, conjuring up spectres of death in the oddest of places. As mentioned above, the film can be interpreted allegorically or can be followed in more literal, and decidedly supernatural, terms.

Thought-provoking and atmospheric, there really aren’t many equivalents to Dreyer’s film, which remains a crystallised dream from so many years ago. In many respects, the film is timeless, harnessing the eccentricities of the production, some intended, some not so much, to create a project that stands apart from both Dreyer’s other work and cinema in general. Its influence can be traced through to David Lynch and others but it remains a singularly important work all of its own and a necessary trip for all of cinema’s dreamers.

The Pendulum, The Pit, and Hope (1983) Jan Švankmajer

If you’re stuck for time but would like a quick shot in the arm, then this one’s for you. Created by Jan Švankmajer, one of the world’s finest animators, here he adapts Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, conjuring up an abstract, nightmare vignette set in labyrinthine tunnels with a deadly, bizarre apparatus threatening the unnamed protagonist. Using primarily live action, the film blends in his trademark stop-motion techniques to filter the otherworldly into the frame.

Staying close to the original text’s style, Švankmajer seeks to heighten the experiential by presenting the entire film in a first-person perspective, the lens of the camera literally the eye of the tortured protagonist. This blends with the claustrophobic set design and the details of hideous minutiae to create a particularly jarring and atmospheric rendition of the tale, perhaps the best ever filmed.

The Face of Another (1966) Hiroshi Teshigahara

The sixties was a great decade in general for paranoid identity studies. Though spoiled for choice, it would be easy to nominate Japan’s Hiroshi Teshigahara as their king. The Woman in the Dunes is probably his best known film though my preferences tend more towards his later film, The Face of Another. Alongside Pitfall, they form a loose thematic trilogy on the subject of fractured minds, societies, and identities.

The story concerns an engineer whose face is badly disfigured in an industrial accident. He becomes reclusive and angry, unable to deal with this injury. Things look up when a doctor offers him an experimental treatment, essentially a lifelike mask that can replace his entire face. The only issue is, since his face is destroyed, it will have to be another man’s that forms the model. This doctor’s office is a completely abstract space, free-floating and amorphous, and the discussions there wax more philosophical than medical. Concerns are raised that, with a new face may come new behaviours and indeed, perhaps an entirely new identity. These concerns are well met as our protagonist, recognizing the potential to start entirely anew rather than rekindle his old life, begins to adopt increasingly aberrant behaviours.

Teshigahara’s film is visually gorgeous, appropriately utilising black-and-white despite it being somewhat out of vogue by the mid-sixties. His father being a master of Ikebana, the traditional art of floral arrangement that branched, often literally, into huge and remarkable organic sculpture, Hiroshi was entirely at home in the avant-garde and unusual. To that end he surrounded himself with a bevy of experimental artists, adapting novels from the acclaimed Kōbō Abe, with cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa, set and prop designs by noted architects and sculptors, and a musical score by Toru Takemitsu. It is a formally bold film, with its intellectual concerns writ neatly into its every nook and fold and stands as one of the high-points of 60s cinema, in Japan and elsewhere.

For the first part in this series click here

The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine (1931) Heinosuke Gosha…

In Brief: Japan’s first full-sound film isn’t quite as good as it sounds. Or maybe it’s exactly that good. Hmmm **

source: Hulu+

There’s really only one issue with Heinosuke Gosha’s genteel domestic comedy, and that’s with the film’s star- who is foregrounded and considered so remarkable that the rest of the cast is never really asked to pick up the slack. So who is this problematic star? Well it’s ‘Sound Technology.’ With this film, Gosha produced the first full-sound film in Japanese cinema. Sound took a while to catch on in Japan, longer than in the US and Europe where it dominated quickly once the technology saturated the market. Unlike in those regions, in Japan there were certain traditions that offered interesting spins on silent cinema as an art-form, such as vocal accompaniment in the form of the country’s traditional Noh theatre. This dulled the rush to sound, and silent films were still being produced in Japan into the mid-thirties when they’d all but died off in other territories.

Because tonight we’re gonna party like it’s nineteen-thirty-nine!

As anyone who has watched early sound cinema can attest, the technology wasn’t exactly the immediate breath of fresh air one might think it would be. Certainly it enhanced cinema’s potential as an art-form, but upon its original arrival it slowed down and limited film-making possibilities due to the necessity for new, extremely clunky equipment. Silent cinema had just about reached its creative apogee, with the likes of F.W. Murnau and Jean Epstein creating remarkably powerful, layered works of drama through shot composition, optical effects, and camera movement alone. The introduction of sound came as quite a backwards step as suddenly compositions became more ordinary, camera movements were simplified or stopped entirely, and actors had to tone down their efforts to instead focus on ensuring that their dialogue was properly captured by the various microphones stowed about the set.

I’ve got to admit, this whole conversing thing is pretty darn nifty

Into that fray enters Gosha’s comedy, an incredibly slight piece clocking in at little over an hour in length. It follows an easily distracted playwright, played by Atsushi Watanabe (he would become a semi-regular face in Akira Kurosawa’s cinema), who struggles to complete a play before a deadline hits. He moves himself, his wife, and their two young daughters out to a remote, picturesque cottage to help him with this task but of course things don’t go as he planned. Why? Because of sound, of course! Rowdy cats, unruly children, and a practicing jazz band next door all weigh in, creating a less than perfect setting for putting pen to paper.

You remember how to whistle, don’t you?

Okay, you obviously do. Please stop.

Just like the original talkie, The Jazz Singer, every fibre of the project’s being is devoted towards highlighting how we can now hear as well as see the unfolding events. The film opens with an altercation between the playwright and a painter, the latter annoyed by the former’s absent-minded whistling. The jazz band is no random occurrence either, but a major product placement. In fact they get credited before any of the actors and they have one full music number pretty much to themselves. All this invariably leaves the film feeling flabby and directionless despite the film’s brief runtime. It feels more like experiment than an actual feature.

To that end, the film haphazardly concludes with almost no resolution to the primary story. It’s almost like they just ran out of record and just shut the whole thing off. None of this could really rest with Gosha. There’s hardly any material to work with and it was uncharted territory. The very presence of sound is enough to validate the exercise which features a series of jokes that amount to someone prodding you in the ribs throughout and saying, “Did you hear that?!” Perhaps there’s more wordplay or clever dialogue that subtitles can’t quite capture. We might hope so since the project offers a specific credit separate from script and story for, ‘jokes.’ 

The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine is certainly no imposition. It carries a gentle lilt that, if nothing else, allows it to present itself as a slice-of-life vision of 1930s Japan. It helps in this respect that Gosha was known, as were a number of his contemporaries, for preferring to shoot on location- a trait that was less preferred in American and European cinema at the time. Nonetheless, standing as an important milestone in Japanese cinema, The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine can’t help but feel more like history than artistic endeavour. Especially when you consider, although such a direct comparison is unfair, that in the same year Fritz Lang’s M would stretch the dimensions of sound and hark forward to its full artistic potential. For fans of Japanese cinema, this is certainly a technical landmark, but it’s surrounded by magnificent silent films that held a far greater narrative and emotive depth. But of course, you have to start somewhere…