So October is upon us and with it, Halloween and pumpkin-spice lattes and the inevitable uproar on Twitter when someone decides it’s hilarious to dress up in such a manner as to make light of the riots in Ferguson, Missouri or the Ebola epidemic or whatever. Separate of all that, at this time of the year people often like to indulge in a spooky movie or thirty-one. So, for the season that’s in it, here’s a few recommendations based on my having watched them at one point and then typing all of this…
Dust Devil (1992) Richard Stanley
Suffice it to say that Richard Stanley’s career probably hasn’t panned out the way he’d have liked. And unfortunately it’s not because he’s bad at what he does. He’s kept busy of course, with documentaries, short films, and music media, but from promising origins in the late 80s, today he only has two completed features to his name: Hardware and Dust Devil. Luckily, they’ve both taken on cult status although both remain invariably under-seen. Since Hardware has at least managed a reference in the US incarnation of The Office (gangling nerd, Gabe suggests it as a date movie) I’m going to pick Dust Devil for this list.
It was cut by the Brothers Weinstein upon its US release and its UK publisher went bust during production which left Stanley in a bit of a bind. Luckily, with some politicking, he was able to assemble a ‘Final Cut’ which has since made it to DVD. That’s the version to get, although my introduction was the shorter Weinstein edition and I could recognise the quality on display. The film, set in Namibia, concerns an evil spirit made flesh, who wanders the desert in human form, seeking victims. Each person the spirit can ritualistically murder propels him closer to escape back to the spirit realm yet as it has been made flesh, so it can succumb to the weaknesses of flesh. What’s impressive here is Stanley’s sense of scale and drama. What could easily be a hackneyed gory monster flick instead strives to unite African legend, western genre flick, tragic romance, and the tumultuous politics of the region into one unified whole. It’s a tall order but Dust Devil invariably succeeds.
The film’s unusual structure is at times a little jarring, combining extensive voiceover with sweeping African vistas etc., but once you lock step with it, it feels like some kind of old soul, imploring you to heed its warnings. Comparisons to Clive Barker’s Hellraiser are apt. Both films offer a sense of grand romance that is battered by the petty hostilities of our banal world. The Dust Devil preys on its victims because they are bereft of hope and set for suicide anyway. It toys with them, offering them caresses before justifying its final actions as merciful release. A cull practically invited by these souls too delicate for the harsh African sands. A genuine and unusual sense of location, a developed narrative, and a particularly nuanced sense of desperation mark Dust Devil out as a superior horror flick.
Brain Damage (1988) Frank Henenlotter
Although I’m a fan of his, it’s almost a shame that David Cronenberg sits so unassailably atop the throne as the, ‘king of body horror.’ I’ll agree, his place is deserved, but his reputation sometimes seems to crowd out other similar, and excellent work. Exhibit A: Frank Henenlotter. He brings a rip-roaring sense of comedy to the often overtly icky trappings of the movement and remains a criminally underrated talent within the usually quite forgiving annals of schlocky genre cinema. Perhaps part of the issue is that Henenlotter’s films revel in schlock but also come with an alarming amount of intellect. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Brain Damage.
Strangely enough, you’d think ‘responsible’ authorities would love this film, given its fairly strident anti-drug message, but apparently when your film also contains a curiously carnivorous blowjob, they can’t see the forest for the trees. By Henenlotter’s own account, that fellatio scene resulted in his crew walking off set in protest. Which might seem like a big deal but he had practice when a different crew did the same thing during the shooting of his debut, Basket Case. I guess if Cronenberg has ‘king of body horror’ sewn up then Henenlotter can always grab, ‘sultan of really uncomfortable sex scenes.’
Setting aside the shock though, Henenlotter’s tale of a young man held in sway by a charismatic, chemical-spewing parasite is full of imagination and wild visuals- all fabulously realised on a meager budget. While unashamedly lewd, Henenlotter keeps an eye on grander dramatic designs. So if the aforementioned Basket Case managed a romantic tragedy in league with King Kong on a $35K budget, then Brain Damage pushes even further, offering us an enticing and entertaining depiction of drug addiction, under the guise of creature-feature, that soon descends into grubby, defiled awfulness. What could be more telling of the film’s success than that aside from cuts requested on the basis of grotesque violence, upon its initial release the film was also trimmed by its own financiers because some bits were just deemed, ‘too depressing.’ Brain Damage is an unusually socially constructive message, dressed up in a package that might actually appeal to demographics everyone worries about losing to drugs. So it makes sense that the film was mutilated and abandoned by its original distributors. Luckily, thanks to VHS, it later built up a fanbase. If you’ve not seen it, you’re in for a treat.
Martin (1976) George A. Romero
Ask anyone and they’ll tell you, George Romero is the king of zombie flicks- which is true, really. Unfortunately that title has tended to cloud some of his other achievements. Granted, it’s also helped diminish hard feelings for some of his grander missteps too. While I’ll make no qualms about citing Romero’s Day of the Dead as my go-to ‘best zombie movie evar!’ I reckon Romero’s two most interesting films are entirely bereft of the walking dead. Those films being: his ode to low-budget filmmaking dressed up in a tale of motorcycle-riding, jousting knights, Knightriders; and his sole vampire film, Martin, which Romero also claims as his favourite of his own films. We’ll focus on the latter here, since Knightriders isn’t a horror film at all, although a young Tom Savini’s sexual swagger may be unsuitable for the faint of heart.
At the heart of the film is a young man (John Amplas) who is quite convinced that he’s a vampire. The audience though may be excused their uncertainty since he roams the streets and suburbs of Pittsburgh quite freely during the day. He also lacks fangs, instead opting for sedatives and razor blades to free his victims of their blood, while he dresses up their deaths as suicides to keep the law off his tail. It would seem more obvious that this young man is in fact a victim of mental illness, perpetuated by his granduncle Cuda, who talks daily of a family curse that brought Nosferatu into the family line. Muddying affairs are Martin’s visions, which blend details from the present and past to suggest either nightmare or genuine recollection.
Above all else, Romero’s film is a rather sad account of distrust between generations and the weight of familial strife. Whether Martin is indeed a vampire or not is up for discussion, but the film remains one of the most intelligent, inventive, and interesting texts ever assembled on the subject. Which makes it all the more depressing that I’ve encountered many avowed Romero fans that have never seen or even heard of Martin.
A Blade in the Dark (1983) Lamberto Bava
Make no mistake, Lamberto Bava’s best film is Demons, a cacophonous, delirious, veritable meta-textual zombie soup caught on film. It’s hilarious and brilliant and fabulously entertaining. Still, a lot of people get to that film and look no further, so I’m going to push past that one for now. Lamberto is in the unfortunate position of having an awful lot of shadows looming around his career. His father, Mario Bava, is one of Italian cinema’s giants- a man who practically invented both the Italian sub-genre of super-stylised, gory mystery now known as ‘giallo’ and the modern slasher film proper. Meanwhile Bava worked in league with Dario Argento, the man who legitimized and mastered the ‘giallo’ and who remains, to this day, one of the biggest names in cult cinema. So while Lamberto was perfectly poised to learn from the very best, he was also set a near impossible task in trying to really delineate himself from them- and he never really did.
That doesn’t mean there are no rewards in his cinema though. In fact, anything but. Certainly Bava the younger was getting started when the Italian film scene was unfortunately falling apart, which unsurprisingly dented a promising career, but he still managed a few corkers. The aforementioned Demons remains the highpoint, produced and co-scripted by Argento, but there’s also A Blade in the Dark. Sure, Argento brought giallo screeching into the 80s one year earlier, with his riotous, synth-infused bloodbath, Tenebre but with that transition realised, Bava’s film is arguably even more fun. It’s a veritable magician’s trick-bag of giallo gimmicks and trademarks, all expertly manipulated and unfolded. We have Freudian analyses, gory deaths, exposed female flesh, red herrings by dozen, light glinting off blades, and, of course, a protagonist in a creative profession (musician) whose preferred medium is roped into the mayhem.
To that end A Blade in the Dark might not be anything new for the seasoned giallo fan, but it’s a pretty wonderful recapitulation of the movement’s mechanisms and highpoints. Granted, seasoned giallo fans have likely already watched it but luckily, if you’re entirely new to the genre, by the same token it works rather well as an introduction too. Just be sure to check your disbelief at the door.
Faust – Eine deutsche Volkssage (1926) F.W. Murnau
F.W. Murnau is, without question, one of the most important film directors within the medium’s history. Aside from the dream-like web of Nosferatu, which remains a quintessential vampire film, which I’m not going to talk about because it’s far more widely seen, his work in Der Letzte Mann (aka. The Last Laugh) fully evoked his concept of the ‘unchained’ camera and the notion, now quite humdrum, that camera movement and perspective could generate meaning in tandem with the events actually being filmed. Certainly, he didn’t quite ‘invent’ this notion, as it manifested almost unconsciously through cinema from an early stage, but he championed and elaborated on it, providing stunning examples throughout his all too short career (he died in a car accident). If you have any doubt, watch some silent films made prior to Der Letzte Mann and then enjoy Murnau’s film. It’s like being punched in the gut by awesome.
But Murnau was no one-trick pony and for all the amazing choreography of Der Letzte Mann he still found room for more magic. It was thanks to that film that he’d soon move from his native Germany to Hollywood, securing an unheard of contract from William Fox to produce a film with no limits on budget or topic. Yes, Fox was so wowed by the film that he pretty much wrote Murnau a blank cheque. So he made Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, which is generally regarded as one of the greatest works of cinema, silent or otherwise. But between those two films he had another project, an adaptation of the ancient tale made famous by his countryman, Goethe- that of Faust. To give you an idea of how splendiferous his film is, just bear in mind that it was basically the most elaborate film ever made in Germany to that point, and German silent cinema is not exactly remembered for a lack of elaborateness. Only Lang’s Metropolis, released the next year could really match it and that was a project of such gargantuan scope it nearly bankrupted what was, at the time, one of the biggest and most powerful film studios in the world.
Granted, for all its grandeur, Faust may not be quite the cinematic landmark that Der Letzte Mann or Sunrise is, but it’s still incredible stuff. With some of the most talented artisans in the world, and with no less an actor than Emil Jannings playing the tricky Mephisto, Murnau went to town crafting a blockbuster extravaganza using every trick in the Cinema Book. The end result reminds us that even in 1926, the Cinema Book apparently boasted a shitload of tricks. Puppets, multiple film exposures, trick photography, and good old-fashioned elaborate set design combine to create a swirling tale of a man’s struggle to choose between good and evil. It’s only testament to the remarkable peaks of Murnau’s career that Faust got relegated to ‘lesser’ status by many film fans. There are few films out there that so fully and fabulously evoke the monstrous and malevolent. If you’ve not seen it before, you owe it to yourself.
Ugetsu monogatari (1953) Kenji Mizoguchi
For the casual cinema-goer, it’s easy to imagine that Japanese horror cinema began in earnest in the late 1990s with Hideo Nakata’s Ringu. That certainly opened the world up to a refreshing vein of supernatural cinema but it’s little surprise that Nakata’s shocker was perched upon the shoulders of giants. Although a gentle antecedent, the great director Kenji Mizoguchi’s masterpiece, Ugetsu monogatari remains one of the most remarkable ghost stories in the annals of cinema. Granted, this isn’t really a film that sets out to scare anyone, it’s resolutely more drama than horror, yet the universality of its story, and the film’s pitch-perfect direction, build an eerie power.
The story concerns a potter who, in times of war, sees the promise of great profit by selling his wares to competing militaries. The possibility of so much money, enough to lift him and his family out of subsistence-living, inevitably makes him lose sight of that which he truly holds dear, his wife and son, and he is visited by tragedy. Led by a stellar cast of classic Japanese actors, including Masayuki Mori and the ever amazing Machiko Kyô, what impresses even more is Mizoguchi’s exceptional direction, particularly his use of sequence shots- long, complex takes playing out without a single edit. Within an uninterrupted frame the corporeal and spirit worlds intermingle seamlessly, vying for the protagonist’s senses. It is often so delicate one might feel an intruder into someone else’s dream.
The film’s closing shot, a technically simple lift of the camera that, in the context of the vista it opens, communicates vast realms of information and more vitally, of hope, remains one of the greatest moments in all of cinema. Couple that with the film’s unusually feminine edge (albeit a mainstay of Mizoguchi who, while not exactly a feminist, found his greatest success in tales of tragic heroines) and Ugetsu is surely one of the loveliest ghost stories ever told.
Concentric Ocelot Party 