October 31 2023, 19:21
Halloween (1978)
Director: John Carpenter
In Haddonfield, on Halloween night 1963, the young Michael Myers, after watching his sister make out with her boyfriend, stabs her to death with a kitchen knife and is locked away. Fifteen years later he escapes and returns to his empty family home. His doctor, Loomis, gives chase, but Myers has already taken an interest in a young high school student, Laurie Strode, and her friends Lynda and Annie. He steals a mask, a kitchen knife and some rope, and sets about a night of multiple murders.
And so I return to where this horror project began, seven years ago, in October 2016, when I decided to watch a few horror films to get me in the seasonal mood. It has a purity that other slashers don’t have — the crisp cinematography, Laurie’s naive, nerdy charm, the simple (perfect) motif of the score. I can’t fully explain it. It’s like Alien in that way. It gets everything right first time. All the copycats and sequels (and requels) can’t recapture the original’s magic.
October 30 2023, 05:40
Enemy (2013)
Director: Denis Villeneuve
This is my favourite discovery of the month. It doesn’t give up its meaning easily, which I respect, and the performances are engrossing. Barely ninety minutes, looks beautiful, has a startling final image, and I’m still thinking about it a day later. The opening scene—a group of well-dressed men, including Adam (or is it Anthony?), watch a woman in a club masturbate before moving to impale a live tarantula on one of her heels—creates a tone of background dread that comes to astonishing fruition in the final act.
Adam is a professor at a university in Toronto, living a repetitive existence in a bland, half-empty apartment, with a girlfriend who comes and goes. He lectures on dictatorships and the different ways they control populations. A colleague at his office suggests a film, and out of boredom Adam rents it. He notices one of the extras, Anthony Claire, looks just like him, so he decides to track him down, but Anthony doesn’t like the unexpected attention.
Adam, girlfriend Mary, Anthony, and his wife Helen, dance around each other as the fantastical fact of these two men’s identical bodies with different personalities plays out. Every scene has something in it, whether a background object or a line of dialogue, that suggests something about the mystery, but nothing prepares you for the final beat and Adam’s ambiguous reaction.
October 29 2023, 05:36
Cloverfield (2008)
Director: Matt Reeves
Monster movies, or at least big monsters in movies, are about destruction, usually of cities, and about how small we are in the face of them. They’re similar to disaster movies in that way — hurricanes, earthquakes, tidal waves and tornadoes all make us feel insignificant and powerless, which has certain psychological comforts.
Cloverfield is the name given by the US military to a catastrophic alien event in Manhattan, and from the beginning we know the found footage we’re watching is classified. Rob and Beth have broken up because Rob has a new job in (amusingly) Tokyo. They meet again at his leaving party in a Manhattan high rise with their new partners, and just as we discover they might get together, explosions rock the city.
I saw this in the cinema when it came out, and I remember feeling frustrated at the shaky camera and sparse glimpses of the monster. Actually, you see quite a lot of the monster, and I wonder if I was overwhelmed on the big screen, or if I was comparing it to films like Godzilla or King Kong, where the creatures are very much on display. You have to really focus on what’s happening if you want to see the alien here. I could have done with less twenty-something relationship drama in the first thirty minutes, but it does give Rob emotional stakes to go back to the collapsing building for the finale. Not that that does him any good.
October 28 2023, 06:53
You're Next (2011)
Director: Adam Wingard
The super-rich Davisons are having a get-together for the first time in years at a remote family-owned mansion. Patriarch Paul has his favourites, but none of his children get along. One of his sons, Felix, brings girlfriend Erin to meet everyone for the first time. Nobody knows that a gang of masked intruders have just killed a couple in a nearby house and it looks like the Davison family are next.
I enjoyed this, but it is bleak, mainly because everyone apart from Erin, our heroine, is an awful person. Her secret ability to adapt and survive in the face of attack is surprising, then funny, and eventually unnerving as she brutally dispatches people with a variety of unlikely weapons.
It has notes from Home Alone, but I was more struck by its impact on films that came later, like Ready or Not, and 2022’s version of Scream. Is this the beginning of the trend towards final girls becoming as violent as their attackers?
October 27 2023, 06:10
Duel (1971)
Director: Steven Spielberg
I watched Duel dozens of time on television as a kid, as well as it’s rip-off cousin The Car, so it was a treat to revisit it. I certainly didn’t notice our hero’s crisis of masculinity back then, but that’s one of the gifts of middle age, I guess.
David Mann is a salesman driving across the California desert to an appointment that he can’t be late for. He passes a truck, but it immediately overtakes him back as soon as he slows down. Mann is forced into more and more dangerous maneuvers to stay ahead of the truck and its driver, who he begins to realise is playing a deadly game.
George Miller must have been inspired a little by this when he was making Mad Max eight years later. The chase scenes are always exciting, even when they stretch for several minutes across a monotonous desert landscape, which is testament to Spielberg’s direction. It’s mind-boggling to think this was his first film. He was twenty-four ffs.
October 26 2023, 06:10
Return of the Living Dead (1985)
Director: Dan O’Bannon
While showing a new employee around a medical supplies warehouse, manager Frank accidentally cracks open a military canister containing a chemical that can bring dead bodies back to life. The leak infects a corpse in the freezer which they manage to dismember and cremate, but the contaminated smoke falls on a nearby graveyard.
This is a high energy, gory teen comedy, with plenty of slapstick moments, just like Evil Dead 2, but it’s more of an ensemble piece than that. The punks hanging out in the graveyard are everything I wish I’d been as a teen — vibrant, trashy, horny, loud, and sometimes naked in public. The downside is that there’s too much shouted dialogue in small rooms.
Hidden in the chaos is a tragic moment when an undead woman, tied to a table, is asked why she needs to eat people’s brains, and she says it’s the only thing that eases the pain of being dead. Which broke my heart a bit.
October 25 2023, 06:02
Evil Dead 2 (1987)
Director: Sam Raimi
In the role he is most famous for, Bruce Campbell tears up the screen as Ash, a man who wanted to have a romantic weekend in the woods with his girlfriend, Linda, and is instead made to fight for his life against demon-possessed corpses. And trees.
It starts with a recording of a missing archaeologist reading mysterious words from The Book of the Dead. This summons a demon who quickly possesses Linda. When the professor’s daughter, Henrietta, arrives looking for her father, instead she finds a half-mad Ash covered in blood, and her undead mother in the cellar.
It’s showing its age and budget constraints, but this is more than made up for by the charisma of the cast, Raimi’s creativity with the camera, and a relentless pace that doesn’t let up. Ash’s transformation from awkward nerd via slapstick comedy and self-mutilation to action hero is one of the wonders of the horror genre.
October 24 2023, 05:57
Invaders From Mars (1986)
Director: Tobe Hooper
Continuing my Tobe Hooper deep dive, Invaders from Mars takes us to small town America, a loving family, and a boy, David Carlsen, watching lights land in the field behind his home. Neither of his parents believe him, but the next morning his father has a cut on the back of his neck and is behaving strangely. Soon people all over town are doing the same and David is on the run.
Hooper is playing with a pastiche of black and white science-fiction films, but subverting it by having the aliens turn people into conformist fifties stereotypes instead of communists as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I wish it were shorter, less of a children’s film, and with a sharper ending — there’s too much shouting and running around. Karen Black as school nurse Linda has fun hamming it up when the impressively gross and made-with-practical-effects aliens appear. Fun fact: David was played by her real son, Hunter Carson.
I didn’t know Hooper did this pivot from horror into sci-fi. He signed a three-movie deal with Cannon after Poltergeist, of which Lifeforce and Invaders from Mars were the first two. I’m not sure I’ve got the will for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Part 2.
October 23 2023, 08:00
Lifeforce (1985)
Director: Tobe Hooper
Tobe Hooper had a long career and is still talked about reverently on the film podcasts I listen to, but I’d only seen his greatest hits — The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Poltergeist, and The Funhouse. But where to start with his other films... naked space vampires hidden in Halley‘s Comet, you say? I’m in!
Colonel Tom Carlsen is the only survivor of a science expedition into the tail of Halley’s Comet that discovered an alien spaceship inside it holding three humanoid aliens encased in glass. The aliens seem unharmed and are taken to a UK army facility. The female breaks free and escapes into the countryside, so the British government bring in Colonel Colin Caine to work with Carlsen, who seems to have a psychic connection with the alien woman, to track her down. The alien spacecraft leaves the comet and approaches Earth, and the aliens plan for humankind soon becomes clear.
Like The Quatermass Experiment, astronauts bring alien life home with them, but Lifeforce looks like it had a big budget, with lots of guns, explosions, London in flames, hundreds of zombie-like extras running around, army units, helicopters, the whole shebang. It looks amazing. The Space Girl (!) walks around naked for the first half of the film, coolly dispatching all who attempt to stop her by sucking psychic energy from her victims.
Carlsen is both her strength and her vulnerability. There’s a whole explanation of how she’s shape-shifted to appear as his idealised woman, and his unhinged behaviour in her presence is an amusing manifestation of how it feels to be in love in that crazy way where the other person isn’t seen as real — in this case, a seven-foot tall bat creature.
October 22 2023, 05:59
Infinity Pool (2023)
Director: Brandon Cronenberg
James and Em travel to a luxurious resort in an obscure foreign country to help James find ideas for his next novel. It’s been six years since his debut, so when flirtatious fan Gabi invites them to dinner with her husband, James accepts, and the foursome soon find themselves outside the resort driving to a deserted beach in a rented car. On the way back, James drives into a local farmer, killing them, and the local police explain that the penalty for doing that is death... but if they can afford it, the police can make a clone of James, and the clone can be killed instead.
It’s wonderful that the films of father and son are in conversation with each other. Crimes of the Future is about a man’s desire to use his natural generative energy (aka organs) for art. Infinity Pool is about the price a man will pay to escape the despair of writer’s block. Gabi switches from seductive to direct to monstrous in the blink of an eye, which is at times very funny, and like us James is transfixed.
At the start, Em half-jokes that she is with the creatively impotent James because of daddy issues, but James has far more destructive mother issues, swapping the financially supportive but emasculating Em for the manipulative Gabi who demands James prove his strength though ever more dangerous acts. His self-destructive nature meets its match in someone who wants to test him to destruction.