HOARDS

Francesca Horror Film Blog

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The Lodge (2019, S. Fiala & V. Franz)

Finally, a horror movie I have been looking forward to seeing after two-something years of somewhat underwhelming movies that did not bring me the desire to reawaken this blog : ‘ )

Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz are back with The Lodge; an American taste of their wholly traumatic tales (if you have not yet seen their Goodnight Mommy you must do so, preferably before seeing this one!) of familial horror.  

To me Fiala and Franz are fond of creating stories of horror based on parent-child relationships--almost fairy tale-like if you put yourself in the shoes of the children in question, from believing your mother is an impostor (in Goodnight Mommy) to believing your stepmother is evil (in The Lodge) and doing something about it. 

Without wanting to reveal too much about the plot since I highly recommend you watch this in the dead of night in the dead of quarantine, The Lodge is a children’s cautionary tale against PRANKING and GASLIGHTING.  It has been a long time since watching a film has truly scared me (it has the isolation, claustrophobia, and the feeling of insanity peeking over the edge of your bed of The Others and February), and the slow zoom of the shots on extremely low ceilings and cramped spaces, and the darkness of the interiors of the eponymous lodge itself emphasize all the death and sadness that the (annoying) kids are going through.  That being said, death once again hovers over this story and you can feel the weight of it in most scenes.  

I might digress a little to share that slow zooming shots of low ceilings and cramped spaces perfectly capture the traumatic experience I had when someone in my year in the first grade tragically passed from a terrible illness that no child should have to endure.  It was so horrible that her wake seemed to last forever, her coffin being wheeled out of the chapel slowly and horribly while we were singing our school song. I’m sorry to end on such a sad note.  May she rest in peace.  Again, just to bring it back to this story, the filmmakers of this movie in my humble opinion are among a select few storytellers who have mastered painting the shadow of death.  Watch it!!!!

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We Have Always Lived in the Castle (2018, Stacie Passon)

Based upon Shirley Jackson’s perhaps most notable novel of the same name, and being the first adaptation of it as well, Stacie Passon’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle is as beautifully molded as Jackson’s words.  Faithfully depicting the story (and mood, and house) of the reclusive Blackwood family survivors' fall from grace from a poisoned sugar bowl incident (hi, Lemony Snicket), this film exceeded my expectations.

All of the book’s main characters are perfectly cast.  Taissa Farmiga is a spindly creepy little Merricat Blackwood, knowing her poisonous mushrooms by heart, practicing her sympathetic magic, and bringing to life Jackson’s *spoiler alert* persecuted little murderess.  Alexandra Daddario, ethereally beautiful, plays the older sister Constance to a tee; the eternally pleasant, immaculately kind and lovely mother-figure to Merricat, who won’t set foot outside their estate.  Crispin Glover (man I’ve missed him) is their bleary Uncle Julian, also confined to his chair, rambling blearily on about his papers and unfinished stories.  And cousin Charles Blackwood, played by Sebastian Stan, is probably a little too handsome and charismatic as the threatening outsider who has come into their lives.

Needless to say, the Blackwood castle is the perfect depiction of the novel’s ill-fated house; from the drawing room to the parlour to Father’s room to the kitchen where Uncle Julian had his nook full of plants, to the cellar where Constance kept all of her jams, to the stunning grounds and gardens and hidden magic spells of our little Merricat.  If gothic literature were real life, then the Blackwood land in this film is where I would spend the rest of my days, baking rhubarb pie, tending to the garden, and poisoning those who persecute me by means of a fateful little sugar bowl...

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Piercing (2018, Nicolas Pesce)

I love Nicolas Pesce because he knows exactly how to paint portraits of psychopaths.  Is he one?  He did it in The Eyes of My Mother, and he did it here in Piercing (based on the novel of Ryū Murakami).  He makes sure that we enter, even for a short time, the convoluted mind of Reed (Christopher Abbott), whose killing intentions are pure as the shady past he sprung from, with his bullet journal of chloroform dosage schedules, body disposal rehearsals, and suits as sharp as his proverbial ice pick.  Not only that; Pesce makes sure we also delight in the wild Mia Wasikowska (who imho was born to play roles like this ie India Stoker, Agatha Weiss, etc), portraying fellow unhinged Jackie, whom apart from her stunning taste in apartment furnishing and style, we only get to know as a proper match for the budding killer in Reed.  (For peeps like me who haven’t read the book lol)

 I love how Pesce never reveals time nor space, and by that I mean we never really know where his films are set, or in what time period (this is based on my viewing of only The Eyes of My Mother and Piercing lol).  Piercing takes on a kind of 60′s noir vibe, and Jackie’s accent switches between American and Australian and it’s wonderfully off-putting :3

Again with how Pesce paints his portraits of psychopaths, I love how he ensures you do not revile them, because he captures their endearing and earnest qualities as much as he illustrates their aberration.  :3

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The Favourite (2018, Yorgos Lanthimos)

Power struggle in Yorgos movies is a hundred times more fun to watch, every single time.  I love how he seems to have a special place in his heart for featuring animals (literally or as plot devices or whatnot) in his films, and delicately elegant places and subdued, absurdly humorous dialogue--going the whole nine yards in this period film with nothing less than the royal court of Queen Anne.  Amidst the eccentric, scandalous lives of Britain’s royalty, and amidst watching women clawing their way to the top, Yorgos always delivers us some kind of cathartic poetic justice (in my humble opinion); in this case, and congratulations to Olivia Colman--the Queen stays Queen.  Adios!

Other than that, i seriously cannot get over how similar certain aspects of this film seemed to be to Agnieszka Holland’s The Secret Garden (1993).  Now for those who have had it up to here and will not stand for another one of Frannie’s comparisons, you may now look away!

The Secret Garden (1993, Agnieszka Holland) vs. The Favourite

Mary Lennox: strong-willed persona....................Lady Sarah

Colin Craven: frail, bratty persona....................Queen Anne

Both Colin and Queen Anne had a slightly unhealthy attachment to their BFFs, combined with entitled/possessive jealousy during times in which their BFFs were paying too much attention to someone else:

i.e. When Lady Sarah was dancing with Masham, Queen Anne told them to STOP; which is like when Mary Lennox was looking into the eyes of Dickon, as if they were about to kiss, Colin had also told them to STOP!

Another scene in which Queen Anne threatened to jump off her windowsill and Lady Sarah called her bluff and Queen Anne was pulled to the floor sobbing:

Reminds me so much again of Mary Lennox proving to a sobbing, self-pitying Colin that the spores from outside his window would not kill him:

(even those window panes! Gotta love British castles and manors...)

and that line spoken by Colin when he asked Mary what the Maharaja says in India when he’s finished speaking... “I have spoken, all depart.” were the very words spoken by his “reincarnation”, Yorgos’ Queen Anne....

Now........ I have spoken, all depart......... yes you................

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The Haunting of Hill House (2018, Mike Flanagan)

I have a lot to say about this show directed by one of my favorite directors who adapted the terrifying Gerald’s Game earlier last year, but for all intents and purposes, we shall speak mostly about Episode 9 entitled, “Screaming Meemies”.

The Haunting of Hill House is lifted from Shirley Jackson’s (and anyone’s, really) greatest work of art of the same name.  But just like the not-so-imposing Tudor-revival mansion that our modern TV family moves into, the show obviously pales in comparison to the original estate of evil and aberration birthed by the genius of Jackson.  But that isn’t to say that Flanagan and the writers of this show did not create something wholly traumatic, emotional, addictive, and cathartic.  It starts off with your iconic references and lines from Jackson’s Haunting, its main characters’ names are from the novel though portraying totally new (besides the Dudley’s) people, and the main character itself, Hill House, is also portrayed as closely as possible—rooms, conservatory, spiral staircase, tower—to Jackson’s Hill House.

Now even if a few side stories and characters are stereotypically embattled by the darker depths of life, Episode 9 is worth a bunch of praise and makes me feel nostalgic with a bittersweet feeling that brings me back to the golden years of emotional horror (the excellent portrayal of love and loss made me think of The Others and El Orfanato).  

Screaming Meemies *spoilers ahead* focuses on beautiful Carla Gugino’s Olivia Crain’s descent into the hell created by Hill House.  Gugino plays Olivia, a woman plagued by the premonitions of her two youngest children gruesomely dead and not just dead, but suffering in the midst of being dead… and even if this is the House’s doing, what it does to Olivia is damage her beyond repair until she too becomes a living, haunted specter, trapped to feverishly roam inside the entrails of Hill House.  Gugino is brilliant at playing the part, and so is her gossamer-like night robe.  An almost crushing scene with her two cutest offspring and an equally-cute Abigail, resulting in our prolonged glance at a *SPOILER* lifeless Abigail, whilst Olivia moans in anguish about wanting to wake from her screaming meemie (the flapper dialogue in this episode was wonderful), really brought me back to the grief of the main mom, Laura, in El Orfanato, who gave everything to be *spoiler alert* reunited with her dead son.

Grief is the worst emotion in the world, and Flanagan’s direction of how Olivia finally “woke up” from her grief to a heart-breaking flashback of brighter days, was exactly the kind of emotional horror that gives you the kind of masochistic teary catharsis that you need sometimes.  For whatever suffering you are going through as you read this, dear reader, please know that days will get better, and there is love around you to keep you strong.

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Apostle (2018, Gareth Evans)

Gareth Evans is the mastermind of The Raid franchise, aka my favorite martial arts movie(s) of all time.  It was thus with much anticipation that I awaited this Netflix period horror flick starring Dan Stevens, Michael Sheen, and the breathtakingly-beautiful Lucy Boynton, about a man who enters a cult to save his kidnapped sister from ~evil~.

Like its The Raid brothers, Apostle does not shy from gruesome fight sequences; probably more gut-wrenching in this horror story, and it certainly made me remember why I balk at the vision of medieval torture.  Unfortunately watching the story unfold left me wanting in terms of period perfection such as The VVItch (and to a certain extent The Wicker Man tho I’ve only seen the one w lovely Nic Cage, and The Village); which seem to have inspired Gareth Evans to write and film Apostle.  

The central characters surprisingly lacked the kind of depth Gareth Evans made his beloved Rama and Uco (and even Mad Dog and equally-beloved Prakoso) (characters from The Raid and The Raid 2) possess.  I mean Thomas (Dan Stevens) had something good going on in his character development but it was lacking something I can’t quite put my finger on.  Evans is prob still developing his talent for matching violence with storytelling, which he already super duper nailed in The Raid 2, which continues to be the Gold Standard of Moviez for me <3  But that isn’t to say that there aren’t heart-stopping climactic sequences in Apostle that’ll make your dentures fall off.  If only the characters in Apostle could do martial arts too :)))))))

Also in terms of mysticism, old gods, and monsters, Apostle offers some real grotesque pain and evil that ain’t for the faint of heart!

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Hereditary Postscript: Remembering The Others

I will compare a horror movie like Hereditary to the similarly psychological/supernatural horror movie The Others (because watching Hereditary delighted me, and led me in my musings, to re-watch The Others) to be able to rationalize why I still hold The Others as my gold standard of horror.

*mad spoiler alertSsss*

Hereditary is, as viewers have seen it to be, a ‘carnival of grief’, the nightmare of death and the supernatural, and above all of that, the triumph of demons and occultism over an imploded family unit that was already doomed to begin with.

Leading Lady:  Though the film’s POV shifted from Annie to Peter during the final act, Toni Collette played to a tee the quietly-traumatized daughter/artist whose elders perished in the macabre clutches of mental illness.  She also showed us guilt and resentment directed at her two children; the first child of which being the object of her resentment (because she never wanted to become Peter’s mother), and at her second child, Charlie, of her guilt for resenting having Peter in the first place.  From there she unraveled into fits of rage and grief at the death of a loved one, and the terror in her became the terror in us.

Hapless Dad:  We never really find out what the dad does except give honest love to his family and try to protect them from evil.

Spiritual Elements:  In Hereditary, the only Catholic rite we see is when the family buries their dead.  The rest is taken from demonology and occultism, revolving around Paimon, a spirit name borrowed from actual demonology grimoires.  This leads us to the twist and resolution, where viewers may feel shortchanged by the abruptness of pacing, from excellent slow-burn dread, to cheapish horror elements (possessed people scaling walls, garrote-ing themselves, pounding their heads on the attic door).

Twist: It wasn’t really about coming to terms with the death of a loved one or dealing with the haunting of a vengeful spirit, but about a coven of witches summoning Paimon who lived inside one of the children.

Resolution: As such, the film ends in a shock wave/spectacle of naked elders enraptured by the crowning of their incarnate Paimon king, where the movie throws out all semblance of our emotion, just when we were already enjoying brooding over death, despair, and morbidity.  But despite my annoyance, I still reveled in the beauty of the first half of the movie and am obviously not over it since I’m writing shit like this.

The Others is the gothic masterpiece of Alejandro Amenabar (whose overwhelming use of heaviness and dread I immediately recalled after seeing Hereditary), similarly portraying an isolated family shrouded in an isolated house, suffering from madness, isolation, and grief, also plagued by supernatural horror.  

Leading Lady:  Nicole Kidman plays the stately, pious, and austere Grace.  Whereas Toni Collette’s madness turned her into a literal mess, Grace remained an otherworldly creature whose despair was veiled in the prettiest little head full of perfect blonde locks (I sound lesbian) and vampiric/angelic elegance. This to me was exceedingly frightening to watch, as beauty confuses you into thinking that everything should be okay, even if it isn’t.  But OK other than that, as Grace and Annie play two totally different characters, it’s just refreshing to remember this similarly strong performance of a woman who descended into the depths of hopelessness, but whose austere faith made her keep it together for the most part, all in the intense, fearsome portrayal by Nicole Kidman (did she win an Oscar?).   

Hapless Dad:  Even if the Dad makes an appearance after being lost at war for over a year, he is an enigma wrapped in strange wistfulness and nonsensical words “Sometimes I bleed” that you’d rather he just go away, because he is just too damn sad and creepy even for their world..  And then as mysteriously as he comes, he just leaves again... Chilly....

Spiritual Elements:  There is no greater subversion of the Catholic faith that I have ever witnessed than the portrayal of it in this movie which makes me believe that The Others is the most frightening movie there is. Sure, satanic movies like Hereditary are frightening for the obvious reason—portraying evil as triumphant over good.  But at least it’s rightfully named by the audience as evil.  But in The Others, Catholicism is subtly portrayed as a religion of lies.  Grace staunchly taught her children about an afterlife where good children went to heaven and bad children went to hell.  But in the movie there is no heaven or hell, and by that logic…there is no god.  There is only the house that they haunt.  Also in comparison to the way Paimon is creepy because he exists in actual grimoires, the Book of the Dead they find in The Others was also an actual practice in the Victorian era and I swear when I first found out about postmortem photography because of this movie, I shat my pants.

Twists/Resolution:  1) The three mysterious household helpers turned out to be ghosts returning to the house years after they died of tuberculosis, Lydia becoming mute after she died, because of the shock that she was no longer living 2) Grace’s husband was also dead and returned to the house after dying in the war and being a literal lost soul 3) With the help of a living medium, Grace realized she went insane and suffocated her two children with a pillow and then shot herself when she realized what she had done 4) Grace and her family refused to leave the house despite being disturbed by the world of the living, because they really had nowhere else to go.

The clues leading to these revelations were also all there from the beginning just like in Hereditary, but its story never meandered the way Hereditary kind of did.  It just kept flowing with coherence, developments, and bone-chilling horror at every turn.  Therefore the twists here were way more well-earned, dramatic, and profound.  

Franny’s takeaway: Hereditary takes a seat in the Scariest Movies Hall of Fame, but The Others belongs to the Best Movies of all Time Hall of Fame <3

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Hereditary (2018, Ari Aster)

Death is the immediate author (and authority) when this story opens.  A family—a mother, a daughter, a son, and faintly a father—are honoring their late grandmother at a funeral full of strange guests, whose presence we see in a portrait and in her casket, feels like it was once this heavy cloud hovering over the relatives she left behind.  I say her presence felt heavy, for in her eulogy from her daughter, she was painted as a secretive woman whose other life was extremely veiled, and the way we see her closed-up reposed self in the casket, and the way the camera cuts to her portrait, where her smile is only the trace of a smile, we are meant to feel unsettled, wondering who exactly this woman was, and what exactly she meant to her family.  The removed way in which our mother, played by Toni Collette, delivers her eulogy, is also somewhat embittered and bothered (we learn more of this trauma later).

Even if the grandma’s recent death came as somewhat of a relief to this family, as they vaguely let on, tension hangs in the air of their large wooden house, in their estate in the woods.  The tension is so thick, you could cut through it with a knife.  First of all, they are a family of liars.  Second, their daughter Charlie is a strange little thing with no friends, tons of wooden figurines in her room, a treehouse that she sleeps in on most nights, and she attracts birds who die at her whim, only for their heads to be cut off by her, AND she clicks her tongue a lot. Third, their mom is an artist who recreates every morbid event from their lives into miniature form, from hospital beds, to granny exposing a gnarled old breast to breastfeed Charlie, to *spoiler alert* a spine-tingling homicide scene.  Fourth, a pervading theme of this film besides grief is trauma and mental illness and the inextricable relationship between the two. Lots of dark, dark shit going on in the Graham family, and as the film cuts away at the iceberg of darkness from the beginning, it leaves us swimming in the deep end by the…deep end of it.

What’s so impressive about this movie is the ominous feeling of dread that engulfs you for the most part (*spoiler alert* some very disturbing subject matter about DID and possible fugue states when the mother sleepwalks and almost lights her son up in flames after pouring paint thinner all over him was overwhelmingly dark and sad for me) up until the very climax, when *spoiler alert* a séance is made by the Graham family.  Big The Others fear levels and the entire audience of the movie house I was in was shrieking in terror.  I thought that after that climactic scene, it meandered with some cheap thrills to keep the audience’s heart attack level up, which were mediocre for the director’s caliber, since prior to that, he was already perfecting our experience of the worst nightmare we could ever experience in a long time of horror movie-viewing.  

As you may have already seen the film and as you may have also already read reviews about it, (of course you have, because I’m probably only talking to myself HAHAHA), the mystery is revealed bit by bit right from the beginning, that the Graham family’s late matriarch belonged to a cult/coven worshipping Paimon the demon.  And yes MOST of the details tie up to the movie coming full circle at the end, save for a few unanswered questions that were superfluous to the film in my humble opinion.  It was really nice for me during the times that grief and madness were the main conflicts in the movie.  Even if I didn’t love the ending, I read about Ari Aster’s explanation of why it ended like that, and that made me appreciate the movie more.  I would enjoy watching it again though, because of the excellent way it wields emotional horror.  It sits among the ranks of emotional horror films It Comes at Night, The Others, El Orfanato, and satanic movies like Rosemary’s Baby, The Wailing, and The Witch.

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Unsane (2018, Steven Soderbergh)

ugh i love them together so much can you tell </3

how to look like a murderer facial starter pack

I love it when you wear blue.  I mean, I love you in anything.  You wore blue that first time I saw you so anytime I see you in blue, it reminds me of how I felt at that moment.  How I never really knew what being alive was until I saw you. You unlocked something inside me that day, something I didn’t even realize was there.  And right then, I knew that nothing in my life was ever going to be the same.  In that moment, I was transformed permanently.  You did that.

That is what we hear as Unsane opens: a man’s twitchy, unhinged voice looming over a shadowy thicket in blue lighting.  It is one of the most frightening voice-overs I’ve heard in a long time; the clinical coldness by which the words of obsession are spoken set the tone for the shitstorm we’re about to be thrown into.

We are thus immersed in voyeuristic shots where every scene, shot from the angle of a lonely iPhone propped up on a ledge or the edge of a table (or something) looks like porn (without porn) or snuff.  But how should I know, right? Hyuck hyuck! (ok joke’s over)

Again, this movie belongs in my horror blog for its most prestigious subgenre, and that is psychological horror.  I swear the only practical reason I majored in Psychology was to appreciate these movies. On that psychiatric note, this movie allows us to settle in as voyeurs to the atypical life of Sawyer Valentini, and it starts off slightly strange—she freaks out during a tinder hookup that she herself initiated—then tumbles down an entire slime vat of crazy as she seeks counseling for what seems to be paranoia about stalking and ends up institutionalized in this creepy 70’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest insane asylum.   We, the audience, are in turn imprisoned by what happens next, in the most oppressive way via the intense wide angle shots/flat picture quality of that goddam iPhone.  Steve Jobs you da real horror MVP.

The villain in this movie is one of the most hateful ones I’ve ever known since Bambi’s hunter, for reasons I’d rather not spoil...  Our heroine, Sawyer Valentini (her name just rolls off the tongue in the offbeat way the entire script of this movie reads out), is pushed to the very edge of her sanity in this ordeal of imprisonment in her own mind and in her….insane ward…. With political ramifications about how institutions scam us out of money, this movie makes us ask ourselves how oppressed we have to become to go legit apeshit.  Wow that sounded pretentious…but being caught up in the corruptions of a system we call society can sometimes…imprison us…for real….  

But I digress.  No matter how bleak the series of unfortunate events in this movie became, Unsane was so well-acted by strong leads and supporting peeps up to that gut-wrenching climax, that this movie can do no wrong for me.  But I will probably never watch it again because it hurt too much. : (

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Revenge (2017, Coralie Fargeat)

Revenge is the pulpy breakout film of Coralie Fargeat and to my pleasant surprise it was extremely entertaining!

It starts off in all its pulpy hypersexualized glory, where a wealthy man hides away his mistress (this little lolita blonde played by the Daenerys-esque Matilda Lutz) in a desert mansion, and she unfortunately falls victim to male violence.  What seems in the beginning to be a leading lady with weak moral character, the naivete of a fifteen-year-old (sorry, fifteen-year-olds), and extreme damsel in distress circumstances, turns out to be someone who gloriously (almost supernaturally) turns the tables on her assailants, and for us grateful viewers, causing us to root for her instead of vilify her (that came off wrong pls dont lynch me, feminists).

This whole arid desert action with good-looking leads reminds me a lot of The Bad Batch, and that's OK, because it's got that same gritty badassery (if not more so in this one), and like I’ve said in the past, i love survival/battle movies between unlikely opponents.  The pulpy action is turned up a few notches in the events that lead to the movie’s climax; the saturated color scheme of the cinematography works in favor of that, where the cerulean blue sky contrasts golden sandy flesh, and all the blood (this movie is viscerally full of it) really pops like a high fashion editorial.  This was stylized violence with a splash of magic realism and it was so damn good!!!

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A Quiet Place (2018, John Krasinski)

Mad respect for John Krasinski for co-writing and directing this taut, emotional suspense-drama (again, with horror elements) set in a near-future/alter-present post apocalypse.  As challenging as it may be to create an almost silent film about surviving in the midst of an otherworldly predator preying by hearing, Krasinski and his peeps pretty much nailed it with the emotion, story-telling, and damn fine acting.

I will assume by now that my readers (all two or three of you) have seen this movie and are reading this for entertainment purposes as I often post spoiler-y commentaries; that being said, let’s discuss the movie part by part.

In opening sequence of Day 89 (after all hell broke loose) or so, we are thrown immediately into the world of a family scavenging, Walking Dead-style, in an abandoned store, in an abandoned town, where we see a corkboard full of missing persons, which may as well be the entire world, as Krasinski’s family is all we see onscreen for a good period of time.  Of course, there is that other detail, where they make no sound to survive something unseen (for now).  Great effort with the barefoot sand-trail life, and from the beginning you can see that the entire family communicates in sign language because they have a deaf daughter.  We see that their survival was largely due to them having a kind of upper hand by knowing how to communicate in sign language/silence.  

Also in all the silence, the film shows you a hauntingly beautiful and peaceful world, in perfect harmony with nature and ~mankind~.  A poignant scene I loved was during dusk when Krasinski’s character lit a fire on a hill, and a few other fires started showing up in the far-off distance signalling that some others were still alive.  But then noise = death.  We see the monsters that swiftly attack and devour any living breathing thing, which immediately immerses us in a new nightmarish world.  This movie packs a punch in terms of suspenseful scenes.  Some of them so tense you feel like you might shit your pants, which my Vinny was close to doing amidst incessant flatulence. (``,)

I really enjoyed the little wonderful details to mark fear and suspense, such as the family’s ingenious ways of communication--the warning lightbulbs with safety/danger colors, and also their *spoiler alert* baby bunker which was pretty much a coffin with an oxygen tank :(  Speaking of sadness, props also to this movie for mixing in that good ole emotional horror/drama.  The film is actually a beautiful portrait of a loving family where even the children make sacrifices to save and protect their own.

Other than the more somber It Comes at Night, which had a similar story about a family living isolated in the woods in a post apocalyptic universe, the tone and style and content of this movie also reminded me a lot of M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, one of my favorite movies, which also emphasizes the importance of family, love, and courage.  And that things happen for a reason/the answer to a difficult problem or riddle might actually have been right under your nose all this time.

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You Were Never Really Here (2017, Lynne Ramsay)

This movie deserves all the horror accolades because of its wonderful director, Lynne Ramsay, who made our beloved feature film, We Need To Talk About Kevin.  Not only is she the queen of movies with long titles such as that and this one, entitled, You Were Never Really Here, but also the queen of really good adaptations, as both were based off of books of the same names (which I sadly have not read but since the films were so good I will attest to this).  In expert study on mood/trauma/grief, Ramsay makes movies where dialogue is sparse, yet scenes are impregnated with feeling and emotion.  Again, her movies are not meant to be horror films, but because she directs them with the most effective horror elements, like with this latest one, it deserves a spot in this humble blog.

So Joaquin Phoenix, whose dark and brooding sexiness will last forever, plays Joe, a hired gun with PTSD flashbacks of his dark childhood, vet and FBI past, who finds missing girls.  From the poster you will notice his main weapon is the hammer, which brings me fond memories of The Raid 2′s Hammer Girl, and right into the beginning of the movie, you can see that he is very effective, being born into violence and living with it all his life.  You learn why, from his disconcerting flashbacks, that his father also used a hammer on him and his mother when he was a child.  Aside from his past, the main plot in this movie is that Joe is assigned to look for the missing Nina, the preteen daughter of a senator, who has been lost to the dark world of trafficked underage girls for a high-end brothel.  The instant bond between Joe and Nina work well and hearken to a Leon: The Professional vibe, where we immediately root for the lovable and age-old fantasy of the father-daughter protector-damsel thing.

Aside from this movie being beautifully-shot with excellent acting from Phoenix and up-and-coming otherworldly waifish beauty Ekaterina Samsonov (wish i had her Russian eyes and Russian name wtf), its strong points are its horror elements such as its score and unconventional/strategic/disturbing shots of violence.  The jarring strings and bangs mark suspenseful scenes and are admittedly so frightening that the hallucinations brought by Joe’s PTSD freaked me the fuck out every single time.  An achingly sad and tender scene is also marked in turn by a beautiful and melancholic score.  It’s just super effective and beautiful throughout.  As for the disturbing story lines/scenes, they leave me wondering why I am into watching that type of thing in the first place.  Or the more I see stuff like that in the movies, does that mean others are like me and into that shit too?  Spoiler alert: refer to above screencaps with pink children’s room.

Watch this for the mood, the beauty, the Sleeping Beauty-esque (but I mean the Emily Browning one) aberration of rich and powerful men, and the melancholy brute force of Joaquin Phoenix.

Stray observations:

- Omg Joe crushed a (green) jellybean in a scene and it’s giving me so much ASMR feels (I have newly acquired my ASMR and am loving every little tap, crush, crisp, what have you)

- How the heck did they make Nina’s pupils dilate for the camera?  Or was it unintentional?  At first I thought they made her take something to appear drugged with dilated pupils and shit but it could also just have been the lightning while shooting and that she just gives a really good dazed look since she is after all a model in real life <3

- *Spoiler alert* what a wonderful redemptive ending for Joe, whose violence walked alongside him as his shadow all throughout his life, for when he met Nina the child, she let him have a break by doing his dirty work for him in the end.  He saved her and she saved him.  And then they could be a team or a family in the end. <3

[bellyslitting]

Thelma (2017, Joachim Trier)

This is the type of melancholy film a fifteen-year-old me would have loved...  Too bad it came out 10 years too late though!!!!!!!!  Just kidding,,,, everyone appreciates a good enigmatic arthouse supernatural horror once in a while/always <3

The last great arthouse coming-of-age horror films that I can recall are Goodnight Mommy and The Eyes of My Mother; though not as subtle as Thelma, the often macabre theme of adolescence (and repression) is universal and alluring to watch.  Our titular girl, Thelma, whose austere religious upbringing masks a secret hereditary supernatural power, is lonely and on the outside of things, not to mention she just started seizing inexplicably at school, just like how [most] of us Catholic school gals [probably] felt when we were little.  

I’m traveling back in time to when I used to not be allowed to do anything (no boys, parties, evil thoughts), and this was around the same time in my life that I used to pass out in stuffy Sunday mass in church, a condition which my mom told me i inherited from my dad who had a mild form of epilepsy as a kid (im not joking), and voila, TOTES RELATE TO THELMA AND HER SUPERNATURAL SEIZURES!!! I COULD TOTALLY FEEL HER PAIN AND PARANOIA, GIRL!  PASSING OUT AND SEIZING AINT EAZY!  Not to make this about me but up to this very day, I have no idea why i used to have those fainting spells back in school.

If that wasn’t enough to make her feel ‘other’ enough, repressed prudent Thelma had to fight these lesbian urges for her schoolmate Anja, which might actually have been causing her to seize and shit.  Add to that the gothic appeal of her unexplained secret grandmother locked away in a sanitarium somewhere removed from that quiet little world.  What’s most terrifying about this mysterious tale is that when she was just a child, her convulsions caused her family a tragedy so great, you would have to see it for yourself because it brings tears to my eyes to have to explain it for you.

I’m not sure if the equally torturous ending was made for the sake of arthouse dread, but to be purely objective about this portrayal of a young woman as strange and beautiful as the mystery of nature and mother earth herself, this movie is a wave of suffocating panic, somber beauty, and deafening stillness all at once, like how I’m imagining seizing to a strobe light would feel like, or on a deeper note, like the riddle of life when a younger version of yourself tries to figure it out.

[bellyslitting]

The Ritual (2017, David Bruckner)

Welcome to da family, David Bruckner’s first feature film!  You may have seen some of his prior segments from VHS or Southbound and this full length feature is a gorgeously-shot movie ostensibly set in Sweden in the throes of da Woods. 

Upon seeing the prelude where a group of friends plan a hiking trip and a couple of them get into a convenience store robbery with one of them ending up dead because the main character (Rafe Spall) didn’t do shit to help him, the wheels and gears in my little dinky film analysis brain began to churn and cause me to wonder, ‘why do all great horrors have emotional horror or begin with a separate tragedy?’  How does this tend to add emotional weight to the situation our heroes will later get themselves into?  Is it due to our empathy or some deeper way of relating to them when a separate life tragedy (aka our main plot) occurs?  Simply enough, that dinky little question i had ended up getting itself a pretty blatant explanation near the end of the movie, to my slight disappointment.

So as this introduction gives way to our main plot of Rafe Spall’s remaining friends (and himself) pushing through with said hiking trip (to Swedish mountains) in honor of said dead friend, one of their ~proverbial~ wolf pack’s weaker members twists his ankle, forcing them to take a shortcut down the mountains, into the deep dark woods.  Cue in the ominous singular drum beat and an ominous shot of the deep dark woods.  Now there are a few spine-tingling and hair-raising similarities to the vibe of Blairwitch in that the woods are a lovely dark and deep place to get lost and mutilated in, full of trees etched in runes where things seem to be watching you, a solitary cabin that you’re forced to spend the night in, containing an effigy of a human torso with antlers, you get the idea and it isn’t pretty.  A superb work of fear!   As we come to realize, the woods are a well-loved symbol of fear in man, almost always promising that you will get lost in them and never be found.  And what finds you will eat you.

This movie takes a turn for the supernatural from the psychological in the end, and though the first half to me was way more effective and compelling than the ending, with The Village of Shyamalan sensibilities (but less captivating), it was nevertheless meant to be a kind of fairy tale for grown men about outgrowing and losing one’s childhood friends.  As poignant and wistful as that sounds, I could tell it must have affected our good writer/director in the pain and loss and guilt portrayed, and that growing up/adulthood really sucks like a monster demon bitch.

[bellyslitting]

Creep 2 (2017, Patrick Brice)

Creep 2 is the sequel to the first film of its name by Mark Duplass and Patrick Brice, whose work we delight in for spine tingling-humor and discomfort (see my posts of The Overnight and the original Creep).  Since this is a sequel, we shall compare it to its predecessor, with Mark Duplass reprising his role as our titular serial killing creep who plays (superbly) our delightful (isn’t this word delightful?) study of your modern-day charming, hilarious psychopath, who in this installment evolves as a character from his golden age of killing (in da first movie) to the twilight of his ‘existence’ (in Creep 2).  A serial killer going through mid-life crisis, not unlike many of us reading this right now! aka myself!  Yes you heard me, I’m proof-reading this right now as well! Heehee!

I’m just going to put it out there—horror sequels are rarely better than their predecessors, and I am going to say this of Creep 2 in terms of my desire for new feelings of discomfort and fright.  In my humble opinion, a found footage film like Creep will be way scarier the first time around, as you have no idea what Duplass’ character is like until you see him in the entire first movie—imagine a man you’ve just met and bonded with for a day, who declares that he wants to be with you forever till death do one of you part—a man inspired by the gold standards that are Misery and Fatal Attraction.  Yes, we revel in that kind of fear of all-too-real, seemingly normal folks who get under your skin and never leave until they kill you.

The nightmare continues in Creep 2, but it’s less nightmarish because we already have the knowledge of Duplass’ character as a bad one.  All we can do is hope our current heroine is wily enough to outsmart the predator, but even that is almost cookie-cutter, which to me makes Creep 2 lose some of the charm its first film so gloriously possessed in introducing Duplass’ insanity onscreen.  

But speaking of charm, it is in this second installment where characters of psychopaths and potential psychopaths (remaining mysterious throughout) are studied and flourish.  We get to hear more from “Aaron” (Spoiler alert: Duplass’ killer never really reveals his names but takes the names of his previously murdered victims) Mindhunter-style, as a kind of ‘Portrait of a Serial Killer’ dossier.  Equally interesting to note is that our seemingly impenetrable heroine named Sara (Desiree Akhavan) may as well be hiding secrets of her own as her stoicism in the face of apparent danger often causes Duplass’ character to wonder if he’s met his match.

Come to think of it, we (and by we I mean me) love battle (of the wills) movies!  Where two characters are an equally good match when pitted against one another!  Happy Halloweeny!

[bellyslitting]

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017, Yorgos Lanthimos)

Daddy Yorgos is back in da hauz as the King of disturbing and grisly make-believe worlds soiling his elite/first class aesthetic <3  The Killing of a Sacred Deer, his first full-blooded psychological horror flick which one might find borrows from the Greek myth of Iphigenia, is two hours-worth of  politeness and manners choking under the pressure of Evil [home] invasion.

From the first shot of a pale beating open heart under surgery, together with the operatic choir score blaring into your ears, this film is entirely surgical in terms of dread, neatly cutting into your flesh, elegantly letting your blood flow, whilst an orchestra delivers masterpiece upon masterpiece too loud for you to be able to think straight while you lay dying.  I can’t thank this director enough for allowing us viewers to fix our sights upon so many aesthetically-pleasing homes and settings—even hospitals.  Also for casting pale ethereal beauty Nicole Kidman who is a queen in her own realm of psychological horror as her gaze fixed upon you is a palpable source of awe and dread.

Now this story introduces us to a renowned heart surgeon who lives the perfect domestic life with his pale, fair-haired wife and their ruddy-faced, decently talented children. Sprinkle in some morbid humor of first menses, necro-anesthestic fantasy roleplay and such, and we have our perfect family in a perfect home in a perfect upper-class neighborhood.  Only one minor detail that doesn’t fit into this perfect story comes into play, and that is of a mysterious teenager named Martin who has latched himself onto the good Doctor, and slowly invades this perfect host—that is the doctor’s entire household.  Not unlike a lethal parasite!

And as this parasite is forcibly removed, the arbitrary curse he places on the family—all the while retaining his own blank-faced sociopathic stare—unfolds in torturous blows, and we the audience are forced to cringe all night long at the horrific choice our good doctor must make in order to save his family.  Movies like this are really only part of an extremely select few in which immaculately beautiful settings are wrought with entirely disturbing acts, almost as if what we are witnessing is always a living, breathing painting, or an opera, and Lanthimos is the maestro.  

PS Omg opera…operating room….

[bellyslitting]

Gerald’s Game (2017, Mike Flanagan)

My realdad (hi, Dad!!!!), the Stephen King fan, is having the time of his life seeing more and more of Stephen King’s novels turned into films.  I sadly have not read Gerald’s Game but I have heard that this movie is the best possible/most faithful adaptation one could make of the story.  There’s something terribly beautiful about TV movies set in the woods…The nostalgic soft lighting, the loneliness, the comfortingly mature actors…

This is a cautionary tale against getting handcuffed in isolation, compounded by having a husband with heart problems, compounded by the wonderfully terrible luck of being in the vicinity of a grave robbing monster.  What makes Gerald’s Game splendid to watch isn’t so much our heroine’s struggle for survival against seemingly hopeless odds, as it is about figuring out that past pain and suffering can become your friend and help you survive the present.  One day this pain will be of use to you………………………

For the benefit of my reader(s) (hi, dad!) who may ironically not have read Gerald’s Game either, I would like to leave as much out as possible for optimum viewing delight. Though I will never be able to warn you enough of a monster in this film that is so frightening, he makes The Babadook look like a bunny.  He is the Smiling Horror Moonlight Man silently emerging from the shadows, smiling all the while.  I legit had zero sleep last night because of him.  Good luck, and have fun…