A Dreadful Decade (Part VI): Amer (2009) dir. Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani

Logline: A triptych of sex and death. In the first segment, Ana (Cassandra Forêt), a young girl, has strange and frightening encounters with her wraith-like grandmother on the eve of her grandfather's funeral. In the second segment, Ana (Charlotte Eugène Guibeaud), now an adolescent, savors the sensory delights of the world and the attention of men during a trip into town with her mother (Bianca Maria D'Amato). In the final segment, Ana (Marie Bos), now an adult herself, returns to her abandoned childhood home to confront her past and is instead confronted by a black-gloved killer brandishing a straight-razor.

Analysis: Amer is about the perils (and pleasures) of psychosexual development gone horribly awry. Freudian psychoanalytic theories have long been entwined with horror cinema on both sides of the Atlantic, but rarely so explicitly as they are in this Belgian-French thriller. The film dramatizes an extreme case of sexual repression, with our patient-- the young, adolescent, and finally middle-aged Ana-- confusing Eros and Thanatos during her latent stage of childhood development. To confuse, perhaps conflate sex and death at such a delicate period in one's life will create obvious issues later on. Thus, we watch as Ana grows up into a woman who simultaneously courts and resists sexual attention, as if the prospect of sex is akin to a primal threat of violence and a gateway to the ultimate sensual pleasure.

We witness the root of Ana's repression taking hold in the film's first segment, when Ana walks in on her parents having sex immediately before the family is to attend its decrepit patriarch's funeral. The film tells us that this is a key moment: Ana's eyes go wide, and glass cracks and breaks across the the image of her face as the lights illuminating the screen shift between vibrant primary and secondary colors. She sees her mother on her back in a fit of ecstasy, looking much like a corpse on a slab, or like the corpse of her grandfather in the other room. Her father's sexual thrusting looks like the mindless violence of a killer thrusting a knife. The damage is done.

Ana has this traumatic encounter after being chased around the house by her ghastly, witchy grandmother, who is perpetually veiled in black lace to conceal her horrific visage. For the child Ana, this elderly presence, with its extreme age, opaque habits, and proximity to death, exists as a personification of death itself, always in pursuit of us mortals from the day we're born. However, these feelings don't dissuade Ana from her attraction to the death that the elderly figures in her life represent. We see her recklessly spy on her grandmother's arcane activities, and she steals her dead grandfather's jewelry from his corpse (going so far as to use a crucifix to pry it from his rigor mortised hands). The threat and presence of death will continue to have an allure for Ana.

In the film's second section, we watch as Ana's mother recognizes a connection that Ana has already made: through her daughter, who has now grown into sexual maturity, she sees that she is being replaced by a younger copy of herself and thus becomes aware of her own mortality, recognizing (as Ana already does, in her own twisted fashion) that the price of sex (read: reproduction) is death. As the two women strut into town in their sundresses and consciously attract the gazes of the men they're passing by, each is acutely aware of the other's position in life. Ana sees her mother's graying temples and smugly smirks; her mother sees her daughter's budding sensuality and tries desperately to hold its hand like a mother would a small child, to prevent it from blossoming.

But, for Ana, her blossoming is a complicated life event. We notice as the wind blows onto her body and an ant crawls across her skin that Ana has become keenly aware of the sensual pleasures that the world now has to offer her. Thus, the sexual attention of the men she encounters on this trip into town is somewhat appealing, but it's also clearly threatening. As she walks, alone, past a large group of rugged and dangerous looking motorcyclists, we understand her to be pulling her windblown dress down out of both feigned modesty and a genuine sense of fear. She's intrigued by the pleasure these men have the potential to now offer her, but she's also cognizant (however rightly or wrongly) of the danger in embracing such sexual pleasures.

In the third section of the film, we learn that Ana's predicament has resulted in a frigid and apprehensive adulthood. She has forsaken sexual activity, imagining every male she encounters in her daily travels as a threat to her safety. We meet her as she is returning (for reasons unknown) to her family's abandoned villa, the site of her traumatic experience and the catalyst of her sexual repression. While there, wandering the villa's empty rooms and hallways, her psychological troubles come to a head as she is stalked by a masked, black-gloved madman who is attempting to violate her (in one way or another). Is this villain the rugged, dangerous-looking cab driver who drove her there? After all, he knows where she's staying and that she's staying there alone. Have Ana's fears of the men around her proven justly founded?

The reality of Ana's situation is more psychologically complex than baseless paranoia. The killer she encounters (who first attacks her while she's getting perhaps a little too comfortable with her own body in the bathtub) is no one but herself, projected outwardly into the world by her psyche as a separate entity. She lives in fear of her own desire for sexual pleasure, imagining this desire as a faceless, psychotic male waving around a phallic straight-razor. For Ana to express her sexuality in any form (by herself or with a friend) is to beckon the violent reaction of this other persona, who appears to have taken the place of her grandmother in her psyche as the primal figure of Death. While her mind primarily views this entity as something separate from herself and looking to punish her, she also opportunely uses the persona to punish others: when the cab driver eventually does show up at the villa (for purposes unknown but probably no good), Ana, adopting this persona, brutally carves him up with her razor. For all, the price of sex must be death. Ana is certain of this.

So certain is Ana of the correlation between sex and death, that she stabs her personified sexual desire in the gut to avoid confronting it, inadvertently causing her own death by gut wound. When we next see her, in the film's final images, she's on a slab in the mortuary, being delicately, perhaps sensually manipulated by the hands of an unseen mortician. Her expressions, in death, mirror those of her mother during sex, and the soundtrack is filled with low, ghostly sighs, as if she's actually responding to touch. In death, her confusion of Eros and Thanatos is reconciled if by nothing more than the fact that there's nothing to fear from the death that has already caught up to her. This isn't an unhappy ending: we discover that for Ana, the price of death is sex. And, as we see in the final frames before the credits roll, a little bit of much-needed postmortem physical attention has the ability to break down psychological barriers and animate the coldest and clammiest of souls.

Technical Merits: The technical merits of Amer should be immediately obvious to anyone with working senses. It's one of those "every frame deserves to be screencapped" pictures. Directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani are practitioners of a high style, using sound and image to communicate their story and its themes without the use of exposition or dialogue. (The few small snippets of dialogue in the film's first segment don't serve as meaningful exceptions.) The technique the the pair employ switches frequently and with ease, like when transitioning from the first episode's Jan Svankmajer-style frenetic focus on abstracted actions and objects to the second segment's Spaghetti Western-inspired protracted dramatic tension. Amer's style is also a jumble of visual and aural associations from Italian fantasy-horrors of the 1970s: Cattet and Forzani's framing plucks exact shots from the work of Argento and Bava, and their soundtrack effectively repurposes the music of Stelvio Cipriani and Bruno Nicolai. Pilfer they might, but they pilfer from the greats.

Relevance: Despite the popular consensus that Cattet and Forzani's Amer is a blatant (if possibly egregious) homage to the Italian giallo thriller, the truth is that the film's homage extends to most areas of Italian exploitation cinema of the 1970s. Sure, the film's longest episode is given over completely to giallo elements and imagery, but signifiers throughout the remainder of the film call to our minds other genres, like the Argento-style supernatural horror film (as in all of the first episode), Leone-esque Spaghetti westerns (as in the incessant, tension-filled close-ups on eyes in the second episode), and poliziotteschi crime films (as in the use of several soundtrack selections recycled from genre classics).

Amer doesn't strive to be a flashy contemporary giallo; rather, it succeeds on its own merits by taking a recurrent giallo theme (the Freudian sex/death confusion), filtering it through the kaleidoscope of '70s Italian cinema in toto, and then translating it into French, creating a lurid and often dizzying demonstration of the artistry inherent in the era's diverse sights and sounds. In this sense, Amer could be seen as a celebration of others' work, and that it is, but its originality lies in its complex rearrangement and intensification of those cherry-picked motifs and visual/audial elements. In flaccid-- if more digestible-- terms, it's less of a Greatest Hits than it is a collection of recognizable but undeniably distinct (and weirdly alien) remixes. Thus, Amer is brain candy for any critically-minded viewer of Italian horror cinema, alternately numbing and igniting the synapses as it stalks its merry way across the cortex.

To grasp the subtlety of Cattet and Forzani's approach to their material in Amer, one need look no further than their follow-up feature, The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (2013), a study in cinematic excess and incoherence. Minus the Belgian duo's still obvious talent as visual filmmakers, their relentless experimental tendencies, and their expert use of genre soundtrack greats, their sophomore effort all too frequently resembles what Amer's detractors claimed that film was: a cluttered, pretentious film-school appropriation of the giallo. Put into juxtaposition with one another, Amer must now seem the more tasteful approach to lovers and haters all.

A Dreadful Decade (Part V): Lake Mungo (2008) dir. Joel Anderson

Logline: After the accidental drowning of their teenage daughter (Alice, portrayed by Talia Zucker), the surviving members of the Palmer family have trouble sorting out their collective grief. Their problems are exacerbated by the alleged appearances of Alice's ghost in their home and abroad. This pseudo-documentary seeks to determine the existence of Alice's spectral afterlife and uncover the lingering mysteries of her corporeal days, long buried in the sands of Australia's dried-out Lake Mungo.

Analysis: When we see Alice Palmer in old photographs and video footage, those taken both before and after her untimely demise, we can't shake the feeling that we're looking at a ghost. Perhaps, as the film hints, she was always a ghost, in one sense of the term. We learn over the course of the film that she has encountered her own ghost, has dreamed of her later life as a ghost, and has taken actions that she will later take again as a ghost. Alice Palmer haunts Lake Mungo. The appropriateness of the film's title and its reference to New South Wales' famous dry lake is manifold. At the film's climax, Alice encounters a specter of her future at the dead lake, only to later die in the active waters of another, different lake. Later, she is seen haunting the lake she died in, and yet she was already haunting the dry Lake Mungo while she was alive. Lake Mungo itself materializes within the film as a phantasm, as a visual monument to a place both dead and curiously alive, lingering on as a palpable presence and vacation spot. The temporal circularity of Lake Mungo leaves the dry lake and Alice stuck somewhere between life and death, existence and nonexistence. Lake Mungo laments the tragedy of such a fate, and one way to read the film is as an ode to those sad souls like Alice who can anticipate their own ends through the troubling way they lead their lives. Alice is haunted by her own ghosts: the knowledge that her actions are leading her swiftly towards death and her resignation over the fact that no one can help her, not even those closest to her.

But I think there's a far grimmer reading to be dredged from the bottom of Lake Mungo, one derived not from Alice's personal demons but from the gross negligence of her family in recognizing her trouble before (and after) it was too late. The Palmers loved Alice, certainly, but it's clear they never really possessed any awareness of what was going on in her life. They're ignorant of her fear of death, her use of psychic counseling, and her bizarre sexual affair with the next-door neighbors. We're told of the chilly relationship between Alice and her mother, June (Rosie Traynor), who could never manage to give herself fully to her daughter. After Alice's death, each member of her small family attempts to grieve in a different way: Roy (David Pledger), her father, distracts himself with his work; Mathew (Martin Sharpe), her brother, inexplicably forges fake evidence of her ghost's presence in the family home; and June steadfastly clings to the hope that Alice might not be dead at all. With the exception of Roy (who is eager to forget Alice entirely), the family's expressions of grief are based in the logic of guilt. They don't want Alice to be gone from their lives entirely, because if she is that means they've failed her in some way, and that June's fear that Alice will have died not knowing how much they loved her is fact. Thus, the family colludes to keep Alice alive, in one form or another, until they feel absolved of their own guilt over not being able to help her during her existential depression, of which they were clueless.

It's the act of uncovering Alice's secrets in the year that follows her death that makes her family think they've finally put her spirit to rest. The film's most melancholy and heart-wrenching horror is that they're wrong. In their desire to move on with their lives, the Palmers were distracted by the superficial revelations about Alice's troubled life and were thus unable to see that her deeper problem was her inability to seek solace and assistance within her distant family unit. During the film's denouement, a masterful montage of separate psychic meditation sessions with mother and daughter conducted a year apart about an unknowingly shared dream, we learn that Alice has been trying to communicate to her family her continued existence, to no avail. In the end, her family abandons her, moves to a new house free of her association. But perhaps they had already abandoned her, back when she was alive, sobbing with fright at the foot of her parents' bed but unable to bring herself to awaken them. The film's conclusion leaves Alice's family ignorantly, blissfully sleeping on, and Alice herself haunting empty hallways, alone, in death as in life.

Technical Merits: The effectiveness of Lake Mungo's documentary approach to horror storytelling goes a long way towards lending legitimacy to the documentary/found footage horror subgenre. The film's documentary form suits the material, allowing us to glimpse Alice Palmer only through ghostly family videos and photographs, in which her vibrant life is captured in flat, lifeless celluloid and digital pixels. The documentary form allows writer/director Joel Anderson to keep Alice and her mystery at a distance from us, but it also enables him to slowly unravel a lot of the plot's big revelations in a way that feels organic to the constructed nature of a documentary, and which would probably feel cheap or unearned in a traditionally shot horror feature. Watching Lake Mungo, we're always aware that we're in the hands of a skilled documentarian who wishes to lead us gently from one mystery to the next, with the film's sheen of faux-reality making us feel (however fleetingly) like collaborators, following the leads placed before us. As if we're watching a segment on Unsolved Mysteries, and right before the commercial break we'll be flashed the phone number for the tip hotline.

Much of the film's success as a faux-documentary can be attributed to that fact that it's wonderfully shot and edited, with a keen awareness of the proper balance of static talking-head interviews, moody scenery and location shots, and amateur found footage. Like the best actual documentaries, the screen is subtly kinetic and layered, with the assembled images providing for the viewer a narrative beyond the information given through interview and observation. For the sticklers out there, you could easily (and cruelly) convince a fellow viewer that it was a real documentary (I have!), as it only very rarely stretches credibility or verisimilitude. (The only obvious flaw in this aspect of the film is the repeated occurrence of random folks around town discovering important-to-the-narrative images/figures/ghosts in their barely discernible amateur-recorded video footage. A bizarre, unnecessary form of crowdsourcing, we might say.)

Relevance: If the television series Twin Peaks (and its prequel film, Fire Walk with Me [1992]) had been filmed as a faux-documentary and lost all of its oddball humor, it would look a lot like Lake Mungo. Of course, there's no murder mystery acting as Lake Mungo's narrative backbone like in Twin Peaks, but otherwise the similarities are pertinent: a beautiful, locally adored teenage girl (also with the surname "Palmer." Imagine that...) dies tragically, her family's grief affects the whole town, a mystery (of a sort) is unraveled as the characters discover the seedy secret life of the dead girl, and eventually all gives way to a creepy, half-decipherable supernatural world. This affinity for the intrigue and narrative twists of Twin Peaks-inspired dead teen girl mysteries is actually a partial detriment to Lake Mungo, though not a fatal one. All of the focus placed upon Alice's secrets and hidden quasi-bad girl persona distract from what is, at its core, one of the most emotionally despondent horror films out there. The film drowns itself in sadness, and yet it's no less frightening for its embrace of that emotional tether. Lake Mungo is far from the first film to try to make us feel sympathy for a scary ghost, but it's one of the best at making us realize the crushing, inescapable humanity of those storied chain-rattlers.

A Dreadful Decade (Part IV): Calvaire (2004) dir. Fabrice Du Welz

a.k.a. The Ordeal

Logline: Heading to the south of the country to perform at a Christmas gala, corny traveling musician Marc Stevens (Laurent Lucas) is stranded in the swampy Belgian countryside after his van breaks down. He stays the night at the defunct inn of a local proprietor (Jackie Berroyer), with his intention being to see a mechanic and continue on his journey the following morning. However, things don't go quite as planned, and Marc's mild annoyance at a prolonged stay at the inn quickly turns to abject horror when his deranged host reveals his true intentions.

Analysis: Despite its conventional horror movie trappings, the horror in Calvaire sprouts from a fear far more existential than that of being held prisoner by a madman in a remote area: it exploits the fear that we exist in other people's minds not as individual, autonomous beings, but as objects that can be manipulated and transformed to fit others' desires. Worse yet, the film implies that we're helpless to stop others from forcing this metamorphosis upon us. We are prisoners of others' characterizations of us. Marc, the film's protagonist, winds up in his bound and beleaguered position because his host, Bartel, decides that he faintly resembles his absent wife, Gloria. (The resemblance? They are both singers.) We know that Bartel understands that Marc is not Gloria, but we eventually learn that it makes no difference to him: Gloria was not so much a person to Bartel as she was an idea, and if he has to use Marc to occupy the place of that idea in his mind (and thus fill the void in his life), then so be it. Marc has no options other than to wear the dress and smile or to attempt (and fail) to escape.

The objectified relationship between Bartel and Marc is not an isolated incident within the film. Nearly every character treats Marc similarly. The old folks and nurses (including the ever-lovely Brigitte Lahaie) at the assisted living homes he performs at see him as a dashing lover who will sweep them away from the death and decrepitude coloring their lives. The violently perverted villagers of the town Marc's stranded in decide to agree with Bartel and thus also choose to see Marc as Gloria, who they are certain will fill their lives with love and carnal pleasures, as of old. Furthermore, this displacement and confusion of individual identity for self-serving purposes extends beyond Marc and his relationships with others, which we see in the villagers' use of livestock as proxies for human lovers and the man-child Bruno's insistence that a calf is his missing dog.

The titular ordeal that Marc faces is his struggle to accept and embrace that he is only what others want him to be. Thus, his ordeal (and the viewer's) ends in the film's final moments when he assumes his given role as Gloria and (in a truly horrifying flourish) demonstrates his sympathy for those who have objectified him. Marc learns that the role of an object is to provide selfless comfort and absolution for others. As implied by the moment halfway through his torture when Bartel literally nails Marc to a wooden crucifix in his barn, the objectified person is a martyr, dying for the sins, vices, mistakes, and emptiness of us all.

Technical Merits: So very drab. The impossibly cold earth-tones and wintry, overcast gloom of the film's interiors and exteriors encourage one to feel that if the film had been toned in sepia it would have resulted in a picture with little discernible difference from the actual final image. This drabness of the visuals is oppressive for the viewer, and rightfully so: we are invited to share in the ordeal and to feel the same slow, dreary restrictiveness (figurative and literal, of course) of the backwoods locations. 

Though director Fabrice Du Welz's films have become more overtly stylish in the last few years, Calvaire is marked by its near absence of style. All events, from the ordinary to the sickening, are filmed with the same flat disinterest by the camera. Violence is incidental; traumatic horror is routine. This anti-style reflects the senses-deadening weight of these characters' continued existence, in which objects and experiences blur into one another. The unremarkable cinematography also keeps the film's more surreal elements grounded in far-too-uncompromising reality. The only moments during which the film breaks this spell and implements a deliberate style are during the piano waltz that the villagers dance to in grotesque zombie-like fashion while gathered in the local bar (shades of Bela Tarr's Damnation [1988]) and the frenzied camera's whirlwind capturing of enthusiastic laughter and faces in closeup at the climax. The former, in limb-severing medium shots, awkwardly displays the villagers' equally as awkward attempts at feeling anything at all, while the latter dizzily demonstrates the intoxicating but ultimately deadly power of experiencing an actual emotion. These moments of style are brief and illustrative. Like its world, the film has little room or tolerance for enthusiasm.

Relevance: Calvaire is the second herald of what I called the mini-Belgian Horror Renaissance in my write-up of Left Bank (2008). However, its place in this contemplation of the past decade in horror cinema could just as easily belong to Du Welz's followup thriller, Vinyan (2008), an enigmatic tale of a couple who make the dangerous journey from Thailand to Myanmar in search of their possibly abducted child. Vinyan might even be the better film, but Calvaire is the one I have the most admiration for as a piece of horror filmmaking. It's rather stock horror set-up (man's car breaks down in woods, man stays at creepy rundown inn, man is made to suffer for this decision) is rather quickly subverted by far stranger narrative impulses, resulting in a film that could have been made by the hypothetical deformed offspring of Bela Tarr and Robert Aickman. Is it religious allegory? An unhinged love story? A waking nightmare? Whatever it is, it's far from typical. 

Plus, its refusal to linger on its implied acts of bodily torture and depravity makes it a quasi-torture porn film for the squeamish. In truth, the film hardly feels like an entry in that most abhorred of horror subgenres. It's impossible to recall another torture porn film that goes so far out of its way to avoid depicting on-screen gore as Calvaire does. Isn't sexually-charged splatter the whole point? But, then again, isn't it so much worse to imagine your captor and tormentor telling you how much he loves you before he goes to work tenderly on your flesh? In order to create those audience nightmares, there's no splatter necessary.

A Dreadful Decade (Part I): Left Bank (2008) dir. Pieter Van Hees

a.k.a. Linkeroever

Logline: After being diagnosed with an inexplicable bout of chronic fatigue syndrome and dropping out of a big track competition, Marie (Eline Kuppens) moves into the apartment of her new boyfriend, Bobby (Matthias Schoenaerts), in order to convalesce. While there, she begins to unravel the mysteries of the sudden disappearance of the apartments's previous occupant and the sinister pagan history of the surrounding area, Antwerp's Left Bank. As her condition worsens and the peculiar encounters pile up, Marie begins to realize that someone or something in the Left Bank has plans for her.

Analysis: If Left Bank has any obvious fault, it's that it might have hammered away too freely at its themes of wasted lives, second chances, and rebirth before its incredible final moments, when this previous talk takes on very literal significance and (almost) all is made clear. Perhaps there's one too many lines of dialogue in which Bobby expresses his desire to give Marie "the chance to do better" or Marie herself wishes she could "just start all over again." For the viewer, Bobby's observation that Marie doesn't even look happy when she's running (i.e. engaging in her life's passion) was apparent already from Eline Kuppens's sober and aimless performance. At only 27 years old, Marie is a young woman who has been beaten down too far by her own brief existence, saddled as she is with the baggage of an overbearing mother, a disappointed father figure, the absence of a social life, and a sense of self-loathing bred from perfectionism. In truth, she's a typical twentysomething who is having difficulty making the transition to full-blown adulthood, and so she experiences the malaise of having to Figure It All Out. There's nothing inherently fatal about Marie's condition, though it might certainly feel that way to her, stuck in the moment. She yearns for a return to the childhood innocence she has left behind, when all this stuff didn't matter.

Peculiarly, this dilemma in Marie's life is that which the film's pagan guild exploits for their earthly magic. Reading the overdramatic suffering and ennui on Marie's blandly tortured face, the guild members decide to lead her (forcefully, but perhaps not unwillingly) towards sacrifice in honor of what they call alternately The Diabolical Vagina and the great Dragon in the ground. Through their drawn-out occult ceremonies, they usher her towards both death and life renewed. This makes them rather odd villains. They're certainly menacing enough (and mean with a crossbow when threatened), but the pagan guild is essentially doing no more than giving Marie what she outwardly desires. Sure, the guild themselves possibly receive immortality and eternal youth in return, but would we begrudge them that for their good deed? In one sense, they're preying on Marie's youthful weakness and confusion for their own benefit; in another, they're teaching her what so many of cinema's gypsies have taught us in the past-- be careful what you wish for.

Technical Merits: Though the pagans' plot against Marie is ultimately revealed to be quite simple (at least in comparison with other human sacrifices we've seen in film), director Pieter Van Hees and his screenwriters don't shy away from including ambiguous visual symbolism--the sort to inspire much baffled IMDb discussion board commentary--whenever they have the chance. The choice to include so many of these unexplained moments (like Marie's discovery of ash in the crotch of her panties, her suckling of a grown man while on a jog through the forest, the rat that explodes from out of her hairy knee wound, and the presence of her paternal track coach at her apparent rebirth) could be frustratingly vague, but the cinematography from Nicolas Karakatsanis and the editing by Nico Leunen ably support such maneuvers by never lingering the shot or prolonging the scene in order to hold our hands through an interpretation of its ripe imagery. Nor does the cinematography or editing easily explain away these surreal visuals as products of Marie's dream life; rather, these aspects of the film ground the visuals in a skewed sense of reality. This approach gives such moments a subtle coherence or logic: despite how strange they may appear, they're presented as if they're organic to world we're witnessing on screen. To make the bizarre commonplace is an impressive feat.

Relevance: Left Bank should be of interest to horror fans for its successful melding of two European horror subgenres previously unassociated, Polanski's Polish/French/American urban paranoia thriller (as seen in The Tenant [1976], Rosemary's Baby [1968], and Repulsion [1965]) and the rural pagan superstition horror that was dominant for a time in the United Kingdom (in films like The Wicker Man [1973], Robin Redbreast [1970], Lair of the White Worm [1988], and The Blood on Satan's Claw [1971]). We can call the combination successful because the juxtaposition of what seems at first to be two disparate subgenres serves to point out the obvious facts that we've forgotten: the cities of Europe were once rural landscapes, and the people inhabiting these areas might not have possessed the same cuddly, (largely) non-violent belief systems of the modern world. The film asks us to ponder what dark, ancient history might still remain buried in the earth, beneath the excess of concrete and metal that we've built up around us. Beyond its narrative conflation of the subgenres, the film also does a swell job of reminding us visually of this dual history of its location by giving frequent screentime to placid shots of the quietly menacing forests, fields, and waters scattered alongside the Left Bank's busy urban environments, reminding us that the latter has not consumed the former but simply masks it.

Left Bank is also of interest in that it--along with a few other notable recent films--marks a revitalization of Belgian horror cinema, which has been nearly nonexistent in the last few decades, and previously was only marked by a few scattered films like Daughters of Darkness (1971), The Devil's Nightmare (1971), and Rabid Grannies (1988). Left Bank is the first of three (!) contemporary Belgian horror films to make this collection of my favorites of the past ten years, so (in my estimation at least) we're in the midst of a mini-renaissance of horror from the land of fries and waffles.

Robert Aickman Double Feature: "The Cicerones" (2002) & "The Swords" (1997) dirs. Jeremy Dyson; Tony Scott

Robert Aickman (1914-1981) is the master of a sort of fiction that remains nameless. You could brand his collected stories as 'horror,' but beyond the rare tale or two (like the prosaic vampire yarn "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" (1973)) you'd be far off the mark. His fiction lacks the visceral blood and guts, the outright breathless terror, and the classifiable supernatural presences of his contemporaries' work. Some of his tales first saw American publication during the early 1970s in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but neither of those genre labels feels somehow complete either. (Or do they? In a sense, Aickman's stories probe the boundary between mundane reality and horrific fantasy. And there's also no denying that his plots and fictional contrivances often disregard the laws of physics, of space and time.) Aickman himself termed his work "strange stories," and that appellation-- as oblique and indeterminate as it may be-- is the one that fits best. What else to call his quietly surreal tales but strange? 

The majority of Aickman's collected fiction (nearly 50 stories and two novels, published from 1951 until his death at the dawn of the 1980s) explores the modern human psyche through routes obscure in origin and destination, producing personal insights for and about its characters that are paradoxically ambiguous and trenchant. During this slow, queer process of narrative intensification, the reader of Aickman's strange stories is left in a state of inexplicable anxiety and mounting unease. What, precisely, is awry in the fictional world or what dilemma begs to be resolved remains unclear: all the reader knows is that escape (if one can call it that) will come only with the placement of the final period on the page. Reading one of Aickman's stories is to invite equal parts mystification and inarticulate understanding of the revelations held in store. The many narrative breadcrumbs he leaves for the reader ushers one into a forest vast and dark and nearly impossible to conceive of as a rational, coherent object. But only nearly so: blind as we may be, we catch the scent in the air of a candied house of horrors somewhere near the forest's center and know instinctively that all paths, no matter how labyrinthine, lead there.

Undeniably consequent of their elusive nature, Aickman's fiction has seldom been adapted for the screen. Though Aickman's prose is often clean and direct (in contrast to his story's themes and events), they almost entirely lack the sort of action that would render them so obviously enticing for a visual storyteller. His stories beg adaptations as cinematically complex as they are on the page, and a less talented artist runs the certain risk of  obliterating the singular subtleties inherent within them during the transition. Thus, Aickman's IMDb page remains sparsely populated. But those few courageous stabs at adaptation deserve examination, if for nothing else than their ability to help express in whatever small, circuitous way the unique quality of Aickman's perhaps unadaptable fictions.

"The Cicerones"

(2002)

dir. Jeremy Dyson

One of the briefest tales in Aickman's oeuvre, "The Cicerones" is nevertheless ripe with the sort of mind-bending suggestion and delirious ambiguity that defines his best longer work. First published in 1967, the story has since cropped up in numerous anthologies devoted to ghostly tales of the supernatural (including one edited by Aickman himself, The Seventh Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1971)). But, as is often the case with Aickman's fiction, such an easy paranormal explanation for the tale's strangeness is woefully insufficient. An initially straightforward account of a man taking a walking tour of an ancient Belgian cathedral after hours quickly devolves into an oppressive trip through another dimension, a plane of existence where silence reigns and time runs backwards or not at all, where the sacred and the demonic are one in the same, and where pagan saints are made and preserved in life and in art. Whatever it ultimately may be, "The Cicerones" is far from a simple Dickensian or Jamesian ghost story.

The tale's otherworldliness is preserved and expanded upon in a 2002 short film adaptation by The League of Gentlemen's Jeremy Dyson and Mark Gatiss for BBC Channel 4. Both Dyson and Gatiss are avowed fans of Aickman, and their appreciation and understanding of his peculiar sensibilities is evident throughout the short's chilling thirteen minute running time. Gatiss assumes the role of Trant, an English tourist in a foreign land eager to gawk at the pieces of religious art written about in his guidebook. However, when he arrives at the Cathedral of St. Bavon he finds his printed guide superseded by a set of progressively younger human guides (or 'cicerones') who are eager to set Trant on a path of their own devising. Dyson and Gatiss's short is faithful to the letter, rendering many minute details of the original story with visual aplomb. The aesthetic palette on display places the film in line with the BBC's classic A Ghost Story for Christmas adaptations, but the inexplicable foreignness of Trant's surroundings (cobbled together from the interiors and exteriors of several monstrously Gothic English churches) and the inscrutable demeanor of his guides unsettle any sure footing we might try to find for the film in the common cinematic lore of the British supernatural.

The film, like the story, is wide open to one's most devious or sinister interpretations. However, a deliberate intensification of one of the story's elements through the addition of an original prologue does serve to tip our worst thoughts in one particular direction. The added opening finds Trant travelling on a train through central Europe to his destination at St. Bavon. He has a brief but significant encounter with an old woman and her two young, to-be married companions sitting across from him. He reveals his nationality and status as a bachelor to the woman before asking her for any info she might have about the cathedral. She quickly snaps at him that the cathedral is "a holy place" and then beckons him to say a prayer for the young couple on the eve of their wedding. Why would she desire Trant's particular blessing when he's a foreigner possessing a different belief system? In the corridors and secret galleries of St. Bavon we learn of the dark mixture of Christianity and pagan superstition worshiped within, of the virgin saints and martyrs dragged to hell by demons and venerated through transcendent portraiture, and we begin to suspect that the blessing of a sacrificial saint to-be is a valuable thing to have.

"The Swords"

(1997)

dir. Tony Scott

An earlier adaptation of Aickman's work is "The Swords" (1997), directed by the late Tony Scott as the inaugural episode of a British/Canadian anthology TV series loosely derived from the themes of and bearing the same name as his 1983 Whitley Strieber adaptation The Hunger. Its source material is the lead story in Aickman's 1975 collection Cold Hand in Mine, and it's among the author's most subtly repulsive. As written, "The Swords" concerns a young travelling salesman who is as-of-yet unacquainted with carnal activity. Attending a carnival in a small town, the young man witnesses a bizarre stage show in which a man in a seaman's outfit invites men from the audience on stage  for the chance to pierce with a ceremonial sword, for a small fee, the abdomen of a beautiful but silently obedient woman named Madonna, leaving her unhurt and the men perversely stimulated. The young salesman, refusing (out of bashfulness?) to participate in the communal act, is later approached alone by the woman's handler, who offers her total services and a private show to him for a reasonable price.

Aickman's protagonist acquiesces, and what follows-- his first sexual encounter, occuring in a cheap lodging house-- is punctuated by a peculiar bit of nastiness: his violent thrust for a greedy kiss wrenches the woman's arm right out of its socket and from her body, again without causing her any pain or bloodshed. Madonna, perhaps used to such an occurrence, merely snatches up her discarded arm from the floor and flees, leaving the seaman to return and collect her (or is it his?) fee. Through its morbid surrealism, "The Swords" acts as a melancholy but pointed social criticism of the way men use and violate women as if they were bloodless, fleshy objects. It illustrates how this attitude is enculturated through communal forces, and also how such an attitude's grim results-- loveless, violent, queasy, and crushingly lonely-- may dispirit or shame a young male like the story's protagonist, but only for a brief beginner's moment: "After the first six women, say, or seven, or eight," the narrator tells us, "the rest come much of a muchness."

Scott's adaptation of "The Swords" takes the basic skeleton of its source story and seals it into a flesh of its own devising. Aesthetically (and sonically, as evidenced by the tropical island score, despite a metropolitan English setting), Scott is working in his True Romance (1993) mode: all the bad boys and bad girls are dressed in candy colors and waxing purple poesy. And yet this half hour short would be better thought of as an antidote to True Romance's Love Conquers All (Even, If Not Especially, Death) mentality. The love (or whatever you'd call it) between James Chandler (Balthazar Getty) and Musidora (Amanda Ryan) ends in a tragedy bred not of too much affection but of too little, hinting at (though never quite achieving) Aickman's grasp of the cold detachment we sometimes feel towards other living bodies. Balthazar Getty's Chandler is a too-cool-for-anything recovering addict (of women and other substances) who floats into town to take a job selling cosmetics (for his boss, played by the great Timothy Spall, who comes off like an alternate dimension version of Alec Baldwin's Blake who quotes Naked Lunch during his sales pep talks). He encounters Musidora's stage show at a garish night club he attends with a couple of co-workers, and soon after his first viewing of her act he finds himself courted by her handler, Dean (Jamie Foreman), for a private show. 

It's at this point that Scott's film departs from the ghastly trajectory of Aickman's story and instead angles for overblown romantic tragedy. Chandler and Musidora have their hotel date, and-- one supposes because no limbs were lost the first time out-- proceed to go one several more dates. Musidora admits to falling in love with Chandler the first moment she spied him in the club; Chandler stares blankly ahead. She tells him that her growing affection puts her protective spell-- the one that keeps her from being skewered by the lusty swords of men-- at risk of being broken; he remains mute. Chandler's refusal to reciprocate emotional passion leads to an obvious rift between the lovers. However, he of course happily reciprocates physical passion until the bitter end, culminating in an aggressive, emotionless sexual encounter mirrored by the show-stopping stage stabbing she receives in the next scene, leaving her bloodied and (finally) wounded. Scott's thesis is plain: nothing spurs a man's crisis of masculinity quite like the notion of vowing commitment. Filmed in Scott's quick-cutting, whirling dutch-angled, operatic style, the sentiment appears a bit pat, but in truth it's not wholly removed from Aickman's own. Musidora, unlike her resigned and objectified literary counterpart, hungers for a connection deeper than the random, impersonal, and violent encounters with men that she's used to, and-- being disappointed by her one grasp outside of those confines of male-female relationships-- falls upon her sword. Chandler, precisely like his literary counterpart, takes only a moment to mope and weep crocodile tears before the numbness returns, coming much of a muchness.

July 2013's Footstones

Being a List of the Assorted Horrors I've Consumed During the Month of July, 2013.

The Conjuring 

(2013) 

dir. James Wan

James Wan's The Conjuring is an excellent major studio-backed horror film, among the most well-crafted in several years. It hits every note of demonic terror to supernatural perfection. Essentially, it's the best Greatest Hits of 1970s-1980s Major Studio Horror that's been produced thus far, incorporating elements of such pop culture titans as The Amityville Horror (1979), Poltergeist (1982), and The Exorcist (1973) into its ceaseless assault of innocent audiences. (Appropriately, those involved had the good sense to make it a period piece set in 1971.) It's good press that The Conjuring is the first film to be given an R-rating by the MPAA not because of any specific content but because it's simply too scary. However, this badge of honor from the MPAA also inadvertently articulates an almost intangible quality of the film itself: it's horror filmmaking at its purest, most refined state. Every accelerated plot point, every dread-filled pause in the action, every move the camera makes is executed for maximum fright effect. To aid this, the filmmakers adopt the feeling of '70s horror alongside its base mechanical parts: The film avoids CGI and paces its jumps with suspense. It establishes a concrete sense of space with the Perron family homestead (one of the more simultaneously beautiful and creepily atmospheric movie houses of recent years) and then drops a thick, palpable layer of unheimlich menace over it. Deplorable teenagers aren't shoved in front of us as our protagonists, but a pair of loving and sympathetic families is. There's no story-betraying sting-in-the-tail twist, just the schmaltzy, reaffirming Poltergeist II-styled message that Love Conquers All (with a little help from Jesus, too: though the film's general lack of cynicism is refreshing, the social and religious conservatism implied by its conclusion is a tad too old-fashioned, supporting (rather sneakily) an overly traditional notion of the family unit as a man and a woman with clearly defined gender roles popping out an endless string of children in service of God. For more on how this implicit message is at odds with the more interesting and dynamic changes to social and cultural values brought about in the '70s, check out Jed Mayer's excellent essay on the film).

All of these deliberate stylistic choices signal that The Conjuring is determined to be a classical horror movie updated for modern viewing sensibilities, much like Wan's two previous horror films, Insidious (2011) and Dead Silence (2007). But The Conjuring sidesteps the eccentric creativity of those previous films in favor of conventionality. Every recognizable scary movie element is here: the dead dog, the child who talks to ghosts, the birds who fly into windows, the hidden basement, the possessed doll, the invisible force that pulls on your feet at night. Noting all of these components helps one to realize that The Conjuring might be the most generic horror film of the past decade, but not to its detriment. The film's effect lies in its ability to compound those elements of horror movie lore into one seamless though overstuffed entity that hurls itself incessantly at its audience and sticks, leech-like, at the back of our necks. It's exhilarating to watch the film push two hours but never outstay its welcome and not once lose the attention of its rapt audience. The Exorcist can't claim that much. 

True, it is a bit of a downer that Wan, one of modern horror's top directing talents, chose to retreat from the slightly more daring propositions of his early horror films, Saw (2004) included, because The Conjuring-- as technically excellent as it may be-- doesn't attempt to add anything new to the genre's repertoire. (Perhaps the absence of his frequent partner, screenwriter Leigh Whannell, has something to do with this relative lack of daring.) Even worse, Wan is beginning to display signs of a desire to move out of the genre, as we might guess from his recent landing of the Fast 7 gig. We're fortunate enough to be the recipients of Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013) a couple short months from now, but if that's the last we see of "James Wan, Horror Filmmaker" for the foreseeable future, then we certainly have a lot less to look forward to. But maybe our future isn't hopeless. The monstrous financial success of films like The Conjuring and The Purge (2013) this year is heartening, for it shows the major studios that they can take risks on mature, inexpensive, and creatively made R-rated horror films because an audience hungry for them indeed exists. (Perhaps unfortunately, the equal success of Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013) back in January also tells them that the easy-to-please teenage audience is still breathing, too.) If the studios decide to take a few more of these chances in the coming years while avoiding the big budget horror flops, remakes, and tossed off sequels of the recent past (all of which have had diminishing returns) the genre will be better off for it. And, who knows, maybe something more bold and original will slip past some executive's desk and into theaters.

Valentine

(2001)

dir. Jamie Blanks

The magnetic tape in my VHS copy of Urban Legend (1988) has degraded to the point that Rebecca Gayheart's irrepressible mane always looks like its snowing, and yet, as frequently as I've enjoyed that supreme slice of late '90s slasher throwback cheese over the years since its release, I've been neglectful in checking out the further work of its Aussie director, Jamie Blanks. Because Blanks displays in Urban Legend the most playful and perceptive understanding of the subgenre of any of his contemporaries during the latter part of the decade, this neglect of his subsequent films is especially egregious with regard to the second slasher flick he directed a mere few years later. Valentine (2001) switches out the stock college campus setting of Urban Legend (which brought to mind such campus slasher classics as Final Exam (1981) and Girls Nite Out (1982)) for that of the equally recognizable holiday party (like those in April Fool's Day (1986) and Killer Party (1986)). Valentine also trades on the time-honored slasher tradition of jilted dorks taking revenge against adults for affronts committed when they were childhood classmates, just like the jilted dorks in Slaughter High (1986) and Class Reunion Massacre (1978) do. Though based on a thriller novel by Tom Savage, it's clear after only peeping at the source material's jacket copy that the basic story was reconfigured by its screenwriters and director with the classic (and less-than-classic) slasher canon in mind. The resulting picture is not quite as much fun as Urban Legend is (it's missing that film's irresistible legend-based hook), but it's roughly as successful with regard to its aim of placing standard '80s slasher tomfoolery into the context of the new millennium. What inspires the killer's nose to bleed right before he makes his kills? On what planet could David Boreanaz be convincingly cast as an alcoholic? Why does Denise Richards strip down for a solo indoor jacuzzi dip during the middle of a party in a house that isn't her own? Why are these questions? The acting is bad, the punning valentine notes the killer sends his victims are worse, and a stalking scene set in a video-art museum installation is strikingly, nearly sublimely goofy. Valentine is the genuine article, a decade and a half too late.

Giallo (2009) dir. Dario Argento

Logline: A viscous, sickly hued madman (Adrien Brody as "Byron Deidra") is prowling the streets of Turin in his taxi cab, abducting beautiful women so that he can torture, mutilate, and murder them. He's pursued by the tireless and troubled Inspector Enzo Avolfi (also Adrien Brody), whose unconventional methods include teaming up with Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner), the sister of the killer's latest abductee, in order to stop the killer before he kills again.

The man must find joy in giving his films misleading titles. Like Tenebrae (1982) before it, the title of Giallo gives those viewers familiar with Argento's earlier work a false impression. Considering he's the man who (despite the existence of examples of the subgenre that predate his own) solidified the template for the Italian giallo film with 1970's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, you'd imagine that a later film bearing solely the title Giallo would be exactly that: an old-fashioned black-gloved, J&B swilling giallo, in the mode that Argento himself established and has returned to, continually, up through the early 2000s. But it's not. Ironically, Argento uses a film titled Giallo to branch away from the Italian subgenre and into markedly American territory, specifically torture porn and the serial killer police procedural. Though Argento apparently had a hand in the story, the film's screenplay is credited to two Americans, Jim Agnew and Sean Keller, whose combined credits boast of little more than a few low budget TV creature features and a straight-to-DVD Wesley Snipes action film. Their American sensibilities combined with Argento's seeming disinterest in the material produces a film so far removed from the modish style and psychosexual mystery of its namesake that we would almost find it funny if we hadn't already been tricked into watching it.

Giallo features no mystery, no suspense, and no revelations. Its story is a flat, one-note procedural that ends on a bizarre unresolved note. Seemingly, its sole narrative concern is to be as grimy and unpleasant as most modern American horror films, at which it succeeds miserably. The cheeky sleaze of a typical '70s giallo is transformed into Giallo's lengthy scenes of living victim mutilation and other poignant moments, like the one in which the killer wheezingly jerks off to digital photographs of his victim's corpses on his computer while sucking an infant's pacifier. There's nothing fun or compelling underneath the layer of dirt caked onto Giallo, making it all the more beguiling as to why big, respected names like Brody and Seigner would agree to participate. In its pitiful grasping at a theme of duality, the film allows Brody the chance to flex his acting muscle by portraying both the hero and the villain (aided by prostheses and yellow makeup in the latter instance), but neither character is given much depth to express beyond simplified tortured childhoods, so, again, where's the appeal? (The killer's motivation by-way-of tortured childhood is one of the genre's most mind-numbingly juvenile: a jaundiced orphan, the killer Giallo was placed into a church's orphanage as a young boy where the other orphans made fun of him for his yellow skin, inspiring him to take revenge by kidnapping and mutilating beautiful women later on in life because, hey, why not.)

In a way, Giallo might be the perfect encapsulation of the goals and intent of Argento's late career. Here we find a film that crassly exploits the goodwill surrounding the director's earlier achievements while simultaneously debasing those achievements through the injection of stale and contrived modern genre elements straight into their still-beating hearts, seemingly for no creative reasons but only to increase their commercial cache. There's not an entry in Argento's last two decades of filmmaking that couldn't be accused of such calloused, uninspired actions, and the resulting feeling produced-- in both filmmaker and audience-- is one of apathy over the films. As disagreeable as its content is, it's difficult to work up much ire over a film like Giallo. Why waste our breath? Argento didn't. A lawsuit lodged by Brody against the film's money-grubbing producers kept the film barred from wide DVD release for about a year after it premiered, but would we have missed it if it still remained in limbo today? Does a film like Giallo slip from our memories as quickly as it enters, or does it debase and devalue the former art from which it's constructed? At one juncture in the film, Seigner's Linda asks Brody's Inspector Avolfi an unanswerable question about the killer's motive that could easily be asked of that killer's creator: "Why would he want to destroy beautiful things?"

The Mother of Tears (2007) dir. Dario Argento

Logline: When art restoration specialist Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento) cracks open an ancient box containing the magic cloak of the mythical witch Mater Lachrymarum, the world starts going to hell. Literally. Murderous mall goths, furry disemboweling monsters, and a pesky screeching monkey are only some of the horrors Sarah will have to face as she works with the sparkly ghost of her dead mom to send the Mother of Tears back to the evil dimension from which she sprang.

It's not as if there was any way that this could have turned out well. Filming and releasing the concluding chapter of a trilogy over 25 years after the previous installment hit screens would be an artistic gamble for a director whose career hadn't devolved into utter tripe, and so this effort from Dario Argento-- whose career by 2007 had long been demonstrating some arguably tripe-like qualities-- was doomed from the start. So why did he wait this long to make the The Mother of Tears? Glancing at its tortured pre-production history, we see that the film could have been made as early as 1984, when Argento and his former wife and collaborator Daria Nicolodi had finished a draft of the screenplay. But for whatever reason it wasn't, and it took a couple more decades of drafts and false starts before it materialized. Perhaps it took Argento and his collaborators that long to crack the film's story, but that argument implodes on itself when one watches The Mother of Tears and observes that it boasts the same basic structure as the previous installment, Inferno (1980), but with a more pronounced apocalyptic emphasis. A more likely reason is that it took those decades elapsing (and the critical regard of Argento's back catalogue rising) before any studios would dare pledge him the funds for another supernatural romp. Despite its recent appreciation, Inferno was a critical and box-office failure upon release (going straight-to-VHS in the United States, no less) and may have soured Argento's producers and financiers (and perhaps to some extent himself) on pursuing the surreal fantasy horror mythology he began in Suspiria (1977) with another loose sequel. It's telling that his immediate followup to Inferno, 1982's Tenebrae, was-- despite its being named after one of the Three Mothers-- a back-to-basics giallo. But the notion of a third film never totally faded, and by early 2006 it had acquired its financing from both Italian and American production studios and was on its way to being born.

What rough beast was born out of this deal is a melange of Argento's various periods and styles, all blurring and blending together into a frenzied, volatile, and yet often silly attempt to recapture the favorable critical regard of earlier years. There's decided effort here from Argento (in contrast to some of his other recent works) and this effort results in The Mother of Tears being a provocative film-- one that occasionally brushes up against the aesthetic chills of Argento's peak-- but it's never a satisfying viewing experience, and far less of a satisfying trilogy capper. Like Inferno, it's a messy, at times inscrutable fairy tale, but what coherence Inferno gained from its nightmare logic is traded in for the cheap but nonsensical magical wizardy of Mother of Tears, by which Asia Argento's character can become invisible when she concentrates really hard and the shimmering, floating ghost of Daria Nicolodi can manifest at convenient moments to drag demons down through a craggy portal to a computer-generated hell. These new elements feel frighteningly unimaginative-- the stuff of a lazy fantasist who has chewed on a few too many magical beans-- and those other fresh ingredients added to Argento's stew (like flesh-munching zombies and sudden demon face jump scares) are swiped directly from modern mainstream horror's typical bland entrees. (Credit where credit is due: The Mother of Tears was prescient in one aspect. It presented a series of wildly humorous unexplained mass suicides and murders-- including an uproarious scene in which a new mother throws her literal baby doll off a tall bridge-- a whole year before M. Night Shyamalan would concoct the same in his enviably insipid new comedy classic The Happening (2008).)

The "new things" that The Mother of Tears does it does poorly, without artistic finesse or the proper reverence for what had come before. (The film explicitly retcons the events of Suspiria in order to give a secondary character in this one a more prominent role, it recasts Udo Kier and Daria Nicolodi as entirely new characters from their previous appearances in the trilogy, and it banks on the fact that the viewer won't recognize how fundamentally similar its plot is to that of Inferno.) But, then, the whole ordeal is sort of worth it to glimpse the director's dark dreams alive on the screen once again, however fleetingly: an early scene, in which half-seen demons disembowel a young art curator in a museum and Asia's character, catching sight of the carnage, attempts to silently flee while being sniffed out by a cackling monkey, is the most suspenseful and visually appealing he's captured in over a decade. But that scene's existence within the film is more disheartening than anything else: the nicest thing one can say about The Mother of Tears, as a whole, is that it has its moment.