A Dreadful Decade (Part X): Toad Road (2012) dir. Jason Banker

Logline: After meeting James (James Davidson) and his close-knit group of drug-taking layabouts, the once clean-cut Sara (Sara Anne Jones) soon spirals into substance dependency. But when Sara begins searching for a high that will break down the walls of perception and elevate her into another realm of existence, James grows concerned about the radical shift in her behavior. He's especially worried about her desire to test out an old York, Pennsylvania, urban legend, that of the Seven Gates of Hell erected (literally or figuratively) deep within the woods. No one has made it all the way to the seventh gate and entered into hell, but Sara is determined to cross the barrier, with or without James' help.

Analysis: There's a strong temptation to read Toad Road as a stern note of caution against escalating drug use and addiction, but that would be ignoring the reality of the lives that the film presents us with: if not for the temporary release provided by drugs, and if not for the potential they might hold for opening up gateways to better worlds, then what else is there? We learn that James' parents are worried that his aimless, drug-taking friends are having a bad influence on him, but the truth is that James and his friends are drawn together because they're all equally unmoored from the lives expected of them. We see, particularly during Sara's induction into this group of friends, that no one in this ragtag group of kindred spirits is pressured into doing drugs. Rather, they all independently seek out the temporary escape from their lives that mind and senses-altering substances provide for them, and their association with one another is more akin to a support group than an influential social circle.

The film doesn't condemn or condone these young adults' use of drugs, but it does question the efficacy of their actions. Are they actually achieving liberation from their lives, or merely casting themselves into a sort of purgatory? As Sara explores her hunger for new chemical experiences, to the growing concern of even her constantly narcotized friends, she decides to discover the answer by achieving the ultimate high: an encounter with hell itself. She's determined to pass through the gates of hell symbolized by the town's local urban legend of Toad Road, which James references as a metaphor for the point of no return that one can fall into through irresponsible drug use but which Sara sees as a literal exit. This difference of outlook is the death knell for their romantic relationship, as James isn't brave (or misguided?) enough to take his recreational drug use and temporary sojourns from reality to their extreme. Instead, he imagines out loud the lives that he and Sara might be able to lead together: they can move away and start anew, he can go to college like her, and maybe they'll even get good jobs one day. Sara reminds him that she's failing out of school; she's moved far past the desire for leading a conventional life.

After Sara has slipped through the seven gates, abandoning James, her disembodied voice seems to report back with her findings. As she passed through each successive gate, a little bit more of her previous life-- her self-doubt, pain, disappointed parents, fractured relationships-- faded from existence, replaced by nothingness, through which she gained power. Past the final gate, Sara experienced the embrace of "a black void," offering "ultimate solitude." But, if so, how can she communicate this information from her state of solitude back to us, those imprisoned souls who have refused to pass into hell? Are these words we hear her own, or merely James' imaginings, as he's left behind with his guilt and numbness and only able to hope for the best? We never see the other side that Sara allegedly passes over to, nor the other possibilities it might have to offer, even if those "possibilities" are no more complicated than the oblivion accompanying death. What we do see is life grinding on for James and his wayward friends, and a decided lack of improvement in their situations. And, after long enough, not even the drugs help anymore.

Technical Merits: Toad Road exists as a curious hybrid of style and genre, in part documentary, found footage, low budget drama, and psychological horror. Director Jason Banker, who also wrote the film and acted as its cinematographer, blends Cinéma vérité documentary footage of his cast of non-actors going about their aimless daily business with scripted scenes of those same non-actors contemplating their actions, relationships, and futures. The obvious ease with which the actors perform in the authentic hangout and party scenes provides a nice thematic contrast with the discomfort they appear to display when grappling with the somewhat stilted dramatic scenes, as they endearingly stumble their way through the words written for them. Like the actors who portray them, these characters act more naturally when under the influence of the artificial haze produced by drug and alcohol consumption than they do within the confines of the scripted "reality" that forces them to consider their relationship troubles, family issues, poverty, and collective inability to lead "normal" lives. The film's style is such that the characters' words seem false and contrived whenever they're required to deal with existence beyond the next high or juvenile gag. And that's appropriate, because for them adulthood is a role for which they are poorly suited. When, in one of the film's scripted scenes, James lays out his sketchy plans for attaining a "normal life," he sounds like he's stealing half-remembered lines he once overheard from a bad movie. But when he's having Vicks blown into eyes during one of the many documentary sequences, and he breaks out in tears at the bizarre physical sensation it's producing within him, we witness an uncomfortable human rawness that couldn't be captured in the performance of any actor.

Relevance: This is reality horror. Toad Road captures the meandering, blitzed out lives of its very real characters with uncanny, documentary precision. Because the film is, in part, a document of its actors' actual lives, it also stands as a universalizing summation of the general malaise felt by so many emotionally deadened suburban teens and twentysomethings. I knew a version of every one of the film's developmentally stunted characters back in high school. Our parties looked exactly like the parties they throw (with fewer hard drugs, maybe), and our stunts and pranks were much like theirs. Our interactions were as shallow, and our prospects about as promising. We even had our own urban legend out in the woods, and our own ill-advised adventures bent on testing out its reality. The  film understands, as we implicitly did, that the societal expectations for those youths of the mid-to-lower middle class to develop into "normal human beings" can be crippling, and that the appeal of simply slipping away from it all, by aide of illicit substances or by some worse method, is difficult to ignore. That the film can't settle upon which fate is worse-- oblivion or the average life of an American adult-- points towards an existential horror that's far more chilling than any monster creeping in the forest.

The real life death of actress Sara Anne Jones from a drug overdose not long after the film's completion stands as a tragic, melancholy reinforcement of the film's observations, and it situates the fictional action as a truer reflection of reality than we might like to admit. Toad Road is haunted by Jones's ethereal image. (Eerily, the last time we see her in the film, she's swallowed up by a gigantic video distortion leading to hell, as if the medium itself has consumed both character and actress.) If we are aware of Jones's death going into Toad Road, her presence compels us to wonder about the validity of her character's claims. Is there an alternative to the existence we're pressured to embrace? Is it possible to enter hell and emerge out the other end, into the possibility of "something better, something real"? Or do we, in our search for that other plane of existence, only manage to kill ourselves, out of frustration, ennui, or fear? We can't possibly know. The fictional Sara and the actual Sara aren't around to tell us, and we're left, like James is, slamming our fists uselessly against the foundations of the unfinished structures we've built around us, hoping for it all to collapse but knowing it won't.

A Dreadful Decade (Part IX): The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh (2012) dir. Rodrigo Gudiño

Logline: After inheriting the estate of his estranged mother (Vanessa Redgrave) upon her death, Leon Leigh (Aaron Poole) visits her empty home to gain a sense of closure to their unresolved relationship. Alone in the house and surrounded by her collection of occult relics and decorations, Leon begins to recall his traumatic childhood, during which his mother incessantly tried to induct him into the bizarre cult of angels that she and her husband belonged to. Over the course of the night, the ghosts of Leon's past and the monsters of his present will converge in order to test the strength of his disbelief.

Analysis: There are two different interpretations that we are encouraged to read from Leon Leigh's journey back through his tortured personal history and decayed family relationships. Rather than being antithetical to one another, these separate readings are both required pieces of the same sad puzzle.

At first, we're encouraged to read the haunting that Leon experiences while spending the night in his mother's home as symbolic of him confronting the trauma of his childhood spent with her. We learn as the film progresses that Rosalind subjected the juvenile Leon to borderline sadistic "games" that sought to pressure him into becoming a believer of her occult faith in the power of angels. The rift that formed between mother and son was caused by Leon's steadfast refusal to "play" his mother's game and his eventual flight away from the oppressive coercion she placed upon him at home. Now, separated from his experience for many years, Leon begins to subconsciously doubt his decision, despite his outward gestures demonstrating his continued agreement with the conclusions of his younger self (e.g. putting his cigarette out in an angel statue's stone eye). Leon begins to fear that his mother was right, and that by turning his back on the angels of her faith he has encouraged the angels to give up protecting him from the horrors of the world. Thus, the horrors of the world come scraping at the front door, in the form of a snarling, impossibly long-limbed cat-beast, a creature that could have oozed its sickeningly hairy form from the pages of one of M. R. James's tales. Thanks in part to the rationalizing psychological advice of his girlfriend/therapist as given through various phone conversations over the course his harrowing night, Leon is eventually able to shake off his frightening hallucinations and renew his conviction in the falseness of his mother's beliefs, ridding himself of her cloying spirit and his lingering self-doubts in the process. As a final gesture indicating that he's ready to move on, Leon announces his intentions to sell off every bit of Rosalind's property. This chapter of his life has been completed.

But the film's final moments provide us with the second interpretation of the events that have transpired. Rosalind, who has been speaking to us throughout the film as a disembodied voice on the soundtrack, finally reveals her words as emanating from beyond the grave, rather than from the written last will and testament of the title. From her restless spirit, we learn of her suicide, and how it was motivated by her son's unwillingness to forgive her, the loss of faith that accompanied her belief's inability to set things right, and the subsequent loneliness that crept up on her, "like an animal ready to pounce," over the years spent without her beloved son. We learn that in her continuously cruel desperation to coerce and control her son's feelings, she leaves Leon a suicide note reading, "Do you miss me as much as I miss you?" Finally, we learn that Leon never reads the note, for he never deigns to visit her accursed home, even after she bequeaths it to him. The Leon of the film is Rosalind's fantasy, an imaginative torture she puts herself through nightly as she watches, again and again, her son abandon her and her beliefs, even as she cries out pitifully for him to stay. The ghost becomes the haunted, and rightfully so. Rosalind's inability to understand the effect of her actions on her son, and thus her unwillingness to seek forgiveness or change her ways, marks her for her haunted fate. We could call this existence Rosalind has made for herself a sort of hell, but perhaps not: in her imagination, at least Leon wills himself to remember her, if only for a night.

Technical Merits: The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh is writer/director/Rue Morgue Magazine founder and president Rodrigo Gudiño's first full-length feature film, produced after creating only a handful of short films prior. Though inventive, his shorts lack the substance to elevate them above their visual gimmicks. What is so surprising about Rosalind Leigh, then, is how confident, controlled, and deliberate its style feels, and what a boon it is to the film's realization of its narrative. Though minimalist by design and budgetary necessity, the film hardly feels like an apprentice effort. Gudiño effortlessly blends long takes, voice-over storytelling, found footage, single location shooting, dodgy (but well-masked) CGI, and documentary-esque explorations of visual space as if to do so were his second nature. You could label the film's freewheeling, ever-evolving style as the product of an overeager first-time filmmaker wanting to cram all of his newly learned tricks in at once, but that feels to me like the wrong assessment. There's a clarity of purpose in the film's every wild and unexpected stylistic shift, as it seeks to make strange once again the horror stories and situations that we've become overly familiar with. I don't necessarily understand every one of Gudiño's stylistic choices (uh, opening credits over the little brother of Kubrick's cosmic fetus?), but I suspect he has his reasons. And, even if not, the cumulative effect of the film's technical experimentation is a breed of weird I can still get behind

Pared down to its bones, Rosalind Leigh contains no plot development or horror set-piece that we could call wholly unique, but the myriad ways in which these familiar elements are presented to us sure make them feel that way. An example: a character calls up a home security company to review the footage from the camera outside the front door of the house he's in. We've seen this scene before in other horror films, and we know it might (very likely) end with the discovery of some fiend or creature barely visible somewhere within the frame of the blurry footage. Gudiño makes this typical scene strange by a) implying vaguely, and without future consequence, through religious music on hold and creepy amateur web design that the security company is run by the mysterious angel cult, b) presenting the customer service representative on the other line as a strangely lifelike computer-generated voice that can seemingly respond to complex human language commands, and c) having this impossibly strange computer be voiced by the very same actor who is speaking to it over the phone. Nothing of any particularly horrific value occurs during this scene, plot-wise -- unless you find a man on the phone sitting at a computer to be a terrifying sight in and of itself -- but the film's off-kilter presentation of the action makes it one of many uniquely disquieting scenes sown throughout the film, sprouting strangeness.

Relevance: As a single-location, (more-or-less) single-actor horror film, Rosalind Leigh bears a certain resemblance to the excellent middle portions of the two adaptations of Susan Hill's The Woman in Black (1989; 2012), in which our lone protagonist wanders around the dreary home of a now-deceased occupant and uncovers curiosities, documents, and recordings that reveal a macabre secret history underlying the present day narrative. But unlike both versions of The Woman in Black, Rosalind Leigh realizes that the isolation and anxiety produced by this haunted ramble can be intensified by never leaving the property. We're given no respite from the subtle terrors lining the walls and lurking behind every door of Rosalind Leigh's unheimlich abode, and this helps make the film one of the stronger examples of horror cinema fascinated with architecture and physical space. Like The Shining's Overlook Hotel, The Innkeepers' Yankee Pedlar Inn, or Session 9's Danvers State Hospital, Rosalind Leigh's grotesque home is essentially the film's secondary protagonist, and exploring the very form and atmosphere of this space provides many of the film's most suffocating terrors. (And, again, unlike those other films, Rosalind Leigh never allows us to fill our lungs with the air from any other location, not even for a moment.)

Also of interest to horror fans is Rosalind Leigh's exploration of the relatively untapped potential of angels as objects of horror. Sure, we can't help but see shades of Doctor Who's Weeping Angels in the possibly animate angel statues of Gudiño's film, but the defining characteristic of Rosalind Leigh 's angels (besides them not being, well, time-energy feeding aliens) is how creepy they act while ostensibly trying to save our souls from an afterlife of torment. That's an impressive feat. The film employs its angels as symbols of the uneasiness you feel when a little old lady on the street hands you a church pamphlet while cheerily informing you that you're going to burn in hell. The horror of these angelic figures is generated from the jarring disconnect between the dual religious messages they impart to their victims, alternately turned towards them with open arms and turned away with grimaces carved upon their faces: If you believe in me, I will comfort and protect you; If you disbelieve, fear the worst. These are the sort of benignly horrific angels that cinema could use more of. They're a welcome development away from the mopey badass angels of The Prophecy (1995) and Legion (2010), and they're just about as frightening as a winged John Travolta in Michael (1996).

A Dreadful Decade (Part VIII): Absentia (2011) dir. Mike Flanagan

Logline: Seven years after her husband vanished without a trace and with his death now having been declared in absentia, Tricia (Courtney Bell) is finally beginning to move on with her life, despite feeling haunted by his absence. She's pregnant with her first child, involved in a new romance, and reconnecting with her long-estranged younger sister, Callie (Katie Parker). But when her husband, Daniel (Morgan Peter Brown), appears bloody, malnourished, and traumatized on the street in front of their home, Tricia's life is once again thrown into confusion and turmoil. Where has Daniel been for the past near decade, and what does his disappearance have to do with the large number of missing persons in the immediate area over the past century? The answers lie within the walls of a dark cement tunnel, underneath the reality we perceive, in a fantastic hell of unearthly origins.

Analysis: Absentia is a film about loss, grief, and the ghosts of past shames haunting us in the present. It's a film about sisterhood, family, and sacrifice. Perhaps strangely, it's also a film about the cruelty of a greedy bridge troll. Well, as we learn, it looks a little more like a silverfish than Shrek, but a troll nonetheless. Fortunately, the film's emphasis isn't placed on exploring the wickedness of a fairy tale monster, but on examining the sad lives of the gruff goats the troll gobbles up in his hunger. Though the film takes the Norwegian fairy tale "Three Billy Goats Gruff" as its partial inspiration, we're left to experience the alternate version, in which the goats fail to outsmart their adversary. We're watching the previous goats, the ones who attempted to cross the bridge before the fairy tale proper begins: the goats whose lives gave the troll its reputation for voraciousness.

These are battered, broken characters, hobbled by their addictions, mistakes, and regrets. Tricia has lost seven years of her life searching for and mourning over her lost husband, whom she never really loved to begin with. (They were high school sweethearts, we learn, and their marriage was a rash and unhappy decision.) Callie has been adrift for most of her adult life, struggling with drugs and doomed romantic relationships, all while alienating herself from her family and loved ones. Both seek solace through various methods (Tricia through rounds of therapy and meditation; Callie through religion), but both cannot escape their demons (Tricia is haunted by visions of her accusatory husband; Callie keeps her emergency stash in a jewelry box beneath her crucifix). Their lives are not happy ones, and just when things begin to look up (the sisters reconnect, a baby is on the way, a romance is in bloom, a new house is being hunted for, a fresh start is on the horizon), life kicks them off the figurative bridge into the muck: Daniel returns and then disappears once more, Callie starts using again (or at least everyone assumes-- and always will assume-- she has), romance is ruined, plans are scrapped, and trust and faith evaporate.

The film's tagline proclaims, "There are fates worse than death." True: there's always life. What option do Tricia, Callie, and even Daniel have but to absent themselves from their situations, to retreat to a realm that's not quite death but far from the disappointments of earthly existence? In their turns, all three are spirited away to a subterranean nether realm, existing beyond the laws of matter and possibly time. But, you might be asking, isn't this all the fault of that greedy troll and his famous appetite for those who wander onto his terrain by mistake? Surely these three weren't asking for their grim fates. Ah, but a counterargument: consider how easy it is for those characters who remain to justify away the absence of those missing, to imagine the hundred reasons they would have to simply disappear. When Callie attempts a trade with the troll for Tricia and her unborn infant, we might commend her selflessness for offering up herself first, instead of the customary neighborhood pets. But is it selflessness of selfishness? Is Callie envious of her sister's tortured quasi-oblivion? It might seem the cruelest trick when the troll spits out only Tricia's unborn fetus in response to Callie's offer before collecting its flesh bounty from her, but perhaps it's not a trick at all. Perhaps Tricia is precisely where she wants to be, absent from the pains of the past seven years. And as for Callie, it's telling that our last image of her in the film is a tranquil one, shot from behind and through the strange perspective of the realm she now inhabits, looking out into what she used to know as her cursed reality. We see that her new keeper has its insectile arm draped lightly over her shoulders, as if in comfort.

Technical Merits: Absentia is a testament to the potential effectiveness of horror on a limited budget, With over a third of its production funds crowdsourced from a Kickstarter campaign, the film didn't have an inordinate amount of money to play around with, but writer/director/editor Mike Flanagan sure makes the most of his pennies. Unable to afford lavish special effects to create the film's eerie subterranean netherworld or its mammoth insect overseer, Flangan and his cinematographer choose to employ suggestion and subtlety (those oft forgotten tricks of the trade) in those spots of the film where visual horror is necessitated. The dreary digital sheen of the film's mid-level high definition video is made an aesthetic asset rather than a mark of its financial inferiority: its startles us with its placement of an ancient, folkloric evil within the context of the mundane contemporary world and the digital lenses we now more often than not glimpse it through. 

This is what budget horror cinema should look and feel like in the current decade. That Flanagan was able to accomplish so much with the pocket change (relatively speaking) that he had for Absentia, and then turn in a glossy, Hollywood-esque followup with (in Hollywood's terms) a paltry $5 million for his next feature, the excellent Oculus (2014), should shame most other horror filmmakers out of the genre. You know what else cost $5 million? Paranormal Activity 4 (2012), which was funded and produced by Blumhouse Productions, just like Oculus was. It shouldn't be, but it's like comparing rotten apples and blood oranges. The rotten apples should start paying attention to the superior fruit.

Relevance: Absentia is a candied house of horrors for its viewers. As we approach it, the film gives off the sickly sweet appearance of a character drama. We imagine we'll get up close and personal to the lives of our principles, tasting the bitter outer layers of trauma and hardship before our taste buds hit the saccharine redemption at the center. Ah, but we are mistaken, for this is a witch's candy house, and as we wander inside we discover the horror locked in the basement: the endurance of the scarier fairy tales and folklore against the progression of time, sugarcoating a Lovecraftian realm of supernatural, subterranean terrors and torment. Our mouths taste sour before we're pushed into the oven, off of the troll's foot bridge, into Grandma Wolf's gaping maw. We've been tricked. The film ushers childhood bedtime stories and nightmares into horror's contemporary era, but its revisions of these interchangeable tales we dimly recall from our youth are only surface-level. (A bug for a troll isn't much.) To truly frighten us, it knows that it need only tell us the tales again.

A Dreadful Decade (Part VII): The Innkeepers (2011) dir. Ti West

Logline: On the last weekend of the historic Yankee Pedlar Inn's operation as a business, front desk clerks Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) embark on a ghost hunt when not serving their few remaining guests. The two minimum wage workers hope to capture evidence of the presence of Madeline O'Malley, the hotel's famed phantasm, for fun and possible profit. But Claire is soon to discover that the spirits of the Yankee Pedlar Inn are very real, and that they have their own plans to capture her, too...

Analysis: In traditional ghost stories, ghosts aren't created by accident. Fate (or the authorial hand) pushes certain characters-- even on occasion the protagonists-- towards their haunted afterlives, bestowing upon them an existence lonelier than death. Such a fate may seem cruel and unfair, but we can't shake the feeling that these characters are marked for ghost-dom, and that they might lead more productive lives postmortem than they were able to while still breathing.

In The Innkeepers, Claire is already a sort of ghost when we meet her. Her aimlessness and twenty-something ennui places her somewhere between life (or adolescent vigor) and death (the inevitable daily grind). When, early in the film, she flees from the range of the insipid juvenile babble issuing from the mouth of a similarly aged barista (Lena Dunham), we realize that Claire has divorced herself from the concerns of young adulthood, but her inability to even comprehend a life or passion outside of her dead-end job illustrates her failure to assume the (sometimes soul-crushing) responsibilities of being an adult. At one point in the film, Luke accuses Claire of being in the throes of a "quarter-life crisis," but this is news to her: even with the inevitable closing of her place of employment mere days away, Claire hasn't given a moment's thought to her plans post-steady paycheck.

This absence of forethought on Claire's part is because she is exactly where she's supposed to be, among the other lost and purposeless spirits (a widower, an abandoned bride) haunting the Yankee Pedlar Inn. Claire has been marked by fate: as Luke notes, when trying to comfort her, "Everything happens for a reason, Claire. Nobody just winds up at Yankee Pedlar." His aren't hopeful words.

The film posits young adulthood and minimum wage work as a sort of purgatory that one can either aspire a way out of or be trapped in forever. (Though the film also acknowledges the difficulty of making anything of one's self in our busted, post-bubble economy. What exactly is one to do for a "legitimate career"? Open a hotel?) Luke is spared a ghostly existence because at least he's trying, however poorly, to achieve a level of success outside of the doomed inn. On the contrary, Claire subconsciously realizes she has no aspirations, prospects, or literally any place else to haunt, and the end of the business is, for all intents and purposes, the end of her aimless wheel-spinning.

The rotten economy leads to the demise of both Claire and the Yankee Pedlar, but it's the hotel that emerges as the major figure worth mourning. The film imparts to us lots of little intimations that the Yankee Pedlar has a real, tangible history, and that the hotel itself is actively resisting becoming obsolete, forgotten, and unoccupied (it's making new ghosts, after all). And, if we can't bring ourselves to feel sympathy for a woman unable or unwilling to pull herself up by her still-corporeal bootstraps, we can certainly lament the loss of a home for wayward souls.

Technical Merits: Separated by actual title cards, the film's chapters unfurl before us like those of the best supernatural literature: slowly but certainly, like graveworms to the corpse buffet. The Innkeepers abandons the retro style of Ti West's previous films The Roost (2005) and The House of the Devil (2009), but revels in the slow-burn horror of the latter. West's avoidance of a deliberately nostalgic style in this retro-narrative-influenced outing is appropriate, juxtaposing the lurid appeal of ancient history (the historic hotel; the classical ghost story) with the overwhelming sterility and blandness of the modern world (dispiriting economic recession; contemporary horror cinema). Thus, West keeps much of The Innkeepers snail-paced, its exquisitely framed images rolling deliberately, almost fluidly, across the screen. He allows only fleeting glimpses of the supernatural to crawl into his compositions and remind us of the gracefully sinister storytelling traditions wallpapered over by the 21st century's drudgery.

Like all effective horror films (and like very few of its contemporaries), The Innkeepers understands that true horror is not located in the repeated build-up and release of suspense. Rather, horror is generated by mood and atmosphere, by the disquieting framing of the camera or by editing that lingers serenely on the ghastliest of sights just long enough to sear them into our retinas. In this vein, West openly pokes fun at his peers and their over-reliance on build-and-release jump scares: in one scene, Luke spooks Claire with one of the many Youtube videos in which a half minute of silent anticipation is shattered by a demonic shriek and the enlarged image of some variation of Linda Blair's face. Put into comparison with the mastery of the genre's form on display in The Innkeepers, the bulk of modern horror looks roughly as complex and polished as the uploaded shock-video efforts of hypothetical Youtube user dEMonIAC94. Sure, West is rubbing other filmmakers' noses in their own laziness a little bit (even if lightheartedly), but I won't fault him for setting a higher standard.

Relevance: The Innkeepers is a little like Charles Dickens's "The Signal-Man" (1866), if you transported the latter's action from the lonely railroad tracks of England to a lonely historic inn in Connecticut. Both The Innkeepers and "The Signal-Man" are concerned with protagonists stuck in dead-end jobs, haunted by spirits of their own static lives, and ultimately consumed by their inability to extricate themselves from their situations. There's not an exact resemblance between the two works, but Ti West, The Innkeepers' writer and director, is quite obviously paying homage to the tradition of classical Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories that "The Signal-Man" is a sterling example of: quaint, melancholy tales of the relationship between fate and the supernatural.

The film's use of this classical ghost yarn form is important because of its increasing obsolescence in 21st-century horror cinema. Traditional ghost stories simply aren't feasible in our postmodern era. Look at the ghost films of recent years: Paranormal Activity (2009), Ringu (1998), Kairo (2001). Each of these films strives to place the figure of the ghost outside of its familiar territory (no more haunted manors, hotels, moors, or cemeteries) and thoroughly enmesh its existence with the most recognizable elements of modern technology (home video cameras, telephones, VHS tapes, televisions, webcams, and the Internet). The postmodern ghost transcends fixed place and lives out its afterlife digitally through our devices and media; the traditional ghost that The Innkeepers homages is stranded, rattling its chains to deaf ears while irrevocably tied to its location. And the fact is that America's haunted locations are dying. Demolitions, re-modelings, and renovations are eradicating the country's architectural history, replacing buildings of character with antiseptic McMansions, planned communities, and strip malls. At the time of The Innkeepers' release in 2011, Phil Coldiron wrote, "who could imagine a ghost story set in a Courtyard by Marriott?" No one can, and that's why the majority of traditional ghost films produced in the last decade or so (The Others [2001], The Orphanage [2007], The Devil's Backbone [2001], The Awakening [2011]) have been period pieces set in foreign countries, alleviating our difficulty in imagining a contemporary America with standing buildings old enough to have a history.

The ghosts of yore dematerialize with the shuttering of their local haunts, and this is a reality worth mourning. In the for-real operational Yankee Pedlar Inn (est. 1891) and its ghostly inhabitants (both "real" and imagined), West finds dual last bastions worth celebrating, and his film's intelligent drawing of parallels between the demise of historic architecture and the growing irrelevancy of ghost stories demonstrates his fondness for and eagerness to preserve both, if only temporarily. Sadly, but appropriately, he ends The Innkeepers with the image of a door being shoved closed, both literally and figuratively. We could claim a spirit's forceful push was the cause, but the handprints smudged on the frame are our own.

A Dreadful Decade (Part III): Berberian Sound Studio (2012) dir. Peter Strickland

Logline: In this 1970s period piece, Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a successful sound engineer of English nature documentaries, is invited to Italy's Berberian Sound Studio by the director Giancarlo Santini (Antonio Mancino) to work on his latest film. Though initially excited about the prospect of working on a narrative film with a renowned filmmaker, the meek and mild Gilderoy is soon put off by the complex hostility of the Italian film industry and the grisly tasks he's asked to perform to create the film's sound. What Gilderoy wasn't informed of is that Santini's latest film, The Equestrian Vortex, is a graphic horror film, and thus the sound engineer's increasing complicity in bringing to aural life the sickening images on screen is having a frightful effect on his sanity.

Analysis: Italian horror cinema of the 1970s was, in a sense, the apex of queasy on-screen violence. Certainly, horror films in the decades since have sought and succeeded to increase the sheer level of bloodshed on display, but as the '70s bled over into the '80s and on, what were once startling moments of stylized physical violence (occupying a realm halfway between delirious fantasy and sober reality) transformed into the cartoonish excesses of modern cinematic gore. We necessarily remain at a distance from cartoon violence, but the brutal hacking and slashing seen in Italian gialli like Deep Red (1975) and Don't Torture a Duckling (1972) was (when compared to that of their international contemporaries) impossible not to feel the visceral effect of. Even today the violence in these battered and aged Italian gialli has the power to shock viewers in a way that the goopiest modern torture porn horror cannot. With an unmatched sleazy ferocity, '70s Italian horror broke the taboos first.

In part, Berberian Sound Studio ponders the effects of such violence on those souls who labored to create it. It asks: could anything but a film industry full of monsters produce this sadistic breed of cinema? This is a criticism that's often been lodged against the likes of Argento, Fulci, and Martino, and it's a possibility that Peter Strickland's film finds fascinating to explore. We watch as Gilderoy feebly attempts to maneuver his way within an industry that is as callous and insensitive towards its financial debts as it is towards cinematic depictions of vaginal rape with a branding iron. When not popping champagne corks in honor of undefined celebrations, those in charge of the Italian movie-making machine are grinding up the human beings in their employ, disposing of them if and when they refuse to be the mere objects they're required to be for the production's sake. If not monsters-- the film appears to argue-- then these films couldn't have been created by anything but desensitized automatons, psychologically oblivious to the carnage they're wreaking on screen.

Yet, what sounds like a rather puritanical blanket condemnation of '70s Italian horror and its producers grows more complex when considered in light of Gilderoy's evolution over the length of the film. Initially, Gilderoy (a stuffy Englishman, naturally) is horrified and repulsed by the images he's forced to gaze at day after day during his employment at the studio. His halfhearted attempts to create the soundtrack to the film's murders eventually give way to outright defiance: Gilderoy can't will himself to be complicit, as if his refusal or failure to provide the required foley effects could spare the on-screen victims their fates. But as his frustration with his bosses and his situation grows, Gilderoy slowly begins to embrace the cinematic violence, insofar that he begins to lose himself in the images of the film. Soon enough, he's watching himself in horror movie situations that play out on the screen in front of him. Reality and fantasy enmesh, and Gilderoy emerges from the collision as another one of those cold-blooded movie-making automatons. (Appropriately, he also emerges magically fluent in Italian.) At the film's ear-piercing climax, Gilderoy sadistically employs his trade to cause violence to another member of the crew for the alleged benefit of the film. Immediately after Gilderoy has sunk to this new low, the camera moves in to find tears crowding his eyes with regret, and we watch as he wanders over to attempt communion, perhaps reconciliation, with the movie screen he's been battling all along. 

Perhaps in the end the film is an essentially moral one, arguing against the bloody misanthropy on display in Italian horror and the potential detriments it might bring into the psychological lives of its makers (not to mention its audience). But, at the same time, the film recognizes the allure of cinematic violence and the inherent temptation we feel to wallow in it: we can't forget that Gilderoy was smiling as he tortured another human being with his deafening sound waves, as if he were one of The Equestrian Vortex's inquisitors "interrogating" an accused witch. The Italian horror film that inspired his psychosis is appalling, certainly, and probably not of the artistic merit that its director claims, but it's essentially innocent. As a piece of lifeless cinema, it doesn't command his actions or dictate his thoughts. Ultimately, Gilderoy's failure is his inability to distinguish the screen from reality and cinematic violence from actual violence. Through negative example, perhaps the film hopes we fair better.

Technical Merits: One would expect that a film about the creation of sound would itself have expert sound design. Berberian Sound Studio does not fail on this count. Though it expresses an occasional affection for the bombastic scores of Italian soundtrack stalwarts like Morricone, Nicolai, and Cipriani (courtesy of the English band Broadcast), much of the film's sound design is deliberately subdued, placing ambient noises (those real, imagined, and manufactured) at the forefront. Thus, sonic tensions run high. Strickland's film has the distinction of employing sound as a physical weapon, both within the film and without.

Humorously, Strickland also undermines our expectations by never allowing us to glimpse a single frame of The Equestrian Vortex, the horror film within the horror film (beyond its stylish, solarized opening credits, that is). We've come to a horror film (of two sorts), and yet we're denied any bloodshed. How rude. Or perhaps not: the film's greatest visual merit is its fixation on the gory remains of the assorted fruits and vegetables that Gilderoy and his assistant foley artists massacre for their sound effects. As the lingering, nauseating closeups of the putrid, rotting husks of melons and turnips remind us, there are real victims of violence here, if not those we expect.

Relevance: If nothing else, the film is indisputably about the production of horror films, and specifically that unique moment in European genre cinema in which entire films were captured without live sound and instead employed the work of gifted sound engineers, foley artists, and voice actors to create the films' post-synced soundtracks. The effort and talent that went into producing all the sound for these countless genre classics have been largely ignored in favor of praise for the delirious cinematography of the era. I think Berberian Sound Studio successfully corrects this oversight by deftly demonstrating how these sound practitioners could manipulate the silliest of audio recordings into the truly horrific.

You might scoff at my contention that Berberian Sound Studio is itself a horror film, but I believe I have enough evidence on my side. In spite of whatever reservations Strickland might have about horror cinema, his film is clearly modeled after the Italian giallo (and his film within the film, The Equestrian Vortex, obviously derived from Suspiria (1977), that supernatural giallo supreme). Impressively, Strickland manages to imbue his film with the mood and atmosphere of a giallo without ever fully slipping into the subgenre's cliches. We encounter shady characters, implied sexual violence, a descent into psychosis, and a late night stalking with a blade, but all of these moments are approached from directions grounded (more or less) in quasi-reality, as if the film were coming at the giallo's tropes sideways. An example: The physical violence, as noted above, is vegetal. It's a humorous employment of the giallo's elements that provides them for us while denying us their full expression. Like the figure we see switching out reels in the titular studio, we sense that a fiend in black leather gloves is running Strickland's projector, too.

A Dreadful Decade (Part II): Resolution (2012) dir. Justin Benson, Aaron Moorehead

Logline: After being e-mailed a video chronicling the dire condition of his drug-addicted friend (Chris, portrayed by Vinny Curran), Michael (Peter Cilella) resolves to help his long-estranged buddy break free of his dependency by confronting him at his remote cabin in the woods. Michael decides to go the tough love route, handcuffing the stubborn Chris to the wall and vowing to help him through his violent, expletive-filled withdrawal over the next few days and nights. Complications arise when it's discovered that Chris has lost a large supply of his dealers' drugs and that he's actually squatting on a Native American reservation. But worst of all are the mysterious documents and recordings being left around the cabin and surrounding woods for Michael to discover, documents and recordings that begin to reveal the horrific history of the area and eventually suggest the possibility that someone is attempting to revise the story these two friends are living out.

Analysis: Resolution is a film about the demands audiences make and the unfortunate effects these demands can have upon characters living within a narrative world. As part of an audience, we have certain expectations for structure. We expect development and complication, explanation and resolution. Beginning, middle, end. Only the most tolerant of us aren't angry when a narrative fails to include any of these aspects, whether it be out of ineptitude or defiance. After watching movies or reading books we've been somehow disappointed with, we often express our wish for how it should have ended. In contrast to most narratives outside of Choose Your Own Adventure books, Resolution gives this power of revision to the audience, though in a limited way. The film presumes to know what sort of plot we want, and it chastises and punishes its characters whenever they fail to provide it. What we want (says the film) is an unhappy ending.

The first time I watched Resolution, I was somewhat put off by this assertion that the film makes. After all, hadn't I grown unusually fond of these characters over the length of the movie? Hadn't I wanted them to escape their predicament and resolve the issues in their lives and friendship? Why would I wish them the ill that the film claims I do? I thought that the film was working at cross purposes by including such well-wrought character drama and then assuring me that I wanted to see these likable fellows dead, one way or another. But further viewings and reflection has me feeling differently. 

I think Resolution is correct. As an audience member, I wanted events beyond the mundane to transpire in these characters' fictional lives. When creepy recordings turn up in and around the cabin, I want Michael to explore them despite his better sense, to probe further and risk putting himself in danger. I desire problems and drama within the central relationship of the film, and I yearn for them to be resolved. When the characters maintain that their personal problems (like so many problems in our real lives) can't be solved, I'm happy when the film forces them to reconsider, in spite of whatever further dangers or traumas they will have to experience. In a sense, I derived my entertainment from these characters' suffering, and so, by extension, how could I ever be satisfied with a happy ending, especially within the context of an ostensible horror film? I'll need the truly horrific to rear its ugly head eventually, whatever the cost. Resolution doesn't fail me on this count. Or, rather, I don't fail it.

Technical Merits: The film's naturalistic, nearly Dogme 95-esque approach to visual storytelling (single location, handheld camerawork, the absence of a musical score) is offset by creeping reminders of the essential artificiality of the images on screen. Scenes occasionally transition from one to the next by way of an audio and video effect that is akin to a hot projector burning up the print passing through it. One of these faux-antiquated effects (the presence of such being curious enough considering the film was captured digitally on the Red One camera) even interrupts a scene mid-conversation, causing our two leads to question the strange noise they just heard (but which, of course, they should not have.) These metafictional stylistic contradictions are deliberate, making apparent on screen that the archetypal audience's desire for a certain type of ancient narrative transcends time, format, medium, and style itself. Notice, for example, the fact that Michael's discoveries throughout the film reveal numerous narratives to us, and while each takes on a different form--photographs, projector slides, books, vinyl records, film reels, video tapes, audio tapes, computer-recorded video-- each also possesses the same grim ending. As the medium improves over time, imbuing its images and sounds with greater clarity, definition, and verisimilitude, we may forget that what we're watching is a constructed story. Resolution's approach ensures that we remember.

Relevance: A quote from the Village Voice on the front cover of Resolution's home video release boldly proclaims that Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead's film "puts The Cabin in the Woods to shame." That's not an entirely honest assessment. Certainly, both films are metafictional reflections on horror cinema and both take place in a woods-ensconced cabin, but similarities end there. Cabin in the Woods is unmistakably a genre film, while Resolution is not so easily classified. Cabin in the Woods revels in the various permutations of the same basic story we see again and again in horror films; Resolution dreads the inescapable pull of a deeper, ingrained narrative structure that anticipates (perhaps requires) tragedy. Cabin in the Woods is excess; Resolution is restraint. A "one coin, two sides" situation. For the open-minded viewer, they make lovely companion pieces to one another.

But it's that unclassifiable nature of Resolution that makes it noteworthy for admirers of horror cinema. Its decided refusal to engage earnestly in any stock horror movie cliche is noble. (Moments of the film gleefully deflate recognizable scare tactics like the figure tapping on the window or the person lurking in the dark of a cave.) Yet, it's the film's dedication to employing a primal essence of horror that is what defines it. It presents us with objects of fear that have no face, and with suspense that derives from no obvious or explainable catalyst. The film is full of palpable unease, but its audience would be hard pressed to describe for you its monsters. Are these monsters indeed personifications of the audience, or are they more supernatural in origin, as the final moments might suggest? Or are they instead all too human, or cosmic, or spiritual? As the eccentric French hermit, Byron (Bill Oberst, Jr.), asks Michael in the film, how can an isolated tribesman in Ecuador tell the difference between an alien, an angel, and a ghost? He can't, of course, but he can perhaps sense a difference of intent, and the intent of those undefined forces in Resolution is undeniably no good.

ESSAY: No, YOU'RE Next: The Transformation of a Home Invasion Thriller

Abstract: A consideration of the possible influence one little-known home invasion thriller had on another, much more well-regarded home invasion thriller. A nasty case of plagiarism? Well, we wouldn't be shocked if the makers of the latter had caught a late night television broadcast of the former at some point. Regardless, this isn't a case of outright thievery; it's a demonstration of how a thriller film becomes a horror film, and of the fine line separating cliched earnestness and intentional self-parody in cinematic storytelling.

This essay features discussion of:

You're Next (2013) dir. Adam Wingard

Below Utopia (1997) dir. Kurt Voss

Allow me to describe for you a horror film. Help me to remember its title.

It goes like this: A young couple is driving to a family get-together. The man (a college English teacher) is anxious because his relationship with his wealthy family (though particularly his father) is strained due to their perception of him as a failure. The woman--the man's significant other--is also anxious, considering this will be her first encounter with his family. The couple arrives at this isolated family estate in the countryside, and many tense encounters are had between siblings and between children and parents. During dinner, a trio of ferocious mercenaries invade the home and murder most everyone inside. The young couple survive by evading the killers, and, eventually, they're able to turn the tables on their aggressors by way of borrowed weapons. In particular, the woman demonstrates her physical and emotional resilience to the terror surrounding her in this second half. 

The killers successfully done away with, a twist is tossed our way like a live hand grenade: the male half of this couple staged the whole grisly affair. See, he hired the anonymous assassins to murder his entire, much-maligned family so that he would be the sole recipient of their vast estate. (It appears that being an English teacher simply wasn't paying the bills.) He then decided to put his girlfriend through this harrowing ordeal so that she could serve as an innocent witness to the authorities concerning the senseless carnage and, thus, discourage any suspicion that might turn in his direction. But, now that she has learned the truth of her boyfriend's nefarious scheming and mass familicide, she has no recourse but to murder him in retaliation, which she does.

What movie am I thinking of?

You might be thinking that I'm thinking of Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett's recent home invasion horror film You're Next (2013). Actually, I was describing the film Below Utopia (a.k.a. Body Count, 1997), starring Alyssa Milano, Justin Theroux, Tiny Lister, and the incomparable Ice T. But you wouldn't be wrong, either, because what I've described above is the same basic story (and accompanying minute details) seen in You're Next. The two films are identical in this broad sense, separated only by their respective decades of release and the fact that if you're reading this blog you've most likely seen the one and never even heard of the other.

I'm hesitant to label the similarities between Below Utopia and You're Next as the product of an act of deliberate plagiarism by the latter against the former. Kurt Voss's Below Utopia isn't exactly startling in its originality, and it's possible that writer Simon Barrett was simply working from the cliches of the twisty, surprisingly long-lived inheritance scheme thriller genre when he was drafting You're Next, resulting in a film the travels the same well-trodden path. But I have a tough time swallowing that line. The two films are much too much alike for the resemblance to be mere coincidence, and I would wager that Barrett was influenced at least unconsciously by the earlier film, if not directly. Either way, I have no doubt that Barrett had seen Below Utopia prior to writing his film. This isn't a criticism. I'm equally as certain that Barrett and Wingard had seen The Strangers (2008), Funny Games (1997; 2008), High Tension (2003), Them (2006), Inside (2007), and numerous other contemporary home invasion thrillers before writing You're Next, too. In its postmodern self-awareness, Barrett and Wingard's film is striving to upset the expectations of its specific subgenre, and thus it requires a resemblance to (and familiarity with) those prior films within that subgenre. It's to be expected.

The complicating factor in all this is that Below Utopia isn't a horror film, despite the fact that the majority of home invasion films are. It's a thriller, certainly, perhaps a crime or a drama film, but it's not horror. Almost all of its violence happens off screen, with the emphasis being not on forcing the audience to gawk at the visceral images of a family being demolished but on encouraging that audience to follow the loopy plot twists and stay ahead of the action. The film's antagonists aren't shadowy, menacing madmen, but Tiny Lister checking the radio for basketball scores and Ice T cracking wise between gunshots. It's shot and edited in a flat, suspense-bereft late-'90s DTV style (despite it having received a theatrical release), and while you might run the risk of being absentmindedly entertained by the events on screen, being afraid seems unlikely.

You're Next transforms the same basic story into something that could not be mistaken for anything but a horror film. The film intends to shock, terrify, and amusingly astonish by the lengths to which it goes in sowing its mayhem. Frenetic handheld camerawork, palpable tension punctuated by cheap jump scares, iconic villains, unflinching brutality leavened by audience-rousing reprisals, buckets upon buckets of fake blood: it's all the things midnight movies are made of. Considering its foundational commonalities with the earlier film, You're Next is best viewed as a revision of Below Utopia, seeking to amend the errors of the "original" film's presentation. In a commentary track on You're Next's home video release, Barrett expresses that his desire in writing the film was to correct what bad home invasion movies got wrong. That it does. Despite its novel twists and turns (which You're Next co-opts as its own), Below Utopia is as typical as they come, with audible DUN-DUN-DUNs soundtracking its revelations and strained grasps at psychological complexity. Nevertheless, Below Utopia still presents the horrific concept of a man callously ordering the deaths of his entire immediate and extended family. Does not such a horrific concept deserve the casing of a horror film that You're Next provides?

But You're Next has value beyond this transformation of genre, whatever the truth is concerning its source. In that same commentary track, Barrett and Wingard agree that what is necessary in contemporary horror cinema is not necessarily new material, but new perspectives on that material. You're Next is better classified as an upheaval than a new perspective. Despite their claim that the film contains no overt "postmodern winks," Barrett and Wingard approach You're Next as self parody. The film lulls us into a sense of familiarity by beginning like an earnest slasher film and playing up narrative cliches like the motiveless thrill-killers and cinematic cliches like the sights and sounds of an unnaturally creaky old house. But it's not all that long before the film disregards our expectations and embraces the absurd, with blenders to the head and the apparent immortality of Joe Swanberg's character (another aspect mirrored, though without comment, in Below Utopia's similarly immortal brother character of Justin, as portrayed by Nicholas Walker). You're Next encourages its characters to blindly but knowingly play into genre cliches by splitting up and wandering into dark rooms despite the presence of murderous psychopaths and then milks these moments for dark humor. Simultaneously, the film creates characters and moments that subvert those cliches, like Final Girl Erin (Sharni Vinson), whose childhood training as a survivalist makes her beyond circumstantially resilient, in contrast to so many other horror movie heroines. In short, the film strives successfully to be as unpredictable as it is knowingly hackneyed.

This is because You're Next is pointing out the conventional flaws of films within the subgenres of the slasher and the home invasion thriller while self-consciously reveling in those flaws. To an extent, it's devaluing the earnestness of those other films and acknowledging how crudely fun they can be. It's a film that puts on lurid display its exhaustion with the cliche of horror narratives motivated by nothing but their villains' inherent sadistic evil (à la The Strangers) or hoary psychological derangement (à la Inside) by leading us towards those cliches and then making them vanish, much to our discovered elation. Like Scream (1996), which Barrett and Wingard strangely assure us their film is nothing like, You're Next allows us to feel smart for noticing its manipulation of conventions and its evacuation of faux-realism from a horror movie scenario that rests in absurdity.

Case in point: Below Utopia falls into the trap of faux-realism-through-cliche when it attempts to ground the reasoning for the by-proxy massacre in the sudden and inexplicable mania of Justin Theroux's previously sane character. It's amusing to watch Theroux ham it up as a secret psycho, but this attempted justification of the family massacre plot is far from a satisfying development, as it's trying too hard to explain away actions that are artificial and born of genre narrative necessity anyway. This phony realism, propped up by groan-worthy storytelling banalities, is the state to which so many home invasion thrillers fretfully strive. Why? Unlike most other horror subgenres, the home invasion thriller is constrained by its location. What could be more real or sacrosanct to us than our homes? It's for this reason that most audiences find the notion of home invasion skin-crawling, but it's also for this reason that filmmakers working within the subgenre actively forgo including levity or self-awareness in their productions in the interest of playing on those very real fears. Thus, home invasion thrillers are by and large dour, self-serious affairs, mired in their flimsy sense of authenticity, regardless of the level of preposterous genre fantasy they depict on screen. Like Below Utopia. (Or, for instance, Inside, in which the goopiest, goriest, stupidest blood fantasies are enacted without the trace of a smirk.)

In rebellion against this trend, You're Next embraces the artifice of its plot throughout, and pointedly (and humorously) recognizes the barbarity of its central inheritance scheme, with its mass familicide being ordered for no reason more complex than the accelerated transference of wealth between uber-greedy family members. Barrett and Wingard have re-structured their borrowed plot around the act of the wealthy swallowing up all those around them in the pursuit of more wealth, despite all good sense, placing these actions within a hysterical reality dictated by the logic (or illogic) of the conceit. What the filmmakers achieve is a state of genre filmmaking unadulterated by the restraints of verisimilitude that so many works of fantasy are hobbled with. They've taken a series of films set in its ways and liberated it for a receptive audience, but this insight is partially lost if it's never made clear to us what, specifically, they were taking to begin with, but for a chance encounter with it in the discount DVD bin. If the influence is there (which I suspect it is), it's frustrating that Barrett and Wingard have been so coy about it in the publicity surrounding the film. After all, it's sort of the point.