Canonically Weird (The List)

157. NOSFERATU (1922)

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Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens; Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror

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“It is commonplace to say that silent films are more ‘dreamlike,’ but what does that mean? In ‘Nosferatu,’ it means that the characters are confronted with alarming images and denied the freedom to talk them away.”–Roger Ebert

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DIRECTED BY: F.W. Murnau

FEATURING: Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schröder, Alexander Granach

PLOT: A young clerk named Hutter leaves his wife Ellen to travel to Transylvania with a deed for one Count Orlock to sign so he can purchase a house in Viborg. Orlock, however, is nosferatu, a vampire, and Hutter find himself a prisoner in the Count’s castle as Orlock ships himself to the German port in a coffin. When Orlock arrives the town is shut down for fear of plague, and the vampire takes an interest in Ellen…

Still from Nosferatu (1922)

BACKGROUND:

  • F.W. Murnau’s first seven films, made between 1919 and 1921, are all considered lost. Among them was an adaptation of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Nosferatu was his tenth movie.
  • Albin Grau, Nosferatu‘s co-producer, financier and production designer, was an occultist and a German rival of . His production company Prana intended to produce films promoting occultist beliefs, but the company went bankrupt after Nosferatu.
  • Nosferatu is an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula,” barely disguised by changing the names and moving the action from London to Germany. The Stoker estate successfully sued the filmmakers for copyright infringement after release, and the film was ordered to be destroyed (fortunately, many prints survived).
  • Ranked #21 on Empire Magazine’s List of Best Films of World Cinema.
  • ‘s 2000 film Shadow of a Vampire is about the making of Nosferatu, and plays on the notion that the actor Max Schreck might really have been a vampire (an idea fleshed out from a tongue-in-cheek suggestion made by the writer Ado Kyrou in his book “Surrealism in Cinema”).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: What else could it be but Max Schreck, the rat-faced herald of plague and pestilence and the screen’s most bestial bloodsucker? The scene where he rises unnaturally, stiff as a plank, from his coffin in the ship’s hold still presses the primal panic button.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The experimental use of negative images, sped up film stock, primitive stop motion photography, and the play of shadows to suggest a diabolical world coexisting with our mundane sunlit world creates an uncanny, nightmarish universe. The once new and startling techniques Murnau employs quickly became commonplace, but after nearly a century of disuse they have again become novel through their very archaism.


Trailer for a 2013 re-release of Nosferatu

COMMENTS: At the dawn of cinema, horror movies weren’t diversions meant to give teenage boys an excuse to put a comforting arm around their Continue reading 157. NOSFERATU (1922) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: EVIL DEAD (2013)

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DIRECTED BY: Fede Alvarez

FEATURING: Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez

PLOT: Five kids go to a cabin in the woods, read incantations from an evil tome lying around in the basement, get possessed, and start killing each other.

Still from Evil Dead (2013)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: This remake is a perfect example of how to take a unique product and de-weirdify it for mass consumption.

COMMENTS: Evil Dead has photogenic young leads who are also decent actors, inventive camerawork, good music and sound, crisp (if somber) lighting, and more than acceptable makeup, and ample gore (they splurged on the twenty-gallon drums of karo syrup and red food dye). Fans of the original 1981 movie (and its Certified Weird 1987 remake/sequel) will recognize many basic elements: five kids entering a cabin, one coming out, a reading from a forbidden Book of the Dead, chainsaws, body part dismemberment, possessed women chained under the floorboards, the mixed emotions involved in chopping up your zombified girlfriend into itty-bitty pieces, and even a nod to the evil spirit-POV shaky cam.

What’s missing from this version of the Dead, notably, are the scenes of cabin fever, the hallucinatory moments when the furniture laughs and corpses dance in the moonlight. 1981’s Evil Dead was grimy and gritty, a bloody bon bon for drive-in gorehounds; it had low-budget imagination and occasional lapses in taste (the “rape by the woods” scene), but it was an original (and much-imitated) synthesis of The Exorcist, Night of the Living Dead and Friday the 13th. The bigger-budget Evil Dead II was a work of genius, telling the same story as the 1981 movie, but with outrageously over-the-top comic gore and whiplash shifts between horror, action and black comedy.

By contrast, Evil Dead (2013) is slick and professional looking, but it’s seriously lacking in character: it plays it safe, retreading a predictable story that’s firmly rooted in the horror movies’ version of reality. There are a few changes from the original storyline to keep fans on their toes, including some psychological backstory and a ridiculously strained ending switcheroo. It’s gory, it’s packed with action and nail-gun shootouts, but the rough edges are all smoothed out. The mania that animated the early incarnations is missing; Evil Dead has turned into one of its literal-minded imitators. This movie replays the formula last year’s The Cabin in the Woods satirized almost to the script beat. 2013’s Evil Dead has its place in suburban cineplexes; this is an unassuming flick that hearkens back to horror’s unironic let’s-scare-the-teenagers roots. It’s a technically adept production that neither outshines nor embarrasses the original, and it does no harm to the Evil Dead brand. Still, a bad (or at least controversial) remake might have contributed more to series lore (see the effect revisions have had on Halloween fans) than this forgettable one will.

Evil Dead was helmed by Fede Alvarez, a previously unknown first-time feature director from Uruguay, but it was produced by the team behind the original, including director , star , and original producer Robert G. Tapert. By backing an unnecessary remake that would, to the casual observer, look like a blatant money grab, these guys put their reputations on the line as much as the reputation of the franchise. Campbell went so far as to assure fans that the remake would “kick ass.”  In terms of red blood cell count (and box office), Evil Dead 2013 delivered on his promise. But as far as kicking artistic ass…

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“..this polished, clever remake remains true to the spirit of the original, which was at once viscerally terrifying and weirdly lighthearted.”–Dana Stevens, Slate (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: ALYCE KILLS (2011)

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DIRECTED BY: Jay Lee

FEATURING: Jade Dornfeld, Tamara Feldman, , Eddie Rouse, Larry Cedar

PLOT: A young woman unintentionally destroys her best friend while on drugs, then spirals into anti-social behavior, dragging her acquaintances into the dark morass of her twisted psyche.

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WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Like a high-speed bullet train to Hell, Alyce is novel and exciting, but it doesn’t take us somewhere we want to go.

COMMENTS: With a cursory acknowledgment of the Lewis Carrol tale, Alyce Kills is as much an entry-level clerical answer to the Fortune 500’s American Psycho (2000) as it is a morbid odyssey of self discov—uh, make that self-destruction. Young, pert Alyce (Jade Dornfeld) toils away in a depressing corporate cubicle for a shrewish boss at a thankless job. After work she trudges home to her cramped apartment to freshen up before some much-needed steam-venting at dingy nightclubs. It’s not much of a life, but Alyce has her friend Danielle (Rena Owen), an alpha-female whose guidance Alyce relies upon.

When the women take the Generation-X drug “ecstasy,” Danielle leads on Alyce. It comes out that Alyce has a crush on Danielle, but Danielle rejects her.

Is it an accident then when Alyce “accidentally” pushes her friend off the roof a short while later? It’s not clear whether Alyce is vindictive and a little crazy, or merely reckless and irresponsible. Danielle stands on the ledge, tempting fate, and Alyce mock-pushes her. Alyce is playing a game and behaves as if she doesn’t intend the result—Danielle’s dive to the pavement. But Alyce definitely intends to make contact, and under the circumstances it’s no surprise when Danielle plunges to her doom.

Despite the fact that the drug led to tragedy,  Alyce decides she likes ecstasy and trades sex for X from a repulsive dealer. Under the influence of the psychedelic, Alyce locks herself in her apartment for marathon-length trips during which she perpetually masturbates to violent videos. Conniving to obfuscate her complicity in Danielle’s misfortune leads Alyce to take increasing risks, until she pulls out all the stops. Traipsing across an urban landscape of bizarre characters, settings and situations, Alyce taunts the family of her victim, and eventually conspires murder against those who annoy and inconvenience her.

Having now lost Danielle’s boundary-defining structure, Alyce’s fragile veneer of sanity falls away like an uncoupled caboose from a speeding express. Her locomotive throttle is wide open and there’s no engineer in the cab. Alyce resolves to take charge of her own life, but her brand of self-assertive, feminist “empowerment” is to embark upon a self-indulgent journey of risky behavior. Yet it’s more like a spree, and it degenerates into a maelstrom of self destruction, dragging those closest to her along for a hell-ride on her crazy train.

The theme of women scheming against men has been around at least since ancient Greece. From Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” to the Biblical Eve convincing Adam to bite the proverbial apple, we’ve seen versions of the femme fatale in various literary incarnations through the ages. A few examples are Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra; Daniel Defoe’s opportunistic Moll Flanders; Oliver Goldsmith’s lighthearted, scheming Katie Hardcastle from 1773’s “She Stoops To Conquer”; the conniving Matilda in Matthew Gregory’s 1796 supernatural Gothic novel “The Monk: A Romance”; and the malevolent man-hater Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations.”

Whereas these feminine plotters employed cunning and sexual manipulation to achieve their aims, their modern counterparts resort to brute force. The concept of the fairer sex outwitting men has evolved into the myth of women’s domination over men, and convoluted orchestrations have given way to the karate kicks and machine guns used by characters such as secret agent Emma Peel (Diana Rigg, or Uma Thurman in the 1998 film version) in “The Avengers,” to Max Guevera (Jessica Alba) in TV’s “Dark Angel,” and La Femme Nikita (Anne Parillaud; Bridget Fonda in the US remake). The latest trend has dark-psyched vixens engaging in just plain psychopathic killing sprees.

Alyce‘s quirky but undeveloped character may be inspired by the leads in May (2002) and Neighbor (2009), two similar stories about loner hellcats who indulge their necrophilic and cannibalistic urges through acts of violence. May () commits her violence via a misguided search for an similarly misfit mate; in Neighbor, “The Girl,” (America Olivo) thrill-kills for the sheer sadistic pleasure of it, making a living by robbing her victims and using their homes like motels. Alyce, however, lacks any sensible or even cognizant motivation at all. Her deeds defy logic, her methods are unsound, and Alyce’s lack of planning is sure to bring her only more trouble. We’re not sure if even she understands her actions. This makes her singularly one-dimensional.

The characterization is a profound disappointment, too. What’s engrossing about Alyce’s sexy character is not what she does, but the wry way she does it with her distinctively iconoclastic demeanor. It’s not the revulsion inherent to her wanton acts of sex and violence that catches our attention, but the manner in which her smug, witty bearing holds out the promise of a satisfying payoff. We keep waiting to tumble into an epiphany of insight into her disturbed psyche, or at least some commentary about human nature or revenge. It never happens, and we’re left feeling like the lone passenger on a runaway train with no destination in sight, and no emergency pull-cord to stop the projector.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…might’ve been an invigoratingly gaudy cult classic if Lee’s imagery was more original. Alas, quite a bit of the first hour resorts to standard horror clichés involving dark alleys, strobe lights, and hallucinations of girl corpses with milky white eyes. But the third act is a small triumph, as the requisite violence is a peculiar blend of the cartoonish and the legitimately grisly.”–Chuck Bowen, Slant (contemporaneous)

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Alyce Kills movie trailer

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)

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It was inevitable that we would have to find an individual space for Edward D. Wood, Jr.‘s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). Everyone knows the story of how the 1959 sci-fi flop was rediscovered: two smarmy fundamentalist brothers, who managed to become full time film critics and fancied themselves patron saints of the bourgeoisie, crowned Eddie’s opus as “the worst film of all time.” Only it backfired on the Medveds, and their “Golden Turkey” award gifted the recently departed director with something he could not achieve in this mortal coil: infamy. The Medveds will be rightfully forgotten, cast into their suburban purgatory of banality—and if there is justice amongst the lesser gods, then little Mikey and Harry will be personally tended to by Mr. Heat Miser and Mr. Snow Miser in a tailor-made torture pit. In the moral cosmos, Yukon “even among misfits you’re a misfit” Cornelius has knighted the societal outcasts to dole out celestial justice. Rounding out the bacchanal of a Medved hell, little Eddie Wood, Jr., reunites with Bela, Vampira, Criswell, Tor, and Valda Hansen, administering an eternal enema to such constipated dolts.

The Medveds evolved into Mystery Science Theater 3000. Rather than giving Hollywood, with its plethora of big budget, generic excrement, what it deserved, the MST3K production team, erroneously imagining themselves hip, picked easy targets in low budget indie films. Naturally, Ed Wood was a frequent focus. The do-nothing couch potato geeks made the show a hit. It was their sole shot at superiority.

Wood stands out, even among his peers, because he imbued his films with his own personality. Even in his later films, when his energy had been zapped by one personal defeat after another, there is still no mistaking Wood’s hand in the recipe. Near the end of his life, Wood waxed nostalgic about his failed career and admitted that Glen or Glenda (1953) was his self-portrait, but that Plan 9 From Outer Space was his pride and joy. Both films stand out, even amongst likeminded 50s indie genre films. Intensely and inherently weird, they are defiantly individualistic and, in that sense, they stand apart as authentic art, of far more intrinsic value than most of the drek manufactured by big studios.

Attesting to its originality, Plan 9 From Outer Space has as many classic lines as films like Dracula (1931) and Casablanca (1942), but do not take our word for it. Just read them:

Still from Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)Narrator [Criswell]: “Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown… the mysterious. The unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you, the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are bringing you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony, of the miserable souls, who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places. My friend, we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts of grave robbers from outer space?”

—-

Narrator: “All of us on this earth know that there is a time to live, and that there is a time to die.”

—- Continue reading PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959) →

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