An office worker suffers increasingly gruesome visions of his own death.
Tag Archives: Horror
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960)
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DIRECTED BY: Wolf Rilla
FEATURING: George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Michael Gwynn, Martin Stephens
PLOT: All the women of child-bearing age in the Midwich become pregnant after a mysterious period of unconsciousness; their offspring have a distinctive appearance, mature rapidly, and behave in a manner quite unnatural.
COMMENTS: For two years running, I have celebrated Halloween here with a classic 1950s goofball–monster showcase. So here we are, on the cusp of the 60s, and lots of things look familiar: we’re back in black-and-white, we’re back in England, and something is once more out to get us. But it’s a little different this time. This time, the beasts aren’t strabismus-afflicted giant birds or giddily bouncing brains. They’re children, notable for their platinum hair, their glowing eyes, and their sociopathic behavior. This time, our monster feels earnestly threatening.
We don’t get to them right away, though. The film cleverly serves up its surprises and horrors at a deliberate pace. We must first work through the mystery of the lengthy period of unconsciousness, which the authorities investigate seriously and thoroughly, diligently working through experiments that culminate in a terrible sacrifice. We never get a full explanation for that occurrence, though, because we’re quickly on to the conundrum of the many immaculate conceptions and the havoc they wreak among the populace. In fact, we’re well into Act 2 before we get our first encounter with the enigma of the curious children themselves, who can solve puzzle boxes as toddlers and who get revenge upon their mothers when the feeding bottle is too hot. (The filmmakers were right to forego the original title of John Wyndham’s book; “The Midwich Cuckoos” would have been too much of a giveaway as to the childrens’ origin.) This sense of compounding catastrophes keeps you off-balance like the residents of Midwich, never able to relax before the next dilemma arrives.
The children are appropriately creepy. Lead child David (Stephens, unconvincingly dubbed) does most of the talking, serving up uncomfortable sociopathy by directly confronting the shopkeepers who think them an abomination, or helpfully suggesting to his father that, “If you didn’t suffer from emotions, from feelings… you could be as powerful as we are.” However, the young terrors do most of their intimidation without words. A walk through the town shows the residents in a mixed state of fear and revulsion, responding to the cliquish collection of quiet children as if they were a rowdy biker gang. Luckily, all they need to do is put on their best wish-you-to-the-cornfield look and the townspeople’s reactions do the rest. They come by their fears honestly, because we’ve seen that the children’s disapproval carries with it the threat of death. This is most evident in Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960)
SATURDAY SHORT: THE TEMPLE OF LILITH (2017)
The Gods of the Unjust are dead; the Flesh prevailith.
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DEAFULA (1975)
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DIRECTED BY: Peter Wechsberg
FEATURING: Peter Wechsberg (as Peter Wolf), Lee Darel, Dudley Hemstreet, James Randall
PLOT: In a universe where everyone communicates via American Sign Language (ASL), theology student Steve Adams discovers that he is the son of Dracula and has been leading a second life as a blood-thirsty vampire with a trail of bodies in his wake.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Even if it weren’t one of the first (and, to this day, one of the only) films made exclusively in ASL, Deafula’s imaginative presentation of a world where gestural speech is the lingua franca and its singular interpretation of the Dracula legend make it a movie that truly has no comparison.
COMMENTS: Let’s start with the remarkable durability of the Dracula myth. Vampires have lost none of their fascination even in our modern world (I’ve discussed this phenomenon before), and Dracula lords over them all, appearing in some form in more than 200 films. Unlike most of his classic horror brethren (werewolves, mummies, zombies, Frankenstein monsters, creatures from black lagoons and the like), Dracula is verbal, and even handsome, as likely to use seductive words as violent action to achieve his aims. So when an underrepresented community wants to tap into the mainstream, there’s probably no figure more iconic and adaptable and copyright-free than Dracula, standing by and ready to tell his tale once more. Blacula, anyone?
And so we come to Deafula, in which writer/director/star Wechsberg endeavored to give the deaf community something they had never had: a popular entertainment of their very own. He conjured up a messily layered version of the story, with the fundamental vampire-kills-people plotline frequently taking a back seat to the hero’s fraught relationship with his father, a police procedural featuring a Van Helsing substitute whom everybody hates, and a substantial commitment to themes of religious devotion and divine punishment. We do get Dracula in this movie (as an appropriately imperious and condescending figure), but he’s not our star. Instead, our hero is a pretty average, milquetoast kind of guy who, when he transforms into a villain, looks less like a demonic force and more like a low-rent Svengoolie with a ridiculous fake nose.
It is impossible to divorce Deafula from the circumstances of its creation. A drama student at Gallaudet University, Wechsberg was drawn to the power of film, and after getting into some production work, he scraped enough money to make a movie his way, with the deaf audience in mind. (He also aspired to give deaf creators their due; the closing credits specifically distinguish the hearing-impaired performers from their hearing colleagues.) His inexperience shows, especially when it comes to action. He crafts a clever introduction to reveal his hero emerging from the vampire state, but afterward gets caught up in disjointed edits and inconsistent pacing. Deafula’s savage mind-control of a would-be robber should be evidence of his Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DEAFULA (1975)
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE SUBSTANCE (2024)
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DIRECTED BY: Coralie Fargeat
FEATURING: Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid, Margaret Qualley
PLOT: An aging actress loses her job as hostess of an aerobics show on her 50th birthday and is recruited into trying a bizarre underground “anti-aging” substance, with instructions and regimens that must be followed precisely to avoid unwanted side effects.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: In the third act, an unhinged black comedy emerges from the carcass of what to this point had merely been an odd, satirical horror movie.
COMMENTS: Incredibly, just about everything in Coralie Fargeat’s sophomore film—which mixes sledgehammer satire and comedy with clean Kubrickian interiors, squicky Cronenbergian body horror, and a third act tonal shift often described as “bonkers”—works. It’s a message movie that doesn’t spare the blood and guts or the leering nudity (the movie is of the view that you can’t satirize the male gaze without indulging it). The cinematography is ace, the soundtrack on point, the practical effects astonish, it never drags despite a almost 2.5 hour runtime, Qualley appears to be the most beautiful woman in the world, Quaid hams it up delightfully as an empty-suit corporate cad, and Demi Moore has never given a better performance. It’s both elevated horror and degraded horror, equally indebted to the art-house and the grindhouse, and it never goes halfway when it could instead go to twice the length you expect.
The high concept plot gives Fargeat space to make lots of obvious—but funny—jokes about men reduced drooling idiots when confronted with a beautiful woman, and why women might lust after that kind of power. We are a superficial species, after all. That’s why we fall for blatantly Faustian bargains, as when Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle is offered the opportunity to create a “better version of herself” by picking up a packet of suspect medical gear from a back-alley beauty supply company. Set amidst L.A.’s glitz, the script addresses our obsession with surface beauty, but as it intensifies it peers deeper into human psychology. Sure, youth and beauty is associated with fame and success, but it’s also the inverse of decay and death: even slowly fading beauty like Elisabeth’s is a reminder of mortality. The scenario also invites concepts of split personality and addiction (there are a lot of needles here, and literally self-destructive behavior). Besides the satirical jibes at such follies, The Substance offers a good deal of heart and empathy. Moore reveals her (gracefully) aging body to public scrutiny in an uncomfortable nude scene, and is compensated with a wonderful scene in front of the mirror as she desperately attempts to achieve an impossible ideal of female beauty, despite the fact that it’s obvious to everyone but herself that she’s more than glamorous enough for the occasion.
The Substance‘s first two acts take place in an exaggerated reality that allows it to focus solely on satire and psychology. Just about everyone other than Moore and Qualley act like caricatures (Quaid is the lynchpin here). Why is the substance apparently offered to Elisabeth for free? Why are network TV aerobics programs so lucrative and influential? How does Sue manage to build that secret room, and why is there no super in her million-dollar apartment? What are the chances either Elisabeth or Sue are always the featured image on the billboard right outside her own window? And just how in the hell is this Substance supposed to work, in a biological/continuity of consciousness sense? You take everything on faith: details that are irrelevant to the main characters’ psychological realities are simply ignored. But your ability to suspend disbelief is shattered in the third act, which is a pure B-movie nightmare hallucination. The practical effects, which previously recalled Cronenberg, now look like a blend of Screaming Mad George’s work on Society, Toxie from The Toxic Avenger, and something out of a Frank Henenlotter freak movie—in fact, the entire finale resembles something that might result if Henenlotter were given a multi-million dollar budget for stage blood and access to an crack cinematographer. Even with those hints, the results are nothing you could possibly anticipate.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![The Substance [4K UHD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41XCdUAI1JL._SL500_.jpg)
- The Substance [4K UHD]