Tag Archives: Horror

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FANTASIA 2023: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: WHERE THE DEVIL ROAMS (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: , , 

FEATURING: Toby Poser, John Adams, Zelda Adams

PLOT: A scrappy family trio travel Depression-era Catskills pursue an ascension into big time carnival show-biz, all while executing harsh justice.

Still from Where the Devil Roams (2023)

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: It probably shouldn’t—if not for that final shot. My goodness.

COMMENTS: Dark times bring forth dark magic in this meditative and macabre motion picture from the renowned indie horror team the Adams Family. They entered our collective awareness with The Deeper You Dig, knocked off socks (and knocked out ear-balls) with the metal-infused follow-up Hellbender, and gloriously return once more with Where the Devil Roams. Tobey, John, Zelda, and Lulu continue to hone their craft as a family-filmmaking team (and unlike the Ormonds, these are fun-time, fun-filming folk). Their “tiny” movie explores big ideas, delivers big gore, and proves to have a big heart beating at its tattered core.

The slow death of the carnival business grinds down the poor carnies of upstate New York, perhaps none more so than Maggie, Seven, and their daughter Eve. This trio aspire to earn a place at the “Buffalo Horror Show,” the last remaining big to-do in the circuit. While traveling along with their bare-bones circus group, they drop in on various ill-doers—a cruel landlord, a crooked financier—smiting the enemies of the little man with a smiling viciousness. Maggie wields the weapon, Seven speaks the scripture, and Eve, born mute, captures their handiwork on camera with a quiet relish.

Taking a moment to consider the inputs for this film—third- and fourth-hand props and costumes, self made sets, musical chairs camerawork (who ever was not in a frame at the time was typically behind the lens), and the mystical fusion of American myth with homemade magick—the film is impressive. But then, it feels impressive even without that qualifier. I mention those elements to share how much heart and soul went into this little wonder; and that’s not mentioning the blood. Papa Seven cannot abide further carnage after his time as a medic in WWI, so Mama Maggie applies his blindfold before the blood and fury. These grisly doings are a grisly delight: either through the sheer bluntness of a chiming skillet, or a deadly harpooning with a fire poker, it’s always fun to watch these righteous murderers. And with the black magic tied in (heh), there is an unreal aura whose moral ambiguity becomes darker and darker.

The image gets a bit dark, too, and strange: beginning in a full-palette, it flickers and devolves into grainy, black-and-white harshness. By the end, as the family’s already meager fortunes collapse (along with a couple of their bodies), we enter a saturated, white-light nightmare.

Which brings me to the punchline. In the penultimate shot, our heroine Eve has transformed from an angel of light to one of darkness, who escorts an unknown entity down one of those looong corridors typically reserved for nightmares. With a reassuring bend of her finger, she beckons to her follower, along with us, to go through the final door to end stage. A song emerges from her lacquered lips, a spotlight jolts into life, and BAM!

Listen to Giles Edwards’ interview with the Adams family about Where the Devil Roams.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a conscious homage to early cinema traditions… Formally, the film is audacious, again pulling off stylistic flourishes that in the hands of less confident, skilled filmmakers could feel hokey or cliched.”–Alexandra Heller-Nicolas, AWFG.org (festival screening)

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FANTASIA 2023: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: VINCENT MUST DIE (2023)

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Vincent doir mourir

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DIRECTED BY: Stéphan Castang

FEATURING: Karim Leklou, Vimala Pons, François Chattot

PLOT: Vincent flees his humdrum city life when it takes a deadly turn as more and more strangers try to kill him.

Still from "Vincent Must Die" (2023)

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: L’absurde et la comédie comme Dupieux, le commentaire social comme Godard, et un peu d’ultra-violence comme Romero? Une combinaison gagnante.

COMMENTS: Vincent’s boss had a dream: a horde of deer in an open field, his mother in a grand, flowing dress—just like she has in real life!—and a newly-grown pair of antlers. What could it mean? Vincent (Karim Leklou) doesn’t care; politely, he shifts the conversation to inquire who that new guy is. Boss tells him it’s Hugo the intern. Vincent jokes to the new lad, “Where’s my coffee?” It falls flat, and later that day Vincent’s face gets smashed by repeated laptop blows from the intern. It’s all very calm, and sets a comedic start ahead of the ratcheting horror to come.

Castang is one of those irritatingly sure-handed newcomers, having floored the audience at Cannes with his feature debut Vincent Must Die before shuffling it across the Atlantic to floor the Fantasia audience. Vincent’s journey from mild-mannered office jockey to prey is more of a shift in his bodily injuries than his behavior. Leklou conveys affable soft-spoken softness and sheer personal terror with masterful body language, apt facial expressions, and (almost) unfailing placidity.

The premise could well have been concocted during a night of one-upsmanship between Godard and Dupieux, with heavy references to Weekend and the quiet office absurdity permeating Keep An Eye Out. For reasons never explained, more and more people—strangers, friends, and even the damaged manic-pixie-dream-girl waitress, Margaux—cannot resist the urge to attempt to murder the protagonist, using whatever is at hand. Not long after his attack by laptop, a passing co-worker stabs Vincent in the wrist multiple times. And his boss, the fellow with the Buñuelian dream of antlers and mother, thinks it best Vincent spend some time away from the office. You know, to help morale. (Everyone’s been a bit tense.)

And the world has gotten tense. As we join Vincent during his internet delvings and late night drives through the French countryside, more and more plot snippets flesh out a growing problem. Castang explores fury and abandon, uncomfortably drawing our attention to a world becoming more and more unhinged. An understated absurdist comedy morphs increasingly into a febrile survival horror, spiked with the requisite French sex and deadpan. I laughed, I gasped, and I began eyeing a malfunctioning automatic door by the movie screen with more apprehension than logic should allow. But logic went out the door, as fear stole its way through the stunned crowd.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“While Vincent Must Die is first and foremost a horror, it is also a mystery, sometimes a thriller, occasionally dramatic, and absurdly comedic.” – Eamon Tracy, Irish Film Critic (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: SPOONFUL OF SUGAR (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Mercedes Bryce Morgan

FEATURING: Morgan Saylor, Danilo Crovetti, Kat Foster, Myko Olivier, Keith Powell

PLOT: Millicent applies for a nanny job caring for a special needs kid with crippling allergies; unbeknownst to the parents (who are pretty screwed up themselves), Millicent is under psychiatric care, undergoing an experimental therapy where she microdoses LSD daily.

COMMENTS: Millicent, the lead character of Spoonful of Sugar, has been prescribed LSD by her psychiatrist, to be taken in microdoses. Microdosing psychedelics is an online fad taking its cue from homeopathy. It involves taking amounts of the drug too small too produce psychedelic effects on a regular schedule. When this practice is followed, the user does not hallucinate. Also, short-term tolerance to LSD builds very quickly, requiring larger doses to achieve any effects, so regular dosing should provide diminishing returns. The practice’s proponents claim that it improves their well-being and quality of life without producing a disabling intoxication, but the supposed benefits have never been studied on a meaningful scale; the evidence is overwhelmingly anecdotal. It is currently not legal to prescribe LSD.

In other words, real-life microdosing is nothing at all like the picture painted in Spoonful of Sugar: hallucinations would be virtually impossible, and no reputable psychiatrist would (or could) ever prescribe the substance. In one sense, this is a minor issue. We could suspend disbelief and head-canon Millicent’s treatment into some kind of experimental pilot program set sometime in the near future. We can posit that she hallucinates because of an underlying mental illness, possibly exacerbated by the LSD regimen (a reasonable supposition). But I think that the sloppy handling of the microdosing concept underlies the problems with the promising but ultimately unfulfilling Spoonful of Sugar. The premise sounds cool, but it just doesn’t work, at least not as executed here. But the filmmakers decide to go ahead with it anyway, trusting that the viewer will skim over the obvious flaws and focus on the vibrant hallucinations (a demonic sex scene, a crawling severed finger) and dark psychology.

If you can get involved enough in the story to make it to the end, Spoonful of Sugar concludes on a strong note, with an exciting and unexpected violent finale ending in a dark twist. Hopes of running into another psychedelic nightmare prods you to stick with it. But unfortunately, the bad mostly outweighs the good here. Morgan Saylor is asked to strike a difficult tone as the “weird girl,” required to be quietly sinister, wounded, naive, and delusional, all at the same time. It’s a tough assignment, and she has difficulty creating a believable character: her expressions and readings are awkward and forced, forcing her wardrobe and hairstyle (Red Riding Hood coat, Pippi Longstocking braids) to do the heavy lifting in constructing her childlike persona. The script, which includes creaky, clumsily ironic lines like “people aren’t always as they seem” and “women aren’t violent,” doesn’t provide a lot of support. The other main performances are fine, especially Kat Foster as the mother with issues relating to her sick child and a secret taste for masochism; Danilo Crovetti also makes a convincing kid, helped by the fact that he’s embedded in an astronaut costume for most of the picture and has very few lines. But a credible performance from Millicent is central to making this logically-challenged scenario successfully pull off the trick it wants to—and on this score, the experiment falls short.

A Spoonful of Sugar is now on DVD and available on VOD; it also streams on Shudder.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… a strange and uncanny psychedelic thriller with excellent performances at its core.”–Jon Mendelson, CBR.com (contemporaneous)

Apocryphally Weird

39*. UZUMAKI [SPIRAL] (2000)

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AKAWhirlpool

“Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.” – Robert Smithson, creator of Spiral Jetty

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Eriko Hatsune, Fhi Fan, Hinako Saeki, Eun-Kyung Shin, Keiko Takahashi,

PLOT: High schooler Kirie notices a growing and dangerous fascination with spirals throughout her small town, beginning with her friend Shuichi’s father, who develops a compulsive need to own and consume objects with the pattern. The affliction spreads to her classmates, who take on whorled physical characteristics and even transform into snails. With increasing numbers of cases and deaths, Kirie and Shuichi decide if they should–or even can–escape. 

Still from Uzumaki (2000)

BACKGROUND: 

  • Uzumaki was adapted from a manga by , who makes a cameo of sorts on a “Wanted” poster in the sandal-wearing policeman’s office.
  • Production on Uzumaki began before Ito had finished writing the series (possibly at the studio’s insistence, so that it could coincide with the release of another Ito adaptation, Tomie: Rebirth). As a result, the manga and film have significantly different resolutions.
  • A four-episode animated TV adaptation was announced in 2020; it is still in production after many delays.
  • Director Higuchinsky took his name in tribute to his birthplace of Ukraine. This was his first feature, up to this point having worked primarily in music video.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: It’s not the most shocking sight, nor does it draw upon the many examples of body horror that define the spiral epidemic. But the appearance of an enormous spiral-shaped storm in the sky, which begins to coil downward and reach out to the town like the accusatory finger of God, is when Uzumaki lays all its cards on the table. The spiral is everything, can reach everywhere, and will affect everyone.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Mr. Saito’s eyes; Kyoko’s crazy curls

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Uzumaki lacks a proper monster, any kind of terrifying villain. The bad guy here is a curling pattern. It’s to the film’s credit that it not only pulls off this unlikely trick but adorns it with truly unsettling examples of its malign influence. The fact that there are no sorcerers or alien invaders to blame only makes the events of Uzumaki more unnerving. This outwardly harmless force has no clear point of origin, no cause to be addressed, which only makes its effect on the populace more disturbing.

Original trailer for Uzumaki

COMMENTS: In order to appreciate the strangeness of Uzumaki, it’s Continue reading 39*. UZUMAKI [SPIRAL] (2000) →

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (1928)

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DIRECTED BY: Jean Epstein

FEATURING: Charles Lamy, Jean Debucourt, Marguerite Gance, Abel Gance

PLOT: Roderick Usher invites an old friend to the portentous mansion where he lives in the company of the servants and his dying wife, Madeline, whose portrait he has been obsessively trying to paint.

Still from The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Like it’s source material, Epstein’s silent film treatment of ’s short story doesn’t explicitly depict any extraordinary phenomena, but the aura of metaphysical discomfort and  mysterious menace is so pervasive that it lends it an oneiric character—one that’s likely to give a stronger and longer lasting impression than any more overt effect.

COMMENTS: Despite the expected controversy over the precise definition and characteristics of the movement (or whether it even qualifies as a movement), one could say that the underlying tenet of French Impressionism is the search for an emancipated cinematic language, with its own forms and techniques, in contrast to the “filmed theater” approach. Instead, cinema was to articulate, with its own unique means, certain realities (and modes of expressing them) that no other art-form could. Impressionist films focused on, among other things, subjective, psychological reality: dreams, madness and all sorts of altered states of consciousness, The methods necessary to compellingly bring it to life were unconventional camerawork, including character point-of-view perspectives, innovative editing techniques, a preoccupation with the visual composition of shots and their picturesque qualities (such as the contrasts between light and dark), etc.

With this said, it’s easy to see how such a movement proved vitally influential to weird cinema (and filmmaking in general)—as well as why it’s the perfect fit for an adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe story. And indeed, Jean Epstein aptly translates the author’s most revered hallmarks—a constant, underlying sense of unease—to the language of cinema. It’s so well-realized that the viewer can predict the house’s impending ruin even without the title. The suggestion of a spectral world of shadows and unconscious forces subtly advances on diurnal reality, and the persistent aura of mystery and the uncanny reveals itself at each new turn, be it in the enigmatic presence of Madeline Usher, in Roderick’s afflicted mood and behavior, or in the many disquieting details of the mansion and its surroundings.

The resulting atmosphere of dreamlike disquiet is sustained through the film’s runtime, as if the viewer were trapped in the elegant and ethereal matter of a cloud as it gradually darkens and thickens before the storm. And as overused as it might be, “atmosphere” is indeed the appropriate term, considering the amount of shots purely devoted to its establishment (the ominous images of Nature, the manor’s vast, empty spaces where nothing but the wind manifests itself)—especially when compared to the more practical approach Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (1928) →