The Gods of the Unjust are dead; the Flesh prevailith.
Tag Archives: Occult
CAPSULE: HOUSE OF SCREAMING GLASS (2024)
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DIRECTED BY: David R. Williams
FEATURING: Lani Call
PLOT: After her mother’s death, Elizabeth inherits her grandmother’s school building and moves in.
COMMENTS: In a story such as this one, told in this particular style, a good deal is left up to the viewer to either figure out—sooner or later—or choose to overlook. It requires a certain ambience, and a compelling lead. She needn’t be a great actor so much as a curious presence (in both meanings of the modifier). Crafting a liminal space as much as a narrative film, in this dreamy wibbly-bit between sleep and waking, between story and mood, there can be a captivating pathway for the viewer to follow along. While Lani Call nails her task as protagonist—indeed, as the only human character—of House of Screaming Glass, at the half-way mark David R. Williams throws a Necronomicon-sized spanner into the work’s erstwhile smoothly-ticking gears, knocking the entire experience into a gooey netherworld of tedium.
What the film does right is feature Lani Call. Her narration is deadpan, sometimes bordering on comatose, lulling the listener into a sort of mental surrender. Her character, Elizabeth, seems done with life before the movie has even begun, and a great deal of the House of Screaming Glass experience is us watching her looking at things in the creepy building she has come to own. (Worry not, she’s as confounded at the turn of events as we are, so we’re in good company.) She tours the abandoned, semi-converted school building in fast-motion, with the camera locked on her face (à la Angst-cam). We enter a daze with her as she builds routines and gets a feel for the place, talking to it in her narration. She plays a bit of piano and a strange entity approaches over her right shoulder. She finds some photo albums, and a child’s book of doodles—which holds a set of nudie photos, quite probably of her grandmother.
So far, David Williams has done well. You probably know the type of thing going on here—something akin to Enys Men, or a less minimalist Skinamarink. It is a meditative and repetitious experience, but summons growing ill-ease. But (oh, but!) at the half-way point, Williams decides this is not what he wants to do any more. Improbably, Elizabeth finds a box full of occult props, tools, liquor, and reading material. The revelation scene, as she drinks the potion from the tentacle bottle and looks over a tome on loan from the Evil Dead museum, is pretty darn cool: colors sicken and glowing text cycles across the screen as she gains understanding.
But it comes at too high a cost, as far as I’m concerned. It is here that House of Screaming Glass stops being interesting and becomes just kind of gross. The thorough gear-shifting wrenched me from the reverie the film had worked so hard to put me under, and I spent the next forty-five minutes Hm-ing, Hrm-ing, and occasionally wishing there were fewer skin lesions. Better luck next time, maybe? I’m certainly interested to see what Lani Call ends up doing. She’s better than what Elizabeth is ultimately obliged to go through.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![House of Screaming Glass [DVD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41bOw0DOeuL._SL500_.jpg)
SATURDAY SHORT: THE BEANING (2023)
A mockumentary describing the supposed Masonic influences hidden in America’s pastime, focusing on the 1920 death (sacrificial killing?) of Ray Chapman from a beanball.
(This short was suggested by Parmesan74, who said “picture Haxan but it involves baseball.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
CAPSULE: LO (2009)
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DIRECTED BY: Travis Betz
FEATURING: Ward Roberts, Jeremiah Birkett, Sarah Lassez
PLOT: Justin uses a spell book to summon the infernal spirit Lo to help him see his dead girlfriend once again, but the demon uses every trick possible to avoid fulfilling the command.
COMMENTS: There have been many movies about demonic possession, but few about demonic summoning… and no other, that I can think of, where almost the entire movie plays out from inside the safety of a pentagram. (Lo‘s closest competition for time spent inside a thaumaturgic circle might be Viy.) For the first five minutes we watch Justin, in a pitch black room lit solely by candles, painstakingly (if clumsily) construct this magical barrier, following the instructions etched on the yellowed parchment of an ancient grimoire, christening the ritual with his own blood. He then speaks the magic incantation and successfully summons the demon Lo, a pathetic yet powerful devil with a partly exposed brain and useless crushed legs which force him to painfully drag himself from out of the inky blackness towards his summoner, angry and defiant but unable to cross the enchanted barrier and devour Justin’s soul. The spell Justin cast compels a boon from this creature. You see, he saw a demon drag his girlfriend off to Hell, and now he wants her back—or at least to see her one last time. And Lo must meet Justin’s demand—although, in classic Mephistophelian fashion, the spirit isn’t above resorting to temptations, tricks, half-truths, and twisting Justin’s requests in any way he can.
The way Lo achieves its aesthetic aims on a minimal budget is nothing less than magical. Darkness is an ally; the set is a essentially black box, props are minimal, and only the demon costumes consume a significant amount of dollars. The flashbacks that supply the backstory are told through reenactments on a stage Lo conjures in Justin’s darkened apartment. There are red curtains, applause, visible stagehands, and comedy and tragedy masks that react to the proceedings. For additional color, Lo also summons a fuzzy green demon rat, a lizard-headed Nazi demon, a pair of damned silhouettes who press against a saran wrap wall as they describe the torments of Hell, and a couple of (mediocre, but welcome) musical numbers.
The story advances almost entirely through the antagonistic dialogues of the demon and his summoner. Chances are good that you will guess the twist ending early on; but it’s such a perfect construct that it doesn’t detract from the poignancy of the reveal. Who can’t relate to falling in love with the wrong person, a love that might be mutual and true, but which fate and circumstance dictates must be temporary? And who can’t relate to the compulsion to understand the true reasons behind a disappearance, however horrible the answer might be? As breakup movies go, Lo supplies a real, mythic catharsis.
With all that it has going for it, I would love to nominate Lo for our supplemental Apocryphally Weird list. Is it ingenious? Definitely. Engaging? Undoubtedly. Passionate? Sincerely. Recommended? You know it. Weird? Ah, here is where the favorable adjectives falter. Lo is well off the beaten path of the average filmgoer—the one who doesn’t frequent this site. What we see in Lo, though, isn’t so much weird as offbeat, rare, counter-Hollywood: unusual in its approach, by necessity, but not so far out-there that it makes us question our notions of reality, or if what a film can and should be. So, despite the fact that we give Lo a high rating, we won’t be adding it to our List. That doesn’t mean we’re giving you a pass to skip it.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Kat, who argued “I’m a little surprised not to see Travis Betz’s Lo (2009) on the suggestion list. Like Ink, its imitations and inspirations are pretty obvious– but I personally think it outstrips Ink in a few key areas, never over-stepping its budget. I found it a little more bizarre, too, in the way it takes a simple trope of a premise and reels continually between drama and dark comedy.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
CAPSULE: THE EMPTY MAN (2020)
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DIRECTED BY: David Prior
FEATURING: James Badge Dale, Marin Ireland, Sasha Frolova, Stephen Root
PLOT: James Lasombra, ex-cop and widower, offers to help find his friend’s daughter and discovers he’s being pursued by a malevolent spiritual force.
COMMENTS: David Prior’s feature debut is a horror movie, a thriller, a melodrama, and an exploration of dark spirituality. It’s stuffed to the gills with cultists, menace, and twists, all drizzled with snark. It’s brimming with so many ideas that its title becomes nearly ironic. Sure sure, it features a tulpa with an appetite whose current manifestation evokes the “slender empty man.” Additionally, the protagonist is empty on the inside: his wife and son died some years prior. In fact, the introductory scene (a thorough twenty-two minutes) culminates with a hapless hiker slipping into an empty space in some Bhutanese mountain. But if any one criticism is to be leveled against The Empty Man, it’s that there is just too much of everything.
It starts with excessive location detail. The Bhutanese mountain in question is precisely identified in a superimposed opening title card, scored by foreign drone-singing, and emphasized further by a passing bus-load of Buddhist monks, a wall of spinning prayer bells, and bunches of fluttering prayer flags. Guess where those four random mid-’90s mountaineers are? Exactly where they shouldn’t be. After they meet their grisly but otherwise nebulous fate, we’re brought back home (and to present-day) with the title card “Webster Mills, MO, 2018”. In case we didn’t trust their word, there’s a shot of a water tower with the town’s name slapped across it. In the (second) introductory scene we meet James Lasombra, a grizzled forty-something who runs a home security business. His adventure features teen disappearances, teen deaths, expository expostulation from a goth-pixie daughter figure, the “covertly” sinister Pontifex Institute, and recurring flashback nightmares breaking through his doxepin regimen.
This rich vein of material coupled with countless I-don’t-trust-the-audience reminders made me feel that its 137 minutes was both too brief and overly long. The camera might linger obviously on a detail in one scene and then swing back to it when James reaches the relevant point in his investigation. As he drives through the rainy nights of Webster Mills, earlier lines of dialogue repeat in his memory. And Prior makes the regrettable choice of providing an uncut version of a key flashback that would have left things more interesting, and still adequately explained, had he trusted his viewer to have been actually watching the movie.
But I can’t dislike a movie for its eagerness to tell as much story as it can. An opening credits tip-off strongly hint that The Empty Man has something to do with a comic book universe, which helps explain the problem. Prior’s movie should have been no shorter than a mini-series. It could then explore: the Himalayan incident in more depth; the unclear history between James and Detective Villiers; the mythos of “the Empty Man” in contemporary American society; and the socio-spiritual machinations of the Pontifex Institute. In future, I hope Prior adopts either an exhaustive or a less-is-more approach−not both.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: