Don't Look Now (1973)

What makes Don't Look Now such an effective horror film is its coyness about letting the viewer realize he's watching a horror film.  I don't know how the movie was marketed in 1973, but I went into watching this film about a married couple coping with the recent drowning death of their daughter expecting a depressing family drama in the vein of Ordinary People only with some fantastical elements.  That it would be one of the most haunting films I've ever seen is something I couldn't have predicted until the final minutes, when Nicholas Roeg unveils the final details that rack the entire picture into intense focus.

Don't Look Now conveys the story of John and Laura Baxter (Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland), an educated, loving couple who live in Britain with a young son and daughter.  John is an artist and architect who meticulously restores deteriorating medieval churches, and though his job puts him in close contact with religious imagery and people, he is a firm atheist.  His wife likewise is a woman of few religious or spiritual convictions.  When their daughter drowns in a pond behind their home, they cope with the grief as well as could be hoped.  The death of a child is a strong precondition for divorce, but John and Laura maintain their love and sanity despite their underlying pangs of sorrow.  To help move on with their lives, they send their son to boarding school and take an extended working vacation to crumbling Venice, where John has been contracted to restore a cathedral.

Venice, however, is an old and musty city some sixteen hundred years old.  Its ancient mode of life and imposing stone buildings tower over the present, blending the centuries together.  War, plague, political intrigues, assassinations, and greed have given the city its share of ghosts, which stroll the dark, labyrinthine alleys and haunt the mildewy, stone-cobbled corridors.  Venice has steadily been sinking into the muddy foundations on which it is built for several centuries.  The city's doom is fated, and any life there is fleeting and unstable.  A thriving tourist business insures its economic survival, but when the tourist season ends, the city begins to resemble a ghost town in the truest sense.

So it isn't long before John and Laura encounter a haunting reminder of what they are trying to escape.  In a restaurant guest room, Laura encounters a blind woman (Hilary Mason) and her sister (Clelia Matania), two batty spinsters who arrest Laura with an impossible message from beyond the grave.  The blind woman cannot see the world, but she has been gifted with a second sight that enables her to see what no one else can, and what she sees is their dead daughter, happy, giggling, accompanying them on their vacation.  Don't be so depressed, the blind woman tells Laura.  Your daughter is very happy, and you should be too.  The details are impossibly accurate, and Laura is convinced by the woman's message.  She experiences an exuberant release knowing that life can be eternal.

But John is a skeptic, and he dismisses Laura's happy turn as a dangerous placebo effect and accuses the two women of being hustling charlatans.  His daughter is dead, he declares, and the only way to move on with life is to accept this fact in all its cold truth.  The disagreement leads to the harshest division between the couple as events in the film begin to spiral into dark directions.  John begins to doubt his wife's sanity as she delves deeper into supernatural and religious beliefs.  Has she lost her mind to grief?  Laura, meanwhile, mistrusts her husband for cynically denying what to her is so obvious.  And as this conflict escalates, a number of inexplicable dark premonitions--undeniably felt by John and supported by the predictions of the blind woman--manifest in unfortunate moments.  Are the two sisters up to no good?  Is John, Laura, or their son destined for death?

Don't Look Now is a tour-de-force of editing, which was done by Graeme Clifford, likely with strong direction by Nicolas Roeg.  Every scene elicits precisely the intended emotions.  A rather audacious sex scene early in the film, fluidly intercut with shots of the couple dressing for dinner, is simultaneously erotic, loving, and mournful.  A brief glimpse of the two sisters laughing confirms all of John's (and our) suspicions that they are up to devilish mischief.  The opening scene in which the daughter hits her head and drowns while the couple hang out in the living room and the son fixes his bike tire in the backyard is edited with such synchronicity as to make the death seem preordained.  Though the three separate fields of action seem suitably distinct at first, actions begin to overlap with a sinister momentum.  Motion in one direction by the wife, for example, mirrors motion by the daughter.  A tossed remote control becomes a falling baseball.  Eventually the three scenes become part of one inseparable action--the turning of the universe around its center--so that when John spills red ink on a slide he is studying, we know with certainty that the daughter has died.

This exquisite control is exercised not only within individual scenes but within the film as a whole.  The theme of the film is predestination and psychic premonition, and Roeg gives us a taste of these, working minor images into our subconscious so that when they reoccur later they seem to arise from the deepest stirrings of our collective unconscious.  When John watches from afar as police pull the half-naked body of a drowned woman from the canal, the unidentified corpse in its wet, white underwear bears an unsettling resemblance to something we once saw--Laura in her underwear in the bathroom prior to the sex scene.  The deja vu is palpable, as it must be for John, who immediately enters a whirlwind of anxiety wondering where his wife is at that particular moment.  Window panes, trickling water, the color red--as these motifs repeat with dizzying intensity, we surrender to the conviction that disaster is imminent and unavoidable.

Don't Look Now, based on a short story by Daphne Du Maurier (who also wrote Rebecca), is an unsettling masterpiece. 

Don't Look Now (1973)
d: Nicolas Roeg w: Allan Scott, Chris Bryant
(Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie)
TSPDT?: #143
10/10

Paranormal Activity (2009)

Paranormal Activity is the pseudo-documentary account of a series of demonic hauntings visited upon a young couple in the fall of 2006.  In the style of The Blair Witch Project, all footage is captured by a consumer-brand hand-held camera operated by the two main characters, Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston, who play (versions of) themselves improvising dialogue according to an outline provided by Oren Peli, who made the bare bones horror film in his own home for just over ten thousand dollars.  A couple other characters--a psychic and a best friend--appear briefly, but the bulk of the short film revolves around the cohabitating duo's daytime arguments and nocturnal frights, all captured by the constantly running camera.

The back story in Paranormal Activity is delightfully brief and ambiguous:  in short, Katie has been visited periodically by a malevolent demon since she was eight years old.  The demon may have been responsible for burning down her childhood home, but what the demon is or wants is never fully clarified.  Now that Katie has moved in with her boyfriend, the being has reappeared with a resurgence of horrifying activity.  A friendly, matter-of-fact psychic (Mark Fredrichs) explains that the entity likely feeds off of negative energy, but this dangerous news only sets off an intense cycle for the couple, who conflict over how to approach the situation.  Katie, who has lived with the presence for over fifteen years and is not at all amused by it, would rather just ignore it, try to forget about it, and hope that it's influence eventually diminishes, which, according to the psychic, would likely be one of the safest paths to take.  Micah, however, who has just recently found out about the entity, is intrigued by its supernatural novelty and believes that he can proactively negotiate the situation with the inhuman being.  He brings paranormal technology and a Ouija board into the home trying to draw the presence out so that he can better understand it and be better prepared to deal with it.  Interacting with it, however, just makes it stronger, and there is no normal means of negotiating with a satanic ghost.  As the demon becomes stronger, much to Micah's fascination and Katie's dismay, their arguments intensify, the negative energy escalates, in turn making the demon scarier, which in turn makes them more afraid, hence increasing the negative energy further.  The ending cannot possibly be happy.

The key scenes in the film are the time-progressed, night vision episodes of their sleeping, episodes which feature some basic special effects and some eerie sounds but which deliver the most effective terror through simple yet abnormal imagery.  One night after a particularly ugly argument Katie sleepily rises from bed and stares at Micah.  The time counter advances and we watch her as she stares, unmoving, in the darkness for almost two hours at her sleeping lover before finally disappearing down the dark stairs.  The horror in Paranormal Activity is effective because it never distances itself from the viewer's own situation--there is no specific slasher who attacks in a particular neighborhood, no monster that haunts a particular locale, no far-fetched mythology to justify impossible occurrences.  Paranormal Activity instead focuses on unfamiliar sounds, small but unnatural happenings (like a door closing when it shouldn't be), a couple fighting, and a girlfriend standing and staring for hours in the middle of the night when she should be in bed asleep.  Everyone in the audience lives somewhere and everyone sleeps eventually, so it's easy to superimpose the frightening scenarios onto our own situations.  It's easy to take the horror to bed with us, wondering exactly what we would do if our lovers should suddenly decide to sleep in the backyard at 3:30 on a cold morning.

This short, unnerving film is chillingly effective because it doesn't work too hard to be scary, instead trusting the viewer to use his own imagination and worst instincts to fill in the scariest details.

Paranormal Activity (2009)
d/w: Oren Peli
(Katie Featherston, Micah Sloane)
7/10

Movie Review: Eraserhead (1976)

When in an early scene of Eraserhead Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) is informed by his alluring neighbor that his girlfriend requests his presence at her parents' house for dinner that night, Henry's reaction is shock. Neither producing unhappiness nor fear (and certainly not pleasant expectation), the stimulus is so mortifying to awkward Henry with his polygonal hair and highwater slacks that his nervous system shuts down. Like a deer in headlights, he lacks the fortitude to process the danger that's coming his way. Having spent the first ten minutes of screen time silently wandering the apocalyptic city streets alone, he responds to the invitation by immediately sitting on the corner of his bed, drying his socks, and staring at the radiator, waiting for darkness to fill his room so that he can make his nighttime appointment. From inside the radiator comes a promising glow, a suggestion of something orderly, peaceful, and longed for, but the glow fades away with the promise unfulfilled. Tonight is not a night of pleasant routines. Tonight he will be yanked from his comfort zone into uncharted, perilous territory: girlfriends, parents, dinner etiquette.

Long past dusk, at the industrialized home of girlfriend Mary (Charlotte Stewart), Henry is chastised for being late. Mary has stood by the window, nervously awaiting his arrival with a frown furrowing her face; in her opinion, there was no guarantee that he would come. Perhaps she's used to him blowing off plans with his friends, either from forgetfulness, fear, confusion, or something else. Henry supports her assumption when he tells her, in a panicked outburst like much of his speech throughout the film, "I wasn't even sure you wanted me to come!" Despite the straightforward terms of the invitation and Mary's obvious desire that he show, Henry has almost unconsciously convinced himself of what he wants to believe, that his presence at the uncomfortable dinner is neither necessary nor wanted. Nevertheless, he hesitantly comes, and the dinner that follows is more uncomfortable than he could possibly imagine.

In the corner of the room, a newborn litter suckles at a mother pup's teats. The sound, which fills the room constantly, is like feasting, scurrying rats. With this grating, inhuman noise combines a steady whir of lonely wind, a sound like chaos howling before the dawn of time, and the combined effect is to set the viewer--and Henry--constantly on edge. The sound could be his own overworked nerves on the verge of snapping; whether the film depicts an objective reality or a manifestation of Henry's subjective perspective (I lean toward the latter) is never quite clear. Mary's mother, Mrs. X, is at once abrasive, insistent, and dismissive. When Mary assures her that Henry is a very clever printer, she responds with what could easily be either agreement or sarcasm: "Yeah, I'll bet he's clever."

When Mr. X, an excitable plumber, enters, introducing a string of new conversation topics from chickens and pipes to progress and knees, Henry's panic level rises. Henry has trouble keeping up with one thread of conversation; following half a dozen is impossible. When Mr. X later asks him, "Well, Henry, what do you know?", the openendedness paralyzes him. "Oh, I don't know much of anything," he humbly replies, but the future father-in-law continues to stare at him with an expectant smile. The question is a banal piece of conversational fluff, a statement devoid of depth, intended more as grease for the wheels of social interaction than as any prying insight into human understanding. Henry could easily respond with any number of trivialities--the weather, sports, work, politics, a humorous anecdote--anything to keep the chatter flowing, but Henry, completely lacking in social consciousness, interprets the question literally as an interrogation demanding a complete accounting of the vast corpus of knowledge he possesses. "What do you know?" Where to begin? Better not to begin at all--and so the conversation stalls.

When Henry is asked to carve the chickens--a task made more difficult by the fact that these are unknown, alien chickens, miniature mechanical creations--Henry is forced to perform as the center of attention. If he had any fears about making a fool of himself, now would be the time when that would happen. The tiny, squirming chicken, moving in a rather sexual motion, vomits blood as he slices it, sending Mrs. X into a violent, screaming convulsion that causes her to run from the room. Pandemonium erupts. Mrs. X aggressively questions Henry about his "sexual intercourse" with her daughter, combining guilt, anger, and threats with sexual awkwardness when she suddenly begins licking and kissing his neck. Responsibilities, expectations, restitution, and threats are piled on: Henry has a baby, he must marry his girlfriend, he'll be "in very bad trouble" if he doesn't "cooperate." The whole spectrum of difficult, confusing social interactions and expectations combines in one disturbing climax as the ratlike puppies continues suckling and as Mr. X worries about the chickens growing colder and as Mary's catatonic grandmother puffs at a cigarette.

If I had to guess what Eraserhead was about, I'd say social anxiety disorder or perhaps even something severer like autism. How else can I explain the peaceful satisfaction that Henry derives from his lonely wanderings and his isolated quarters? His window looks onto nothing but bricks, yet this doesn't seem to bother him. Instead of pets or photographs of people, his apartment is furnished with plants and dirt. His favorite passtime (or should I call it a ritual or an escape or a safety net?) is the solace of staring into his humming radiator, where he imagines a shy, affectionate, inhuman woman dancing and promising him better things to come. The repeated lyrics of the only song she sings are, "In heaven, everything is fine. You've got your good things, and I've got mine." You have yours and I have mine--no "ours." They are both separate, and everyone is happy. Henry is prone to misinterpreting and misreading the statements and actions of others. When his beautiful neighbor tells him that she has locked herself out of her apartment by accident, we see her move close into his face in a sexual aggressive maneuver. Is this real, or is Henry's confusion--his eagerness to see the most awkward in any social interaction--forcing him to imagine a conversation that is much more complicated and loaded than it really is? Does every conversation Henry has really end in disaster, or does his hypersensitive mind merely convince him that they all do? Is Henry "on vacation" from the printing factory because of psychological reasons? Why does Henry's baby--which cries and moves like a real baby--look like a monster? Perhaps because Henry has enough trouble seeing fully grown adults as humans; a tiny, babbling creature is as alien to him as an embalmed calf fetus. Henry's problems and reactions, his fears and perceptions (if we are to view Eraserhead as existing entirely within Henry's perceptions) all resemble the innerworkings of a mind riddled with social anxiety, right down to the climax in which Henry, at the height of his stress, imagines his head becoming disembodied and used by caricatures as a cog in a factory machine. The portrait of severe social anxiety is disturbing, stressful, and accurate. David Lynch has fascinatingly depicted what it looks and feels like to feel utterly disconnected from the people around you.

Of course, when I first saw Eraserhead about five years ago, before I was dealing with the social anxiety I presently deal with, I didn't interpret the film in any such manner. I thought it was about the fear of growing up and facing responsibility. The worries of parenthood. Maybe even abortion. The baby's fetal appearance, the odd sperm-like creatures that the woman in the radiator stomps on, the infidelity that Henry commits with his neighbor while trying to conceal his crying baby, the bizarre infanticide: everything pointed to this conclusion, and I think that's a conclusion that many viewers reach.

But trying to analyze what Eraserhead is about is an exercise in futility, stupidity, or arrogance. No explanation is all-encompassing; any analysis will still be rife with holes and questions. If the film is about social anxiety, then what are the worms that the woman in the radiator battles with her feet? If the film is about anxiety or about fatherhood, then what does the horrifying man who lives inside the moon and pulls the levers that begin all the action in the film represent? David Lynch is a surrealist, and in his filmography he has proven himself a master of cumulative effects. Scenes, visuals, dialogues, songs, sounds, and other aspects of Lynch's films don't necessarily fit together like jigsaw pieces. More often the varied parts of a Lynch film harmonize together kaleidoscopically, achieving an effect of plenitude. In a symphonic composition, a flute plays a part, a tuba plays a part, and every few moments a tympani drum plays a loud part. In isolation, these parts are scattered, unstructured noise; together, they are music. The unsettling soundscape, the dystopian landscape, the bizarre dialogue, the overemotional overacting, the lush black and white photography, the immersive cinematography, the horrifying imagery, and the haunting music of Eraserhead combine to create the overall effect of a nightmare.

David Lynch's first film, assembled in Philadelphia over five years for a modest budget, is a fascinating, terrifying dream that pries its way into the mind, demanding to be understood despite refusing all attempts at explanation. In over thirty years, Lynch has never abandoned this aesthetic, instead perfecting his mind-boggling vision into works of art like Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire. Eraserhead may perhaps suffer from being too long and too baffling, but like certain disquieting dreams, it will never be forgotten by those who have seen it.

Eraserhead (1976)
d/w: David Lynch
(Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart)
TSPDT?: #318
8/10

Movie Review: Suspiria (1977)

Italian director Dario Argento purportedly wrote the classic horror film Suspiria with his girlfriend, actress Daria Nicolodi, based upon a combination of a dream that she had once had and a scary story that her grandmother once told her. The screenplay was originally to star a cast of twelve-year-olds, but when producers balked at the idea of exposing children to graphic violence, the screenplay was changed to accommodate a cast of young adults without changing a single word of their immature dialogue or a single act of their childlike behavior. The result is one of the worst screenplays ever filmed.

The convoluted, plot hole-riddled story tells of a German school founded in the late-nineteenth century by a Greek immigrant, Helena Markos, who was actually a powerful mistress of the dark arts, Mater Suspiriana ("Our Lady of Sighs"). The school she founded was a combination school of dark arts and witchcraft-slash-classical ballet studio, but following public outrage and the death of Markos, the witchcraft department was removed from the curriculum, leaving only the dance school. Or so we think! New student Suzy Banton (Jessica Harper), with the help of Scooby Doo-style clues, physically impossible revelations, an idiotic and easily spooked friend who insists upon solving a mystery that doesn't even seem to be a mystery, and a chance encounter with a professor of occult studies who has literally written the book on Markos, connects the complicated and ridiculous dots and realizes that Markos is still alive, in some way planning something that's probably dark and possibly even powerful. So Suzy kills her by, of course, thrusting a glass feather into her shadow, which causes the entire school and all the evildoers within it to explode.

Most critics these days don't spend much time discussing the obviously absurd and inane plot of Suspiria, insisting that its set pieces offer chilling horror despite a lack of overall plot structure. I don't buy that. Supposedly, original audiences of The Great Train Robbery in 1903 would scream and hide under their seats when the villain pointed and fired his gun at the camera. A century later, such a gimmick doesn't scare a single spectator because most of us need more than visuals and camera trickery to feel a visceral, emotional response to the film reel. We--some of us more than others--need something that allows us to transcend the knowledge that we are merely watching a film. We need a heartfelt theme, a believable character, a raw conflict--something that tricks at least a tiny part of our brains into believing even if only for a few minutes that we are perceiving a meaningful reality and not simply twenty-four frames a second of contrived filmmaking. This is what the "suspension of disbelief" is. It's not just believing that pigs can talk or vampires fly at night; it's believing that anything at all in the film is something real. It's that tiny bit of movie magic that sells us the deception that we are no longer on a couch or in a theater staring at a flickering screen.

Argento never achieved that with me in Suspiria. I often speak of being "taken out of a movie." By that, I mean taken out of total immersion in the film's world and thrust back into my seat, abruptly jolted into the reality that I'm just a guy consuming a movie. A good movie is a sustained act of hypnotism; a bad movie consistently reminds you that you're being hypnotized. Though Suspiria starts strong with a storm-soaked, dreamlike establishing scene, it quickly devolves into confusion. The idiotic setting of Suspiria (the "coven-slash-ballet academy"), the atrocious characterization (fully grown young women who speak and act like bratty children), the ludicrous plot structure (a key revelation revolves around Suzy being able to count the distance and direction of footsteps throughout a massive building), the lack of motivation (what exactly are these witches trying to accomplish? what are they even capable of accomplishing? what have they accomplished aside from killing a few people they don't like?), the over-the-top, unrealistic effects of the grisly murder scenes (you can plainly see that the barbed wire in one memorable death doesn't have any barbs), the disoriented editing (cut to: a scene in which a bit character, a blind man, is killed far from home for reasons that have almost nothing to do with the plot), the hammy exposition (Suzy meets a professor at a pivotal moment who just happens to be able to answer all of her questions), the bad accents: all of these elements and many more constantly prevented me from feeling that Suspiria was anything more than a horribly made horror film.

We go into a horror movie prepared to be scared. In doing so we build up our defenses against being scared. A good horror movie tricks us into feeling fright anyway; Suspiria never does. At its best, it gets two things right: lavish, otherworldly sets painted in gorgeous, nightmarish Technicolor strokes of mutant green and blood red and a theme song by Goblin that--while much overused--is effectively unnerving. These elements save Suspiria from the vast, swampy dregs of the worst horror movies, but they're not enough to make it scary or a classic film. Why have Entertainment Weekly, Bravo, and Total Film named it one of the scariest movies of all time? Why has the Village Voice called it one of the hundred best films of the twentieth century? Why does the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? list of the greatest movies of all time list it at #484?

I have no idea.

Suspiria (1977)
d: Dario Argento w: Dario Argento, Daria Nicolodi
(Jessica Harper, Joan Bennett, Udo Kier)
TSPDT?: #484
4/10