The Possession (Ole Bornedal, 2012)

by James Hansen

It isn’t all that surprising that Ole Bornedal’s The Possession is derivative. Exorcism movies all follow the formula set by The Exorcist, which undoubtedly remains the benchmark of the horror subgenre. Nonetheless, several recent films (The Unborn, Orphan) have found ways to blow open the category in relatively interesting, exciting ways. Unfortunately, The Possession is not one of those films – it starts too big, telegraphs nearly all its scares, and never breaks free from its box of horror movie cliches.

The Possession starts strongly enough. A creepy, wooden box sits on a shelf calling to an older woman. Soon, her mouth begins to bleed and, in true PG-13 fashion, she is barely seen being violently thrown around the room by a demonic spirit. (Nevermind why this spirit that feeds on children is attacking an old woman. Spirits have their reasons.) A short while later, a recently divorced father, Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), buys the box for his youngest daughter (an effective Natasha Calis) who has come with her sister Hannah on a weekend visit. In a new house among a developing neighborhood (although there are no neighbors in sight), Emily cracks open the box. Before long, her eyes become distant, her personality changes, her room fills with a swarm of giant moths, and her inner anger transfer to her father who she stabs in the hand with a fork. 

Blame it on the divorce. The confusing thing here isn’t so much stylistic ineffectiveness – although Bornedal relies too heavily on audio crescendos punctuated by a single, deep, pounding piano key – but rather that this is all too much too soon. While the film spends time establishing the supposedly fraught relationship bewteen Clyde and his ex-wife Stephanie (Kyra Sedgwick) – Stephanie remains much too flirtacious and Clyde too attached for this to be heading anywhere other than reconciliation – some of the first things we see Emily do – sitting in the middle of her bed, staring in the distance in a room suddenly filled with angry moths – are far too extreme for the attempts at realism (“She’s acting out because you left us!”) that the script pitches. Instead, the parent’s indecision comes too slowly and becomes laughable, just as Clyde’s Google search discovery of Jewish exorcism and complete embracing of the theory comes too quickly. Similarly, too many moments build to family unrest or Emily seeming upset rather than the brooding violence and terror of her body being overtaken. 

By the film’s third act, it is already out of steam. Despite the hilarious discovery of the spirit through an MRI (finally convincing Stephanie that something is wrong) and a pretty spooky culmination of the exorcism, The Possession never really clicks. Its overemphasis on family issues along with its lack of build and repetitive stylistic techniques have it land with an all to familiar thud. 

Continue reading...

Burning Yourself Down

by James Hansen

Given the recent events in Texas, Breck Eisner’s The Crazies initially seems full of restrained timeliness. Something is wrong in Ogden Marsh. The small-town has been filled with something causing several residents to act strangely. A man saunters onto a local baseball field during a game with a loaded shotgun. Another locks his wife and child in a closet before lighting his house on fire. Local law enforcement – notably the sheriff, David, and his deputy, Russell – scrambles for answers as the town begins to implode home by home. Ah yes, small town America is as crazy as ever. And what could be the cause? This would-be timeliness vanishes pretty quickly with a sloppy narrative and even messier director. Unfortunately, The Crazies follows the fate of the town and burns itself down entirely too quickly.


This premise, slightly reworked from George Romero’s 1973 film of the same name, fits the bill for standard horror fare, yet Eisner and his production team instill in the opening sequences a taught atmosphere creepily mimicking the quickly dissolving population. The first 20 minutes are a wonderful balance of hard and soft light, noise and stirring silence, and craft a dangerous aura that one can only hope is sustained throughout. But just as the narrative’s zombie-fied residents and baffled authority set up a strong base for the “small-town on the brink of nothingness” dilemma, Eisner and screenwriters Scott Kosar and Ray Wright pull the rug out from under their own first-act momentum by abandoning Ogden Marsh and heading for larger power struggles between the individual and the government, as well as internal debate, that only feels confused and half-hearted. After about an hour, it becomes impossible not to ask, “Where in the hell did the movie go?”

The Crazies shifts gears moving away from the town and into a government-run facility before our sheriff and deputy break out, wander around, go back to the government-run facility, and then walk around some more. Losing interest in the town, The Crazies tacks on story after story of David, Russell, and Co. trying to run away from...something...and defeat the...zombies?... government?... a disease?...their self worth? Trouble of it is, there is never a sense of what the characters are trying to do as they cycle around looking for “answers” amidst a narrative that never posed any questions. Instead, the characters just wander, as does the film, without the faintest purpose ultimately recalling shoddy Romero fare that has been placed in a broken blender and liquified with half-assed versions of The Road and Gerry.


Perhaps too indebted to Romero or not bold enough to move away from Romero’s obsession with trapping characters in buildings and having them escape with large vehicles (hard to know how much influence Romero had with an executive producer), The Crazies screenplay traps itself in a narratological no-man’s land. Of course, Romero, at his best, knows how to work through what he has created. The same cannot be said for Eisner and his team. After Ogden Marsh becomes totally incidental, maybe unintentionally, The Crazies pulls out a small bag of tricks to keep it moving (warning: secondary characters introduced an hour into a horror movie have no chance for survival) but it just becomes canned, flat, and crazzzy boring. After it gets lost, there is no finding its way back. In destroying its own ability to reflect on Ogden Marsh in a movie distinctly about small-town mania and destruction (you can really tell how misunderstood the material is with the inclusion of an abysmal coda) The Crazies locks itself in a closet and lights its house on fire. But if we know the house is empty, then why bother watching?

C
Continue reading...

Mommy Issues

by James Hansen

If the brood of deformed evil children in David Cronenberg’s The Brood were just a little older and had slightly more complex, if equally deranged, minds, they would have been a lot like Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) - the new spawn child showcasing her love of hammers, pianos, and arson (oh my) in the horror thriller Orphan. Despite its exceedingly familiar formula of evil kids behaving badly in (where else?) tree houses and playgrounds, Orphan ups the nasty on its way to being exceedingly entertaining and a downright riot.

An inverted Freudian slasher movie of sorts, Orphan works precisely because its twist is the pitch of the movie and the clear conceptual punch behind the otherwise overlong screenplay. There is something wrong with Esther, and the something, executed randomly (read: perfectly) in a spectacular gold mine of a sequence, like the big reveal in the classic B-horror film Sleepaway Camp, highlights why the film was working in the first place.


Freud aside for now, none of this works if the execution of the pitch is off, so major credit has to be given to director Jaume Collet-Serra (House of Wax) who sets the tone from the get go with a bizarrely violent opening sequence that underscores the unrest that lurks through the entirety of Orphan. No matter the wild direction of the story or the complete implausibility of the decision making, especially on the part of the dumb male (Name of the) Father (Peter Sarsgaard), Orphan keeps its serious tone, as do the actors.

Vera Farmiga, as the Mother, filling an inverted psychoanalytic position as proposed castrator of Esther, is all-in here, still managing to evoke sympathy amidst her insane plight. Whether she is sprinting through hospital wings, meeting with an intractable psychiatrist, or confronting her out of control foster spawn, Farmiga remains deeply focused and intensely dedicated. Isabelle Fuhrman gives a solid performance as Esther which is deepened by her hilarious costume design and some precise editing in certain sequences. Girl has more material to play with than Tim Gunn.


Most of this material for Esther comes from the clever Freudian inversion that, surprisingly, hasn’t been toyed with that much in horror. Freud never really knew what to make of girls, as the lack of a phallus makes his theory predicated on the existence of a phallus completely inapplicable. He admitted that there is likely something similar, but never knew exactly what the process would be. Well, low and behold, Orphan screenwriters David Johnson and Alex Mace have figured it out! Or, more likely, flipped it directly on its head, sense making or not. Esther is in direct competition with her mother, as her (blood) lust is directed to the person she most wants to bone err...lay - her father. By simply toying with this classic horror approach, Orphan derives a little extra juice, builds a lot more spunk, and flashes a load of balls.
Continue reading...

Horror Relaunch

by James Hansen

While the 2008 French film Inside proved that new horror movies can still be fresh and seriously frightening, America’s slices of horror continue to take a different path. Although there are certainly exceptions, there have been more revamped horror series in the past few years than ever before with even “classic” works finding recreations for younger audiences who know a different kind of horror. The new Friday the 13th, if nothing else, makes clear that good horror ideas do not age, and rarely need to change. Teens wander into woods. Have sex. Get drunk. Run into [masked] killer. Die in increasingly gruesome ways. Repeat until movie is over and a couple kids have “escaped” only to discover the killer magically reborn in the last instant before the movie smash cuts to black and the credits roll. Spoiler alert? Please.

Thus (surprise surprise) goes the new Friday the 13th. This is not to say the movie is not without value, stylistically well executed, and a bit stirring – all three are apt descriptions. Sure, its stock material where the “good guys” are motivated by tits and ass, and the killer kills indiscriminately for no apparent (read: marginally substantive) reason. But does it really matter? Granted, the movie does not deserve a pass – none do – but how is anyone to fairly view, analyze, and understand modern horror movies in the first place? Acting? Direction? Pure style? Whatever the case, something needs to change, and if the movies are not doing it themselves, then maybe we – viewers, fans, and critics – need to alter our patterns for them.


For Friday the 13th, as well as other horror movies, it is quite possible that it should all go back to the psychoanalytic family. This is, after all, a movie where the killer is avenging his mother, and the hero is saving his sister. While this remains the kind of reasonable analysis that has dominated academic discussions of horror films since Carol Clover’s 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws, it appears that in recent horror franchises (Saw, The Devils Rejects, Hostel) the rooting interest for the viewer has slowly shifted from the would-be innocent teenagers to the villains. As this change occurs, so must the theories we use to write and discuss.

Undoubtedly, the brash tongue-in-cheek attitude of Freddy vs. Jason, Jason X, Leprechaun in Space, Bride of Chucky, etc. has contributed to this greatly. Rather than have terrorizing villains, they have become useless models of comedic death, destruction, and battles. Perhaps it is all to blame on Scream who took the magicians’ hat off, cleaned it out, and explained each trick to the audience. Though the mindless glorification of violence in Friday the 13th and some of the other franchises make these discussions more problematic, the relaunch of classic horror into a new horror environment signals a good place to begin.

Starting at the end of the original Friday the 13th, the new Friday the 13th is immediately less interested in establishing, or, at the very least, putting stock in, the Jason mythology. Mother spouts her anger at a counselor for not watching Jason when he drowned. She is promptly decapitated and the endless death spree begins. With a baffling, and surprisingly effective, opening 20 minutes, Jason is shown to be a ruthless killer, who nonetheless will always wait to see some tits before he spears, beheads, or mutilates his victims. In what is essentially its own Friday the 13th short film, complete with its own cast of one-dimensional characters, the opening is a miniature prelude for everything that is to come and has come before. Odlly enough, the prelude seems more interested in its narrative than the rest of the movie, which makes the actual movie a bit tiring and repetitive. But, when it comes to the stock narrative, how would it not be?


Rather than focus on any kind of mythology or reasoning behind why characters die at the hands of villains, Friday the 13th, and modern horror in general, features narrative that focus on how characters die. Even while morality and humanism are tossed around in the plot (especially in the Saw franchise which, working in complete opposition of itself, clearly labels its morality in order to focus on the how rather than the why), Friday the 13th moves from death to death like a sledgehammer loudly slamming its way through sheet metal. Extended to excruciating lengths, at least in the mind of many viewers and critics who have subsequently dubbed the inane and misguided term “torture porn” for these modern horror movies, death becomes something that is not understood, but rather something that purveys every action of the characters until their long, painful final moments come. Jason, like the creators of new horror franchises, never shies away from making death take a little bit longer, and he, of course, always prefers to have an audience. This new form of entrapment, which Friday the 13th proudly revels in, inculcates a new age nihilism which few viewers willingly accept. At the same time, just as in the narrative of Friday the 13th, it takes a brutalized victim enmeshed within that system to turn the tables and break free.

So...what’s the point? While I have not been attempting to justify, support, or reject the methodology of many modern horror movies, most specifically the relaunched Friday the 13th, I have tried to raise many new issues with analyzing new horror which I think are especially important in this time of horror pastiches run wild. It seems rather unessential and unmotivated to write a generic review of an essentially plotless horror franchise which has no real interest in “good” acting or a “good” story. Instead of focusing on the acting (which is uniformly “bad” even for a horror movie) or direction (which is blunt yet effective) or the success of the scares (of which there are several solid moments), the repetitive nature of the narrative along with a complete totality placed in the ways characters die calls for a different kind of analysis which few critics or academics have yet to approach. Rather than allowing the franchise and form to remain dormant with toss-off accusations and typical criticism, let’s bust out from under that dock to see the complexities in a new kind of scare.
Continue reading...

Fear(s) of the Dark

by Chuck Williamson

Thomas Schatz’s contentious theory of generic evolution provides a coherent, holistic—and ultimately reductive—method of analyzing and taxonomizing popular cinematic genres. These classifications rely on what Schatz refers to as a “system of conventions” that characterize and define each generic mode, thus providing a methodology that allows the entire trajectory of a single genre to be traced in linear genealogical thread. The horror genre, in particular, contains specific narrative and iconographic elements specific to this abstract umbrella-term. Yet as I watched the black-and-white animated horror anthology Fear(s) of the Dark, I suddenly recognized the limitations of genre theory—specifically, the way the construct of “genre” has been muddled in an age of mass consumption, mass communication, and internationalism. Unlike the archival horror classics we familiarize ourselves with every Halloween—from creaky studio “creature features” to sleazy exploitation fare—Fear(s) operates outside the boundaries of this rigid genealogy. Whereas these past films borrowed heavily from classic gothic fiction, E.C. comic book anthologies, and macabre pulp fiction, Fear(s) pulls from an entirely different set of referents—particularly the thriving vanguard of American, French, and Japanese graphic fictions that have, until now, rarely found an adequate cinematic counterpart. Because of these deviations, Fear(s) of the Dark represents an original piece of pop entertainment in a genre now burned with a derivative assembly line of genre stinkers.


Of course, not all substructures of the horror genre get reconfigured in Fear(s)’s appropriation of these generic mechanisms. Directed by six independent graphic artists, Fear(s) follows the basic anthology format culled from its precursors, presenting a collection of loosely intertwined tales of terror that literalize the sort of psychic and social phobias ripe for the horror treatment. Transnational by design, the selection of artists employed in the film represents a sort of “who’s who” of contemporary sequential art and graphic design. And as with any omnibus film, some vignettes work better than others—and the quality here remains as variable as it would be in an issue of, say, Art Spiegelman’s Raw or Fantagraphics’ Mome. Black Hole novelist Charles Burns and graphic designer and Liquid Liquid bassist Richard McGuire direct the film’s two best vignettes, with the former helming a psychosexual body horror narrative of teenage love, sadomasochistic fetishization, and insectoid impregnation, and the latter opting for a more traditional haunted house narrative filled with inky shadows, atmospheric grays, and sparse noir lighting. Burns’ segment revisits the Cronenbergian mutations that characterized his aforementioned graphic novel, where biological metamorphoses and deformities function as metaphorical representations of the psychic cost of lost love, hard sex, and the pains of adolescence. Filled with pain, longing, and bodily mutations, this vignette stands between the divide of the romantic and the grotesque, delivering a caustic final image of a loveless romance taken to its gruesome metaphorical extremes. McGuire’s piece, on the other hand, shies away from these grotesqueries in favor of pure atmosphere—impenetrable shadows, harsh lighting, pregnant silences. The cumulative effect is shocking, as these techniques enhance a somewhat clichéd story of a murderous housewife and a silent drifter.

The rest, unfortunately, are less successful. Belgian artist Marie Caillou directs the disjointed dream narrative of a school girl entangled in the phantasmagoric world of Japanese ghostlore (or is she?), which unfortunately devolves into an scrambled hodgepodge of eastern supernatural ephemera: spectral samurai, shapeshifting bakemono, serial killing school children, mad scientists, dream-vs.-reality canards, etcetera, etcetera. Nullified by its staccato pacing and jumbled narrative threads, this piece comes across as nothing more than a visually arresting—albeit convoluted—catalogue of overused J-horror tropes. Italian graphic novelist Lorenzo Mattoti does better with his own exploration of adolescent horrors—a slow burn story of a parochial village menaced by a ravenous beast that may or may not be the protagonist’s best friend. While its frame narrative punctures the suspense somewhat, this piece successfully conveys the terror of childhood in its bold, scratchy art and pained mediations on growing up, where an unseen monster represents the impenetrable fog that clouds childhood. Interspersing these longer tales are Pierre di Scullo’s abstract, cubist vignettes of mutating geometric shapes—a rorsharch test for terror—overlaid with a running dialogue on the nature of fear, and Blutch’s primal, silent story of an eighteenth-century nobleman and his savage attack dogs. Both are visually intoxicating, but seem truncated and incomplete in the context of the film.


Even at its worst, Fear(s) is a sumptuous visual feast, featuring the diverse black-and-white graphic art of each creator. Burns’ photorealist E.C.-standard cum ecroche style contrasts the subtle surrealism of his story, McGuire’s geometric designs and moody lighting intensify his segment’s atmosphere, and Mattoti’s jittery, nightmarish pencilwork recalls the work of Francis Bacon. Even Calineascu’s piece features enough bug-eyed, Ghibli-inspired charm to compensate for its narrative shortcomings. But, more importantly, the film assists in the restructuring of our basic understanding of film genre. While never “making it new” in a tangible or all-encompassing sense, Fear(s) seems determined to alter what Schatz calls the “grammar” of cinematic genre. Schatz contends that “we might think of the film genre as a specific grammar or system of rules of expression and construction and the individual genre film as a manifestation of these rules.” In Fear(s), the fundamental grammar of horror is changed to simulate the mechanics of the source material. Whereas most horror films rely on fluidity and motion to stimulate fright, this film defies these conventions with jagged rhythms and static tableaus—the sort one might find in graphic fiction. Instead of the conventional handbag of shock effects systemic to the grammar of horror, Fear(s) regularly features unnerving pauses, understated silence, and an added emphasis on composition and symmetry. For all of its flaws, Fear(s) of the Dark successfully integrates the language of contemporary sequential art into the world of horror.
Continue reading...