http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Mon, 10 Nov 2003 15:03:05 EST http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/11/10/150305.php Sean T. Collins(Originally posted at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat by Sean T. Collins.)I've been a big booster of the band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club ever since they were personally recommended to me by the Dandy Warhols. (Hey, when a man named Courtney Taylor-Taylor tells you something, you listen.) And I love, love, love their first record, B.R.M.C.. It's swirly, it's dark, it's loud, it's ambitious, it's progressive, it's classic, it's generally a big fat rejoinder to the critics who inexplicably tagged the band as a Jesus & Mary Chain knockoff. (I guess they look a little like J&MC used to, but I really have never been able to figure out the prevalence of this meme.) So I was pretty damn psyched to pick up their second record, Take Them On, On Your Own. Sounds angry! Sounds brash! Sounds boring.Okay, that was harsh. To be fair, about half of TTOOYO is a good record, and without the existence of the band's first album, the whole thing might be considered pretty swell. But alas, they already recorded songs like "Whatever Happened To My Rock and Roll?" on the first record, so filling half of this one with uninspired retreads of that song's thunderous school-of-rock marching-band-isms and endless feedbacky coda is just an exercise in water-treading. And in song after song--"Stop" (which at least has an interesting six-word chorus), "Six-Barrel Shotgun" (might as well be a "Whatever Happened...?" remix), "We're All In Love," "Generation" (this one riffs on the first album's "White Palms" instead--ooh, innovative), "Suddenly" (in 3/4 time, but otherwise same deal)--that's exactly what they do.This is not to say that the Club tries nothing new. On "In Like the Rose," the band tries to do the Dandy Warhol's drone-y groove thing, but unfortunately all they manage to do is plod; "Ha Ha High Babe" fares much better in its similar vein. "Shade of Blue" seems like more of the same until a simple, sunny guitar line jangles in from out of nowhere mid-song, lifting the whole thing up out of the doldrums. "And I'm Aching" is acoustic, which is pretty, but makes the limitations of lead vocalist Robert Turner's vocals all the clearer (and they were pretty clear to begin with, on this album). But the record closes with a one-two punch that rivals some of the combos on its predecessor: "Rise or Fall," a New Wave-y banger that, you want to yell infomercial-style, really works!, and "Heart + Soul," which sounds like nothing so much as Pink Floyd covering the MC5, which believe me is a good thing to sound like indeed.So yeah, there's half a good album on there. It's only disappointing when you consider their first album--the searing regret of "Love Burns," the sneering rage of "Red Eyes and Tears," the swirling psychedelia of "Awake," the rumbling angst of "White Palms," the rockin' "Jean Genie"-isms of "Spread Your Love," the swelling religiosity of "Alive." At least 50% of what you have on Take Them On is merely competent, a sort of balls-to-the-wall-by-the-numbers routine. I guess we are on our own, after all. Music9996@blogcritics.org Mon, 10 Nov 2003 15:03:05 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/31/171136.php Sean T. Collins(Originally posted at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat by Sean T. Collins.)The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 131. The Blair Witch Project dir. Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez the scariest movie I've ever seenWell, here we are: Blair Witch. Let me say right off the bat that I don't expect to change anyone's mind here. This is a movie for which the phrase "you either love it or hate it" was invented. I remember seeing it on opening night in a theatre: Half the audience booed and yelled at the screen as the closing credits rolled, while the other half looked as though they'd just been eyewitnesses to a plane crash. With most films you can argue that people just didn't "get it," but it's different with this movie: It gets you. Or it doesn't. A lot depends on where you first see it, how you'd heard about it, the kind of mood you were in, and (I think) the kind of mood you allowed yourself to be in. So yeah, this movie gets you, or it doesn't.Good God, did it ever get me.Opening night, August 1999, was not the first time I saw Blair Witch. That was actually back in June of that same summer. At the time I was working for Troma Studios, progenitors of the Toxic Avenger, Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD, and various other rubber-masked individuals you see at the San Diego Comic-Con or on E! Entertainment Television. The Troma Team had just gotten back from their yearly expedition to the Cannes Film Festival, which took place just before I began interning at the company. Along with the usual tales of living 20 people to a room and having your picture snapped by hundreds of paparazzi while dressed as a man-eating condom, my coworkers had brought back a videotape. It was given to them by the makers of The Blair Witch Project, who, it turns out, were enormous Troma fans. (I guess Troma is an inspiration for anyone who wants to make a movie for less than no money, although clearly the Blair Witch people emphasized Troma's can-do spirit and not so much their fondness for exploding heads.) They gave them a copy of their movie, which was just beginning to garner some attention during its screenings at the festival, as a gift. Needless to say the Troma folks were quite excited: Horror-film true-believers to a man (and woman), they were up for anything, as long as it was frightening. Before long copies were making the rounds of the whole staff, and I remember being quite excited when I finally got mine. There was no hype, no stories in Newsweek or Time proclaiming this the scariest film in history and touting its micro-budget blockbuster status, no appearances on late-night and early-morning talk shows to publicize it, no endless parodies consisting of people talking into videocameras. All I knew when I took my copy home was that it was a mockumentary, and that it was scary.That weekend I dutifully summoned my buddy Dave G. (the cartoonist currently known as Davey Oil), the guy who forces me to call myself the second biggest horror fan I know. By the time Dave and I got around to putting the thing into the VCR, it was late--I think around 11 o'clock or so. The house was quiet, and it was dark outside. We sat back and began to watch.I'm not sure at what point it began to dawn on me that I had never, literally never, been so scared in my entire life. I think it might have been when the three student filmmakers woke up to find someone had constructed little rock monuments around their tent that Dave and I began saying "oh, shit" compulsively. I remember that around the third nightfall or so, when the tent was shaken, that my heart was pounding so hard it was actually uncomfortable and my stomach had that feeling it gets when you narrowly avoid a car accident. People, we were completely terrified. There wasn't a single level on which this film didn't work for us--the realistically pointless vulgarity of the kids' speech, the endless grays and browns of the video-taped forest, the way in which the lights from the camera illuminated just this much of the night, leaving so much of it ripe for possession by something... other. Even the fact that the Troma copies were the rough-sound edit enhanced the experience: though we couldn't hear what the characters could when noises awoke them during the night, we wanted to, and we sat on the edge of our seats and strained our ears and damned if our minds didn't provide a soundtrack that more than adequately scared the wits out of us.And then--and then--the final scene. This time the yelling in the distance we could hear, and I still wish, when I hear it again, that I couldn't. The panicky running of Mike & Heather, that house looming up out of nowhere--my God, I was shaking, shaking hard. And then they went inside--no, please don't! I still vividly remember thinking to myself, almost in an abstract fashion, that if an old woman's smiling face were to appear in one of those (many, goddamn it) windows I would literally collapse in fear. Then up to the top floor, then yelling that "I hear him downstairs!", then running into that basement, turning a corner-- Heather following, screaming over and over again, past the handprints and scrawled gibberish on the walls, down the stairs, around the corner-- oh my God, what is he doing? WHAT IS HE DOING IN THE CORNER?The End.Dave and I sat for a moment, staring at the credits as they rolled by. Then slowly, we turned to each other. Our eyes widened. "Holy shit," we said, almost in unison, "what a scary fucking movie." There is almost no way in which I could exaggerate how horrified we were by that film that night. Despite the fact that at this point I had to urinate so badly it was painful, I think it took us 45 minutes to actually work up enough nerve to get out of our chairs and move to another part of the house to go to the bathroom. Since the bathroom was one of those deals where the fan comes on automatically with the light, thus making it difficult to hear what's going on the other side of the door if it's closed, I forced Dave to walk with me to the bathroom, stand outside, and continuously talk to me as loudly as possible while I peed, just so I could be sure that he was still there and hadn't disappeared. At some point we realized it was late and I had to drive him back to his house on the other side of town. This was a genuinely harrowing ordeal. We were scared of the distance from my door to the car. During the car ride, we were scared of the back of the car itself, which was way too dark for us to be able to handle it. We were scared of the way the headlights illuminated the night--way, way too much like those camera lights for comfort. When we finally got to Dave's house, it took us another 15 minutes to build up the courage to actually allow Dave to exit the car, walk the 20 feet or whatever to the back door, and go inside. Then I had to drive back to the house alone, making the back of the car even more frightening and making every dark street I passed by a goddamn nightmare. Then I had to navigate the space between the car and the house myself, then walk through the entire dark, empty, silent ground floor--past the freaking television where the freaking movie was just playing, for the love of God!--by myself, walk up those creaky stairs (stairs!) by myself, and turn the light on in my room without having a heart attack from thinking that something would be in there waiting for me. I say it again: this was the most scared I've ever been in my life.A few weeks later, I brought the movie with me on a trip with some friends to a cabin in the woods upstate. At this point I was still terrified by the movie, but enjoyed the experience enough to subject others to it. And they were outraged by how scared they got. One girl called it "emotional porn" and was furious at the filmmakers for having made something so completely harrowing (and she's no anti-horror puritan--she was just scared half to death). And then a few weeks after that was the premiere in theatres. This was a very different experience--better in some ways (watching a crowd of strangers have the bloody bejesus scared out of them was fun; some of the more grating lines of dialogue, ones that didn't ring true, were cut; and of course the sounds from around the tent were now fully audible), worse in others (the disappointed/pissed off moviegoers who booed; the fact that the movie really does work better as an unlabeled nth-generation bootleg than as a big-screen projection). The main difference, though, involved the ending. This is a spoiler, so far as it goes: The final image consists of Mike standing in a corner. In the version I originally saw, no explanation was ever given for what the hell was going on here. None. So either he's dead, and something has propped him up, or he's a live, and---uuhhhhhh GOD I don't even want to think about it. However, in the theatrical version, a man-on-the-street interview was added to the collection of such snippets at the film's beginning, in which a local claims that the serial killer once inspired/possessed by the Witch would take kids into the basement two at a time, and make one face the corner while he killed the other. So we switch from a nameless horror that I'm still trying to scrape out of my brain to a "hey lookout she's over there!!!" kinda moment. It's a lousy tradeoff, as even the actress Heather Donahue seemed to notice--though she didn't specify what she was talking about, she feistily pointed out on Leno that week that she and the other two actors had shot everything in the film themselves "except one thing." She wasn't happy about that one thing, let me tell you. Neither was I, but so what? I'd done without it, to my everlasting horror and delight. And I've never gotten around to buying the official, DVD version of the film. That grainy tape is, for better or for worse, and mainly for better, I think, the way I will watch this movie.Are there movies that are, as a whole, scarier than this one? Yes, I'd probably have to say so. The Shining, and probably The Exorcist, and maybe even Texas Chain Saw and The Ring are packed wall-to-wall with terrifying images and relentless ante-upping horror. Blair Witch has sticks and stones. But it relies on the strength of its stars--three humans, and their collective fear. If you see it in the right way, at the right time, with the right people, that fear overtakes you. And you're there in the basement, standing in the corner. Video9735@blogcritics.org Fri, 31 Oct 2003 17:11:36 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/31/125250.php Sean T. Collins(Originally posted at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat by Sean T. Collins.)The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 122. The Shining, dir. Stanley Kubrickthe second scariest movie I've ever seenLook at this. Go ahead. I'll wait. And hey, while you're at it, look at this, and this.I'll admit it: Even in broad daylight, sitting in my goofy romper-room of an office, with people talking and music playing and all manner of distractingly normal goings-on going on, those pictures beat me. I actually cannot look at them for long without quickly scrolling past, or giggling nervously, or simply looking away. And now, as I type this in our darkened apartment, I'm afraid to look over my shoulder at the doorway to our bedroom. I am a grown man, and three little images, two of which aren't even of anything inherently frightening, all of which I've seen a million times before, have scared me to the point of irrationality.This is how Stanley Kubrick's horror masterpiece--and I swear to you those are not words I use lightly--The Shining operates. This film is not content to spook you from behind shadows or gross you out with kayro-syruped viscera. This film wants to scare the living shit out of you, over and over again, and not really for any particular reason. This film is a bully. This is arrogant horror."Arrogant"--I struggled for a long time to find a word to describe the mentality of the horror in this movie (yes, we're ascribing mentality to an intangible quality--why not? this is a movie about an evil hotel, right?). The critical blurb on the cover says "epic," but I don't think that's quite right. This is certainly horror on a grand scale, but I think that word was chosen simply because this wasn't a skeevy little movie made on the cheap like most horror tended to be throughout film history, whether we're talking about the Universal classics or the creature-features of the 50s or the new wave of Romero, Hooper, Carpenter, Craven et al. Also, I think "epic" connotes some sort of struggle between mighty opponents--the type of thing we see in The Exorcist. The Shining's Dick Halloran is many things, but Father Lancaster Merrin he isn't. I stumbled across "arrogant," finally, when looking at the performance of Jack Nicholson as the deteriorating patriarch of the Torrance family with the same first name. I don't often focus on this aspect of the movie, transfixed as I am by the imagery seen above. But it's this aspect that many fans of the film's source novel, its author not least among them, blamed for what they considered a failed movie. They believe the film doesn't work because we never feel sympathy or empathy for Jack Torrance--it's clear from the moment he opens his mouth that he's about five minutes away from Richard Speck territory. Nicholson, who studied the larger-than-life performance techniques of Grand Guignol actors to prepare for the role, does not exactly attempt to capture the inner torment of a man losing a struggle with his own demons. He plays it like a schtick, grunting and gesticulating, staring and grinning, and most importantly, mocking and sneering. His is an evil that drips with condescension and contempt for everything good. It's present as early as when he sarcastically echoes his wife Wendy's assertion that writing is just a matter of getting back into the habit, but it explodes into the forefront during the long pas de deux from the typewriter to the stairs. Jack transparently feigns concern for their son Danny's health and patronizingly asks Wendy her opinion on what should be done. He mimics her high-pitched weepy voice. In the midst of threatening to bash her brains in, he comically reprimands her for not allowing him to complete his sentences. He sticks his tongue out and makes a goofy voice like a taunting child as he tells her to hand over her baseball bat. When he's finally put out of comission for the time being, he fakes contriteness and injury so badly that there's no chance of his wife believing him, so badly that the only possible purpose is to display the extent to which he believes Wendy is a total fucking moron. He's not just crazy, and he's not just evil--he's an asshole.This is what is terrifying about The Shining. Not just Nicholson's performance, but those horrendous visions--textbook monumental horror-images one and all--it all mocks our desire for solid ground to stand on. We want a main character with a tragic arc, but we get a smirking prick on a straight shot into lunacy; we want one who fights to stay human, but we get one whose essential inhumanity appears to have been there all along waiting for its chance to escape. We want an evil we can define, in a form we can recognize, with a cause we can identify and a cure we can affect; but we get random, almost arbitrary snippets of nightmare, ranging from a river of blood and a reanimated corpse to a couple of kids and goddamn spectral "furry," interlaced with a dry drunk who falls off the wagon thanks to the help of a phantom bartender, all of which ostensibly will continue to plague visitors to the hotel site "forever and ever and ever," and all of which is "explained" in a throwaway line about Indian burial grounds that paradoxically highlights just how arbitrary the entire "explanation" is to begin with. (Actually, there's a fascinating interpretation of the film which argues that the whole thing is a metaphor for the Euro-American genocide against the American Indians--you can read all about it here. Watch the movie with this in mind and you'll see it's all there. Was this intentional and serious, or intentional and a gag, or just the equivalent of playing Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz? I think the film feels we don't deserve to know for sure.) Perhaps this is best encapsulated by the arbitrary changes to facts established earlier in the film when they're brought up later on: Wendy tells Danny's doctor that Jack dislocated Danny's shoulder five months ago, but a month later, when Jack is pouring his heart out to Lloyd the bartender, it's become two years; the hotel manager tells Jack that the former caretaker who ran amok was named Charles Grady, but when Jack speaks with Grady later on, the man calls himself Delbert. Given Kubrick's well-deserved reputation for perfectionism, I think we can safely assume this wasn't the result of the script girl having the day off--it seems to be just another way for the film to demonstrate that it's making its own rules, and the rules will always be to the detriment of normality and sanity.This movie may be Grand Guignol imbued with the Theater of the Absurd, but it's lower-case-"a" absurd, too. It has a wickedly black sense of humor that, for once, heightens the horror, not deflates it. I still laugh when the music builds to a crescendo only to have the chords crash frighteningly upon the appearance of the word "TUESDAY"--scariest Tuesday ever!; the cut to Danny's horrified doctor as Wendy tells the story of Danny's injury is just priceless; you've got to think that even Wendy and Danny noticed the, ahem, appropriateness of the Road Runner cartoon they watch; and what can we say about Dick Halloran's interior decorating? That last bit is, I think, particularly telling: Kubrick takes one of Stephen King's great everyman heroes (I actually am quite fond of them) and turns him into both a dirty old man and a blaxploitation parody. It's very funny, and very mean. It's a kick in the teeth of the notion that anything in this movie will be capable of heroism, capable of creating sense, capable of defeating evil. This evil knows our hopes and, to paraphrase Lou Reed, pisses on them. It's the proverbial boot stamping on the human face. It's a dead man with a bleeding head saying "Great party, isn't it?" It's wrong.I truly had to debate with myself as to where to rank this film in my countdown. For years, this was the scariest movie I'd ever seen, no question; The Exorcist came close, but the horrible purposeleness of this movie, as well as the unparalleled terror of those images, kept The Shining in a class by itself--the class of movies that can still keep me up at night, afraid. Eventually, I saw a movie that beat it. I saw that movie under just the right circumstances, though, and I don't know if it's worth arguing whether it really is "scarier" than this one. All I know is that any time I think of those two little girls, I believe that pound for pound, scene for scene, horror--arrogant, arbitrary, absurd, cruel, evil horror--comes no more horrifying than this. Except, perhaps, for...(to be concluded)-----Postscript: I did a lot of writing about The Shining back in my film studies days. Kubrick films hold up under close reading better than those of any other director, in my opinion, so it should come as no surprise that I actually manged to pull off two separate close readings, separated by three years. The first was a study of the film's employment of duality, and especially mirrors and mirroring--you can download it here, and I truly do think you'll be surprised to see just how much thought went into every shot in the film, as evidenced by just this one trope. The second took place in the context of my senior essay on the monumental horror-image, this time focusing on the countless appearances of such images in the film. You can access the whole senior essay by clicking here, but once again I'm reprinting the relevant part in an effort to offset all the waxing poetic I did up above with some hardcore textual analysis. Again, it's simply astounding how rational was the planning of this, a film about the complete failure of rationality. Enjoy.-----Analyses of The Shining often focus on its psychological horror, in particular the madness of Jack Torrance, its central character. This detracts from the painstaking manner in which Kubrick sets up monumental horror-images (particularly those of the first type) so as to overpower characters and audience alike with the horror of the "unreal." In a way, the confines of the Overlook Hotel come to define a new world, one where old conceptual frameworks of time, space, and human behavior are mercilessly hacked to pieces. Jack's insanity is simply his method of adapting to this systematic violation of his old world - a violation for which the indelible monumental horror-image stands. The first encounter we have with such an image is fleeting, yet unforgettable - an almost subliminal flash of the twins seen during Danny's vision/episode before he and his family move to the Overlook for the winter. They pop out at us unexpectedly in the midst of a slow-motion shot of a torrent (Torrance?) of blood gushing forth from the hotel's elevator doors, accompanied by ominously low, droning music, and mirrored by a subsequent flash cut to Danny screaming. However briefly they appear, the twins are presented as a concretization of the fluid, a personification of the forces of violence, fear, and death present in the rest of the vision. Further, since we have already heard the story of how the twins were slain by their father, one of the Overlook's winter caretakers, we know that seeing them at all is a violation of physical reality. This "violation of reality" is reinforced when the twins next appear, in the rec room scene described at length above. Though there is nothing particularly special about the way the twins are presented or shot, they are clearly out of place in this quotidian setting. A careful look at the shot structure of the film reveals why they make us feel so uneasy: throughout the movie, the camera has been in constant motion. We begin with a breathtaking fly-over shot of Jack's car as it snakes through the mountains toward the Overlook; we are constantly following characters with Kubrick's trademark tracking shots, made even more fluid by the recent invention of the Steadicam; even simple close-ups are usually made mobile with slow, barely perceptible tracks or zooms into the characters' faces. But in monumental horror-images of the first type, such as that of the twins, the camera comes to a jarring halt. Kubrick has accustomed us to movement, subtly training us to be uneasy when this movement ceases. In the rec room scene, the jarring nature of this contrast is highlighted by an uncharacteristically rapid zoom-in on Danny just as he turns to see the twins in the doorway. Their presence, standing there like twin tombstones, is a violation not only of the physical laws of the film, but in this movie's case, a violation of the physical laws of film. The usefulness of the movement/stasis contrast in making the spectator uneasy is even clearer in the twins' final appearance. We follow Danny on his Big Wheels as he glides through the corridors of the hotel, until he turns a corner and comes to a screeching halt, finding himself face to face with the twins once more. As mentioned earlier, this scene highlights the Freudian "uncanny" aspects of the girls, one such aspect being the compulsive repetition in their speech. But the phrase they repeat - "forever and ever and ever" - calls to mind the concept of overwhelming infinitude central to both the sublime and to cosmic fear. Danny reacts by covering his eyes to block out the horror of what he is seeing, then using Tony to tell himself that, "like pictures in a book," the twins can't hurt him. But his uncertain tone of voice belies this claim. The twins have hurt him, but through his mind's eye, which no hands can cover. They have shattered Danny's feeling of safety, both physical (they were slain by their father - might he fall victim to a similar fate?) and metaphysical (they are dead, and yet they are standing at the end of the hall and beckoning to him - what other cracks in the fabric of reality might threaten to swallow him up?). By the time the film reaches its climax, dangers of both types have reached enormous proportions. Jack turns violent, chasing his wife and son with an axe. His total transgression of behavioral norms is mirrored by the hotel, which in turn unleashes its most numerous and large-scale violations of reality - many of them, naturally, in the form of monumental horror-images. Indeed, as a terrified Wendy, having become separated from Danny, runs through the hotel to find him, she is practically bombarded with such images. After climbing a flight of stairs, she looks into a bedroom down the hall, where a man dressed as a dog kneels and performs fellatio on a man in a tuxedo. They sit up and stare at her, unblinking. Minutes later, after discovering the body of the Overlook's chef Dick Halloran (who has been slain by Jack), she turns to find another tuxedo-clad man at the end of the hallway. His bald head covered with blood, he raises his glass and says merrily, "Great party, isn't it?" Like the dogman and his friend, he is isolated in the distant center of the frame (his central position is accentuated by the presence of a chandelier hanging directly above him, just as the dogman and his lover's position was highlighted by their framing in a doorway), where he stands like a monument to the malevolent party being held in the hotel. It is important to note that as these sequences unfold, we are also tracking Jack as he chases Danny out into the snow-covered hedge maze on the hotel grounds. We know that Wendy is no longer in physical danger, as the axe-wielding madman that is her husband is no longer inside the hotel with her. This does not detract from the horror of her situation, however. The presence of these spectral "guests," unthreatening as they may seem, proves incontestably that much more is wrong with the Overlook Hotel than its caretaker. By the time Wendy sees the final, truly monumental image of the elevator (which she approaches as if she knows what is going to happen) gushing blood, it is clear that the Overlook itself is a "monument," a physical embodiment of undying evil capable of warping both time and minds. In this sense, Jack's demise is fitting: frozen and immobile, he becomes a monument himself, a physical embodiment of the cosmic horror of the Overlook Hotel. Video9732@blogcritics.org Fri, 31 Oct 2003 12:52:50 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/31/124732.php Sean T. Collins(Originally posted at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat by Sean T. Collins.)The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 113. The Exorcist, dir. William Friedkinthe third scariest film I've ever seen"Allahu akbar..."These are the first words we hear. So we're in foreign territory, then, and territory presided over by a very great God, one who demands--and receives--worshipful obedience. To dust off an almost forgotten cliche: 'In light of recent events,' it might be tempting to believe that we are to understand the events that follow as a product of this devotion to the potentially murderous mysteries of faith. It is equally tempting to fume about Orientalism and misrepresentation of the Other. Interesting ideas indeed, but here I'm going to opt to ignore the forest and focus on one of the trees: This movie begins in Iraq, an appropriate instance of synchronicity given that The Exorcist, the film widely considered to be the greatest horror film of all time, is actually a war movie.Of course I'm not referring to a war between countries, or even between civilizations, although there are certainly hints of the latter in the rapid-fire juxtaposition of Islam, paganism, Christianity, and modern atheism that begin the film. I am referring to that most unfashionable war, that of good versus evil. But it even trumps the unfashionable rhetoric of today, which when it uses those four letter words does so as codes for democracy and totalitarianism. This is not a philosophical war, or even a religious one. It's a spiritual one--literally, a war between spirits. The field of battle is humankind, the weapons are lethal in the highest degree, and the horror of the conflict, in which neither side answers to man and law, is total.I can't think of another horror film that's as... majestic as The Exorcist. The horrific images it employs are not just frightening, they're mind-blowingly so, and deliberately at that. This is a film intended to scare the living daylights right out of you for hours after you leave the theatre or turn the TV off. It's the cinematic equivalent of shock and awe, and its makers are virtuosos to rival any four-star general. And it's all harnessed (quite explicitly, in the oft-stated words of its director) to force the audience to confront the idea not just that we are not alone in our world, but that this world is not ours at all.The demon is first shown as a tiny statue, with the noise of insects buzzing incongruously as it is discovered. Friedkin is already establishing that this thing is royalty--it is the Lord of the Flies. We see it stop a clock. We seem to hear its influence in the cacaphony of the town--the clanging of hammers on anvils, the thunderous stampeding of carriage hoofs as a wild-eyed woman (not the last one we'll see, oh no) is pulled past, mouth agape as if in some silent scream. We see the potential of the little statue realized in a massive monument--monkeylike head, insect wings, snakelike phallus, blank eyes. The noise swells and buzzes and screeches and growls and screams. That kind of intensity is unmistakeable: War has been declared.The battleground is a body, that of Regan McNeil, a young girl from Washington, D.C. (and that is surely no coincidence). Here, actually, is where many critics stall: This must be a film about male anxiety over female sexuality! Well, yes, it is that--if Regan's curiosity about her mother's love life didn't tip you off, and the displaced menstrual imagery of urination and surgical blood spurts didn't either, and dozens of male doctors penetrating her with all manner of needles and tubes still left you guessing, surely "Fuck me!" and "Let Jesus fuck you!" and "Lick me!" and "Your mother sucks cocks in Hell, Karras!" weren't insufficiently obvious. But it isn't any more about just that than, say, Apocalypse Now is just a critique of U.S. foreign policy in Indochina. Human sexuality--human female sexuality--the onset of human female sexuality--these are just weapons in the war, accessible by either side. What better way to erode the resistance of the humans who comprise both the battlefield and the frontline troops than to force them to focus on areas they see as private and personal, if not shameful and animal?As in many wars, at first the wrong kinds of troops are deployed. We're supposed to be comforted by the clinical whites of modern medicine, even when they're stained red. But it becomes rapidly apparent that as much guesswork and dead-ending and thinly veiled savagery is present here as in the work of the "witch doctors" such disciplines believe themselves to have supplanted. The boundaries are blurred further by the sideline professions of the witch doctors themselves. Our very first glimpses of Father Lancaster Merrin show him to be an archaeologist, apparently of some reknown; he simply seems to have brought along, in addition to intellectual curiosity about the old gods, fear of them as well. But our protagonist witch-doctor, Father Damien Karras, does not have the regal, professorial carriage of Father Merrin. What he has is a massively sympathetic face with eyes that seem to pour forth emotion like faucets, a degree in psychology as valid as that held by any of the condescending experts, and the frightening knowledge that his faith is failing him. This modern witch doctor, who has been the latter half of his split personality, is about to see his belief in the former shaken to its foundations as well.The primary method of assault is visual. (It tends to be, in the great horror films: As Mr. Morgan puts it in The Ring, "My God, the things she'd show you"; or as the Hitchhiker puts in in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, "You like this face?") The demon (the filmmakers) show them (us) an escalating onslaught of horrors. Regan's face is wounded and made monstrous. The lights flicker in and out. Regan's head twists around like an owl's, and her tongue extends like a snake's. She levitates the bed, then she levitates herself. She flashes the face of a demon (the first apperance of which, in Father Karras's dream (we're talking about the original version of the film here; I think its earlier appearance in the special edition loses much of its power, though to be sure I'd need to ask someone who saw it for the first time that way) is in my opinion the second scariest image ever put on film). The demon statue appears behind her. And most horrifyingly--for it almost succeeds--she transforms into Father Karras's mother. As voiced by actor Jason Miller in one of the all-time great performances, the anguished cry Karras responds with--"You're not my mother!"--is like some pathetic inversion of the final words of many a dying soldier. The assault is aural, too. The demon's voice emanates incongrously from the little girl's body, as does at one point or another the voice of a homeless man and a dead English film director and a dead mother of a priest. The demon's language is obviously an assault on the ears. The otherworldy growls, screams, buzzing and screeching crescendo repeatedly. And we musn't forget the extradiegetic music, any more than we'd forget the terrific splendor of Father Merrin's spotlit arrival at the McNeil household while Regan's demon eyes stare expectantly outward. Harsh, dissonant strings, tinkling bells, ambient tones--evil has a power of beauty just as does good.And good's power is cruel just as is evil's. Good relies on strength, and on the projection of that strength. The priests shout and yell. They wrestle and restrain. They strike. They dress in uniforms, like soldiers. They wield weapons of God. They chant like the repeat of artillery: "The power of Christ compels you," over and over again, sending chills up and down the spine, over and over again until that power's compulsion is at last affected. It's a magesterial moment: At last, good is bringing out weapons big enough and hard enough to fight those that evil has used throughout.War is death, and there is death here, brutal, human death--heart attacks and defenestration are sufficient to feed the fires of this battle. And it's the sacrifice of soldiers, make no mistake about it. They submit themselves for sacrifice not because they don't fear death--clearly they do, evidenced by the fervor with which Father Karras tells Regan's mother Chris that Regan will not die--but because they do fear it, and because that fear gives them basis for comparison against the superior fear of the evil such sacrifices are meant to combat. Good (at first I accidentally typed God, but I suppose it wasn't much of an accident) demands such sacrifices without compunction. After all, this is war.My point is that, in a sense, this movie lacks that awful certainty I tend to look for in horror. There is evil, which his a horrifying notion, but there is also good, which is... leavening, if not comforting. But still I say only "in a sense," because even though evil has an opponent, we are still caught in the crossfire. At any moment we may be asked to believe the unbelievable in order to fight the unspeakable. It may cost us our faith. It may cost us our sanity. It may cost us our lives. How we rank those losses is the film's central question. And the realiztion that there are forces whose intrusion could cause that ranking to change, forever, is the horror at the movie's heart.-----Postscript: It should come as no surprise to you that in a war waged in and by a horror film, the monumental horror image is what I view to be the most lethal weapon in the arsenal. In my senior essay I did a close reading of The Exorcist, detailing the use of the monumental horror images throughout the film and the profound, "cosmic" fear they engender. Below you can find reprinted the relevant portion; to read the whole essay, click here and find out how.----- The inspiration of cosmic fear - specifically the type stemming from Catholic dogma--was an explicit thematic concern of William Peter Blatty, who adapted The Exorcist's screenplay from his own novel of the same name. He carefully constructed his story so that the demon Pazuzu, who possess young Regan MacNeil, would be more terrifying for its mental effects on those around Regan than its physical effects on Regan itself. In the novel, Father Lancaster Merrin, the missionary and archaeologist who is summoned to exorcise Regan, insists that "the demon's target is not the possessed; it is us...the observers...every person in this house." Merrin discusses this further in a conversation with the conflicted Father Damien Karras, found in another scene that was cut from the film's final cut but was present in both novel and screenplay:Fr. Karras: Why this girl? It makes no sense.Fr. Merrin: I think the point is to make us despair. To see ourselvesas...animal and ugly. To reject the notion that God could love us.Director William Friedkin stressed the importance of the idea that the film's true horror stemmed from what the demon represented in his introduction to a recent special edition video release: "...it's a story that can perhaps make you question your own value system, even your own sanity, because it strongly and realistically tries to make the case for spiritual forces in the universe, both good and evil....[t]his had to be a realistic film about inexplicable events."With their unequalled, specifically representative power, monumental horror-images were the logical choice to convey these themes in the film. Unlike The Shining, however, The Exorcist focuses on the second, more literally "monumental" type of horror-image. From the beginning, Pazuzu is associated with monuments and statues. During a dig in Iraq, Fr. Merrin accidentally unearths the head of a small Pazuzu statue after removing the St. Joseph's medal that had been placed mysteriously nearby. At that moment we first hear the unearthly buzzing sound we come to associate with the demon; the discovery of this mini-monument appears to have "unleashed" him once again. Later that day, a shaken and disturbed Merrin travels to the site of an ancient, ruined fortress. Though he earlier told a fellow scholar that he was leaving because "there is something [he] must do," he seems shocked to discover exactly what this "something" turns out to be. As Merrin stands in the ruins, a shadow covers his face. He looks up to see an enormous statue of Pazuzu looming in the center of the frame, blotting out the harsh glow of the midday sun. As droning, atonal music is heard on the soundtrack, Merrin climbs a rocky hill; the camera rapidly swings around his head to reveal the statue, now fully visible, atop a hill opposite Merrin's. A series of quick cuts follow: a startled Merrin turns to see an Arab atop a similar hill, watching the proceedings (rifle-toting Arab security guards had threatened Merrin at the gates to the ruins moments before); he turns again and sees two wild dogs, fighting and growling in the desert. Finally, he turns back to the statue. The camera zooms in slowly on Merrin's face, then on the statue's face. Finally, as the dogs' angry growls become distorted, merging with the droning music, the buzzing sound we heard earlier, and what appears to be a woman screaming, we cut to a final shot of Merrin and the statue, standing on opposite ends of the screen, facing off in an archetypal image of good versus evil. This in turn dissolves to a shot of the setting sun above the barren desert landscape, which itself dissolves to a placid aerial view of autumnal Georgetown. The bizarre sounds gradually fade out.By first showing us Pazuzu not in his "real," demonic form, but in a representational, monumental form, Friedkin offers us a hint as to the true threat that the demon represents. Pazuzu is a holdover from an outmoded, ancient belief system, an embodiment of an evil for which the modern, complacent, atheistic America into which it has been introduced (in this very sequence) cannot account. Fr. Merrin seems to understand this threat simply by gazing upon its graven image in the ruins.Pazuzu itself appears to understand the power of the monumental horror-image to concretize evil in a supremely disturbing fashion; in fact, the next true monumental horror-image we see - a desecration of a statue of the Virgin Mary - is its doing. A series of leisurely cranes, pans, and tracks follow a bespectacled priest as he enters Georgetown University's chapel to place flowers by the statues of the Holy Family. As he crosses the altar after placing the first batch in front of St. Joseph, he stops short, and the camera swoops in on his face as he looks up. We cut to a still shot of the Virgin, centered and illuminated by the light from the chapel's windows. Crude red and black breasts and an enormous, conical penis have been affixed to the statue, whose hands have also been painted blood red. The priest reacts with a horrified whisper of "Oh God."This horror-image, once again literally "monumental," comes a solid half hour into the film. We have yet to see anything explicitly supernatural or violent; nevertheless, the fact that something profoundly wrong is happening has been undeniably confirmed by this indisputable, literally concrete depiction of evil. The defiance of contemporary Judeo-Christian conceptual schemes implicit in the ancient Pazuzu statue is made explicit in this direct violation of a Christian icon. Furthermore, it is worthy of note that by this point in the film, Regan has been shown to be an amateur sculptor. As the gaudy coloring and childish workmanship of this desecration indicate, Regan was the vessel in which the demon committed its crime; her talents neatly lend themselves to its mission to boldly proclaim the presence of irrational, diabolical forces in the world. Pazuzu, it would seem, picks its victims well. The use of the monumental horror-image reaches a feverish peak in the film's climactic exorcism sequence. In this sequence, Pazuzu's possession of Regan (which often displays inanimate, "statuesque" characteristics: catatonia, somnambulism, immobility, and of course the infamous "head-spinning" special effect, made possible by the use of an actual mannequin) becomes explicitly monumental in nature. After a series of seismic tremors that nearly destroy her bedroom and a vicious verbal assault against Fr. Karras in which she blames him for his mother's death, Regan bursts her bonds, her eyes going white. She slowly levitates off her bed, arms outstretched in a blasphemous, satanic parody of Christ's crucifixion. After further earthquake-like shocks to the room, we cut to a shot from above, in which the Regan-thing, bathed in cold blue-white light, is placed dead-center. This "vulgar display of power" stuns both Merrin and Karras; they respond to it by repeatedly invoking a rival power, that of Christ. After she finally sinks back down onto the bed, she assaults Karras as he attempts to re-fasten her restraints. Another tremor sends Karras and Merrin crashing against the wall, where they look up to see the supposedly bound Regan, arms outstretched, silhouetted against a strange blue light. The clear graphic similarity of this shot to the introductory shot of Pazuzu's monument is made unmistakable by the inexplicable appearance of that very statue behind Regan's bed, accompanied by the same buzzing, droning, and screaming heard during the original sequence.Regan's levitation and the subsequent appearance of Pazuzu are the one-two punch apotheosis of the horror of The Exorcist. Their near-total violation of moral, spiritual, and physical norms can only be described as obscene. Displaying nearly all the characteristics of the archetypal monumental horror-image, they clearly demonstrate the unforgettable power of such images to make "real" the unreal, the abnormal, the things that should not be. Their accompaniment by cataclysmic physical trauma to the bedroom reinforces the fashion in which such images rend the fabric of reality that Karras and Merrin have viewed as normal all their lives. Their exhaustion at the end of this scene stems not from any great physical ordeal, but from the tremendous toll these monumental horror-images are taking on "[their] value system, even [their] own sanity." Such are the effects of horror at its best (or worst?) - the horror of cosmic fear. Video9731@blogcritics.org Fri, 31 Oct 2003 12:47:32 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/31/123923.php Sean T. Collins(Originally posted at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat by Sean T. Collins.)The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 104. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, dir. Tobe HooperBack in college I lived with the same six other guys for three years. All of us had different interests, almost all of us had different majors (I think there were two history guys, but one of those was also a musician, and the rest of us were involved in film studies, architecture, art, economics, and pre-med stuff), but one thing we all had in common is that any time I brought home a movie, everyone was up for watching it. It pretty much didn't matter what it was, whether it was rented for pleasure or for an assignment, whether it was something they'd been meaning to see or something they'd never heard of--next to playing Mario Kart, watching movies and then bullshitting about them was our favorite pastime. (Beer, pot, and sex were up there too, I think.) It was always fascinating to hear the different reactions and interpretations that would come from this disparate group of people. Except in the case of this film. With this film, everyone reacted exactly the same: like they'd just been involved in a car wreck.The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the most thoroughly disturbing movie on this list--hands down, I would say. After seeing it for the first time I could not for the life of me understand how it had come to be lumped into the same slasher category with the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th sequels, to say nothing of the Slumber Party Massacres and Prom Nights and what have you. Yes, there are slashers involved in both, but then again there are car accidents involved in both Crash and The Cannonball Run. This movie is simply in a class by itself. If there is a more intense, more brutal movie about murder out there, I'm not sure I want to see it.This is another one of those dark fairy-tale movies, the kind with a house of horrors and a dark forest, the kind where plot is first simply pragmatic and second disposed of entirely. It concerns a group of five young people--two couples and the parapalegic brother of one of the girls--who take a trip to the grave site of the siblings' grandfather, which they've heard on the news has fallen victim to a sudden outbreak of grave desecration. While out there, they decide to take a trip to the old family house, now abandoned. Upon exploring another house nearby, they encounter another family--one of deranged cannibalistic killers. The primary engine of murder for this clan is a huge idiot killing machine named Leatherface, so called for the masks he wears, which are fashioned from human skin. It seems unnecessary to detail the plot any further.Superficially, the movie has much in common with its neverending horde of imitators: a blade-wielding killer in a mask, a group of silly and attractive teenagers who are slaughtered one by one, a "final girl" who outlives her friends. But similarities end there. Take the masked killer--this isn't some mute cipher gussied up in weakly supernatural trappings to make him some sort of dark-side Superman with a machete, like Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers; this is a lunatic with roots. He seems to be mentally retarded, and given what we see of his environment he may well be the product of inbreeding. He gibbers like a baby, squeals like a pig, reacts with grotesque obesiance when scolded and capers like a dervish when thwarted. He even sports different skin masks for different occasions--a motherly one when cooking, a made-up glamour-face when entertaining a guest--in a horrific parody of normal human etiquette. Gunnar Hansen, the actor who plays him, didn't just conjure some bogeyman out of the ether to guide his performance--he studied mental patients and the severely retarded. There's a there there in Leatherface--and that the there is this disgusting abscess of humanity is what makes him so frightening a figure.Then there are the kids who get killed. First of all, they're vaguely hippie-ish; what with the fact that they get torn to pieces in an all-American state like Texas, the Vietnam metaphor is inescapable, and in this case actually appropriate. (The spectre of Vietnam loomed large over the horror films of the late 60s and early 70s, and was, I think, much more interestingly explored there than in many films explicitly about the subject. I suppose this goes without saying, but I for one feel I learned a lot more about the era from Night of the Living Dead than I did from Forrest Gump.) Moreover, they're not dead-obvious targets--there's no pot-smoking, no sex, no drinking going on. Hell, they went to go make sure their grandpa's grave was okay, and then went on to revisit the place they spent many happy childhood hours. You can't get more innocuous than that; you can't find less of a reason to be killed than that either. And yes, 4 out of the 5 kids are attractive, the girls in particular--but even what appear to be T&A shots end up being little more than set-ups for later horrors. Take, for example, the memorable low-angle tracking shot that follows Pam as she walks toward Leatherface's house: At first we think this is just an excuse to gaze longingly at the seeming miles of skin on display outside the almost nonexistent confines of her skimpy clothing, but we learn within minutes that this was really intended to impress upon us the fact that her shirt has no back. (How we learn this I'll just leave to the movie, but it may be the most shocking scene in a film that's full of them.) And Sally, our "final girl," is undoubtedly beautiful, but those secondary sex characteristics filmmakers seem so enamored so often of are of no avail to her: Her long, lovely blonde hair catches in the brambles and branches of the woods she flees through; her wretched, unmistakably and pathetically sexual pleas for mercy to Leatherface's family--"I'll do anything you want"--fall on deaf ears. Sexuality isn't being punished here, because sexuality is a non-issue. These kids are nothing but meat.It's that angle that makes this film so difficult to watch. You're watching a group of kids be dehumanized by sub-humans. If that makes it sound unpleasant, then I'm failing, because it's so far beyond that. Watching it today--and I've watched this movie a lot--I was still stunned by how barbarically savage and disgusting it is. As many critics have noted, what disturbs us isn't gore, since there's very little actual gore on display. Rather, it's the unremitting cruelty of it, a cruelty devoid of style, slickness, and attractiveness. The movie looks and feels like a snuff film, or perhaps an animal-rights activist's hidden-camera footage of a slaughterhouse, seen on a copy of a copy of a copy. It begins with grainy, underexposed flashes of a dead body, segues into a long, lingering shot on a monument made of corpses to a soundtrack of news-report atrocities. Then you're treated to the constant spiteful whining of the lonely, unlikeable crippled brother; the addle-brained self-abuse of the greasy-haired, facially disfigured hitchhiker; and from there, total madness that does not let up until the final frame. In there somewhere--you'll want to forget exactly where--is the debut of the sledge, Pam's discovery of the bone room and subsequent placement for later disposal, Sally's discovery of Grandpa and Grandma, the cook's sadistic and cackling use of his broomstick, Grandpa's snack, and of course the dinner sequence, possibly the most excruciatingly awful scene I've ever seen. It's just awfulness from beginning to end. That it ends with laughter and dancing is the cruelest part of all.If you insist, I'll come up with a film to compare this one to: John Boorman's Deliverance. They're both fables of a sick frontier, one that was never the heroic homestead of free men it was made out to be. Everything's twisted inward and collapsed on itself: the cars are rusted and stand where they stopped, the children are inbred and idiot, the adults are depraved and pointlessly murderous, modernity passed through only to destroy the small remaining possiblity of normal life, graves are upended and emptied, and nature is mute and hostile. Back in school I wrote a paper comparing the two films, and even though I had the idea to begin with I was amazed how similar they really are. You can download the essay here. Next to my senior essay, it's the academic writing I'm most proud of--it's concrete close-reading where this little post is kind of vague in an attempt to capture the ineffable, blah blah blah. You're welcome to view these two brilliant horror films as a double feature, if you think you stand a chance of stomaching them. It's difficult even for me.There have been many gratuitously cruel movies, of course--slick little productions where the girls get blood on their tits and the men behind the camera gaze greedily at the bottom line. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a necessarily cruel movie, which is a very different animal indeed. I think there's a value in seeing the worst, the absolute worst, and that's what Hooper shows us--as clearly and as unrelentingly as if his life depended on it. There's no exit, no escape hatch, no levity or joy or beauty in this world at all. It's a total vision; indeed, a totalitarian vision. Watching this film is like being inocculated against some nightmare virus. It really is like a car crash; the closing credits may be an airbag, but you'll never forget what you've been through. Video9730@blogcritics.org Fri, 31 Oct 2003 12:39:23 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/31/123142.php Sean T. Collins(Originally posted at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat by Sean T. Collins.)The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 95. The Ring, dir. Gore VerbinskiFor once, I don't have to recount my first time watching a movie. I already did so a few months back, on this very blog. The movie was The Ring, and I was scared as hell.The most recently made film on my list, it's very much a product of the genre's history. The Shining, Hellraiser, Jacob's Ladder, The Blair Witch Project, Shivers, Videodrome, Candyman, Psycho, Rear Window, The Silence of the Lambs, The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, Twin Peaks, Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Scream, Poltergeist, and The Sixth Sense are all referenced (as are creepy moments in Fight Club, Blow Up and The Conversation, for that matter). Astoundingly, though, the film manages not to be at all derivative or lazy. It's simply too relentless for that.This is a film that deploys the Monumental Horror Image with almost unbearable regularity; to paraphrase a famous review of Stephen King's It, The Ring is to the Monumental Horror Image what the Sears Roebuck catalog is to things to buy. A chair, a ladder, a television set, a tree, a well, a mirror, a girl, the ring itself--they all stand there in the center of the screen, mute indictments of normality, sanity, reality itself. They should not be, and yet there they are, over and over and over again, each time imbued with more menace than the last.This is also a film that embraces the horror of the small detail, the little things that just don't seem right: defaced pictures, distorted photographs, a fly on the TV screen, unexpected phone calls, static on the television. (It seems safe to say that this film will have caused more people to have nervous breakdowns when the cable goes out than any movie since Poltergeist.) Just as the monumental horror images shatter our composure, these "minimal" horror images undermine it. No scene is "safe," because the filmmakers establish that horror can be found anywhere, in anything. (Especially, thanks to one of the all-time great shock moments in film history, in closets.)It's interesting to note that they do so from the very beginning of the film. I've found that many of the best horror films begin with a long, slow build-up of tension, with some hints of the horror to come but very little actual action in that direction. Here, however, we're only five or six lines of dialogue into the movie before the central horrific conceit is introduced. Sure enough, the opening sequence doesn't end without claiming a victim.The filmmakers are also smart enough to tie the discovery of horror directly into the plot, which is essentially a search for information. The protagonists are a reporter and a videographer, and the instruments they use to capture and convey information are lushly fetishized throughout the film: lines of type, pens, paper, videocassettes, televisions, editing decks, telephones, cell phones, answering machines, files, microfilm, frames of videotape, photographs, cameras, hands and fingers (with which we write and type and press play and record), and, of course, eyes. With televisions, telephones and a videotape as its central vehicles of horror, this is a prime example of Information Age anxiety in art.But the most disturbing facet of this intensely disturbing film is, as is often the case with great horror, one of cruelty. When you think about it, it's actually kind of obvious that all horror is about cruelty: "Look at what we're doing to your precious status quo. Look at what we're doing to everything you believe. We're destroying it. We're destroying you." But this is a different status quo than that of the small towns and suburbs that are so often the locus of horror. I'm not referring to the traditional business wherein the kids who smoke pot and fuck get chopped to pieces by the masked killer--no, not at all. This isn't rebellion that's being punished by the motiveless agent of horror--it's a whole new status quo that's being destroyed, one of leveling, of comfort, an "I'm OK, You're OK" world. Our hero, Rachel, is a foul-mouthed absentee parent who has her son Aidan call her by her first name. The kid's father, who Rachel insists must "grow up," talks to Aidan as though they're on the same level: "I just don't think I'd be a good father," he explains to the little boy the same way he'd explain it to Rachel, or to one of his buddies. Moreover, Rachel views the terrifying supernatural occurrences that befall her as a mystery she can solve, preferrably with comforting life-lessons about love and acceptance. She believes that heartless psychiatric workers and a domineering, abusive patriarch are to blame for it all, and that the murderous "sickness" that has infected her world can be soothed away through understanding. The filmmakers aid us in buying into this, slowly transforming the movie into a relatively traditional beat-the-clock mystery.In the end, though, we understand nothing.I won't go into it any more than that--I don't want to spoil this film, which should be viewed as unspoiled as possible--except to say that depictions of evil and malice as purposeless and uncompromising as this one are rare, perhaps mercifully so. Mockeries of goodness, of the soporific means of understanding the presence of badness in our world that we feed ourselves, are rarely this vicious, this unrelenting, this frightening. We're scared, alright. And we're more scared still, because we've been shown that the presence of that which scares us will never, ever end. Video9729@blogcritics.org Fri, 31 Oct 2003 12:31:42 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/31/122636.php Sean T. Collins(Originally posted at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat by Sean T. Collins.)The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 86. The Silence of the Lambs, dir. Jonathan DemmeFor years I wrote this movie off. "It's not really 'horror,'" I argued, "it's just a thriller." Thrillers are about cat-and-mouse games and things jumping out at you and (in my opinion, mere) suspense, not the genuine dread and hopelessness and irreversible transgressiveness and awful certainty of true horror. Horror was the stuff of nightmares; thrillers were detective work. Bo-ring. I saw the movie once back in high school and quickly forgot about it.Then the nascent Film Society at Yale got hold of a print and had a screening. I thought it might be fun to give it another viewing, knowing what I'd by then learned of filmmaking. Also, it was a good excuse to get high and sit in the dark in a theatre and watch an ostensibly scary movie with one of my roommates. So that's what we did. And this time I realized that something was going on here. Seen in the proper aspect ration on a big screen in the dark, the intelligence of Tak Fujimoto's cinematography became far more apparent than it ever did on a little TV screen in my basement. Sucked into the world of the film in the way that only stoned college kids can be, I quickly noticed that the conversations between Jodie Foster's Agent Starling and Anthony Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter, Lecter's face was always framed much tighter, allowing him to nearly fill the screen and dwarfing Starling by comparison. Some more thought had gone into this, I realized, than just working out the business of whodunit.The final step in this film's path to rehabilitation in my eyes took place about a year and a half ago. This is back when The Missus and I were engaged and still living separately. She has to get up hours earlier than me for work, so after saying goodnight to her the night was still young for me. Usually what I'd do is rent a movie, grab some fast food (I tended not to eat dinner till after 11), go home, and eat and watch. One night I decided to give The Silence of the Lambs one more go. (Actually, it was a bit of a hassle--I had to go back to Blockbuster when I discovered the DVD I'd rented was fullscreen. "Didn't you check before you rented it?" the clerk asked. "Why on Earth would I assume a DVD is fullscreen? What the hell is the point of a DVD that isn't widescreen? If a DVD is fullscreen it should be in great big block letters like a Surgeon General's warning!" I got to exchange it for a widescreen version for free.) So, biting into my Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, I cued up the movie.I ended up doing this every night for about a month.(Granted, people seem split on what aspect of this is more horrifying--the fact that I watched The Silence of the Lamb every night for weeks, the fact that I ate McDonald's or Taco Bell with similar regularity, or the fact that I did both these things at the same time. But I digress.) Even to this day, I literally cannot believe how good this movie is. That's not meant to be hyperbole, you know--it's just an accurate description of how I feel about this film. Watching it today, I found myself near tears twice, not even by anything particularly heart-wrenching or tear-jerking, but just by how well the film portrays a world that is thoroughly sad, sad down to the air and the water and the soil. If there's a more effective depiction of the horror of living on film than this one, I've yet to see it.My guess is that a plot recap is not necessary, so I'll just say that this movie is about how miserable it is to be a woman in a man's world. No, honestly, listen: Watch the way Demme and his cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto (who also worked on Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense and Signs) frame the close-ups of the men who come in contact with Clarice: Agent Crawford, Dr. Chilton, Barney the guard, her fellow agents during combat training, the cops at the funeral parlor, the SWAT team lieutenant, and especially Hannibal Lecter himself--they all stare directly into the camera, making the viewer as aware of the power of their gazes as is Clarice herself. Eyes are weapons in this world; witness the night-vision goggles that give Buffalo Bill both a practical advantage and a psychological feeling of super-poweredness, goggles that are employed in one of the most terrifying audience-identification sequences since Halloween, or even Psycho. The threatening nature of the looks Clarice receives are brought home when compared to the gazes she does not find threatening: of all the looking-directly-into-the-camera/at-Clarice closeups we see, only her friend Ardelia (a woman) is stared directly back at by Clarice herself. They're on the same level, and we as the viewers are permitted to join them as, in their carved-out safe haven (Clarice is even wearing pajamas), they unravel the clue that cracks the case. There's also the two goofy entymologists Clarice comes to for help--like many of the other men in the film, they clearly desire her, one even going so far as to admit he's hitting on her, but this time Clarice takes it in stride. The explanation is visible: one wears coke-bottle glasses, and the other has a lazy eye. Their threat is thereby neutered. After all, as Dr. Lecter points out in his explanation of Buffalo Bill's pathology, he kills because he covets, and "we covet what we see." Seeing is not believing--it is destroying.If I'm making this all sound like some hamfisted attempt to adapt Laura Mulvey's theories on the male gaze whole-cloth, I'm doing something wrong. The points being made here are specific ones, tied into the plot, and not just reflexive pseudofeminist wonkery. Clarice Starling is a woman in a governmental agency dominated almost entirely by men. The very first time we see her, she's climbing uphill; and before long we discover that she's running an obstacle course. Her boss slights her in order to curry favor with local authorities; a psychiatrist hits on her, then dismisses her reason for being sent in to see Lecter as simply "to turn him on." Meanwhile, Buffalo Bill, though on the surface a transsexual, is (as Lecter assures us) nothing of the sort; rather, he began killing women because he apparently couldn't have the one he wanted. His behavior is littered with signs of pathological misogyny and homophobia. Those who criticized the movie as homophobic itself apparently missed the fact that his lisping limp-wristed routine is a mockery of gays, that as a serial killer of women he can reliably be presumed to be a heterosexuality, that there are even pictures on his wall of him cavorting with strippers. Lecter spots these manifestations of misogyny and works them for all they're worth, repeatedly suggesting that the men in Starling's life have sexual designs on her, and ruthlessly mocking the maternal actions (and power suit) of Senator Martin, the mother of Buffalo Bill's latest kidnap victim. The thorough contempt for women is made plainest by Bill himself, when he mocks the screams of his victim, pulling at his shirt to simulate breasts. To me, this is as grotesque as the famous scene in which Bill tucks his penis between his legs to ape the body of a woman. In both cases, what's being condemned by the filmmakers is not inappropriately feminine behavior, but raw hatred of women--which is nothing more or less than a socially acceptable form of hatred itself.If I seem to be ignoring the most commonly discussed aspects of this film--the thrills and the performances--I apologize, because in both cases it's as good as everyone says. The garage sequence, the escape sequence, and of course the big switcheroo and visit to Bill's basement at the end of the film are as riveting and pulse-pounding as thrillers can get. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins simply disappear into their roles. Foster gives a performance of excruciating melancholy. Hopkins delivers each line so well one can hardly imagine them being spoken any other way--if his subsequent scenery devouring in movie after movie were to put him on the path to thespian Hell, this role insures he won't go any lower than Purgatory, methinks. And please don't forget the criminally overlooked Ted Levine, whose pathetic mania is both skin-crawling and, in a weird way, heartbreaking. I think that the greatness of this movie is often lost in the minds of the public--lost amidst the thrills and chills, or the countless "Greatest Villains of All Time" hype about Hannibal Lecter and the concomitant overemphasis of the fava beans bit and the gag at the movie's end. But this is a real horror movie, about real horror. It's scary and haunting and so, so sad, all ruined towns and wasted lives and regret. That's what I realized when I watched it over and over again--I think it makes us scream so that we don't end up crying. Video9727@blogcritics.org Fri, 31 Oct 2003 12:26:36 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/31/121754.php Sean T. Collins(Originally posted at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat by Sean T. Collins.)When I began my month-long horrorfest, the illustrious Eve Tushnet, no stranger to the macabre herself, asked me what I thought of The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, by author David J. Skal. Turns out that the book was one of those tomes that I'd bought at some point but had never actually gotten around to reading. Spurred on by Eve's question, I've spent the last few days plowing through the thing on the train. (Thank God for the commute, eh?)It was... okay.Actually, parts of it were quite good. Skal assigns himself a suitably monstrous task: to chronicle the development of horror a cultural phenomenon, focusing primarily on the 20th century, and America, and film. In some sections he does a fairly bang-up job. His analysis of 1931 (an almost apocalyptically productive year for the horror film, introducing as it did the definitive film versions of Dracula & Frankenstein, an Academy Award-winning version of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, and the notorious parade of deformity and excess known as Freaks) is both exhaustive and authoritative. Skal also convincingly summarizes the hidden real-world fears that manifest themselves in horror film's different "cycles": the unresolved trauma of World War I, the looming spectre of World War II, Vietnam, the sexual revolution and its attendant reproductive-science advancements and setbacks, AIDS; in one particularly masterful chapter Skal nails one 1950s horror/sci-fi trope after another, citing dozens of films inspired by the Bomb Scare, the Red Scare, the Juvenile Delinquency Scare, and the stress of the TV-induced Information Age. Skal also makes the occasional choice that's both unorthodox and wise, such as his examination of the video for Michael Jackson's "Thriller"--one I've long held to be a criminally undiscussed cornerstone of contemporary horror filmmaking (particularly due to its all but unrivalled impact on popular culture).Moreover, Skal displays the righteous rage of the horror fan--I know it well--in going after some of the more obnoxious nemeses of the genre, including the old Hays Office Production Code, the Catholic Legion of Decency, feminist watchdog groups, self-appointed culture-guardian film critics, and (most viciously) the MPAA (an organization that deserves to be cast as the "winner" in a film adaptation of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" if ever there was one) and Dr. Frederic Wertham (whose one-man war on comic books as the source of juvenile delinquency was so successful in spite of his near-total lack of non-fabricated corroborating evidence that the industry is still reeling from its effects some 50 years later). As Eve pointed out in her own review of the book, Skal's no fan of Ronald Reagan's; I found his bias a lot less pervasive or distracting than Eve did, though, possibly because I'm more sympathetic to the anti-Regan point of view (for the record: driving a stake through the heart of International Communism? Good! Using poor people to sharpen the stake? Bad!), possibly because the horror filmmakers of the Vietnam era through the 1980s generally did lean left (at least insofar as their antipathy toward segregation, the war, the crimes of the Nixon administration, and rampant consumerism was concerned) but mainly because Skal offsets this liberalish politics by displaying skepticism, even occasional antipathy, toward a variety of common right-wing targets, including psychiatry, the Pill, women in the workforce, sexual liberation, body piercing, the fashion industry, and so forth. But the real problem with Skal is not his sociopolitical analysis--it's his horror-historical one. Skal subtitled his book A Cultural History of Horror; unfortunately he uses the amorphousness of that second word to justify an arbitrary placement of emphasis on certain aspects of horror art while unreasonably ignoring others, all in an ill-conceived and quixotic quest to Say Something About Life, accuracy be damned. Skal's previous efforts in the horror-crit field include books on the long road Dracula took on its path from book to movie and a biography of Tod Browning, Dracula's (and Freaks's) director; it's unsurprising and disappointing, then, that a full third of The Monster Show is devoted to detailing these pet subjects in the guise of using Tod Browning's life as a metaphor, that of America-as-freak-show. Skal inflates the importance of these films and filmmakers (particularly that of the influential but still obscure Freaks) at the direct expense of other important facets of early film horror (Frankenstein is by no means uncovered, but it's goofy to give it no more space than Freaks; James Whale, director of Frankenstein and its Bride, is given scant mention compared to the far less technically competent, and not really even all that more interesting, Tod Browning). Skal also puts a bizarrely strong emphasis on the gruesome work of photographer Diane Arbus: Well and good, but I can think of several equally or more viable candidates for giving the low art of horror the gloss of high-art legitimacy--Dali, Magritte, Bacon (Skal does at least try with him), Warhol, Mapplethorpe, Reed, Bowie, Fellini, Scorsese, Lynch...the selection of Arbus seems due almost completely to the fact that she's known to have seen Freaks in a movie theater.Skal also misreads the third horror archetype (in addition to Frankenstein's Monster and Dracula; he also cites Freaks, but c'mon, already) as Jekyll & Hyde; J&H were the obvious inspiration for the Hollywood werewolf concept, but the Stevenson story was merely the John the Baptist for the Jesus Christ of Lon Cheney Jr's Wolf Man (linked inextricably with the Bela Lugosi Dracula and the Boris Karloff Frankenstein by generation after generation of American kids, who really never have a definitive Jekyll/Hyde image in mind). In a misguided attempt to pinpoint the moment at which Dracula and Frankenstein (the monster) became linked in the public consciousness, he spends a chapter detailing the misadventures of one Horace Liveright, an American bohemian and would-be multimedia impresario who finagled the screen rights to Dracula and attempted to do the same with Frankenstein. But Liveright failed in the latter attempt; why Skal focuses on him instead of any number of the members of the British theatrical troupe that formed the backbone of the story (producing and performing, as they did, simultaneous stage adaptations of the two horror classics) is a complete mystery. Additionally, Skal gives short shrift to the zombie and serial-killer/mass-murderer archetypes, too, discussing them (when he does so at all) as subsets of the Vampire/Dracula image, whereas in horror films and literature of today they're clearly their own entities, drawing on their own sets of themes and fears.It's not until Skal reaches the 1960s, though, that the book really loses the plot. He abandons his almost strictly chronlogical approach for one that bounces erratically back and forth between the 60s, 70s, and 80s, nominally in an attempt to point out more of the underlying tropes which he had previously pinpointed quite well. This time, however, all he really manages is a cogent summary of the birth-trauma cycle that began with Rosemary's Baby, included much of David Cronenberg's work, and reached its apotheosis with Alien and Eraserhead. Even there he's sloppy, not even bothering to mention The Omen and perfunctorily shoehorning the complex issues of The Exorcist into a two-or-three-graf subsection. The slasher cycle is hardly mentioned, excised in favor of exploring the real-life subculture that's as fixated on Dracula as Skal seems to be and launching into a condescending analysis of the work of Stephen King and Bret Easton Ellis. The seismic, seminal King Kong, Psycho, and The Exorcist are inarguably three of the most important horror films of the 20th Century, yet a gossipy chronicle of the life and times of Maila Nurmi, better known as the schlocky-sexy 1950s TV personality Vampira, takes up twice the space in the book of those three films combined. As if that weren't unforgivable enough, films like Night of the Living Dead, the Hammer horror pictures, Kubrick's The Shining, and (the vastly overrated but still important) A Nightmare on Elm Street (as well as its sequels) are barely mentioned, while an almost comically wide range of key films from Metropolis to M to the Creature from the Black Lagoon to Peeping Tom to The Birds to the Italian gialli directors to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to Jaws to Halloween to the Friday the 13th series to Aliens aren't even discussed at all! And this is to say nothing of movies that, while not horror per se, helped pave the way for the increased viscerality and intensity of modern horror: You'll find bupkis about Tittitcut Follies, Bonnie & Clyde, The Wild Bunch, A Clockwork Orange, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Pulp Fiction, Saving Private Ryan, etc.; Un Chien Andalou and Fellini Satyricon get one-line throwaway mentions. Even contemporary horror's real-life analogues--the modern-day media superstars known as serial killers--go undiscussed; Gacy and Dahmer are mentioned in passing, Manson, Whitman, Speck, Ramirez, Fish, and the Stranglers Hillside and Boston not at all. The JFK assassination is also glossed over, nearly unforgivable given that the Zapruder film could well be seen as the most popular splatter flick of all time. As for the horror-genre influence on the work of the 1970s young bucks like Lucas and Scorsese, fugghedaboudit; the closest you'll come is a recounting of Coppola's over-ambitious Dracula remake and an anecdote from Steven Spielberg about how he used to love reading Famous Monsters of Filmland.(Actually, Skal's socio-politics do get problematic, even bizarre. For the most part it's limited to the excessive but harmless Freudian phallocentrism that Eve detected--for the love of David, man, the poses of the Aurora model-kit monsters did not secretly evoke masturbation--but occasionally, as in his out-of-left-field assault on gender-change operations as Frankensteinian affronts to womanhood or his paranoid rant about the Human Immunodeficiency Virus not really being the cause of AIDS (is he taking med school classes with Thabo Mbeki?), the author veers into bona fide crackpot territory. It's as distracting as it is disturbing.)Am I glad I read the book? Oh, sure. I can't get enough of this kind of stuff, and as I said there's plenty of little diamonds in that great big rough. But the gaping holes in Skal's canon are too wide to be ignored even by the most charitable horror fan. I said before that Skal gave himself too much leeway with the second word of his subtitle; I think that ultimately what killed this beast was the first word. This truly was a cultural history of horror--David J. Skal's. The cultural history of horror has yet to be written. Books9726@blogcritics.org Fri, 31 Oct 2003 12:17:54 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/31/120919.php Sean T. Collins(Originally posted at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat by Sean T. Collins.)Today's film just missed inclusion in The 13 Days of Halloween. Actually, it was part of the list as late as this morning, but a little more thought on my part led me to conclude that structurally, it's not quite horror--it doesn't have that beginning-to-end crescendo of suspense, it doesn't have that allegorical/fable/fairty tale feel that most horror has at its heart. Quite possibly, this is because, in its joy and its terror, its humor and its cruelty, its beauty and its gut-wrenching ugliness, it's true.The film is Heavenly Creatures, directed by Peter Jackson and starring Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet (in her film debut). Based on a true story, it centers on Pauline and Juliette, two teenage girls in 1950s New Zeland. Pauline is a sullen introvert, Juliette a boisterous, self-confident transfer student from England and sundry other countries to which she's been either shipped or dragged by her free-thinking university-faculty parents. Together they construct an intense friendship, and a mutual fantasy world of medieval romances and Mario Lanza songs. They fall in love. And they go mad.I'm surprised at this point to find myself at something of a loss for words. It's been a while since I've seen this movie, and in watching it today with Amanda I was actually stunned to discover just how intense an experience it is. The first three-quarters of the movie are just about as delightful a cinematic experience as you're likely to come across. Lynskey and Winslet are quite simply revelatory in their roles as girlfriends completely besotted with one another's talents, intelligence, beauty, and joie de vivre, all of which seem to them compounded exponentially when they're together. It's the kind of friendship, so I've been told, that lots of girls have, one just as intense as first love with a boy, or even full-grown love with a man. Jackson, who at this point has so proven himself to be a cinematic visionary that no additional evidence is even necessary, demonstrates here much of the virtuosity he displays in his Lord of the Rings films. Then as now, his knack for harnessing gorgeous, inventive visuals to convey human drama and emotion is second to none. The whirling, constantly on-the-move camerawork that follows Juliette & Pauline's joyous bike ride and Lanza-scored romp through the woods in their skivvies captures the giddy heady rush of happiness the girls are immersed in. Things get more elegant when, after bad news comes down from Juliette's parents, the girls find "the key to the Fourth World," and the countryside around them morphs into a secret garden of unicorns and giant butterflies. Then there are the shocking and hilarious moments when the human representatives of those twin bugbears of troubled adolescence, the Church and psychiatry, are dispatched by the clay-sculpted prince of the girls' fantasy world. And of course there are our journeys into that world, Borovnia, a precursor to the kingdoms and creatures of Middle Earth, this time stemming not from the painstaking recreation of an Oxford don's detailed notes, but the fevered, ecstatic scrawl of two girls falling in love with each other and out of touch with the real world. It all happens so convincingly, so entertainingly, so beautifully that, as Amanda put it to me tonight, you almost feel guilty of conspiracy when it all goes to hell.The final quarter of the film comprises some of the most heartwrenching, nerve-wracking moments of cinema I've ever come across. One moment you're in the tragicomic world of teenagers in love, one you're intimately familiar with even if not under these specific circumstances; the next thing you know, it is announced to you that you are on a collision course with sheer, pointless insanity. You spend those minutes with your heart and stomach lurching around your ribcage like drunken dance partners. You alternate between sympathy and revulsion, a feeling of disbelief and a feeling (one you know is the right one to have, you've known it since the opening sequence) of inevitability. And when it happens, it's not just bad--it's awful. The sounds alone are pure horror. And it helps no one, and there's no point to it, none at all, and it happens anyway, and your ship pulls away, and you're left standing on the shore, crying (I've seen this how many times and I still cried?), and alone.No monsters, no chainsaws. Just the horror of the inevitable, the horror of a decision that cannot be undone. The horror of the human. Video9724@blogcritics.org Fri, 31 Oct 2003 12:09:19 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/31/115809.php Sean T. Collins(Originally posted at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat by Sean T. Collins.)The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 77. Lost Highway, dir. David LynchI'm finding it difficult to come up with something interesting to say about this movie, arguably the most critically divisive film in the already divisive ouevre of David Lynch. The first time I saw it I spent its duration riveted, then felt that give way to borderline outrage after the credits rolled: What the hell just happened? Was it the work of a genius, or just lousy storytelling? And can we please get that scary fucking man with no eyebrows out of my head before I have to go to sleep? I probably don't have to draw you a map from there. I'm a horror guy, and this movie scared the bejesus out of me. Anything that frightening deserved another viewing. So (with a great deal of encouragement from The Missus), I gave it a second chance.And a third. And a fourth. And God knows how many others throughout my entire college career. Lost Highway was not so much a film for me and my friends as it was a five-hour experience: two hours to watch, three hours to think and talk it over. We advanced all sorts of theories to explain the bizarre leaps in narrative logic, the nature of the various doppelgangers and doubles, and the origin of the Mystery Man (Robert Blake in his second-most disturbing performance ever). We marvelled at the gorgeous cinematography, which particularly in the first segment of the film gives everything an elegantly morbid, textural feel, like immersing the palm of your hand in a vat of black nailpolish; and at the brilliant use of sound, which coaxes as much menace and emotion from the sound of breathing as it does from a soundtrack that's at turns ambient and roaring (one assembled by nine inch nails mastermind Trent Reznor). We compared the film to other Lynch efforts, the most germane being the surrealist mood piece Eraserhead and the supernatural horror of Twin Peaks and its theatrical prequel Fire Walk with Me. We'd stay up until the wee hours going over every line of dialogue, every move of the camera and change of lighting. And then we'd go to bed, and we'd only be a little scared that we'd turn around to see a stranger's face. "It looked like you, but it wasn't."Honestly, pretty much every other movie I've tackled during this month's marathon, I feel like I could make a good case for--that if you saw it and didn't like it, I might be able to bring things to mind that'd make you reconsider. This one, I'm not so sure. Experience suggests that even among fans of difficult cinema in general and/or Lynch in particular, this is a movie you either love or hate. (Though it's tempting, I won't say "you either get it or you don't"--some people have definitely told me that they got it, alright, but it was still stupid.) For me, there's just so much to love. The gallows humor, for instance--this is not something that usually appeals to me, but from Mr. Eddy's lesson in highway safety to "Dent Head," it's there and it works. As I said earlier, the film is extraordinarily well made, and that alone makes it worth studying. Patricia Arquette is just stunning throughout the film, and gives the whole proceeding heat. (By the way, the steamy eroticism is not the only thing this movie has in common with another favorite horror flick of mine, Della'morte Dell'amore--I like to describe that movie as Lost Highway with zombies.) And the horror is played flawlessly. Lynch, who proved himself the equal of Hitchcock at constructing tension on film in scenes like the closet sequence in Blue Velvet does it again here. He wrenches amazing tension and dread out of the accoutrements of modern living--phone calls and videotapes especially. In several deeply frightening scenes, no violence is involved, no monster or maniac pursues anyone--characters simply hear someone's voice on the line, or watch something on their VCR. What they see and hear is self-evidently wrong, wrong enough to terrify character and audience alike. It culminates in a scene near the end, when the Mystery Man produces a video camera and tapes the our hero, who attempts to escape. As he struggels with the ignition of his car, we cut to the videocamera-eye-view, seeing the car draw closer and closer as we the Mystery Man approach faster and faster. We're a part of this horror film now, even if we can't make sense of it. Funny, but that's pretty much how I felt ever since I first watched it. Video9723@blogcritics.org Fri, 31 Oct 2003 11:58:09 EST