Genre pictures: horror

Frankenstein

US, 1931

Directed by James Whale

That abnormal brain that Fritz stole is an unfortunate betrayal of the grand original.  It consigns Mary Shelley’s complex notions about noble savagery and the abandonment of children to the margins, makes the creature a mere monster, and is somehow supposed to justify Victor’s obscene abandonment of his own creation, or excuse the film’s mobocratic conclusion.  After that initial error the movie is inconsistent to the point of not making sense.  It flips and flops between monstrosity and the poignancy/artistry provided by Karloff and all of those expressionist trappings.  Which will it be?  He did kill the child, after all.  It was an accident, and he’s a child too, after all.  He menaced the bride, after all.  She’s so boring and annoying that you half want to kill her too, after all.  Anyway, shades of Browning’s Dracula, meaning that someone wrote a silly play, keyed on the more risible elements of the source, and mostly ignored its substance. 

Still, maybe we can cut the movie some slack.  It’s 1931.  The horror genre wasn’t fully established.  The property must have been pretty risky undertaking/investment, and Depression audiences might not have been interested in a philosophical narrative derived from the works of John Milton and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Technical considerations are also important.  Film sound wasn’t fully figured out either—we get music during the titles only, because Max Steiner was over at RKO, and they hadn’t made King Kong (with Steiner's wall-to-wall score) yet.  The design is so outlandishly outstanding, so aggressively unrealistic, that you can really sympathize when they hedge their bets a little.  

Karloff, who was apparently a very nice man

In sum, Frankenstein is a crazy muddled horror movie, and a great one too.  It's a silly concoction, intersected frequently by wonder and astonishment.  Shelley is nearly jettisoned, but the epoch-shifting core of her work does remain in place.  It’s in that properly, undeniably iconic animation sequence, catalyzed by that bolt of lightning and climaxing in that subtle, almost imperceptible movement of the hand beneath the sheet.  What a moment: Religion and Science, God and Man, the Medieval and the Modern all hanging in the balance.  Colin Clive (quite good as Victor, for all the silly things they make him do) gets to the heart of things with that stunning, long censored bit of blasphemy: “Now by God I know what it is like to be God!”  Now the trouble begins.

I wonder about director James Whale, who strikes me as being somewhat over-vaunted.  Poetry yes, but ham hands with the actors (some admittedly terrible) as well, and a seeming disregard for how people, even in stylized stories, actually behave and interact.  An heir to the house of Frankenstein indeed.

In the end, though, Boris Karloff cuts right through the confusion, even when he’s only supposed to be menacing.  That’s partly because of how he is framed, not just in individual film compositions, but by the movie’s entire, beautifully integrated visual strategy.  The sets are so stupendous, as are the poignantly, indexically bumpy camera movements (especially when they go laterally, from room/set to room/set).  The actor is more stupendous than that.  Conceptual confusion notwithstanding, he created a character/performance that is utterly for the ages.  Very moving.  

Freaks

US, 1932
Directed by Tod Browning

That Hercules character sounds just like Bluto!  Very “B,” in the uneven performances, the conceptual murk, and how in the end all that doesn’t matter much.  It's great!  It's a mess too, though.  Here is a movie that is in quite a bit of conflict with itself.  Which way do they want it?  Such sympathy for the misshapen other that we cross all the way to empathy?  Or deformity as our worst nightmare made flesh?  Both, I guess, which makes this either a confused film or a superb social dream just begging to be analyzed.  It’s probably pretty Birth of a Nation: regretables, and a vivid portrait of vivid realities.  Also, clear exploitation, while providing employment and even exposure that wouldn’t otherwise have happened.

Hans and Frieda/Harry and Daisy Earles are lovely, as characters and as performers.  There’s a heavy humourous hand here, but the broad jokes (the Siamese twins and their fiancés especially) may actually be sort of respectful, and eventually even helpful.  No tiptoeing, no pretending that things aren’t things.  They model the fact that you can get used to and have fun with difficult reality.  Every family with a disabled member knows as much.  Then there’s that amazing arcadian sequence, the vision of the innocent children dancing in the garden.  Those dear hypocephalic girls!  And their dear minder—who is clearly not an actor, but their friend.  They shouldn’t be so grateful for the aristocrat’s largesse, but one thing at a time.  

(For a comparatively unconflicted, decidedly nurturing take on disability, see Heather [2000], the first entry in our Fit for the Kingdom film series: http://fitforthekingdom.byu.edu/?page=watch&piece=heather)

By the time the freaks/our friends get to the “we accept you we accept you one of us one of us” sequence, they’re now addressing the members of the audience, and they’re also articulating the attitude the audience has developed toward them.  It’s quite an accomplishment in manipulation, or maybe education.  The bad guys’ cruel rejection of these poor, good people cements our sympathies.  But then the horror genre reasserts itself, and exacts its due in a not-very-nice plot turn.  This may be fiction, but the mindset behind the final plot resolution is a matter of pure social documentation.  Mixed messages then, and mixed feelings; in 1932, when the freaks crawl up out of the muck to exact their revenge, stomachs must have knotted as much as when Frankenstein's monster was running through the bride’s boudoir.  That wasn't the direction we seemed to be going toward.  One step forward, two steps back.  (Plot/logistical confusion: how is it that they turned that scornful lady antagonist into a chicken?)

For The Mummy (US, Freund, 1932), go here: http://dunfam.blogspot.com/2010/12/font-face-font-family-cambria-p.html)

White Zombie

US, 1932
Directed by Victor Halperin

That Lugosi is a handsome devil.  They make him mug a lot, though.  What was striking in Dracula is already becoming mannerist here.  I’ll bet he could have done more for them, poor guy.  The situation here is also very Dracula-like; the sets are actually from the earlier film.  Again, they’re superb, and very well utilized.  Dracula-like, but with a colonial wrinkle.  Instead of the westerner getting lost in the Carpathians, this time the westerners come to stay with some other occupying westerners, and then get lost at the hands of a Kurtz-like white guy gone selectively, inaccurately native.  Having established these hierarchies, the film's zombie idea is very simple, and very poignant.  They are corpses in the service of the boss, or in other words, hopeless oppressed workers.  The zombies look great, and they’re effectively utilized—atmospherically in the factory, dramatically at the climax.  More than that, in their situation they prefigure what seemed so radical in Romero’s Land of the Dead.  They’re the good guys!  

With regard to Haiti and all, White Zombie is actually quite refreshingly progressive.  As the superb Dr. Bruner/Joseph Cawthorn—a thoroughly satisfying Van Helsing figure—tells us, the local superstitions come from Africa, which is to say from Egypt (the most powerful empire in the world), and thence from “the countries that was old when Egypt was young.”  Fantastic: not only are they trying to be scary, they’re also, quite casually, giving respect to indigenous traditions, and their weighty continuity.  “She’s not alive, in the hands of natives!” says the wan white swain.  (As boring as in a L&H or Marx Bros. movie.)  “Better dead than that!”  Typical sentiments, but Bruner laughs them right off.  A few awkward bits disappear in the midst of all this cool.  Maybe the movie is just a bit too slow.  Or perhaps it’s an unofficial, proto-Val Lewton film.  It’s certainly full of terrific compositions and beautiful camera moves (the coffin being placed in the crypt!).  Powerful conclusion.  Also, I like the match joke.

 

Mad Love 

US, 1936

Directed by Karl Freund

US, yes, but where would this genre be without the Germans?  Karl Freund is the secret weapon, the implicit star of this whole spate of movies, from Murnau/Lang and right up to this little masterpiece.  It's kind of an unusual horror movie in the period, being so sharp and disciplined and consistent.  For such a superb take on irrational impulse, it’s awfully decorous.  No missteps, nothing out of place, each performance and object and composition just right.  In fact, it’s a Swiss watch of a horror movie, if such an outlandish non-sequitur can be applied.   But when the moments occur, do they ever occur.  (Lorre and Clive's meeting!)  Anxious art rising out of the enlightenment, Buchner out of Pascal.  I’ve hurt myself.  

Source: Veidt, in Wiene, 1924

Cat People

US, 1942

Produced by Val Lewton

Directed by Jacques Tourneur 

“Moia sestra”—wow!  Those three famous sequences—walking, swimming, draft-room—are exquisitely executed.  They add just a little more to the mix, each time.  The climax at the conclusion of this last one is extraordinarily elegant, too.  Instead of crass violence, or gross sentimentality, there’s an appeal right out of Moses, chapter one.  The man and the woman begin to fear exceedingly, and whisper a vulnerable appeal.  “In the name of God, leave us in peace.”  George Sanders’ brother has no such luck.  Now a surprisingly explicit and compassionate portrayal of marital sex woes (and no one blamed!) gives way to some really satisfying violence.  More evidence: B&W beats colour, silly. (This is an RKO production. Note the year of release.  Notice that Irena is living in what was just recently the Ambersons' mansion.)  

The Seventh Victim

US, 1943

Produced by Val Lewton

Directed by Mark Robson

Another Lewton thriller from RKO.  This is a real curiosity, a strange stop and start thing.  (Plus it's about Satanists, produced right in the middle of the production code period.  How on earth?!)  The protagonist, played by a very fresh-faced Kim Hunter, finds herself in a situation much like Jane Eyre’s—boarding school and all.  She walks out of that frying pan and into this fire; a situation that is loaded w' dark portent, and populated by people who won't tell her what's going on.  We empathize, since audience members empathize with protagonists.  So far, so hermaneutically conventional.  It's in the imparting of information, and in the fact that none of the revelations seem to dispel the darkness at all, that the film most distinguishes itself.  (If you find that a distinction, that is.)  

(Here's a powerful, semi-climactic image from another Lewton/Tourneur film [and another adaption of Jane Eyre!]; I Walked with a Zombie, 1943:)

The downward spiral starts with that assistant instructor’s whispered urge for the Hunter character to get the hell out of there.  This is very unsettling, and very effective.  That feeling only increases, partly because of the very well crafted sequences that follow, and partly because of the elusiveness and uncertainty of the whole.  The missing sister is a nice conceit, through which other effective and unpleasant things get introduced.  (Downstairs to the Dante restaurant, eh?)  The entire section with Mr. August, the P.I., is masterful.  Finally, we might think.  An adult, and a male adult.  We're going to get to the bottom of all of this!  Then Mr. August becomes inexplicably, disproportionately afraid.  Then he goes into that room, and emerges more frightened yet.  And then he dies.  With never an explanation!  Here is the famous Lewton indirectness, his horror by implication.  You kids should try it.  

But this is not just technique.  Ideas are attached, and they're not particularly nice ones.  August's kindness gets him killed, and not a thing comes of it—at this moment, and in this film, merely generic and commercial horror suddenly descends into nihilism.  The conventional wisdom is that after the Lewton cycle, A-grade American film horror kind of took a break, moved into sci-fi hybrids, never quite fully returning until Psycho and such.  Maybe, but the seeds of a dire future are being planted right here.  Roman Polanski may or may not know this film, but he certainly channeled it as his work turned more and more hopelessly infernal (cf. the dire conclusions to Repulsion, The Fearless Vampire Killers..., Rosemary's Baby, The Tenant...).

When we finally meet them, the Satanists are so wan and affectless.  Not at all what you'd expect.  It's another unsettlingly effective dramatic choice (forward to Tourneur's Night of/Curse of the Demon [1957]).  When it comes down to it the missing sister's creepy husband and that poet guy are also pretty wan and affectless.  Something isn't right with these men, and with the burgeoning romances that they're half-heartedly essaying.  Apart from the not inconsiderable problem that the Hunter character is way underage, it’s like they keep forgetting the woman that they're allegedly looking for.  L’Aventura?  Satanists or not, there are no lasting bonds here, and nothing seems to mean anything.   

Here's a shower scene, in which that lady just walks right in on the other young lady!  Now they're hinting at gender-quakes; this is a very enterprising movie!  Whirlwinds on the horizon.   

Eventually, they decide to answer some plot questions for us.  Here's sister Jacqueline, finally, and all the devil worshipers, and they're requiring that she kill herself.  Given this affair's general hopelessness, it's a bit of a surprise when the devil worshipers end up letting her go.  But this is only to allow her to go through this terrific montage sequence, to experience this brief and very vivid infernal passage.  Some prospect: murder on the one hand, eating and drinking unto soul-annihilation on the other.   

In the next scene we get a surprising bit of Sunday School.  The doctor and the poet meet back up with the bad guys, to whom they issue a rebuke.  It's about time that someone stated the obvious!  This is muted, but compared with the context it registers as really bright.  The Code probably demanded it, but so did the dramatic situation, and it really works.  These non-Satanist characters briefly stir themselves, and we stir with them.  They deliver a simple sentiment, but does it register!  Forgive us our trespasses.  Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.  Frisson!   

The film ends with a structurally daring epilogue.  They've switched protagonists on us.  Though we've lost sight of her, we guess that the Kim Hunter character is situated, and happily.  And Jacqueline?  You know how in Shakespeare's tragedies the victor gets the last word?  (Fortinbras in Hamlet, Albany in Lear, etc.)  Well, here too, and pretty horribly.  In the film's final shot Jacqueline meets a tubercular neighbour on the landing just outside her door.  The neighbour has been sickly and cowering, but now she decides to go out for a last fling before she expires.  Mind you there's no joy in it, no assertion of spirit in the face of mortality.  Look at them both: The Sickness Unto Death.  This final meeting of Consumption and Despair is so dark as to leave the taste of dirt in your mouth.  The sickly woman goes down to degradation, while Jacqueline enters her room and closes her door and leaves us with the sound of the chair's thump and the gallows drop.  A text is superimposed on the screen.  “I run to death and death meets me as fast.  And all my pleasures are like yesterday.”  John Donne as a spokesman for godless despair, eh?  B movies! 

The Exorcist

US, 1973

Written by William Peter Blatty

Directed by William Friedkin

The Iraq prologue doesn’t make any sense, nor, really, do the logistics of possession.  The sequencing is just all over the place, and not just for disorientation’s or dread’s sake.  This reminds me of the theologically incoherent Angels in America.  Could it be that the perpetrators of this movie finally didn’t really know what they were talking about?  Then again, with regard to powers and principalities, or the Prince of the Air, who really does know what they’re talking about?   

While you can absolutely imagine how this would have scared 'em silly in 1973, by now some of the effects are a bit transparent, even threadbare and dumb-ish.  Shows how far we’ve gone, which might not exactly be a thing to celebrate.  Anyway, dumb things: the spinning head.  The levitation seems kind of purposeless, except for demonstrating a special effect.  The Lt. Kinderman stuff is also silly, and the Chris making a movie material, as well as a lot of the character dialogue/interaction.  (Mind you, here's a hint at an extra-cinematic insight.  What can have possessed these protesting, profane, breaking-out-in-spots kids of ours?)  The swingin’ and the counterculture is especially strained.  And that long, noisy part when they keep saying “the power of Christ compels you” registers as a lapse of both theological and cinematic imagination.  Maybe about what would happen if you were in the same room as the Devil. 

On the other hand, this is some humdinger!  Jason Miller/Father Damian’s back story may be a bit too tidy, but it does gives some substance and heft to all of that unseemly spectacle.  Also, what a face!  Terrific nightmare.  His skepticism is actually pretty well explored.  You wouldn’t want to accuse Friedkin of sensitivity, but maybe Blatty had some feeling on the topic.  There’s a hint of theological inquiry here, especially with some of the added footage.  That inquiry certainly ends positively.  (This is a great big ad for the Catholic church.)  The vaunted sound design absolutely deserves its vaunting, though the Oldfield cue is just bad needle dropping.  The thing I notice this time around is that the photography is just as good as the sound.  It’s partly that V. Zsigmond-type 70’s method, where they combine camera zooms with actual, elaborate camera moves.  They’re calling attention to the artificiality of it all.  Look, we’re creative!  Well, they are.  The stylish stuff is profitably mixed with more documentary-like footage.  It’s an effective hybrid.

Boo!

Previous impressions about the film’s sadism remain, but that’s not all there is.  We have the (really effective) torture footage in the hospital, and of course all the infamy that follows.  (McCambridge!)  But there’s some actual tenderness in the expository parts of the Burstyn/Blair relationship.  Burstyn is a tremendous actress, of course.  Blair isn’t so trained, and there’s a sweet freshness to her performance.  Put together, it all means something.  Of course that may be the most sadistic thing of all.  (It is clear that the gymnast is really the one doing most of the vigourous/objectionable work.)  But at the very end, when those men have given their lives to save this girl's soul, at the point where she leaves that house all bruised and apparently restored, there’s an actual salvific frisson.  “Help me…” she'd said, somehow.  (What actually happened in there?!)  Whether as a line in a play or a fervent hope in one's extremity, "Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!" is a formidable, powerful expression.  They came through.  

After all the stridency, the movie’s most effective moment may be the one featuring a dead old (Swedish) man and a half pleased, half curious devil, looking quietly at his body.  Again—what just happened?!  Cf. Michael Herr’s Dispatches, or Mr. August in that Lewton film.  The worst thing is not knowing.  And you never know, do you?  It’s a hard world for little things.

Suspiria

Italy, 1977
Directed by Dario Argento

It's kind of hard to concentrate on plot the first time you see this.  The second time I noticed that the plot is secondary to the point of insignificance.  In fact the story itself, the explicit content of the film is made up of implausibilities, dumb dialogue and (mostly) bad performances (Valli!).  Well, wait.  Are they bad, or just kind of undirected/neglected?  Our director might have had other priorities.  Those priorities emerge when you forget that plot and return to the things that grabbed you in the first place.  Suspiria has a couple of consistent, all the way through amazing things in it.  There are the gleefully virtuosic set pieces, which are also kind of unforgivably brutal (the first double murder; a room full of razor wire?!).  Less obviously, more profoundly we have some of the most operatic, amazing design ever.  Suspiria is full of fauvist wonders, astounding colour schemes and costumes and objects, all executed as wonderfully as they were conceptualized.  And the camera work itself is an unrelieved series of extravagant, perfect compositions and movements.  Not too much going on upstairs, and what is going on is tough to defend.  But formally!  Wow!

Third time?  Could it be?  As with William Friedkin on the subject of sensitivity, we don't want to accuse Dario Argento of being a feminist or anything.  But get a load of our diminutive heroine, standing up to all of these howling, infernal forces.  And prevailing!  More than that, notice that she isn't objectified for a minute, at least not hardly.  In fact, I can't remember any gratuitously voyeuristic imagery at all.  Is it that women are antagonists, and so there's no sexual menace, no prospect of sexual violence?  I'd better check that again...