31 Days of Horror: Days 21 – 23 – “From Beyond” (1986)

I watched the latest episode of “The Walking Dead” on Day 21 and the final presidential debate on Day 22, so I didn’t have time for horror movies on these days.  On Day 23, I watched Stuart Gordon’s “From Beyond,” a very entertaining mad scientist creature feature.

Mad scientists Dr. Pretorius and Dr. Tillinghast have built a device known as the Resonator that stimulates the brain’s pineal gland and thus enables anyone within range to see creatures that exist beyond our perceptible reality.  The only problem is that the Resonator gives the creatures the same ability and when they see the two scientists for the first time one bites the side of Tillinghast’s face and another eats Pretorius’s head.  Tillinghast is blamed for Pretorius’s murder and locked in an insane asylum, but Dr. McMichaels, the psychiatrist treating him, believes his story and wants to learn more about the Resonator.  She has him released under her supervision, and she and Tillinghast rebuild the device.  Creatures appear, including a mutated Pretorius, and things quickly get out of hand.

Gordon, best known for the mad-scientist classic “Re-Animator” (1985), does creature features and mad scientist movies better than anyone currently working in horror, and  in “From Beyond” he was clearly reveling in his appreciation for both subgenres.  Part of what makes this movie so enjoyable is the interplay among the three mad scientists.  Tillinghast, played by Jeffrey Combs also of “Re-Animator” fame, is the least mad of the three, and throughout the movie he struggles to restrain the mutated Pretorius and prevent McMichaels from descending even further into madness as she becomes more and more obsessed with the Resonator.  The other reason to watch “From Beyond” is the creatures.  They start off as small wormlike beings that seem to swim through the air, but as the movie progresses they get much larger.  At one point, Tillinghast has to be pulled from the mouth of a giant worm, leaving him bald and scarred.

This was another very enjoyable 80’s horror movie that I had neglected for far too long.  Watching it reminded me that although Stuart Gordon has continuously made good horror movies since the mid 80’s (“Dagon” (2001) and his episodes for the “Masters of Horror"  (2005, 2007) are the most recent examples), he is underappreciated.  This is probably  because none of his movies have received wide theatrical releases or acquired the cult status of movies like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” or “Halloween.”  As a result, only  hardcore fans recognize the name Stuart Gordon, whereas people with only a passing interest in the genre are familiar with John Carpenter and maybe Tobe Hooper, despite the fact that no one really cares about their recent work.  There is, however, a cover story about Gordon in the current issue of “Fangoria,” which I hope will inspire new interest in his work.

31 Days of Horror: Day 20 - V/H/S (2012)

I’m not really a fan of the “found footage” technique for horror movies.  Although it’s meant to create hyper-realism, it often has the opposite effect because for  narrative coherence scenes have to be filmed that wouldn’t have been filmed if the footage were really authentic.  This makes the movies seem more artificial and contrived than they would be if they had eschewed the found footage technique and taken a more traditional approach.  Another problem is that they too often feature an annoying character who won’t turn off the damn camera even when his friends are being brutally murdered.

The technique works well in “The Blair Witch Project” (1999) because it makes sense for the camera to be rolling throughout the production of a documentary.  It works even better, however, in “Cannibal Holocaust” (1980), an Italian horror movie about an expedition of anthropologists who are eaten by cannibals while studying a tribe somewhere in the Amazon rainforest.  Their colleagues learn about their fate from the reels of film that they find when they go looking for the missing group.  Only about 30 minutes of “Cannibal Holocaust” consists of found footage, giving it an authenticity that’s often lacking in movies that rely entirely on this technique.

“V/H/S” is both a found footage movie and a horror anthology, and the combination of these two techniques results in five very effective segments, a few of which I found truly horrifying, even though I’m rarely frightened by horror movies anymore.  The found footage technique works because the segments are so short that it’s entirely believable that the events would have been captured on film spontaneously. Each segment was made by a different horror director, and three of them explore unique ways of capturing the footage, avoiding the necessity of having a character holding a video camera at all times.

In “Amateur Night,” the first and best segment, a character wears glasses containing a miniature video camera, so everything he sees is recorded.  He and his friends go out to a bar to pick-up girls and capture the experience on video, but one girl is not what she seems.  “The Sick Thing that Happened to Emily When She was Younger” is the most promising segment but also the most disappointing, for reasons I can’t describe without revealing the ending.  It consists entirely of recorded Skype conversations between a couple who are living apart while the boyfriend attends medical school.  His girlfriend, Emily, keeps hearing strange sounds in her apartment and begins to believe that it’s haunted.  When she hears the sounds at night, she calls her boyfriend, so he can observe via Skype as she investigates.  In one of the most terrifying moments of “V/H/S,” he can only watch in horror as Emily begins to discover what is going on.  Another innovative way of capturing the footage is a nanny-cam imbedded in the mask of a bear costume worn by a character in the last segment, “10/31/98.”  He and his friends enter a house thinking they are going to a Halloween party, but they actually stumble upon what appears to be a ritual sacrifice.  They rescue the victim with surprising results.

The other segments rely on characters with handheld video cameras to record the action.  “Second Honeymoon” is a road trip story in which we quickly learn that someone else is following the couple and attempting to enter their hotel rooms at night.  It features some of the creepiest moments of “V/H/S.”  As its title suggests, “Tuesday the 17^th” is a killer-in-the-woods style slasher, but its villain is very different from Jason Voorhees.

 

My only complaint is with the framing story that tries unsuccessfully to make the five segments fit into a larger narrative.  But the problem with this frame isn’t so much that it fails to unify the narrative—each segment works perfectly well on its own—as it’s just a bad segment.  It, too, relies on found footage, but it lacks the authenticity of the others and feels contrived.  A group of hooligans who like to film themselves committing crimes is hired to break into a guy’s house to steal a video tape.  He turns out to have a large video collection, which includes the five segments of found footage that “V/H/S” comprises.  The character with the camera is the one who finds the segments and seems to be filming them while he watches.  The result is found-footage overkill.  I wish “V/H/S” had either followed the example of “Cannibal Holocaust” or left out the frame altogether.

But aside from this one flaw, I really enjoyed “V/H/S,” and it’s not hard to imagine it becoming a new horror franchise. 

31 Days of Horror: Days 18 and 19 - Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994)

I’ve had four sets of research papers to grade, so I’ve fallen a bit behind with my blogging but fortunately not with my movie watching.  To follow up on last week’s Frankenstein double feature, I watched James Whales deliberately campy “Bride of Frankenstein” on Day 18. Whereas his first Frankenstein film adapts the first half of Mary Shelley’s novel with Frankenstein creating the Creature and the Creature killing a few villagers, “Bride” covers events from the second half and gives more of the Creature’s perspective.  However, both movies are rather loosely connected to the novel, and “Bride” makes one very significant change by adding a second mad scientist, Dr. Pretorious, Frankenstein’s former professor, who has stolen a bit of the fire of the gods himself and created miniature humans.  He coerces Frankenstein into working with him to create a female. 

“Bride” is lots of fun to watch because it amplifies all the elements that make the first film so enjoyable.  This time, the Creature talks rather than simply grunting.  He makes a friend and learns to enjoy wine and cigars.  Frankenstein and Pretorius use the same tower where Frankenstein gave life to his original creation, but it’s now filled with more gadgets that crackle and pop as Frankenstein adjusts them to imbue life to the Creature’s mate.  The Bride herself is probably the best part of the movie and is yet another horror icon that Whale had a hand in creating.  She shrieks in horror and cowers behind Frankenstein when she sees the male Creature, and her moves are a bit robotic as she is just learning how to work her limps.  Her most recognizable feature, of course, is her conical black hair streaked with a white lightning bolt on each side. 

Continuing with the Frankenstein theme, I watched “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” on Day 19.  This is the most faithful film adaptation of the novel that I’ve seen, but it’s still a bit of a misnomer to call it “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.”  Director Kenneth Branagh makes a significant change to the story by having Victor reanimate his wife, Elizabeth, after the Creature kills her when Victor refuses to make him a mate.  The results are disastrous, of course, and it’s the movie’s clearest example of Victor’s inability to consider the consequences of his actions or fully acknowledge and attempt to correct his own mistakes.  His childishness makes him almost insufferable, but this can’t really be blamed on Branagh as it’s also a major flaw in Shelley’s novel.  I know that Shelley’s novel is a cautionary tale about hubris and we’re not meant to like Victor, but I’d prefer him to be a sinister misanthrope rather than a whiney bitch.

Despite its annoying main character, however, there is plenty to like in Branagh’s take on the Frankenstein story, particularly the creation/birth scenes, which were clearly inspired by Whale’s Frankenstein films.  Victor sets up a lab in the attic of a boarding house and fills it with a variety of gadgets that emit sparks and bolts of electricity.  His exact method for imbuing life to the Creature is never specified, but it relies on a combination of inserting acupuncture needles in key points, stimulating them with electricity from eels, and immersing the Creature’s body in amniotic fluid.  Thanks to the movie’s very believable makeup effects, the Creature looks exactly like his body is a composite of several corpses.  Throughout the movie, he picks out the stitches that were used to sew him together, and the scars they leave behind are especially realistic.

Shelley’s novel has inspired dozens of film adaptations and “Bride” is one of the best.  I can’t say the same about Branagh’s film, but it does contain some very compelling elements that make it well worth watching.   

31 Days of Horror: Days 16 and 17 – Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

I skipped last night to watch the presidential debate, and thankfully, it wasn’t a horror show like the first one.  Tonight’s feature was a French silent film adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher.” I had seen the Usher film starring Vincent Price and thought it was terrible (I can’t remember while), but I had read good things about this one, so I was excited to see it. Unfortunately, it’s a snoozer.

As its title suggests, the Poe story is about the last living members of the Usher family, Roderick and his sister Madeleine, who have isolated themselves inside their crumbling family manor, which is clearly a symbol of the Usher family.  During his visit to the house, one of Roderick’s old friends observes as Madeleine finally succumbs to what seems to be chronic fatigue syndrome, and he and Roderick end up burying her alive.

The 1928 film follows the story’s basic plot but makes Madeleine Roderick’s wife, which is a logical change with the story’s suggestions of incest hinting that Roderick and his sister had been living as if they were husband and wife.  Roderick sits around the house all day painting his wife, and although she appears vigorous in the paintings, she is actually wasting away.  Roderick clearly cares more about the paintings than about his wife, and by painting her he is actually stealing her life force and transferring it to her painted image.  Madeleine, of course, dies, is buried alive, returns, and then the house falls down with the last remaining Ushers inside.

In some ways, horror is perfectly suited for silent film because it places so much emphasis on the visuals.  There’s no place for bad dialogue and convoluted and unnecessary explanations for the horror when all you have to work with are haunting visuals and a few intertitles.  The 1928 “Usher” tries, but for me at least, there’s nothing really horrifying about an emo, goth pussy sitting around his house all day painting his chronically fatigued wife, no matter how ghostly the wife looks or how many close-ups I see of Roderick’s crazed eyes.  I would have been better off with another Hellraiser sequel.        

31 Days of Horror: Day 15 - Frankenstein Double Feature

For tonight’s double feature, I watched the silent “Frankenstein” (1910) produced by Thomas Edison’s film studio and the Universal “Frankenstein” (1931) directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff.

The Edison “Frankenstein” is a short film that condenses the basic elements of Mary Shelley’s story into about twelve minutes.  It hasn’t been well-preserved, and the images are very cloudy, but for the most part, this doesn’t detract from the film’s visual effects, which are the reason to watch it.  The birth scene, in particular, is more believable than a lot of the CGI effects that plague movies today.  After mixing various powders into a vat and then closing it safely inside a large cabinet, Frankenstein watches through the viewfinder as goo from the vat slowly transforms into a skeleton that grows skin and gradually forms into a humanoid creature that bursts through the doors of the cabinet.  The blurriness of the film prevents us from getting a clear image of the Creature, but we can see it well enough to know that it looks more like Quasimodo from “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” than any of the more famous images of Frankenstein’s monster.

The most famous one, of course, appears in Whale’s take on Shelley’s story.  Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster is probably the most iconic image in horror, and although he does look a bit silly lumbering through the countryside, he is pretty horrifying in the darkness of the tower where he was created.  This version of “Frankenstein” completely omits the Creature’s point of view that helps make the novel so complex (we get this in the sequel, “Bride of Frankenstein” (1935)), and concentrates on Frankenstein’s creation of the Creature, and the Creature’s brief reign of terror in the village of Golstadt.  I’ve seen Whale’s “Frankenstein” probably a dozen times, but I always enjoy watching Colin Clive as Frankenstein, especially when the Creature comes to life and he goes into hysterics shouting, “It’s alive!  It’s alive!  It’s alive! Now I know what it feels like to be God!”  He’s utterly convincing as a mad scientist totally consumed by his work.  It had a been a while since I had seen the movie, and I was a bit surprised at how blasphemous it is. 

It’s hard to go wrong with mad-scientist movies, and these two helped establish the formula that horror filmmakers will probably continue reworking for years.    

31 Days of Horror: Days 12 - 14 -- Hellraiser 4 - 6

I opened the box, and I don’t think it’s going to close until I’ve watched all nine “Hellraiser” movies.  Thankfully, the experience has so far involved more pleasure than pain.

I ended my post about the first two Hellraiser sequels by criticizing “Hellraiser 4: Bloodline” (1996) because it begins in space with a robot opening the puzzle box, but it seems I was a bit hasty with my judgment.  As ludicrous as the idea of Pinhead in space sounds, “Bloodline” is actually the best “Hellraiser” sequel I’ve
seen so far.  It traces the history of the puzzle box from its origins in 18^th century Paris, to New York City in 1996, and then to a space station in 2127.  The “Bloodline” of the title refers to Philip L’Merchant, the toymaker who designed the box, and his descendents, who also have connections with the box. 

“Bloodline” is an anthology film consisting of three different segments.  It begins and ends in the space station with Dr. Paul Merchant summoning Pinhead for what he hopes will be his family’s final encounter with the Cenobites.  The future segment serves as a framing story for the other two, the first of which shows Philip L’Merchant designing the box for a magician who uses it to summon a female demon, Angelique.  Two hundred years later, Angelique seeks out John Merchant, an artist who is attempting to create an exhibit based on his ancestor’s sketches for the original puzzle box. Angelique summons Pinhead and together they try to make John create a permanent pathway between our world and hell, so they will no longer be bound by the rules of the box.

Although I can think of several bad horror anthologies—most notably “Creepshow 2”—I sometimes think horror works best in short segments because there’s no time for bullshit. “Bloodline” definitely benefits from this format.  Each segment works well because the Cenobites appear almost immediately, and characters either die or send the demons back to hell before they have a chance to become annoying.  The unifying narrative is the conflict between the Cenobites and the Merchants for control over the gateway to hell, and it moves beyond the box itself to explore the patterns that the box utilizes and the control they have over the Cenobites.  The gore effects are believable without being unduly disturbing and even the space station and robot look real.   

“Hellraiser 5: Inferno” (2000) and “Hellraiser 6: Hellseeker” (2002) are both psychological thrillers that use Pinhead and the puzzle box as vehicles to illustrate the personal hells that their protagonists create for themselves.  In the first case this works well, but the second has very little to do with the puzzle box and seems like a case of Dimension Films attaching an unrelated script to the Hellraiser name as a marketing ploy. 

In “Inferno,” a hardboiled police detective finds the puzzle box at a crime scene.  The detective is corrupt and unfaithful to his wife; he never visits his parents in the nursing home; and he double-crosses his partner.  When he opens the box, the Cenobites begin tormenting him in his ways that remind him of just how low he has sunken.  He hopes to end his suffering by locating a mysterious figure known only as “The Engineer.” Although “Inferno” places less emphasis on the puzzle box and the Cenobites than other movies in the series, it still works well as a Hellraiser movie because it continues to explore the pleasure-pain duality that lies at the heart of the series, and it does so in such way that moves the series in a new direction while staying true to its roots.  The same is not the case with “Hellseeker,” which takes the same approach and applies it to an unfaithful husband whose wife dies in a car wreck.  Pinhead and the other Cenobites appear so briefly that they seem to have been added as an afterthought.

Three more to go before the box will close, but it seems that I’ve gotten the worst out of the way.

31 Days of Horror: Day 11 - Mother of Tears (2007)

Last night’s movie was Dario Argento’s “Mother of Tears,” the third part of his Three Mothers trilogy, about three witches who live in secret locations and use their evil powers to spread darkness and sorrow throughout the world.  The first two films in the trilogy, “Suspira” (1977) and “Inferno” (1980), are two of my favorite horror movies, but I had been avoiding watching “Mother of Tears” because the quality of Argento’s recent work has been uneven at best.  Since he had failed to complete the trilogy in the 80s, I thought it was best left unfinished.  This month seemed like a good time to give it a chance, so I watched it with very low expectations.  It’s not the steaming pile I feared it would be, but overall it’s rather flat, not very good, not very bad, just an ultimately forgettable horror movie.

In the earlier films, two of the mothers were located and killed, the Mother of Sighs in Freiberg, Germany (“Suspiria”) and the Mother of Darkness in New York (“Inferno”).  The Mother of Tears lives in Rome, and when a researcher at an art museum reads aloud an Aramaic passage from a cloak that was recently unearthed on the grounds of an old church, the Third Mother and her minions appear to kill her and take the cloak.  Sarah, a friend and colleague of the murdered researcher, witnesses the murder, and then flees to safety.  When the police are unable to find the killers, Sarah begins searching for them on her own. 

Meanwhile, the Mother of Tears has begun to unleash her evil on Rome, summoning witches from around the world to come spread darkness throughout the city.  Aware that Sarah has learned that the Mother of Tears is active in Rome, the witches want to kill her.  Sarah’s search leads her to an old bookstore where she meets a woman who was a student of Sarah’s mother.  Sarah never knew much about her parents, who died when she was very young.  She learns that her mother was actually a powerful white witch who died fighting the Mother of Sighs.  She then realizes that the voice she has been hearing in her head must be her mother explaining to Sarah how to use her own powers.  When Sarah listens to this voice, she is able to make herself invisible to her pursuers.  She eventually meets an alchemist who gives her more information about the Three Mothers and helps her find the Mother of Tears’ secret home in Rome. 

   

“Mother of Tears” works fairly well as a supernatural detective story.  For an Argento movie, the narrative is surprisingly cohesive.  Although “Inferno” is the second part of the trilogy, it doesn’t really continue the narrative so much as it builds upon the themes presented in “Suspiria.”  By contrast, Argento directly connects “Mother of Tears” with the first two parts of the trilogy, particularly “Suspiria,” and thus gives the trilogy a more unified story.  Through Sarah’s research, he also makes interesting connections between the Three Mothers and other triads, for example the Graces and the Furies.  At times, his portrayal of the chaos that engulfs Rome is very effective, for example, when a woman lovingly lifts her baby from a stroller and is then compelled by the dark magic to drop it from a bridge and when an old priest says he has received more requests for exorcisms in the past week than in his entire career.  

However, I would gladly trade the movie’s tighter plot for more of the visual flair of Argento’s best work.  Conspicuously absent are the elaborate set piece murders for which he is so well known.  Instead, we get one dull chase scene through a bookstore in Rome’s train station and an even duller one through a train.  Sarah is pursued by a Japanese witch who looks likes a ComicCon attendee in an anime costume.  In fact, most of the witches look like high school girls in cheesy Halloween costumes.  More cheesiness comes from the scenes when Sarah communicates with the spirit of her dead mother.

Although it’s not terrible, “Mother of Tears” is a clear example of how much the quality of Argento’s work has declined since the 1980s.  I would rather he had left the trilogy unfinished.