Spooky Looks

As a special Halloween treat, I'm excited to introduce my first guest blogger for this week's blog post. I hope you all enjoy my husband's post on scary movies as much as I did! Read his post below!  

If the fearless leader of this blog is the bibliophile in our family, I am most certainly the cinephile.  My love for film has been a lifelong affair, and one that has served to both spike my imagination in that wonderful childlike sense, and has also informed how I view and analyze both the written and spoken word.  Thanks to the unbridled generosity of our aforementioned fearless leader, I have been given an opportunity to share with you my thoughts on a small handful of scary films which are particularly timely on this day, that most frightful of days, All Hallows’ Eve. 

Ask any fan of the horror genre why they would voluntarily submit themselves to movies which can only be viewed through one’s fingers and which are guaranteed to generate adrenaline-filled cold sweats, and many will struggle to give you a straight answer.  What cannot be denied is that the best of the genre can transport us outside our usual reality, landing us in a place which bends our rationality to the whims of the filmmaker.  This escapism is unlike any feeling that can be found anywhere else, and while it’s not something most people want to experience on a daily basis, there is no better day than October 31 to get cozy, hope for a dark and stormy night, and throw on something that is certain to haunt our dreams.  And with that, we’re off!

Rosemary’s Baby.  There is no shortage of divisive viewpoints on director Roman Polanski, but this 1968 classic of atmospheric horror leaves no doubt that he is a master at creating a palpable sense of dread and paranoia without resort to gratuitous violence or schlock.  Set in Manhattan, the story centers around freshly-minted couple Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy (John Cassavetes) Woodhouse.  Rosemary is initially portrayed as a content and supportive wife.  In contrast, Guy is an overly ambitious but somewhat flailing actor who has thus far been relegated to commercials and minor stage work.

After the death of an elderly female resident in a highly desirable apartment complex, a vacancy opens in the building and the Woodhouses are quick to pounce on the opportunity.   Upon moving in, the Woodhouses are deluged by a series of nosy neighbors whose interest in the couple and their future is unusually strong, with one particular couple, Minnie (Ruth Gordon in an Oscar-winning turn) and Roman (Sidney Blackmer) Castevet, making a particularly keen investiture in Rosemary and Guy.  After the Woodhouses and the Castevets have dinner one night, Guy and Roman adjourn to the living room, where they engage in a conversation off-camera that is not made known to the audience. 

Shortly after the occurrence of this conversation, Guy’s career begins to take off, and he begins to apply pressure on Rosemary to have a baby.  Rosemary becomes pregnant shortly thereafter, and the Castevets’ intrusions subsequently become more frequent and severe, with Minnie dictating a very unusual diet for Rosemary, giving her a foul-smelling charm to wear during her pregnancy, and insisting that she go to a specific obstetrician (a young Ralph Bellamy for those of you who like to face-spot).  Rosemary’s suspicions as to her neighbors’ motivations begins to balloon, particularly after a conversation with a family friend who suspects that her building may be the epicenter of a group of occultists whose interest in Rosemary’s baby go well beyond neighborly well-wishes. 

What follows is a serious masterclass in the art of gaslighting of Rosemary by the building’s tenants (including Guy, whose career ascendance coincides with his near-robotic obedience to and defense of the other tenants), with repeated dismissals of Rosemary’s suspicions by those around her as paranoid and borderline delusion.  The viewer is constantly left to ponder whether Rosemary and her baby are in mortal danger, where the actual motivations for the involvement of her neighbors lie, and to what degree Rosemary may simply be suffering a psychotic break.  The tension builds throughout the course of the 137-minute runtime, but rest assured, all of the above questions and more are fully answered in horrifying fashion.

To go any further would require a spoiler alert, but this atmospheric horror film interweaves themes of female body control, the effects of loneliness of the psyche, reality vs. perception, the nature of Christianity, and the occult into a whirlwind of terror and uncertainty – with a minimum of gore or violence.  The viewer is largely left to ponder what exactly is occurring on the other side of the Woodhouses’ walls, and allowing the viewer extended time to spin themselves up over these questions is often more effective than Polanski simply presenting it to us in Technicolor.  This is a movie that holds up extremely well in light of its age, given its timeless (and timely) themes.  It demands to be seen.

***Bonus Polanski***:  While it is not considered among his finest works, I would be remiss not to also mention Polanski’s The Ninth Gate in the context of a literature blog because the entire movie revolves around a book dealer’s (Johnny Depp) pursuit of a series of texts which can reportedly conjure the Devil and grant the summoner near-unlimited power.  Depp plays it straight, but the primary antagonist, a wealthy collector of rare volumes, is played with gleeful malevolence by the incomparable Frank Langella, who can send more chills down one’s spine than any number of computer-generated monsters.  This one is too on the nose not to include.

The Evil Dead.  The year was 2002, and the average mainstream moviegoer was introduced to director Sam Raimi with the first entry in the monstrously successful Spider Man trilogy.  What many of these patrons did not realize is that, 21 years prior to the release of this popcorn flick, Raimi (at all of 21 years of age) had already made his bones with 1981’s The Evil Dead, a film considered by many to be one of the leanest, bloodiest, and most effectively shocking horror movies ever committed to celluloid.  The plot can be relayed in one sentence: a group of post-graduate co-eds go to a remote cabin for a weekender, a demon is inadvertently summoned through the recitation of certain passages in a book of questionable origin found in the cabin, and all hell (literally) breaks loose.  Depending on your mood, sometimes simpler is better.

Unlike Rosemary’s Baby, which excelled in a “tell but do not show” kind of minimalism that largely sidestepped blood and violence, The Evil Dead attempts to do the exact opposite – the movie throws buckets of blood at the viewer as our protagonist (Bruce Campbell) attempts to survive the night and the zombie-like creatures in the surrounding woods which are attempting to dismember him.  And I mean buckets of blood.  The over-the-top nature of the gore is somewhat tempered by a strong vein of black humor and slapstick running through the film which, while counterintuitive to a traditional horror film, meshes well in the aggregate and is a significant contributor to The Evil Dead’s status as one of the seminal pictures of the genre.  I could ruminate on themes, but in this case that would be absurdly pretentious.

Not for the faint of heart (and not for those lacking a twisted sense of humor), this is foundational bedrock for the horror genre.  All the more impressive is the film’s miniscule budget ($90,000.00) which, in addition to contributing to the film’s grittiness, rendered it massively profitable with an eight-figure worldwide gross.  The movie has gone on to spawn two sequels and two remakes, and deservedly so – however, as with so many franchises, the original remains king.  Speaking of King (Stephen), the master of horror himself has deemed The Evil Dead one of the best horror movies ever made.  So you don’t have to take my word for it.  Just see it, and don’t eat beforehand. 

Hereditary.  Now for something that is both psychologically stimulating and is not afraid to sear your retinas with visuals that cannot be unseen.  Directed by Ari Aster (who would later go on to direct the incredibly divisive and unsettling American-Swedish collaboration Midsommar, also a great watch), Hereditary is a film that deals in concepts of motherhood, mental health, paganism, the effects of grief which can spawn from unexplainable (in this case, supernatural) tragedy, and the inherent unknowns in relationships we have with people who we see every day or even grew up with as part of our family. 

Annie (a reliably great Toni Collette) and Steve (Gabriel Byrne) are parents raising Charlie, their 13-year-old daughter, and Peter, their 16-year-old son.  At the outset of the movie, the family is in attendance at the funeral of Annie’s mother who, while very much something of a recluse, nevertheless has a significant number of people at her funeral. 

When Charlie is tragically killed in a car accident, a grief-stricken Annie seeks counseling in a support group and is befriended by Joan, a fellow member.  Joan suggests, and Annie’s family participates in, a séance in Annie’s home so that Annie may commune with Charlie.  The séance proves effective, causing objects within the home to float and smash.  Annie is also temporarily possessed by Charlie and speaks in Charlie’s voice during the séance.  Even more concerning, Peter, whose carelessness as an older brother to Charlie largely contributed to her death, begins to show signs of longer-term possession by Charlie.  Subsequent to the abatement of Annie’s possession and the increasingly potent possession of Peter, Annie goes through her mother’s things in the attic and discovers that her mother was secretly the leader of a coven of witches (explaining the funeral crowd), and that this coven has nefarious designs to reanimate Charlie through the utilization of demonic rituals, the details of which will be reserved for those desiring to see the movie.  Subsequent to this revelation, Annie is re-possessed by Charlie as the mortal vessel through which the aforementioned rituals are to be performed on (and by) the family and the larger coven.  The culmination of this re-possession and the subsequent rituals are among the most unsettling and terrifying scenes to be committed to film.

As the title suggests, Hereditary invokes numerous themes of family, generational repetition of behavior and inclinations, disconnection, grief and remorse which add a nuanced psychological layer that more than separates it from the traditional “Satanic cult” moves of the 1980’s.  While this is a great film and far more complex and rewarding than a standard slasher flick, do be prepared for a truly unsettling last 25 or so minutes, as the finale will really stick to your ribs, which is either great if you’re built for this kind of shocker or significantly less so if graphic paganistic rituals are not in your wheelhouse.

Thanks again to my lovely wife for allowing me to be a part of this ongoing project.  Stay safe out there this Halloween, and don’t look over your shoulder!