The Question in Bodies #34: The Woman (2011)

Spoilers galore for a movie that contains literally everything that is possibly likely to ruin the day of anyone sensitive to, well, you know. You have been warned.)

The second time I watched The Woman, I had to take a break twenty minutes from the end. I knew what was coming. It was too much. To say this is a hard film to watch is one of the most basic and obvious things to say about it. But it has that genuinely unusual distinction of being harder to watch on subsequent viewings, because it is one of those films where knowing what is to come makes things that much harder to bear.

On a Thousand Walls #29: Vivarium (2019)

(Spoilers.)

Vivarium, then. I suppose I should start with the plot, which is simple enough. A young couple, primary school teacher Gemma (Imogen Poots) and landscaper  Tom (Jesse Eisenberg), are thinking of moving in together. There is pressure upon them to get on the property ladder. They go to an estate agent. The man working there, Martin (Jonathan Aris) is stilted and a bit creepy, but they nonetheless agree to see a house. He takes them to Yonder, a labyrinthine suburban estate full of identical detached houses. While they're looking around number 9, unimpressed, Martin vanishes. And they find that no matter where they drive to, they are still at the door of number 9. 

On a Thousand Walls #28: Orrore Popolare, Part 4

The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh) (1971)
The Perfume of the Lady in Black (Il profumo della signora in nero) (1974)

(More Italian cinema. Spoilers. Discussion of misogyny, with all you might imagine that entails. You know.)

The easiest thing to do when you're looking at the portrayal of women in classic horror from any country is generally to shrug and say, well, those were different times, and to an extent that's true, in that the way we did discourse forty or fifty years ago was different, and the terms in which we framed our expectations of gender roles were informed by societal mores, and the law, and what mum and dad were told by their mums and dads. But what that ignores is empathy.

On a Thousand Walls #27: Orrore Popolare, Part 3 and a half

The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave
(La notte che Evelyn uscì dalla tomba) (1971);
The Black Cat (Gatto nero) (1981)

(This is a continuation of my discussion of films set in England where everyone speaks Italian. Once again, spoilers abound.)

The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, another richly saturated, spicy and mainly nutty giallo by Emilio Miraglia, begins with a man trying to escape from a psychiatric institution. He has all the genre movie signifiers of “madness”: he twitches and shakes, his vision is blurred. The orderlies restrain him and drag him back. The credits roll.

On the other side of the credits, we see him again, out of hospital. He is, we discover, Lord Alan Cunningham (Peter Wyngarde lookalike Anthony Steffen), inhabitant of a decaying ancestral pile a short drive from central London (yeah, let that sink in).

On a Thousand Walls #26: The Man Who Killed Hitler and then the Bigfoot (2018)

There is a way to phrase a title that raises an expectation, to tell you about style, tone and content. For example, let's look at the early work of George Lucas, because it's an easy one. Star Wars (as Episode IV: A New Hope was simply called on release) is a pair of booming, declarative, internally alliterative monosyllables that almost have their own echo. It is the title of a film where a planet gets blown up, and if it does not disappoint in that department, that's less of a surprise than you might think. The title of American Graffiti, meanwhile, suggests a sentimental approach to the indiscretions of youth – you may be ambivalent towards the concept of graffiti, or for that matter the concept of America, but juxtaposition of the two makes both better. Graffiti is just writing on walls, but American graffiti is something to feel nostalgic for. On the other hand, there's something brutalist about THX-1138. Something that evokes the mechanistic, the Soviet (or, more accurately, the Western idea of the Soviet). And indeed it's a bleak, chilly sort of film. Not Soviet, though. THX-1138 is very much a capitalist dystopia. It's the future Elon Musk wants.

But. The point is, there's a lot in a title. Repo Man. Excalibur. Jupiter Ascending. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. Apocalypse Now. The Shining. The title is a vital part of your engagement going in, and creates an expectation, or inspires investigation into a mystery, or simply tells you what sort of film you're watching.

It's actually very rare that a title is apparently made with the intention of wrongfooting you. And it's sort of complex how The Man Who Killed Hitler and then the Bigfoot does that. To talk about those expectations, there will necessarily be, as ever, spoilers.

On a Thousand Walls #25: The Love Witch (2016)

No film so nails what it feels like right now, how the past haunts the present, as The Love Witch.

No preamble here: there will totally be spoilers.

On a Thousand Walls, interlude: We Are Haunting Ourselves

One of the theses that I have about the cultural scene right now is that it reflects wider society. I mean, OK, that should be a no-brainer, except that it isn't, because if it really was, people would have noticed. But put it this way. I wrote a wildly successful (in niche nonfiction terms) book about folk horror. It is not successful because it is good. It might be good, and I like to think it's quite good, but that's not why it succeeded. It succeeded because it had an audience.

On a Thousand Walls, Christmas Special: Pottersville (2017)

Today we will be talking about the surpassingly, bizarre Christmas movie Pottersville. We will spoil plot elements of the movie. But we will not spoil Christmas.

Obviously we've already dealt with our favourite Wyrd Christmas Movie. That's Gremlins, because of course it is. Why would it not be? Obvious festive horror fare isn't thin on the ground, but let's face it, the bar for Christmas movies is never high. I'm not really interested in a scary Christmas anyway. But Christmas is weird, it is, and yet, Christmas movies try so hard not to be. My kids have been raiding Netflix and Prime for low bar family Christmas films, and there seem to be three basic themes in modern Christmas movies: the kids defeating bad guys and winning over negligent parents at Christmas, good people finding another chance at love at Christmas, and good people saving something important at Christmas. The fourth traditional theme, the inhumane curmudgeon taught human feeling at Christmas, has sort of fallen out of fashion, but then, in our cultural climate, that's really not a surprise, is it?

Several films exist in the lower reaches of the streaming services that cleave hard to at least one and often more of those formulae, and sometimes Names will appear: Sonequa Martin-Green wasted inexplicably and horribly as the second fiddle love interest for a guy who once voiced a cat opposite Paula Abdul in a movie about Finding Christmas Love and an independent radio station Saved For Christmas (Holiday Rush (2019)); Danny Glover, easing into his role as the Cool Person's Morgan Freeman ever since he played the President in 2012 (2009), appears to have done a Christmas movie every year for ages, but Christmas Break In (2018) has a smart, resourceful little girl abandoned in her school at Christmas and defeating a couple of Comedy Hoods with the help of Wise Janitor Ray (Glover) and on the way teaching her parents a lesson in responsibility, which is a film you've seen before, even if you haven't seen this one.

Few films cleave so hard to the formula, however, and yet are so very, very strange as Pottersville. Saved for Christmas. Love Found. Also, the Sasquatch. And furries.

On a Thousand Walls #24: Orrore Popolare, Part 3

Dylan Dog (Tiziano Sclavi et al, 1986-present)
All the Colours of the Dark (Tutti i colori del buio) (1972)
What Have You Done to Solange? (Cosa avete fatto a Solange?) (1972)

It's straight to business with the usual provisos: these are mystery films I'm writing about (and also a comic, but we'll get to that) and there are spoilers. These matter more than most spoilers, because mysteries. Also, one of the films I'm writing about is What Have You Done to Solange? And listen, if you are deeply bothered by violence against women, sexual violence, mutilation of women, abuse of minors and well, pretty much every horrible thing you can imagine being done to women and girls, best to skip that bit. There are other things that can ruin your day. An essay about a horror film shouldn't be one of them.

I am not sure if London is really the weirdest city in the world. Certainly, of the places I've visited, I could make a case for New Delhi, Los Angeles and Lisbon being equally weird in their own ways. But London thinks it's the weirdest, even if it won't consciously admit that, and horror cinema, and to a lesser extent horror fiction, is full of stories that evidently want you to think London is the weirdest, or act as if they do, which I suppose amounts to the same thing. London's fractured geography gets a chapter of its own in On a Thousand Walls, but the weirdest take on London has to be the funhouse take of the outsider, particularly the outsider who hasn't been there.

On a Thousand Walls #23: Orrore Popolare, Part 2

Deep Red (Profondo rosso) (1975)
The House with Laughing Windows (La casa dalle finestre che ridono) (1976)

It's rare, I suppose, that I do writing with consultation, but these giallo pieces I'm doing probably wouldn't be possible without the help of Warwick University academic and expert on Italian pop culture Dr. Fabio Camiletti, and Autunnonero Festival founder Andrea Scibilia, both of whom are chaps who know their merde, so to speak. Fabio and Andrea have been very kindly talking through the movies I've been watching, and giving me welcome pointers on what to see next. This is a shout out and a heartfelt vote of thanks to both.

Again, these films are in some sense murder mysteries and as such they are in the vanishingly small category of films (possibly, in my opinion, the only one, to be honest) where spoiler warnings do actually count for something. One of the main delights of these movies is hermeneutic, in working out what is going on as you go, and if that matters to you, the following will completely ruin these films for you.

With that in mind, let's take a stab (or multiple! repeated! bloody! stabs) at two of the very best examples of the giallo genre.

On a Thousand Walls #22: Orrore Popolare, Part 1

Don't Torture a Duckling (Non si sevizia un paperino) (1972);
The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (La Dama Rossa uccide sette volte) (1972)

The biggest hole in my viewing over the last couple years has been in the cinema of mainland Europe, I think, and in the last year I've got to know a whole bunch of people from the continent, and it's been important to me to rectify the gaps. One area I really felt I should take on is giallo. I've mentioned the word in connection with a couple of films in the last few years, but I've never really written about a film that everyone unanimously agrees is part of the genre.

Let's define that. It's a genre that's Italian; largely from the long 1970s; sometimes has a lot of folk horror-adjacent material; and is, primarily, stabby. Sometimes strangly, and more often slashy, but mainly stabby. Serial murder and urban paranoia abounds. And frankly, this is a shoo-in for my project, isn't it? Weird folklore, popular hysteria. And daggers.

Academic Fabio Camilletti has proposed that rather than talk about giallo as such, we should be talking about Orrore Popolare, which I suppose you could just about translate as "folk horror" and which admits some of the meanings of the term, but which is, as I understand it, skewed towards the "horror of folk" meaning of folk horror, rather than pagans and witches and standing stones and countrysides, necessarily.

The thrills these films offer are their own, and no nation has ever been quite so great at putting a uniquely regional spin on the great cinematic genres as Italy. Orrore Popolare is as much a living, screaming genre as Australian Outback Horror, American Backwoods Horror and British Folk Horror.

I am normally quite dismissive about spoiler warnings, but these movies are basically murder mysteries, and in order to talk about them I really am going to share details that may in fact completely ruin them. Go carefully.

On a Thousand Walls #21: Rasganço (2001)

I found very little written in English about Rasganço (French title Dechirure, English title variously Rending and The Rip). I mean, in Portugal it's an important movie, but I don't think we realise how insular we monoglot Anglophones are, and how little of the rest of the world we see, and how distorted the parts we do see are. I came across Rasganço at MotelX this year, where it was billed as one of the only Portuguese slasher movies.

In the interests of full disclosure, I also met its director, fellow jury member Raquel Freire, at MotelX. I didn’t get to see Rasganço on screen, but Raquel gave me an online screener, and one of the many lovely folks I met in Lisbon found me a DVD copy (because getting an import was about six times the cost of buying one in Portugal and getting it posted over, and you can't buy online in Portugal unless you're actually in Portugal), so I got to see it, and I’m glad I did.

There are spoilers in this post, as ever. This film includes several uncompromising and unromantic scenes of sexual violence against women, and so if watching that or reading about it would really ruin your week, do take caution.

We Don't Go Back: A Watcher's Guide to Folk Horror and Pagan Film

The Gorsedd, Singleton Park, Swansea. 

Updated: 6th April 2021

Towards the end of October 2016, I thought, "I know! I've got this copy of The Witch sitting here and I could spend a few days going through some of the other stuff I never got round to watching and it's years since I had a Halloween movie binge, and hell, why not write about them?" I had a copy of The Wicker Man I'd found in a record sale in 2010 that I'd never watched; a copy of Beasts that cost me 50p at a stall in the Summer. I last watched Simon Magus before I had kids, and now my oldest is 11. I planned my viewing carefully.

It spiralled out of control.

On a Thousand Walls #20: The Third Part of the Night (Trzecia czesc nocy) (1971)

Andrzej Zuławski's Possession is, as you probably know if you've read this blog a bit, my favourite horror film. It's the film that keeps on giving, a stack of metaphors for trauma, and disintegration, and the occupation of physical places and human hearts. Inevitably I was going to get to more of Zuławski's films: Possession is a gateway drug for a lot of people, especially since the restored blu-ray came out a few years ago, and a lot has been written about it. Obviously genre fans stop with Possession, since it's Zuławski's only horror film (and similarly, the not-quite-but-sort-of-finished On the Silver Globe his only sci-fi film) and that's sort of missing the point, because Zuławski, although a filmmaker with some serious problems, is always quite directly honest in the films. I don't think I would have liked him personally one bit, but I have a fierce admiration for the way he discloses himself in his films, and the way he returns to them.

A case in point is his first film, The Third Part of the Night. The more you see of Zuławski's films, the more it feels like they're a set of interlocking puzzle boxes, each of which contains the means to unlock another, and when you watch this fiercely personal film, you can see how Possession is a comment on it, an expansion, even in some ways a rebuke.

OatW #19; TQiB #23: A Conversation that’s all about Us

Us (2019)

It’s what they call a Very Special Episode today. So over the space of a couple of weeks, my old pal and contributor to We Don’t Go Back, the luminous and epic Monique Lacoste, engaged in a conversation about Jordan Peele’s recent film Us. Us, you may know, stars Lupita Nyong’o as Adelaide, who in returning to a place of childhood trauma finds her family under threat. To say any more at all is of course a spoiler, and as usual, we’re going to have all the spoilers in this post.Seriously, the whole plot. Laid bare.

The one thing I’m going to say before we start that is not a spoiler is this: we both think Us is brilliant. Neither Monique nor I had a bad thing to say about it. In my opinion it’s better than Get Out (and I loved Get Out). I think everything about it, its pacing, plotting, performances, images, ideas, is absolutely spot on. It works on every possible level, and our conversation about the film is essentially predicated on the simple fact that we don’t have a bad word to say about it, so there’s that.

It seemed right somehow, for a film about duality, for two of us to do it. 

Here we go, then. This is what we had to say about Us.

On a Thousand Walls #18: Personal Shopper (2016)

Usually when I write a response to a film, I tend to avoid looking too hard at the technical stuff, things like the specifics of direction, mise-en-scene, the edit. And that's partly because I'm sort of laser focussed on writing, acting performances, and the tastiest, sexiest bit of all, the subtext. And that's partly because this technical stuff is right outside of what I call my field of expertise. And of course the shortcoming of my approach is that a film is an entire artefact. All of these things work as part of the story told by a film or a TV show. Consider how with selective editing reality shows routinely make friends appear to be enemies or entirely innocuous social cues to be actions of calculating villainy: fictions are like that too. The truism with conversation also holds with visual media – it's not what you're saying, it's how you're saying it.

And this is where I get to the films of Olivier Assayas, and Personal Shopper in particular.

On a Thousand Walls #17: The People Under the Stairs (1991)

So. I'm a Bram Stoker Award Nominee. We Don't Go Back: A Watcher's Guide to Folk Horror got the nomination for Superior Achievement in nonfiction after all, and holy crap, is all I can say. No chance of going to Michigan for the ceremony, but still. I get a certificate and everything. In the meantime, let's get back on the horse writingwise.

I haven't managed much the last couple of months, for various reasons, not least a bad case of shingles, but let's start strong and ideological and everything with Wes Craven's chucklesome yet political horrorshow,which is a film about racism (which means that people in it do racism) and features some miserable child abuse (so you have been warned). Of course there are spoilers.

On a Thousand Walls #16: Gremlins (1984)

When Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel originally reviewed Gremlins, Ebert described the film as a haunting. It haunted the portrayal of Small Town America, he said, to which Siskel replied, “It's like a Norman Rockwell painting, where there's blood on the turkey.” And that's pretty insightful because Gremlins is, for all of its eighties wackiness, a haunted film, one that engages with the history of the Cinematic American Town, and its subset, the Small Town Christmas Movie; issues of class and economic injustice are raised and not solved; post-war urban myths pepper the whole thing.

On a Thousand Walls #15: Edge of Darkness (1985)

(Spoilers as ever. But this is a piece of TV that's well over 30 years old, so frankly, who cares?)

One of the things that I've spent a deal of time looking at since this film and TV project became a serious thing, rather than just a movie marathon that got way out of hand, is how the conditions for cultural moments reproduce themselves, how a trope or a plot concern can be utterly of its time, and then some years later becomes really dated, and then a bit later still it looks utterly prophetic. And that feeds into this wider idea I have of folk horror as a hauntological thing, which is in short how we make movies about witches in the woods when we as a society are haunted by the feeling that history is unresolved, that the past has business with us.

And the difference between the urban wyrd (or the urban weird as I'm becoming more inclined to spell it) and folk horror is that the precise grounds for this discomfort, both literal and metaphorical, are different. The psychology of the urban landscape admits a different sort of haunting. I mean it's not even that an urban wyrd/weird story happens in a city as such: both Dead Man's Shoes and Helen, for instance, as well as Edge of Darkness, which I'm going to be looking at here, pivot on events in green spaces, but it's how the body politic intrudes on those spaces that makes for the status of the haunting.

On a Thousand Walls – Guest Post: Quatermass and the Pit (1958/9)

OK, this is epic, this. It's the single most extended piece of criticism yet to appear on this blog, and it's not by me, it comes from my friend and frequent co-conspirator Jon Dear. You may know Jon from the credits of Perplexed Music, the wall of the BFI and the fine cultural criticism he writes at Views From a Hill. Jon also very kindly contributed four entries to my book We Don't Go Back: A Watcher's Guide to Folk Horror, which you can totally buy now for Kindle and which, if the Universal Forces (and also Amazon) are kind, should be available in inch-thick print by the end of August. 

Jon's piece on Quatermass and the Pit fortuitously comes at a time when for reasons I don't fully understand, the BBC have seen fit to put the whole thing up on iPlayer so if you're in this United Kingdom that we still (Brexit willing) have here, you can watch along. Jon worked like a demon on this piece, and it shows. Jon's done me proud here. Over to Jon.