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Posted on July 24, 2018

God’s Work: Witchfinder General and the abuse of power

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Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968), or The Conqueror Worm in the US, sits slightly at odds with other seminal Folk Horror texts The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971) and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973). Despite similarly engaging with belief systems and Britain’s rural traditions it’s a more overtly political film, less straight horror, in which paganism is an excuse for the human horrors in the film rather than the cause of them. Indeed, almost no one in Witchfinder General believes in anything except advancing their own interests.

A low budget film produced by Tigon, Witchfinder General exists in several different versions (cut for violence in the UK; with additional voice over work in the US in an attempt to link the film to Corman’s Poe cycle; with extra nudity in Germany), it’s a little rough and ready but makes good use of the East Anglian locations and draws out an excellent low key performance from Vincent Price at odds with much of his work in the genre.

Posted on July 14, 2018

Double Exposure in Beyond the Black Rainbow

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If you have yet to view the trailer for Nicolas Cage’s upcoming horror film Mandy (2018), please do so at your earliest convenience. This lurid, two and a half minute pastiche of color and chainsaws explodes with the force of a thousand metal album covers, yet retains an ineffable dreaminess. Mandy marks the second outing of writer/director Panos Cosmatos, offering an occasion to revisit his first film, Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010).

Posted on July 4, 2018

Fallen Kingdom: Failed Experiment

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Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (J. A. Bayona, 2018) is an experiment in nostalgia. Like many of the other franchises cluttering theaters these days, the latest Jurassic Park installment reawakens our admiration for its original. It elicits memories of prior experiences watching Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993). I myself will never forget the first time I saw it, when at the age of four or five, I ran screaming from the theater because the T-Rex broke loose and ripped the lawyer off a toilet—“when you gotta go, ya gotta go.”

Like me, many Jurassic Park fans can similarly identify lines of dialogue with their moments in the film. Perhaps the dialogue was so well-written, so representative of their moments, and delivered so well—by fully fleshed-out characters with plausible motivations and complete backstories—that enthusiastic audiences can easily recall it. Several of the more intuitive lines, like those above, are spoken by Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who specializes in chaos theory and predicts the fall of the park. It’s no wonder, then, that the character returns in Fallen Kingdom, whose taglines read: “life finds a way” and “the park is gone.” The former is the oft-cited Malcolm line, the other something he insistently prophesizes.

Posted on June 25, 2018

Hereditary and the Changeling Myth

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Before we meet Charlie (Milly Shapiro), the younger of the Graham family’s children in Ari Aster’s 2018 film Hereditary, we’re already worried about her. It’s the morning of her grandmother’s funeral, and her father, Steve, played by Gabriel Byrne, can’t find her anywhere. Exasperated, he finally wakes Charlie in the treehouse. “You could catch pneumonia!” he warns.

“It’s okay,” she says, but Charlie is not okay.

She evinces a flat affect—Charlie is not so much passive aggressive as just passive. She couples this quality with a pathological carelessness. At 13, Charlie demonstrates less concern about her serious food allergy than many 5 year-olds. Constantly munching on sweets, she has an appetite for the types of food that could be fatal to her. Charlie’s radical insouciance seems to suggest that she has inherited the family’s history of mental disorder, but her troubles resist diagnosis. She doesn’t seem depressed. Is she on the autism spectrum? The characters of Hereditary overtly reference a number of mental disorders, but never one in regard to Charlie.

Posted on June 23, 2018

Decapitation in Upgrade, First Reformed & Hereditary

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Three movies that happen to be playing in multiplexes this week have a surprising connection. Upgrade (Leigh Whannell, 2018) is a sci-fi action film, First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017) is a spiritual drama with a dark comedic streak, and Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018) is a horror film with plenty of family drama for seasoning. When I saw all three in the same weekend I thought I was programming a few days of very different movies, and they are that indeed. But they all feature a particular variety of body horror that brings them into conversation with each other. Not only does the same gruesome thing happen to a character in each film, but it also happens at roughly the same time in each film. If you’re looking to avoid spoilers on these movies, I would skip the section about the ones you have not yet seen, although I won’t be discussing the endings. Instead, I’ll examine how this form of body horror emphasizes the film’s themes and ideas.