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Posted on March 3, 2017

Fairytale Imagery in The Neon Demon

Guest Post

Young girls in middle-of-nowhere European villages used to be told that if they were beautiful enough a Prince would find them, take them back to his castle, and they would live happily ever after. Change Europe for America, the stories for magazines, the Prince for an agent, the castle for Los Angeles. You now have the quintessentially American fairytale that is Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon (2016). (Even the “Neon” in the title could be an update of the colour typically used in the titles of fairytales.) Indeed, The Neon Demon is nothing less than a slick, sick modern fable laced through with the imagery of fairytales and myths. But these fantastic reference points have gone under the knife; disguised in Americana they are made fresh again.

Elle Fanning plays Jesse, a small town sixteen-year-old who has “It.” Whatever “It” is the audience can’t see, but when she moves to LA she’s the fairest in the land. She walks into the room and jaded agents turn their heads, everybody wants her; it’s almost preternatural. Naiveté and isolation put her at risk, she has no family, something strange is going on at her skeevy motel, and her closest friend wants more from her. When she falls in with a makeup artist, Ruby (Jena Malone), and her model friends she begins to embrace her beauty. But the beauty industry proves to be still more sinister.

Posted on February 27, 2017

Case 39 Challenges Our View of Children

Gwen

After watching Case 39, I started mulling over one of those nature vs. nurture conundrums: are children in horror films born innocent and made evil or are they born evil and we suppress their natural tendencies. So often, children in horror films serve as cautionary tales where parental missteps lead to baby Beelzebubs. Freudian analysis would suggest that humans are born naughty and dominated by their self-serving, Id driven psyche. Freud also argued that in order to maintain a civilized world we must repress our instinctual drives such as Thanatos. If Freud is correct that children are impulsive imps who must be tamed, then horror scholar Robin Wood speaks in tandem when he suggests that children are the “most oppressed section of the population.”* Interestingly enough, much horror scholarship assumes a psychoanalytic tone, yet often minimizes the inherent and uncanny nature of the child.

I am arguing here that the evil child in horror film is not always an innocent babe perverted by the reckless decisions of adults. Children are born uninhibited, selfish, and matter of fact. However, these traits are not the ones that disrupt normality in the horror film nor do these traits make the child monstrous. Since the millennium, I believe it is when children use these traits to usurp established power structures that they become monstrous.

There are moments in time that change the way we think about things. I recently had one of those moments when re-watching the film Case 39 (2009), directed by Christian Alvart. Here, Detective Mike Barron (Ian McShane) makes a spontaneous statement that presents the viewer with an astute juxtaposition between man’s best friend and the innocent child. His one sentence exposes the way we tend to lump all children together as innocent.

Posted on February 25, 2017

Jordan Peele’s Get Out & The Stepford Wives

Dawn Keetley

Jordan Peele’s Get Out is a masterful exercise in social commentary and a damn good horror film steeped in the horror tradition. Peele’s references aren’t mere knowing nods and winks, moreover; he evokes horror tropes in order to reflect on their earlier meanings and to create new meanings. Despite Peele’s brilliance, though, the film would not have worked as well as it did were it not for a stunning performance by Daniel Kaluuya as the film’s lead, Chris Washington. Kaluuya carried the film with his grace, compassion, humor and, in the end, his anger and outrage. As a horror fan, I was enthralled with a film that unequivocally embraced the horror tradition. As a moviegoer, I was drawn in and moved by Kaluuya’s Chris.

Kaluuya himself would not have been as effective without a stellar (and often chilling) supporting cast—especially Allison Williams as Chris’s girlfriend, Rose Armitage, Bradley Whitford as her father, Dean, Betty Gabriel as the Armitages’ housekeeper, Georgina, and LilRel Howery as Ron, TSA agent extraordinaire. Is it time, finally, for a horror film to win in some big categories at the Academy Awards (film, director, actor, supporting actor and actress) for the first time since Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (which was, let’s remember, a whopping 26 years ago, now?)

Posted on February 23, 2017

The Eels: Best Thing about A Cure for Wellness

Guest Post

R 146 mins. Gore Verbinski USA 2016

I think you need to start with the eels. The eels are everything in A Cure for Wellness. They are what I am going to remember from this oddly forgettable movie, and they are a metaphor for the film’s promise and failure to live up to that promise. If this movie were a character in The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015) and had to turn into an animal because it couldn’t find a mate (and I can’t imagine there are a whole lot of potential suitors lining up), it’d chose to turn into an eel and slip out of our grasp and our memories as soon as it could. And it’s not even an electric eel! There is exactly one scene that works in this movie, but the movie couldn’t let it last and so it moves to the next scene incoherently, but we’ll get to that. For now, just picture some eels looking kinda weird but not actually doing anything (perhaps they’re supposed to be phallic? The movie almost does something interesting with this, but then it definitely doesn’t) for a whole minute and it’ll be like you watched A Cure for Wellness, but instead you’ll have 145 minutes left to do anything else with your life. Maybe get yourself an eel and play with it?

One front from which you can’t attack A Cure for Wellness is its scope. Thanks to its extended length, it takes its time to develop a world which at once exists within our own and about 200 years in the past. A man named Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) must travel to the Swiss Alps to retrieve a fall guy for some shady business dealings. He discovers that the sanatorium his prey resides in might not be on the up and up, but before he is able to finish his task he suffers an accident and breaks his leg, forcing him to become a patient at the weird mountaintop resort where the water just might kill you. There’s a lot, and I mean a lot, between that set-up and the overblown climax, but recounting it will not help you understand the film any more, nor will it be very meaningful. This movie is too busy trying to do everything that it ends up doing nothing other than test the viewer’s patience.

Posted on February 20, 2017

XX: What’s in the Box?

Dawn Keetley

XX, from XYZ Films and Magnet Releasing, features four short films all directed and written by women: indeed, it is the first ever all-female horror anthology. “The Box” is written and directed by Jovanka Vuckovic (“The Captured Bird”) and based on the enigmatic short story by Jack Ketchum. “The Birthday Party” is co-written by Roxanne Benjamin and Annie Clark and directed by Clark (in her directorial debut). “Don’t Fall” is written and directed by Roxanne Benjamin (Southbound, V/H/S, and V/H/S/2). And “Her Only Living Son” is written and directed by Karyn Kusama (Jennifer’s Body and The Invitation).

Since the quality of the films in anthologies are typically uneven, I was pleasantly surprised by the high quality of all four of the short films in XX: they are all well-directed, well-written, well-acted, and all four of them offer something—some enigma—to think about after the film ends. In fact, that’s how I’d sum up what ties the films together, which is perhaps indicated in the title: each film introduces a mystery that remains a mystery—a kind of gap or hole in the story that doesn’t get filled in. X, as it were, marks the spot. X marks this central and provocative absence.

The two best entries, the two richest and most thought-provoking, are those that frame the anthology—Vuckovic’s “The Box” and Kusama’s “Her Only Living Son.”