october

Unfriended: Dark Web (2018): I’m not so sure that we’ve purged ourselves of the found-footage phenom, a subgenre that clings especially tight to the horror genre and has yielded enough fruit at the box office to stay steadily lucrative since the Paranormal franchise spun $15,000 into $193,000,000. Before it Ruggero Deodato turned a $1,900,000 profit in 1980 and 19 years later The Blair Witch Project wrangled $247,000,000 much to the delight of Artisan/Lion’s Gate. I’m not sure why it took seven years for producers and studios to start flooding the market but since 2006 the already thin formula didn’t take long to be in desperate need of a rebirth. Like it or not, Levan Gabriadze’s Unfriended may have ushered a prospectively fleeting but fresh rendition of an old and tired tune. I’ll admit that I wasn’t fan my first go around. I saw it with four other people, not on the big screen and with plenty of chatter. On the small screen it’s hard to read some of the messenger text and easy to feel lost. The POV is limited to Blair’s laptop, bouncing around from one tab to the next in a frantic attempt to stop an apparition from murdering her and her friends on the anniversary of the ghost’s suicide (an act shown via Linkdin style at the movie’s opening). At some point we begin to realize that Blair would rather watch her friend’s die than face her own culpability, or worse, to accept the judgment of others within the realm that we all spend most of our waking lives in. It’s also quickly revealed that all five of Blair’s friends are backstabbing opportunists at best. Their will to survive only exasperates this tendency in very predictable ways. It has a nice nasty E.C. vibe to it. The nightmare here is Blair’s fear of past iniquities being made public, much like the embarrassing video that sparked the suicide. Gabriadze makes good use of our communal fear of not being able to close a tab, take down a post, or essentially delete the worst aspects of our being. It’s quite the indictment, though these cyber-jerks aren’t far from the fish in a barrel types you would see during the 80s slasher craze, thus it’s painless to accept their demise. These are some heartless kids, the kind whose rottenness thrives on anonymity. The second installment takes a different approach. First, the threats here are very real. Second, the kids are fairly good people thus witnessing them succumb to shit luck is ostensibly harder to watch. Director Stephen Susco adopts and respects Gabriadze’s technique and lands a better finale. Here the Skype heads wind up in the seemingly omniscient grasp of human traffickers, anonymous via the titular dark web where fellow creeps bid big bucks (or bit coins) on various reprehensible acts, mercifully (?) left to the imagination. I’ll say this, it left me feeling very icky and slightly unsafe by end, though the twist lightened the blow. It was too contrived to completely buy, whereas the River itself recalled all too real horrors lurking in the most loathsome depths of human nature. I also wasn’t invested in the love story and the subsequent calamity born from it. I would argue that the first film did a far better job juggling the tabs and sidebars. While that film introduced the dissemination of vile and cowardly anonymity, this film exists in a world where we witnessed a Twitter troll become president. The cup of shit spilleth over.    

Halloween (2018): I was just listening to two men discuss this modern iteration of Laurie Strode as a contradiction or as an ill-defined character. Their reasoning was bullshit, a yearning for absolution. In a nutshell, they were confused as to how a woman in Strode’s position could be both wounded and empowered as though people who survive such things can’t be both. They also spoke of Carpenter’s original, specifically Myers, as a manifestation of Strode’s fear of her own sexuality, aka trying to “elevate” a perfectly efficient horror film for their own conscience’s sake. That’s what I get for listening to a podcast, and I should consider myself lucky considering the fate that befalls two loathsome podcasters in David Gordon Green’s sequel, which is the first that John Carpenter himself has consented and is thus given the hallowed distinction of being cleared by the creator himself to ignore all nine “sequels” and Rob Zombie’s two remakes and continue the saga of Mike and Laurie. It is often conjectured that psychoanalysis does the masked maniac no favors. Leaving Michael’s homicidal impulse as blurred as possible makes for a scarier ride, so they say. Zombie ignored this advice, and some very good and astute critic’s have argued that his second whack at Carpenter’s boogeyman is a damn near masterpiece as a result. I’m not quite with that, though the death of Annie Bracket (along with its aftermath, namely the wonderful Brad Dourif’s reaction) and the nightmare intro are scenes I would gladly re-watch if there was some way to circumvent the dialogue and a lot of the stuff in between. Green’s film flirts with explanations but lands on nothing regarding Michael; he’s evil and addicted to killing people. Check out the scene where he walks from house to house with no drive other than to send random Haddonfield residents to Charon’s boat. The 78 Halloween shows the 1951 The Thing From Another World on a screen, and the director once commented memorably on the amount of times we see someone open a door. At once routine and seemingly futile, that decision leads to one of the best scares in horror movie history. I have vivid memories of seeing it as a child and jumping out of my seat. Patience can pay off, especially in the right hands. Halloween (78) was made before the days of cell phones and dwindling attention spans, thus remaining relatively prevalent despite taking its sweet time getting to the slashing. Green avoids such aspirations and it’s probably for the best. One of my favorite bits of dialogue (some written by Danny McBride) comes in a scene where Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson is walking down those familiar Haddonfield streets with a pair of friends, talking about the events that put their town on the map. The pothead boy makes a flippant but relevant observation about the deaths or lack thereof. In today’s headlines, 4 dead teenagers wouldn’t make a splash and thus its fair if not callous to wonder why anyone gives a shit. Within 30 minutes Green’s Michael has that matched, and very little is left for the imagination. I don’t say this disparagingly. Before this exchange, Allyson dispells the rumor of Laurie’s ancestral union to Michael, a nod to the 1981 sequel which I happen enjoy. I remember seeing that at my uncle’s house in Connecticut. I’m still not sure how I pulled it off. By removing all familial affiliations we are able to wonder once again why Michael is so hellbent on killing the Strodes and that’s as it should be. Green’s Halloween isn’t as bestowed with mobility and physicality, it doesn’t use enclosed space anywhere near as successfully as it’s hallowed ancestor. But as a product of its time and creator, it’s a nice alternative to haunted nuns and purges.

Hereditary (2018):  The name says it all. I guess there are fewer fates as bad as being in the wrong womb at the wrong time. Ari Aster’s debut follows a condemned familial heirloom much like the Loomis’; one in which nearly every off-the-cuff detail can be/often is a presage. And I’m very thankful to report that these details don’t wind up a superimposed thesis in disguise. All the invading horror is what you fear it to be and all signs point to an inevitable but still surprising culmination that goes contentedly off the rails and all for the better. I don’t typically find sadism or cruelty a badge of honor, but there is something endearing in Aster’s readiness to follow through on such bleak intimations. Annie (Toni Collette, give her awards) embodies such a real representation of parenthood at its murkiest and most frantic, which isn’t to say that she’s a bad mother. She’s not, but her mother -- a deceased character never to be resurrected but still somehow very much present---- sure as hell was. The film opens with the bad grandmother’s death and the relatively tempered reaction to it. Little does anyone in this family know that this death will set such terrible things into motion. As Annie’s life begins to mirror her vocation (creator of diorama mini-sets) sinister forces begin to manipulate her trajectory and the trajectory of her children and husband. At one point she unknowingly unleashes the very thing she seeks to ward off. It’s because she doesn’t have all the information and dipping one’s toes into witchery can be especially treacherous to a greenhorn. She’s at the mercy of a group of people who reject it by nature; not dissimilar to visiting a fraudulent mechanic with no clue of how a vehicle works. It seems Aster knows the mechanizations well enough, but any humdrum film school neophyte can build a nice slow malevolent dread to a lackluster fizzle, it’s in the landing that Hereditary ultimately ensures its place at the table. Finally A24 has a horror film to be proud of.