What's the scariest sound you've ever heard? For me, it might be the sound of my brother's arm breaking when we were kids. Or maybe the sound those hanging dead bodies make when they're cut loose in Predator. But a close runner-up would have to come from one of the movies of Japanese master of suspense Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who is an absolute genius when it comes to creepy sounds in movies. With Kurosawa, though, it's not single sounds that make an impression, it's whole bunches of sounds, threaded almost subliminally through his movies.
One of those movies, Seance, is a TV production from 2000. But unlike previous Night of Terror entry The Whitechapel Vampire, this is definitely not something you'd see on the Hallmark Channel. The atmosphere here is one of creeping dread, and not the easily shaken kind, either.
Unlike Kurosawa's more famous movies like Pulse or Cure, the plot of Seance is relatively straightforward. A woman, who moonlights as a psychic medium, assisting parapsychologists and desperate police officers in their respective businesses in addition to providing run-of-the-mill psychic readings, is married to a man (a sound technician for TV and movies, naturally) who accidentally brings a 5-year-old girl home in a trunk. She was fleeing from a kidnapper, hid in his trunk, and he brings the trunk home and leaves it in the garage for days before the wife, who is of course helping the police look for the missing girl, picks up a psychic vibe and finds the girl there. She's still alive, but in bad shape.
At this point the story takes an almost Coen or hardboiled crime vibe, because instead of calling the authorities immediately, the couple hatch a scheme to make the police believe it was the wife's psychic abilities that found the girl. This entails shutting the girl up in their guest room for several days, even during visits from the police.
This is all builds to some excruciatingly suspenseful scenes, in addition to other supernatural hijinks involving the medium's psychic powers and ability to see dead spirits. And unlike most horror movies, it deals with many of the philosophical underpinnings of the supernatural - this is probably the only horror movie I'll write about this month that has an explicit reference to "Carl Jung's Collective Unconscious" in the dialogue!
I can't recommend this movie enough, particularly if you've watched Pulse and been frustrated by the murky and sometimes incomprehensible plot (or lack thereof). It's a great combination of straightforward horror/thriller plotting, and the kind of ephemeral creepiness Kiyoshi Kurosawa does best.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Night of Terror #9: 'Thirst'
First of all, I'd like to apologize for the slight lag in posts that developed over the weekend. I'm gonna make a second post tonight to pick up the slack. You can all go home now, #Occupy31NightsOfTerror protesters.
Anyway, today's post was written by my friend Jeremy Clymer (his blog can be found here) who watched the excellent Korean horror movie Thirst, which incidentally is one of my favorites to come out recently. Here he is, and maybe I'll post a few thoughts on the movie in the comments.
Anyway, today's post was written by my friend Jeremy Clymer (his blog can be found here) who watched the excellent Korean horror movie Thirst, which incidentally is one of my favorites to come out recently. Here he is, and maybe I'll post a few thoughts on the movie in the comments.
The best horror movies aren’t about scaring audiences; they’re about telling a story. The Shining is ostensibly about a haunted hotel, and yeah that makes it spooky. Underneath the surface, though, it’s really about alcoholism and domestic violence, and that’s what gives it its power. Jack Nicholson is so widely revered for his acting in that movie because he is utterly believable as a man who would get drunk and beat the shit out of his wife and kid, and that makes him terrifying to watch. A lot of modern directors and screenwriters have forgotten about the storytelling aspect of horror movies. That’s why we get movies like Paranormal Activity 3, which is really just about how many times the director can make audiences jump with cheap camera tricks.
Park Chan-wook is a director who knows how to tell a story. You might remember a little movie he did called Oldboy, which just happened to be far and away the best revenge thriller of all time. It was not only gorgeously shot but also extremely well-written, and the same can be said for Thirst. On the surface level, Thirst is a vampire movie, and a very stylish one at that. Beneath the surface, though, it is a gripping story about addiction and codependency. The true horror of the movie does not come from vampires sucking people’s blood, because frankly we’ve seen that a million times before. It comes from watching a doomed relationship spiral out of control, and all the collateral damage that occurs as a result.
Thirst follows the story of Sang-hyun, a Catholic priest who volunteers for a vaccine study that he knows will probably end in his suffering a painful and gruesome death. Instead, he ends up making a seemingly miraculous recovery after receiving a blood transfusion. There’s an unfortunate side effect to this recovery, though: he has to continuously drink the blood of others or else the disease he was infected with will quickly return.. Despite his newfound addiction, Sang-hyun continues to try to be a good and moral person. He only drinks the blood of a coma patient whom he had a personal relationship with, justifying it by telling himself the man would have wanted it that way. His attempts at non-violence are eventually undermined, though, by Tae-ju, a miserable and self-destructive woman whom Sang-hyun develops a particularly unhealthy relationship with. It’s at this point that the real horror kicks in, as Tae-ju becomes increasingly violent and domineering and Sang-hyun fails to stop her because he fears losing her.
If you replaced blood with heroin or crystal meth, this is a couple that would not be out of place on an episode of Intervention. Sang-hyun and Tae-ju seem to have little in common with each other besides shared misery and, eventually, shared addiction. I trust I’m not spoiling the movie for anyone when I say that things do not turn out particularly well for the couple in the end. This is still a Korean horror movie, after all. Still, after all the couple puts each other through there remains some real tenderness between the two of them, and it’s that human element that makes Thirst as engrossing a movie as it is.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Night of Terror #8: 'Child's Play'
My good friend Jere (he of the world-famous podcast The Audio Assault) was kind enough to contribute to 31 Nights of Terror about the movie that shaped his life in still-unknowable ways: Child's Play. Here they are, presented unedited by me.
One of the great things about Child’s Play is that the origin story for Chucky (Brad Dourif), the homicidal doll and, let’s face it, the star of the movie, is kept to the first 15 minutes of the movie. It’s a quick, ably-filmed chase scene, with some voodoo mumbling and FX-enhanced clouds. From then on, even as the characters wish to figure out how the soul of a serial killer inhabited the body of a child’s toy, there’s not much more exploration involved, needed or welcomed. All the scenes investigating Chucky’s voodoo practices (...LOL) do more to move the plot along than explain things (“Chucky needs to transfer to a new body soon! ...also voodoo has arbitrary limitations!”). At a tight 87 minutes, Child’s Play’s at a pretty good length for a story like this, which plays the tension straight (something that its later sequels - and I like Bride of Chucky a lot - don’t do quite as well).
Yes, the idea of a murderous doll is possibly the silliest idea to become a 4-sequel (and planned remake) series in mainstream horror. But the brilliant thing Child’s Play accomplishes is to cleave itself into two movies, generally not at the same time. The first focuses on young Andy Barclay, the poor child who received the doll. For this half of the movie, the movie depends on adults not believing the kid. His mother and the police think he’s a kid who doesn’t respect the gravitas of the situation. Understandable, but from the perspective of a child (which I was when I first saw this movie), it’s terrifying. This chunk of the movie is the most effective.
(Plus, there’s the weird scene where Andy’s in a mental facility with a doctor who’s even more terrifying than Chucky - what’s a hospital for children doing with electric shock therapy strong enough to fry a guy?)
The second story of the movie plays on Karen (Andy’s mother, played by Catherine Hicks)anxieties as a parent to create the tension. Once Chucky is revealed to, indeed, be a doll possessed by the spirit of a murderer, her plot becomes a rescue mission. The movie from her perspective is a weaker one (this woman in her mid-30s seriously can’t overpower the doll?), but necessary. It’s notable that once Chucky’s revealed to the adults in the movie, it becomes much more of a cliche-ridden action movie, for better (a scene where Chucky tries to strangle the cop that “killed” him in a car, then tries to kill him while he’s trapped in the wreck) and worse (where Chucky’s revealed to be alive and bites and pulls his way out of Hicks’ grasp. Again, how is he somehow stronger than her?).
Taking multiple perspectives, dividing the movie roughly in half actually keeps it together. This is probably the maximum amount of horror movie you can get from the premise. It’s a testament the whole thing that it doesn’t become campy until the climax, where Chucky gets the better of two adults who know he’s alive and Andy via the magic of false endings and Brad Dourif’s superb voice acting. The biggest flaw, really, is asking adult actors to struggle with a doll a third their size and look scared. It’s almost admirable how un-killable they made the doll in the last 13 minutes of the movie.
Some individual scenes stand out. About midway through the movie, Chucky kills his former accomplice who left him to die. There’s a great tension as Andy is running around the bad neighborhood while Chucky’s victim is waving his gun around, unable to see the doll. (Chucky’s a pretty stealthy dude.) Similarly, the scene where Chucky tries to kill the detective that killed him manages to find the perfect way to trap a full-grown adult in a situation where it’s plausible that an evenly-matched fight scene between a doll and a man can occur. The makers of Child’s Play also managed to pull maximum theatrics from their death scenes, whether it’s frying a dude or hitting a woman with a hammer so she falls four stories out a window. That’s par for slasher flicks, but considering the villain, it’s worth a shout-out.
The Wikipedia page for Child’s Play mentions that it was originally conceived as a mystery, making audiences guess if Andy or Chucky is the killer. This plays out for the first half of the movie, when Chucky’s barely shown saying anything out of the ordinary or moving, but two deaths happen in his and Andy’s presence. This story has its limits, of course, and if Child’s Play were written like that, it would probably live on in the annals of bad horror twists. As it is, they actually hit a pretty decent halfway pitch for the premise. Maybe it’s unfortunate that - at best - the premise lends itself to only an above-average but not great horror movie, but hey, they got there.
Friday, October 7, 2011
Night of Terror #7: 'Psycho III'
OK, so I actually got to watch two scary movies today. One of them was my first-ever movie from the famous Hammer studios, a 60s thriller entitled The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll, and Psycho III. I was planning to write about the former since I already covered Psycho II, but it's just not that interesting. Might write about it later if I'm in a pinch.
Psycho III, on the other hand, is VERY interesting. Anthony Perkins directs as well as stars, and he's looking a lot craggier than in Psycho II, which was made 3 or 4 years earlier (I do these write-ups fresh, no research, like Larry King. Think of me as the Larry King of short-form horror movie blogs). The movie's a lot different, too. Where the first Psycho sequel opted largely for Hitchcockian classicism with a few contemporary jolts thrown in, Psycho III is closer to a full-blown horror movie, complete with creepy/pretentious religious imagery. The most jarring example of this aspect of the movie is a scene in which Norman, dressed as his mother, is taken as a vision of the Virgin Mary by an attempted suicide victim.
I don't think the religious stuff works particularly well, Perkins seems to have lost most of the perverse charm he has in the first two movies (especially the first, obviously), and Jeff Fahey's (!) character takes some really weird and unexplainable turns, but there are some things in the movie that work great. Two set-pieces in particular will probably stick in my brain for quite a while. The first is a murder scene in which the famous shower of Hitchcock's original is replaced with a phone booth. The murder itself isn't really the interesting part here, since it's mostly standard-issue slashing and gushing. The memorable part is the lead-up. I don't want to spoil it too much, but I think it suffices to say that the poor girl who gets killed had a pretty sad and poignant last few minutes on Earth. The second memorable set-piece is a lot funnier, and it has to do with a dead body Norman has stashed in the motel's ice machine, of all places.
Like I said in my Psycho II post, I'd never really been interested in the Psycho sequels before now. But I can definitely say they're worth seeing, particularly if you can open up your mind to the very notion of a Psycho sequel. Which is what I had trouble doing, but I'm glad I was finally able to do it.
Psycho III, on the other hand, is VERY interesting. Anthony Perkins directs as well as stars, and he's looking a lot craggier than in Psycho II, which was made 3 or 4 years earlier (I do these write-ups fresh, no research, like Larry King. Think of me as the Larry King of short-form horror movie blogs). The movie's a lot different, too. Where the first Psycho sequel opted largely for Hitchcockian classicism with a few contemporary jolts thrown in, Psycho III is closer to a full-blown horror movie, complete with creepy/pretentious religious imagery. The most jarring example of this aspect of the movie is a scene in which Norman, dressed as his mother, is taken as a vision of the Virgin Mary by an attempted suicide victim.
I don't think the religious stuff works particularly well, Perkins seems to have lost most of the perverse charm he has in the first two movies (especially the first, obviously), and Jeff Fahey's (!) character takes some really weird and unexplainable turns, but there are some things in the movie that work great. Two set-pieces in particular will probably stick in my brain for quite a while. The first is a murder scene in which the famous shower of Hitchcock's original is replaced with a phone booth. The murder itself isn't really the interesting part here, since it's mostly standard-issue slashing and gushing. The memorable part is the lead-up. I don't want to spoil it too much, but I think it suffices to say that the poor girl who gets killed had a pretty sad and poignant last few minutes on Earth. The second memorable set-piece is a lot funnier, and it has to do with a dead body Norman has stashed in the motel's ice machine, of all places.
Like I said in my Psycho II post, I'd never really been interested in the Psycho sequels before now. But I can definitely say they're worth seeing, particularly if you can open up your mind to the very notion of a Psycho sequel. Which is what I had trouble doing, but I'm glad I was finally able to do it.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Night of Terror #6: 'The Silence of the Lambs'
Don't really know what to say about this one, but it's the only scary movie I got to watch today so I guess we're all stuck with it (I'm sick and have been working a lot, both of which cut into my movie-watching time, unfortunately).
The reason I don't know what to say about it is it's one of those movies that's just been there for so long that it's difficult to even look at it with fresh eyes. This isn't a problem I encounter that often: There's a long list of "established classics" that I consider my own - The Godfather, Chinatown, Double Indemnity, Blade Runner, the list goes on. But for whatever reason, The Silence of the Lambs has always been one of those respected/liked rather than loved movies for me.
Just to be clear, I do like this movie a lot. It has that electrifying quality that a well-produced Hollywood thriller has where you feel the movie isn't pulling its punches, and that almost anything can happen. There's a thematic depth, too, in everything from Buffalo Bill's modus operandi to Clarice Starling's plight as one of the only females in her line of work. And that "doorbell" misdirect towards the end, where the audience is led to believe the FBI is about to come crashing through the serial killer's door only to find poor little Jodie Foster behind the door when he opens it, is one of my favorite sequences in any movie. But it's still somehow at arm's length for me, in a way that I completely and totally acknowledge is my fault.
I haven't said anything about Anthony Hopkins yet. He's very good as Hannibal. I haven't seen any of the sequels yet but I'm going to try to get to Hannibal before the month ends. Don't know if I'll write about it or not, but it should be interesting to see the differences in the character when he becomes the star of the show.
The reason I don't know what to say about it is it's one of those movies that's just been there for so long that it's difficult to even look at it with fresh eyes. This isn't a problem I encounter that often: There's a long list of "established classics" that I consider my own - The Godfather, Chinatown, Double Indemnity, Blade Runner, the list goes on. But for whatever reason, The Silence of the Lambs has always been one of those respected/liked rather than loved movies for me.
Just to be clear, I do like this movie a lot. It has that electrifying quality that a well-produced Hollywood thriller has where you feel the movie isn't pulling its punches, and that almost anything can happen. There's a thematic depth, too, in everything from Buffalo Bill's modus operandi to Clarice Starling's plight as one of the only females in her line of work. And that "doorbell" misdirect towards the end, where the audience is led to believe the FBI is about to come crashing through the serial killer's door only to find poor little Jodie Foster behind the door when he opens it, is one of my favorite sequences in any movie. But it's still somehow at arm's length for me, in a way that I completely and totally acknowledge is my fault.
I haven't said anything about Anthony Hopkins yet. He's very good as Hannibal. I haven't seen any of the sequels yet but I'm going to try to get to Hannibal before the month ends. Don't know if I'll write about it or not, but it should be interesting to see the differences in the character when he becomes the star of the show.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Night of Terror #5: 'Psycho II'
I've been on a bit of an Anthony Perkins kick lately. I got to see Psycho on the big screen at the beautiful Paramount Theater in Austin, along with my girlfriend who had never seen it before. She really liked Perkins in it, which I of course used as an excuse to check out a bunch more Perkins movies. I rented The Black Hole. I watched Winter Kills again. And tonight I checked out a movie I'd read about but had never been interested enough to watch before now: Psycho II.
The reviews for Psycho II all seem to express the same sentiment: "It's not as bad as it could have been." There are few movies with the same iconic power as Psycho, so it's pretty much a given that a sequel made more than 2 decades after the original wouldn't come close to matching it.
Now that I've seen Psycho II, I'm going to go out on a limb and say: Yeah, the critical/audience consensus matches up with my thoughts on the movie. What I wasn't expecting was how delightfully batshit it ends up being. I particularly like a scene towards the end involving Anthony Perkins and a shovel. It is what you're thinking.
What I WAS expecting was the gory kills compared to Hitchcock's original. I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but there's one scene involving a certain "old Hollywood" actress that made me a little uncomfortable. Alright, fine, I'll spoil Psycho II: It's Vera Miles getting a knife shoved down her fucking throat!
One more stray observation before I call it a night: It's somehow magically bizarre seeing the old Bates Motel and house in color after spending so much time watching Psycho and seeing it in black and white. It doesn't even feel wrong, exactly, just strange and surreal. Maybe they could have done more with that, I dunno.
The reviews for Psycho II all seem to express the same sentiment: "It's not as bad as it could have been." There are few movies with the same iconic power as Psycho, so it's pretty much a given that a sequel made more than 2 decades after the original wouldn't come close to matching it.
Now that I've seen Psycho II, I'm going to go out on a limb and say: Yeah, the critical/audience consensus matches up with my thoughts on the movie. What I wasn't expecting was how delightfully batshit it ends up being. I particularly like a scene towards the end involving Anthony Perkins and a shovel. It is what you're thinking.
What I WAS expecting was the gory kills compared to Hitchcock's original. I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but there's one scene involving a certain "old Hollywood" actress that made me a little uncomfortable. Alright, fine, I'll spoil Psycho II: It's Vera Miles getting a knife shoved down her fucking throat!
One more stray observation before I call it a night: It's somehow magically bizarre seeing the old Bates Motel and house in color after spending so much time watching Psycho and seeing it in black and white. It doesn't even feel wrong, exactly, just strange and surreal. Maybe they could have done more with that, I dunno.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Night of Terror #4: 'Duel'
I just got back from a showing of Steven Spielberg's Duel at The Alamo Drafthouse. But enough product placement, let's get on to my hastily recorded thoughts on the movie.
Duel has always been a favorite of mine since I saw it for the first time a few years ago. I like the novel sense of being helpless out on the open road, the pared-down thriller mechanics of the plot, and Dennis Weaver's increasingly unhinged performance as David Mann, the hapless boob that is selected by an evil truck driver for a little Most Dangerous Game action. I had never seen the movie on the big screen before, and I have to say that I think the rather bare-bones plot might actually play better on TV - this makes sense if you realize that it was originally produced FOR television back in 1971. In the theater, it seems the slightest bit "stretched to fit," but trust me, this is a small concern about an otherwise excellent suspense movie.
I'm a sucker for a movie that gets to the point. Sure, Duel might not have that wonderful sense of humanity that Jaws is chock-full of, but it has a kind of minimalist tension that Spielberg would never duplicate (or even attempt to duplicate) again. And that's not the only practically avant-garde element of the movie: Listen to the score from Billy Goldenberg. It's mostly atonal drones and bursts of sound, with the occasional Psycho screeches mixed in.
Anyway, I like Duel a lot, even though I never realized until tonight just how little happens in it. Then again, maybe that's one of the movie's strengths.
Duel has always been a favorite of mine since I saw it for the first time a few years ago. I like the novel sense of being helpless out on the open road, the pared-down thriller mechanics of the plot, and Dennis Weaver's increasingly unhinged performance as David Mann, the hapless boob that is selected by an evil truck driver for a little Most Dangerous Game action. I had never seen the movie on the big screen before, and I have to say that I think the rather bare-bones plot might actually play better on TV - this makes sense if you realize that it was originally produced FOR television back in 1971. In the theater, it seems the slightest bit "stretched to fit," but trust me, this is a small concern about an otherwise excellent suspense movie.
I'm a sucker for a movie that gets to the point. Sure, Duel might not have that wonderful sense of humanity that Jaws is chock-full of, but it has a kind of minimalist tension that Spielberg would never duplicate (or even attempt to duplicate) again. And that's not the only practically avant-garde element of the movie: Listen to the score from Billy Goldenberg. It's mostly atonal drones and bursts of sound, with the occasional Psycho screeches mixed in.
Anyway, I like Duel a lot, even though I never realized until tonight just how little happens in it. Then again, maybe that's one of the movie's strengths.
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