31 Nights o' Horror: IMMERSION

VR hotshots gather on an island to develop new tech and find that the place is haunted by a very nasty on-eyed ghost. The village has a bus service and school along with a very few other residents which renders it silent and eerie. One of the women in the team is there to seek the fate of her father who disappeared (in a prologue) when his virtual self ventured too close to a Shinto gate a few metres off the beach. A woman also met the same mysterious end on the same day. A local mystic confirms this and cautions the wizkids off. They're wizkids, though, and they track down the VR recordings of the two missing presumed dead people to see what they can find. This unleashes a further blurring of the space between the technology and the supernatural forces that threaten to get rid of everybody they can find.

I'm leaving details out and not just spoilers. This is the latest foray into the nature of memory and place by J-Horror source-point Takashi Shimizu who brought us Ju-On (The Grudge) and all its descendants. While much of the flow of ideas and the confrontation between spirit and gigabyte can get detailed, he reins back the action to give us time to digest. That's necessary and for some it might make this a slow slog of a film. However, the patient will be rewarded with a low key and effective essay on the memory of folklore and locality, the the hard recorded recall of information systems. The two sides increasingly overlap and the notion of an inevitability to this, that they are attracting each other to form a potentially catalysmic union is where the scares of this horror story lie.

A few jump scares here and there approach tokenism and the vision of the waterlogged one-eyed ghost will appear unsurprising to anyone who has paid attention to J-Horror over the decades (including all the influenced cinema from other cultures). To me this is about using the iconography to explore the idea. We can feel comfortable in the familiarity of the ghoulish figure, so, when we see her interact with the reality blurring tech so that the lab's floorboards flood with seawater and people in underwater struggles glitch out of the scenes. One of the significant points revealed about the characters and how they plug into the world around them is a port of Kyoshi Kurosawa's terrifying Pulse which describes an apocalypse of isolation.

I've said very little about those characters and performances. They are all perfectly fine but they are at all times subject to the great fable, the two giants of human life - folklore to explain it and technology to enhance it - are the greater characters and, through a constantly stimulating visual environment we watch as their subjects interact. In the end we have a fulfilment ... of sorts and a meeting of potential ... of sorts. It's not a screamfest, it's a worry. That's why it works.

Viewing notes: I saw this as part of the Japanese Film Festival at the Kino in Melbourne. A terrific screening marred at the start by the oafs behind me who didn't understand that everyone could hear them murmuring and devauling the ticket price paid by everyone around them. For a short moment, it felt like they settled but a minute later the chief murmurer started up. I turned and looked straight at him long enough to make him shut up for the  rest of the running time. Gotta let these social troglodytes in on cinema etiquette.

31 Nights o' Horror Selections #5: BEETLEJUICE @ 35

Young Adam and Barbara Maitland find themselves rendered as ghosts after a car accident. The world outside the door for them is a weird and hostile environment, somewhere between a moon of Saturn and a Tex Avery cartoon. Before they can quite settle into the new reality a small family of New Yorkers moves into the place, threatening to strip the house into the kind of affected monstrosity that plays better in Manhattan than here in Connecticut. The Maitlands have found a book left for them by unseen forces, a manual the recently deceased. It's wordy and dry and difficult to read but they come across an ad in it for an entity who offers a kind of extermination service to get rid of the new living pests. This manifests on the attic televsion as a home-made late night style commercial. The guy really wants to be seen. Should they?

Tim Burton's second feature came cool on the heels of his debut Pee Wee's Big Adventure from three years previous. While that had been a marginal hit at best it still made an impression for its quirky story, the star's uber quirky performance and Burton's own family friendly bizarreness in design and direction. He was a fit for Beetlejuice but that didn't come up until Burton had rejected a pile of mid-'80s drivel that was going for the John Hughes quirky teen dollar. But Beetlejuice felt bespoke. There was so much opportunity for building a world that teetered on the edge between cartoons and reality that it would have felt irresistable.

And that's how it looks and feels. The house is the sole quirk free element in this conflict between a couple who would vanish in sunlight from blandness if they weren't made interesting by being ghosts and a family of three members constantly at odds with each other. The bickering alone might write itself, just add Burton's trick or treat aesthetic, Danny Elfman's musical gymnastics and you've got an iconic hit.

I first saw this on video just after its release and while I enjoyed the ghost train look and the satirical city vs country caricatures I felt it lacking. The fresh Winona Ryder as the first goth in mainstream cinema and her own big break was pretty captivating and her counterpoint, Catherine O'Hara's Delia, created a perfectly balanced tension. Jeffery Jones was as seemingly effortless in his anxiety as he had been rarely imperial previously in Amadeus. The strangely flavourless Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis cannot quite break out of the flatness of their written parts, even when literally pulling grotesque faces in the afterlife. Glen Shadix as the urbane schemer Otho is magnetic until his function takes over and he is left with mechanics alone.

That leaves Michael Keaton in the title role, a manic, fluid voiced spinning top of a character whose malevolence is barely masked by his charm. While it's not true to say that he is the sole reason for watching the film, he owns each second he is on screen and many while he's off. But when he is off, having been introduced, he is the only thing we want to see. Without him the drag of the second act is laid too bare and is inescapable. By the time of the pre-climactic scene when we should be held by the sight of a terrible supernatural sentence passed on to the Maitlands we just keep looping between an agonisingly slow effects development and a wondrous and unbelievable reception of it by its witnesses. The race to risk the thing that would reverse this feels interminable.

After this, an epilogue scene which should be darkly warm ends up cute. If you like cuteness you'll dig this end. If cuteness makes you as nauseated as does me you might have to look away. I should point out here that this impression is more from my first viewing than my more recent one. More recently, I was easily able to look around Burton's clumsy mishandling of the pace of the climax and the goofy ending recognise a little more of the shifts that had occurred in the household, why the Maitlands were finally made substantial and the joy of the final moments. 

Tim Burton's career from this high and his follow up Edward Scissorhands plateaued for a decade before making a grinding decline in the 2000s. Has his public abandoned the persistence of an old sure thing? Is Burton just another victim of a great shift to day-long comics universe films that deliver their own fantasy without the depth of his humour? Wes Anderson's authorial outings get public guernsies each time but the sense is that it's because he doesn't get more ambitious and plays to an audience that never gets sick of the flavour? Burton's triumphs have always needed writing that he doesn't appear capable of providing himself and his look and feel no longer cut it outside of imitators keeping to the limits of music videos. If he were to return it might need more Big Eyes or Ed Wood style departures but that would mean less Tim Burton. Watching Beetlejuice almost make it across the line into durability was a difficult watch for such an easy toned film and it just made me wonder if those few exceptions that revealed his skills without the goofy art direction were only glimpses into where he would go if he wanted to hide. Otherwise we could just put this on again and sing along. It is quite catchy. 

31 Nights o' Horror Selections #4: THE EXORCIST @ 50

Movie star Chris McNeil thought this was just another gig on location, a student revolt movie set in DC. When her young daughter Regan begins to act weirdly and then violently and then the furniture in her room starts flying around while she's hacking art her genitals with a crucifix, Chris thinks it's time for desperate measures. She's already been to the priciest doctors she can find and they're all drawing blanks. One of them suggests Christian exorcism as a kind of autosuggestive cure and, against the wall, she relents. She meets with a priest whose relationship with his own faith is draining from him but whose professionalism as a psychiatrist draws him into the case. He meets Regan, expecting a mixed up kid but finding a real demon. His universe is shaking for change.

William Friedkin's compressed epic of faith began with the kind of tension that could make or break the project: an atheist director adapting the source novel of a committed Christian. What worked in its favour was that Friedkin approached it the same way he'd done with the previous film The French Connection, blur the line between fiction cinema and documentary practice and see what happens. He was working from a novel by a razor sharp wit who had a artisanal way with dialogue. Between them, the creative tension birthed one of the most durable horror films in cinema history. That durability is as much due to what it doesn't do as to what it added. Until the climactic scenes of spiritual melee, the film is of generic bombast. This was the era of AIP and Hammer and, while they did fine work stretching genre, they came within not a cooee of The Exorcist's power which dared to frighten by appearing to report rather than offering a ride on a ghost train.

The prologue scene in Iraq establishes this. Father Merrin's discovery of the demonic carving is played with what feels like a lifetime of gravity but only the subtlest of emotive signalling. Instead of a big BAM BAM BAM moment, we get the clinks and clanks of the hammering workers, the silence of a museum and then the understated violence of his confrontation with the demonic statue. We don't have the details but we do have the mood. When we crossfade to Georgetown, USA and the house which will host the majority of the action, we start to feel on edge without any generic statement. Chris McNeil lies on her bed and goes through the next day's script when she hears a noise in the attic. She gets up and checks on her daughter who is sleeping but with blankets cast aside and the open window letting in a gale of icy autumn air. Something is wrong but everything looks normal. When things turn extraordinarily wrong, they still walk and talk around this normal house.

Over at the church, young and hunky Fr Damien Karras doesn't feel anything as he adminsters the eucharist and it troubles him. He visits his ailing, fragile mother in New York and it's a dark and poky apartment in a rough neighbourhood. Her fate, confused and pained in a public mental hospital, drags her son into subterranean guilt for not being there. Desecrations to the figures at his own church draw the attention of Detective Kinderman to Karras' twin expertise of psychiatry and Jesuit membership (their dialogue is muscular and earthily funny). When Chris meets him the scene, with the progressed narrative now turned frightening, is a grab at warmth in a frozen environment. 

These are not the usual terms to speak of horror movies. This film just doesn't play like anything before it made to scare its audiences, yet its sense of dread and the frankness of its depictions of the weird haunt us as we watch with a sense of failing control over what we are watching. There had been some notable left turns in the genre just prior to this film's production. Night of the Living Dead gave us a doom that had no conceptual handholds. Rosemary's Baby gave us an experience of paranoia that could bring us to screaming point. Neither of those are like the Exorcist, though, in that an insistence on the process of things not immediately related to the source of the horror. Regan's hospital examination is a blow by blow squirmfest. We probably don't need it for the story but to live through the child's ugly medical experience invests us more than the finest jumpscare could. And it's playing by your own rules that, if it works, gets you slap bang in the middle of influential icon territory. That's what happened here.

Add astute casting, mixing real priests in with fresh faces, career-making chances on lesser known actors and so on seal the deal. Max von Sydow, all of forty four when he made this, is so convincing as an eighty year old man (walking with the cautious step of one who knows how brittle his bones are) that I thought he was that old when I first saw the film (and then there's the makeup). Ellen Burstyn shot from a respectable lower tier career to front and centre of the younger character actors of the time with a performance of near unbearable stress retention. Jason Miller as Karras adds a day-to-day intensity to his own burdened world. Linda Blair only needs to convince us that she's a bright twelve year old girl but gives us more of the scarifying side of her possession than she usually gets credit for (there is a lot of audio and vision mixing which led to doubts about how complete her performance was). And so on. There's not a false note between them. By the final moments of turbulent action we are left wrenched by genuine catharsis.

So much has been written about this film's technical achievements that I'll keep that to a recommendation for reader's to follow up for themselves. The history of its production and reception are fascinating.

My own story begins in the early seventies when this film was notorious, wracked (and frankly supported) by rumours of genuine supernatural forces at play in its very celluloid. I'd heard so many of these that my impression was of a film made of shocking scenes, plotless and sensational. The only people I knew who had actually seen it were my parents whose discussion of it, measured and careful in front of me, yet vibed up as quietly terrifying. 

Finally, when I was old enough to see it legally, I watched the modified version on tv, cut to shreds with bowdlerised dialogue and not much more than an impression of why it deserved its reputation. But it was intriguing. This was as an undergraduate and at the dawn of home video. When I went back home for Christmas holidays it was the first thing I rented. That was when I understood the complex shifting of protagonists and how the alternations of perspective created the film's constant momentum. It was a wonder. This is at a time when I, and every other film student of my age, was ploughing through the new Hollywood of the '70s with its wealth of  cinematic challenges. 

The Exorcist reigned among them because it felt complete in ways that the others didn't quite. Part of the completion was this: as a lifelong atheist, I had no trouble folding myself into Karras' crisis of faith or his action at the climax. My understanding of the motivation for that action contained no need for it to be spiritual (whatever that means) but I had no trouble with anyone of credulous religious affliation who might take it more literally. You could watch it as Blatty the Christian writer or Friedkin the atheist director and the film would be unchanged.

I saw this at a cinema in Melbourne last night. It was (thankfully) the original 1973 cut so unhampered by pointless dragging extra scenes and embarrassing superimpositions of scary demon faces in shadows or cooker hoods. It was preceded by a wide ranging presentation on what had preceded the film, its aesthetics, casting, writing and so on. This caused stirs around me in the auditorium with one old goose behind me murmuring as though he were in his loungeroom waiting for the commercials to finish. 

There were other bursts of this kind during the screening, some clearly signalling aloofness or superiority to the film (then why buy tickets to it?) and others so baffling they felt pathological (the guy beside me who snorted at a scene change to Jason Miller jogging was a worry). But though this persisted through most of the scenes (except the hospital and finale, of course) the greater audience's refusal to indulge it was a great refreshment. This bullshit phenomenon seemed ot peak in the mid 2010s at similar retrospective screenings of classics, following a meme that offered licence to meet anything out of sorts with contemporary filmmaking or manners with ridicule. The laughter always sounded forced, a bird call of attempted sophistication (as though such casual snobbery was anything but oafish philistinism). Last night, though, the chortlers were contained to their small islands of influence and were never allowed to dominate. I fancy it was the younger members of the crowd who led the silent pushback (there was, in a show of hands, a surprising number of first timers there and they all looked under thirty). Just as the line accompanying this film has often had it, there is hope to be had.

31 Nights o' Horror Selections #3: DON'T LOOK NOW @ 50

After losing their daughter Christine in an accident, the Baxters avoid grief by throwing themselves into their careers. They decamp to Venice where John is overseeing the restoration of a church. One day, John and Laura are lunching at a restaurant when they spy two old women looking over to the Baxters' table. When one of the women needs assistance, Laura gets up and helps out. One of the women is blind and blurts out that she "saw" young Christine at their table, laughing along with the conversation. Laura freaks out and faints back at the table. Back at their hotel, she tells John what happened which disturbs him. Laura's uncharacteristic singsong joy at hearing that the spirit of Christine was lingering on earth is going to have some serious effects.

Nicholas Roeg's film of Daphne Du Maurier's novel was written by Allen Scott and Chris Bryant who modernised the setting and kept sight of the theme of grief firmly in the centre. Without this, the director's signature time shifts and stream of consciousness montages might have ended up in a mess. But the discipline of insisting on this core allows strange moments on screen to successfully beg our patience. When John sees a funeral barge pass his ferry on the canals, with Laura in mourning black standing on deck, his confusion over events and rage over the influence of the weird sisters on his wife. His grip on events, already loosening, might well have caused this hallucination. Soon enough, we'll know the truth of it. Roeg isn't always so fortunate with his writers but here it works. 

And it's helped in industrial quantities by its location. Off-season Venice is a large, grey and sinister place where the windows are shuttered and the footpaths which could trip you into lethally cold water as easily as you taking the next step. The assignment with the church is going south after a sloppy accident on the site and a serial killer is lurking in the many shadows of the city. Then, John starts seeing Christine or someone like her, in the red raincoat we've only seen her in. The figure darts over bridges, slips into alleys and can seemingly vanish at will. Hell of a way to defy grief through toil.

When I first saw this film it was on an old black and white tv in my undergrad house. As a film student eager to touch cinema that waived convention, I saw its stretching pace and abstractions as attractive. Then came the infamous ending (no spoilers here, sorry) when it rapidly turns into a very conventional horror film for a single scene before landing more softly back on the path where it started. We couldn't shut up about it at Uni. I got it out on VHS over the Christmas break and saw it in colour (finally getting the red raincoat motif) and its standing increased with me.

Cut to decades later and I show it to a couple of friends who hadn't seen it and disaster struck. They were tired and unwilling to get dragged through such a attention defying movie. I was surprised to find that like yawning, this boredom spread to me, too. I apologised for the choice. One of them begged off and retired for the night. The other insisted we see it through. It was far too late, then. The film had stodged out to bland stultification, not to recover.

A decade after that, I saw it on a retail site in 4K in steelbook packaging at a great price and thought why not. It sat lodged in the shelf for well over a year until it came up as an anniversary film, Mark Kermode dedicated an episode of his Screen Shots podcast to it and I was brought to October, seeking all the mostly unseen 4K physical media I had. This time, I just watched, let it flow over me, enjoyed the gloomy Venice and performances of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, including their notorious sex scene (which now comes across as a moment of happiness that marks the renewal of their intimacy after the death) and enjoyed the holy living b'crikey out of it.

Don't Look Now and even any Nicholas Roeg film, really, is not for everyone. It's glacial (but not tedious) and it is respectful to the gravity of its theme. The backwards/forwards time shifting can jolt at first but isn't hard to get used to. Mainly, though, the committed performances of the central couple in a parallel universe version of a city of carnival and gaiety which is smothering them like a giant grey blob bring us through. And as the tiny red dart that brings their grief back front and centre jut keeps flitting around in the shadows we hope that they can make some peace and that that peace will not be ugly.

Viewing notes: This triumphant viewing of Don't Look Now was done with Studio Canal's superb 4K presentation. It's a cheap rental from Google Play but is free on SBS on Demand (with ads).

31 Nights o' Horror Selections #2: THE HAUNTING @ 60

Dr Markway, an academic ghost hunter, assembles a team to investigate a mansion with a sinister history. Luke, nephew of the owners is squandering his youth until he can inherit their wealth. He's all jazz talk and skepticism but makes a good martini. Theodora wants you to call her Theo and is a strong clairvoyant. And then there's Eleanor, Nell, dowdy and sheltered, recently free of a life spent nursing her invalid mother and then gently imprisoned in her own house by her sister and young family. She thinks of the investigation as a holiday. The house is creepy, designed with a crazed irregularity. The dead are not quiet there. Nell is both terrified and at home.

Robert Wise's take on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House came at around mid point in his seven decade career. He edited Citizen Kane for Orson Welles, made several of Val Lewton's celebrated grown-up horrors, made a credible sci-fi entry with The Day the Earth Stood Still, thrilled audiences with West Side Story and still had The Sound of Music to come. That (and more) is all before 1970. Less taught by experts than came from on the job training by visionaries, Wise was one who not only sprang free of small movie apprenticeship, he became a giant of the mainstream. But this was minus the auteurism that put the likes of Hitchcock into the common parlance. Wise just did the work as effectively as he could.

If that smacks of faint praise, take a look at this film. The rich black and white interiors, shiny polished panelling here, spotty old mirrors there, strangely angled close ups of marble cherubs that look like demons, and more deep focus process shots than you could shake a Kane at. Wise went into his cinematic workshop and chose the Welles file to fashion a setting at once gothic and traditional but constantly modern. When Markway's lines about psychic phenomena stretching from the prehistoric to daily police reports the mise en scene backs him up. The weirdness of the nocturnal exteriors of the house is mostly due to shooting them with infrared film, giving them a simultaneous dark and detailed appearance. Some adventurous audio design and physical effects like the sitting room door that starts to breathe and you have the kind of cinema of trickery that William Castle was still using to thrill and (phsycially) shock his audiences. If it were only that, The Haunting would be known to us for its ghost train gags. 

It isn't only that. Wise's strenuous work on his setting brings us deeply into the world the better to let us focus on the story of Nell. Nelson Gidding's screenplay honoured the source novel by concentrating on its narrator. The film begins with a brief change to this as Markway tells the story of the house over the scenes of death and violence. This segues into his interview with the owners. This works for the adaptation as it allows a lot of background (the arresting visuals prevent it from feeling like an information dump). Then from Nell's first scene we hear her interior monologue for the rest of the film. This is necessary. It might strike today's audiences as creaky or perhaps soap operatic but it is saved by performance.

Julie Harris is magnetic. She contains a rage so consuming it is like a separate personality, pushing through the most timid of her lines. As we see her growing comfort and assurance that she belongs in the diseased house we witness a kind of relief from a lifelong resentment. In a timelapse sequence in the prologue we see Abagail Crain age from girlhood to her death in her sickbed and it presages Nell's need to escape her mother and the possibility that she will become her. Theo's bullying taunts and the disappointment that Dr Markway proves a romantic cul de sac are worn by her as a kind of hazard gear on her way to consummation with the house. Harris' embodiment of all this puts the rest of the cast well behind. By the time of her final lines of narration she is as much possessor as possessed which is the stone that hangs off its finale.

(Aside: I'm sure David Lynch used Julie Harris appearance and performance for the character of Mary in Eraserhead. Google the titles and choose images. Seeing is believing.)

For their parts, though, the central cast do step up. Richard Johnson does what he can with his dialogue which can be a series of smug claims about his expertise. His concern for Nell warms him up, though, and he emerges more rounded than his posh nerd start. West Side Story alumnus Russ Tamblyn stretches his sharp frat boy bopper into something more relatable when he is forced to show fear. None too subtle, this nevertheless enriches the film's atmosphere. 

And then there's Claire Bloom, ethereally beautiful but soured here by arch cattiness as part of her defence equipment. Her ubermodern look is supplied by fashion leader Mary Quant which allows her jaguar-like performance to remain visible. Theo's lesbianism is not just hinted at, it provides her with one of the film's funniest lines ("you're the doctor" you need to see it get it) and Nell with a barb that at the time would have shocked. Bloom neither butches up nor nancies down for Theo. Her urbane dialogue would be equally at home at a Manhattan cocktail party which is largely how she delivers it. Her sexuality is offered here as something unremarkable in her chosen milieu but queered by proximity to the straight world. A scene in which she threw her partner out of their apartment was cut but I think that was less because it was risque than the dilution it might add to Nell's story.

Joan Fontaine remembered Robert Wise as a mechanical film maker, directing scenes with a stop watch. That was from experience not too much earlier than this production but, rather than cast doubt on Fontaine's slur, the notion of attending to the machine first does come through in The Haunting. Once that's set, though, the warmth rises and helps us through the craft of nurturing the cast. Wise might have  had better conversations with his editors or electricians but his casts move and talk through their scenes as though they are really in them. One of my comfort movie resorts if I am alone (after guests or without them, so as not to use this as torture) is to watch the sequence from when Nell enters Hill House with Mrs Dudley through to all four central characters meeting and having dinner. I want to be physically in the scene whenever I see it. 

Also, I've known folk to chuckle at Mrs Dudley's lines about the isolation of the house, that no one will come "in the dark ... in the night". This is not delivered like a campy ominous warning, it's light and spare, like a musical motif or a moment from Samuel Beckett's icy two hander Footfalls. It's not given as scary but eerie. And that goes for the film as a whole. There are some pioneering set ups and effects but if you let them happen while witnessing Nell's self discovery causing her to unravel and race to the genuine tragedy of the finale, you will feel the eeriness without need of any pointers. I watch this film in full at least once a year. I've seen it once at a cinema. I've suggested it is a kind of comforter but the more I think of it the more I wonder why that is. And then that becomes eerie.

Viewing notes: I watched my imported Blu-Ray which offers a very good transfer marred at points by white burn out but is generally very deep and clear for a film with as much detail as this. The audio needs a little cranking but it's pretty much the best presentation to date outside of a screening on 35 mm at a cinema. There was once a local dvd release but that would be long deleted. You can, however, hire it from Prime or Google Play in HD for about $5.

31 Nights o' Horror Selections #1: RINGU @ 25

Two schoolgirls on a sleepover. One tells the other a version of an urban myth. The other tells a fuller version, claiming it as experience. On the surface they're doing what kids do, outdoing each other. But these tales within a tale still have to convince even just for a moment so that the shell can convince us of its own merit. This it does and with great force. When our protagonist appears (at the funeral of one of the girls who was her niece) she finds herself picking up intel from the family and more schoolgirls about the myth which might have just proven itself true. 

Reiko, the aunt, an investigative reporter, is on the trail. She follows it to the scene of her niece's tale, experiences the triggering object (an unmarked video tape) and, in line with the myth, gets a phone call that tells her she has seven days left to live. She shares this with her ex, a mathematician for his rigorous appraisal and a psychic for his intuition, who becomes the next potential victim of the curse. They pursue the story to its roots and find, at first, a heartrending story of punished talent but a cry of rage so strong it can burn itself into the airwaves, narrow casting to any who tune in and smudging them with death.

This was the third take at filming Koji Suzuki's novel of the same name. The first two were for tv and remain obscure (never seen them). It was Hideo Nakata's lean and elegantly atmospheric slow burn for the cinema that broke Sadako's fury into the public consciousness. And then, unintnentionally but inevitably, just as in the story, the copying and miscopying began until exhaustion for the next decade. Ringu is regarded as the Ur text of J-Horror. This is distinct from Japanese horror cinema, as such, which existed for decades but does not share some essential traits with the later phenomenon. After it, the traits travelled to Korea, Hong Kong, South East Asia and kept going, adding locality to the solid core established by Nakata, until the term needed broadening to Asian horror. Its success was so solid that Hollywood ordered industrial quantities of remakes which all but obscured the originals with their normalising, point missing, bloat. After all that there is still Ringu itself, endlessly replayable, as strong as ever. So, what's so good about it?

First, it knows its own audience and starts with them. The novel and subsequent stories by Suzuki were devoured, along with the weirdo horror mangas of Junji Ito, by schoolgirls, readers sophisticated enough to want atmosphere and clear emotional arcs with their big-idea scares. The two girls at the start are all but welcoming their chief demographic into the tale. And it is all about telling and shows its muscle early by switching rapidly from tell don't show to its opposite in one scene. The remainder of the film will follow this as the reporter who tells for a living gets shown and to show, most startlingly as part of a part of a psychic chain that takes her into the past and leaves physical marks. Reiko was feminised by Hiroshi Takahasi's screenplay to cut corners from the novel and place the character in the high stakes position of a protective parent. The novel's Asakawa bears a mass of backstory and heavy complication that sits snugly in a novel where it would drag a film. As Reiko interviews the schoolgirls formally, hearing their versions of the myth, it's a kind of audience meets character encounter.

Second, Ringu plays cleverly. The race against time of the plot is never allowed to fall from our minds but we also want to know as much as we can about the cause of the curse. We're happy to follow Reiko and Ryuji all over the landscape, getting the intel they need before another time stamp appears with the strange electronic inverted bell tone to keep comfort at a distance. Only in the climactic action, which gets down to the minute, are we forced to tense up and even then it is a scene rich with carefully played pathos. It shouldn't work but it does. At other times figures appear where they shouldn't and that is played variously for shock and afterschock. Why does Reiko's young son Yoichi watch the video? It's easy to miss, not essential to the plot but freezing in its implication.

Third, it's world building. Unless it's set in a gothic castle with cobwebbed hallways, you might not associate a contemporary horror film with the kind of art direction, mise en scene that you could use to judge a sci-fi. But Ringu's Tokyo and beyond is a place of polished boarding, downcast camera angles and church-like silence between walls. The sea is huge and hungry and islands might be dry land but feel as though they might easily sink without a trace. The transmission of the curse via videotape might seem quaint now (it did, when I saw it in 2000) but it's offered as familiar technology, so much so that the notion that its carriage of the cursed images feels almost natural instead of being recorded from what was thought to be a local rural channel; it's just the VHS cassette in your handbag that holds your fate. And the images themselves, like a record of a nightmare imprinted on to magnetic tape, offer glimpses: this is a world that only feels recognisable; it holds horrors in the ether.

Fourth, it's scary. Yes, it's easy to decide you're not going to go along with a claim like that if you are not feeling inclined. I know I've hyped the comedy of Bringing Up Baby to people only to have them sit flatfaced through the whole thing. I've banned people from my home for actively ridiculing Night of the Living Dead when all I did to praise it was to emphasise the originality of the idea and the great economy of its execution. If you don'wanna, ya don'wanna. But, if you can get past the oddly contorted death masks of Sadako's victims when you are told they died of fright then you probably have the imagination to welcome the scares as they come. 

I first saw the film at the long grieved Lumiere. It was straight after work and the cinema was letting in the grinds and hammering of the roadworks outside. The cinema was about half full, I and my companion toward the front and a large group of tertiary students toward the back. We coasted along with most of it, enjoying the atmosphere and the mounting tension but once the false bottom ending was shown to be that and the real climax happened I was struck with the sensation that the film couldn't be doing what it was doing. I all but felt that everyone in the cinema was holding their breath along with me until the assault of it finished. And then, in the slow descent from that point where the final decision is made, we could easily miss quite what the character was doing. More in the spoiler section below.

Ringu at twenty-five might seem on the surface to be almost contemporary to the viewer of 2023 and after but the essentials are steadfast. The remake from 2002 missed these things, or buried them beneath megatons of Hollywood genre stock. Overstated orchestral swells, backstories no one asked for, cliches from the previous decade of swollen mainstream genre and a climax that looked like it was edited for MTV which featured a monster made so intentionally ugly that it looked like its design was dictated by a child. The original climax, accounting for shifts in the technology it depicts (change a tv screen for a painting, a '90s button landline for an old wooden box phone), could have been shot in the silent era. The takes are long enough to register the uncanny physicality and motion that unnerve the viewer and allow a flow to the progress of the scene so that it feels (despite what's happening) natural. For all the showbiz trickery of almost anything in the horror genre of which this film is a significant and willing participant, Ringu is yet pure.

Viewing notes: I saw this most recently on Arrow's stunning 4K release which has detail to gasp at, real film grain that hasn't been "cleaned up" and a 5.1 audio track that delivers strong immersion.

Ringu is available to stream in Australia on Tubi and SBS on Demand.

SPOILERS BELOW

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SPOILERS

Well, spoiler. The last lines of dialogue come from an unnamed girl who talks about how copying the tape lifts the curse. So, this sounds like one of the interviews that Reiko was conducting with the schoolgirls. There is a narrative point made toward the end of the film by which Reiko understands about the copying. It's not ambiguous; with the help of an apparition she twigs. This means she didn't already know it before her husband met Sadako for the first and last time. But if it was in there among the schoolkids' testimony then it's surely something she would have recalled (like when she was frantically filling buckets of water at the bottom of the well to lift the curse). Yes, I know it's just a bit of over-egging to let us know in case we missed it but it's occurrence just before the credits roll makes a sore thumb of the statement. 

Oh, the plural was right all along. Someone on a discussion group came up with this funny but true observation: Reiko is presented as a bad mother at first but becomes a bad daughter in the final scene. She's barrelling down the highway toward her father's place to get her son to copy the tape and give dad an eyeful, passing on the curse to him. Sure he can just copy it and pass it around to anyone but his sparse rural community is going to run out of people soon and will have to set up a kind of Wicker Man community, cursing everyone they can find. Well, she might have just given it to someone in a hospice and let time and Sadako have their way and create a terminus but how long is that going to last. Thing is, even with all this in operation the thread as is, remains doomladen and only serves the film itself.

Oh, I should point out that none of these objections marrs my overall appreciation of the film; it remains one of my favourite horror movies of all time.

31 Nights Review: THE CLEANSING HOUR

 

A man strapped to a camp bed is being yelled at by a hot young priest. The bed rises and the many-voiced man in it hurls verbal filth at the priest. Violence, blood and noise until everything works and the demon is exorcised and, except for the viewers at home, it's a wrap. The Cleansing Hour is a web show in which the actor playing the priest performs a new exorcism every episode and offloads merch while he's at it. Stream no. 1.

There's a growing irk between the star of the show and the producer which extends to the latter's fiancé who can't stand "Father Max". Well, she's soon off to a tv audition so she might not have to live with her contempt for much longer. Next ep comes along and the actor playing the possessed doesn't show (minor spoiler as to why but I don't need to reveal it) so Lane (aforementioned fiancé) steps in to play the demon haunted girl. A few minutes into it she goes off script. It's a real demon. Stream no. 2.

Right, so what we get is a play between global scale entertainment culture with its fickle, ravenous audiences and the horror of demonic possession. How does that work? Well, the demon knows all and who's lying about what and how easily that could all change with a few extortion tricks. It does happen so we also deal with what's at stake in the realm of "reality" entertainment. So far, that's a pretty good mix with something current brought to the table. Production values are high and the practical effects are superb. So why doesn't this work?

Well, because, for all those good things I just listed there are two problems that, once visible, don't go away. The first is that the mould on exorcism movies was broken way back in 1973 with The Exorcist and every single reiteration looks like that one, so however good you make it all the writhing and re-voicing are just going to come off as generic. The second problem has to do with what is done to offset the first. Whether you add comedy (all those horror parodies) or commentary  you need to make that weave in and so tightly that the two become indistinguishable. That kind of happens here but the more delving done into the characters' pasts that render them vulnerable to attack the less important it becomes that it's a demon doing it. There's another narrative crossroad but it's not addressed. What ends up happening is a choice made that blends the two streams on a level so superficial that it ends up as naïve on one hand and clunkily generic on the other.

The problem here is one of indecision as no amount of higher production values are ever going to mask writing that can't make up its mind. It's funny, it's cynical, it's scary except that it's none of those. Contrast with found footage movies made with such concentration on their missions that for all the glucky video look to them and stammered improvised lines of the actors are often far more effective than this quite lavish production. Maybe the time has come when a return to committed genre does a better job at justifying itself as cinema. Because the best of horror is always allegorical, regardless of whether its audiences acknowledge that: the theme should emerge through the horror rather than accessorise it. The demon through Regan attacks Fr Karras by sounding like his mother and getting to him through his guilt as it is his faith that is at stake. Possessed Lane sounds pretty much like lunchtime Lane ranting against Max.

Seen on Shudder

31 Nights Review: HELL HOUSE LLC

 

Three threads of narrative are displayed and then woven as a disaster at a horror themed attraction is investigated. There's no spoiler in telling you that the showbiz gets real and the punters are running from real nasties. Oh, it's a found footage film.

Twenty-one years after The Blair Witch Project kicked the sub-genre off (yes, I'm discounting Cannibal Holocaust as it isn't the source point) the conventions for found footage are firmly in place. They have become so much a part of the manual that the requirement that characters on screen still give a reason for keeping the camera on all the time. Another is something that Blair Witch didn't include as it didn't know it had to: a real world framing device, usually in the form of interviews. 

Hell House LLC does the first more than once but shouldn't as the wishy washy answer just gets less convincing each time. Surely it has long been time (even in 2015 when this was made) for this aspect to get self-parodic. It almost does this in the logs that the otherwise unseen camera operator delivers to camera at the end of the day. The replay trope is also given more air than usual which saves a lot of time in credulity test scenes. So, that is a levelling.

It's the framing that detracts from the film as a whole as the casting of the interviewees is too uneven. The reporter and her crew hold their own but it really only takes one to break the spell (this even happens in the mostly mighty Ghost Watch). What does work is the signposted development of the team's involvement as their investigation takes them to an extended interview with one of the house's founders and thence to the house itself. 

All this works fine but I'm left with the faint praise of calling it competent rather than outstanding as the differentiation of character in the core footage can leave the action muddled, giving us less of a stake in the action than we should have. This makes some of the effective chills along the way (and there are real  ones) unsupported by the characters and allows too much control to the viewer to function well as horror. Eventually, the empathy for the people under threat on screen drains so we are left with a string of decent scare setups, much like they would have been in the attraction to one of the paying guests.

This will sound flippant but it both criticises the execution and celebrates the idea: I was less scared by the film than nightmare it engendered. I dreamed I was back in one of the shared houses of the '90s. Everyone else in the house was getting quietly bitchy with each other and I was losing motivation to deal with it. Eventually it came to the point where I realised I'd just paid the rent for everyone without thinking about it. This caused a profound sadness in me as, under the dream, I knew it was something I would never do unless desperate, something I would never do in real life but that's not the way dreams work. And it was one of those dreams where the main emotion lingers into wakefulness until reality cleans up the psychic mess.

So I wonder what the sequels are like.

Seen on Shudder.

31 Nights Review: THE WITCH IN THE WINDOW

Simon picks up his young son Finn. Beverly, Simon's ex, is fraught because Finn broke into her computer and saw bad stuff. So, he's on zero screen time, including the phone, and in disgrace. Simon welcomes the chance to bond and takes the boy out to the house in Vermont that he's flipping. Bit of rustic air and some old fashioned slog will do the lad a world. Finn is sullen. He's on the 13 side of twelve.

Father and son work a slowly thawing truce while getting into the house repair but hear odd noises. The electrician arrives in the first jump scare and lets slip the story of the family that lived there and the woman, thought a witch, who by legend did the husband and son in and now haunts the place in anger. She can be seen in the upper floor window on a bad day. Not twenty minutes in and there's your title.

A later chat between Simon and Finn features a blurred shape of a woman in a mirror in the background. When you see it you shiver as they don't and it just stays there. A few more appearances and this thing is really picking up and then, at the point of crisis between the pair the ante's upped to maximum when she, Lydia, the witch, appears in the upper floor chair by the window. Beyond this point spoilers so that's that for plot.

I'd put this aside because of the phrase Hallmark film that I read in an IMDB user review. I know, I know but it stuck. Well, I can see what prompted that but it's a criminally inadequate description of this tale of communication and the gravity of acceptance. Simon's work on the house has a motivation I'll leave you to discover but it has nothing to do with sales. At first you might think of how futile his plan is but increasingly you have to understand that it only works when he thinks it, not when you do. His commitment to the house has profound consequences.

So where's all the horror? Well, the build up to Lydia's activation (let's call it) is so deftly done that the moment it bursts into ignition I cursed the movie for its jump scare as I felt a full body shiver and admitted how good it was. See, I hate most jump scare movies as the jolts are unearned; they are the difference Hitchcock drew between suspense and surprise and how he preferred the former. Apart from the first two in this film (both are mild and fun) all of the jumps are hard earned. The worst feature white knuckle suspense. I cried out at one of them. They are earned not just because the suspense is so well built but built upon character and the weave of essential information. While she is a distant apparition in a window or a mirror she will send shivers but when she breaks from this her power and malevolence render her terrifying.

So, here we have a horror movie that earns its shocks through expert atmospherics and a sombre determination to stick to the growing sadness of its central story. See also, The Innocents, The Haunting and Dark Water. Hallmark film? Hallmark IMDB review, more like. This one works and works hard, even delivering a soft and puzzling chill at the end just for value's sake. That's not a sequel setup, it's class.

On Shudder.

31 Nights Review: DARLING

Darling, a young woman, gets a job in a house deep in darkest Manhattan. The owner, about to flee to vacation, tells her that the previous house sitter threw herself from the top floor balcony. Oh, anything in the fridge is fine, call you when I get to the Hamptons. Bye. Darling sets to discovering the house but is soon beset by hallucinations and a twin curiosity and dread about the locked room at the end of the hall.

There are violently scratched messages in the bedside cabinet and muffled movement throughout the house. Her visions start coming in stabbing flashes and seem to involve her in bloody violence. While out on the street one morning she is stopped by a suited man who returns the crucifix necklace she dropped. She looks back in silent gaping fear. She follows him and locates his nest before primming up and luring him back to the house. The rest you will have to see for yourself (it's 76 minutes long; it won't kill ya)

What might have been a heavily derivative genre exercise smothered in student affectation becomes a lean and effective tale of mental disintegration. Yes, it's archly arty with its chapters and hipster ironic title font and ... whatever, man. But it also gets its work done. If it uses strobing it's unusually subtle. If the black and white reminds you of too many other movies it might be aspirational but it's still effective. The score is electronic and variously droning and screeching but it's appropriate. Is it a hip New York cover version of Repulsion? Pretty much, but you don't have to know that.

I don't want to damn this effective urban gothic film with faint praise, so instead of going on anymore about its self-aware style I'll mention the oddly icy warmth of its centre, young actor Lauren Ashley Carter. I have seen Carter in two other films and they and she are both impressive (The Woman and Jugface) and a look over her filmography bids me seek out more. From her Deneuve ice-slacker entrance to homicidal maniac, she takes us with her and we happily follow on behind. Like Deneuve in the earlier film, Carter presents her flawless beauty as a starting point to an arc that alienates us from it. We discover something (but not too much) of her history and where it has left her and if we are still hankering that a girl as cute as she should ruin it all with stuff like that we should take note of our own response as it is a major part of how this film works.

It might seem odd to say but this restlessly stylish film, in committing to its horror, is, for all its affected quoting and self consciousness does more to earn its genre stripes than many more self-avowedly unpretentious pieces from the last ten years. It might be pretty but it works.

Seen on Shudder

31 Nights Review: LAST SHIFT

Jessica, a rooky cop is put in charge of staffing her dad's old police station for one last night to cover the changeover to the new one. She gets a call from a distressed girl who hangs up before vital information can be passed. She ejects a homeless man after he urinates on the foyer floor. It's not going well already but it gets worse and weirder. Compactus shelves move by themselves. The lights go out. Bizarre figures appear out of nowhere and disappear just as suddenly. The girls keeps calling up and her situation is getting worse. Piece by piece, Jessica learns of the background of the station and it's not good and will probably only get worse. Ok, it does.

This haunted house in a cop shop tale shows its M.O. from the off and keeps its effects within easy reach at all times. It's a sizeable building with a lot of corridors and confined spaces. Once you see a distant shadowy figure move across a doorway or see a compactus bay (a big metal cranked bookcase on rails) move by itself you know you are not going to be able to look at most of the backgrounds easily for the next ninety minutes. The pallet is kept on the cold side, recalling time spent in official buildings not designed for ease. I had a full body shiver at sight of a moving inanimate object within a few minutes of the start. Just what the doctor ordered.

And for a good deal of the run time that dread of unseen forces was pursued. The haunting is from the dispatch of a Manson-like cult who came to a bad and bloody end at the hands of cops from this station (including Jessica's father who came to his own violent end). Well, they're back. The girl in trouble keeps calling there rather than the new station or the emergency number and her situation is getting worse. The paranormal monster party is getting cranked up, too and it gets hard for Jessica to tell real from hallucinated.

But it's at this point that the film loses pressure. While there is a laudable restraint from the kind of lazy jump scares that the setting might beg for with its obstructed lines of sight there is increasing repetition of certain tropes after the point (in a very well staged scene that mixes exposition with chills) that Jessica is aware of the possibility that she is only imagining things. It looks less like the things are going to torment her forever and more like her failure to mount an offence against them. But it suffers from repetition. So, as the Jacob's Ladder-headed ghosts wobble away we are allowed to get used to them. So is Jessica. The night of terror becomes more of a bad trip. When the girl on the phone motif reaches its own climax it's creepy from the break in repetition as much as the denouement. 

One other moment is worth mentioning: a grotesque figure appears and seems to stalk a freaked out Jessica who hides in the compactus: we get a few shots to suggest that we're about to get a jump scare and a properly earned one but this doesn't happen and we have enough time at the apparition to recall a significant detail from earlier and we understand why we don't get the jolt. 

The third act turns the looping phenomena off as Jessica faces the bad things down and goes in pursuit. If the ending is unsurprising it is at least committed and offered as a hard conclusion. As such, it doesn't disappoint. That sounds like faint praise but really, I am only recognising something that too seldom rewards the idly taken chance on an unknown film. It helps that Juliana Harkavy's Jessica is a credible and nuanced protagonist who (although the writing can let her down) carries us through the proceedings with an unexpected warmth, not a thing you'd think to demand from a film like this.

Seen on Shudder.

31 Nights Review: CLINTON ROAD

We begin in a busy night club run by Ice T. Four young friends cram into a booth and chew the fat and plan to go out to where the wife of one of them died and perform a seance. Too long for a prologue but too briefly presented to do more than suggest a lifestyle that will have no bearing on the rest of the story. There is one good moment. Eric Roberts comes to the doorbitch and says he's on the list. The doorbitch doesn't believe him so he flashes his licence and she apologises. She'd thought he was one of them pesky Eric Roberts impersonators again.

Then we're out in the bush on Clinton Road and the psychic falls to the dirt by the fire and does the funky gibbon which freaks everybody out. It freaks one of them out so much that he goes to the car to get his phone (and then just opens the door without the key). He's interrupted by a  ranger/state trooper/guy in a uniform who tells him to skedaddle. After the uniformed one vanishes things start happening like a big ginger incel with a blunt instrument (nyurk nyurk) who lumbers around roaring and hitting folks and a little girl who is not as scary as most under-tens who want to stay up past eight p.m. goes strolling around the woods with a security blanket.

The location of the title is a real place on a real map and subject to a lot of folklore, every item of which is included in a kind of tourist sideshow re-enactment. At some point they're in a building and then they're not and then it ends. 

I am a champion of the notion that cinema should be seen as a blank canvas with each new screening. It's difficult to dispel one's own experience of elements like plot and genre in order to do this but a little effort can add a sense of newness to any film you see. Apart from the bizarre night-club to backwoods trek we make here all we really get is a series of set ups shot with the cleanest looking digital video imaginable. There is no suspense. There is no sense of development. Nothing builds or mounts.

I did some Googling on this title and got far more than I expected. Articles in Variety and other trade mags mention Ice T being in the new supernatural horror Clinton Road. So, someone got a Go Pro and had some dirt on Ice T (and probably just knew Eric Roberts' mobile number) and asked Tommy Wiseau to fund the pre-press. 

It's my own fault. I go into Tubi and find things I haven't seen that I really might want to see. I tend to stay away from most of the genre fare as it's mostly knock-offs. You know that person who dresses with labels like Praba or Pierre Cordin after a holiday in Bangkok? Well if you go to Tubi you can feast on epics like Paranormal Phenomena or The Amityville Terror. This movie isn't a knock off of any specific movie and is unlikely to generate knock-offs. My mistake in choosing it discounted that important consideration. I broke out the old Val Lewton number Isle of the Dead afterwards which crapped all over it and got outta there.

I read the synopsis of Clinton Road and then flipped through the IMDB. The first page of user reviews are all shills who give it 10/10 or 9/10 if they want to throw you off the scent. The next page's ratings all plummet to the under 3/10 end of the spectrum. So, if you liked the cover art of this one, do like the ranger man says: "get off the road and go home! NOW!" Before he disappears.

31 Nights Review: BEYOND THE GATES

Night Eight rolled up and I decided to find something unseen on Shudder. A few synopses later I chose this for the premise: two brothers meet up to deal with the estate of their father, starting with the video shop he ran while drinking through his guilt over his wife's death. As they go through the old stock and we meet some more of the cast, they find an old fashioned board game plus video in the locked office. Putting it on they get freaked out but they're intrigued: it might hold a clue to their father's disappearance and it looks neat, anyway so they take it home. The game binds them into playing it which will lead to them going to where the title says they will.

This is the kind of thing that people who are snobs about horror claim to let through: well produced, character development, considered plot and credible performances. I know, such people still think that horror movies are all hockey masks and teenage death-sex but they will all claim to hold genre films to values that are often irrelevant to them. That said, put to the test I don't think any such people (and I know a fair few personally) would get along well with this. Why? Well, it's like when someone who thinks they are witty hears a pun and calls it a bad pun. If you ask them for an example of what they think is a good pun they will often just dismiss it with: all puns are bad. Really? So, they've never read any Shakespeare or James Joyce or ... any novelist in or out of an airport newsagency who cares about delighting their readership. But I digress. 

The reason such folk won't get on with this is that it takes its time to get to where its going. We get to know these characters with nuanced performance supported by solid writing. Everything required of a creditable drama is on screen. Only at the very end (and I mean the final ten minutes) does it break out into what might be described as generic action and in those moments it does falter as they feel more perfunctory after all the world building of most of the film. The story needs it but it feels too sudden and lacks the power it might have had with more construction. This is why horror fans might find it lacking; they'll want the game tighter and faster. But while I am as subject to consumerist itching as any movie goer I let this pass as I was so impressed at the immersion I was offered. I felt the dread and dominance of the face on the television screen (Reanimator's Barbara Crampton) whenever they were in the room and then wherever they were. It's the world of it that's creepy, not the Ghost Ride action at the end.

If you do give this one a click, watch with patience and stay until after all the credits. You'll want to ask your tv a question. Out loud. But you won't.