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.

Review: YOU'LL NEVER FIND ME

A remote flat roofed house in a thunderstorm. The man inside toys with a glass of whisky. A knock at the door. He's hostile, telling whoever it is to fuck off. The knocking persists and he cautiously opens the door. A young woman is outside, asking if he'll give her a lift or let her use his phone. Begrudgingly, he lets her in. He tells her he doesn't have a phone and his car is playing up so she's out of luck there but he does giver her a pocketful of coins for the payphone at the edge of the gated community. The phone is a hike away. Or she can have the couch. There is a slowly mounting sense of dread in the air. As the trust-establishing dialogue progresses and curiosity-stirring movements ensue we are taken on a strange trip between these two and what this encounter might turn out to mean.

This is a two hander. The third narrative force is the punishing weather which rages throughout the running time, turning down or up according to the action. The shooting style is a series of variations on shot reverse shot, kept mostly loose to avoid gimmickry, and we get the feeling that what begins as a kind of stiff dialogue transforms into more of an interview or even interrogation. If it is the latter (and it can feel like it) it stays shy of hard definition; there are no accusations or questions too leading but the persistent information-gathering nature of the back and forth is constant. The fourth narrative force is the  crafting of the dialogue itself which goes from alienatingly awkward to fluid and engaging, icy to burning.

Both Brendan Rock and Jordan Cowan have to hold this difficult gig aloft for a hair over ninety minutes and this is where flaws appear. This is less to do with their skills at emoting or emotional inertia than the scheme their performances must progress. The second act feels overlong, dawdling while the audience is busy guessing the end, which detracts from the explosive climax just enough to diminish its power from surprise. Nevertheless, if a film like this with its difficult brief commits only the sin of a draggy middle act, it's not doing so badly.

You'll Never Find Me is in a kind of limbo. It's the short film you feel needed to be longer to realise its potential. It's the feature that needs to be a little trimmer. However, its cinematic hand prevents it from feeling stagey and use of highly evocative exteriors and a developing motif from a different setting (which does let us know probably more than we should) build its world which might well not be the one we were introduced to. One of its strengths is a refusal to blatantly explain this and it ends on a note, in the dark, as its audience is, showing only what happened. That, finally, is what gives it its lift.

Viewing notes: I saw this as part of MIFF and ACMI's encore screenings (like last week's Monotlith. There was a brief introduction but Q and A with filmmakers afterwards which means no information on further distribution. As with Monolith, I would hope we see it in cinemas at some point and would happily see it on a streamer like Stan or Shudder.

Review: THE FORBIDDEN PLAY

Young Haruto tries growing a lizard from a jettisoned tail on his father's playful advice and it works. Naoto, his father, is improving the house he's just bound himself to by mortgage by making the garden workable for his wife Miyuki who smiles at the gesture before cuddling up to him and saying, "don't betray me again". That's because young up and coming documentarian Hiroko used to work in the same Tokyo salaryman pit where she was cornered by her horny boss but saved by Naoto who is considered unfaithful by Miyuki who shows that she can summon terrifying wraiths to torment anyone who troubles her. Then, there's an accident which claims Miyuki's life and leaves her son in a weird state. He pinches one of her corpse's fingertips to plant in the garden. Well, it worked for the lizard tail. All good? Great, strap in, there's more.

But that's all the plot you'll need for this review as it just keeps piling the supernatural tropes on until saturation if achieved somewhere in the second act. Is that so bad for a supernatural horror movie? Not at all, the reason we call them genre is that we expect things of them, sometimes to fine detail.The problem here, if there is one, is that this is not just the latest assembly line unit hammered out by the James Wan stable of ghost train boo-scares, it's the latest feature film from the man who can be said to have founded the still heavily influential J-Horror sub-genre. (I'm not getting into any bullshit discussions on the bounds of J-Horror as its prime examples from the late '90s to the early '00s are clearly identifiable and only slightly related to what came before and since. I hate the contention as much as the equal bullshit one of when punk rock started.) Hideo Nakata's Ringu is still the gold standard of J-Horror and here he is really just repeating something he's already done. If it was just this film, there wouldn't have been a J-Horror.

That's not to say it's bad. Yes, there are frequent overstated performances and we get information in dialogue that both we and the characters ought to know by then and the third act is a playing out rather than an explosive revelation, but, really, those are the kind of things that sell the tickets. I bought my own in absence of any fantasy that Nakata was going to pull another gamechanger from the ether, I knew what I was in for. Every box is ticked and then some (that wraith is scary) but ...

Well, put it this way: think of your favourite musical act. Now, imagine them taking a hard left, a massive and possibly suicidal swerve away from what you're used to. What do you think of them, now? Well, you've still got all the good stuff from before, so sit this one out and wait to see if they come to their senses for the next one. Apart from a tiny group in their fandom set, most will think this way. Lou Reed had one Metal Machine Music but then got back to songs and a refreshed career. In the '90s, Harry Connick Jr charmed millions with his retro crooner schtick but then killed all that off with one album of indigestible funk. Michael Buble started the same way but took baby steps and still keeps the wolves away. 

So, do we saddle Hideo Nakata with being the guy who made Ringu and started J-horror. Shouldn't we rejoice that he brings out cover versions of his own work which can never have the impact of the first few? Well, he tried. But he tried oddly. He made the sequel to the US travesty The Ring and it was bleh. He remade the Pang Brothers' masterful The Eye but, like The Ring 2, it just ended up as a conventional American horror. The later Chatroom was promising, abandoning the J-Horror tropes altogether and trying something out (it's worth a track-down, actually). So, he went west and swilled around with big American money with real effects budgets and guaranteed wider distribution; give the guy a break.

Well, I would except that the guy began with a lot. Just before Ringu came a taut erotic thriller Chaos which slashed at the time line as well as kept everyone guessing. Ringu started a seismic shift. And then, the effortlessly finer and deeper Dark Water. He wasn't just a good film tradie, he had vision and cinematic poetry. I don't begrudge anyone for chasing the good life even if it means letting their standards down, but it bothers me that when they try to spell the old magic they make flat cover versions of their own genius.

The Forbidden Play is a perfectly entertaining piece but there are things impossible to ignore about it that go beyond Nakata repeating himself that bother me. Adding a comedic element in the psychic character and his samurai-like sidekick is quite well managed but feels more like Takeshi Miike and his pragmatically bizarre genre-bending. But it's worse, while the movie looks all '90s and stuff it starts taking on the look and feel of those James Wan horrors I mentioned before. It's the sight of an iconoclast learning from the hack that gets to me. Well, I've still got all the old albums.

The Forbidden Play is currently screening as part of the Japanese Film Festival.

Review: MONOLITH

We have our own stories and we like it that way. "I'll tell you a story," says a voice in the dark. It's a tale of a stalker. As the black screen slowly lightens to reveal the metal grid of a microphone's protective grill, another voice interrupts with a question. The first voice turns from an urgent confidence to an attack on the interloper and the story's credibility skids off the rails.

A young journalist, disgraced and outcast, has turned to podcasting to find a way back into the profession. She'd been loose with her fact checking in the rush to bring a criminal to justice. It backfired. The bad guy got away, aided by the case against her. So, now she must break a story that could transcend the popular medium and make her case irresistible. But podcasts are unregulated, true-crime might be fact checked but conspiracy-theories are left to grow wild. The form itself won't help her, she needs hard, substantial truth. But she's desperate and getting hounded by the boss of the syndicate she's signed up to, so she picks an anonymous email about a strange object with mysterious powers and follows it through.

And then she falls down the rabbit hole. I like this phrase. The further you go into the rabbit hole, the darker it will get and the loopier (I can never shake the association between rabbits and Alice in Wonderland). In the paranoia thrillers of the '70s like The Parallax View or The Conversation, the era of Vietnam and Watergate drove secrecy from above to the fore. The internet gave everyone a voice and the notion that all viewpoints were valid rose with instant global communication. Snopes' fact checking page grew to a reference source against this but began in the proto social media of Usenet (itself largely unregulated). By the time of 911 "truthers", Trumpian politics what was a babel of opinions became the sickening phrase the "post-truth" world. Add a world wide plague and physical isolation that ran on the internet and rumour becomes indistinguishable from news. That is the world of Monolith. It's also our own.

This might seem a lot to tackle for a little indy movie made on a pittance but there's been some clever thinking here. The journalist (not named in the credits nor, I only realise now, in the dialogue) is being hounded by the scandal she created so has fled her city flat to her parents' home in the country. On her quest to follow the story of the mysterious black bricks, she communicates with people world wide through the phone and online means, has to do a lot of problem solving remotely and even, at one point, receives a game changing piece of information in a physically delivered parcel: there's no virus but she's in lockdown.

This can only work if your central performance does. Lily Sullivan has to carry everything. We hear from other characters and see some in videos and photographs but they all interact with Sullivan and her responses. Whether she is using sly professionalism to coax information from media shy witnesses or raging to control the runaway train of information as it hurtles towards her, Sullivan's portrayal only falters when the writing does. This is a one hander and such lapses, forgivable on stage, can be glaring. However, the film always manages to regroup and carry on for its acceptable ninety-four minute run time. There is a major twist in the third act but it is delivered at the end of threads rather than in a big bamming revelation. We in the audience are asked to do some thinking for ourselves and the trust is warming.

While not without its flaws, Monolith is striking for a first feature and gives us a look into the fable making of  contemporary culture, suggesting that our ability to face the truth when we find it depends on the barriers we set against it and that the "alternative facts" we choose for our own comfort can only work if left unquestioned. Our increasingly scary world only seems to be comfortable when bolstered by wondrous technology but the truth of it might only be one glitch away from cataclysmic reality. There's a very practical reason that the journalist has based herself in the isolation of a stunningly opulent and isolated mansion but there is a thematic reason, too. That is, increasingly, the kind of shelter we will need if we don't start listening to the warnings, the inconvenient truths and lapping sea levels of the physical world. Monolith is post-truth horror.

Viewing notes: I missed this at MIFF but was pleased to see it (along with two others) screened at ACMI as a replay. It will start a short run at the Nova and Lido in Melbourne before (at an unspecified date) going to streaming (no word on which).

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.