Category: Horror

PSYCHO

By Marc S. Sanders

To watch Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho today is a blessing and a curse.  You can’t take your eyes off the craftsmanship of the film.  Yet, you know all the surprises and plot twists.  There’s only so much blood you can draw from the stone. 

Recently, I told my fourteen-year-old daughter, who doesn’t like scary movies, that she needs to watch the film.  If only because she knows absolutely nothing about Psycho.  She has no idea what’s to come of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh). She’s never heard of the shower scene.  She doesn’t know about the true relationship between Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) and his chastising mother.  Imagine, assuming you have seen the movie and/or know all its secrets already, watching the movie with someone who is seeing it for the first time with a completely blank canvas to go on.  Oh, the reactions you’ll get to see!!!

Hitchcock’s film, with a screenplay from Joseph Stefano, works under a lot of different dimensions.  It’s classified as the first “slasher movie.”  That may be true.  However, it’s much more intelligent than a typical Jason or Freddy Krueger fright fest.  Psycho begins as one story with a central character, seemingly innocent, carrying out a crime.  Later, it turns on itself and becomes something else altogether.

Marion Crane makes off with $40,000 in cash from a chauvinistic, obnoxious client of her real estate boss.  She hits the road, heading towards her lover’s home in nearby California.  Her impending doom is never implied.  Stefano and Hitchcock focus only on Marion’s scruples with the crime she’s committed.  She gets haunted by a curious police officer.  She certainly wonders what her boss must think when he’ll discover that she never deposited the money in the bank.  Is the used car salesman going to follow up on her after she urgently trades in her car for a new one with new plates?

Soon though, none of that will matter when she has no choice but to pull off the road for the evening to stay at the Bates Motel, currently with twelve cabins and twelve vacancies.

For the one or two readers who have never heard of Psycho, I’ll stop there with the narrative.  However, what I appreciate about the second half of the film is that the new central character, now young, quirky, altogether strange Norman Bates, seems to respond with avoidance when a private investigator named Arbogast (Martin Balsam), and then later Marion’s lover Sam (John Gavin) and her sister Lila (Vera Miles) start questioning him about Marion’s whereabouts.  Arbogast is on the trail of a thief who went off with $40,000.  Sam and Lila are also curious about the theft that seems unheard for Marion to commit.  Yet, there’s something else leaving them curious.  Norman, on the other hand, knows nothing as to what Marion was up to.  In his eyes, the only odd thing about her is that she checks into the motel under a different name.  All of these characters are coming in conflict with one another, but not for the reasons they think they are.  The fun part is that we are the only ones who know the hands that each player is holding.  Even more fun is when we uncover a secret that Norman has been hiding from the audience all along.

Hitchcock tricks his audiences with Psycho.  With its first story, we are in suspense of one criminal.  Will she get away with the theft? Rather, how and when will she get caught?  With its second story, we are unnerved by someone far worse and frighteningly mysterious.  Following the infamous shower scene, it’s a little nerve wracking to watch as Norman tries to hide the evidence in the trunk of a car that he pushes into the nearby swamp.  Any storyteller would just have the car simply sink.  Hitchcock brings in shadowed close ups (with his wise idea of black and white photography) of Norman chewing gum, and then becoming completely still when the car actually stops sinking midway through its descent.  As a viewer, your jaw drops.  What is Norman going to do if the car doesn’t fully submerge?

Later, it’s a wonder how Norman is going to circumvent around the unexpected visits form Arbogast, Sam and Lila.  Then, we are in suspense of their safety.  They’re just looking for the missing money while tracking where Marion went off to.  Unbeknownst to them, they have can’t even fathom her demise.

I was talking with one of my Cinephile brothers about Psycho, explaining how it follows a similar dynamic that the second half of Vertigo moves upon.  In Vertigo, the main characters, Scottie and Madeliene, are both in love with one another.  Yet, it’s for different reasons that they can’t explain to each other.  In Psycho, the characters are all under suspicion and even paranoid of each other, yet for all different reasons.  Norman never knew of Marion’s crime.  Though the other characters suspect that he does.  In both pictures, only we, the audience, know almost everything at play.  According to various documentaries I’ve watched, Hitchcock wholeheartedly trusted his screen writers to flesh out the stories.  He concerned himself more with constructing the film with a faithfulness to the script.  What’s commendable about the films Alfred Hitchcock chose to make is that he sought out these conundrums where his chess pieces are left bewildered or unaware of why they are sharing the stage with the other players.  The director had a way of channeling into deceiving his characters against one another, allowing the viewers to relish in their trickery.  Going a step further though, Hitchcock reveals other twists never suggested in the film to turn the audience on their ear in shock.

You can’t take your eyes off Psycho, even with knowing all the goodies that Hitchcock provides. 

Anthony Perkins especially is a tense and unnerving menace.  He has a boyhood innocence to him that should not appear threatening to Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane.  It’s in his relaxation with the role that it feels all the more terrifying to the viewer.  Simply look at the way Arbogast pulls up to the motel and Perkins is sitting calmly on the porch eating his bag of candy.  Watch how he casually shares with Marion how he relishes in stuffing the birds he has mounted on the parlor walls, or even how he casually offers cabin number one for Marion to occupy so that she can be close to everything.  Norman Bates hides himself very well in his virtue.  A wolf in sheep’s clothing.

The Bates Motel and the large house poised behind it on the hill were set up on a Universal back lot.  It remains one of the most famous settings in film history.  When you see the silhouette of Norman’s mother in the window from afar or young, slender Norman standing in front of the house, the images of the chilling locale stay with you whether it is on a dark and stormy night or even during a sunny afternoon.  Hitchcock opted to shoot the film in black and white to taper the goriness of the piece.  Outside of the gore elements though, the black and white lends a foreboding feeling to this destination.  Even before we realize that Marion is in danger, we feel uneasy with just arriving at this place.

The shower scene of course is one for the ages.  I’m not here to discuss all of the mechanics of film’s centerpiece.  The assembly of the scene’s elements are masterful though.  Can you imagine the scene without Bernard Hermann’s shrieking score?  Hermann was to Hitchcock like John Williams is to Steven Spielberg.  The aftermath is brutally shocking as well.  The camera does a zoom out on Janet Leigh’s eye as the soaking head of her corpse lays down on the bathroom floor.  I notice the eye does just the slightest twitch.  For me, that’s all the more disturbing than just a very still open eye.  It implies the last bits of life leaving her body and consciousness.  Later, when Norman cleans up the bathroom, Hitchcock shows his process with a mop and neatly wrapping Marion in the torn shower curtain and disposing of anything belonging to her, including a newspaper that isn’t just a newspaper.  Norman is methodical.  Perhaps this strange man has done something like this before.

I do have one grievance with Psycho.  The air is kind of sucked out of the film in its last few minutes before that delicious last close up on Norman.  Stefano’s script offers up a psychological explanation for what Norman Bates seems to suffer from.  It’s as if we are given a scientific description for what ails him. This is all painfully boring.  I dunno.  Maybe in 1960, when Psycho was a pioneering kind of horror film, and moviegoers were not as familiar with the genre that seemed far scarier than Boris Karloff, and vampires and mummies, they needed a summation like this.  Sixty years later, naturally this is not necessary.  We know all to well that there are disturbed people who live among us.  We know, sometimes, to be cautious of folks like these.  For someone as reputed as Hitchcock was, being identified as the “Master of Suspense,” this long monologue, spoon fed diagnosis from the psychiatrist kills all of the horror we’ve bared witness to over the last two hours. 

Psycho was the first slasher movie.  It was the first movie to feature a toilet and have it flush on film. It has one of the most famous characters in all of film history.  It has one of the most famous scenes of all time.  It was directed by one of the greatest directors of all time.  Yet, it also has one of the worst conclusions of all time.  If ever a scene should have been cut from a finished product, it is the second to last scene of Psycho.

Now, go find someone who has never heard of Psycho, knows nothing at all about Psycho, and watch them watch Psycho.  Of course, as the famous marketing campaign for the film insisted, by all means do not start the movie or walk in the middle, and never reveal any of its secrets.

ALIEN

By Marc S. Sanders

To be lost and alone is my absolute greatest fear.  I don’t know what to do when I find myself in situations like that.  I feel palpitations and terrible anxiety.  The only argument my wife and I had on our honeymoon was when we got lost in the Louvre in Paris.  She was relaxed.  I definitely was not.  I didn’t know in which direction to walk through the massive museum, located in a country that I’m not at all familiar with, inhabited by a majority of people who speak a language that I’m terribly limited at using for conversation.

When a person is completely, physically isolated, the only thing to depend on is his/her own wits and sensibilities.  That’s step one in constructing a scene of terror.  Step two is to lock that person away with an entity that is unpredictable, unrecognizable, smart and grotesquely frightening.  In a film, each time that entity comes into the play, the scene should not look like the last time the protagonist or the audience encountered this creature.  Whatever I learned a few minutes ago is not going to offer much help the next time around. 

I’ve just described the spine of the story that makes a horror film like Ridley Scott’s Alien so successful.

Science Fiction always works best when it can be convincing enough to lend authenticity to the fiction of its, well, science.  With Alien, a variation of biology and evolution lends to the terror of the picture and you don’t even realize it until the movie is half over. The title character is introduced in different characterizations with every scene it is called for.  First, it’s an egg, then a tentacled creature wrapped around the face of an unfortunate victim.  Later, at dinner time, it reveals itself in an unforgiving and memorable scene as a phallic shaped organism with a snake like tail and steel teeth.  Lastly, you just can’t even describe what it is except to say it is huge and its even worse than the monsters you imagined as a kid hiding in your closet or under your bed.  Credit has to go to the creature designs from H.R. Giger.  Every limb or shape of the monster seems to serve a purpose.  If that’s not enough, the animal bleeds acid that’ll burn through the hull of an enormous spaceship.  The alien in this 1979 film, later deemed a “xenomorph,” is one of the scariest and most unforgettable monsters in movie history.

A crew of seven are piloting a large ship back to the planet Earth.  Their cargo is carrying mineral ore (whatever that is).  This crew is not military of any kind.  There’s a science officer, but by and large, I’d characterize these people as truckers in outer space working on behalf of a company, by hauling a load across the galaxy.  During the long journey, they rest in a cryo-like sleep.  As the film opens, they are awakened by their transmission computer, known as “Mother,” to respond to a distress call.  Their ship has been diverted from Earth to investigate an unexplored planet.  As the piece continues, the crew brings back a plus one. They have no idea what to expect or how to handle its presence, and then they are hunted across the maze of the large ship, dispatched one by one.

The byline for Alien is marketing brilliance.  In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream.  It only scratches the surface of the terror you encounter when watching this terrifying film.  Ridley Scott uses art direction set up with long, dark hallways and warehouse size rooms that make the cast appear infantile.  His labyrinth of a spaceship offers up practically any place for a killer creature to hide and strike at an opportune time. 

It’s important to point out that Alien lends to the argument for the value of 4K resolution.  This latest print to honor the film’s 40th anniversary offers much clarity within the dark settings of the picture.  Having seen Alien countless times, I still examine each frame carefully because Giger’s designs allow the monster to blend in properly with engineering architecture of long and large pipes and cables, and immense darkness.  Chains hang from the ceilings and water drips down for no reason to be explained.  It’s just how the spaceship lives, apparently.  The atmosphere rattles you, however, when you realize there’s a dangerous bug crawling around somewhere.  Did I just catch a glimpse of the alien’s head there????  Was that his tail????  Is that a limb, like an arm or a hand????  I know all of the highlights of the picture by now, but to this day I still look for when and where the silent terror is looming, thinking I missed it from the last time I watched.  Would you believe on this last viewing, I found a caption of the alien I don’t recall ever seeing before?

Once the monster is established and we see our heroes within inescapable danger, then paranoia and mistrust can lend to their erratic nature.  The screenplay from Alien co-creator Dan O’Bannon establishes how the “grunts” of the seven (Yaphet Kotto, Harry Dean Stanton) debate what is and isn’t their responsibility and what monies they truly are entitled to on this mission.  Early on, before the threat is even considered, a divide exists within the band.  They are not always going to get along.  Later, the debate on whether to quarantine the crew members who investigated the distress signal on the strange, unknown planet comes into play.  It would be easy to simply make Alien all about blood, guts and sci fi laser pistols in a post Star Wars/Star Trek era, but it is even more effective to create disagreements and seeds of unreliability among the group.  One or two of them could end up operating in a different and unexpected direction that won’t help their cause.  Maybe it’s not just the alien we should be afraid of.

The seven members (5 men, 2 women) all have different personalities.  They like one another well enough, but they all have uncommon values and motives.  Sigourney Weaver portrays Ripley, the third in command, behind two men.  However, in outer space, does it really matter where she falls in the line?  The science officer, Ash (Ian Holm), seems to drift into his own way of thinking, separate from the rest.  Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) moves along the straight and narrow, only doing what’s assigned simply to move on and get things over with.  The other woman Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) does not have much dialogue to work with, but her expressions seem to be questioning why she even took this job.  Was this woman desperate for work and this is the best she could find?  She’s definitely the most unrelaxed and fearful of the crew.

Like Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, Alien does not operate on the movie monster alone.  There are other factors at play.  A popular Hollywood story is that Spielberg didn’t show the shark for a long period of time simply because the thing would not work, mechanically speaking.  Ridley Scott, however, demonstrates that he can present the animal one way and then show it in a completely different form later.  When it has reached what we can only believe is full evolution, we still don’t get a clear physical picture of the creature’s design from head to toe.  Scott will show us teeth, or maybe a shoulder blade or a tail that whips or moves at a slow and cautious pace.  The alien functions with a combination of real-life predators’ behaviors.  It hatches.  It sheds its skin.  It bites.  It runs.  It hunts a prey.  It grows and evolves…and seemingly very quickly.

Alien has been duplicated many times following its release, including a few shameless sequels.  Mind you, some of the franchise follow ups remain exceptional in their own right.  What misgivings Ridley Scott’s movie have later inspired cannot be helped.  Mr. Scott should consider it an honor, at best, that various craftspeople have attempted to top what he accomplished, I guess.  Those copycats don’t follow the recipe of Alien though.  There’s either too much of an ingredient included like blood and guts or there’s a lacking in its script, such as the eerie haunts of a dangerous setting or the overeager intelligence of its characters.  Whatever the case may be, the achievements in horror work so well in Alien, because it moves with dread, uncertainty, helplessness, a lack of knowledge, and then with only a few touches of gore and violence that are mostly left to our worst imaginations. 

Alien is not only one of the best science fiction films ever made.  It is also one of the best horror films ever made.

THE THING (1982)

By Marc S. Sanders

Often, a great beginning to a film offers an intriguing question. So as I finally watched John Carpenter’s 1982 interpretation of The Thing, I was especially curious as to why a sniper aboard a fast moving helicopter was targeting a dog running across the open plains of Antarctica with a pulse pounding beat from legendary film composer Ennio Morricone. The film has me hooked and none of the gory horror to come, compliments of creature effects wizard Rob Bottin, has even presented itself yet.

Gore never did anything for me in horror, and horror has never been my most favorite genre of film. Rather, suspense always held my attention and kept me thinking long after the movie was over. Carpenter’s film is full of Bottin’s imaginative gore but the paranoia and mistrust among a crew of science operatives is the real centerpiece here. Whether it’s the innocence of a dog or the star power of Kurt Russell, I never trusted the narrative of The Thing and that’s the point.

An exceptional scene on the same level as the dinner scene in Ridley Scott’s Alien occurs following a crew man suffering a heart attack. The defibrillator is brought out, “CLEAR” is shouted and the man is zapped. Then something else happens. I won’t spoil the moment. Yet, this is where imagination was put to work; where effects and storytelling work cohesively. Thankfully, moments like these become a running theme throughout The Thing. You never know what to expect from an unmeasurable and incomprehensible enemy. The fact that resources are scarce and escape is impossible traps our characters and the viewer as well.

Convenient, fast learning knowledge only tells you that this entity can duplicate anything it comes in contact with. So, you might just be sidling up to the thing itself and you won’t even know it until it’s too late.

Isolation, lack of trust, fear, paranoia – all of these elements work towards the advantage of superb imagination and storytelling in Carpenter’s piece.

The Thing was always a movie that eluded me. I’m now so grateful to have witnessed it. It makes me yearn for better storytelling in today’s films beyond remakes and superhero exhaustion.

John Carpenter’s The Thing is an absolute must see motion picture. Watch it with friends and watch it with the lights turned off.

THE SHINING

By Marc S. Sanders

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining has become a legendary film that set the standard for haunted house films. It’s a spooky story with a musical soundtrack never destined to be played at weddings or bar mitzvahs.

The whole movie is unsettling, beginning with a long winding road drive through the Colorado mountains as the title and credits unconventionally roll up the screen, one at a time. Kubrick was never typical. Here he was frighteningly weird.

The film, based of Stephen King’s bestseller, consists of four characters. Three of them are novelist Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and their son Danny. He’s one effed up kid with a mop top haircut. I think I’d be disturbed if I uncovered what Danny grew up to be hereafter.

The fourth character is the main attraction, the isolated Overlook Hotel; left empty during the harsh winter months to take advantage on reviving its morbid history of harsh violence by means of ghosts, bleeding elevators and hacked up innocent looking, pig-tailed, young girls. Don’t ask me to explain the guy with the gold lion mask about to go down on a happy partygoer. No. I also can’t explain what exactly happened in Room 237. Perhaps King’s book covers all of this. Kubrick opts not to and focuses on the naivety of Wendy while Danny and his imaginary friend Tony talk to the consciousness of the hotel only to understand it is gleefully influencing Jack into an obsession of murderous incentive, eventually leading him to charge his ax through some doors.

I once visited the Louvre in Paris. I couldn’t fully enjoy or appreciate it. It was too big and too overwhelming. I didn’t know where to start or where to end. I had a panic attack, but I didn’t know it at the time, and I was eager to leave. Kubrick works on that anxiety during the long exposition of the film. Effectively disturbing tracking shots are provided that shoot deep hallways, vast ballrooms, large furniture pieces, and loud colors of reds, browns, yellows and whites along with emerald, green in the bathroom of room 237. The pastel blues of the young girl’s dresses and pigtail ribbons are also deliberately garish. Colors are normally cheerful for me. Here, they are unwelcome and intrusive and when I say loud, I mean to say the colors scream at you,

You just want to get away with Danny on his Big Wheel that he pedals around the property, softly on the carpet and thunderously loud on the tile and wood.

The character of the setting continues its disturbing details by means of a maze. Kubrick offers a great transition when Wendy and Danny enter the maze while Jack overlooks (pun intended) on a small-scale model. The hotel’s haunts have its prey in sight by means of its possession of Jack. Kubrick clearly shows that with his camera work. There are wide shots both overhead and facing Jack, and narrow, trapped captions of Danny and Wendy lost in the labyrinth.

I won’t say The Shining is a favorite of mine. I think this is only the second time I’ve seen it. I’ll watch horror movies, but they often bother me; leaving me distraught and stressed, unrelaxed. Occasionally, while Kubrick is vague with his imagery, Nicholson is blatantly obvious in his urge to terrify; maybe a little too blatant. He is in direct competition with John Belushi in the facial expression department. He’s disturbing even before the hotel’s influence is available to take hold, and so I didn’t necessarily get a good character arc from him. Same with Duvall or the boy. This family is downright weird all on their own from the moment you meet them until the film’s cold, wintery end arrives. Kubrick gets you curious about what this hotel is capable of. Then he shows you. Then the end literally tires the story out.

The Shining is best when you have an urge for fear and frights. A house of horrors tale where a cat or bird will not suddenly fly into focus for a cheap jump-scare. Rather your vision and hearing will still feel shocked, leaving butterflies in the stomach, and shortness of breath. Repeat viewings will leave you awake at bedtime, and worried and agitated. There’s so much to explore, but do we really want to know what’s in that room, or down that hall or around that corner, or even how that photograph of a July 4 celebration from the 1920s ever came to be?

THE BABADOOK

By Marc S. Sanders

The Australian psychological horror film, The Babadook is a very unsettling piece, and I hate my colleague, Miguel E Rodriguez for subjecting me to a viewing. It’s so unnerving simply because it is so good.

Jennifer Kent writes and directs an eerie film about a troubled mother and her young son (Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman) named Amelia and Samuel Vanek. Samuel’s father passed away in an accident while taking Amelia to the hospital when she was in labor. Seven years later, Amelia endures much sorrow and loneliness while Samuel has social issues in school and resorts to crafting barbaric weapons out of wood. I just played with action figures. This kid puts sharp knives on a sling. Other mothers and children keep their distance from them. Samuel’s school is concerned of his presence with other first graders, and Amelia opts to not even celebrate the boy’s birthday on the actual day, also known as her husband’s date of death.

One evening, Samuel pulls a book known as “Mister Babadook” off the shelf for bedtime reading. Opening the book is their first and most regrettable mistake. Haunting images of a dark shadow are shown in “pop up book” form with promises of death and so on in a cute, yet sinister, Dr. Seuss like rhyme. This is the evil “Cat In The Hat.”

Like most creepy horror films, there’s pounding on doors and floors, open doorways to find nothing there, disturbing phone calls, shadows, surprising sound editing and so on. That’s nothing new. What makes Kent’s debut film so special though are the performances from Davis and Wiseman.

As I watched the film with Miguel, I told him after about a third of the way through that I hate that annoying little kid. I think that’s the point though. Noah Wiseman plays his part with great hyperactivity who can never be satisfied or calmed with any variation of attention. Essie Davis plays Amelia as strung out and exhausted. You can’t help but feel for her inescapable circumstance of being trapped in a home with no other family and no friends who seem willing to help, much less tolerate her crazed son.

Later, long after the disturbing children’s book is read, Jennifer Kent’s script turns on a different perspective. It’s not so much that the character’s have changed. More so, the aftermath of reading “Mister Babadook” has altered the mother and son’s behaviors. What caught me by surprise was that my own perspective gradually changed on the two players.

You will need to watch the film to truly uncover the mystery of the book’s power. However, it’s a very frightening exploration. Kent is very good with the sensory overload; which really is a necessary tool in horror, particularly in what you hear and what you see. Kent mixes up what sense is alarmed first though, with each passing sequence. It makes it hard to relax as a viewer, while it’s also hard for the mother and son to sleep at night. That’s what keeps the hairs on your body standing up and believe me, mine were standing at full attention.

Kent covers much psychologically. Insomnia, depression, aggression, night terrors and trauma are all given attention as they manifest into this disturbing unrecognizable character know as The Babadook.

I also observed an interesting aspect in use of color. Namely that Amelia is dressed primarily in faded pink and yellow while Samuel is adorned in dark grey or charcoal like the two story home they live in. The contrast in colors left me guessing who was the real source of fright in this film because at times the contrast seems to flip. I risk sounding vague here, but I’d prefer not to spoil what’s presented.

Again, The Babadook left me feeling shaken like the best of Stephen King’s adapted films including Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and especially the latter half of Brian DePalma’s Carrie. I’ll even go on record and say this film is better or more effective than those two films. It’s sharper and more mysterious.

I’m not sure I was entertained with The Babadook because I was always feeling disturbed and unsettled. Good horror films do that to me. Forgive me. I can’t help that.

On the other hand, Miguel was quite entertained at me cursing him out and loudly expressing my seething hatred towards him as I watched. What can I say? Mig had it coming for introducing me to The Babadook.

A QUIET PLACE

By Marc S. Sanders

M Night Shamylan is kicking himself right now for not thinking of this story.  All it took for director/co-writer John Krasinski was very, very minimal dialogue, some well skilled young actors and his brilliantly, talented wife Emily Blunt to pull off one of the best pictures of 2018.

Another desolate, post-apocalyptic future has occurred and thankfully this story does not feature tired zombies or vampires.  Krasinski uses old fashioned techniques to hide or mistakenly reveal his characters to the boogie men with no other agenda except to shut out all of the noise. A silo, a basement, a waterfall, fire, a nail, a hearing-impaired character, bare feet, a toy space shuttle, sand, lights and fireworks. I accepted every plot device used in the film, and each element is a miniature story in and of itself.  As well, when there are moments that allow the four main characters to actually talk, there stands to be good reason for it and I bought all of it.

Emily Blunt is an incredible actress full of hard concentration and Krasinski does not let up on long running close ups to heighten her tension of isolation surrounded by the most terrifying threats, all while enduring a physical emergency.  She stares without a blink.  She effortlessly shakes with paranoia, and she evokes pain of the worst kind; all without uttering a sound or saying a word.  This is the same actress who played a snobby diva in The Devil Wears Prada, and later went on to portray the most popular nanny of all time, Mary Poppins.  This performance should not be overlooked.  It’s incredible.  You don’t need monsters in your face to be afraid.  All you need is Emily Blunt to carry you along.  

Krasinski springboards his terror off the best horror films from Jaws to The Shining to Alien to The Blair Witch Project and the original Paranormal Activity.  Yet, he does manage to pioneer his craft with A Quiet Place.  This is not something you have seen before. Hiding in silent fear has been done to death.  The girl always hides in the closet from the killer.  Here, you can hide, but staying out of sight won’t necessarily save you or do you any favors.  These creatures just might be prepared for that.  So, now you have something new to wrestle with.  Can you keep quiet?  This script does not make that easy. If ever a movie was to justify the need for Oscar categories like Sound and Sound Effects Editing, then this is the film to turn to.  These tools give reason for the storyline more overtly than any other that I can imagine.  You do not take the sound for granted, and you do not take the lack of sound for granted either.

Miguel Rodriguez and I originally saw this picture in a Dolby theatre.  It’s a telling film that gives reason for a Dolby theatre in the first place.  A film like this is worthy of the upgraded ticket price. (By the way, Mig, you still owe me $11.00.)

Put John Krasinski up as a top-notch director.  I believe this film was granted a very small budget, but like the best directors to come before him, he has managed to put up big screams and the best in dramatic storytelling with little expense. He even manages to tug at your heartstrings if you allow it. The ending was a huge pay off for me personally.  John Krasinski gives you a horror film, but he’ll make sure you have something to think about while you’re watching it, and long after you have left the theatre.

ANNIHILATION

By Marc S. Sanders

Science Fiction/Horror for the thinking viewer is the best way to describe this film.

Director Alex Garland has found a way to make a viewer’s eyes pop, not just with fear but with the unimaginable. This is as good an effort or better than his other well known film, Ex Machina. I foresee it will not be long before Garland is recognized among the ranks of today’s most notable and popular directors like Del Toro and Nolan.

This is not a run of the mill monster movie. This is fictionalized science that seems foreign and strange, yet makes complete sense by the time the credits roll. All questions are thankfully summed up despite a hanging thread or two to relish in deep thought long after the film has ended.

Natalie Portman strongly leads a nearly all female cast to uncover the purpose and functionality of “The Shimmer.” She does so, but at what expense? She’s great and believable in her role with lots of dimension by way of her career as a Johns Hopkins professor/former army infantry soldier and through periodic dreams of sin she feels guilty over.

Jennifer Jason Leigh does her best no nonsense disturbing creep. Gina Rodriguez makes good transitions in levels of sanity.

Like Black Panther, I’d argue this is also a front runner for art direction as an encapsulated swamp is overrun with strange pastel plant life, mixed up animal life and cinematic lens flare. Yes, here the lens flares serve a narrative purpose which is why the cinematography should also be given some recognition.

I’m looking forward to seeing this again to uncover what I missed the first time.

Annihilation turned out to be one of the biggest surprises of 2018.

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008, Sweden)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Tomas Alfredson
Cast: Kåre Hedebrant, Lena Leandersson
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 98% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A bullied schoolboy makes friends with the new neighbor, a girl about his age who doesn’t leave her apartment during the day and has some alarming eating habits…


A little while ago, I reviewed a movie called Klaus, a film that took an age-old pop culture trope (the origins of Santa Claus) and turned it on its ear.  I wasn’t sure when I would find another movie that would be able to do that so effectively.

Well…here it is.  Let the Right One In, a Swedish film from 2008, made huge waves at the time of its release.  Critics called it a film with “magnificent emotional resonance.”  “One of the great horror films of recent years.”  “One of the real finds of 2008.”  “A spectacularly moving and elegant movie…a remarkable film.”

Too good to be true, right?  Well, I’ve just finished watching it earlier tonight, and I can tell you, the hype is real.  While the very ending brought up more questions than it answers (where is the train going?  where are the parents?), the ride getting there was phenomenally good.  Calling it simply a “vampire movie” is almost insultingly reductive.  It poses questions about vampire lore that I had never really thought about, and it provides immensely satisfying answers.

For example, one of the most well-known rules about vampires is they cannot enter your home unless you invite them inside.  At one point in the film, a vampire hesitates at a doorway because she hasn’t been invited, and the boy asks her, “Well, what happens if you come in anyway?  Is there something in the air?”  So, she goes inside without being invited.  What happened next was totally unexpected, and it made perfect sense.  I remember thinking, “So THAT’S what they’re afraid of…”

But I’m jumping ahead.  Let the Right One In tells the story of a bullied pre-teen schoolboy, Oskar, who fantasizes about knifing his tormentors.  One day, new neighbors move into the apartment next door, an older gentleman and a preteen girl.  He meets the girl one evening out on the snowy playground in front of their apartment building.  (Her first appearance is one of the great entrances in cinema.)  She tells him her name is Eli (pronounced “Elly” in Sweden).  He says she smells funny.  She tells him they cannot be friends, even though she seems eager to make friends with Oskar.  Her eyes seem to be abnormally large, almost like a character in a Miyazaki anime.

We’ve already seen the older gentleman who moves in with her botch a food-gathering run, so it’s obvious from the get-go what exactly Eli is, and what she needs to survive.  This is all done within the film’s first fifteen minutes or so, so I promise I’m not giving anything away.

What happens after those establishing moments, I’ll leave for you to discover.  You may already be remembering countless other vampire films like Fright Night or Interview with the Vampire and thinking, “I’ve seen all this before.”  But I can assure you, you haven’t.  Not like this.

The relationship between Oskar and Eli never gets sexual (they’re both too young for that…well, Oskar is), and is handled with remarkable sensitivity and keen observation.  At one point, he buys her a snack from a vendor.  She refuses it.  He feels hurt.  So she takes one anyway and eats it.  Seconds later, she’s sick to her stomach.  What does Oskar think about this?  He’s surprised, but he takes it in stride and apologizes.  There’s something so clever about this approach, about making it between an old soul and a child, that feels fresh and new to me.  Oskar knows the term “vampire,” but clearly hasn’t seen enough movies to recognize the signs of one standing right in front of him.

Eli is forced to make a kill periodically to survive.  These attacks are done with a minimum of gore but are incredibly effective and horrifying.  There’s something instinctively creepy about seeing a little girl jump – or drop – from the shadows, clamber onto the back of her victims, and latch onto their necks with an animalistic growl.  The fact these attacks are stitched together with quiet moments, like Oskar teaching Eli morse code, creates a unique atmosphere that is impossible for me to describe satisfactorily.

(Another detail: when Eli is hungry, it’s not depicted as it is in other vampire movies, where the overpowering urge to feed makes her go mad and wide-eyed.  Her stomach rumbles.  True, it’s a little louder than when it happens to a normal person, but it feels…right.  Of course her stomach rumbles…she’s hungry.)

There is more to the story, of course, about Oskar’s bullies and Eli’s incompetent roommate and the suspicious bar regular whose friend was killed, and so on.  Better to leave the rest as a surprise.  And there are LOTS of cool surprises here.  This feels like the kind of movie Guillermo del Toro might have made if he had gotten there first.  (Oh, wait, he did make Cronos…I stand corrected.)

THE BABADOOK (2014)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Jennifer Kent
Cast: Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 98% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A widowed mother and her precocious but troubled young son experience some strange goings-on at home after reading a disturbing pop-up book about a malevolent spirit called The Babadook.


All due respect to the classics of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but some of the greatest and scariest horror movies have been released in the 21st century.  Paranormal Activity, The Descent, Hereditary, A Quiet Place, The Cell, It, and many, many others, including, of course, The Babadook.

However, The Babadook stands out because, not only does it achieve its scares with an ingenious less-is-more approach, but it’s actually about something.  Only the best horror films can say that.  And it’s not about some corny love-conquers-all theme.  It’s very specifically about people who have experienced a great personal loss, what that loss does to those people, and how a healing process can hopefully begin.

Amelia (Essie Davis) is a struggling single mother who was widowed on the day her son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), was born.  Samuel is now six.  He loves his mother, but he does a lot of acting out…the kind of acting out that earns judgmental stares from other parents.  He builds crude but working weapons, including a catapult he can wear on his back.  (Assuming he lives to see college, this kid’s going to be an engineer.)

Amelia appears to be hovering on the edge of a breakdown.  She loves Samuel, but she’s painfully aware that his behavior, and her inability to control it, is causing problems at school and with other family and friends.

One night, he chooses a book to read as a bedtime story.  Amelia doesn’t recognize the book – where did it come from?  It’s a pop-up book about a nightmarish creature called The Babadook.  (For the record, the last syllable of “babadook” rhymes with “book.”)  In the annals of film history, few books are creepier and more disturbing than this freaking book.  I want one.

After reading the book, the mother starts hearing noises in the house.  Sam believes The Babadook is real.  He has nightmares.  Amelia tears the book to pieces and throws it in the garbage outside.  The next morning, there’s a knock at the door…and the book is sitting on her doorstep.  The pages have been re-assembled and pasted together…except now there are new passages at the end that include some troubling visuals of her, her son, and their dog.

Even without the subtext I mentioned earlier, this is some seriously scary s**t.  If the movie had been stripped of all its intelligence and insight, this would still be a horror classic.

The performance by Essie Davis as Amelia is as horrifying and memorable as Jack Nicholson’s in The Shining.  She’s that good.  She convincingly portrays a woman slowly descending into madness, faced with making impossible decisions while trying to shut away the crippling grief she still feels over the death of her husband.  In her mind, the best way to move on with her life is to pack all of her husband’s belongings, pictures, and clothes into the basement and keep it all locked up.  One interesting clue to her true mindset is that Samuel is not allowed to celebrate his birthday on his actual birthday, since his father died that same day.

Things get worse.  Amelia finds shards of glass in her porridge.  She discovers a hole behind her fridge with…things coming out of it.  Samuel becomes so terrified that he has a fit.  Amelia starts to see quick glimpses of what may or may not be the Babadook itself.  After one particularly horrific encounter, Samuel becomes afraid of his mother.  She seems to be changing…

It all comes together in a final sequence that includes some of the most terrifying scenes I’ve seen since The Exorcist.  (Fair warning: it’s not graphic, but some violence is perpetrated on a four-legged animal.)

What elevates The Babadook is the aforementioned underlying message of the story.  It provides a glimmer of hope for anyone who has suffered the kind of loss Amelia has suffered.  It reminded me of a famous poem by Stephen Crane, “In the Desert.”

          In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”

At this point, everything else I want to say about The Babadook would involve giving too much away about the climax.  I am just amazed at how well this movie combines genuinely frightening material with an insightful look into correcting destructive human behavior, and not just in some general way, but very, very specifically.  It’s a modern masterpiece.

UNDER THE SKIN (2013)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Jonathan Glazer
Cast: Scarlett Johansson
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 84% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A beautiful, mysterious young woman seduces lonely men in Scotland and takes them to her home, where something very strange indeed happens to them…


Under the Skin captivated me in a way that I did not expect.  It is a sci-fi mystery that stubbornly refuses to supply neat and tidy answers, and yet is spellbinding to watch. How director Jonathan Glazer accomplished this is no less mysterious to me than the origins of the movie’s main character, a solitary young woman played by Scarlett Johansson in a bravura performance that must have required a great deal of courage and trust in her director.

After a cryptic opening sequence involving some trippy visuals accompanied by an eerie musical score, Johansson’s character (listed only as “The Female” in the credits) gets down to business.  With the help of a mute motorcyclist (???), she acquires a van and trolls the streets of Scotland for young men on their own in the city.  She lures them into her van with pleasant conversation and a smile, which is easy enough to do when you look like Scarlett Johansson.  She then takes the men back to a deserted house in the country where I wouldn’t DREAM of revealing what happens.

The appeal of this movie is not the story, although that is obviously a big part of it.  It’s the storytelling.  Director Glazer works from a script that has the bare minimum of dialogue, usually when The Female is convincing men to get in her van.  Everything else depends on visuals.  It’s the kind of movie my friend Marc would enjoy, as it uses the camera to tell the story much more so than the soundtrack.  It shows us images and challenges the viewer to put two and two together to figure out what’s happening.

This visually-heavy strategy is a tightrope walk.  One false step and, instead of a mind-bending masterpiece, you get a head-scratcher that leaves you feeling cheated.  Under the Skin manages it.  There is one specific visual sequence that sealed the deal for me, a scene that provides a more detailed explanation of what happens to the men once they’re inside The Female’s house.  The real genius of the scene is that it provides information without fully answering the questions going through your head.  What is that black liquid?  Are the men hypnotized?  Their behavior would make it seem so.  And exactly how big is that house?

I’m being deliberately obscure because the delight of the film comes from discovering the thread of the story and following it along with The Female.  Her discoveries were just as interesting and scary to me as they were to her, because I felt really in tune with her character while I was watching the movie.  The closest I can get to describing it is…a long, LONG time ago, there was a computer game called Hacker that I got for my Commodore 64.  It came with literally no instructions beyond putting the disk in the drive and loading the game.  Then your screen went blank and it just displayed: “LOGON”.  And that was it.  As the gamer, it was up to you to figure out what to do in order to keep playing.  As you discovered more clues to the object of the game, you became more and more involved.

That’s how I felt watching Under the Skin.  Those opening visuals start you off thinking, “What the f@#k???”  Then the movie progresses, and the wheels start turning, and you realize what’s happening, and what The Female is attempting, and the discoveries she’s making about herself, and before you know it you’re as wrapped up in the story as she is.

I remember there was a lot of talk when this movie came out, but I never really hear anyone discuss it any more, outside of movie-centric blogs and Facebook pages.  If I can convince just one person who hasn’t seen it that this movie is worth their time, I will be happy.  Under the Skin deserves to be seen, discussed, and puzzled over.

P.S.  Under the Skin is, in fact, mildly famous because, yes, Scarlett Johansson gets naked.  But don’t get too excited.  Her nude scenes are utterly drained of any sexuality or eroticism whatsoever, due to their context.  You’ll see what I mean when you watch it.