Strange Vistas

horror

Princess, the hotel woman, in yellow and red

Sion Sono's Tokyo Vampire Hotel is the definition of a guilty pleasure: I cackled my way through it, but also see all the hastily-thrown together bits, amateur acting and bipolar pacing, and would have the damnedest time finding someone to recommend it to.

Not that Sono gives a single Kamurocho fuck about it. He did exactly what he wanted to do. He came up with Tokyo Vampire Hotel when he went to the Transylvanian film festival in 2016, fell in love with the area around Cluj-Napoca, and decided he would set his next project there.

What he came up with is an elaborate mythology about how the Draculas (plural, it's a family) were driven underground by the Corvins (different type of vampire), who then took over the world from the shadows. But there's a prophecy that a child born under a certain date will release them, so centuries later the Draculas steal three Japanese children, feed them with special blood, and wait for the 21st birthday when they'll come into their powers.

Yes, Japanese children.

Cut from Romanian-speaking non-actors in white robes who stare directly at the camera to a panning shot of a Shinjuku yakitori place, 20 years later, filled with giggling young women and a few salarymen who will soon end up dead.

Massacre at the izakaya

Which makes perfect sense since Cluj in Romania and Shinjuku in Tokyo are connected through the Salina Turda, a salt mine just outside of Cluj which (if I understood it right) leads to everywhere in the world.

Of course, there's a struggle between clans to control the Chosen One. Of course, this means gunfights and swordfights and all sorts of murder and dismemberment. Of course, this involves spending half the movie's budget in fake blood. Of course, keeping the momentum for this type of movie is hard, so Sono doubles down on the mythology and comes up with byzantine plot covering a large group of characters and their twisting allegiances.

Yamada, the ancient hip-hop vampire kingpin with daddy issues. K, a grim Japanese terminator who (sort of) speaks Romanian and refuses to die. Japanese Elizabeth Báthory, played by former gravure model Megumi Kagurazaka, perennially on the verge of bursting out of her corset. The unmovable Princess, sitting somewhere in the bowels of the hotel, all toothy smiles and veiled eyes. Poor, confused Manami, the Chosen One with the least agency in the history of cinema.

Not to mention the dozens of young Japanese men and women who Yamada has gathered at the hotel, who all think are coming for a night of exclusive partying but are there to watch the end of the world.

K in an alley covered in blood

Yes, it's absurd and it's baroque and it goes on for too long. But it's so much fun.

It can be incoherent. But the good kind. The kind where Sono kept asking himself “what is the silliest left turn the plot could take here?” and then did that. Every 10 or 15 minutes.

I can't tell if it's always intentionally funny. Some of the fun comes from the dedication with which the actors throw themselves at their preposterous roles. Some comes from understanding a tiny bit of Japanese, enough Romanian to get around, and hearing people from each country try some gooey Brundlefly of a diction. Some is just from the random mix of violence and soliloquies, wordplay and decapitation, silly situations played straightfaced.

Hence, hard to recommend. I'm in a narrow audience segment. I also happened to see it at an open-air screening at Bánffy Castle, in the same area that inspired Sono, the 15th-century construction and dark Transylvanian sky right behind the screen.

There's a resonance from having a restored castle shield you from the wind while you laugh at the exuberance of a bloody vampire movie.

If I were complaining, I'd say it goes on for too long. It was originally an Amazon TV series which got repurposed as a movie. The script seems to have changed (maybe Sono decided to use scenes that didn't make it into the series or alternate endings) and the various elements don't always gel.

But one can hardly relish the abandon with which Sono created this deranged, blood-soaked microcosm and then complain that he doesn't exercise restraint in the editing room. Stupid as the movie can get, the glee with which they made it comes through, and that's enough for someone to have fun.

Elizabeth Bathory and Yamada

#horror #stupidweek #sionsono

Cairn from The Ritual

The Ritual (2017) is the rare horror movie that derives its tension not from carnage, or trick camera angles, or jump scares, but from good, old-fashioned knowing-your-craft and doing-your-job by everyone involved.

The set up is simple. A group of British friends go hiking in Sweden six months after the death of one of their mates. The weather is miserable, the mood morose. On the way to the lodge, one of them trips and hurts his knee, so they choose to take a shortcut through the woods. Rune-carved trees become the least-ominous discovery on their trek, and they find themselves more lost than they thought.

That's all the background you need. Avoid looking for more – even IMDB photos have spoilers.

The Ritual grasps why we watch movies. They shouldn't just help kill time. For whatever long they last, be it 90 minutes or three hours, they are supposed to take over any other concerns you have in your head, to cause the world outside to cease existing. Good horror is therapeutic – you spend a scene transfixed, unsure of what the outcome will be, gorging in the events, mind racing to process them, trying to figure out escape routes, running right alongside the characters, until it's over, and you realize you were holding your breath when you exhale, slowly, relaxed.

Go through that enough times and you emerge on the other end reborn.

Originally published in my old blog.

#horror #joebarton #rafespall #arsherali #davidbruckner

Hermana Muerte in Veronica

You know what? No.

We're not doing this.

It takes Verónica an entire hour of dragging its feet before it finally did something unexpected. A whole hour before it found its own voice, said something of its own, then lapsed back into boilerplate.

Before that it was as entertaining as a teenager watching the classroom clock waiting for recess. Waiting for the 30-minute bell so it could give us a scare while wasting a fun character in the Hermana Muerte, someone whose one good line is the main salvageable thing one can scavenge from under the caked layers of trope make-up.

I've written and thrown away a couple of thousand words about Veronica, trying to find 400 which I didn't write better before, when I was dissecting how Under the Shadow got all Syd Fielded.

I hate repeating myself. If your movie is nothing but a different dress on the same skeleton propping up so many other films, if you are so unimaginative that a movie about a Spanish high-schooler with an Ouija board follows the same exact beats as movies about a besieged Iranian mother and her child or a bunch of soldiers fighting ghosts in future Moldova, I can't be arsed to do anything but rant.

Originally published in my old blog

#veronica #sydfielded #pacoplaza #sandraescacena #consuelotrujillo #horror

Cultist from The Void

The man crashes through the door, flees into the night, manages to escape. The woman trails him. One of the pursuers shoots her in the back. As she lays on the grass, crawling, still trying to get to safety, they cover her in gasoline then set her on fire.

That's the start. You get a few minutes of peace before, less than 15 minutes in, The Void becomes flesh-rending, sanity-shattering, Whateley-impregnating unhinged.

It's revolting. It's hellish. It's The Fly and Hellraiser and The Thing and all the best Call of Cthulhu sessions, brought together by the Prince of Darkness.

It's beautiful.

A horror fan's Christmas movie.

#thevoid #horror #jeremygillespie #stevenkostanski #callofcthulhu #johncarpenter #davidcronenberg

Carla Gugino tied to a bed, viewed from above

Jessie Burlingame ends up handcuffed to a bed, keys just out of reach, not a single person for miles. Living person, at least. Her husband, the one with the bondage kink and the rape fantasy, is dead on the floor. The heart attack probably did it, but banging his forehead on the tiling didn't help. She's pretty sure he's dead, at least. There's too much blood.

This rekindling of the flame is going worse than she expected.

I'd said while writing about Before I Wake that Mike Flanagan likes his crucibles. The characters in his movies are always trapped in a situation and squirming to get out of it. Jessie is the personification of that narrative device.

On the one side of the bed, Gerald's Game is a sensational example of how to adapt a book. It tweaks details, focuses on the performers, retains the story's strengths while enhancing it with the right cinematic language.

Carla Gugino gives a protean performance as Jessie. There's little artifice she could default to, no gimmicks she can pull. She has to spend most of the movie in a single position, handcuffed in place as Jessie is. She doesn't even get a change of outfit. It's all expressions, intonation, what little body language she gets to show.

Bruce Greenwood does a great job as her husband Gerald, whose eponymous game put her in that position. He has a rakishness to him, with Greenwood looking better at sixty-two than I expect I'll ever look, but it's balanced out with a husband who still wants to care. Gerald is someone used to getting things his way, but who wants to make it work with the wife instead of going out for the hookers and mistresses he could have.

(And I'm sure does)

On the other side, there's the issue that as a faithful adaptation of Stephen King's book, it'll carry the weaknesses of the material.

For instance, what's up with her background?

We need a new term for what's going on with characters, where what used to be considered a tragic backstory is now the baseline. People have to be sadder, had to have had a worse life than you thought. A good tear-jerking story doesn't bring in as much waterworks as it used to. Their drama needs to be more dramatic.

It's so much misery inflation.

Is it not enough for a woman to be in handcuffs, ogled by a ravenous dog gone feral, dying of thirst, losing her mind and talking to both herself and her dead husband, terrified by (one would hope) hallucinatory threats?

No? Not enough?

Does she also need to have been sexually abused as a child as well?

I'd have been freaking out at the handcuffed thing myself. Maybe “being eaten alive” at most. We wouldn't need dredging up any past horrors to compound the present ones.

It's Stephen King's fault, not the movie's. There are too many echoes from his other stories, from the solar eclipse to name-dropping Cujo. He writes these things for himself now, all the stuff he's put out blending into one big gumbo pot in his head.

And then there's the inspiring, talky, tacked-on ending. King is a great tease, but when it comes to fucking, he climbs on top and writhes around for a couple of minutes before declaring he is done.

Before it gets to that duct-taped apocrypha, though, you'll get some masterful scenes. Gugino's arguments with herself are impeccable. Greenwood is the perfect bastard, released from all social constraints by death and her agonizing wife's imagination. There's a scene, as Jessie finally figures out a plan, which felt like it went on forever, me squirming on the couch, calling out “oh fuck no” several times. I exhaled when it was over. There's constant tension before and after that horrifying moment.

That's what we watch horror for, so the movie succeeds. Even if the coda feels like someone stapled it on right before release because they felt we needed to get an uplifting lesson out of the whole thing.

#mikeflanagan #stephenking #geraldsgame #carlagugino #brucegreenwood #horror #miseryinflation

Movie poster for Before I Wake

A family home, a widowed mother feeling cornered by her sister's return.

A mirror, full of ghosts, and the siblings who take it back to the house where it took their parents, trying to destroy it before it possesses someone else.

A couple alone with an adopted otherworldly moppet, bringing it back to the isolated house where their child died.

Mike Flanagan likes his crucibles.

It's not surprising. He makes movies for horror fans and crucibles make for a convenient horror setup. There wouldn't be much suspense if people could easily walk away from the problem, would it?

In Before I Wake, Thomas Jane and Kate Bosworth play the Hobsons, a couple whose own kid drowned in an accident. The adoptee is Cody, an adorable, all-too-well-behaved child who you just know is hiding something – even before it the social worker talks about his string of failed adoptions. It doesn't take too long to find out what: Cody chugs energy drinks and pops caffeine pills like they're Flintstones Vitamins, trying to keep himself awake.

Strange things happen when Cody is asleep. Some of them are pleasant, colorful, things borne out of dreams. But every kid has nightmares. There be monsters.

Flanagan has a talent for tension but flounders with actors. Near the start of the movie, he shows us the Hobsons' tragedy, makes us feel the desperation of a boy who can't help himself and knows he is dying. It lasts only a few seconds, but it adds weight to the Hobsons' situation in a way that ten minutes of character discussion wouldn't – particularly considering how Jane and Bosworth phone in their performances.

Before I Wake gets the cat out of the bag right away and starts flinging it around. Characters pick up on what's up immediately. It avoids those annoying moments where you just know someone who had seen at least a couple of horror films would have saved themselves a lot of grief. Instead, it uses that same character knowledge, the normalization of the unreal, a grasp for how to play with the rules of the supernatural, to fuel one of the most uncomfortable behaviors one could expect from a grieving parent.

If only Jane didn't sleepwalk through the whole movie, or Bosworth hadn't become a discount Rachel McAdams.

At least that lets secondary players a chance to shine. Jacob Tremblay plays Cody with a light touch that's surprising in someone so young. The kid is too cute by half – he'll be playing a serial killer in no time flat. Dash Mihok, who I've seen in at least a dozen movies but never noticed, is a bundle of raw nerves and gets to deliver one of the movie's best lines (”I wouldn't say that around here. They'll fit you for slippers”).

It just doesn't come together. It's not only the leads who are to blame, though. The monster's origin feels arbitrary, its moniker something retrofitted because they felt a thriller needs some sort of revelation. It all leads to an ending that, had the actors been better, could have had the weight of two people brought together by tragedy yet managing to find a way forward.

It doesn't. The whole thing instead feels like a kludge, the tacked-on optimism half contrarianism and half pandering. Not every horror movie involving children needs to be The Babadook, but it wouldn't hurt for them to try for its single-mindedness.

#horror #mikeflanagan #thomasjane #katebosworth #annabethgish #jacobtremblay

Shideh holding her daughter in Under The Shadow

For fuck's sake, stop cargo-culting Syd Field, people.

If you are making a low-budget movie, there are three fundamental things to keep in mind:

  • Keep your perspective tight,
  • Make it uniquely yours,
  • Less is more, so don't waste time with special effects,

These apply to any movie and any genre, but the more formulaic the genre tends to be (cough horror cough), the more having your own style counts. If your budget is tight and you don't have much production time, every choice you default to your genre's known tropes is a time you invite unfavorable comparisons. Speaking with a unique voice is fundamental.

The rest is laziness and habit.

Under the Shadow comes close. It's got a good grasp of technical basics, a unique setting – Tehran in the 1980s – and under-used mythology.

But it pays more attention to Field's structure than to its unique ingredients. It blindly follows a recipe, MacDonalizes its product instead of trying to cook a local dish with them. If Field's recipe isn't telling it how to use an item, well, let's chuck it into the pot with the rest. Blend them all, let structure sort them out.

Close is not good enough. Entertainment has been commoditized – there are more choices than time. You have to bring something to the table other than your autochthonous nature.


Shideh is a former medical student and home-bound mother. We first see her wrapped in a chador, sitting in a bureaucrat's office. She's a demure little thing, pleading to be let back into the college she's been banned from, unsure of her crime's specifics.

She used to be an activist during the revolution before finishing her studies. Iranian society does not look kindly on her independent thinking. The bureaucrat tells her, with a callous delivery, she is never going to study again. She should have kept her mouth shut and behaved.

We soon see Shideh back home, where it turns out she's neither demure nor eager to conform. She dresses in Western clothes. Her family owns a VCR, which she uses for Jane Fonda exercise tapes and so her daughter Dorsa can re-watch cartoons they can't get on TV. She fumes at what she perceives as her husband's lack of support, his unstated desire that she settled for being a housewife instead of bashing her head against society's walls.

And the city's under siege from Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which was bombing and launching rockets against Iran's major cities.

Things were stressful even before the spirit arrived, which it does almost on cue at the 30-minute mark.


I keep having to bring this up. Too many scripts adhere to Syd Field's formula, treat it as blanks to fill in.

Field proposed that a movie should be split in three acts.

Act I is the set up, and on a regular 1'40” movie, it usually lasts half an hour. It has a plot point just at the end of its allotted time, a clash of cymbals to jolt your audience awake.

Act II is the confrontation. It's twice as long as Act I, so on our hypothetical movie it would last one hour. But that's too long to trust your audience's attention span, so you're going to need plot points at the 60- and 90-minute marks.

Act III is the resolution. It's just dénouement, some 10 or 15 minutes helping you come down from the big explosion that you got 90 minutes in.

Credits roll. Everyone goes home happy. The end.

Everyone but those who have learned to spot this pattern, because once you see it, you can't unsee it. You get a big moment, check your watch, tick the act as done, and know you have half an hour to kill until the next one.

Not knowing how to keep people's attention, writers settle for Syd Field's structure. They hide their personality as they let Field tell them how to act and talk and walk.

And Under the Shadow has Syd-Fielded itself into blandness.


If you feel I've spent too long on the introduction above, you have no idea how long the first half-hour of the movie feels. It sleepwalks until the requisite pivot, where it jolts awake for a moment, then it falls asleep again. It dribbles mythology, here and there, to pass the time.

By all rights, it should be singular.

Shideh feels alone, lacking support from her husband and her husband's family, and she finds herself in increasing physical isolation as everyone flees the city because of the Iraqi bombings. The windows are taped, in anticipation of an inevitable explosion. When the supernatural threat shows up, the first sign is a widening crack in their apartment ceiling, the external world trying to creep into their Westernized bubble. The djinn then manifests to Shideh as a floating chador, a visualization of the pious uniformity Iranian society wants to jam her into.

The ingredients are all there.

But these problems arrive on cue, and the movie doesn't know what to fill its time with. The script wastes opportunities and gets burdened by a late-movie focus on special effects that they can't afford.

When the spirit appears, Shideh sees it as cloak that moves as carried by the wind. Or it should. It appears to move with that plasticky fluency of CGI that not even the grainiest post-processing can help hide. It breaks the illusion, even more when you contrast it with the one moment of the movie where they use an actual cloth.

In It Follows, the main special effect is the casting. David Robert Mitchell aims to unsettle, so we don't get deformed beasts or glowing eyes. We get people. Odd, perturbed-looking people who may or may not be there. The lack of a “tell” on their appearance and the lack of that special-effect shimmer increase tension, as we never know who around the characters might be a threat.

Worse is how Under the Shadow squanders the opportunity provided by the setting. Shideh is besieged by the Iraqis, cornered and coerced by her countrymen, nudged into submission by her husband. Neighbors condemn her non-conformism with their stares until they need her medical expertise. She has a history of sleepwalking when stressed. Then her husband gets sent to the front lines.

On a better movie, we'd spend most of it wonder if the djinn's actions are all in her head. It could be disturbing as an Iranian The Babadook. If the script didn't take that away from us by declaring her sane, because Dorsa sees the djinn as well, and her observations match Shideh's. There's never a question that Dorsa might just be playing along, humoring her mother. The child knows what's going on before the mother admits it herself.

You don't give a protagonist who we might think is crazy an anchoring point like that. Resolving ambiguity that early only removes a source of suspense, and you could use a few of those.

Under the Shadow doesn't get going until it's too late. The mood-setting is fine when they get around to it, but by then, it's spent too long contorting itself into the structure corset someone thought they were supposed to wear. At least there's no jump scare at the end, just a wind reminding you that things aren't over.

Shideh is a nonconformist trying to survive in a society that tries to hammer her into a hole she hates. Under the Shadow, too much of a conformist itself gleefully bends itself into the shape of the hole it thinks it's expected to fit.

Originally published on my old blog

#undertheshadow #sydfielded #babakanvari #nargesrashidi #iran #horror

Soma title card

He woke up, and remembered dying. Ken MacLeod, The Stone Canal

That line stuck with me ever since I first read it. Not only it's a killer way to start a book, but it has always seemed an apt description for games.

SOMA, Frictional Games' first since their nerve-wracking Amnesia: The Dark Descent, is a worthy successor to both Amnesia and the long line of existential science fiction that begat The Stone Canal. And it starts in almost the same way.

I've been excited about it ever since I saw the Mockingbird teaser they first put out, which contains some very minor spoilers. My main fear was that SOMA would succumb to the cheap horror of Amnesia's successors like Outlast, which are nothing but a string of jump scares and gore. SOMA scales back the horror from Amnesia, instead, and replaces it with a growing, pervading sense of dread.

Much like in System Shock, another brilliant game about a lone individual wandering an abandoned, abomination-infested station, SOMA's story is not told to you directly but found among the detritus of the inhabitant's former lives. A notebook here, a drawing there, a cargo manifest, a garbled info dump, all gradually fill in the many gaps in your character's consciousness. Its universe is fully built, and the extra color provided by the universe's bric-a-brac helped keep me guessing. What's actually behind everything? How deep in are we? Am I Legend? For once, I guessed wrong. It's a nice change.

Eventually, SOMA gets to asking some questions of you, and you will be forced to provide an answer either by action or inaction. These quandaries will be more unsettling for those who haven't read much science fiction, but anyone who has will have answered them before.

Even beyond them, though, SOMA is still effective at getting an emotional response. It's less of a game and more of a well-written movie you get to play through, but if more movies were as well crafted as this, I'd be in the theater more often.

Plus, how often do you get to think of a game as Baby's first transhuman existential horror?

#soma #games #horror #transhumanism

A character standing inside a tunnel, backlit

We had a Viewmaster when I was a kid. It was this small, orange-red plastic thing where you inserted a cardboard disk, then you could see stereoscopic images. You were looking through it at a light, and the images had this vivid, three-dimensional quality that's impossible to achieve with just projection. We only had a handful of disks for it, but I think they were all kid's stories.

The one that I vividly remember, because it terrified me, was Three Billy Goats Gruff.

I remember the bridge, the bloated troll hiding under it, the terror that each goat might be eaten as it crossed over, but mostly, my disbelief as a child about the strategy that the goats were seemingly using to save themselves.

Mike Flanagan's Absentia tells you where it's going right at the start, when broadly-drawn former-junkie problem-child Callie shows up at her sister Tricia's house carrying, among her meager possessions, a copy of Three Billy Goats Gruff.

Tricia's husband has been missing for seven years, and she's wrapping the paperwork to declare him dead in absentia. In walks Callie, setting up a predictable confrontation between the reliable sister who has managed to maintain a house by herself (and is gearing up to be a single mother) and the nomadic rebel with the crazy ideas. A confrontation that takes too long to appear, since Callie is busy hallucinating about her husband... and her (never quite explained) discomfort at dating someone after her husband has been gone for almost a decade... and Callie is dealing with some oddball tunnel behavior.

Mostly, it takes a while because Absentia is busy getting all tangled up in its mythology, and trips a few times before the end.

It's less disciplined than Flanagan's more effective Oculus, and thus, less tense. It's funny to think that even though it's the smaller budget movie of the two, Oculus is the one where he seems to have focused on the script more, honing it until the edge itself could strike fear into the characters' hearts. But Absentia was made a couple of years before, and to his credit, he seems to have learned from it.

Gotta say I like the look of his movies. They seem homemade, like they were put together for $200 among a group of someone's friends, or people who answered a newspaper ad. When the movie works, like in Oculus, this lends it some verisimilitude. But when it doesn't, it makes them look amateurish.

It does have several things going for it. The unsettling way in which her dead husband integrates himself into Tricia's daily life, reminiscent of the ghosts in the Pang Brothers' The Eye. Doug Jones, wearing the least make up I've ever seen him wear, with a young Anthony Perkins playing his kid. The fresh mythology. A perspective switch that made me stop and clap.

Absentia is but a chrysalis for something better that never finishes emerging during its run time. That better creature, however, is gradually coming out on Flanagan's other films. He hasn't yet shown the raw, focused talent of a young John Carpenter, but he seems determined to make up for it with constant improvement.

#absentia #horror #mikeflanagan #catherineparker #dougjones #courtneybell

Nadia Hilker looking at Lou Taylor Pucci in Spring

American gets in trouble. American flees to Europe, where he meets exotic Italian girl. American falls in love with Italian girl in that way that only drifting American tourists in their first trip out of the country can. Girl is not what he thinks.

Sounds cliché, I know. Spring is a smart movie doing genre slumming, a new theme grafted onto an old setup.

I don't think it's a spoiler to say that it's a monster movie. It strongly suggests as much on the trailer. The trick is figuring out what kind of monster movie it is.

It's by and large carried by how honest it feels. Lou Taylor Pucci is earnest as Evan, looking like a cleaner, responsible Jesse Pinkman. He follows Nadia Hilker's Eva, a latin Minnie Driver-lookalike, with a single-mindedness that's half horny traveler and half orphaned puppy looking for a mother figure. The movie's color grading makes it feel like a trip polaroid, without having to go into shaky-cam faux-travel-footage style. The natural air to the whole thing is refreshing, considering how stale the horror genre has gotten behind its thematically incestuous closed doors.

It's not particularly tense, though, less about the tropes you would expect and more about withholding the answer from you. It drops hints here and there, trying to keep you guessing. And then shows its fangs earlier than expected, making you wonder “what now?” before it transforms into something else. The answer wasn't what I thought it was going to be, and I normally see these things coming from way over the next town. Even when I noticed all the bits they left around, I wasn't sure how they'd recombine all the parts into their creature.

I do love being surprised.

#spring #horror #romance #loutaylorpucci #nadiahilker #justinbenson #aaronmoorhead