DO YOU WANNA KNOW A SECRET?

A second review requested by Zev Burrows, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

In his two-volume collection of lyrics and personal recollections, Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat, Stephen Sondheim acknowledges that among his impressive corpus of skills, the ability to construct a dramatic narrative has eluded him. He has been blessed with strong collaborators to write the books for "his" shows, but a playwright he has never been.

There has been only one original story co-written by Sondheim produced, in fact, and it's not a theatrical piece. In the early 1970s, he and Anthony Perkins - it's his only writing credit as well - collaborated on a on a screenplay for a film that was ultimately directed by Herbert Ross and released by Warner Bros. in 1973, The Last of Sheila. It's an old-school murder mystery written by obvious genre enthusiasts, and it's a solid piece of work, neat and clean in all its particulars. But it also doesn't really dispel Sondheim's belief that writing great scripts isn't a strong suit. There's a certain mechanical soullessness to the way the story unfurls and how the characters are built into it that, at any rate, doesn't show off the natural skill of its co-writers. Sondheim and Perkins wrote two later screenplays that were never filmed, which is a pity: it seems fully possible that they grew more comfortable as they went along, for The Last of Sheila has all the earmarks of a promising first attempt by a pair of first-timers mostly concerned with proving they could get ideas down on paper, and with the jitters worked out of their systems, they could build on its foundation.

The scenario is deliberately contrived: a year after the death of his columnist wife Sheila (Hammer vet Yvonne Romain, cameoing in the swell opening scene), movie producer Clinton Greene (James Coburn) reunites the six friends who were his guests the night of the hit-and-run accident that widowed him. These include director Philip Dexter (James Mason), screenwriter Tom Parkman (Richard Benjamin) and his wife Lee (Joan Hackett), the only person at the party who's not a film professional (and this will later prove to be, if not "important", then at least a nice grace note), movie star Alice Wood (Raquel Welch) and her manager husband Anthony (Ian McShane), and agent Christine (Dyan Cannon). On Clinton's gigantic yacht off the coast of the French Riviera, he announces the rules for the Sheila Greene Memorial Gossip Game: each of the guests are assigned a secret - a piece of fake gossip - and on each of the trip's six nights, they'll go on a scavenger hunt in a different port town to uncover one of those secrets. The night's game ends when the individual whose secret is the subject of the hunt finds the proof, hopefully before any of the other five have already done so.

It's tough to describe, because it's frankly pretty damn convoluted, and that's the mechanical soullessness I had in mind. For much of his life, Sondheim had delighted in constructing absurdly elaborate mystery games for his friend, and these games only grew more ambitious once Perkins started helping him construct them in the 1960s. The Last of Sheila is in great part an attempt to memorialise these games on celluloid, and the momentum-deadening scene where Clinton explains the fussy rules to the partygoers comes straight out of that impulse. It is not a sequence that grows elegantly and organically out of characters; we haven't even really met the characters yet. This is nothing but showing off on the part of authors who are really proud of the ingenuity of their mechanism and want to make sure that we notice how conspicuously Written it is, right down to the sound of typewriter keys clacking at the beginning and ending.

This is, for good and ill, a major component of the screenplay. Not that it's a two-hour exercise in Stephen and Tony showing off, exactly; but it is very tangibly the result of people who love making and solving murder mysteries. It's very rare to find a mystery film - by the way, what ends up happening is that Clinton ends up dead on the second night, and everyone quickly concludes that it must have been the one who mowed down Sheila that night last year who killed him, and it then turns into a tense yachtbound stand-off as everyone starts to suspect everyone else - that's so conscientious in its construction to make sure that all the clues you need to figure the movie out are right there in plain sight, without foregrounding any of them with a neon sign reading "THIS IS A !!CLUE!!" Not even with a scene that finds Clinton grandly announcing, in almost so many words, "you can figure out everything just from the details presented in this scene". And I confess that I didn't figure out the movie and wasn't really interested in trying to. But that is, kind of, the point: it's an immaculately made puzzle that is damned proud to dot every i and cross every t, not like all of those other mysteries that hinge on an unpredictable twist (viz. The Sting, which came out later the same year).

That leads to a movie that's undeniably a bit chilly: the writers were so busy making sure the mystery was structurally airtight that they missed out on crafting rich, deep characters, or giving them anything but the most ordinary relationships to each other. This doesn't end up ruining the movie almost entirely because of the efforts of a number of people to make sure that interesting human wrinkles are saved from the gears of the plot: obviously one of these is Ross, whose direction has never been peppier in any of his films that I've seen (which isn't even half of them, and "peppier than Funny Lady" is one of the easiest bars to clear ever), and so are most of the cast, but it would be bad form to overlook production designer Ken Adam (miles away from the florid fantasy of his Bond fortresses), art director Tony Roman, and set decorator John Jarvis, for building a well-stocked box of little details and red herrings, and for the staging of Clinton's two successfully-executed and highly baroque puzzle rooms, and for augmenting the inherent loveliness of north Mediterranean architecture without feeling like they're gilding the lily. Hell, I'd even have to tip my hat to costume designer Joel Schumacher - that Joel Schumacher) - for the niceties of showing who has money and prestige, versus who had money and prestige through fashion. (I do not know who out of all the possibilities deserves credit for the strangulation via clown puppets climax, but they are a hero to me).

But back to Ross, whose aggressive show-off touches are few and far between, but are all the better for it. The opening sequence, the night Sheila died, is maybe the most elegant, impressive part of the movie: the camera follows Romain as she's obscured by people, plants, sheets of distorted class. It's easy to presume that this must be Sheila, but the film puts so much energy into hiding anything about her that it starts building up tension and mystery right away. There are other sharp visual moments: Clinton descending out of frame on a lifeboat as he finishes a florid monologue, or a hunt for clues inside an old monastery, setting up a stuffy, dark space that helps the artful misdirection that ends up taking place there, and which we see elucidated late on in flashbacks.

As for the cast, it's a collection of people who aren't, like great great - only Mason and Coburn had a truly impressive body of work in '73, and only McShane has come anywhere close to forming one since - but who have spirit and energy and dive into the one-note characterisations with a good eye to fleshing them out. Cannon especially; and when there is a film with Dyan Cannon and James Mason in it, and Cannon gives the better performance, we've entered some kind of mirror universe. But she gives maybe the most blunt and uninteresting of the characters a loopy, electric sense of presence; that's a hell of a lot. The only person whose performance falls short is Welch: she was angry and combative on set, by all accounts (including her own), and that seeps into the performance, which is all sharp angles and spikes in places that keep the other actors at bay, rather than the other characters, if you feel me.

Outside of her, the cast is having enough fun cruising the Riviera and play-acting detectives that their energy turns contagious: while the emphasis on problem-solving is enough to make The Last of Sheila fun for fans of mystery paperbacks, it takes a bit more of the human sparkle that the cast provides to make it fun for the rest of us. It's never more than a lark, but it's at least two different kinds of larks designed for two different audiences, and it's pretty damn good at both of them.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: NEW HOLLYWOOD HORROR - LORD HELP THE MISTER

One of the main unifying traits that connects nearly all the filmmakers who were part of the New Hollywood Cinema period (not every last one, of course) was their knowledge of cinema. For most of them, this was the result of having gone through film school rather than come up as an apprentice, the way most film artists prior to the early 1970s had done; they were the first generation trained in cinema history and to have absorbed the theories of the French critics in the '50s and '60s as an academic truth. They were, in short, the first American filmmaking generation as to be on the whole cinephiles, in the sense that we now use that word.

This meant different things in different individual cases, but I bring it up now because we're about to set our sights on Brian De Palma, who presents one of the clearest examples of "film buff as film director" in the history of the medium. I suspect that the one thing people know about De Palma if they've heard of him at all, is that he's the director who made all of the Hitchcock pastiches. This is unfairly reductive - you can count on one hand the number of De Palma films that are primarily Hitchcockian - but the lines of influence are clear and unmistakable.

So with that, let us turn to 1973's Sisters, De Palma's seventh feature in five years, and also one of those primarily Hitchcockian films. In fact, so consciously was the director looking towards the great Hitch for his cues that he used an assortment cuts from Bernard Herrmann's scores for Hitchcock movies as his temp track, before talking the actual Herrmann out of retirement to write the "original" score. And those scare quotes aren't optional - there are moments, right from the very beginning, where the music isn't riffing on Psycho and Vertigo, so much as directly lifting from Psycho and Vertigo with a couple of notes switched here or there to make it at least slightly unclear what's up (sometimes, it dives into electronic music that sounds nothing remotely like any of Herrmann's work with Hitchcock) But it works in its new context, and really that's the only thing we need to be particularly worried about.

As for De Palma's story, which he turned into a screenplay with Louisa Rose, it's superficially quite a blast of Hitchcock in its own right: the first act plays the same "false protagonist who suddenly dies" card as Psycho, and the second act steals "sometimes apartment dwellers can see terrible crimes being committed across the way" straight from Rear Window. That film also supplies a number of individual story beats, and many of the individual shots and story ingredients crib from some Hitchcock film or another, right up until a final scene that works as both homage to and parody of the final shot of Psycho, the one with the car housing a corpse being dredged up from the swamp.

The important thing to note in all of this is that Sisters isn't simply an exercise in remixing classic thrillers for the sake of showing off De Palma's knowledge of film history. Which I confess had been my impression for many years, and was the major reason I've put off watching till now. It's craftier than that; it starts at Hitchcock and then pushes forward, making a fantasia on Hitchcockian themes with the angry energy of the new. For all its nods towards classicism, Sisters is a vigorously '70s movie, in its psychosexual raggedness (long before "psychosexual" had become the most clichéd way of describing any kind of thriller), and the ugly frankness with which it depicts the streets and buildings of New York. And its primary mode of tension and horror is forward-looking as much as it's conservative - there are moments whose staging and conception anticipate David Cronenberg more than the look backwards to Hitchcock or anyone else.

And all of that misses a pervasive truth of Sisters that I expected not at all, and was delighted to find: it's a funny movie. Perversely, darkly funny, sure - the opening credits are photographs of human fetuses, delicately positioned to stare at the camera with dark scowls of murderous rage, and it's as discomfiting as it is hilarious. But there's also room for the grand absurdity of the fake game show where we enter the story, Peeping Toms, something like a sexualised Candid Camera, in which hidden camera capture victims in awkward situations, with a panel of players asked to guess how they reacted to their situation. Our particular game concerns Phillip (Lisle Wilson), who's stunned to see a gorgeous blind woman, Danielle (Margot Kidder, who dances nimbly at the edge of comedy with a big ol' Québécoise accent) wander into the men's locker room and start changing. He has the good grace to leave quietly without watching or humiliating the woman - who is, of course, an actress, and can see just fine - and so wins two dinners at a fancy restaurant. After the show she suggests that he takes her out on a date with his prize, during which meal they're interrupted by her intense and frightening ex-husband, Emil Breton (William Finley). It's not enough to dissuade her from inviting Phillip back to her place on Staten Island, where they have sex after tricking Emil into thinking they were parting for the night.

The next morning, Phillip overhears an argument between Danielle and her identical twin sister, Dominique - by this point, we've already seen the enormous scar on Danielle's right hip, as accompanied by an electronic sting on the musical score that is much too freaked out the scar and much too anxious to make sure we absolutely pay all of our attention to it, so we've got quite a head start on figuring out exactly what kind of twins they are - after which Danielle emerges and asks if he'd be so kind as to pick up her pills, while also idly mentioning that it's her and her sister's birthday. On the way home from the pharmacy, he decides to use this information to play a nice surprise, buying the twins a cake, and this proves decisive; the delay in taking her medication sends Danielle into a writhing fit on the floor. By the time Phillip gets back, Danielle is nowhere to be seen, and Dominique is asleep on the bed; when Phillip rouses her, she grabs the knife he brought to cut the cake, cutting him in each of his femoral arteries (or, cutting him twice in the same femoral artery; there's bad continuity racing throughout the film, and some of it is clearly intentional, but this is one of the places where I think it probably isn't), letting him bleed out.

This is witnessed from across the alley by Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt), a columnist with a local paper who has managed to get herself in trouble with the local police thanks to an article titled "Why We Call Them Pigs", among other attempts to rouse the populace in radical anger, from her tiny little soapbox. "Yes, the Grace Collier, I wrote that story" she sighs on the phone with the cops, in a beautifully petulant comic line delivery that I wish I could bottle and listen to every time my spirits were low. She eventually convinces them to come over to check things out, at which point things start to get interesting as all hell: to sell her story, she starts piling on details that we know to be true, because we were in the room when Phillip died. But Grace wasn't, and she could only see a fraction of the killing from her apartment - this we know because we see the image as she sees it, and it's even put into a zoom backwards to make sure we notice just how circumscribed the angle she has into the room is.

The police find nothing, so Grace persuades her paper to let her do some investigative reporting, which they'll only do after assigning her a private detective, Larch (Charles Durning), to help. What they find is at times not remotely surprising (Danielle and Dominque were conjoined twins, a fact the movie tries so little to hide that it shows up in the ad campaign), and is some places enormously surprising, and at some places is surprising primarily because the movie made one twist that doesn't happen seem incredibly obvious, so we were looking the other direction while a different twist altogether sneaks up on us. It would be shabby to give away more - this isn't a Psycho, where it has become such a carved-in-granite classic that everybody knows how it ends. Let us leave it with: the things you expect to be revealed are all cleared off the deck early enough that the film has enough time left over to go into places that I did not see coming at all, tranforming flawlessly from a horror-tinged mystery about shady Québécois doctors going to extraordinary lengths to hide their professional and personal sins from the world, into a surrealist nightmare about having one's identity pulled out from below, and one that revises the question of who these people are so definitively that the ellipses and confusing loose ends the film was teasing us with earlier turn out to be nothing but its most dramatic sleight-of-hand.

It's an extremely unsatisfying conclusion, but it's hard to imagine one that would fit better; even the fact that it's unsatisfying plays off the film's depiction of the limits of what we perceive and how we interpret it; sometimes you just don't fucking know what's going on, and Sisters is, among other things, a big tease in stretching out our pleasant misery at not being able to solve all of its mysteries. Really, it's mostly a game in perceptual exercises overall, from its deliberate employment of continuity errors to its fun use of split-screens: at one point the film shows Danielle and Emil's desperate attempt to clean-up after Dominique (another Psycho nod) in one half while Grace's frustrated attempt to get the cops to god-damn go upstairs already plays in the other, a nifty way of building tension through style that mere cross-cutting wouldn't be able to achieve, while also making demands of our attention that we're of course not quite able to meet, and so the film once again points out that stuff is going to happen and we can't figure it all out.

There's an attempt at social commentary here: the brutishness of cops towards women and minorities is an obvious point the movie wants to touch on, though it does so only glancingly. It's more sustained in looking with horror at the abuses of power by authoritative men, with its final twenty minutes a sustained flurry of sucker punches that manage to show how such abuses can continue on in the world even after the abuser is dead. But the things that are most lingering about Sisters are generally stylistic: it's the flair with which De Palma stages his imagery that lingers more than what those images denote. A bright red spot on a sofa there, shallow focus to make it all the clearer how much the film is preventing us from seeing there, and plenty of skillful lifts from Hitchcock. It's a bit more surface level than it entirely wants to be, and the wackiness in the performances from Kidder (inadvertent) and Salt (deliberate, or at least successful) don't serve to give it any more depth, though they do make it quite a bit more fun. And when that fun suddenly flashes to sharply-honed cruelty, the film packs a hell of a lot of punch for something that's basically an insubstantial genre exercise. It's a terrifically smart piece of craftsmanship that keeps slithering out of your grasp; maybe not a great cinema by the usual standards, but I found it a compulsively addictive viewing experience.

Body Count: 2, and its surprisingly unambiguous about that number, considering how much else it's ambiguous about.

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THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST

A review requested by Julian D, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The career of director Michelangelo Antonioni is not the kind that can be neatly summed up in blunt descriptions like "culmination", so I can't use that word to describe his 1975 triumph The Passenger. It does, however, clearly punctuate the director's career: the seventh feature in a chain of hyper-modern masterpieces stretching back to 1960, and his last film before an unintended six-year break that left him an old master whose new films we should dutifully consider even though we probably don't like them very much. A far cry from being one of world cinema's handful of true visionaries, using his movies to anatomise the character of modern society in the same breath and in fact by the same means that he pushed the boundaries of representational, narrative cinema.

In fairness, The Passenger doesn't push boundaries as hard as some of the director's other films. But I think it might very well be his best social document: it dissects and lays bare the paranoias and neuroses of the 1970s even more strikingly than Blowup does the same for the 1960s, and without feeling nearly as dated. The subject is Western Europe and the United States in the aftermath of Vietnam and the social revolutions of the 1960s, blindly hunting for a sense of purpose in a world where Western dominance has been dealt its most serious setbacks of the 20th Century. In the screenplay by the director with Mark Peploe and Peter Wollen), the embodiment of this collapse of identity and purpose is David Locke (Jack Nicholson), a presumably American-born BBC journalist making a documentary on the civil war in Chad. After failing to scrounge up any war or warriors, he loses himself in the Sahara Desert, and walks back to his hotel, where he finds that David Robertson (Charles Mulvehill), the only other white person around, whom Locke has befriended in a vague and noncommittal way, has died. On the spot, Lock decides to swap identities with the dead man, following Robertson's date book to complete whatever task the other man was in the middle of. This turns out to be gun-running. In the meantime, Locke's wife Rachel (Jenny Runacre), has asked her husband's colleague Martin Knight (Ian Hendry) to look for "Robertson", to learn what he knows about "Locke's" death, meaning that Locke finds himself dodging his friend in addition to faking his way around a group of impressively dangerous men who think he has a cache of weapons for him, aided only by an architecture student (Maria Schneider) he meets in Barcelona.

Purely at the level of narrative, there's a lot to unpack, from Locke's indeterminate Anglo/American status, to the complexity and slitheriness of gender roles in the movie (Schneider's character is literally only ever identified as "The Girl", but Locke is in some ways "The Not Even a Man"), to the relationship between Europe and its former colonial holdings bubbling in the background. All of that's not even mentioning the film's most prominent characteristic as a story, which is its merciless portrayal of Locke as a hollow thing, worn down by the speed with which the world is changing and by all available evidence for the worse, to the point that he's a human-shaped signifier of an identity without actually possessing a concrete self. The one word that describes Antonioni's filmmaking is "ennui", and The Passenger is his ennui-est movie; L'avventura and La notte might showcase characters with a complete detachment from the shallow culture containing them, but The Passenger goes one step further, taking away the culture itself.

It's not merely psychological and social vagueness that the film depicts; its indefinite sensibility goes clear to the structure. Antonioni's own stated interpretation of the movie is that it took place over the course of one day, and he and cinematographer Luciano Tovoli filmed it to match (the lighting, mostly natural, grows more and more afternoon-like as it goes along, and it's only in the very last shot that dusk arrives), even if at a practical level it's hard to see how a narrative that moves from Africa to Germany to Barcelona to rural Spain can possibly all take place in ten or twelve hours. Literalism or plausibility aren't the point, though: what is clearly the case, both in the writing and in the visuals, is that The Passenger doesn't seem to have chronology: time moves wrong in the film, in those moments that it moves at all. It is immodestly slow-moving, which has been used a criticism as far back as 1975 (Roger Ebert was an earlier detractor, though he later changed his mind), but of course the fact that the movie is stretched out and not apparently going anywhere in a hurry, or at all, is hardly incidental. Life itself, in The Passenger, isn't really going anywhere; anyplace you go is equally likely to be dead zone of anomie.

The visual scheme Antonioni and Tovoli use to explore this sensibility is broadly familiar from the director's earlier movies: there's a great deal of empty space, whether it's the open sky or featureless walls, against which the characters are set from a far enough distance and low enough in the frame to feel crushed by the size of the composition. The film uses a fairly straightforward and simple color scheme, influenced by the natural earthtones of its locations, the lend a feeling of blanched-out energy, with everything stronger tending to feel oppressive, such as the blue skies or, in the film's most visually and narratively aberrant scene, the toxic-looking neon lights in a metal and concrete hell of an airport. What primarily marks the film as its own thing is the magnificent use of location photography: The Passenger is set mostly in corners of the world and Europe that have a heavy sense of history on them, finally ending in a Spanish town that has tacked elements of modern technology onto streets and buildings that look ancient, hewn from the ground itself in some ways. These are locations bigger than human stories, and Locke seems small and forgotten by the end, finally getting his wish to lose his self figuratively.

Also literally, in the film's incredibly famous penultimate shot, one of the two big showy long takes Antonioni uses (the first is a shocking attempt to bring us into a flashback without cutting, and it's beautifully organic, suggesting the displacement of Locke's thoughts even before the plot starts to make the scope of that displacement clear). It's a long slow track past Locke and through the narrow window of his hotel room, focusing our attention on the geography of the town and the architecture of buildings while its characters die and come to other crises points largely offscreen, the perfect summary of the film's exhausted humanity. Ultimately, it's not even worth showing what happens to the character we've spent two hours getting to not know. Stuff just happens. This is all deeply pessimistic and inhumane, but The Passenger so persuasively argues that pessimism and inhumanity are two of the key traits of Western culture in the 1970s that it doesn't even feel depressing: just "yeah, I guess that's about it". Not a film for a happy, transporting mood, then, but as a diagnosis of purposelessness the film is the most intelligent, engaging kind of misery.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD - B-HORROR IN THE 1960s - A LOVELY GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO JUST HAPPEN TO BE...

There are enough Psycho knock-offs in the world to keep you busy for as long as you could possibly stand it, but there never was a Psycho knock-off quite as overt about it, yet at the same time as creative and effective in its own right, as Homicidal. It's one of the earliest of its breed, coming to theaters in the summer of 1961, less than a year after Hitchcock's groundbreaking work, and the screenplay by Robb White is precisely the thing that you'd expect when a producer gave the order to copy this other movie exactly, but make every single detail a tiny bit different. And I don't meant that as a slight on White at all - viewed solely as a Psycho riff, Homicidal is downright inspired in the way it jostles elements into a brand new configuration. Still, it's good for the film that the producer in question, who was also the director, was the legendary William Castle, who for a brief period as the '50s turned into the '60s combined in one body the savviest instincts of a marketing guru with the nonsensical ebullience of an old-fashioned carnival barker and an abiding enthusiasm for cinema as a playground to just go and and have fun, as either a filmmaker or an audience member.

The savvy instinct is what led him to copy American cinema's biggest talking point of 1960, of course, but it's the enthusiasm that makes Homicidal such an appealing watch - certainly one of the best of the wannabe Psychos. It lacks the cheerful campiness of Castle's best-known films, The Tingler and House on Haunted Hill, both made in 1959 and both starring Vincent Price, patron saint of cheerful campiness. Indeed, besides the very opening and up until a key moment near the end, the film doesn't openly cop to any sense of humor at all, instead focusing sustaining its grim mystery and overall tension. Neither of those things are necessarily the film's best strength: William Castle was not, on his very best day, Alfred Hitchcock. But seeing the elements of Hitchcock as reworked by an aesthetic sensibility trained on matinee movies is a delight no matter what. Straitlaced as it undeniably is, Homicidal is shot through with a trashy glee in the things it can get away with.

It opens with its biggest single joke: Castle himself appears onscreen (as he tended to do) to introduce us to his latest masterwork, after briefly reminding us what some of his recent hits have been, all while calmly doing needlepoint. I love William Castle. And I love him all the more since the needlepoint he's been working on is the film's title, done in a homey font. From here, we head back to the past of the central family, one of the most fucked-up in any '60s film not based on the plays of Tennessee Williams. And we also head straight into the script's dogged refusal to clarify more than it absolutely has to, since all we see in the prologue is a little boy named Warren stealing a doll from a little girl whose name we never pick up, nor is their relationship clarified. Then we skip ahead to Ventury, CA: today. Not today. 1961 today. And here we find Miriam Webster (Joan Marshall), furtively checking into the Hotel Ventura with an obvious basketful of noir-heroine-on-the-run mystery, like we haven't just wanted into Psycho, we've skipped right ahead to the third reel. Miriam picks the youngest, handsomest bellhop (Richard Rust) to help her with the bags, and when she's got him alone in the room, she springs her highly abbreviated tale of woe: for the enormous sum of $2000, she'd like him to marry her, and get an annulment immediately. But they need to get married tonight. That kind of unthinkably large tip, plus the promise to hang around all evening with a beautiful woman, are enough to overcome his natural confusion at the situation, and late that night, they're on their way to a justice of the peace named Adrims (James Westerfield). No sooner has he completed the ceremony than Miriam pulls out a knife and stabs Adrims to death, fleeing before any of the witnesses or her dumbfounded new husband have had a chance to react.

That is just about as bravura as openings get: in terms of jaw-dropping madness per square inch and a desire to find out what the hell is going on, it's right up there with Samuel Fuller's crazed opening scene in The Naked Kiss. I can only imagine how it must have played in '61: the stabbing itself is magnificently disgusting, with squelchy stabbing noises that put the famed casaba melon of Psycho to shame, and while we never see the knife enter poor Adrims, the way he feebly paws at the spreading wet mass seeping into his shirt leaves even less to the imagination than the violence befalling Marion Crane in that doomed shower. The violence is shocking enough, in context (since even several decades later, anybody watching a William Castle picture isn't anticipating that kind of intense violence, and the director's joshing tone in the opening is hardly meant to give us an expectation of any kind of darkness to follow), that it even trumps how manifestly unclear anything in the plot is, to this point.

And, as it happens, as unclear as much of it remains. Homicidal is not a film bogged down by needless exposition, nor by much exposition at all, even down to the level of character relationships. We meet people, and we can tell that they're to be important down the line, but the film doesn't put much effort into clarifying why until it's actually important. So I'm not going to tell you how all of these people fit together: Miriam, it turns out, is actually a woman named Emily, and she's taking care of an elderly mute invalid, Helga (Eugenie Leontovich), whom she plainly doesn't like at all, given the first thing she does the morning after the murder is to gloat, knowing full well that Helga will be horrified to know that Emily has just committed a crime to ensnare the real Miriam (Patricia Breslin), a florist who, for whatever reason, has made a devoted, lifelong enemy out of Emily. Miriam is the half-sister of Warren (Jean Arless), who's set to inherit their shared father's entire estate; and Miriam has a boyfriend named Karl (Glenn Corbett), a pharmacist. And that is all you get, because Homicidal is all complications and twists from the moment it hits the ground. It does enough to say that Emily 's hatred for Miriam and Helga and basically everything is deep-down nasty enough that she's hatched quite the scheme to take out all of them, and her relationship with Warren goes much beyond his hiring her to work as Helga's nurse, to the added detriment of all concerned.

The script's obscurity is a magic trick: it sets us up to look at the film as a confused messy B-picture, when in fact it's a puzzle designed so that once we triumphantly fit in the last piece, we're too proud of ourselves for having solved it to notice that we've gotten everything wrong. Of all the things Homicidal pilfers from Psycho - and there's virtually nothing in it that isn't either a direct lift or a mirror image of something in Joseph Stefano's script for that movie, right down to a psychiatrist explaining what the hell we just saw in the last moments - a twist ending that makes perfect sense even though the film has spent every molecule of oxygen directing you away from it is the one that makes me happiest.

It's also, as an added bonus, especially pleasant to look at. Castle's movies never suffer for style and atmosphere, though most of that comes from the sets he had to work with. In this case, he ended up with the most overqualified cinematographer he'd ever worked with, Burnett Guffey (who already had an Oscar and another nomination under his belt, and had more in his future), and together they give the film the suffocating texture of film noir mixed into the heightened naturalism and domesticity that was one of the newer trends in horror cinema of the time. It's a movie with a more striking appearance than should be possible for a minor production, but it gives the film such a personality that it was worth every wasted penny of Columbia's money: if for nothing else than a sublimely bleak nighttime exterior of the Hotel Ventury, and the stunning way an unexpectedly graphic decapitation is presented in the harshest contrast of light and shadow possible, Homicidal would be easily one of the best-looking movies of Castle's career, one of the best-looking horror B-pictures of the '50s or '60s, for that matter.

Throughout all of this, it's still basically a William Castle carnival: the surprisingly tricky writing, the style, the violence, all just ways of getting us whipped up to think more highly of an unabashedly shlocky cash-in. And the hell of it is, it works so well at doing so. It has flaws aplenty: the middle third is deathly slow and free of incident, and Breslin and Corbett provide no kind of energy whatsoever, on top of how it's all, basically, stupid. But the performances of Warren and Emily are so dynamic and unsettling - Warren especially, who feels unpleasantly "off" in a way I couldn't quite nail down at first, though it has to do with how his line deliveries don't feel quite right with his face - it gives the movie a nice blast of the exact half-goofy, half-terrifying energy that sets the film out as a Castle special.

Especially when the gimmick comes in! We can't have a golden age Castle production without a gimmick! And in this case, it's a 45-second "fright break" that interrupts the movie at the 79-minute mark to flash a big stopwatch on the screen for any audience member too terrified to go on to leave the auditorium to receive a full refund. With the one caveat that they first have to be publicly pilloried by sitting in the Coward's Corner in the theater lobby, Castle's way of making sure that nobody actually took him up on that refund offer. It's not as obviously inspired as putting buzzers in theater seats or throwing a glowing skeleton at the audience, but it has the benefit of still being just as effective when you're watching the movie on TV at home, and can be baffled into blissful amusement by the producer/director's happy narration as he counts down the clock and urges all the scaredy cats in the audience to run on home like little chickens. It makes it entirely impossible to take the last eight minutes of the film, with their pile-up of revelations, even a little bit seriously, and that makes those revelations the most charming and fun part of the whole movie. As a result of this last-minute hucksterism, Homicidal has nothing resembling in even the most superficial way the rawness and power of its model, but damn me if it isn't still an excellent way to waste an hour and a half being thoroughly disconcerted by the horrible, cruel people parading across the screen.

Body Count: 3, only one of which is not exceptionally gory.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN A POST-WAR WORLD - THE OLD DARK CASTLE

The first two-and-a-half decades of feature-length American horror cinema can be crudely divide into to flavors: the movies made by Universal Pictures, and everything else. It was Universal who, in the 1920s, cracked the code of making literary adaptations that were longer on spooky atmosphere than prestige; it was Universal who finally pulled the trigger on presenting paranormal terrors that couldn't be explained away as hoaxes or scientific abnormalities, with its one-two punch of Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931, the movies that largely birthed horror as a genre. And through World War II, it was Universal where the highest-profile, biggest-budget horror was being produced, until, after a while, it simply wasn't. Universal's solitary "horror" movies between 1947 and the dawn of the 1950s were the generically dubious Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff, and there has never been a period since when the studio regained its allover dominance of the genre.

Here, however, we find the studio's best attempt to do so, after its window of opportunity had closed: The Black Castle of 1952. If the late '40s where a period when horror largely disappeared, the early '50s were a period in which it transformed: almost all of the significant horror movies of that decade and much of the decade that followed where genre hybrids, which could be as easily assigned to science-fiction. In '52, that transition had only just barely started and certainly hadn't established itself (the earliest point that I think we could firmly say that the age of Sci-Fi Horror B-Pictures had begun would be with 1953's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms), but the public's taste for the Gothic mysteries that largely equalled movie horror in the '30s and '40s had mostly evaporated, and its new taste for Space Age pulp was already clearly in place. And so it was that Universal's attempt to revive its dormant tradition of horror filmmaking in the form of one of those Gothic mysteries couldn't possibly have worked; and while I won't pretend to know the feeling in Universal's offices when The Black Castle premiered, with several decades of hindsight on our side, it's impossible to feign shock that the movie underperformed financially. The studio's return to making A-list horror would have to wait two years, until they concocted a brand new monster that fit in with modern tastes better, the marvelous Creature from the Black Lagoon.

In the meantime, we find ourself face-to-face with a movie that would have seemed a little musty if it had come out 15 years earlier, though I will say this on behalf of The Black Castle: time has been kind to it. Director Nathan Juran, who'd later handle several of Ray Harryhausen's fantasies, did an absolutely fantastic job of squeezing all possible atmospheric gloom from Bernard Herzrburn and Alfred Sweeney's baroque Old World sets, and while there's no point at which the odd plot provided by writer Jerry Sackheim feels completely elegant and cohesive, Juran and cinematographer Irving Glassberg were able to make a real triumph from one of the script's strangest sidebars, a black panther hunt where the film is most eager to lapse into a Most Dangerous Game riff that it never commits to being. The pleasures of a mid-'30s costume drama mystery as well as the pleasures of an early-'60s Hammer Gothic are very much in abundance here, making the film simultaneously old-fashioned and ahead-of-its-time, to its short-term misfortune, but its long-term charm.

Let us not pretend that this is a classic, though: there's still quite a bit that's lumpy in the film, which suffers from wildly variable performances of wildly variable characters, as well as a story that clomps about gracelessly and, for at least the film's first half, aimlessly. The Black Castle clocks in at just 82 minutes (which, to be sure, is not especially short for this kind of movie at this point in history), but it's amazing how much of it feels like padding, including a sequence where the hero leaves one location, changes his mind, and goes back to it, for no apparent gain to the film itself.

That hero is Sir Ronald Burton (Richard Greene), an Englishman late of Africa, who has headed to the Black Forest in Austria in search of clues about two of his colleagues sometime in what the film never quite commits to depicting as either the 18th or 19th Century. Their disappearance is connected with the Black Castle of Count Karl von Bruno (Stephen McNally), who was an adversary of Burton and his men back in Africa. He never saw the Englishmen, which is why Burton is able to approach him under the name of Beckett, to make his investigation, and if we didn't have good cause to mistrust him in the first place, we would after his first appearance. He makes an immediate impression of robust Continental villainy when we see him with his sarcastic smirk and eyepatch and cackling line deliveries (which McNally forebears from delivering in any kind of Germanic accent). And it must be said that McNally's obvious joy at playing such a broad part, in the midst of a career of small roles in small Westerns, makes the count a far more enjoyable screen presence than the rather staid Burton. The same is true of his wife, Countess Elga (B-movie staple Rita Corday, appearing as she sometimes did under the name Paula Corday), much abused by her cruel husband and thus predisposed to fall desperately in love with the first man who comes along with the potential to save her from her wretched life.

She's not the only member of the Black Castle's unhappy family to see Burton as a potential savior: the castle staff includes a certain Dr. Meissen (Boris Karloff), who's a bit more ambivalent in his villainy than any of the count's other lackeys and hangers-on, and who feeds Burton advice and tries to help him, though that help comes in some rather bleak forms.

If I describe the situation more than the actual story, it's because the story is frankly a bit smothered underneath the rest of the movie: The Black Castle is high on visual atmosphere and narrative intrigue, but it mostly allows the story to crawl by in stiff, "this happened and then this happened" fashion. Burton's generic qualities as B-movie leading man have a lot to do with that, as he's not very capable of grabbing the attention of the camera or anything else, and so it's not very interesting to watch him step through the beats of a plot that's far too easy to anticipate, given how much information it gives us in advance (it opens with a Poe-esque "don't bury the drugged man alive!" prologue that turns much of the rest of the film into a protracted waiting game). It's a bit skittish of committing to actual horror, it's not mysterious enough to function the way it thinks it can as a mystery, and the whole thing is just a bit ad hoc and thrown-together. By the time we find Count von Bruno's pit of crocodiles, the reveal is more "wow, so crocodiles, huh?" than anything that feels like the moment has arisen organically from the movie as a whole; that same sense pervades the whole movie.

What works about the film is exactly what one expects to work: the sets, both exteriors and interiors, and the thick shadows populating them (I have mentioned the count's panther hunt already, but I trust you will not hate me for doing it again: the murky woods in which it occurs and the angular camera positions are the best thing the film ever has going on visually), the florid acting of McNally as the bad guy, and the soft, calculated acting of Karloff as the cunningly neutral doctor. The film's latter day visibility relies to a great deal on Karloff's presence in the cast (as well as Lon Chaney, Jr. as a mute lug; like most of Chaney's non-werewolf performances, he makes less of an impression than it seems like he should), which is patently unfair: he's quite a marginal character, all things considered, not quite so far down the path to obsolescence as Bela Lugosi or Peter Lorre, both of whom were already largely done with studio pictures by 1952, but it wouldn't be until his stock dropped enough that he could be poached by the independent American International Pictures that he'd see starring roles again. Still, even Karloff in decline had the keen screen presence and effortlessly sinuous line readings of a movie star at his peak, and his small, ambiguous part is certainly the most memorable thing The Black Castle can offer.

Not that good Karloff, enjoyably purple McNally, and lots and lots of mist-soaked Gothic sets are anything to sniff at. It is a terribly enjoyable throwback, if you have any affection at all for the heavy artifice of '30s Universal horror, even granting its considerable deficiencies as a story. There are better films on this general aesthetic model, both prior to 1952 and afterwards, but there are also infinitely worse ones. It's a solid second-tier Gothic mystery-horror-thriller, the kind that's worth catching up with only once you've seen all the good ones. But the important part is that it's worth seeing.

Body Count: 4 humans, and one panther.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN A POST-WAR WORLD - DEAD WOMEN TELL NO TALES

Last time around, I alluded in a vague way to the wild and woolly world of Poverty Row, the scuffed-up ugly underbelly of the American filmmaking industry in the '30s, '40s, and '50s. The name refers to an inexhaustible supply of short-lived and occasionally durable B-picture firms that latched onto the most profitable genres that the big studios dabbled in: mostly crime movies, horror, and Westerns, the things you could do on a budget using only available sets in Los Angeles. For our current purposes, the important thing about Poverty Row is that it's where those genres had to hang out when they got too shabby and shameful for the big studios. It was, famously, to this low-rent world that Bela Lugosi found himself banished after Universal ran out of things to do with the charismatic, threatening Hungarian import with a profoundly limited acting range. And as our current layover in post-WWII Poverty Row filmmaking, we have here not just one of Lugosi's many trashy, slightly embarrassing microbudget crapshows, though 1947's Scared to Death, is all of that and more. It also happens to be the only time Lugosi had a starring role in a movie in color, though the phrase "in color" already implied something more in 1947 than the rather shitty results of the Cinecolor process, here billed with no discernible shame as "Natural Color".

And that's not the film's only gimmick, either! As we'll discover almost immediately, Scared to Death is a murder mystery, narrated from the perspective of the dead body, from within the morgue. This was, incidentally, very nearly the exact framing narrative originally intended for Sunset Blvd. three years later, leading me to the hopefully ridiculous notion that Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett not only saw this film but also saw fit to steal from it.

The body telling the story is that of Laura Van Ee (Molly Lamont), pulled onto the slab by two doctors (Stanley Andrews and Stanley Price) for her autopsy. "One hates to perform an autopsy on a beautiful woman" says one of them in a line of dialogue pregnant with the worst implications. But she doesn't seem to mind very much, and to keep herself from being bored, I guess, she starts to tell us her story one that started just a couple of days earlier. It is a story that has only a small number of moving parts, but fuck me if I'm able to follow it. The first scene is enough to establish Scared to Death as dreck on every level, from the stilted dialogue delivered by uncomfortable actors in what seems likely to have been the first take, to the bargain basement production design, to the visceral ugliness of Cinecolor. And yet the first scene is at a level entirely above the movie to follow, which is all that on top of a screenplay, by William Abbott, that I'd be paying an undue compliment if I accused it of "bordering" on incoherence.

Let's start with the characters. That's enough to give us the shape of it. In life, Laura was the wife of Ward Van Ee (Roland Varno), the son of Dr. Joseph Van Ee (George Zucco), who is currently treating her nervous condition. Dr. Van Ee sort of openly hates his daughter-in-law, and both he and Ward want her to divorce the younger man, which she's perversely disinterested in doing, despite being certain that Dr. Van Ee is trying to drive her insane. This stable household situation is spiced up by the presence of an unduly nosy maid, Lilybeth (Gladys Blake), and an unbelievably dim security guard, Bill Raymond (Nat Pendleton), an ex-cop hoping for a juicy murder to serve as his ticket back to the force, when he's not trying to flirt with Lilybeth. A guest is coming along to imbalance things further: Dr. Van Ee's much hated cousin, Professor Leonide (Lugosi), who for no clear reason has a mute dwarf sidekick, Indigo (Angelo Rossitto). He's got blackmail on his mind, demanding a few days in the Van Ees' guest room in exchange for not telling the horrible things he knows about his cousin's past. Nothing whatsoever comes of this, but Leonide does possibly know something about Laura's own mysterious past, which Ward has apparently tracked back to her time in a European dance duo called Laurette and Rene, and though this information is presented extremely early on, it's not until minutes from the end that anybody goes further in exploring it than noting that "Laura" and "Laurette" are similar names.

Right about this point, Laura receives a package containing a wax head that looks uncannily like her own, which triggers Dr. Van Ee to give up the weak pretense of secrecy around his treatment of his daughter-in-law. But his call is intercepted by a canny reporter, Terry Lee (Douglas Fowley), who brings along his monumentally stupid gal Friday, Jane Cornell (Joyce Compton) to the Van Ee mansion for his investigation. And now that we have all the players lined up, the plot can commence to spinning around in wobbly circles as nobody works very hard to actually solve any of the confusions that crop up, mostly because everybody in the film other than Jane is apparently hiding some kind of gloomy secret or another. It's even more confusing to us than to the characters, since we know as none of them do that somebody is peering in through the mansion's windows, somebody wearing a blue mask. And this would apparently be the green mask that Leonide remembers as part of Laurette and Rene's act, since God bless 'em, the filmmakers built their entire narrative around an object specifically stated to be a color that the Cinecolor process couldn't reproduce.

It's simply not possible to convey how inept the storytelling is in Scared to Death: trying to summarise the story elements necessarily enforces a kind of structure on them that they lack in the original. It's very nearly Dadaist in its virtually complete absence of an actual narrative throughline connecting all of the baffling shit it throws out, in essentially random order. And, too, the conspicuous failure of every element of the filmmaking is so complete that one is tempted to assign some kind of intentionality to it. Horrible, no-budget filmmaking can explain things like the way that in the morgue opening, one of the actors jumps the gun on his cue, and the other keeps soldiering on delivering the lines as they were written, so we have two people talking over each other at different points in a conversation. That's just par for the course in these borderline amateur productions. But the way that seemingly every actor exists in a different kind of movie, from screwball horror to Gothic melodrama, speaks to a disinterest in creating any kind of unity that merely bad filmmaking can't answer. Director Christy Cabanne, almost all the way to the end of one of cinema's most prolific careers, must have had enough experience to know when his cast was spiraling off into a half-dozen different and irreconcilable dead ends, unless he was so repulsed by the total lack of continuity in the script that he didn't bother supplying continuity to the performances or imagery.

There's nothing at all about the film that's acceptable in the least, from its flat staging of characters against a set that never looks meaningfully like anything but a hastily-constructed trio of rooms, and a "forest" made up of some large bushes (the sets are the one point at which Cinecolor, unfortunately, lets us know exactly what reality looked like), to its desperate score by Carl Hoefle, pounding with theremin screams to try and convince us that the plaster-looking blue thing looking in through windows is somehow terrifying. The single thing that's most offensively incompetent is the return, at intervals, to Dead Laura's narration, which is always preceded by a theremin sting that gets prematurely cut off so that she can deliver one (and only one) line, and then always followed by the same sting, while the film dissolves in and out of the morgue so quickly that it's barely in focus in between. It's shoddily executed and serves to do absolutely nothing but guarantee that the film can't possibly manage to work up any momentum, not that it had much of a chance to do that between the lack of a clear plot and the absence of cause-and-effect relationships between any two actions performed by any characters, at any point in the feature.

In the absence of anything remotely good, at least the film can count on Zucco and Lugosi for their grave, vaguely threatening screen presence, though Lugosi in particular lacks an actual character to play - even at the end of the film, I had no real sense whether Leonide had been a villain all along or not (he's also, in color, too ruddy-cheeked and avuncular-looking; if ever an actor needed to have sallow skin and bleached features, it was Lugosi, but here, he looks like Santa wearing a Dracula cape. Yes, he's wearing the goddamn Dracula cape). It's so wildly awful that I can imagine the right combination of friends, mood-altering chemicals, and good spirits turning it into an extraordinarily fun bad movie night experience, though watching it alone and sober, I found myself suffering through pretty much every moment of it, too incredulous and confused to find it tedious, but also too shrill for it to be inadvertently funny. Being long since in the public domain, it's trivially easy to find the 65-minute film on the internet, if you're curious. But don't say I didn't warn you - this isn't just bad filmmaking, it's practically outsider art, made by an unusually incompetent outsider.

Body Count: 1, which is even more boring given that we know from the beginning who it's going to be.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN A POST-WAR WORLD - DIGITAL HORROR

Horror, in its broadest construction, has always been something of a faddish genre. There have been comedies and character dramas for as long as there have been movies, and depending on where you want to set the margins around "action movie", they've existed in some for or another for nearly as long. Horror, though, has its ebbs and flows, periods where it's driven mostly underground, periods where it has to hide out in the form of something else. In recent memory, for example, one of these periods was in the first half of the 1990s, which produced hardly any important works of horror in English that weren't trying desperately hard to be prestige dramas or invisible direct-to-video schlock. But the most protracted lull in American horror is the one that began after the bottom fell out of the horror market in the late '30s, after several years of studios big and small trying to chase Universal's genre-defining hits from early in that decade. It was a slow descent: for most of the war years, studio-made horror didn't vanish, so much as decline in importance, puttering along as program-filler cranked out by the B-film units at the mini-majors, Universal and RKO, while the Poverty Row studios kept the genre alive in the form cheap, tacky quickies. It wasn't until after war ended in 1945 that horror basically disappeared for several years at any meaningfully serious level - the Poverty Row folks never gave up on it, but what they made was strictly crap on a shoestring budget with almost invisible audience. We're going to peek in on what they were up to soon enough in this Summer of Blood.

At the moment, let's spend a moment with what amounts the the last big studio attempt at horror in the 1940s: the 1946 Warner Bros. production The Beast with Five Fingers, which premiered at the tale end of that year (on Christmas Day, in fact), and had most of its run in 1947. It's an awkward fit of company identity and historical importance: Warner's was never one of the biggest players in the genre, and much of the film, especially its infamously stupid, winking ending, feels like a conscious attempt to distance the movie from its own content. Which is, as you can maybe guess from the title, a disembodied hand that murders people.

Among its efforts to not be quite so much about a disembodied hand, The Best with Five Fingers spends the largest part of its running time as a murder mystery stealing from the "old dark house" motif. Around the beginning of the 20th Century, American expatriate Francis Ingram (Victor Francen) lives in a grand old mansion outside of a small town in Italy. He's attended by, he thinks, his best friends and most trusted confidants: lawyer Duprex (David Hoffman) is obviously just there for the slightly batty rich client; secretary Hilary Cummins (Peter Lorre), 20 years in Ingram's employ, is interested solely in the access his position affords him to Ingram's impressive library of astrological arcana, with which Hilary hopes to reconstruct the great lost studies of the pseudoscience; nurse Julie Holden (Andrea King), brought on some while back to care for Ingram after he suffered a stroke that paralysed his right side, has since moved from "kind medical professional" to "borderline prisoner under the obsessive control of a selfish tyrant". That leaves only our hero, Bruce Conrad (Robert Alda), and he's nothing but a con-man: a genial, charismatic con-man introduced in the film's opening scene by fleecing American tourists out of $50 for some worthless fake antiques, and then offering up just enough flim-flam to local cop Ovidio Castanio (J. Carrol Naish) so that the officer can feel like he hasn't totally abandoned his professional ethics. So it's hard to imagine that he sees Ingram as anything but a friendly mark.

Even with these enormous caveats, these are Ingram's friends and confidantes, and they are the people he asks to attest in writing to his evident sanity as he prepares to put up a new will. That, of course, means that he's about to do, which happens by accident, it seems, as he falls down a flight of stairs in his wheelchair. And this is the start of everyone's woes: for Ingram's only relatives are a pair of the worst kind of shitty, entitled Americans, father Raymond Arlington (Charles Dingle) and son Donald (John Alvin), and when they learn that Ingram's mysterious new will named Julie as the sole heir to his estate, they smell a rat immediately. But shenanigans of that sort are soon going to be a rather small priority to anybody but the grasping asshole Arlingtons: cued by a light in the masoleum where Ingram was interred, the rest of the cast finds that the corpse has been desecrated, its left hand removed. And right around the same time, the house is filled with the mournful tones of a Bach piece that Bruce re-set to be performed with one hand, as a great favor to the frustrated, crippled pianist. Different characters leap to conclusions at different times: Hilary, who was almost strangled to death by Ingram's incredibly powerful left hand shortly before his death, is the first to be sure that the dead man's missing body part is now haunting the house, and the first strangulation murder would seem to bear him out.

At no point was The Beast with Five Fingers going to be an all-time classic work of cinema, but given the tenuous state of horror in 1946, it acquits itself beautifully. Screenwriter Curt Siodmak, one of the key voices at Universal during its shift in the '40s to B-horror, thought that putting the weird-looking, weird-sounding Lorre in the role of Hilary broke the tension a bit too much, but frankly, Lorre is the best thing the movie has in its back pocket for the first thirty minutes. The graceful efficiency with which Siodmak introduces the characters, especially Bruce, is more than commendable, but once the exposition is out of the way, the film settles into a groove that goes on a bit too long with too little direction: "there's someone in this spooky old house who wants to screw around with the possible recipients of an inheritance" was old hat years before '46, but the film's first and much of its second acts cling tightly to that plot form like it needs to be teased out carefully and precisely, or else we'll all be hopelessly lost. It's only the characters, which largely means the actors, who keep it purring along for most of this stretch, and with the cast primarily inhabited by second-stringers, that means that it's a bit rocky here and there. King, in particular, is colorless and flat: as the film's only woman of any serious importance, there's far more weight and attention on her than her one-note declamatory performance style can justify. And Naish, he plays-a de Italian with da, how you say, issa great-a big cartoon. At least Alda is a beguiling leading man, smooth enough to see why so many people would fall for his tricks without stopping to notice how shoddy his patter is, and unctuous enough that we, in the audience, have to notice that, likable or not, he's certainly a bit of a shit.

But back to Lorre, who's only third-billed and maybe not even the third-biggest role until the climax, but damn, does he dominate the film. No matter how ominously luxurious and dead the gaping sets appear, and no matter how uncanny the accumulation of hints that there might be a hand afoot, The Beast with Five Fingers would be thin gruel as a horror film without the creepy little Austro-Hungarian there to add a sense of foreboding. Whatever his gifts, Lorre's voice and screen presence limited him considerably in the types of emotions he could stir: he could be a nervous force of rodent-like pathos, he could be an threatening bundle of sinister undertones or, frequently, both. He's much more the former than the latter in The Beast with Five Fingers, although director Robert Florey uses the actor with stiletto-like precision: there are just enough moments where we cut to a shot of Lorre with a sneaky dark look on his face, turned inward in a most inscrutable fashion, that we can't ever shake the feeling that something is wrong, whether with the character or with the movie as a whole. It's the energy that Lorre provides, in effect, that makes The Beast with Five Fingers a horror movie in the first place, at least until that hand finally shows its face.

Which comes late enough that it would be a dirty trick to talk about it very much, other than to point out that its superlative filmmaking, by 1946 standards or our own: there is a grand total of one shot where it feels like a special effect. And while it would be tempting to chalk that up to the acting in response to it, Flory gives that hand some close-ups, all the better to sell the illusion, tremendously well. The third-act freakout in which the hand does most of its work is peerless horror filmmaking, nasty, explicit, and convincing like nothing else in that generation.

I'd say that one wonders how they could have gotten away with it, except that part is obvious: with an unforgivable final two scenes that retrench to the usual "don't worry, nothing paranormal here" attitude of the more squeamish Hollywood tradition, old-dark-house movies in particular. First up comes a tedious exposition dump that's blunt and artless in exactly the way that the film's initial set-up is allusive and sophisticated and cunning, and it's very nearly the twin to the legendarily bad psychiatrist scene in the home stretch of Psycho. And what's really sad is that this is not, in fact, the worse of those two final scenes: the very last scene is outright comedy, with Naish's big honking stereotype looking directly in the camera and mugging about hey, whatta ya gonna do, these old-a spooky houses. It's so unbelievably wretched that you don't just want to dock points for it: you want to overlook how much of the prior to that is craftily plotted, smartly acted and tensely directed, and declare the whole thing to be a misfire.

I mean, let's not do that. The Beast with Five Fingers has much that is admirable: it may be more of a mystery than a real horror film, but it's a pretty good mystery, at that. If studio horror had to be put in cold storage for a few years, there could have been a much worse send-off than this: it's not perfect, but it's got enough atmosphere and well-drawn characters to fuel a good many of the tired low-budget genre flicks that popped up like weeds in the years following it.

Body Count: 3, but none of them are the ones who arguably deserve it the most.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE 1930s - THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN

You couldn't order a more perfect first generation horror movie knock-off than The Vampire Bat. The 1933 effort by Majestic Pictures (which had no other meaningfully long-lived productions before it was absorbed into Republic Pictures at the end of the '30s) is very close to the platonic ideal of a cheap-ass attempt to simultaneously copy both Universal's Dracula and Frankenstein, the two films that ignited the horror boom of the '30s while almost single-handedly introducing the notion of paranormal horror into American cinema in the first place. Acknowledging the Frankenstein influence is, I confess, already leading us into spoiler territory; though the rules pertaining to spoilers about 82-year-old Poverty Row programmers easily found for the watching on the internet are a bit slippery, aren't they? You've had every chance in the world to watch The Vampire Bat, while also lacking any reason to assume that you should. Well, here's me coming along to declare that yes, you should. The movie is no timeless classic, but it's definitely a unique one-off in the annals of pre-1968 horror, even though its individual elements are extensively mined from pre-existing material.

The setting is Kleinschloss, Germany, probably sometime around the modern day, if we're going to jduge by clothes, though the attitude of the local populace is decades behind the curve. Seems Kleinschloss has been suffering from two plagues of late: on the one hand, a large number of unusually aggressive bats have been infesting the town. On the other, there have been a distressing number of exsanguination deaths, with the victims all sporting a pair of pristine holes through their necks to the jugular vein. Take those two things in hand together, and it almost inevitably spells "vampire", but at least one man, police inspector Karl Brettschneider (Melvyn Douglas), thinks that's a load of absolute bullshit. He's been unable to do much in the way of proving that he's right and the rest of town is a bunch of superstitious ninnies, mind you, and the more bodies pile up, the more tense the population is getting, to the point that they're ready to snap. While Karl, his girlfriend Ruth Bertin (Fay Wray, who'd already filmed her career-marking roles in Mystery of the Wax Museum and King Kong, though this film beat those to theaters), and her lodger Dr. Otto von Niemann (Lionel Atwill) work to find some kind of scientific answer to the goings-on, the kind of mob that tends to spontaneously form in movies like this has allowed circumstantial evidence to indict Herman Gleib (Dwight Frye), a transparent knock-off of Dracula's Renfield, right down to the actor playing both parts. And Herman is certainly creepy as all get-out with his freakish adoration of the bats that the rest of the town hates, and his uncomfortably close affection for Martha (Rita Carlyle), the latest victim of the "vampire". But we've got no reason to doubt him, and ever reason to fear for his safety just as much as Karl does. Particularly since we get to meet the real killer long before Gleib ends up running for his life from the mob.

It's no vampire, either - Universal may have paved the road for horror movies with actual monsters from the bowels of hell, but it took a while for that particular innovation to filter into all that many American movies, and The Vampire Bat eschews ghouls for simple monstrous humanst. Yet it finds space for a peculiar, entirely unexplained hypnotism subplot, so it's not entirely allergic to the paranormal.

But still, this is a movie that's deeply undecided what to do with this new thing, "horror", that it has available to it. The opening scene, barring a frantic montage establishing the nightmare that is life in Kleinschloss, is something of a case study in not quite knowing how much faith the audience will have in the film, or how much trust the film can afford to have in the audience. As remarkable as it is to say, 36 years after the novel Dracula appeared, 62 after Carmilla, and 114 after Polidori's short story "The Vampyre", The Vampire Bat is so dubious about its own subject matter that it goes to all the bother of explaining, in extensive detail, what vampires are and what they do. That this scene is palatable at all is due almost exclusively to Douglas, a sarcastic, modernist presence whose sharp energy helps to ease the clumsiness of the writing (and it is enormously clumsy - "Gott im Himmel, don't jest!" is a representative sample of the flop-sweaty Germanisms wedged into the script, and if I wanted to share a sample of the film's puffy exposition, I'd have to spend the next half-hour transcribing bloated monologues). Hindsight's a cheat, but it's not remotely surprising that the actor quickly burst from cheap quickies like this to major studio productions: in the most casual ways conceivable, he acts the pants off of everybody who shares the screen with him, possessing a more distinctive and cutting personality than the rest of the human cast combined. And he manages to add momentum and excitement to the film's rather indulgent reliance on "let's stand around the thing and talk" scenes, enough of them that I'm a little stunned to report that the movie is, in fact, not based on a stage play.

I should be fair and mention that, while Douglas is objectively the best in show, the leads are all pretty solid. Wray is let down by a part that is never more interesting or deep than in her first scene, when she's a focused science-adjacent young woman, and not yet just the romantic adjunct to the main plot, but Atwill's increasingly frayed man of science is one of the reliable character actor's more complicated creations, and Frye blends creepiness with sweet pathos in a lovely way, giving a vastly better performance here than managed to in Dracula. Maude Eburne, stranded in the absolutely unlikable role of the daffy old lady (Ruth's aunt, and Dr. von Niemann's hypochondriac patient), manages to even make the comic relief not as shrill as the writing easily could have encouraged it to be.

The real star of the show, though, is the film's attitude, partially effected by director Frank R. Strayer, who marches the script ruthlessly through its paces (the film's running time, which is variable from source to source, is never reported as more than a few minutes over one hour, and it firmly refuses to dick around with that short allotment of time), while allowing the unstated menace haunting the town to linger in the background and in the spaces where actors say nothing. That's the other thing that drives the attitude: this is actually a fairly brutal, clipped movie, for something made in a nominally more innocent time. Being pre-Code helped The Vampire Bat considerably; it can indulge in a harrowing death for a character who doesn't deserve it, and a shockingly matter-of-fact revelation of unspeakable viciousness on the part of another.

It also benefits from being enormously cheap and efficient: while the sprawling style and atmosphere of a Frankenstein is deeply rewarding in its own way, there's a lot to like about the brusqueness of The Vampire Bat. With no opportunity to slow down and dwell on things, the movie's unfussy look suggests a much more natural, everyday sensibility: the Mitteleuropean sets, looking like a hundred others from the same era, are unexpectedly naturalistic, with Strayer and cinematographer Ira H. Morgan saving the particularly complex, vivid shots for moment of punctuation, or especially intense terror in the characters' lives. As a result, those moments land much harder. And we see in this kind of impulse the seeds of setpiece-driven film production.

Enough is wrong with the film that it can't be regarded as a lost masterpiece: the hypnotism angle is a confusing distraction that writer Edward T. Lowe, Jr. never thinks about resolving, while the necessary expository slowness hasn't aged at all well, now that we all know all about vampires and Gothic derangement in European towns. And the decision to end the movie, an enormously sober look at mob rule, intellectual overreach, and basic human indecency, with a gag about an old lady who has the shits so bad that she might not even make it up the stairs without messing herself - seriously, by the standards of 1933 taste and censorship, it might as well be the diarrhea scene from Bridesmaids - is so peculiar that it transcends "bad filmmaking" into some kind of crypto-Surrealism.

What it can and should be regarded as, though, is a not-quite-great encapsulation of all the things horror was trying to be in the first years as it coalesced out of the ether: society in terror, rich visual atmosphere, pretty girls being menaced, reasonable choices turning into something awful. And there are elements to it that are notable for how little they resemble the horror of the '30s or anytime after: this is a movie in which horror is a strictly human-driven concern, for example, and not even the nicest characters are exempt from culpability, which is the really striking part. It's an invaluable time capsule, anyway, showcasing how much had been achieved by 1933, and how much was left to do. It's nowhere close to the best horror film of the 1930s, but it is maybe the best combination of wide-ranging success with utterly typical elements, and any historically-minded aficionado of the genre owes it to themselves to investigate the singular peculiarities of this one.

Body Count: A whopping 6, a spectacular bloodbath for such an early entry in the nascent genre. And that's not even counting the apparently hefty number of deaths summarised in the opening montage.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SILENT HORROR - HOUSE OF MYSTERY

There's a particular subgenre of movies that's really popular, and relied on so heavily that just a few years after it broke out, the Hollywood studios have almost driven it into the ground. Hoping to freshen things up, one of the savviest producers around decides to offer a job to one of the most impressive directors working in another country, to bring a bit of that foreign stylistic flair to the moribund genre. And it works - the film that immigrant produces is broadly regarded as one of the best, and maybe the best ever made in that style. But it didn't do anything to prop up the ailing genre, which just got staler and more hackneyed until it finally died out a few years later.

I'd add the rhetorical flourish, "remind you of anything?", except that it's happened enough times, with some of the details more or less true in different cases, that what it reminds you of and what it reminds me of might not even be the same. Which is one of the most enjoyable parts of studying history: it's how you realise that things really are exactly the same now that they always used to be. In this case, anyway, the story applies to The Cat and the Canary from 1927 (it's the first adaptation of a stage play by John Willard that would filmed twice more under the same title, and at least a couple of times under various pseudonyms). Let's fill in those blanks: the foreign director was Paul Leni, director and art director, whose 1924 Waxworks was one of the key films of the German Expressionist movement; the producer who was so immensely impressed by Waxworks was German expatriate Carl Laemmle, founder and mastermind of Universal Pictures. And the subgenre was the "old dark house" movie, a later name (the film of that title wouldn't come out for five years yet) for what, in retrospect, we might call the very first trend in American horror cinema.

A trend, moreover, just as inflexible and formulaic as the giant insect pictures of the 1950s or the slasher movies of the 1980s. You take one old, dark house, add a layer of intrigue around a pile of money, plug in a mystery where it seems like some kind of paranormal event might be happening, until it turns out to all be human machinations designed to trick people into overreacting. And in making it, try very hard to split the difference between comedy and horror to the point where it's not terribly funny nor very scary, but it doesn't ever seem like it was trying to be. The style was born, cinematically, with D.W. Griffith's 1922 production of One Exciting Night, an original riff on the stage hit The Bat by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood (itself adapted into film multiple times, including a tremendously popular version in 1926), and it inspired numerous imitators, though the rigidity of the genre guaranteed that it would start to burn out fairly quickly. By the time of The Cat and the Canary, it was already old hat, which is undoubtedly why Laemmle thought to bring in a great stylist with a proven skill at seamlessly marrying an unusual flavor of light comedy with extravagant horror. Something to let the movie stand out from the crowd. And thus, quite by accident, Laemmle changed the fate of American horror, a form so new that it hadn't even been named as such.

For what Leni did wasn't merely film a movie with a florid, exaggerated visual style that gave it vastly more personality than its entirely generic script, by Alfred A. Cohn and Robert F. Hill, could have achieved by itself. Thanks to his presence, The Cat and the Canary is more or less the first movie to introduce Expressionist aesthetics into Hollywood filmmaking in a systematic and consistent way. That, in turn, led to Universal's entire population of genre-defining movies in the 1930s, and all the things that followed on their model.

We'll return to that, but just to keep everybody on the same page, allow me to recap the plot of the movie. In the Hudson River Valley there lived a wealthy man named Cyrus West, whose family hounded him "like cats around a canary", hoping for a taste of his riches. To get back at the scheming greedy bastards from beyond the grave, the first condition of West's will is that it can't be opened until 20 years after his death, by which point a second will has mysteriously appeared, to be opened in the event that the first cannot be fulfilled. The sole living resident of West's decaying mansion, the sour-faced housekeeper Mammy Pleasant (Martha Mattox) is convinced that it's her late employer's ill-tempered ghost, while the executor of West's estate, Roger Crosby (Tully Marshall), brooks with no such paranormal nonsense. But something unexplained is going on - a living moth was in the safe where the wills were kept, despite it supposedly having been locked for 20 years, with Crosby the sole person who knew the combination. And somebody took a peak inside the documents.

No sooner has that unnerving discovery been made than the potential heirs to the West fortune start to turn up, prior to the midnight reading: Harry Blythe (Arthur Edmund Carewe), Charlie Wilder (Forrest Stanley), Susan Sillsby (Flora Finch), Cecily Young (Gertrude Astor), Paul Jones (Creighton Hale), and Annabelle West (Laura La Plante). The latter three are much younger, and weren't so involved in the general avarice that drove Cyrus literally mad, so it's not too surprising when Annabelle turns out to be the solitary heir (the will specifies the most distant of West's relatives to share his surname). There's only one catch, and it's eminently survivable: she must be found sane by a medical doctor, or the fortune goes to the individual named in the second will. Which unfortunately gives the unknown person who took an early look into the documents plenty of time to remove her from the picture entirely. And it might not even be as difficult as all that: a guard (George Siegmann) from the local sanitarium shows up to announce that a very dangerous inmate has escaped and his tracks reveal him to be on the mansion grounds. This is the Cat, a serial killer noted for tearing his victims apart "like canaries".

Ghosts, serial killers, and at least one potentially murderous, pissed-off family member: just another night in a spooky old house, really. 90 years down the road, it takes very little effort to predict the ending, and I don't know that it was all that much different in 1927. What makes The Cat and the Canary stand head-and-shoulders above the rest of its genre, then, isn't its crafty storytelling. And it's not its scintillating characters - these are all stock characters, and there's not a genuinely impressive performance in the lot - La Plante is a thoroughly generic blonde heroine, and Hale (who graduates from tepid comic side character to tepid romantic comic lead) is notable mostly for his distracting Harold Lloyd glasses. With the remainder of the ensemble required to play either daft foolishness (Finch) or unchecked rage (everybody else, basically), there's little room for making any strong impression.

What it does have is the most impressive style of any American proto-horror movie of the 1920s, or probably the three decades of "true" horror to follow. It's a little daft to compare the two films, but it honestly seems to me that it can only be appropriately compared to fellow 1927 release Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, the only other Hollywood production I can name that is so plainly a German movie in all but language, and that's a largely irrelevant concern in silent cinema. Not just in the sense of extreme shadows and the creation of shocking splashes of feeling through compositions that emphasise line and shape more than narrative content, the inheritances of film noir and later horror movies right up to the modern day. The Cat and the Canary uses everything it can within the medium of cinema itself to visually depict psychological states - the exact characteristic that "Expressionism" refers to in the first place - and constantly challenge the viewer's relationship to the image. Right from the start, the movie launches with a montage of inconceivable brashness, establishing Cyrus West's empire, his family, his death, and blasting us forward 20 years through a combination of title cards, newspapers, and discontinuous images. The film calms down a lot after that, but it's still full of impressive touches. Throughout, text and title cards are manipulated to depict not just what is said, but how it's said. Tinted images are used with unusual fluidity and surprising creativity (like the legitimately terrifying jump from "interior lighting" yellow to "hellbound nightmare" red as a character bolts up in fright), enough to suggest that there was a future for this already old-fashioned technique, which was completely abandoned after sound arrived in the same year.

Not all of the film works - the Cat, so suggestive when all we see is flashes of a freakish-looking clawed hand, is pretty unabashedly dopey when it appears, in a way that make sense with the script but isn't any more satisfying because of it, and Aunt Susan is a enervating liability, comic relief going wrong in the most conspicuous way - but the overall use of image manipulation to place us inside the psychology of the people experiencing this particular old dark house redeems just about everything. The generic trappings are intensified and made to seem new and bold - and that's after almost a century of movies using those same trappings! - and the flat characters are turned practically into a legitimate strength. For the film requires psychologically uncomplicated figures to clear the way for it being a psychological performance itself.

The one thing it never is, is scary (hell, even for the rather dubious Susan and Paul, both entirely unlikable comic relief characters, the film scrapes up the energy to be funny more reliably than it's ever scary). Maybe they thought it was in '27. That's the one form of "pretend you're living in a different time period" I've never been good at. It is sometimes good and creepy, usually thanks to the Cat's paw; mostly, though, it's just damn impressive, playing with cinematic form and representation like few movies of any style have gotten away with under the aegis of a big Hollywood studio. Small wonder that it ended up forming the kernel of something very like a new genre: suggesting that all mainstream American horror starts with The Cat and the Canary is blatantly untrue, but it's less blatantly untrue here than for any other individual movie. And even after all those descendants, its strengths are still as unique and powerful as they ever might have been.

Body Count: 1 only, which speaks ill of the commitment of a killer who rips his victim apart like canaries.

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BULLY PULPIT

All due respect to the recent spate of high-profile horror movies to be critically fêted on account of being actually good, but one of the things that The Babadook and It Follows have in common is that they're both immensely well-made versions of something that's already been done. Now, quite unexpectedly, we have the opposite, in the form of Unfriended (which premiered under the name Cybernatural, which simply doesn't do for something made later than 1997, and not a soft-core cable porno). Legitimately, it's as formally radical as any American film in years, and that despite being a genre picture; despite sounding like a slightly tarted-up first-person camera movie, and especially like 2013's The Den, it's only superficially the same thing. It is the rarest of the rare: it has created a totally new set of storytelling tools, laying out the rules for a new kind movie that, a year or two from now, I am hopeful might be used in a really aggressive, challenging way, the first great work of quintessentially Millennial art.

The problem is that Unfriended, aside from inventing a new language, is shit.

But I would like to accentuate the positive for starters, since the things that are bad about Unfriended are common to a great many poor horror films, and the things that are good are almost totally unique. The notion is that high school student Blaire Lily (Shelley Hennig) and her boyfriend Mitch Roussel (Moses Jacob Storm) are all ready to have a fun night of sexually taunting each other on Skype, when their friends Jess Felton (Renee Olstead), Adam Sewell (Will Peltz), and Ken "Kennington" Smith (Jacob Wysocki) jump into the fray, somehow, using computer trickery best described as "the screenwriter wanted it". The five of them banter a bit, getting increasingly annoyed at the sixth individual apparently listening in on their call, trying to figure it out, accusing snotty frenemy Val Rommel (Courtney Halverson) of being the hacker and dragging her into their chat, and only eventually figuring out that what might be going, and since this is a horror film, "might be" = "surely is", is that the dead Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman), who committed suicide one year ago tonight, could be haunting everybody she thinks is responsible for bullying her into killing herself following a humiliating YouTube video that showed her drunk and covered in her own filth. Which does in fact mean that she wants revenge on, basically, the whole school, and I imagine that's to be the sequel hook.

Now, there's nothing special about any of that, except that the whole film is shown as a shot of of Blaire's MacBook desktop. And here's where we must be very specific about what we mean: it's not the footage being shown on Skype, a gimmick that dates at least back to the segment "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger" from 2012's V/H/S, and it's not the Skype window with instant messages popping up in front of it, as in The Den. It is, literally, the whole of the desktop, with .jpgs and folders visible around the edges of windows that include Chrome, Skype, Apple iMessage, and Spotify, at least. Which is one important thing already: Unfriended uses name brand programs, and that adds immeasurably to its sense of realism compared to movies that have people using InstaChat and searching on Snoople, or whatever drippy pseudonyms the copyright-dodging screenwriter came up with that week.

That's lovely, but the really exciting thing, what makes Unfriended totally new in my experience, is that it's showing us the unfiltered version of what happens on Blaire's computer: we see the entire record of her life online, with all the various traces of abandoned thoughts on the titles of browser tabs and in her Facebook history, the programs she had open when she started to flirt with Mitch. And other than the appearance of the mouse arrow as she selects what she's focusing on, there's nothing in the movie to guide our eye; we simply get to decide whether it's the actual video of Laura's death we want to stare at, or the sidebar of "also suggested" videos, we can spy on her song playlist. What Unfriended has done is lay out the rules for how a movie can depict and move through that digital space; it has given the foundation to a filmmaker who wants to go for broke and really experiment by making all of that unfocused side detail where the actual storytelling happens, using scraps and errata that we can look at but don't have to, leaving swaths of important character detail spread out across a screen such that we can't see everything and have to prioritise what to look at. Unfriended even starts to be aware of that possibility, as it leaves sometimes up to six different video chat screens playing at once, and not always having the most prominent ones include the most interesting information.

That being said, while I have no doubt that a truly radical experimental narrative shall be made using this aesthetic, Unfriended is absolutely not it - all that wonderful space it leaves itself for squirreling away important bits of information in little side details is wasted on in-jokes and generic filler, the functional equivalent of "lorem ipsum" paragraphs. And it can't even be bothered to keep continuity straight: the action is clarified to take place in April, and we see certain Facebook well-wishes that are time-stamped to "January" and "X hours ago" at different points, all in story that takes place in real time over 80 minutes. There's also a countdown that skips from 10 to 5. So much for hiding interesting details in plain sight.

The plot, meanwhile, is generic "revenge against the obnoxious teenagers" boilerplate, interesting solely in that the exposition is given out of order and throughout the entire movie, so it all seems a bit more mysterious than in your average slasher, where we understand the point of the revenge more or less from the beginning. But a slasher is exactly what it boils down to, including both the regressive sexual morality (we discover that one character isn't a virgin at exactly the point that the movie begins to turn against that character) and the one-word personality types: the Druggie, the Horndog, the Bitch, the Geek, the Bitch (2), and the Hypocrite. Screenwriter Nelson Greaves's desire to structure this as a mystery and give the film a sucker punch twist ending turn into a tawdry trick, thereby trivialising the only thing about the story that had any prayer of being interesting: the film thinks that it's telling a complex tale of how bullying works in the age of social media, pointing out that bullies can be bullied themselves, and that dogpiling is a horrible fucking thing to do to people, no matter how distasteful they are. But its reliance on cheap horror tropes and shabby shocks devalues that theme significantly.

It's painfully unscary - I suspect that watching it on a television or, preferably, a computer might give it more oomph than seeing it in a movie theater possibly could - and includes one of the most contrived death scenes in recent horror cinema (assuming one would, for whatever reason, keep a blender in their bedroom, would it even so be possible to commit suicide with it?). And the filmmakers' enthusiasm for the Kids and their Ways leads ultimately to a deeply misguided climax built around a high-stakes game of "Never Have I Ever" that is bafflingly silly. So, let's be clear, I emphatically do not recommend this film. It's like someone invented the English language by writing The Da Vinci Code. But I do look forward to recommending its most successful knock-offs a few years down the road.

5/10

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