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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BIGGER & BLACKER

In the wide world of sequels that certainly don't have any actual reason to exist, one could do a lot worse, conceptually speaking, than The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death - though that title! There's absolutely nothing that mouthful achieves that wouldn't be more accurately and clearly covered by just plain The Woman in Black 2. But anyway, the sequel to the 2012 ghost story The Woman in Black has the good sense to leave that film's cast entirely alone, and with a perfectly fine Edwardian-era haunted house that nobody in the surrounding village wants to go near, it was as easy as pie to skip forward a few decades to find it still squatting there, grim and rotting, for a pair of London schoolteachers and band of refugee children to shelter there during the Blitz. This is, I am inclined to think, the most characteristically Hammer-esque touch in this latest production by the resurgent Hammer Films. It is also the only halfway decent idea to be found anywhere within Jon Croker's script, so there's that.

The glow of that one right choice does linger for a bit, though, and the opening sequence, in 1941 London, is a pretty terrific re-creation of the period in all its tightly-circumscribed panic, for a shlocky horror movie. Hell, given the movie this is, and given the people making up its target audience, I'm downright impressed by how unapologetically it throws us into the setting without bothering to explain the context or history. All we get are Eve Parkins (Phoebe Fox), a young woman who teaches under the command of the strict headmistress Jean Hogg (Helen McCrory), and the two of them are in a hurry to get their seven charges off to the rural village of Crythin Gifford. Make that eight charges, since in the previous night's bombing, little Edward (Oaklee Pendergast) lost both of his parents, and is now joining Hogg's band, complete with a shellacked, post-traumatic lack of expression and refusal to speak. This is about the point where the movie uses up all its sense of place and war-era imagery, and no longer can pretend that it's any good in any way.

After arriving by train to Crythin Gifford late at night, the grumbling local do-gooder Dr. Rhodes (Adrian Rawlins, star of the 1989 Woman in Black telefilm) roughly informs the women that the only available lodging is the sprawling mansion on the outskirts of town, Eel Marsh House. Though to be honest, I'm not sure if it's named such. One thing that Angels of Death cannot be accused of is too much exposition on behalf of the viewers who might not have bothered with the first movie, and that goes from setting the stage - the important fact that Eel Marsh House is on the far side of a causeway that disappears during high tide is used during a tension-raising scene without have actually been established - all the way to the meat of its story, which uses the mythology of the titular woman (Leanne Best) that was explained the first time without really bothering to go over it all again, so a great deal of what happens is inexplicable far beyond the normal kind of cryptic events to be found in horror movies. And I cannot help but appreciate that economy of storytelling; but if a film is going to depend so completely on the viewer's knowledge of the first movie in order to make sense as a narrative object, it feels like a cheat to then have the content of the sequel be a re-hash of all the same setpieces from the last time around, in a slightly different order.

In fact, just about the only thing that The Woman in Black did that Angel of Death fails to repeat was to include a single protracted haunting sequence uninterrupted by plot or even dialogue. That was basically the only thing that hauled the first movie across the fine line dividing "derivative storytelling and tacky-looking ghosts on an absurdly over-designed set" from "derivative storytelling that has a really fucking kickass centerpiece that ends up making the whole movie a worthwhile experience". Absent that - and there really isn't even a feint in that direction - the sequel reveals just how threadbare the whole affair is, cobbling together ghost story clichés into a framework where it feels like a third of the scenes are missing: not just the ones explaining the backstory from the first movie, but more prosaic matters like, how does Eve go from riding into town with the hunky pilot (Jeremy Irvine) to poking around in a derelict basement all by herself? Meanwhile, the scenes that are present are trite muddles, doling out tragic backstories for two of the three adult characters with more than two scenes of screentime, and wandering away from the central action in a way that makes it clear that the filmmakers have no sense of what any of the characters are doing when they're not onscreen.

Tom Harper, the director, tries to keep this stitched together more or less by marching through reasonably well-timed jump scares at a steady pace, but even if it worked, that would feel like a cheap substitute for atmosphere and a real sense of the decaying dread that Eel Marsh House is meant to evoke. And for that, Harper and his cinematographer, George Steel, would need to abandon their weird hang-up about overlighting to make sure we can see everything clearly, even when story context - or just plain basic visual continuity - demand murkier blacks.

The film feels composed out of almost nothing but half-measures and recycled ideas, and the result is worse than terrible: it's astoundingly mediocre and plodding. The surprisingly good cast provides something that resembles life - Fox has a terrific sweet, plucky screen presence, and I'm very eager for her to get a better part in a more functional story - and I rather admire the way that the art team (the production designer is Jacqueline Abrahams, the supervising art director is Andrew Munro) aged the garish sets from the first movie into something still more ominous and rundown, but for the most part, Angel of Death is such a slack, by-the-numbers haunted hose story that it's not even up to the task of being bad.

4/10

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: 1981

It has been more than three decades since Hell Night premiered in the summer of 1981, and it has only slowly developed a cult following over those years. Truth be told, I don't know if even now it has a reputation as generally being a crap slasher film from an era when crap slasher films were ten for a dollar, or generally being one of the most effective of all early slasher films. Since it is clearly the latter, I like to think that history is correcting itself, but not nearly with enough speed. Hell Night, I find, belongs in that rare company of slasher films that aren't just good by the standards of their subgenre, but manage to round the corner to being legitimately good works of horror cinema. But it still doesn't have any kind of reputation or name recognition outside of the genre faithful, among whom I find that knowing it and enjoying it is a mark of particular taste and knowledge. Being a Hell Night fan is, maybe, the slasher film equivalent of being a brandy drinker: any drunk college kid can become obsessed with pounding back the cheap beer of the Friday the 13th series or the decent microbrew of the Nightmare on Elm Streets, but it takes commitment and a refined palate to make it as far as this movie.

And by all means even "the brandy of '80s slasher films" puts an limit on what the film can be. I mean, there's the brandy you get from a really nice wine shop, and then there's the brandy you can pick up at the supermarket alongside milk and Doritos.

The plot is gleaming boilerplate: the Alpha Sigma Rho fraternity chapter at a school in Anytown, U.S.A. is celebrating its annual Hell Night, when that year's incoming pledges have to survive an ordeal in order to be inducted. How, exactly, ΑΣΡ fucntions is a little foggy, given that they only have four pledges, and two of them are women, but whatever, it's a slasher film. Chapter president Peter (Kevin Brophy) describes it to his victims thus: on the edge of town, there is a great estate called Garth Manor, a huge mansion with sprawling, forested grounds, and 12 years ago, this was the site of a brutal slaying. Raymond Garth, the descendant of generations of Garths living in that palatial home, killed his wife and three of their four children, all of them grossly deformed. The only survivor was teenaged Andrew Garth, who witnessed the murder of his family and his father's suicide, and who went missing, along with two of the corpses. And now, Garth Manor is the annual home of ΑΣΡ's final ritual before initiation into the fraternity.

And so Peter leads the four pledges - Jeff (Peter Barton), Seth (Vincent Van Patten), Denise (Suki Goodwin), and last but plainly not least, Marti (Linda Blair), who between her masculine name, her rather dismissive view of the trivialities of the Greek system by this point in the process, her fuller backstory, and above all the fact that she's played by The Exorcist's own Linda Blair, is obviously going to be our Final Girl - to Garth Manor, where they will chat, flirt, take Qualuudes, and think about screwing. And unbeknownst to them, where they'll have to endure a whole night of rather impressively sophisticated haunted house trickery perpetrated Peter, the frat's token nerd Scott (Jimmy Sturtevant), and one of the frat's sisters, May (Jenny Neumann). And unbeknownst to them, the whole lot of them are going to have to survive a night under the watch of a great hulking, groaning man-shaped object, who we don't know is Andrew Garth, but it's certainly where the smart money lies.

Where Hell Night shades into genius - and that's probably a strong word for it - is not, clearly, in how it up-ends the narrative tropes that had already begun to crystallise for the newly-forming slasher genre. Rather, it's how the film deepens those tropes, presenting what might very well be the most richly-characterised group of victims of any Dead Teenager movie of its generation. Marti is perhaps no more layered than any of the other top-notch Final Girls of 1981, though unfairly Razzie-nominated Blair is a strong enough actor to make more of the part than most of the largely anonymous performers filling the same functional role. The surprising thing is that the other three pledges are rather impressively layered themselves, despite Seth and Denise both feeling like they should, by all rights, be grating one-note stereotypes (Airhead Jock and Slut, respectively). First-time screenwriter Randy Feldman, whose next credit wouldn't be until Tango & Cash, eight years later, weaves a surprising amount of character detail into the film, staging actual conversations between the kids, ones that both implicitly and directly reveal all sorts of interesting tangents: Jeff's obvious discomfort with his familial wealth, Seth's apparently willful choice to be a dumb jock to avoid having expectations set for himself. It's a little thing, but it means that once the killing starts, we're going to have a lot more connection to these characters than just wanting to see them die hideously.

And indeed, the film does not show them dying hideously: other than a sickle to the gut, and a decapitation so ginger and brief that it almost registers on a subliminal level rather than a conscious one, Hell Night stays away from particularly explicit violence. Part of that, undoubtedly, was the culture: after the first rush of slasher films in 1980, the moral watchdogs started barking and most of the second-wave films in '81 were toned down considerably (the quintessential example being, of course, Friday the 13th giving way to the comparatively chaste Friday the 13th, Part 2). Even by those reduced standards, though, Hell Night is a violence-averse film, so much so that I wonder if that's part of why it doesn't have more visibility among casual slasher fans.

What it does have, though, is a fairly amazing degree of tension and atmosphere for a cheap genre quickie. This was, as far as I can tell, the first actual movie in the career of director Tom DeSimone, after spending the preceding decade and a half making gay pornography. Without, admittedly, having seen any of them, I think it's unlikely that they were a very good crucible for learning the tricks of making a good horror-thriller in a spooky old mansion at night; and yet DeSimone and cinematographer Mac Ahlberg come up with some very fine lighting ideas and acute camera angles to give Garth Manor an inflated sense of foreboding, scale, and inscrutability. And that on top of DeSimone having tread so lightly on the character scenes, allowing them to breath and give us a decent sense of who the characters are - at 101 minutes, Hell Night is wildly long for an early slasher, and should probably be regarded as criminally indulgent, but the mixture of weird atmosphere and nuanced character drama ends up working so well that it feels far briefer and swifter than many slashers whose only purpose in life was to separate teenagers from money.

There are some absolutely terrific individual scenes: a well-staged Final Girl flight with a climax sold through inductive visuals, and a great sequence where Peter flees through the garden, having found Scott's body (spoiler alert: the secondary characters all die), and Dan Wyman's poundy thriller score drifts off, leaving nothing but heightened nighttime sounds to both comfort us (if the music is done, things must be safe) and unnerve us (why are the crickets SO LOUD?) at the same time. Or the cut from the killer's POV, staring at Denise in bed, to a wide shot that shows his great beefy mass staring down at her blankly, passively.

In fact, I'm tempted to say that the only thing which really hurts Hell Night is that, ultimately, it's just a slasher film: it's just about watching a bunch of kids get picked off. That they are more complex as characters; that the film is more invested in creating tension and mood than in squirting stage blood on actresses' boobs; that the script frequently develops the already clichéd plot points in odd, slantwise directions that come across like they're already deliberate choices, even in 1981, to up-end the audience's expectation for who, what, how, and when in a slasher movie; that all of these things happen is enough to make Hell Night a respectable, greatly enjoyable example of a genre that even in its better moments tends to feel a little slummy and disreputable. But it doesn't quite have the creativity of A Nightmare on Elm Street, or the impact and excellent filmmaking of its 1981 colleague The Burning to actually transcend that genre.

The question could easily be asked, though, if genre is really something that needs transcending. The problem with slasher films, after all, is that they're typically shoddy and sleazy, exploitation made with more mercenary instinct and lazy storytelling. None of those apply to Hell Night at all: it does not pander with either violence or nudity (the sex scenes are well-grounded in story logic and possess no nudity to speak of), it makes something close to sense if you never remember to ask yourself why it took 12 years of frat hazing for Andrew Garth to finally decide that this was the day to start killing pledges, and it's fairly obviously the work of a filmmaker who wanted to put all of his creativity and care into something that wasn't another gay porno, and proved that he had no mean amount of talent in the process.

I am tempted to call it, on account of all that, a slasher film for people who don't like slasher films; but it's really even more like a slasher film that could make a person like slasher films that never did before. It is not ashamed of what it is, and it is the absolute best version of that thing possible.

Body Count: 8, a decently robust number for the period.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE

The best thing to do with complex topics, I have found, is to ease into them simply. So: House. This is, apparently, what you get when an experimental filmmaker, Obayashi Nobuhiko, who turned to making TV commercials to make ends meet, was given the chance by a big studio to direct what it hoped would be a valid homegrown competitor to Jaws. Though what, exactly, Toho saw in the scenario for this film that indicated on any level "will appeal to the Jaws crowd" is beyond me, and that's before we get to the finished project, which goes so far beyond anything that could possibly have been implied by a scenario...

House, anyway, certainly drew a lot more from the "experimental filmmaker" side of the equation than any studio would ever hope for, and I'd be inclined to call what resulted to be one of the purest horror movies I could even imagine, let alone that I've seen, if only I was totally comfortable with the inclination that "horror" is the box House fits in most comfortably. It's genuinely unclassifiable, resembling something like a particularly florid Dario Argento movie with all the interstitials removed that more or less explain the rudimentary plot, and that cross-cut with a meta-movie whose mercilessly insincere staging is basically a parody of the act of filmmaking itself. But any comparison, even one as convoluted as that, implies that House exists on some kind of continuum where you can really compare it to other movies as a means of clarifying what it is and what it does, and that's just not the case at all.

Still, the film does have a plot, so let's go through it, just to have something we can hang our hat on later. And there's a certain fact about this plot that's absolutely revelatory, explaining just about everything of why the film works in the particular way it does: while the final script was written by Katsura Chiho, he was just fleshing out a story written by Obayashi's 11-year-old daughter Chigumi. We're going to return to that. In the meanwhile, let's meet some 16-year-old schoolgirls, beginning with Gorgeous (Ikegami Kimiko) - there's no indication that it's not her actual, given name - whose father (Sasazawa Saho) has just returned from a job scoring a movie in Italy (Sergio Leone, he brags, thinks he's better than Ennio Morricone, a random aside that I loved about as much as I loved anything else in this supremely lovable movie). And they're all set to go on vacation, but her father wants to bring along a surprise guest: his new fiancée, Ema Ryoko (Wanibuchi Hariko). This feels like a betrayal of the worst sort to the memory of Gorgeous's mother, so she writes off a passionate letter to her aunt, begging for permission to come visit with six of her friends. Despite the fact that they've only met once, ten years prior, a letter comes back enthusiastically agreeing with the suggestion.

So out to the country travels Gorgeous, along with her aunt's white Persian cat Blanche, and six friends: Fantasy (Ohba Kumiko), Kung Fu (Jinbo Miki), Prof (Matsubara Ai), Mac (Sato Mieko), Melody (Tanaka Eriko), and Sweet (Miyako Masayo). Armed with their seven dwarfish names and personalities to match (Mac, incidentally, is short for "stomach", because she's fat - and fucking hell, but if hers is the kind of body type that the Japanese regard as fat in a teenage girl, it's a more messed up country than I would have ever guessed), the girls tromp off to find Auntie (Minamida Yoko), a striking but frail white-haired woman in a wheelchair, with a large and somewhat cobwebby but still inviting house. And also an uncommented-upon tendency to talk to her young guests in language that would be hard pressed to communicate "I'm going to kill you and drain your essence to restore my own vitality" without stating it outright.

Things get really weird once the house starts to work its evil will on the girls, and I wouldn't want to give away what happens even if I thought I could, because House has a level of gonzo invention and absurdist ingenuity that's unworthy of being spoiled and also, honestly, impossible to spoil. And even at almost four decades old, the film remains sufficiently unknown in the English-speaking world (where it's only been available in any systematic way since 2009) that it remains far more obscure than its level of achievement deserves.

And besides, it's long before this point that makes the movie such a one-of-a-kind experience has made itself manifest. That happens from the beginning, really, with the film announcing itself (in English text) as "A Movie", before the title comes up (also in English), as a gutturally low male voice utters the Japanese interpretation of that word, generally rendered as hausu, while a pair of animated lips replace the "O" and act generally carnivorous and menacing. Also, it's in the boxy 1.37:1 aspect ratio of old movies, which in 1977 stands out as a pretty unyieldingly ballsy choice, letting us know right off that this is going to be a very different movie with visuals that are going to call a lot of attention to themselves.

Oh, do they ever. Within about the first five seconds of the movie proper, we've already been introduced to heavy tinting and an editing technique that I don't think has a name, where the frame freezes and dissolves at the same time, so the movement stops in a ghostly way and yet moves on underneath its ghostly self. It's so disorienting that it doesn't even register as being cheesy and low-rent, which is true of a great deal of the imagery in House. The visual effects are at a level of aggressive crudeness that's doubly jarring when we note that the film premiered the same year as Star Wars: where that film represented astounding new leaps in how effects work could create new realities, House is basically an experiment in seeing how transparently chintzy you can make things before it breaks the film entirely.

But it works! This is a movie that's not going to be broken by things like fakery or discontinuity or inexplicable character logic, all of which are present in abundance - heck, the omnipresent use of beautifully painted but thoroughly unpersuasive backdrops is so complete that the movie's even able to make a visual joke at its own expense about it, when one such backdrop turns out to just be the painted wall of a train depot. It is, rather a movie in which fakery and confused artifice are precisely the point of the thing. Like avant-gardists given the keys to a real studio picture before and after himself, one of Obayashi's guiding interests was in ripping apart all of the rules and aesthetic framework of normal moviemaking to craft something that works in a completely foreign idiom.

There are, I presume, socio-cultural and political reasons why Obayashi might have wanted to do this, but I don't think we really even need to go that far. What House does immensely well is to create a pervasive, non-stop impression of a completely deranged and inexplicable world from the very beginning, long before the titular location makes its presence known. It's not, then, like the contemporaneous Suspiria, in that its narrative discohesion and madcap visual style are specifically justified within the story by a setting in which the rules of reality and sanity are bent. In House, it's the whole damn world that's insane, and the impression one gets is that Obayashi wasn't just thinking of the world within the movie, either.

But again, let's keep it simple. The non-stop bizarre gestures in House, with every scene just about feeling like it's operating according to a completely new set of rules for how to construct and combine images (it's a great film to watch if you're easily bored: ten minutes never go by without it feeling like an entirely new movie has started), and the horrifying moments so outré and purposefully cheap that it's honestly impossible to tell half the time if laughing or screaming is the more appropriate response, are part of the more basic requirement that the film sets for itself and fully achieves: make a movie about a haunting and a demon who drives her victims mad before killing them, and make sure that its entire fabric of being is as chaotic and inexplicable and anti-normal as the haunting and the madness are themselves. House torments us as comprehensively as Auntie torments the girls; and they, like we, are apparently split in half between whether to find it fascinating and enjoyable or creepy and terrifying.

Because it's not just a bombastically surreal movie, it's a frequently hilarious one. Partially because of the randomness of it all, where every new visual trick Obayashi pulls out is so weird that it's hard not to giggle, partially because of the well-timed reliance on comically reiterated motifs in the visuals and the audio (the soundtrack is dominated by a handful of character themes that lurch in and out dramatically, like the film itself only realises after a few frames which character it's paying attention to now), partially from things so outright absurd that just from the concept they're a little bit hysterical.

So anyway, I'd like to bring things back to little Obayashi Chigumi, from whose mind all of this glorious weirdness sprung. And that, I think, is why House creates that feeling of having the bottom fall out over and over again, reality crumbling, cinema itself broken into fragments of ideas that jam against each other instead of setting each other up. It's a stream-of-consciousness piece conceived by a kid, one whose capacity to imagine strange, disconnected nonsense hadn't been tamed by discipline, maturity, and a fully-developed brain. I think that's why House is so flawlessly able to create a truly deranged sense of what happens when the paranormal assaults the rational, above and beyond even the very great horror films by folks like Argento and Fulci working in the same vein: those filmmakers were using adult calculation to create an impression of what madness looks like. Obayashi fille had not adult logic to unlearn, and could simply roll out a story of ghosts and monster cats and aggressive killer houses that followed the arbitrary flow of a dream or a nightmare or just a childish sense of an eternal Now with no recourse to past or present, and even though House in its complete state has the feel of a film in which the writing was a complete afterthought, I'm convinced that it's only because it started from a scenario that came from such a source that it was freed up to achieve everything it did as a work of visual surrealist horror and structural chaos.

Body Count: ...ten?

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STANLEY KUBRICK: ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY

We now hit the point where Stanley Kubrick, Methodical Auteur, turns into Stanley Kubrick, The Hermit Artist. Four years, almost to the day, separated the premieres of 1971's A Clockwork Orange and 1975's Barry Lyndon, not quite enough to make it the biggest gap in his career to that point; and given the complexity and scale of the Barry Lyndon shoot, this was not a particularly inexplicable wait. It would be nearly four and a half years till the director would finally release his follow-up, though, and from that point onward, the wait times in between his films approached mythic, comic levels. To put it the simplest way I know how: Kubrick's entire career spanned 48 years, 1951-1999, and in the first half of that span, from Day of the Fight up to Barry Lyndon, the filmmaker made ten features and three shorts. In the final 24 years of his life, he made a grand total of three feature films.

And to inaugurate the new, deathly slow phase of his career, he made what would appear to all outside evidence to be his most openly populist movie since the broad satire of Dr. Strangelove: his 1980 film The Shining was a haunted hotel picture adapted from one of the biggest hit novels by Stephen King, as popular a writer as you could imagine at the turn of the '80s. I don't know how people felt at the time, being as I was unalive and so not yet the horror fan and Kubrick devotee that currently blogs for you, but I imagine it would be akin to learning that Terence Malick had just read this "Hunger Games" thing, and couldn't wait to take a crack at making it into a movie.

Of course, any fears that Kubrick had decided to take it easy were thoroughly unfounded: The Shining is one of the most aggressively opaque films of his entire career. There was even a 2012 documentary, Room 237, given over to several fan theories about just what the almighty fuck was going on, springing from the theory that as fussy and controlling a director as Kubrick must have peppered the film's structure and mise en scène with clues to the "solution". Since Lord knows those clues aren't on the surface of the script he wrote with Diane Johnson. But even without the unabashed crackpots populating that movie, The Shining has long had the aura of being some kind of puzzle box, and that you can somehow make sense of it all and turn into a very straightforward, logical affair, even the random shot of the dog-man blow job.

So the first thing I would like to do is to restore to The Shining its dignity as a genre film. In other words, sometimes a haunted hotel is just a haunted hotel. While it's surely the case that Kubrick was a control freak who liked to explore deep messages with his stories, and it's been well attested that his career is one big series of genre hops - now a war film, now an satire, now a gladiator film, now a space movie, now a costume drama - he wasn't really prone to subverting those genres. Barry Lyndon, on top of it all, is a great period epic; 2001: A Space Odyssey is great science fiction; and The Shining is a great ghost story. Of course it has thematic depth and complexity and speaks troubling and interesting things about the sanctity of the nuclear family; but if it's frequently inexplicable, self-contradicting, and ends with a giant "what the fuck?" mindscrew, I don't know why we need to use subtext to answer those complaints. Not when at the level of surface text, it's about a mentally fragile man being driven insane by malevolent ghosts. If it's confusing, disorienting, and weirdly unresolved, guess what? That's what makes it a fucking good horror movie. The Haunting is all of those things, and nobody ever said it was Robert Wise's attempt to metaphorically apologise for the genocide of Native Americans.

In fact, the film's desire to be, above everything else, the ultimate experience in grueling terror, is clear just in a quick glance at how Kubrick & Johnson assembled the screenplay. There are some key plot differences between The Shining movie and The Shining novel, like the wholesale reinvention of the climax or the movie's wise removal of the living topiary animals that King isn't ever quite able to describe without them sounding faintly silly, but the main difference between the two incarnations of the story is one of tone and focus: the book is almost entirely about how a man trying his very best to overcome his dormant alcoholism and less-dormant rage issues keeps slipping and in the process endangers his family, and that's something that the film quietly removes. Not least by casting Jack Nicholson, in what very well might be the defining role of his entire career, as a barely-contained rageaholic who doesn't have to slide into madness over the course of the movie; he seems to already be most of the way there from the very first time we see him, with that smirking Jack Nicholson stare out of eyes that look like angry little daggers. Nicholson's Jack Torrance isn't fighting his demons; he's fighting to hide his demons. That's a massive change that serves to make the movie much more about violence and danger than it is about fatherhood and addiction.

But the real tell is in recognising that there are, in fact, three different versions of The Shining: it premiered with a 146-minute running time that was shaved down to 144 minutes with a rejiggered, shortened ending before it opened in the United States. And this version was then slashed down to 119 minutes for Europe, and it is this last version, apparently, that Kubrick preferred as the final version of his vision. Like most Americans, I've never seen this European release, though I know exactly what the differences are, and with every new cut, Kubrick was driven by the exact same impulse: take away "character stuff", leaving only the most high-impact version of the film's horrifying arc (he also took out one short sequence of skeletons in a cobwebby room, which was a smart impulse - the scene in question looks so unrelentingly hokey that I don't understand why he ever even filmed it). Everything I'm about to say is about the American cut, which will matter a lot when I start to go on about its pacing and such, so reader beware. And I'll say this much: nothing I know about the European cut leads me to believe that I wouldn't prefer it to the American version, and by quite a lot. Even though, by all means, I already love the American version.

So the film, anyway, is about the Torrances: father Jack is in the process of interviewing for a job at the unbelievably remote Overlook Hotel in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, with the implication being very quietly forwarded that this is because it's the only job he can get at this point. He's left, for the moment, his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and his son Danny (Danny Lloyd) behind in Boulder, but they'll be joining him for the work itself: six and a half months as the winter caretakers for the hotel, separated from the rest of humanity by an unforgiving alpine winter. This would already be a trial, except that the Overlook has a history, one elliptically alluded to by the the hotel's head chef, Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), when the takes Danny aside during the family's tour of the building to explain that he and the boy share a secret: a kind of psychic ability that Hallorann calls "shining", and which Danny has rationalised by putting it in the voice of "Tony", a little boy who lives in his mouth and communicates with an uncanny gravelly squeak as Danny wiggles his index finger. This sensitivity makes people like Hallorann and Danny more susceptible to the Overlook's peculiar nature: as a place where many bad things have happened, it has become something of a library of malevolent psychic energy, and Dick is concerned, without having to say it, that Danny might become victim to the hotel's dark appetite.

The real concern is Jack, though, who at some point in the past dislocated Danny's arm in a drunk rage, and hasn't apparently fully reconstructed himself since: he's remained sober, and he's working on a book - it's to have privacy to make these tasks easier that the Overlook job appealed to him in the first place - but he's not happy about it. So as the hotel goes to town freaking out Danny with visions of the last children to overwinter at the place - the twin daughters (Lisa and Louise Burns) of the caretaker from 1970, who flipped out and killed his family with an axe - it's seduction of Jack is subtler and more insidious than throwing a lot of spooky terrors in front of him.

Or, y'know, the short version: a family of three spends the winter in a haunted hotel, and the dad goes nuts. Basically it's all the same: the details in The Shining certainly do have their necessary merits, giving some context and shape and making us feel more for the tormented Torrances, but the best parts of the movie are entirely those which use composition, sound, and camera movement to create a totally visceral experience at a level which largely circumvents storytelling concerns - I have no means of knowing whether Kubrick had seen any Italian horror films from the decade preceding his film, but he basically made their English-language analogue, albeit with a little more attention paid to linearity and explication of what, broadly, is happening. Still, we're basically in Suspiria territory: gorgeous style and completely nonsensical content that is more, rather than less frightening because it feels so hard to parse in everyday, real-world terms.

I would be hard-pressed to say whether the visuals or the soundtrack end up being the most important part of the whole; certainly, I think the soundtrack gets less attention and love than it deserves, because it's fucking spectacular. I'm not just referring to the music, though as was increasingly typical for Kubrick post-2001, the music is sublimely used. In particular, something I had never noticed before, which is that all of the really good scare moments, the ones that are enough even the make hardened ol' horror cynic Tim Brayton cringe a little, and feel all the hairs on his neck do a dance, and a small dribble of pee starts to think about evacuating his body - especially the girls in the hall, and the stack of papers next to the typewriter - these moments are all accompanied by a moment where the music crescendos to a shrieking, high-pitched peak that slices right through your head and into your skeleton. It's not just scary, it's forcing itself to be scary by audibly tormenting and fucking with the viewer.

But there are other sound effects I had in mind, not least of which is the noise of Danny's big wheel on carpet and wood flooring, an alternate ripping, clattering sound and muffled hum, repeated just often enough to really start to get mesmerising, fucking with the viewer at least as much as the piercing score does.

But The Shining is well-known as a film of its visuals. Where A Clockwork Orange is the film Kubrick made after he discovered zoom lenses, and Barry Lyndon is the film he made with super-fast lenses and natural lighting, so is The Shining his movie about Steadicam, and for all that we must necessarily credit Kubrick and photographer John Alcott for their work in lighting the Overlook to look so bleary and unnatural (it is as much a staged, artificial world as Barry Lyndon is a resolutely, even radically tangible and physical realistic one), I think that neither of those men deserve as much credit as does Garrett Brown, the film's Steadicam operator and inventor of the device in the first place, whose work was so indispensable that he was even given his very own card during the end credits. The device was fairly new yet when the film was shot, and this is its best possible coming-out: it is to Steadicam as The Wizard of Oz is to color and Avatar is to 3-D, the film that comes along early (but not first) in a technology's existence to say, "here's this new toy that's awesome to play with, and by the way, it will never be used this well again no matter how hard you try". The slithery, fluid Steadicam tracks through the halls and rooms of the Overlook are deservedly the stuff of legend, giving the camera a relentless, hunting feeling whose strange and alien glassiness - even almost 40 years after it debuted, there's still something shockingly smooth about a really good Steadicam shot - feels as otherworldly and inscrutable as any of the nightmares it depicts throughout the movie.

Of course, Kubrick being Kubrick, Steadicam isn't the only visual craft on display that elevates the film to heights almost totally unknown by horror: there are the usual wide-angle lenses to gently distort space (neither as prevalent nor as prominent as in A Clockwork Orange), and compositions which describe the geography of the interior of the building as a kind of prison, in a fashion reminiscent of Fritz Lang, though I don't otherwise really detect any specific Lang influence anywhere in Kubrick. And the director is particularly alive to the possibilities of editing this time around; not that Kubrick films ever boast sloppy editing (quite the contrary), but there's some really special stuff that he and Ray Lovejoy cooked up this time. That same shot spotting the girls in the hallway, where every cut brings them closer to the camera as the music gets more intense is a great, and obvious example, but what really stood out to me as I watched the film this time was the incredibly aggressive use of dissolves: great long ponderous dissolves, not simply fading scenes into each other but having them significantly overlap, so that the characters seem to still be involved in a dramatic moment as they've almost faded into oblivion. The metaphorical possibilities of applying that to a film about ghosts should be obvious; it's also part of what explains, in the American cut, at least, the unusual pacing of the film - at 144 minutes, it's almost obnoxiously long, and it certainly doesn't move very fast on a scene-by-scene basis, but the flow between scenes and through scenes is so erratic and irregular, and the chronology keeps bunching up and then flattening out, that the movie's very structure and moment are almost ganging up on our sense of clarity and normalcy.

With such a beautiful assemblage of aesthetic elements combining to make things good and unnerving and freaky, The Shining wouldn't need a decent human element at all - again, look at the Italian horror films of the period - but it has a remarkably strong central cast that gives it that element anyway. Indeed, taking solely the three co-leads - and there are good actors in the supporting cast, as well - The Shining has probably the most conventionally great acting in Kubrick's post-Strangelove career: Nicholson's glaring insanity isn't much for subtlety, true, but the angry, brutal sarcasm and nastiness that he brings to the role is the best thing that could possibly happen: this is not, ultimately, Jack's story, but a story of surviving Jack, of surviving the complete collapse of the nuclear family and fatherly authority into something psychopathic and deranged. And Nicholson's embodiment of that, is so absolutely terrifying and raw that it's no wonder he's spent the remainder of his career more or less in its shadow. Duvall, in the only major role she got outside of a Robert Altman film, seems somehow no less inhuman than her co-star, though in a completely different way: she's all jangled, meek nerves and passivity and trying to reduce herself, a mousy, retiring creation even by Duvall's standards - it is known that Kubrick was a titanic asshole to her, and while that's regrettable, the way it comes out in her performance is so fantastic that I can't really say that I care. And all this fragility and smallness both makes it more horrifying when she shows up on the receiving end of Jack's rage, and more triumphant when she finds the internal fortitude to survive that rage.

Lloyd, though, is easily the stand-out: both because it's inherently impressive when a six-year-old does anything that looks a lot like acting, and because Danny is the most demanding of the film's roles: Jack and Wendy are both, ultimately, variations around a single theme, but Danny has a whole range of emotions and basically two entirely different personalities. When Lloyd busts out the Tony voice, it never stops to be creepy, especially towards the end, when his frenzied screams of "redrum!" in a tortured, animalistic squawk are nearly as terrifying as anything else that happens in the movie. And he does this all while functioning as the film's de facto protagonist, given the way the plot favors him and the camera continuously favors his perspective and height. I'm sure a fine Shining could exist with everything in place but Lloyd; it's only with Lloyd, though, that it becomes basically the best version of itself that could be.

The film's message is simple and bleak: evil exists, has always existed, will always exist, and it's only possible to keep away from it, never to beat it. The cosmic nihilism of this slots in nicely with Kubrick's depiction of cruelty and inhumanity elsewhere in his career, and the things he was best at as a director - methodical framing, lighting, and color; creating self-contained realities operating according to a clear, consistent set of rules; unhurried pacing that encourages the growth of a particular mood - are the things that all the best horror films tend to enjoy. And I am sorry that he only made the one, though of course he only made the one of anything. Still, he was willing to dive into straight-up genre filmmaking, and that's something to be deeply grateful for: many self-conscious Important filmmakers don't like to muddy themselves with disreputable genres and stories. Thankfully, Kubrick had no such restraint: the result is simply one of the best scary movies ever made, one of the best scary movies even imaginable.

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MASTERS OF ITALIAN HORROR: MICHELE SOAVI GOES TO CHURCH

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies

Michele Soavi only made four horror films in a career that wasn't very long (he took many years off to care for his unwell son), which surely explains why his profile isn't higher. There's no good argument, certainly not one based on those of his films which I have seen (which does not include the third, The Sect from 1991), why he shouldn't be spoken of with every bit of the enthusiasm that horror fans toss at Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. Especially considering that Soavi's work was all done in the '80s and '90s, when those men were at or heading towards their career nadirs.

There's no more vivid example of how much higher than the rest of the industry he was flying than The Church, produced by Argento (Soavi's mentor), who also contributed the story, and who intended for the film to serve as the third entry in the trilogy begun by Demons and Demons 2, also produced by Argento, and directed by Mario Bava's son Lamberto. I enjoy those movies more than most people, and certainly more than they deserve, but the titanic gulf in quality between them and The Church is almost impossible to quantify, and I think it's fair to regard the movie as Soavi's attempt to prove that you could take something as junky as the plot for Demons 3 and turn it into horror art on the level of anything produced in Italy's long and massively respectable tradition of fantastically visual genre films. Certainly, if you hold it at the right angle and squint, you can see exactly how this was meant to fit in with the first two ("demons in a movie theater", "demons in an apartment complex", and now "demons in church"; the general shape of the plot structure is even the same, with the demon outbreak happening shortly after the halfway point). And just as certainly, Soavi does everything in his power to keep the film from sinking to their level; there's only so much that can be done with a movie that has to include the questionable monster effects that pop up in the last 40 minutes of The Church, but within those limits, Soavi was able to make a gorgeous neo-Gothic horror film that, like his debut, StageFright: Aquarius, takes its cues from an established genre and style, but manages to be something far different and more personal than that genre would ordinarily permit (and, in fact, Soavi's efforts to push this film in new directions started a schism between Argento and himself).

That we're in the middle of something special is quite obvious from the very first scene, which should not work, and has not worked in many, many films: somewhere in the Middle Ages, a group of Teutonic Knights has concluded that a village has a Satanist problem, and they go about killing everyone and everything, dumping their bodies into a pit and covering it with a huge stone cross to seal in the evil. It's hokey as all fuck, and not helped by a vigorously synthetic piece of adventure music on the soundtrack (I'll have more to say about the score later), but the way Soavi shoots it is so haunting and poetic that it manages to work regardless of how much it acts like every cheap fantasy movie of the '80s or '90s. It's both dreamy and vivid, cut by editor Franco Fraticelli in a particularly implicit and elliptical way to give the whole thing a distinctly "off" feeling, and Soavi and his cinematographer, Renato Tafuri, find unique ways to stage the action to give it that much more of a detached, at times impressionistic quality. Say what you will about cheesy fantasy movies, not many of them would come up with such a striking image as the POV from a Knight's helmet, looking through the cross-shaped visor at his demon prey:

Cross imagery, as you'd expect from something called The Church and produced by a Catholic-majority country, is found throughout the film. Not usually in a specifically religious way (it's not a terribly Christian film, all things considered), but in a manner that beautifully ties the whole thing together visually - Soavi, in fact, finds a whole lot of different ways to tie the movie together, including the very deliberate use of blue lighting, center-framed images of horrible beings, and a certain similarity between all the film's wide shots of its various interior spaces that gives the whole thing a sense of structure and repetition that firstly, emphasises the ritualistic nature of what happens in the plot and clarifies that this is essentially a film about order versus chaos, and secondly, gives shape to a movie that is absolutely written as "stuff happens involving different people OH MY GOD DEMONS the end". I don't even quite know how to synopsise the plot: in the present day, there's a man, Evan (Thomas Arana) who's just been hired at the church built over the site of the Knightsl massacre as librarian. There's an art historian, Lisa (Barbara Cupisiti), working on restoring the heavily damaged art throughout the church. There is a little girl, Lotte (Asia Argento, all of 12 years old, which I assume would not have prevented her father from putting her in a nude scene, if he was directing), who looks exactly like the last of the Knights' victims, daughter of the church's characters, who likes to sneak around and see things she oughtn't. There are priests scuttling about, worrying about the oncoming evil that is always waiting to burst out of the church.

As a story, The Church doesn't even function, let alone function well, but as much as any Italian horror film I have ever seen, it's not about story but about how Soavi creates a total, apocalyptic sense of dread that never leaves even the most domestic moments of the film, or its handful of moments of comedy (a scene I deeply treasure: as Evan studies an ancient parchment of unlocking total evil, Lisa - the two are lovers by this point - watches him, bored, before picking up a Mickey Mouse comic). It helps that the church itself is such a threatening, brooding presence, a beautiful combination of a genuine old cathedral and terrific sets designed by Massimo Antonello Geleng, and even the most innocuous moments, and blandest set-ups looking through the inside of the sanctuary have been shot by Tafuri to look so dark and threatening. In the places where there's actually creepy stuff (like the weirdly terrifying statues of monks, their faces invisible beneath hoods), this same aesthetic pays off in moments that are far creepier than they have a right to be.

When it comes time to actually start paying off all this mood by showcasing the real demons and devils, Soavi is even better. The chances of The Church turning into tacky crap must have been high, to judge from the uniformly low quality of the monsters we see, but Soavi modulates this by showing them in what amount to freeze frame jump scares that manage to both situate the horror inside characters' minds (and thus make it more psychological than paranormal) and to make the weirdness of the props an asset (no such luck with a lengthy shot of his devil costume near the end, though by that point the film has built up enough mood that it plays as something strange and alien rather than as a wobbly movie effect). And he also spends the most time lingering on the single best effect, a pile of bodies rising from Hell itself that looks more like Bosch than anything out of Fulci or even Argento's more freely violent horror.

The effect of all this is a depiction of apocalyptic horror that's not exactly like anything else, no matter how many movies it has affinities with. It isn't as overwhelming as, say, The Beyond, but it's in the same ballpark: a film so full of inexplicable and terrifying moments that it feels like the whole world is crumbling. If I prefer that be done in the more cosmic structure that Fulci sets his own cinematic hellscapes, that's not to say that Soavi's isn't fantastic; indeed, by limiting himself to a single building that devours and destroys, he's able to make his film more specific and effective on a human scale, instead of simply plunging us into an endless nightmare.

And now, if I may close things out, the score: performed and composed by Keith Emerson and Argento's beloved Goblin, the music is generally good when it's not too audibly artificial, but the thing that really stands out is the use of several instantly-recognisable cues, motifs, and complete passages from Philip Glass's Koyaanisqatsi score. I'll freely admit that the first time I saw the movie, that's all I was able to think about, and it absolutely took me out of the experience: why is Goblin playing Philip Glass? All I can think of is highway traffic now! A second viewing hasn't convinced me that this is the best choice that could have been made, but I have to admit that absent my own immediate associations with some of the most instantly-recognisable music of the '80s, it works within the film: the driving, mechanical urgency of the music, given a savage electronic gloss by the artists performing it here, perfectly evokes the constant, pulsating tension that doesn't abandon the movie until beyond its final shot. Whatever else is true of the music, The Church would be a far less intense experience without it, and I would not want to change any element of this film for any reason.

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PERSONAL CANON: SKULL AND BONES

The word "gimmick" almost always comes with a certain sneering tone of superiority attached: the suggestion is inherent that a thing was less gimmicky, it would be improved as a result. This is not a hard-and-true relationship. There is, for example, the career of director & producer William Castle, whose film career could not be reasonably summarized without heavy reliance on the word gimmick, for nearly all of his best films are noteworthy not just for having gimmicks, but for how those gimmicks are in many cases the most defining element of the whole: entire movies where you get the feeling that an entire plot was built around finding a way to justify putting electric buzzers in the theater seats. And yet Castle's best work, which I'd consider at a minimum to include The Tingler (Percepto, the aforementioned buzzing seats), 13 Ghosts ("Illusion-O", polarised lenses revealing hidden spectres), and our present subject, House on Haunted Hill, are all very close to perfect versions of what they are. Namely, exaggeratedly unserious horror films finely tuned to appeal to a matinee audience of kids looking to be entertained more than spooked.

Of all these, House on Haunted Hill is perhaps the best, and one of the most entertaining for reasons that have nothing to do with its gimmick, unless you consider the casting of Vincent Price in a movie like this to be a gimmick. Which wouldn't be a terribly unreasonable argument to make, given the nature of his roiling, campy, hambone performances in movies of this sort. Price, more than anything else, is what gives this film and The Tingler their sense of heightened fun, for even when he's playing a sour, miserable shit (as he is in House on Haunted Hill, more than just about any of his other roles), he's doing it from a place of warped, spiky fun.

The particular role that Price plays in this film is Frederick Loren, a wealthy industrialist hosting a "haunted house party" at the suggestion of his wife, Annabelle (Carol Ohmart). "She's so amusing", says Price twice during his opening narration, in a rancid & ironic tone of voice that makes it clear that Frederick does not regard Annabelle as amusing, or anything else that's terribly affectionate. In fact, the Lorens are a pair of mostly hideous people, the kind whose marriage presumably did not start out in a healthy place ("I wanted to marry you" she reminds him at one point, Ohmart's expression neatly filling in the unspoken "because you had money"), and has since turned into something of a bloodsport; he has chased away all of her friends after a string of infidelities, she has tried to accidentally poison him on at least one occasion, and both of them talk freely about how delighted they'd be if the other dropped dead on the spot. Castle's career isn't wanting for corrosive marriages, but the Lorens' might well be the most toxic he ever depicted, and Price and Ohmart dive into their scenes together with unseemly relish. It's an odd focal point for a haunted house movie - and an even odder one for a supposed kiddie matinee flick - but damned if it does give House on Haunted Hill the exact sardonic note that gives it a special personality totally unlike the vast majority of the late-'50s B-movies that have remained so much less fresh and entertaining than this one.

Loren's guest list for the party consists of five desperate people who all stand to make $10,000 each if they can survive the night: psychiatrist David Trent (Alan Marshall), newspaper columnist Ruth Bridgers (Julie Mitchum), test pilot Lance Schroeder (Richard Long), Nora Manning (Carolyn Craig), a secretary from one of Loren's companies, and Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook, Jr.), the house's owner, who hasn't set foot in the place since a terrible night many years ago during which his brother died at the hands of whatever supernatural forces inhabit the building. The whole thing, including its title, is an evident knock-off of the Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House, later turned into the genre film masterpiece The Haunting, but whereas that book was a sober account of paranormal terror, House on Haunted Hill, even at its most scary and intense (which I'd take to be the scene where Nora finds a head in her suitcase), is still quite a flippant lark, barely even bothering to stitch the various scenes of people (mostly Nora) poking around in dark corners and getting the bejeezus scared out of them together using narrative, when it can just as easily rely on having Price swan in, chomp on the scenery while passive-aggressively humiliating his wife, and swanning out. And once the film arrives at its conclusion and all things are explained, it's even more flippant than one might have thought to give it credit for as it was all unspooling. I would not dream of giving it away, mostly because it is way too goofy to believe, bringing in a rational motivation for all the things that happen that frankly makes less reasonable sense than "it was all the work of ghosts" ever would have.

The important thing to note is that it's plainly meant to be goofy - from the moment that Elisha Cook's head comes swooping at us against a black background to deliver the first of two expository monologues, certainly from the moment that the opening credits are presented in a font that would be better-suited to the adventures of a bunch of teenagers on a beach than anything with the word "haunted" in the title, this is a fllm anxious not to be taken seriously. It's a film that understands that spooky old buildings with hidden corridors and vats of acid in the basement are ultimately more fun to think about than scary to experience, and that's never clearer than in the final five minutes, when the Castle gimmick finally shows up: a living skeleton appears onscreen and at that exact moment, a skeleton is whisked from some shadowy corner of the auditorium to hover eerily above the audience. This was called Emergo and it was prone to not working, which I think only adds to the silly charm of it *. That's the level of knowing silliness this movie operates on, and it taps into the feeling of being a 10 year old in a rickety but well-intentioned local haunted house, pretending to agree that everything is scary when in fact it is just cool, because skeletons! Who doesn't love a good living skeleton when they're 10? Nobody that I'd want to chat with at a cocktail party, that's certain.

Key to all this - to all of this, it is the reason that William Castle was one of the all-time best purveyors of junk food horror movies, and why House on Haunted Hill is one of his masterpieces, if not, indeed, his overriding masterpiece (I go back and forth with his other "Vincent Price in a terrible marriage" film, The Tingler, which has the all-time best gimmick of his career) - is its sincerity. There are many people who've made crap B-pictures that plainly just wanted to take a job and cash a paycheck; there are people who've made high-budget A-list horror films who clearly thought that they were above such tawdry nonsense (AKA "everyone who directed an Exorcist film besides Renny Harlin"). The number of people who have made B-pictures and seemed to genuinely love that they were doing it is a small list indeed, and rare indeed is the B-movie artist whose work suggests such enthusiasm for his job - it puts Castle on a rarefied level next to the like of John Carpenter, a director you could not otherwise compare him to. House on Haunted Hill might be dumb and corny and reliant to a ludicrous degree on Price's withering sarcasm, but it not only knows what it is, it loves being what it is, and that's enough to make it one of the very best "boo!" movies that I have ever seen.

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THINGS THAT GO CLAP IN THE NIGHT

Inevitably, "the first movie ever rated R just because it's so damn scary" creates expectations that cannot be met, not by The Conjuring, probably not by anything. In fact - allowing that "scary" is the only thing even more personal and subjective than "funny" - I don't even suppose that The Conjuring is the scariest movie about demonic possession directed by James Wan; I was certainly freaked out more by his PG-13 Insidious, anyway. So now that part of the review is out of the way.

But just because The Conjuring isn't, perhaps, the scariest horror movie made in the last decade (though it unabashedly deserves a spot in the conversation), that doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have a good claim on an even better title: it's one of the best horror movies of the last decade, mechanically, structurally, and even in the story it tells, which ends up being a surprisingly intelligent exploration of interpersonal behavior for a film whose aims are so unfussy and low-brow. This wants to be nothing but a ghost story: to give you the shivers and creep you out, maybe to make you jump a couple of times. Wan and his screenwriters, twin brothers Chad and Carey Hayes, are not even a little bit interested in fixing things that aren't broken, and it is notable about The Conjuring that it follows, exactly, every little detail of haunted house movies as they have become ossified in the post J-horror age, ones as shitty and bland and disinteresing as The Messengers all the way up to ones as... actually, they've almost all been shitty, bland, and disinteresting lately. Which is what makes it profoundly cool that The Conjuring, using all of the exact same tools as The Unborn or Sinister or whatever (and that's not to say that the okay-not-special Sinister and the savagely bad Unborn are on the same plane of cinematic existence), is able to be so much more than any of them are, up to and including a third act that, for no apparent reason, is good.

By which I mean, as any horror follower knows - certainly, anybody who saw and loved the first deliciously spooky first hour of Insidious knows with particular intensity - paranormal movies have a much harder time than almost any other breed of horror at sticking the landing. The reason why is easy enough to understand: they thrive on the inexplicable and the unpredictable, the sense of genuinely, fearfully not knowing what's making those noises in the damp basement. The second that the wizened old spiritualist drops in and sees visions of the dead girl, or the crusty old townie reminisces about that creepy old lady who used to sing to her dead son in the woods out back, the threat becomes known, and contained, and domesticated - domestication murders horror. Horror is, by its nature, the violation of domestication. One of the reasons that all of the very scariest horror movies, which for me would include such things as The Haunting, The Shining, and Paranormal Activity, end up working is that they keep piling up the inexplicable until they end, or not even then - what is up with the Overlook Hotel anyway (in the movie, at least)? Resolution and explanation don't happen until the last few minutes, or not at all, and the experience remains uncheapened.

What makes The Conjuring amazing and wonderful and worthy of some kind of overwrought hype, if maybe not the exact hype it has received, is that it maintains its tension and mood and atmosphere and everything, without having to pull a Haunting. Which, to be very clear, is a movie it apes skillfully and rewardingly, in its balls-out use of sound effects to drive most of that atmosphere, rather than a nonstop string of jump scares (there are, indeed only a handful of real honest-to-God jump scares in the film, and one of them, dear reader, got me so good that I yelped. Right there in the movie theater, I yelped). In fact, The Conjuring plays its "hey, we've identified the angry poltergeist" card right where every other movie with the same structure does: long after the little girl is speaking to the imaginary friend that seems unusually specific, shortly after the mother has an experience that she cannot begin to explain that terrified the shit out of her, and a little bit before the noisy-ass scene where a character is thrown around the room as lightbulbs explode. It's that formulaic: you could set your watch by it.

And yet, the explanation is made, the ghost is identified, and The Conjuring doesn't drop even an inch in being as scary and creepy as it was before - which, to be fair, might mean that it goes from "not at all scary" to "still not at all scary": fear is subjective. I can't name another movie, definitely not another movie made in the 21st Century, that navigates that turn so smoothly and effectively and satisfyingly, and I frankly don't know how it works. I guess James Wan is just that good at controlling mood and making it clear that just because the threat has been identified, that doesn't mean it's no longer threatening. Such a magnificent evolution that man has made in the nine years since his feature debut, Saw! The best film of its franchise, sure, but still a grubby, unappealing piece of aimless nastiness. Better yet, his second feature, Dead Silence, for which The Conjuring frankly feels like an apology at times, as though he understood why each element of DS went wrong, and knew how to fix it, and did so.

Anyway, I haven't said a word about the plot, and we're almost a thousand words in. Based on a previously undisclosed file from the case histories of Ed and Lorraine Warren, the famous paranormal investigators whose fame and reputation resides largely on their validation of the story behind The Amityville Horror - one of the most thoroughly discredited "true haunting" stories of the 20th Century, which tells you all you need to know about Ed and Lorraine's skill - The Conjuring tells of the events that befell a Rhode Island family in 1971: Carolyn Perron (Lili Taylor) and husband Roger (Ron Livingston) have just sunk the last of their money into an old house, moving their five daughters in and hoping against hope they can make this all work somehow. It very quickly becomes obvious that they cannot, when littlest child April (Kyla Deaver) starts to talk about her new little friend, when second-littlest child Cindy (Mackenzie Foy) starts up with particularly creepy sleepwalking, and everybody is noticing inexplicable things going wrong. So Carolyn finds the Warrens (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) giving a lecture in Massachusetts, and begs them to help her out. What the find unnerves them badly, particularly with the psychic Lorraine still weakened from a particularly nasty haunting a few months earlier. Badly enough that they want nothing to do with the Perrons; badly enough that they must help the family, or else tragedy is surely a matter of "when" not "if" and "when" is almost certainly "fucking soon".

The Conjuring is not an Ibsen play, and its characters are not the richest, deepest, most intriguing you could hope for. But Wilson, Farmiga, and Taylor, at least, is a lot of talent for one junky horror movie: you can imagine one of them in shlock, sure, but all three together promise something a bit more nuanced than just another damn haunted house and raging dead witch-ghost. And then there's Joey King, who has officially become my favorite under-16 actress in America, as the middle Perron child, and we've got here a cast of legitimate characters played by legitimate actors, and if its theme of the fragility of motherhood isn't quite as vigorously, impressively explored as in the thematically adjacent The Descent, the mere fact that we've got a movie about a meanspirited demon in which there's even a whisper of that kind of psychological shading is far more than I'd expected or hoped for out of a movie whose big calling card was "clapping hands emerging from darkness is hella scary".

Which they are, and it turns out the film's best scene was spoiled in that exquisite trailer, though its second- and third- and fourth- best scenes are nearly as good. Which is all to say: the film might not be as scary as promised, but it is scary, and even when it is not scary, it's telling a richly creepy, beautifully filmed (John R. Leonetti's shadow-tinged cinematography is exemplary, creating a totally unrealistic but effective mood), astonoundingly competent story of the old "sitting around the campfire, trying to scare the shit out of your little sister" mode. I have no little sister, but if I had, I would be proud to force her to watch The Conjuring, which really couldn't be a more perfect version of the thing that it is; it does not push boundaries but does excellent work within the boundaries that others have established, and it's honestly hard for me to imagine what more you could expect or want from a ghost story: it creeps, it crawls, it sneaks up on you and goes "boo!", all without missing a beat or running out of steam, and it does all of this in the most delightful way ever.

8/10

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