Did you do Repulsion? I have a vague memory of that having happened. If not, I'd think about giving it a shot. Makes a good pair with that film.
A Ghost StoryAnybody who has viewed A Ghost Story will likely balk at my including it in this horror-based month-long marathon. I get it. There’s maybe one total jump scare, made up of combining several small jump scares from different parts of the film. The rest isn’t particularly dread-inducing. While the ghostly figure does lurk in the house he lived in after his death, his visual depiction as the child-like sheet with cutout eyes negates much of the spooks another film might wring out of the setup. So if it isn’t quite a horror movie, how does it use horror tropes to tell a story about time, life, death, and the quest to mean something?
Well, it’s an interesting question. The film opens with a quote from Virgina Woolf’s “A Haunted House,” “Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting.” It’s the film’s first attempt to place the viewer in the very particular mindset they’ll need to follow along with the film. Literary, a little spooky, kind of wry. Those words are also, it should be noted, some of the few words in the film. This is a story told primarily through the cinematic language of images with sound and music complementing those images to create a mood unlike most films. There is a ghost in the house, it is a poltergeist that can influence the world around it, but instead of seeing the film alongside the family who moves into the ghost’s house, we get all up inside the ghost’s perspective.
The ghost is played by Casey Affleck under a long white sheet. He leaves his body after a few minutes in the film, and the rest follows his experiences as he watches his wife grieve and then move away. For any other movie, that might be enough, but David Lowery, who also directed last year’s remarkably charming Pete’s Dragon remake, goes much further with the premise. Eventually, the ghost experiences centuries of time passing in an instant. He watches as buildings rise and fall in the spot where he lived his brief life. He sees how his presence scares a young boy, who can at least sense him if not see him fully. Because there isn’t a whole lot of talking, Lowery uses horror tropes to communicate how the ghost is feeling and how the people in the house feel about his presence (or lack thereof).
In the film’s most talked about scene, Rooney Mara, who plays Affleck’s wife, sits on the floor and devours a pie straight out of the dish. It’s a long shot, filmed from the side in the film’s beguiling but beautiful 1.33:1 aspect ratio. What starts as rote eating where we can feel her detachment from the world soon becomes a kind of voracious consumption that seems to indicate a first rush of feeling about her recently departed husband. It is a scene so full of emotion that I didn’t even notice the ghost in the opposite corner from Mara until half of its long length had passed. What other movies exploit for a jump scare or a tension-builder becomes a husband’s powerless witnessing of his wife’s grief. But it’s also still shocking. It’s emotionally intense, a human moment of pain filmed as one character feels deeply while the other becomes less and less attached to a human perspective. That’s why it is so long, I think. It is one of three long shots of one action that dominate the early goings here. The rest of the film is meditative, certainly, but the three shots connect us to the humans and then unleash us to consider the world from the point of view of an immortal being.
There are so many ways that A Ghost Story is similar to mother! that I can’t help but think they were developed together somehow. Both films borrow horror tropes but put them to vastly different uses, both center around a house, or at least a place in the world, both bend time to create a different sense of temporal rules, and both consider the long view of life. The idea that what has happened before will happen again is explored in intriguingly different ways in each of these films, and I’d love to read a consideration of how they use both their narrative structure and their formal techniques to represent these ideas and come to wildly different ends. Where mother! is an intense critique of humanity and Christianity, A Ghost Story eventually shows itself to be a film not about time, not about love, grief, place, or ghosts, but rather a movie about everything which uses those elements as a way of communicating. It is a film that could not be translated to any other medium without losing some of its small wit or big emotional impact.
A+
The Bad Batch
Full disclosure: I fell asleep for a hot minute in the middle. I woke up for Keanu. Sometimes I'd continue here by saying, "but it's not the movie's fault I fell asleep!" except this time it is very much the movie's fault. It's just too darn slow. Sometimes indie directors feel like they can communicate everything they need to say by studying characters' faces. Sometimes they feel like they're saying more by talking less. Sometimes that's true (see above), sometimes not so much. Ultimately, what this film lacks is anything (seriously, anything) to keep my interest. I'll get into whatever a filmmaker is into, usually. You want to blow my mind visually, as in Blade Runner 2049? Consider it blown. You want to explore the concept of humanity and time ala A Ghost Story? I've got my gear, I'm ready to dive in. This movie seems like it doesn't want to do anything. The opening is strange and gross. I didn't really care. The rest didn't give me a reason to follow along. So instead I took a nap and woke up to a pretty dumb character portrayed as admirably as is possible by Keanu Reeves. It's too bad he doesn't have a scene partner worth his talents.
D
Halloween II (1981)
I've seen the original in this series countless times, and the third film once or twice, and bits and pieces of the other films but mostly on cable tv, so it was censored and full of commercials. This season I want to get through most of the original series and see what's going on. This direct sequel to the movie that started the slasher craze (shut up, Black Christmas!) is better than it should be, and I'll venture to guess the rest of the series won't be able to match it. That's fine. What I'm most interested in is tracing how the concepts (formal and thematic) track and change from the first film to the last. Here the returning elements include Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasance (among others), an antagonist who walks the line between human and supernatural, an expansion of the first person shots from The Shape's perspective, and a temporal continuity. The Shape is given a bit of a backstory, a familial connection to Curtis's Laurie Strode, and a name in Michael Myers. In other words, this is the film where a movie becomes a franchise, and you can tell.
I don't care how many times I read that this was supposed to be the end of Michael Myers, this movie is so full of world-building that it feels very much like the early entry in a multi-decade franchise that it is. Start with the opening, which re-does the end of the first film and changes the perspective a little to follow Pleasance's Dr. Loomis who starts interacting with neighbors and police officers that were just little one-scene characters in the first film (or not even seen, in the case of the neighbors). The little town of Haddonfield feels bigger than a suburban house on a suburban lane. Much of the film takes place in a hospital which allows Myers to get a little more creative with his killing methods. He turns a medicinal hot tub up to "scaling" temperatures, hilariously, and does improbably amounts of damage with a tiny scalpel. But still, there are a few fun jump scares and one really great shot involving him emerging from the shadows in a doctor's office.
While the movie isn't nearly as effective as a horror film when compared to the original, it does use an interesting filming style to make the movie feel different in a meaningful way. I mentioned earlier that the film contains more of the first person perspective that the original used so well in its opening scene. Halloween II feels almost infected by his perspective and presence. Early in this film's new footage is a repeat of that first person shot, but then there's also a shot at the house from the end of the first film that is filmed in an eerily similar style. Myers could not possibly be the character perspective for that shot, and it isn't even supposed to be a first-person shot, but it feels so much like those other shots that the scene starts to feel creepy, just by association. It made me feel like Myers had taken over the town and infiltrated its space so much that it even changed the camera's movement and perspective. It's a really neat trick that carries throughout the film and makes the later supernatural-ish stuff less preposterous. It's still quite silly, but it feels justified.
This isn't a great movie by any measure. The acting is pretty bad, the story already starts to feel hung on as a means to see bloody kills (oh yes, this one starts to up the gore factor that the original didn't need to generate scares), and the stuff with Donald Pleasance is almost entirely useless. And yet, I still had fun with it. Halloween may not have the creative potential in its premise like the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise does, but at least it takes its scares a little seriously. That's what is sustaining me so far, plus the fun formal stuff.
B.