Too Much Blood (The 2013 Horror Syllabus Wrap-Up)

A funny thing happened on the way to pulling together this post. I happened to glance at last year’s collection of freaky films, and was reminded how 12 months ago I admitted that I was beginning to get a taste for these films. Well folks – that theory has been proven. I am officially down with being freaked out by a movie, and interestingly enough, this year I wasn’t all that freaked out!

Let’s look at things chronologically.

The amount of Classic Universal Creature Features I have left to see dwindled that much more this year as I finally got around to THE WOLF MAN. Considering what I’d already gone through with DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN, I shouldn’t have ben surprised at how much THE WOLF MAN felt like classic macabre lit, but yet I still was. It’s not like I expected Lon Chaney to be prowling the Welsh countryside as the titular man-beast inside of fifteen minutes, but I never expected the film to get halfway home before we got the much-anticipated transformation. There is something very old-world about THE WOLF MAN. I realize that sounds somewhat ridiculous considering how flat-out old it actually is, but when one compares it to more recent attempts to set stories in classical settings, THE WOLF MAN feels far more authentic.

All in all, 70 minutes well-spent. Chaney is surprisingly a looker, and I already feel the urge to watch THE MUMMY and THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON in order to complete the set.

Fast-forwarding nineteen years or so, I arrive at the film that did the best job of giving me the heebie-jeebies. Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE is remarkably straight-forward with its plot (young woman suffers an accident, parents experiment with surgery to rebuild her face). However, a large measure of creepiness comes from the almost omnipresent visual of Edith Scob in her blank mask as Christine. She doesn’t move through the film so much as she floats…and the expression in her eyes seems that much more unnerving considering the way they contrast the alabaster mask.

There’s something especially disquieting about medical horror. Perhaps because it’s so very palpable – so very possible – that it strikes a deeper nerve than most other types of horror (perhaps save body horror). If we, ourselves, have never been on an operating table, we know someone who has. We know that human beings are never more vulnerable than when we allow someone to take something sharp and poke around inside our own bodies. That feeling of vulnerability is increased twenty-fold when the person holding the sharp thing is doing so without our consent. Any story that involves people taking scalpels and playing God will immediately get me infinitely more uneasy…

…That  Christine’s parents don’t entirely seem to be doing it for her makes it that much worse. This was handily the best of the lot this year.

Every once in a while, my attachment to cameras makes for some strange feelings. Case in point: PEEPING TOM. The Michael Powell title comes with all of the twisted darkness and visual lushness one would expect from an Archer Film. What makes it more messed up – and likewise what spurred those strange feelings – is what Mark Lewis spends much of his time pointing his camera at.

There’s a strange disconnect that comes when one looks through the viewfinder. Forgetting for a moment that we think nothing of immortalizing complete strangers, sometimes at their most vulnerable (there’s that word again)…there’s a tinge of voyeurism that infuses the very medium. That tinge can be corrupted and perverted without much effort at all…such as what we see Mark do repeatedly.

It would be one thing if he decided to capture film of women without their consent, something that much worse if he did so with them in compromising positions. But seeing Mark use his camera and tripod to commit and record such dastardly acts came with a high “ick” factor. PEEPING TOM isn’t a classic horror film, so in a way it sticks out in this series…however, it is every bit as disturbing in a classic Hitchcokian sense.

I might not pick up my Nikon for months.

It feels somewhat strange to have finally caught up with FRIDAY THE 13TH after all these years.

On the one hand, the film gave me everything I thought it was going to give me. I got lusty teenagers, I got that eerie music, I got salacious kills, and I got an unstoppable maniac. On the other hand, considering the character at the core of the series, I feel like I haven’t got the full effect yet since I watched the wrong unstoppable maniac. (Spoiler Alert) Considering I was well-versed with SCREAM since 1996, I already knew that the killer in this chapter wouldn’t be Jason Voorhees, but instead, his mother. Admittedly, Pamela Voorhees doesn’t waste the opportunity, considering how vicious some of those kills are.

However, when one thinks “Friday the 13th”, one thinks of a dude in a hockey mask and his machete. Considering I didn’t get that dude, I feel like I need to continue on to part two.

That said, between HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13TH, it’s now easy to see how much the serial killer movie was moulded in this era of time. One of these days, I’ll have to think a bit harder on what was happening in the world between 1978 and 1984 that made storytellers want to interweave brutal kills with teenage promiscuity.

Curiously, AUDITION might have been the letdown of the series. I’d have to go back and look at the original post, but it seems as though it was one of the titles that came most-recommended. The film certainly was good, and very unsettling in its quiet nature, but for everything I’d come to know and expect with Japanese horror, I came away from the film wanting more.

Now in a way, part of that feeling has to be credited to Mark Cousins’ whose STORY OF FILM tipped off the big freak-out moment of the burlap bag turning over in Asami’s apartment. But I think what threw me more was the way I kept seeing this film turn up on lists of the most disturbing/most violent films, and what I ultimately got felt like neither. It seems strange to say that – like I have become the very sort of gorehound I grew up despising – but the truth is that I thought Asami was going to go further.

While I felt a bit letdown, I did still dig AUDITION – especially for its patience. Even if I thought the payoff would deliver “more”, it was still one incredible payoff after two whole acts spent watching Aoyama choose the best-suited auditionee. Perhaps if I didn’t know what I was getting into, I would have been much more shocked after that lengthy wind-up.

SAW was another interesting watch. On the one hand, I have to tip my hat to the trendsetter for a script that is far more clever than I ever thought it would be. This giant game of “Mousetrap” isn’t just looking to surprise and scare its audience so much as it also wants to make them think about the gifts they waste in life – and what they do to deserve the very harshest of punishments.

Whenever I see the word “Saw”, I always hear the voice of TIFF’s Midnight Madness programmer Colin Geddes in my head. I obviously didn’t see the film at TIFF in 2004, but during an introduction of another film, Colin was listing off the titles that would play, and his voice got an extra dose of joy when he said that festival would come to a close with “S-a-a-a-a-a-w-w-w-w-w-w-w!!!”. In a way, I sort of wish I could go back to that festival and be at that screening…before a dozen different knockoffs started dropping, before six sequels would drop. To a moment when this sort of story felt refreshing.

It’s been almost ten years since the franchise began, and I’m happy to report that its origin story holds up nicely. Despite the copycats, the predicament of Adam and Dr. Gordon is every bit as tense, and Jigsaw is every bit as fucked-up a big bad as there has ever been in horror. Interestingly, the film actually left me wanting to look into some of the sequels, but then I reminded myself of the law of diminishing returns.

One last thing. While this film ends on a pretty fun twist, the twist doesn’t work as well when the actor at the center of the twist becomes well-known.

Last but not least comes THE HOST – a film I must thank my brother and his fiancée for excitedly pointing me towards.

THE HOST could have been called THE ANTI-SAW for me, since I sat down to watch it knowing absolutely nada. I knew director Bong Joon-Ho in name only, and had several guesses what the title was in reference to. Of every film I watched, it was the one I knew the least about by far. So perhaps because of that, or because it doesn’t scare so much as it delights, it’s the film that might well have given me the most bang for my buck.

I’ve stated in the past how stories like this need to pay a great deal of attention to creature design, and to that end THE HOST is a masterwork. Its creature looks so good, so original, that the films visual designers should have been first on the speed dial of productions like SUPER 8 and COWBOYS & ALIENS. The only thing better than watching that giant…thing…run, swim, scare, and make havoc was watching how the humans interacted with it when time finally came to take it down. Of course, throw in some political allegory and more than one touchstone of pandemics, and you have a work of pure monster movie joy.

Edit: I forgot one – RM

While technically not “scary”, THE WICKER MAN was still one of the films selected this year that I enjoyed watching most. It plays upon the vibe that I love most in this genre…one where a normal outsider visits a place that has a different standard of “normal”. Seeing Sgt. Howie try to make (pardon the expression) heads or tails of this village that seems so laden with pagan sexuality was a trippy watch. Then Christopher Lee shows up, and it all gets that much better.

I mentioned earlier not knowing what was going on in 78-84 that led to so many tales targeting teenage promiscuity. When it comes to tales of cult tendencies in the early 70’s, the answer is far more clear. Alternative religions were taking a tight hold on America at the time, so the phenomenon made a perfect target for a few dozen great freaky films. THE WICKER MAN included.

The main take away from this movie – besides the lesson that one should never trust a town where orgies happen in a graveyard – is that the world needs more Christopher Lee.

So when you put all of that together, you get me not very scared, but very much happy with the programme. It’s possible that with age has come a greater amount of backbone, and a clearer sense that “it’s only a movie”. Heck, perhaps I’m even getting jaded! Whatever the case, I believe it’s fair to say that I no longer have an aversion to the genre, and have ramped myself up to speed nicely. Perhaps one od these days I’ll even watch THE EXORCIST at full volume!

…or perhaps not.