Glowing in the dark, p.15
Glowing in the Dark, page 15
I’ve watched it many times since. I’ve also watched the original, and all of its sequels. I’ve experienced all of the original Universal classics, and their silent film predecessors. But watching the David Cronenberg version on Blu-ray today made me think about all of this, so I wrote it down here.
Author’s Note: Disguised (perhaps badly) as a meditation on David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly, this turned into a decently robust dissertation on the monster movie as a cinematic form, hidden away in a post on my website.
Originally published January 2020
orringrey.com
Mission Statement
I have always written a lot about film, but over the last few years I have inescapably also become, among other things, a “film writer.” I have two books of essays on vintage horror cinema in print, and I regularly write reviews of both new and retrospective films for venues like Signal Horizon and Unwinnable.
To the extent, then, that I am a “film critic,” or a critic of any other kind of art, my interest is not in whether or not the art in question is “good” or “bad.” My interest is in the experience of the art itself; in placing that art within its broader context and learning to understand it better, both for myself and for whoever happens to be reading whatever I write.
This makes the experience of art—and of writing and reading about art—necessarily personal, and somewhat immune to criticism, to the extent that you view criticism as nothing more than a binary of “good” or “bad.” Siskel and Ebert, probably the most well-known movie critics of all time, famously simplified it to “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”—not to knock either Siskel or Ebert, both of whom also wrote lengthy, heartfelt, highly personal takes on film all the time.
One of my favorite quotes about the role of art comes from Joe R. Lansdale writing an introduction to a trade collection of the comic book Baltimore. “Isn’t that the job of all great art,” Lansdale writes, “to kick open doors to light and shadow and let us view something that otherwise we might not see?”
He thinks it is, at least in part, and so do I.
As a critic, then, my job is to help art accomplish that goal. To jimmy the door just that little bit wider, to point into the light and shadow on the other side and describe what I see. To walk through the door—or at least peek through it—when others may not have the time or the energy or the inclination or the adventurousness of spirit to do so.
My job is also to keep an open mind. Not just when I sit in the dark and wait for the movie to begin, but long after I’ve seen the credits roll, after I’ve composed my careful sentences that night or the next day or the next week. This doesn’t mean pretending to like something that I don’t. It means being open to changing my mind.
Some of my favorite movies I was lukewarm on when I walked out of the theater. Some movies that I loved the first few times I saw them grew stale with time. Neither of these reactions are wrong—they’re just descriptive of how I experienced the movies.
As a reader of writing about film, one of my favorite things in the world is to find a thoughtful, engaging appreciation of a movie that I thought I didn’t like. One that helps me to view something in the movie that I might not otherwise have seen. Sometimes I still don’t like the movie when I’m done, but I get the chance to glimpse that otherwise unseen thing, and that’s really what I’m always after.
Art can only do so much to kick those doors open, after all. Sometimes we have to be ready to look.
Author’s Note: Many times, both in this book and elsewhere, I have attempted to pin down what it is I do when I sit down to write about film. I think I did a pretty good job of it here.
Originally published January 2020
Unwinnable
We Drilled Too Deep: Underwater (2020)
“We’ve got big things in store for you.”
Underwater is a summer movie from the late ’90s being released in January 2020 for some reason. Maybe part of the reason is that it was actually filmed a few years ago—back when casting T.J. Miller seemed like less of a bad idea—and the distributors obviously don’t know what to do with it, given the complete absence of buzz surrounding its release.
Which is a shame, because Underwater is a good monster movie, a good disaster movie, and of particular interest to fans of weird fiction, and it deserves a lot more attention than it’s going to get before it sinks unceremoniously out of theaters.
Of the few people who are talking about Underwater at all, most are comparing it to Alien under the sea (so, Leviathan, then)—comparisons that it definitely invites, especially for fans of that scene where Ripley is in her underpants. It shares more of its DNA with the various imitators of those films, though.
This is a sibling to movies like Deep Rising, Virus, Deep Blue Sea, Phantoms, Pitch Black, and so on. Like many of those films, it spends more of its running time as a disaster movie than a creature feature, though it drags in plenty of creatures before it’s done.
In spite of the difference in setting—and tone—I actually thought a lot about Pitch Black while watching Underwater, due to the emphasis in both films on crossing an inhospitable stretch of ground while fending off half-seen monsters from the dark. Hell, they’re even dragging something for part of this one.
Underwater opens with pretty much its only moment of calm before the storm, as Kristen Stewart gives us a voiceover monologue about pessimism and how, when you’re at the bottom of the ocean for months at a time, you lose all sense of day and night. “There’s only awake and dreaming.”
These opening moments—and moments is literally all they are—feel more like the start of a ghost story than a monster movie. There are strange noises, doors that pop open on their own, all leading up to a sudden tremor that tears apart the underwater station that’s there entirely to maintain a deep-water drilling operation, seven miles down on the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
From there, the movie never stops running. Underwater is a monster movie, but it feels more like a disaster film. Think of it as Gravity on the bottom of the ocean. When not in the water, characters are scrambling to reach it, or escape it. Lights are always strobing; sirens always going off. Water drips from every surface or pours in from above. The frame is always full of movement.
Neither the characters nor the audience get much more than a moment or two to catch their breath once the initial earthquake starts bringing the compromised structure down around their ears. The characters climb into massive diving suits that make the picture feel a bit like a dry run for a BioShock movie in order to undertake a perilous trek across the ocean floor in an effort to reach the drill itself, which they hope is undamaged.
This breakneck pace doesn’t lend Underwater a lot of room for character development or deeper themes, though there’s just enough of a blue collar, “corporations are bad, actually” message humming underneath everything to keep it from feeling too weightless.
Under the opening titles, we see snippets of newspaper reports—I told you this felt like a movie from a few years ago—about how the company responsible for the drill has dismissed “rumors of strange sightings” and the unknown dangers of working on the bottom of the sea for so long.
Even as the station comes apart around them, the characters are surrounded—and verbally bombarded from the PA system—by corporate platitudes. “You’re not just part of our team, you’re part of our family.” That kind of thing. Meanwhile, when the film is over, the end credits are also accompanied by reports of the company hushing things up and getting back to digging, monsters be damned.
Oh, right, monsters. This is me, after all, the “monster guy,” so if you’re reading my take on a movie about underwater monsters, you probably want to know how the monsters are. Well, for the majority of the picture, they’re scarce. Most of the time, the antagonist isn’t the monsters at all—it’s the ocean itself. The characters are just trying to survive a disaster that is plenty able to kill them all on its own, even before the monsters show up.
But when the monsters do finally show up, folks, do they ever show up.
Okay, I don’t normally do this, but I am going to ring the proverbial spoiler bell here. Underwater has a relatively predictable but really great third act reveal which is going to get talked about a lot once people finally see this movie—which, at this rate, may not be until it straggles onto home video and/or streaming. So, if you don’t want to know how it ends, stop reading now, because I am going to get into spoilers.
If you saw the trailer for Underwater, you know that they run into some monsters down there on the bottom of the ocean. It’s what got me into the theater in the first place, after all. The earliest of these is a relatively small, practical effect creature that they find inside a corpse. Most of the rest are roughly the size of humans or a little bigger.
Like the vast majority of monsters in movies in the last decade, they look a lot like the Cloverfield monster, but their mouths are pretty cool, opening up large enough to swallow a whole person. The underwater bits are murky with sediment, giving all these sequences a found footage feel, but they are also packed with plenty of monsters. They aren’t the end, though.
See, in the film’s last leg, we discover the cause of the earthquake. It seems that they have accidentally drilled into R’lyeh and woken up Cthulhu.
No, I’m not kidding. They never say his name, and you never see a sunken city, but there’s a kaiju-size, humanoid monster from beneath the bottom of the ocean, with a mouth that is fringed in tentacles and wing-like protrusions on its back. No one has to call it Cthulhu.
And before you complain that Kristen Stewart (maybe) kills it by blowing up the drill at the end, may I remind you that, in “Call of Cthulhu,” they defeat the big C by ramming him with a boat. Setting off what is essentially a giant bomb seems a lot more proportionate.
As I said before, there’s not a lot of thematic depth in Underwater. If it’s cosmic horror, it’s from the point of view of the bystanders, someone who gets swept up in the devastation but never really knows the greater implications.
But not a lot of depth doesn’t mean none, and we get a touch of that old transcendent nihilism in the arc of Kristen Stewart’s character, a self-sacrificing pessimist who fights hard against the dying of the light but, when the time comes, actually seems like maybe oblivion at the bottom of the ocean is what she’s been searching for all along.
Author’s Note: Though I didn’t know it at the time, Underwater turned out to be the last movie I saw in a theater before the COVID-19 pandemic effectively shuttered them all for a year or so. There were certainly worse ways to go out.
Originally published January 2020
Unwinnable
“The smell of the rooms terrifies me—
and lures me on”
The House by the Cemetery (1981)
The first time—of the two times, now—that I watched Lucio Fulci’s House by the Cemetery was nearly half a decade ago. I was doing a series of columns called Creature Feature Conversations that I actually miss writing, where author/publisher Jonathan Raab and I would watch some (often B-list) creature feature and Jonathan picked this weird, slow-mo nightmare of a movie.
In the back-and-forth that ensued, we said a lot about House by the Cemetery, some of which I’m going to reiterate here. Like the fact that it is the original source of two samples from the Skinny Puppy song “Rivers,” or my note that, “There is a lot of product placement for Fiddle Faddle in this movie. Fiddle Faddle is the J&B Scotch of House by the Cemetery.”
At the time, I had seen exactly one other Lucio Fulci movie. At this point I think that number is all the way up to…two? But Aenigma and City of the Living Dead are on my list, not to worry!
Another author friend, Jeremiah Tolbert, once described the gore style of Lucio Fulci as, and I am paraphrasing here, “like someone stapled a piece of rotted mutton to a mannequin.” And that’s…surprisingly apt? Enough so that I have since repeated it pretty much every time I’ve ever written about Fulci.
And that aesthetic bleeds from these movies into other Italian movies of the same era—or vice versa. House by the Cemetery and Ghosthouse have more in common than just exteriors shot at the Ellis Estate in Scituate, Massachusetts, for example, in spite of the latter being directed by Umberto Lenzi instead of Lucio Fulci.
Like those films, to say that House by the Cemetery doesn’t make a ton of sense is to engage in the worst kind of understatement. It didn’t make a lot of sense the first time I watched it, and a second viewing did little to clear the cobwebs. But that’s also somewhat beside the point. This is a film that revels in its cobwebs.
If Suspiria is, perhaps, the best example I’ve yet found of a movie that would be worse if it was any better—a film that takes its own weaknesses and flaws and transmutes them, likely entirely by accident, into something transcendently powerful—then House by the Cemetery is its equal and not-quite-opposite reaction, a Frankenstein’s monster of a picture seemingly made up of everything that the filmmakers could think of.
Like the film’s Dr. Freudstein—perhaps the most suggestively named monster of all time—House by the Cemetery is a collection of ill-fitting parts that don’t exactly fit well together. But, like Freudstein, they don’t have to fit well to be effective.
What the hell is/was Freudstein researching down in the basement? For that matter, what are the researches that bring his victims into his web? We hear that our ostensible protagonist is there to pick up the work of his dead colleague researching suicides—but to what end, for what purpose? Why does everyone in town insist that the male lead has been there before, with a daughter he doesn’t have?
The film never really answers these questions, but it leaves them laying out suggestively enough that we feel like the answers are there, somewhere, even if it didn’t deign to provide them.
What it does provide are all sorts of weird trappings. There’s an old dark house with a spooky history (and a tomb in the floor) that everyone in town knows to avoid. (“This isn’t New York,” our Extremely Understanding male lead tells his wife when she discovers the tomb. “Most of the old houses in the area have tombs in them.” Yeah, guy, not buying it.)
There’s plenty of cobwebs and mutton-on-mannequin gore and the eponymous cemetery, which comes right up to the front yard of the house. When the realtor is finished showing it to them and is driving away, she backs into one of the headstones.
Of course, there’s a precocious kid with Shining-like premonitions and the most annoying dubbed voice in the world, who encounters a possibly ghostly girl. There’s a delightfully Castlevania-y score by Walter Rizzati. There’s even a rubber bat, which leads to the goriest bat murder in film history. For real, that bat had to be, like, 250% blood by volume.
In that earlier Creature Feature Conversation, I had a note about the sinister babysitter (because of course there’s one of those) cleaning up the blood from one of Dr. Freudstein’s kills that said, “Everyone is weirdly okay with this huge smear of blood on the floor! Do they all just assume it’s from the gore bat?”
(Gore Bat, incidentally, is the name of my horror-themed thrash metal band.)
While doing the prep work to write this piece, I read another review of the new Blue Underground Blu-ray, which opened with, “I don’t like horror movies.” If you, also, don’t like horror movies, House by the Cemetery isn’t the flick that’s going to change your mind.
In fact, to appreciate House, you need to appreciate an increasingly small niche of horror movies—the borderline-nonsensical Italian horror films of the ’80s, which are remembered for their maggoty gore, but which appeal to me for their haunting and often oppressive atmosphere of weird menace.
House by the Cemetery is neither the best nor the worst example of the breed, but it’s a fairly representative one. If you don’t have the patience for its singular charms, it won’t win you over. If you do, though, the new Blu-ray is a welcome addition, complete with some nice behind-the-scenes features and, as with all the recent Blue Underground releases, a soundtrack CD.
Author’s Note: I really do miss those Creature Feature Conversations. I think you can still find them online, on the website for Jonathan’s publishing enterprise, Muzzleland Press. While you’re at it, buy some books. Jonathan is a hell of a writer!
Originally published March 2020
Signal Horizon
“There’s one trick you’ve never seen.”
The Mad Magician (1954)
“That’s all I ever hear, morning, noon, and night: Plots, plots, plots.”
Today, we’re going to talk about John Brahm. Born Hans Brahm of Hamburg in 1893, he directed movies in Hollywood throughout the ’30s and ’40s and mostly moved to television in the ’50s. His early work has been compared favorably to Hitchcock, and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, writing for the AV Club, called him “the Mario Bava and Brian De Palma of the 1940s.”
My discovery of Brahm came years ago when I picked up a Fox Horror Classics DVD set that contained three of his films—though at the time I knew only that they were three horror films of the ’40s, having no idea that they shared a director. Those films were The Undying Monster (1942), The Lodger (1944), and Hangover Square (1945).
Of those three, The Undying Monster became a personal favorite for perhaps obvious reasons—the book upon which it is based is also a treat, if you ever get a chance to read it. The Lodger is an atmospheric and effective retelling of a Hitchcock silent of the same name, starring Laird Cregar, who also turns in a career-making performance in Hangover Square.
