Month: March 2017

The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2017)

The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2017)

Horror filmmaking continues into its renaissance, thanks in large part to a burgeoning indie scene that has dragged the genre back from the mainstream and given voice to writers, directors, and productions that would otherwise have none (read: it ain’t just straight white dudes running the show any more). Today, A24 adds to their formidable indie cred with the release of The Blackcoat’s Daughter, a fascinating little horror movie from the mind of Osgood Perkins.

Set in a Catholic girls’ boarding school somewhere in Bramford, NY, The Blackcoat’s Daughter focuses on classmates Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton), whose parents fail to show up to pick them up for a week’s vacation. While Kat is convinced that her parents are dead, Rose attempts to reassure her, but has problems of her own. Left alone in the school, with the sole exception of two nuns, bizarre things begin to happen, and it becomes apparent that the girls are not totally alone, the hallways stalked by something not quite human. Their story is intercut with Joan (Emma Roberts), a girl who arrives at a bus station in the dead of winter and is given a ride by Bill (James Remar) and his wife Linda (Lauren Holly) to Bramford.

The film cannily avoids revealing too much of its hand at once by constructing a three-pronged tale from varying perspectives, intercutting the experiences of Rose, Kat, and Joan without offering too much introduction or explanation. Just what is happening, and why, only becomes apparent with the piecing together of narratives and minor, apparently throwaway lines. Because of this, the initial half hour of the film might feel disjointed and directionless, but as it all begins to come together, you realize that there was indeed a method at work.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter has much in common with other films that involve devilish hauntings – and bears more than a passing resemblance, visually and thematically, to The Exorcist and The Witch. Yet it is also, fundamentally, about loneliness, and about the lengths to which people will go to escape from the isolation of their lives. The girls are isolated, physically and metaphorically. The inherent loneliness of their situation is rendered palpable by their surroundings, and the horrors that they face become almost inevitable in their enforced isolation – even the blankets on their beds look cold and inappropriate for the weather. The only source of real heat, and color, on the screen is the furnace in the school’s basement – a chilling symbol, in fact, as the significance of the furnace becomes clearer. The storytelling technique here meshes brilliantly with the stark, almost black and white cinematography (and, having lived through numerous Central NY winters, I can safely say that the depiction is pretty much spot-on).

The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a fascinating film, another excellent indie horror that frightens without relying on major jump scares or buckets of blood (there is blood, but it’s late in the day and it’s very effective). While it doesn’t quite live up to the multiple layers of A24’s similar production The Witch, The Blackcoat’s Daughter does bring an oblique terror all its own.

A Knock At The Door (Short) (2017)

A Knock at the Door (2017)

I am rapidly becoming more convinced that female writers, directors, and female-driven subjects will end up being a major force in the development of the horror genre. This has become increasingly apparent with a spate of fairly recent releases, as women carve out their niche is what has been a male-centric and dominated genre. At the NewFilmakers LA festival this month, female directors have taken a front seat with a showcase of films. One of these is the short A Knock at the Door, written and directed by Katrina Rennells and Wendie Weldon, and produced by Kelley Mack.

A Knock at the Door is an unsolved mystery of sorts, telling in its scant eight minutes the story of Nick (Drew Jenkins), who comes home one evening and hears a terrifying scream from next door. The next instant, Sara (Mack) knocks on his door with an explanation that Nick (and the viewer) doesn’t exactly buy.

A Knock at the Door has a twisted spirit that would serve it well as a full-length feature – in fact, its one major flaw is its length, which limits its story to the barest details and offers little exposition in what we see. Still, for its shortness, it manages to ramp up the tension very quickly, via quick cuts and disturbing sound cues played over otherwise innocuous moments. Like many contemporary horror films, A Knock at the Door creates a cyclical story based in a suburban setting, the threat being the people that surround you every day. Just what is happening to Nick – and why – is never fully elucidated, but the film doesn’t burden itself with attempting to offer explanations for the inexplicable. Nor does it rely on jump scares or gore to make its point; flashes of horror and subtle, unfinished moments are all it needs.

Nevertheless, I found myself wishing that this was a full length feature rather than a short. One would hope that Rennells, Weldon, et al will make further forays into full length horror films. What the film certainly reinforces is that female writers and directors are damn good at horror.

So, watch out for A Knock at the Door. There’s something very interesting going on here.

Mr. Sardonicus (1961)

Mr. Sardonicus (1961)

*now streaming on Shudder

Director William Castle stands shoulder to dubious shoulder with Roger Corman as one of the premiere makers of American B-horror. While Corman lavished his audience with Technicolor-soaked melodrama punctuated by the occasional bout of Grand Guignol violence, Castle went the gimmick route, creating B-pictures that sought to expand the movie-going experience by involving the audience directly. The most justifiably famous of these was The Tingler, in which Castle famously wired up the theater seats with buzzers to scare the audience. Castle’s 1961 schlock-horror masterpiece Mr. Sardonicus is arguably the better film, happily reveling in its ghoulish carnival of the grotesque, with the director himself as Ringmaster.

Mr. Sardonicus is based on Ray Russell’s story of the same name (and Russell himself wrote the screenplay). It tells the deliciously malevolent story of Sir Robert Cargrave (Ronald Lewis), a doctor summoned to the nation of Gorslava by his former lover Maude (Audrey Dalton) to help her mysterious husband, the Baron Sardonicus (Guy Rolfe). Sardonicus is the “victim” of a terrible affliction: while robbing his father’s grave to obtain a winning lottery ticket, he’s so horrified by the appearance of the corpse that his face becomes frozen in a hideous grin. He enlists the help of Sir Robert, an expert in the healing of paralyzed limbs, to restore his face. But Sardonicus is also a sadist, torturing his servants, abusing his wife, and doing unspeakable things to young women in his off-hours, and Sir Robert has some serious reservations about assisting him.

Mr. Sardonicus is just an excellent B-grade picture, totally indulgent of the nastiness it’s presenting on-screen without excuse, or even particularly strident morality. The good guys are not too good – Lewis’s performance as Cargrave is somewhere between concerned and totally done with everything – and Sardonicus’s tragic backstory at least gives some meat to his character. Oskar Homolka is particularly notable as Krull, Sardonicus’s faithful servant who carries out some of his less palatable orders with a twisted glee.

Castle’s films are always heavy-handed, more like carnival rides than actual films, but Mr. Sardonicus moves beyond some of his more gimmicky work. The grotesqueries and “shock” moments are fully integrated into the main story, rather than acting as extraneous gimmicks. The most disgusting and enjoyable of these are the prosthetics used for Sardonicus’s smile, which are actually quite good for this period of film history. Russell’s story – already a masterwork of grotesque horror – translates brilliantly to the screen, and even manages to fill in some glaring plot-holes that might otherwise have remained open.

Superintending everything is Castle, who appears on-screen at the beginning and nearing the end of the film to remind the audience that we’re all here to watch terrible things happen to terrible people. His gimmick this time is giving the audience the option of voting on the ending – one in which Sardonicus is punished, and one in which he’s given mercy – by providing cards with a thumbs up or thumbs down on them. The transformation of the cinema to the site of participatory, gladiator-style theater has to be seen to be believed.

Mr. Sardonicus has a mean streak a mile wide, and asks you to participate in every wondrous moment of it. The more I watch of Castle’s films, the more I realize that he was one of cinema’s finest Ringmasters, fulfilling the audience’s penchant for murder and mayhem by getting them involved in the proceedings. There’s a weird pleasure to be derived from his films, something on the order of being escorted through a house of horrors by a guide who enjoys the wax figures and flying skeletons even more than his audience.

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Prevenge (2016)

Prevenge (2016)

*soon to be streaming on Shudder

prevenge_01

There’s nothing weirder, or more terrifying, than taking the innocence of the child and imbuing it with a secret malevolence concealed behind an angelic face. Within the evil child subgenre of horror, the mother is typically the victim, the most obvious target for the child’s hatred. Alice Lowe’s bizarrely delightful horror comedy Prevenge takes those tropes and warps them even further to create a bloody, hilarious, and moving story that asks the question: what if your unborn baby was a serial murderer?

Writer/director Lowe is Ruth, a very pregnant young woman in Cardiff who becomes convinced that her unborn daughter is impelling her to commit murder. As Ruth and her massive belly cut a bloody swath through the night, the mystery of her vengeance is gradually revealed through flashbacks and personal discussions between Ruth and her daughter. The murders are suitably gruesome without being overkill, while Ruth’s motivation for the killings becomes complicated by the fact that none of her victims are particularly sympathetic people.

Lowe is an entertaining screen presence with a wry sense of humor, punctuating her horror film with comedic moments that cut through the violence. She likewise imbues the undeniably comedic aspects of the film with a very palpable sense of anger and loss. Like The Babadook (another film about sympathetic female monstrosity and motherhood), Prevenge treats grief as a physical presence that manifests itself through acts of horrific violence. But the film is further complicated by the questionable nature of Ruth’s sanity – is her unborn child really a monster, or is her pregnancy and its undercurrent of grief warping her mind?

The difference between Prevenge and a similar pregnancy horror film like Rosemary’s Baby is that the mother is herself not a victim – she finds outlet for her fury through her pregnancy, refusing to be subject to the assumptions and controls of the rest of society. It’s hard to feel sorry for most of those subjected to Ruth’s wrath, representative as they are of selfishness, misogyny, and complacency. Ruth’s pregnancy represents both her monstrosity and her strength; she possesses the social stigma and monstrosity that transforms a woman’s body into a vessel “controlled” by the unborn child. While Western society is accustomed to treating pregnant women as both the sublime form of human nature and the ultimate Other, Ruth takes over her Otherness, using it to enact revenge on those who (in her perception) have wronged her.

Prevenge has few weaknesses. It’s well-paced, building up the tension between Ruth’s acts of violence by interspersing visits to the doctor to monitor her pregnancy, and her conversations with the very angry child inside of her. Giving voice to the baby makes it more palpably real, deepening the question of whether Ruth is acting out her own revenge fantasy or the fury of the child that has been deprived even before it was born. That voice also contributes to the comedic nature of the film, refusing to plunge too deeply into elements of horror, grief, or anger, as Ruth argues with a tiny childish voice inside of her about the morality of cutting off a man’s balls.

The female body and female emotions have so typically been the site of monstrosity in horror films that women began to suppress the notion that our hormones and our physical presence in any way distinguished us from maleness. PMS, postpartum depression, the alterations in hormones that comes with pregnancy, the pain of having a period – all suppressed in the belief that to be female was, in essence, to be an Other, to be something unknown and frightening. In evil child films, to be a mother is to be a victim, and in some ways a deserving one – the mother is the conduit for unnatural evil, the one who brought the evil into the world and is thus destroyed by it. It is the role of the father, or of the masculine society, to control that evil, condemn it, and banish it, usually at the expense of mother and child alike. Femininity is uncontrollable emotions writ large, and as such must be suppressed and controlled by the more rational masculine forces.

Prevenge eliminates the father, the patriarchal, and embraces Otherness, the perceived monstrosity of women, and of pregnant women especially. What’s more, it does so from a sympathetic, feminine perspective, emphasizing the cohesion between mother and child, the reality of female anger and the need to express it, or to destroy the world in the attempt. In horror, women typically have a choice between being the victim or the monster. We’ve chosen the monster.

Prevenge will stream on Shudder on March 24.

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