Tag: bloody october

The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974)

The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974)

Giallo horror tends to run the gamut from artistic to exploitative, and often just combines the two into an unholy union that is at once profoundly uncomfortable and deeply enjoyable. One of the stranger works in the wide range of giallo films is The Perfume of the Lady in Black (the greatest title ever), from director Francisco Barilli, starring Mimsy Farmer as a perfumier in Rome who begins to hallucinate (or does she?) images from her childhood that center around a lady in black.

Farmer is Silvia, a talented chemist who enjoys making perfume, going out with her boyfriend Roberto (Maurizio Bonuglio), and hanging out with his friends, including a professor (Jho Jenkins) with an interest in black magic and the occult. But things begin to get weird when she smells a new perfume and begins to hallucinate a woman, all dressed in black. As the hallucinations get more intense, recalling Silvia’s childhood, her deceased father, and her mother’s old lover, she also begins to believe that she’s being stalked by men in dark trench coats. At the behest of her friend Francesca (Donna Jordan), Silvia goes to a blind psychic, who brings up even more past memories, inspiring another flood of hallucinations. What’s real and what’s Silvia’s psychosis become more and more intertwined, exacerbated by the machinations of her strange neighbor, and the mysterious people who may or may not be following her.

Like many giallo horrors, the focus is more on the aesthetic than the actual plot, which telegraphs the solution to its mystery so clearly that it almost isn’t necessary. The garish seventies’ colors and weird character quirks – like a continuous emphasis on hippos that is just confounding – make for the entertainment value here. Rooms painted bright blue, yellow dresses that are just too yellow, pinks that conflict with purples, haunting music that dogs Silvia’s steps—these are the trappings of the weird. There are the usual elements of the occult and psychosis, as Silvia’s belief that she’s being bewitched co-mingles with her hallucinations, which are either repressed memories, are realities being perpetrated against her by some unknown assailant, or are the result of something more supernatural. What’s unnerving about the film is how difficult it is to completely understand what’s going on, or why. The ending is at once predictable and utterly shocking, and I doubt that a rewatch would be able to place it in proper context. It doesn’t make sense, which is half the fun.

In some ways, though, The Perfume of the Lady in Black needed to be more extreme, to indulge its tendencies to excess rather than attempt to tell a coherent story. What sets films by Bava, Argento, or Fulci off is the willingness to go all in on the aesthetics and overwhelm the viewer with imagery such that we almost forget there is a plot. This film doesn’t go far enough—there’s actually very little violence, and the most violent scene (of an attempted rape) comes off as too serious to be particularly enjoyable. The overlapping of reality and psychological horror is well done, but it could be emphasized more. I wanted more hallucinatory images in a film about hallucinations.

The Perfume of the Lady in Black is available to stream on Amazon Prime.

Child’s Play (1988)

Child’s Play (1988)

childs-play

Every year for my Halloween viewing, I attempt to fill some gaps in my horror knowledge. Is there a horror classic I have not seen? Is there an essential film I’ve avoided? I generally have a problem with horror franchises, often because the first film is often not the best and could easily be ignored, but I’m a completist and must watch it. Which is how I came so late to Child’s Play, Don Mancini and Tom Holland’s introduction to the Chucky franchise, about a doll possessed by the spirit of a serial killer.

Child’s Play opens with the death of Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif), a serial killer and black magic aficionado working on the South Side of Chicago. After being shot by police officer Mike Norris (Chris Sarandon), Ray survives just long enough to perform a ritual and commit his soul to a “Good Guy” doll. Not long after, Karen Barclay (Catherine Hicks), buys the doll as a birthday for her son Andy (Alex Vincent), who is obsessed with the Good Guy television show. Andy becomes convinced that “Chucky” is talking to him and, eventually, that Chucky is actually doing bad things, like committing pushing babysitters out windows. As the bodies pile up, Karen and Detective Norris must discover just what is going on, whether Andy has lost his mind or if Chucky really is responsible for the mayhem.

Like many slashers of the same type, Chucky the character has become better known than the film that spawned him, thanks to the development of the tongue-in-cheek humor only nascent in the original. But Child’s Play is good fun for what it is, thanks largely to the malevolent humor of Brad Dourif (vocally, at least) in the lead. The audience knows that Chucky is evil, but there’s a degree of glee to be had in watching what’s basically a Cabbage Patch doll run amok with a butcher knife, scrambling in and out of windows, threatening small children, attacking and biting grown men. There’s less blood here than one might expect, and the film does better with its tension up to Chucky’s attacks, which become overly comedic once they happen.

Child’s Play exploits a number of quintessential 80s horror tropes, setting itself in the slums and upper middle class neighborhoods of Chicago, playing with Western configurations of voodoo and Satanism, and wrapping it all up in a different kind of villain to undercut the whole idea of an “evil child” so popular in the 70s and 80s. Andy is an initially annoying little boy who becomes more sympathetic as the film goes on – he knows that Chucky is bad, but no one will believe that his doll is a walking, talking monster. Catherine Hicks and Chris Sarandon are likable as the adult leads facing a very bizarre and inherently funny situation. The scene where Chucky finally convinces Detective Norris that Andy’s not making it up is a combination of terrifying and hilarious, not least because it’s a grown man fighting off a child’s toy who keeps trying to stab him.

If Child’s Play is still very much a product of its time – this was the era when people were literally stomping each other to get Cabbage Patch Kids – it’s an enjoyable product of its time. Chucky will return again and again, most recently in Cult of Chucky, to wreak havoc on unsuspecting victims who would never believe that a little doll could be so nasty. And for that, we have Child’s Play to thank.

Pet Sematary (1989)

Pet Sematary (1989)

I have a contentious relationship with Stephen King. I enjoy his plots, and often the films based on his books, but his novels themselves tend to go just a little too far for me, shifting from pleasurable horror to uncomfortable sadism sometime in the final quarter. But there’s no doubt that King crafts some indelible narratives that get right to the core of fear, and this is thanks, in part, to the films based on his books. Pet Sematary was actually the first King book I read (and permanently fucked up my ability to spell “cemetery”) so I turned to Mary Lambert’s 1989 film version, scripted by King himself, to remind me of my childhood fears.

Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby are Louis and Rachel Creed, recently arrived in a little Maine town with their children, Ellie (Blaze Berdahl) and Gage (Miko Hughes), to start anew. Their house is idyllic, even if it is on a road with a number of fast trucks, and even if it does have a creepy burial ground for pets in the woods beyond. When Ellie’s beloved cat Church is struck by a truck, their neighbor Jud (Fred Gwynne) kindly takes Louis beyond the Pet Sematary and onto an ancient burial site to bury the cat. Church comes back to life, but he’s not the same cat he once was, and Louis’s exposure to resurrecting the dead will eventually have dire repercussions for the family.

Pet Sematary is very much about the nature of grief and the lengths to which people will go to avoid the realities of death. Jud’s initial offer to Louis to help with Church is well-intentioned—he doesn’t think that Ellie should have to be exposed to death at such a young age. But of course, it’s a bad idea. Church isn’t Church anymore, and Ellie is troubled by the cat as a result of her father’s unwillingness to explain loss to her. This becomes more problematic as the film goes on – Jud tells about the things that happened when people are buried in the burial site, and speaks the (now classic) line that “sometimes, dead is better.” The narrative problem with the film is the same as the narrative problem of the book – how to render grief so convincing that it actually makes sense for someone to behave in such a fundamentally stupid manner and unleash all the horror that he does. The book mostly gets this right, but the film stumbles a little, due mostly to the performance of Dale Midkiff, in establishing a convincing tone.

Pet Sematary is a very 80s film, with a very 80s aesthetic. The music – including the Ramones! – pulses to the beat of the narrative, and there are moments of extreme hokeyness that all but undercut the dour, serious nature of the story. But those hokey moments, and even a few jokes, also help to lighten what could be a depressing slog. This is a story about grief and death and darkness, so there needs to be a few moments of levity, dark humor though it may be. Lambert deftly combines the story with grotesque imagery and hallucinatory violence that becomes an approximate visual rendering of King’s often fantastical creations. The story of Rachel’s sister Zelda, her first encounter with death as a young girl, is suitably terrifying, as is the creepy, mocking voice of Gage nearing the end of the film.

The standout star here is Fred Gwynne, whose turn as the possibly malevolent neighbor Jud keeps the film on an even keel, evading either dipping into campiness or into self-serious horror. There’s just something inherently creepy about Gwynne’s thick Maine accent, as though he’s doing a good impression of Kate Hepburn. He mostly plays it straight, but there’s a hint of sinister glee in his performance, especially as the film begins to draw to a close. He’s earnest and likable and just a bit frightening, and that makes all the difference.

Pet Sematary may not have aged well – it’s stuck in its time period, and the practical effects are occasionally unconvincing. But it’s still a nice piece of 80s nostalgia, ably directed and a more than adequate adaptation of King’s work.

The House of the Devil (2009)

The House of the Devil (2009)

The 80s are a favorite period for many horror fans, producing as they did films as diverse and disturbing as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, Child’s Play, and a whole range of brutal slasher films that indulged backlash male fears and, occasionally, a few feminist ones as well. The contemporary horror fan’s obsession with the 80s has some darkness to it as well, given the obsession with weaponized maniacs murdering bare-breasted women and prizing the Final Girl as the ultimate virginal fantasy. But there are times when 80s nostalgia produces something really unique, as is the case with Ti West’s The House of the Devil, a deliberate throwback to the decade that immerses its viewer in the chills and thrills of slow-burn violence.

Jocelin Donahue is Samantha, a sophomore at an upstate college who longs to move into a proper apartment. When she spots a flyer asking for a babysitter, she answers it, and heads out to a lonely house far from campus on the night of a full lunar eclipse. There she meets Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan) and his wife (Mary Woronov), and learns that there are no children to look after – the couple just want someone to stay in the house for the evening in order to keep an eye on Mr. Ulman’s mother, a bed-bound old woman asleep upstairs. The whole setup is a bit creepy, but Samantha needs the money and agrees.

We all know where this is going, but The House of the Devil takes its sweet time in getting there. The opening act leading up to the arrival at the house takes up a good bit of runtime, but somehow the slow burn isn’t boring. This is a leisurely film that knows how to develop the tension, rather than getting straight to the violence. And that’s the film’s strength – rather than rushing into what’s ultimately a sparse and somewhat predictable narrative, there’s an inherent enjoyment of the development of the fear, as the audience waits for the killer, the cult, the ghost, or goblin to come into frame. Some viewers who demand more gore and less tension might find it dull, but the time that West takes to develop his story is time well-spent. There are momentary bursts of violence separated by long sections of Samantha ordering pizza, turning on the TV, investigating weird noises coming from the upstairs. As the narrative unfolds at its own pace, the viewer can only sit back and watch, secure in the knowledge that something is going to happen, held in thrall by not knowing when.

Donahue is a big part of what makes The House of the Devil work. She’s a throwback to the Final Girls of the 1980s, recalling Jamie Lee Curtis or Dee Wallace (who has a bit part as a landlady at the beginning of the film), innocent without being weak or even particularly naïve. Although the situation is creepy, the film takes care to develop reasons for staying at the house that are believable and that therefore don’t prompt the audience to dismiss her as stupid, or the film for concocting excuses to get to the scary bits. Given that Donahue has to spend most of her onscreen time alone, it’s a testament to her presence that The House of the Devil never bores, and that the audience can care about her character fairly quickly.

The House of the Devil won’t be for everyone. It’s very much an 80s film, even if made in 2009, with a self-seriousness that avoids any hint of the campy. As such, as it’s incredibly loving film, a movie that feels like an homage without attempting to be more knowing than the films it references, that tries and largely succeeds in approximating one of horror’s most famous periods. But it’s still slow, more interested in the creation of tension than in giving the viewer blood and guts. It works, thanks in no small measure to West’s use of old-school aesthetics in the creation of the house itself, and the occasional hints of what is actually going on just enough to the audience on their toes.

The House of the Devil is available to stream on Shudder.

The Devils (1971)

The Devils (1971)

Ken Russell’s The Devils is almost more notorious for its release history than it is for the film itself. It was rated X due to its violence and sexual content, banned in several countries, and never has seen a totally uncut release in any format. The rumors of its violence and sexuality seem to be more intense than the actual violence and sexuality contained in the film, especially exacerbated by the fact that it mostly involves priests and nuns and is photographed in the grotesque style that Russell became so well-known for. But beneath the controversy is a sharp, vicious commentary on religious and political fervor, a challenge to censorship and to the controls placed on sexuality by the powers that be, and an impassioned, introspective, and occasionally satirical investigation of the religious philosophy of the time period.

The film opens in Loudon, France, during the reign of Louis XIII, where Father Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed) has more or less taken over political control of the town following the death of its governor. Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) and Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) have agreed to begin destroying the fortifications of cities across France, ostensibly in an effort to prevent Protestant uprisings. Loudon is one of the last cities still standing with its fortifications, upheld by the power and popularity of Grandier. But Grandier has already fallen afoul of the local magistrate after impregnating Phillippe (Georgina Hale), the magistrate’s daughter, then abandoning her for the love of Madeleine (Gemma Jones). Meanwhile, in a nearby convent of Ursuline nuns, the abbess Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave) develops such lust for Grandier that she falls into jealousy when she learns he’s having a relationship with Madeleine. After Grandier declines to become the convent’s confessor, Sister Jeanne accuses the priest of demoniacally possessing her. When the rest of the nuns begin to fall prey to possession, the political and religious authorities unite to destroy Grandier.

As with pretty much any Ken Russell movie, the synopsis does not do justice to the combination of batshit insanity and vicious satire at the heart of this film. Russell’s imagery is mash of surrealism and anachronism, uniting a 1970s aesthetic of extremity with the undoubtedly bizarre nature of 17th Century France. But underneath it is a fascination with the forces, external and internal, centered on sexual expression and the repression of religion. The nuns are gripped by religious fervor and frustrated sexuality that erupts in mass hysteria after Sister Jeanne accuses Grandier of possessing them. The eruption feels less like women being crazy and more like a society that strictly controls sexual desire and expression finally breaking down under the weight of undirected sexual energy. The accusations of possession free the nuns from their repression and they are suddenly able to express all suppressed yearnings with the justification of demoniac possession. Orgies, nudity, perversion, fetishization, and the breakdown of the social order are the result of repressed needs, now deformed by strict religious and social requirements.

In the midst of the madness is an intelligent discussion about the nature of sex, desire, and religiosity. Grandier is far from innocent—he has impregnated one young woman and goes through a marriage ceremony with another—but he is no hypocrite. He claims that he is searching for God and meaning within his relationships to women, and there is a refreshing honesty in his behavior that bespeaks his kindness and his willingness to acknowledge himself as an imperfect sinner. But he also has that ability because he is a man and a priest allowed to exist in the outside world, not a cloistered nun or an aristocratic woman who must ultimately either deny sexuality, or pay the price for lust. Grandier’s tragedy is a fait accompli—he has come into conflict with Richelieu for standing up against the destruction of the walls of Loudon; he has defied both political and religious authority and shown himself to be too powerful for the powers that be. His destruction is necessary, and the Church uses the rapture of the nuns to justify it.

The Devils is often billed as a horror film, and there are certainly horrific elements to it, with a vague hint of the supernatural and more than a vague use of religious violence to achieve political ends. Russell’s style in itself gives the film a nightmarish quality, a sense that we are watching things that are larger, wilder than real life. All the actors are used brilliantly, but Reed and Redgrave display their considerable talents to the extreme. Redgrave finds sympathy and pathos in a nun warped by her society and her religion; Reed runs the gamut of emotions, but it is in Grandier’s quietest and most introspective moments that he finds the greatest depth and meaning. For all its notoriety, The Devils is an oddly serious and introspective film, grappling with deeper theological concepts than it is perhaps given credit for, in the midst of its apparent madness.

The Devils is available to stream on FilmStruck.

Hell House LLC (2015)

Hell House LLC (2015)

Found footage is a difficult subgenre to do right – at its best, it brings the viewer into a personal relationship with the horror, but when it’s bad, it becomes as boring and predictable as watching someone else’s home movies. Paranormal Activity, Ghostwatch, The Blair Witch Project, The Curse…these succeed in part because they establish a convincing framing narrative that (mostly) explains the constant presence of cameras, even past the point where most sane people would put them down. Contemporary filmmaking is even better suited to found footage horror than previous generations, given the ubiquity of smart phone cameras, CCTV, and automatic video uploads to YouTube and Facebook. But because viewers are more likely to question what a film shows them as “truth,” it’s a real pleasure to come across Hell House LLC, an entry into the found footage genre that does a great job at bringing the scares.

Hell House LLC tells the story of a group of New Yorkers who leave the city to head upstate (well, Rockland County) to create a haunted house venue at an abandoned hotel in Abaddon, New York. The framing narrative here involves a documentary film crew investigating what happened at the “Hell House” venue, when several tourists and workers were killed during the first tour of the Halloween season. The events are shrouded in mystery – the town, the police, and the officials won’t talk about what happened, and only one journalist actually got inside the hotel after the deaths. When Sara, one of the creators of Hell House, contacts the documentarians to tell her side of the story, she offers  footage taken by Hell House’s cameraman Paul, who documented the construction of Hell House for use on their website. This footage makes up the bulk of the narrative, only occasionally switching back to interviews with journalists, officials, and Sara herself.

The cleverness of the framing narrative goes beyond the documentary crew—early on, the viewer is shown a YouTube video uploaded by one of the tourists that documents the sudden breakdown of the Hell House tour. The later Hell House footage provides a lead up to the video, overlapping and then explaining, at least in part, what we see on the screen. The result constructs a visual mystery – how do we get from this abandoned hotel to the Hell House seen at the start? Who is going to survive? – that the film very gradually reveals. The film mostly avoids the use of the shaky camera as a mode of transferring horror or confusion to the viewer. While there are the usual tropes of heavy breathing, night-vision modes, and the camera being manipulated, dropped, and angled away from the horror, these are kept to a minimum prior to the denouement.

The most effective section of Hell House LLC is the simultaneous construction of the friendships among the crew, and the slow ramping up of tension that finally snaps during the final night. Alex, the founder of the Hell House concept, insists on carrying on in the haunted house construction, even when it becomes clear that there is something terribly wrong at the hotel. The film overlaps the “fake” scares of the haunted house with the “real” figures of the hotel, mixing together dummies, flashing lights, creepy noises, and the actual spirits that inhabit the hotel. It becomes difficult for either the viewer or the people within the film to decide what is a fake scare constructed for the haunted house and what is a “real” ghost. This also provides a meta-narrational commentary on the film itself – we are watching a fake documentary about the fake creation of a haunted house venue in a fake hotel, which asks the question about what the “real” scares are, and what are just the “fake” ones created by the characters. The effectiveness of the film depends on the viewer not always being certain what is really scary and what isn’t…or what’s supposed to be. It’s a smart little quirk thrown into the found footage concept, and for the most part works very well.

Hell House LLC also offers a very basic background on the haunting of the hotel and why the events of the evening have been concealed, giving just enough information to explain and tantalize, but not enough for the revelations of the hotel’s background to become silly. It’s an intelligent move—rather than attempting to offer clear explanations for the events, the film lets the footage do the exposition for itself, making excellent use of vague figures in the background, strange noises in the night, and one haunting piano riff that the viewer will hear in their nightmares.

Hell House LLC is part of a projected trilogy of films set in the Abaddon Hotel (more on that later in the month), and so sets itself up for a sequel while also rounding off the narrative within an hour and a half. While not all of its scares work perfectly, it’s a damn fine piece of found footage horror. It also has a creepy clown that puts Pennywise to shame

Hell House LLC is available to stream on Shudder.

Bloody October: The Invitation (2015)

The Invitation (2015)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the future of horror is female. And nothing proves that so perfectly as Karyn Kusama’s 2015 slow-burn horror masterpiece The Invitation (which, by the way, is available to stream on Netflix, for your Halloween fix).

Will (Logan Marshall-Green) is heading to the Hollywood Hills with his girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) to attend a dinner party thrown by his ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and her new husband David (Michiel Huisman). When they arrive at the home that Will and Eden used to share, Will is immediately struck by the strange shifts in personality of Eden and David. He’s even more troubled at the absence of their good friend Choi, who was supposed to be there early, and the arrival of Pruitt (John Carroll Lynch), a friend of David and Eden’s that they met at a retreat in New Mexico. The party gets underway among a small group of old pals, with seething tensions building ever higher as Will begins to suspect that all is not well in the Hills.

The Invitation builds ever-so-slowly to one of the most satisfying horror climaxes in recent years, ramping up the tension on each plot thread until they threaten to snap. This is one of those films that is made or broken by its ending, and thankfully The Invitation delivers, hitting the viewer very hard and suddenly and letting the terror just flow like wine. But it doesn’t go on for too long, providing just enough mayhem to justify its build-up, but not so much as to drag things out. I think that putting too much emphasis on the slow-burn nature of this film does it some disservice, as the dread is very real right from the start, when Will hits a coyote with his car and has to finish it off with a tire iron. Will’s paranoia pushes the film into the territory of questionable perception, which allows for a brilliant shifting of viewer sympathies. Something is certainly wrong, but is it Will, his friends, or something else altogether?

Much of The Invitation‘s power lies in the focalizing through Will and the use of the camera eye that just barely captures things going on at the peripheries of the scene – a car pulling away just out of sight and then stopping, a red lantern being hung in a tree. As Will flashes back to the traumatic event that caused his break-up with Eden, his trauma informs what happens around him, keeping the viewer off kilter. The horror, when it hits, is believable and shocking, but the entire film has prepared us for this moment, drawing out a weird kind of fear in the act of simply eating dinner, or pouring a glass of wine. Kusama has a deft hand and eye, giving us just enough to keep us interested, but not so much that we can figure out all the angles before things go horribly wrong.

Of all the scary movies I’ve seen this Halloween season, The Invitation is by far the most unnerving, because it is also the most believable. It’s that terror of the mundane, the little things that seem just slightly off, the stories that remain half told, that give it its power.

Bloody October: Grabbers (2012)

Grabbers (2012)

After reading way too much about Harvey Weinstein, I decided that I needed to see a movie about a different kind of eldritch monster from the depths of the ocean. So I popped on Grabbers, about a little Irish town menaced by octopean monstrosities with a way better weakness than those water-hating aliens in Signs.

Grabbers introduces us to a sweet little village on a remote island off the coast of Ireland. It’s home to exactly two police officers: Ciaran O’Shea (Richard Coyle) and the newly arrived Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley). He’s an alcoholic, she’s a workaholic, and so romance will of course be in the offing. When hundred of sea creatures wash up on the beach, the Garda get involved to figure out just what the hell is happening just in time for people to begin vanishing left and right. Meanwhile, one of the many local drunks Paddy (Lalor Roddy) traps an ugly sea monster and takes it home. Dubbing it a “grabber” after it tries to eat him, he carts the creature off to the local biologist, Dr. Smith (Russell Tovey), who proclaims that it’s not quite of this world. But Paddy has discovered the creature’s weakness: it lives on blood, and Paddy’s blood alcohol level was so high when it attacked him that he literally poisoned the thing. The only solution to surviving the creatures, then, is to get roaring drunk.

Grabbers is just an incredibly fun, incredibly Irish little monster movie, with some effective monstrosities to cut through the comedy, and a massive drink-up at the film’s center. The conceit is amusing, of course, and the film carries it off well, building to the revelations of the monsters and how to defeat them with deprecating humor and a charming self-awareness. There are a few plot holes, but that’s all right – I don’t really watch monster movies for the story structure. The romance angle is sweet as well, with a hilarious scene in which a very drunk Lisa explains O’Shea’s life story to him. Grabbers also posits the question of how roaring drunk people can possibly fight vicious aliens, and does so in some hilarious (and gruesome) ways.

I’ve seen very few humorous Halloween movies this year, which is always a mistake. Grabbers was a wonderful distraction from the occasional darkness of the holiday, a reminder that tales of terror need not be soul-crushing. Sit down, have a pint, and prepare to wrestle the tentacled nasties until final call.

Grabbers is available to stream on Shudder.

Bloody October: Inferno (1980)

Inferno (1980)

By now, at least some of you will be aware that I’m a nascent fan of Italian giallo. While my experience of it is not massive, my adoration at least for Bava and Argento is real and passionate. So of course I could not let an October pass by without getting at least one more Argento film under my belt. This time it’s Inferno, a quasi-sequel to Suspiria that takes that film’s nightmarish quality and tries to raise it by half.

Inferno involves musicologist Mark (Leigh McCloskey), a student in Rome who heads to New York City when his sister Rose (Irene Miracle) mysteriously vanishes from her haunted apartment building. Rose had recently grown obsessed with a book called The Three Mothers that she obtained from the antiques dealer next door – a book that supposedly reveals the locations of three forces of evil, who live in Rome, Freiburg, and New York, in houses built for them by the architect Varelli. Mark attempts to solve the riddle of the three, and find out what has become of his sister.

This being an Argento film, the plot is simple but the film itself is complex and full of plot holes – some of which the director doesn’t really care about filling. What he does care about, and what this film has in spades, is stylish murder, bizarre music, and freaky set-pieces that combine art house aesthetics with exploitation film structure. No one quite put these elements together like Argento did, and if Inferno doesn’t hit the high points of Suspiria, it comes dangerously close.

Murders there are a-plenty, though Inferno, like its sister film, does take its time in setting up the suspense and horror before actually getting down to the bright red blood and terrifying acts of violence. It aspires to the same fever dream aesthetics as Suspiria, featuring art deco apartments within Gothic settings, reds, blues, and yellows vibrant against inky blacks. Much can be written, and probably has been, about the juxtaposition of confusing plotting, art house aesthetics, and brutal murders within Argento’s oeuvre, and Inferno is an excellent example of the combination of the schlocky, the extreme, and the brilliantly artistic that so characterizes his films. The murders, when they come, are horrible artistic acts, with grasping hands, knives slicing through throats, and one epically disturbing death involving rats.

Inferno doesn’t quite live up to Suspiria, though, as it lacks the latter film’s malevolent energy and sense of claustrophobia. Inferno could have done with keeping its focus on that apartment building, constructing the suspense from that, rather than the somewhat haphazard jumping between locations. The movement between New York and Rome gets confusing – as do the reasons behind the killings – and the film only really gains momentum when it embeds our hero (and several heroines) in their apartments and labyrinthine corridors, stalked by an apparently supernatural killer. Yet some of its set-pieces – like an underwater sequence that leaves you breathless – are brilliant and audacious, even if they feel ultimately nonsensical.

Of course, the point of an Argento film is never to make sense. In his best work, he achieves a dream logic that falls apart if interrogated too closely. He constructs art house nightmares, terrifying without quite putting a label on why. It’s always hard to find precise logic in an Argento film, and futile to try with Inferno. Just let the horrors wash over you.

Bloody October: Burn, Witch, Burn (1962)

Burn, Witch, Burn (1962)

In the pantheon of witch movies, I was surprised that I hadn’t ever heard of Burn, Witch, Burn, a sharp-edged little Gothic film from 1962, directed by Stanley Hayers from a script by Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson (!). The film has plenty of B-grade bonafides, but it’s not a B-grade film – and features Peter Wyngarde in perhaps his least scene-chewing performance ever.

Wyngarde is Norman Taylor, a psychology professor at an unspecified British university who specializes in superstitions and belief systems. He’s recently returned from Jamaica with his wife Tansy (Janet Blair) and up for a major promotion at the university. Norman is intensely rationalistic, however, claiming that superstition is a matter of belief and not reality – in order for witchcraft to work, you have to believe it will work. This comes into conflict when he discovers that Tansy is a practitioner of “conjure magic,” which she learned in Jamaica. She’s been leaving talismans about the house with the hope of influencing events and protecting herself and her husband. Furious, Norman makes Tansy burn all of the talismans, and unsurprisingly, things start to go horribly wrong.

I went into Burn, Witch, Burn expecting a schlocky witch movie, and I got something far more interesting (though still schlocky). Yes, the usual questions of belief vs. rationality are still there, but the main focus of the film is actually the depth of Tansy’s love for Norman, and vice versa, which leads to her sacrificing her superstition and him, eventually, his rationality. Female intuition and superstition comes into conflict with male “logic,” and the logic begins to break down very quickly. Norman’s logic begins to pale in comparison to Tansy’s beliefs – and whether they are simply psychological games she plays or whether they are true spells begins not to matter. There’s a marvelous showdown nearing the end of the film where Norman’s own beliefs are challenged, one after the other, as he fights to preserve Tansy’s life.

But Burn, Witch, Burn is also gorgeously photographed, calling to mind the more polished Gothic horrors of the same period, such as The Innocents and The Haunting. Hayers has a good eye, making use of the canted angles and deep focus shots, combined with real locations, that make the Gothic real and physically disconcerting. The camera eye melds the concepts of reality and belief, as the viewer begins to see what Tansy and Norman see, drawing into question the existence of the supernatural and rendering it tangible. That notion is disconcerting and Burn, Witch, Burn makes excellent use of it not only through the overt thematics of plot and dialogue, but through the camera eye itself.

All of that being said, Burn, Witch, Burn, as its title suggests, isn’t exactly a nuanced work of horror. Wyngarde is known for his ham acting, and while he’s more subdued here than in practically anything else, there’s still a hefty serving of bacon. But he’s matched in madness by his co-stars – Janet Blair and Judith Scott, in a bit part, especially. Because the plot is just this side of campy, the overacting is easily forgiven, though the wild-eyed shrieking of some characters nearing the end becomes just a bit wearing.

While it never reaches the heights of similarly themed films from the same period, Burn, Witch, Burn does merit more than a cursory glance. The 1960s marked new interest in witchcraft not just as a force of evil, but as a multi-faceted form of magic and belief just as complex, in its own way, as any major religion. While the moralism isn’t lost here, it is beginning to wobble. Witches aren’t for burning any more.