Category / Horror

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Genova (2008)

Videovista has my review of Michael Winterbottom’s Genova.

I was not entirely convinced by the film and I thought its ending was a real betrayal of the film’s otherwise interesting concept (family drifts apart after death of mother).  It was interesting to watch and write about the film immediately after Pialat’s Nous Ne Vieillirons Pas Ensemble as I think Pialat and Winterbottom depict their relationships in ways that are diametrically opposed : Pialat gives us the spectacular views in a mundane setting while Winterbottom gives us the trips to the supermarket in an exotic and alienating landscape.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Orphan (2009)

I went to see Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan over the weekend and found it to be a huge amount of fun.  Firstly, because it has a script that is properly character-based and secondly, because it reminds me enormously of an old favourite : Curtis Hanson’s The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992).

THE ZONE has my review.

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by Jonathan M

Art House to Slaughter House – The Evolution of the French Horror Film

Videovista also have my extended essay on the history of French Horror film.  Ostensibly a “10 Best…” list, I tried to explain how the current wave of French Horror films draw upon cinematical antecedents ranging from the gothic and exploitation to the properly art house.  I have been slowly working on this for a couple of months but it is only in the last week or so that I managed to fashion a proper historical narative.  Worth taking a look at if you’re interested in my views on films such as :

  • The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)
  • Spirits of the Dead (1968)
  • Female Vampire (1973)
  • Les Diaboliques (1955)
  • The Tenant (1976)
  • Eyes without a Face (1960)
  • Switchblade Romance (2003)
  • Them (2006)
  • Inside (2007)
  • Martyrs (2008)
by Jonathan M

von Trier’s Antichrist – Context

This weekend, I saw what I think is possibly the film of the year.  Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) is a triumph of style, content, and artistic politics.  It is such a complex and subtle film that I feel that I need more than one post to do it justice and so, this is the first in a series of posts about Antichrist.  The first intalment is about the correct way to approach the film as a work of art.

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by Jonathan M

Blood Of The Beasts (1949) – Humanity’s Capacity to Dream

Georges Franju’s background was in theatrical set design.  As a set designer, he would have learned to create atmosphere through the use of subtle visual queues but he would also have learned that every scene and every shot are a world of their own.  Properly conceived, a single shot can convey as much information as an entire page of dialogue.  Where the camera focuses, when people enter, where objects stand and how they are lit are not merely aesthetic variables, they are to cinema what words are to poetry and literature.  As such, it is perhaps fitting that Ruthless Culture’s first look at a work of Franju should be a short film that is practically silent; His 1949 short film about Parisian slaughterhouses Blood of the Beasts.

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by Jonathan M

My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002) – The Revenger’s Futility

My Work is Not Yet Done is a novella published alongside two other stories.  It is, to this date, the longest work of fiction produced by Thomas Ligotti.  It is also a deeply vexing work.  While the book is occasionally brilliant and incredibly twisted, it is also a deeply taciturn book that is forever seeking to wrong-foot its readers with a series of shifts in tone, style and even genre.  The book’s ultimate target is work (that most inhuman and universal form of slavery) but I would argue that the book’s shifts in tone and sympathies also suggest a desire to deny its audience the vicarious catharsis that generally comes with a good story of revenge.  It is this aspect of the story I want to discuss here.

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by Jonathan M

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) – The Unwanted Guest

There is no greater testament to the evolving nature of genre than the Vampire.  Once upon a time, the vampire was the poster boy of the gothic romance.  He stood for the dark side of the Victorian heart; The swarthy foreigner whose powers of evil and sensuality lured upstanding Victorian women to their fall not through force but through mesmerising gazes and hushed words.  The horrifying nature of the Vampire lay in his mastery over the very elements of human nature that Victorian society sought to deny.  His was the worst kind of evil.  The evil that one wanted to give in to.  As society changed and cultural attitudes shifted, the Vampire’s evil seemed to dim.  As Horror peeled away from the gothic and what remained sank back down into Romance, the Vampire changed from a dangerous sensual evil into the kind of sensual creature that you would love to date, even if your parents wouldn’t approve :  Male Vampires became leather-trouser clad pretty boys with fashionable hair styles and either a fondness for violence or a deep and brooding sense of artistic self-loathing.  Female Vampires became invariably bisexual and more or less freaky.  The kind of freaky that would scare you but which would also allow you to indulge all of the stuff you see in porn films but would never dare to ask of a real sexual partner.  In other words, good freaky.

In the space of a hundred years Vampires have moved from creatures of pure evil to pathetic sexual Mary Sues for frustrated and repressed Westerners.  The Vampires themselves haven’t changed.  What has changed is our attitude to what the Vampire represents.  That which the Victorians feared and denied in themselves, the people of the 21st Century indulge to the point of solipsism.

However, some attempts have been made to keep Vampires true to their role as creatures of Horror.  Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1995) saw in Vampires creatures more in tune with the violent and self-destructive urges that animate humanity as a whole.  Creatures for whom the rational mind serves as an organ or self-justification rather than control or repression.  Alfredson’s Let The Right One In (2008) presented Vampires as users, creatures who adapt themselves to the demands of the marginalised in order to slowly suck the life out of them.  This essay is about a film that returned to one of the first non-romantic presentations of Vampirism.

Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) is a remake of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu : A Symphony of Terror (1922).  But while the remake is, at times, almost shot-for-shot, Herzog’s version presents Vampires as creatures that are not only deeply lonely but whose power is entirely dependent upon the Humans whose blood it drinks.

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by Jonathan M

‘From’ in which sense exactly?

One of the running themes of this blog since its inception has been my on-again, off-again relationship with the approach to film criticism.  In some cases I have argued that works should be seen as windows into the writer’s mind, in other places I’ve been happy to cast it into the dustbin of history on the grounds that a) if you buy into auteur theory then you really need to know quite a bit about the auteur before writing about their works and b) a lot of films become more interesting if you completely ignore what it was the director was trying to achieve.

Another reason for rejecting auteur theory is that it seems to be the case, in American cinema at least, that the clock has been turned back on the director/auteur in favour of a return to the days of the all-powerful producer.  The poster boy for this development is, of course, J. J. Abrams.

But I see it elsewhere too…

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by Jonathan M

The Virgin Spring (1960) – Trembling Before God

Horror giant Wes Craven reportedly claimed that the violence of his debut feature The Last House On The Left (1969) is a reaction by his generation to the horrors of the Vietnam war.  While this justification seems a trifle pretentious and self-serving, it does raise the issue of why it is that depictions of violence in film need to be justified at all.

Why is it that Richard Curtis never feels compelled to speak about how the goings on in Darfur dictate that he must produce sentimental comedies involving smug upper class people?  Is the production of a third Ice Age film a direct reaction to the death of Baby P?  Were it not for the death of Princess Margaret, would Woody Allen ever have made Vicky Christina Barcelona?

A lot of the time, the way in which we justify things is only as interesting as the fact that we feel obliged to justify them at all.  This is the issue that Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960) seeks to address.

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by Jonathan M

Town and Country (and some links)

VideoVista have my review of Daihachi Yoshida’s Funuke : Show Some Love, You Losers!.

They also have my review of Compton Bennett’s The Seventh Veil.

Funuke is by no means a perfect film but it does shed quite an interesting cultural light on one of my favourite social dichotomies.  A dichotomy I have also been discussing over at THE DRIFT.

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