Category / Horror

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Two Evil Eyes (1990)

THE ZONE has my piece on the Dario Argento and George A. Romero Poe anthology film Due Occhi Diabolici.

I have written about Poe anthologies before… once for Strange Horizons and another time as a part of a longer piece about great French Horror films.

The DVD made for an interesting review as it opens with a film that left no doubt in my mind that George Romero is one of the most over-rated and talentless directors ever to pick up a camera but closes with a film that really brought home to me how much I adore the work of Dario Argento and how much I need to see more of his films.  So a mixed bag really…

by Jonathan M

Heartbeat Detector (2007) – Re-Engineering Ethical Process Outcomes

A little while ago, I reprinted my Vector piece on cinematic adaptations of the works of J. G. Ballard.  One of the themes of Ballard’s work I used to pull together the different films was the concept of a benign psychopathology.  This concept serves to unite the different works from the various stages of Ballard’s writing career and also forms the heart of his development of an old surrealist saw into a form of proto-postmodernism.  The idea, at its simplest, is that Humanity has become detached from the environment in which its emotional hardwiring evolved.  From a world of mountains, deserts, forests, swamps and plains we have moved into a world of cities, motorways, cars and conference centres.  A world constructed largely by us, for us.  However, despite this world being supposedly designed to suit our needs, we find ourselves paradoxically distant from it : Either the architecture surrounding us reflects our position and role in society thereby dehumanising us, Or it is an abstract expression of some impractical aesthetic ideal and it alienates us.  Our reliance upon the car and the city is physically and psychologically toxic and yet we cannot return to the state of nature we once lived in.  We die in car accidents by the hundreds of thousand and yet we still drive to work.  We self-medicate with alcohol and drugs, losing ourselves in the pleasures of consumerism and empty sensuality and yet we do not seek to change the world.  The co-dependent and unhealthy relationship we have with our environment is a benign psychopathology, a form of madness created by an attempt to adapt to an unnatural environment.  A form of controlled and evolutionarily beneficial madness.  A form of high-functioning dementia this benign psychopathology is an attempt to reformat our emotional hardwiring and set up a new set of stimulus-responses that are better suited to our new world.

In Ballard’s early Science Fiction novel The Drowned World (1962), the character Dr Robert Kerans is horrified when Captain Strangman drains the lagoon and makes it possible for humanity to resettle the ruins of a drowned city.  In Crash (1973), the character of Ballard develops an attraction for people maimed in car crashes as automobile accidents become fetishised.  In Cocaine Nights (1996), Charles Prentice comes to realise that rape, arson, theft and murder are not anti-social activities but rather necessary tools for the creation of social cohesion.  Throughout Ballard’s work, the severing of Humanity’s emotional connection to the environment allowing the development of benign psychopathologies invariably results from some terrible event.  An event which Ballard scholars have come to refer to as The Death of Affect, drawing upon a chapter in Ballard’s central work The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) in which a couple visit the scene of a car crash only to find that the site has been drained of all emotional content :

“These infrequent visits, dictated by whatever private logic, now seemed to provide nothing.  An immense internal silence presided over this area of cement and pines, a terminal moraine of the emotions that held its debris of memory and regret, like the rubbish in the pockets of a dead schoolboy he had examined” [Page 108]

Of course, benign psychopathologies do not have to take the form of a sexual predilection for car accidents.  They can be much more mundane.  Much more common.  Much more familiar.  Nicolas Klotz’s Heartbeat Detector — based upon the French novel  La Question Humaine by Francois Emmanuel — is an exploration of the idea that certain psychopathologies can survive the death of their host organism, living on in the cultural aether to rewire whole new generations to fit with new and emerging forms of environmental unpleasantness.  A process of adaptation that is noticeable in certain chilling linguistic similarities.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Left Bank (2008)

Videovista have my review of Van Hees’ wonderfully unpleasant Horror film Left Bank.

Left Bank is reminiscent of films like Irreversible and Cruising in so far as it manages to engage with a set of unpalatable attitudes in a critical way despite embodying those attitudes in the cinematography of the film.  In Cruising, the attitude in question was homophobia, in Left Bank it is misogyny.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Stendhal Syndrome (1996)

Videovista have my review of Dario Argento’s rather splendidly weird The Stendhal Syndrome.

Oddly enough, despite being a fan of Horror and a fan of world cinema, I had never really encountered the films of Dario Argento before seeing this film.  I have seen films inspired by his works and gialli that tried to copy it but I had never actually experienced proper Argento before.  Needless to say, I loved it: A psychological thriller about a descent into madness that brilliantly doubles as a scathing critique of Italian attitudes to women.  Great stuff.

by Jonathan M

Double Take (2009) – Fear and Loathing in Geosynchronous Orbit

Dig through the history of Horror and you will find, buried beneath the Vampires and the Werewolves, a more enduring monster.  A monster that fits uneasily on the cinema screen because his depiction requires no make-up or special effects.  A monster that looks exactly like you.  A monster which, in fact, is you.

From Poe’s “William Wilson” (1838) to Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) and Dostoyevsky’s The Double (1846) through to Kurosawa’s Doppelganger (2003), it is clear that one of the greatest fears humanity has is to wind up face-to-face with itself.  Terror is dealing someone who knows all of your secrets, who knows all of your bullshit, who knows what you are capable of… and who can do it too.  The doppelganger is a reminder that as much as humanity fears the Other, it fears the Self just as much.  Perhaps there is a reason for this.  Perhaps what we hate about the Other is what we hate about ourselves.  Perhaps all hatred and fear is externalised and projected self-loathing?  This idea has a nicely psychoanalytical feel to it.  You can imagine Uncle Sigmund whispering it in your ear as you cough up his fee and prepare for the long slouch back home.  Maybe it’s not them.  Maybe it’s you.  How far can we take this insight into our fears and terrors?

Johan Grimonprez’s documentary essay Double Take attempts to answer this question by using the doppelganger as a device for examining not only the politics of the Cold War but also the relationship between television and cinema.

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by Jonathan M

The Crazies – Past and Present

The Zone have just put up my twin reviews of The Crazies :

It is interesting to note that both films deal, on a thematic level, with the way in which America wages its wars :  Romero’s version is a tightly focused critique of the idea that one can wage war in an ordered and rational manner.  The film paints a viciously satirical portrait of an American military weighed down by petty bureaucracy and staffed by incompetent boobs.  Meanwhile, Eisner’s version is a much vaguer indictment of the savagery stirred up by America’s decision to topple the Iraqi and Afghan governments.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Exhibit A (2007)

Videovista have my review of Dom Rotheroe’s British family drama Exhibit A.

Exhibit A is the kind of film that, at a stroke, entirely justifies all the hours I have spent watching and reviewing straight-to-DVD releases.  It is an intensely real and emotionally harrowing exploration of a family in crisis with some lovely performances and a script that is tighter than a duck’s arse.  However, what really makes Exhibit A and exceptional film is the fact that it uses the increasingly elderly saw of pretending to be found footage shot using a camcorder, but applies it to mundane events rather than supernatural ones.  If a bit of jerky camera-work and a few glitches are enough to make a crushingly formulaic monster film like Cloverfield appear special, imagine the effect those quirks might have on a well constructed family drama.  A joy.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Pandorum (2009)

Videovista have my review of Christian Alvart’s Science Fiction Horror film Pandorum.

This was a terrible film to watch but an interesting film to write about as its action sequences have some quite interesting technical flaws and because its overburdened narrative demonstrates one of the more depressing tendencies in Horror film-making, particularly when that Horror takes place in a Science Fictional setting.

by Jonathan M

Marnie (1964) – The Abusive Nature of Therapy

One of my greatest bugbears in fiction is the concept of the “well-drawn character”.  If we wants to talk about a film in terms of its mis-en-scene or its shot selection then we can read books and treatises about such matters.  Books filled with Eisenstein’s montages and Welles’ long takes.  Similarly, if we want to talk about a book in terms of its narrative structure or its subtext then one can read Aristotle’s Poetics or the countless introductory guides to literary theory that fill the book shelves of people who really should be reading the original source material.  These elements of fiction are well understood.  Their subtleties catalogued.  Their aesthetics understood.  But what about the aesthetics of character construction?  What distinguished a well-drawn character from a tissue-thin one-dimensional empty suit?

Presumably this area of aesthetic achievement is comparatively less well-travelled because, as humans, it should be obvious to us which characters are believable and which are not.  We humans deal with each other quite a lot and so we presumably have a firm enough grasp of human psychology that we should recognise a character who is ‘off’ and unbelievable.  Perhaps they behave in an erratic manner, perhaps they do not speak in a voice of their own, perhaps their actions do not follow from what we know of their character.  In effect, we our ability to detect poorly drawn characters flows from the same place as our ability to read and interpret other people’s emotional states, the catalogue of theories, intuitions and received opinions that philosophers call Folk Psychology.  However, some philosophers question the validity of folk psychology.  They argue that most of our understanding of human behaviour is based on absurdly simplistic theories that are little better than superstitions.  I share this doubt.  This is why every act of characterisation strikes me as explicitly theoretical.  Underpinned by all kinds of beliefs about the way humans work which may, in fact, be profoundly flawed or ludicrously simplistic.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie is a film that wears its Folk Psychological assumptions on its sleeve.  It is a work of drama where the character arc of the main character is sketched not in bland generalities but in explicitly Psychoanalytical terms.  The result is not only a fascinating character study, but also a meditation upon the moral status of psychoanalysis as an activity.

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