The House of the Devil (Ti West, 2009)

The House of the Devil (Ti West, 2009)

Cast: Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov, Greta Gerwig, AJ Bowen, Dee Wallace. Screenplay: Ti West. Cinematography: Elliot Rockett. Production design: Jade Healy. Film editing: Ti West. Music: Jeff Grace. 

I’ve said it before: I’m not particularly interested in or scared by horror movies. But as an amateur film historian, I feel compelled every October to sample the horror classics and newer movies provided in anticipation of Halloween by movie channels and streaming services, even the high-toned ones like the Criterion Channel. The trouble sometimes is that I’m not in on the jokes provided by the horrormeisters, who love to reference older films in the genre. Several things should have clued me in, starting with the oddly flat-footed title, that The House of the Devil was going to be something of an hommage to earlier films, particularly the opening screen that referred to the wave of “satanic cults” that made news in the 1980s. The deliberately retro look of the opening credits themselves should have alerted me, and when Greta Gerwig showed up with Farrah Fawcett hair I did begin to suspect something was up. Since I didn’t watch horror movies in the ‘70s and ‘80s, I’m not the right audience for Ti West’s throwback movie. So all I can say is that it’s a well-done tribute to the kind of movies I should have been watching in order to be the right kind of audience. It’s nicely paced, if a little slow in spots, setting up the menace lurking in the old dark house, and showing us that Samantha, well acted by Jocelin Donahue, is spunky and resourceful up to a point – that point being her willingness to go upstairs, something nobody in a horror movie should ever do. And the cataclysmic burst of action at the film’s climax is as satisfying as it should be. I even appreciated the coda, with its evocation of a true classic that transcends the genre, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968). But I have to leave it to horror aficionados to explicate all the references by writer-director-editor Ti West to the period he’s honoring, which makes The House of the Devil just a bit of a miss for me.

 

The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)

 

 

The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)

Cast: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, David Manners, Julie Bishop, Egon Brecher, Harry Cording, Lucille Lund, Henry Armetta, Albert Conti. Screenplay: Edgar G. Ulmer, Peter Ruric, suggested by a story by Edgar Allan Poe. Cinematography: John J. Mescall. Art direction: Charles D. Hall. Film editing: Ray Curtiss. Music: Heinz Roemheld.

Edgar G. Ulmer’s kinky The Black Cat may have been “suggested by” an Edgar Allan Poe story, as the screen credit says, but the only suggestion Ulmer and co-scenarist Peter Ruric seem to have taken was the title. A cat does appear, and freaks Bela Lugosi’s Dr. Vitus Werdegast out so completely that he kills it – maybe, for it seems to reappear, purring in the cuddling hands of Boris Karloff’s Hjalmar Poelzig, a few minutes later. Otherwise, the movie is an occasion for Universal’s famed horror stars Lugosi and Karloff to appear together and torment each other, and only incidentally to scare the hell out of a pair of newlyweds, Peter (David Manners) and Joan Allison (Julie Bishop, billed under her original name, Jacqueline Wells). The result is a stew (or perhaps goulash, since the setting is Hungary) of satanism, necrophilia, torture, and revenge. Lugosi’s Werdegast is returning to the place where Karloff’s Poelzig betrayed him to the Russians during World War I, and stole his wife while Werdegast was off in the gulag. Thanks to a chance encounter with the newlyweds on the train and a subsequent bus accident, Werdegast and the Allisons wind up at the home of Poelzig, built in the ruins of the fort Poelzig commanded during the war. It has been modernized in a kind of minimalist blend of Bauhaus and Art Deco – lots of glass brick and pocket doors – but there is also a gloomy substructure made out of the old dungeons of the fort. Werdegast and Poelzig meet again with a kind of stiff courtesy, hardly suggesting that Werdegast will eventually skin Poelzig alive. With good reason, for Poelzig has added Werdegast’s wife to his collection of embalmed women that he displays in glass cases, and married Werdegast’s daughter in her place. The Allisons are there only to add some semblance of normality to the whole business. It’s one of the more delirious of the classic Universal horror movies of the 1930s, with some perversities that would not have been allowed under the Production Code.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975)

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975)

Cast: Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Richard O'Brien, Patricia Quinn, Nell Campbell, Jonathan Adams, Peter Hinwood, Meat Loaf, Charles Gray. Screenplay: Jim Sharman, Richard O'Brien, based on a musical play by O'Brien. Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky. Production design: Brian Thomson. Film editing: Graeme Clifford. 

The ultimate cult movie, one that survived critical hostility and initial poor box office to become one of the longest-running movies in film history and to take its place in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. It has raked in more than $113 million dollars worldwide since its release, thanks to audiences that made it a midnight movie phenomenon involving audience participation that included sing-alongs and lipsynching of its songs and dialogue by fans wearing the movie’s costumes. Pretty good for a film that celebrates queerness and thumbs its nose at the straight world. It’s too bad that it really isn’t very good, with amateurish performances by most of its cast, notably excepting Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, a name that pretty much sums up the level of wit in the script. It also flubs its ostensible purpose: to parody the sci-fi movies of the 1950s that it namechecks in the lyrics to “Science Fiction/Double Feature.” But none of this really matters in a movie that thrives on its own raw energy and an audience’s willingness to be swept up by it.

 

Isle of the Dead (Mark Robson, 1945)

 

Isle of the Dead (Mark Robson, 1945)

Cast: Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew, Marc Cramer, Katherine Emery, Helene Thimig, Alan Napier, Jason Robards Sr., Ernst Deutsch. Screenplay: Ardel Wray. Cinematography: Jack MacKenzie. Art direction: Albert S. D’Agostino, Walter E. Keller. Film editing: Lyle Boyer. Music: Leigh Harline.

Two famous works of art haunt (I use the obvious word intentionally) the film Isle of the Dead. The obvious one is Arnold Böcklin’s painting of that name, five versions of which he painted from 1880 to 1901, the year of his death. The image is re-created early in the movie, when the Greek Gen. Nikolas Pherides (Boris Karloff) and an American reporter, Oliver Davis (Marc Cramer) row out to a Greek island to visit the grave of the general’s daughter. But the other, less obvious work that comes to my mind is Francisco Goya’s aquatint etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, one of the images he created for the series Los caprichos in the late 1790s. In it, a man slumped at his desk is surrounded by menacing bats and owls. Producer Val Lewton’s celebrated series of moody psychological horror movies in the 1940s typically depict conflicts between the scientific, rational mind and manifestations of superstition and myth. In the film, the island is swept by what a doctor (Ernst Deutsch) diagnoses as septicemic plague, but the superstitious resident of the island, Madame Kyra, believes it’s caused by a vorvolaka, a vampire-like creature she thinks is embodied in the pretty young Thea (Ellen Drew), who is nursing the sickly Mrs. St. Aubyn (Katherine Emery). And when the doctor himself dies, the superstitious view begins to win out, especially with the general. But the narrative track of the movie, which inevitably includes a romance between the reporter and Thea, and which tends to come apart at the seams a little toward the end, matters less than the creepy effect it creates, including such horrors as the fear of being buried alive. Karloff gives the best performance, of course, as he degenerates from the imperious general who calmly sends a delinquent officer off to commit suicide into a man gripped by terrors he can’t face. 

Single All the Way (Michael Mayer, 2021)

Single All the Way (Michael Mayer, 2021)

Cast: Michael Urie, Philemon Chambers, Luke Macfarlane, Kathy Najimy, Jennifer Coolidge, Barry Bostwick, Jennifer Robertson, Madison Brydges, Alexandra Beaton, Dan Finnerty. Screenplay: Chad Hodge. Cinematography: Eric Cayla. Production design: Guy Lalande. Film editing: Adriaan van Zyl. Music: Anton Sanko. 

It’s hard to know who the sexless gay romantic comedy Single All the Way was made for: people who think Will and Grace is too raunchy? It certainly wasn’t made for a gay audience. It even seems to have inspired a backlash with such gay romcoms as Fire Island (Andrew Ahn, 2022) and Bros (Nicholas Stoller, 2022), in which gay men are having sex with one another and enjoying it. Single All the Way is mostly set in an idyllic New Hampshire town, to which Peter (Michael Urie) returns for Christmas accompanied by his roommate, Nick (Philemon Chambers), with whom he is not having sex. They are greeted by his large, boisterous family who seem to want Peter to have sex, especially with Nick. Except, that is, Peter’s mother (Kathy Najimy), who wants him to have sex with the only gay man in town, her hunky spinning instructor, James (Luke Macfarlane). At this point, you’re probably asking yourself what gay man wouldn’t want to have sex with Luke Macfarlane, but Peter is reluctant to be pushed into any such thing. Of course, the word “sex” is never mentioned. The idea is for Peter to find himself in what these straight people consider ideal: what they would call a “committed relationship.” Chad Hodge’s screenplay leaves no romcom cliché unused as the movie proceeds toward its obvious conclusion: Peter and Nick declaring their love for each other. (Maybe they even have sex, but the film is too squeamish to suggest that.) Gay icon Jennifer Coolidge is there for what fun the movie provides, as Peter’s addle-brained aunt who is directing the town’s Christmas pageant. The absence of chemistry between Urie and Chambers is only one of the film’s problems, and given the apparent squeamishness about gay sex, perhaps its least. 

Vive l’Amour (Tsai Ming-liang, 1994)

 

Vive l’Amour (Tsai Ming-liang, 1994)

Cast: Chen Chao-jung, Lee Kang-sheng, Yang Kue-Mei. Screenplay: Tsai Ming-liang, Tsai Yi-chun, Yang Pi-ying. Cinematography: Liao Pen-Jung, Lin Ming-Kuo. Production design: Lee Pao-Lin. Film editing: Sung Shia-cheng.

Vive l’Amour, the ironic title of Tsai Ming-liang’s film, brings to mind another French phrase: comédie larmoyante. And not just because it ends with a very long close-up of the character May Lin (Yang Kue-Mei) sobbing bitterly, but because the film is its own kind of tearful comedy, one with roots in the genre of farce, in which characters occupy a common space but somehow avoid making connection with one another. It’s a story about existential loneliness. Ah-jung (Chen Chao-jung) is making his rounds in the gloomy job of funerary urn salesman when he finds a key left in the lock of a vacant luxury apartment. He sneaks in at night planning to commit suicide, but only makes a half-hearted attempt at cutting his wrist with a Swiss army knife and bandages himself up. Then he realizes that he’s not alone in the large apartment when he hears a couple having sex in another room. They are May Lin, the real estate agent supposed to be showing the apartment to clients, and Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng), who have picked each other up in a restaurant. Hsiao-kang, who illegally sells women’s dresses on the street, steals her key to the apartment and moves in. Eventually, Ah-jung and Hsiao-kang encounter each other and become friends. But their friendship is tested when May Lin and Hsiao-kang return to the apartment, and Ah-jung, hearing them enter, hides under the bed. As the couple have sex, Ah-jung masturbates below them. After May Lin leaves, Ah-jung gets in bed with the sleeping Hsiao-kang and stares at him longingly, then kisses him. May LIn, having discovered that her car won’t start, sets out to walk home but winds up weeping on a park bench. The story of the three is intercut with glimpses of their lonely lives: May Lin waiting patiently for clients that don’t show, Ah-jung distributing leaflets advertising his urns, Hsiao-kang trying on one of the dresses he peddles. There’s no music score and very little expository dialogue, but the sound track is alive, from the noise of love-making Ah-jung hears from another room to the pock-pock-pock of May Lin’s heels as she sets out on her long walk homeward. We don’t know why May Lin weeps, or what drives Ah-jung to consider suicide, but by showing the texture of their isolated lives, Tsai makes us intuit the causes.