The Witch: A New-England Folktale (Robert Eggers, 2015)

 

The Witch: A New-England Folktale (Robert Eggers, 2015)

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger, Lucas Dawson, Julian Richings, Bathsheba Garnett, Sarah Stephens. Screenplay: Robert Eggers. Cinematography: Jarin Blaschke. Production design: Craig Lathrop. Film editing: Louise Ford. Music: Mark Ford. 

Robert Eggers’s The Witch has a subtitle, A New-England Folktale, that is essential to understanding what the writer-director is up to with the film: an evocation of the state of mind of a place and period. (The hyphen in the subtitle is a deliberate archaism, as is the on-screen spelling “VVitch.”) Because without recognizing this aim, we are left with merely a genre piece, a horror movie to be reeled out every Halloween season. Or else we’re seeing a movie which asserts that the Puritans of 17th-century Salem, Mass., were justified in their persecution of women they thought to be witches. Both of those aims for the film hardly justify the care Eggers took in researching and re-creating the speech and the dress of the people who set out in the wilderness of America, not to mention their anxious, terrifying belief in both God and Satan. Eggers’s film is a work of art, as potent as the painting that may have inspired it, Francisco Goya's “Witches’ Sabbath (The Great He-Goat).” It’s an often harrowing film that transcends the genre it’s usually assigned to, thanks to meticulous production design and intelligently cast actors, then mostly unknown. (It was Anya Taylor-Joy’s first film.) If I have a quibble, it’s that my aging eyes have trouble with the cinematography, designed to use only available light (and dark), so others have seen things in its shadows, particularly in the abduction of the infant Samuel, where I saw only shapes and blurs. But that seems to be a feature of Eggers’s films, including The Lighthouse (2019) and The Northman (2022), and not a bug. An altogether satisfying debut for Eggers, as well as Taylor-Joy.

Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)

 

Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)

Cast: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar, Henrik Dahl, Karin Bergquist, Peter Carlberg, Ika Nord, Mikael Rahm, Karl-Robert Lindgren. Screenplay: John Ajvide Lindqvist, based on his novel. Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema. Production design: Eva Norén. Film editing: Tomas Alfredson, Dino Jonsäter. Music: Johan Söderqvist. 

For those blog-readers getting ready to outfit little Jake or Jenny with plastic fangs and felt cape, let me remind you that the vampire legend, with its penetration and exchange of fluids, is always and invariably about sex, or the fear of it. Even when the vampire is 12 years old. Or maybe especially when the vampire is a 12-year-old girl who moves in next door to a 12-year-old boy on the cusp of adolescence. Of course, as a vampire, Eli (Lina Leandersson) is going to be 12 years old forever, and she tells Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) that she’s not a girl, raising a note of ambiguity: Does she mean that she’s not a girl but a vampire, or that she’s transgender or even neuter? (There’s a flash of nudity which suggests that she has undergone some sort of genital trauma.) No matter, for the film is really about the relationship that develops between a boy who is being tormented by bullies and a vampire/girl with the power to put an end to his tormentors. Let the Right One In is such a richly textured film that it transcends its horror-film elements, its bloodlettings and its suspense-engendering narrative. A good deal of the screenplay is devoted to giving the secondary characters lives (and deaths) of their own, including Oskar’s estranged parents and the man who lives with, and serves, Eli. Even incidental details, such as Eli’s odd possessions, and the ending, Oskar on a train, Eli apparently in a box beside him, are tantalizing. No surprise that the film was remade in the United States as Let Me In (Matt Reeves, 2010) and became the basis for a TV series in 2022.

Hocus Pocus (Kenny Ortega, 1993)

 

Hocus Pocus (Kenny Ortega, 1993)

Cast: Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathy Najimy, Omri Katz, Thora Birch, Vinessa Shaw, Amanda Shepherd, Larry Bagby, Tobias Jelinek, Stephanie Faracy, Charles Rocket, Doug Jones, Sean Murray. Screenplay: David Kirschner, Mick Garris, Neil Cuthbert. Cinematography: Hiro Narita. Production design: William Sandell. Film editing: Peter E. Berger. Music: John Debney.

I come late to the Hocus Pocus party, but then so did almost everyone else. It was a critical and commercial flop when it made its debut in theaters in 1993, and only over the years, as Disney marketing shrewdly took advantage of Halloween hype, did it become a small phenomenon. Parents wanting something for kids to watch other than gory horror films during the Halloween season snapped up the videos and Disney rolled it out on TV along with merchandise like dolls and bedspreads. And now, almost 30 years later, comes a sequel. Disney never butters its bread thinly. You can also thank (or blame, as your inclination may be) the gay community, since the film features two actresses, Bette Midler and Sarah Jessica Parker, who have become iconic for many gays. I finally succumbed to the hype last night and sat through the movie that Gene Siskel called “dreadful” and Roger Ebert squished under his thumb. It’s not as awful as that. Midler, Parker, and Kathy Najimy, the trio of witches, seem to be having fun behaving like drag queens, there’s some wit in making the teenage hero (Omri Katz) the “virgin” who lights the candle with the black flame, and the precocious Thora Birch makes the ideal spunky kid sister. It’s too noisy and too frantic, but we do get to hear Midler’s version of the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins classic “I Put a Spell on You.” Still, I think I’ll wait another 30 years before watching Hocus Pocus 2 (Anne Fletcher, 2022).

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.