Tag: Horrotober

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Horrotober: Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

FILM TITLE: Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

ELAPSED TIME: I watched it all.

WHY DID I STOP WATCHING? Rosemary cedes to Satan. Hail Satan!

Before we get started, I want to apologize. Apologize to myself because this isn’t a review of what I think may be my new favorite spooky movie, A Halloween Puppy, about a silly boy who accidentally magicks his mother’s boyfriend into an English Bulldog. D’oh! I’ve never actually seen A Halloween Puppy but if it is as good as A Talking Cat!?! — the other movie IMDB suggests for people who want to see A Halloween Puppy — it has to be great, right?

Or at least better, for my purposes, than The Exorcist, which I thought about watching last night but couldn’t because I think there’s someone living in my attic and/or my kitchen pantry. A bad, evil, possibly possessed person. I mean, I don’t know for sure, because if this person was living there, primed to kill me, they definitely wouldn’t reveal themselves until I decided to watch The Exorcist alone at midnight. It’s like a Schrodinger’s Cat thing. I’m sure you understand.

I don’t want to let you down (“I came here for CONTENT,” you are doubtless yelling now. “FILM WRITING CONTENT!”) so I watched Rosemary’s Baby. What a relief! Rosemary’s Baby isn’t scary, at least not like The Exorcist. There is a lot of portent, for sure. There is the telling murder of a young dope fiend who has been resuscitated and then possibly killed by a couple of weird old people, the Castevets, who live next door to Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and her husband, Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes.) And by the continued illusions to the death of children, all while the misty-eyed and dewy-skinned Rosemary avows her desire for a baby. There is that freaky half-lullaby theme that makes the first half of the movie (which, sans soundtrack, is exclusively about 1960s home design) into something foreboding.

But when the shit is actually going down, when Rosemary is raped by the Devil in a dream sequence (and to hide the truth her husband claims that he did it because he was “loaded” and “it was fun in a kind of necrophiliac way”?!?), the feeling isn’t so much fear is it is familiarity. The movie takes place on the very edge of the utterly normal, turning normal conversations about picture hangings into something slightly nefarious. Perhaps the scariest thing about Rosemary’s Baby is how, in the cumulative scene — when Rosemary discovers that everyone is, in fact, conspiring against her, and that she has, yes, birthed the son of the Satan — there is almost nothing, tonally, to differentiate it from a mundane cocktail party scene. Except that everyone is yelling “Hail Satan!” The movie ends with Rosemary learning she isn’t crazy, and then quietly realizing that she must accept her child and become crazy, because the world is crazy. Everyone she loves and knows is crazy.

It isn’t scary, but it is haunting. Especially considering Mia Farrow’s terrible real-life abusive marriage to Woody Allen, and the fact that director Roman Polanski eventually fled the country to avoid rape charges. And perhaps the most haunting thing about Rosemary’s Baby is not that it is about Satan, but that it is a hysterical rape myth (Satan, Polanski? Really?) constructed around a world that quietly condones the real deal.

On second thought, I’ll take The Exorcist. 

Horrotober: Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Horrortober: Dracula (1931)

FILM TITLE: Dracula (1931)

ELAPSED TIME: 85 minutes (plus or minus a few in the middle)

WHY DID I STOP WATCHING? The Dracula was killed!

I’m not a fan of horror, but I find it hard to equate the mistily lit estates and silken gowns of Depression-era Dracula with “horror”. This movie is a horror as Miss Mina, Dracula’s would-be bride, pronounces it: “This horror,” she says, lifting pearly hand to porcelain face. The music swells. When Dracula’s three flapper brides leave their “earth boxes” and float eerily towards their caped husband, gruesome and Gatsby-ian, an undead convalescence seems almost attractive. I’m reminded of the essayist Leslie Jamison’s judgement that, in art, “The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars…. Violence turns them celestial.”

I watched an anniversary edition of this movie that was paired with a newish Philip Glass score, something I didn’t realize until halfway through the movie. I thought, “Wow, the 1931 version of Dracula sure does strike a lot of the same emotional notes as The Hours.” Glass’s score is quietly urgent and romantic, designed, as he put it, to fit the “libraries and drawing rooms and gardens” of the classic film. It lights on the mournful and disregards suspense. Even the freakiest of monologues (“Rats. Rats! Thousands! Millions of them! All red blood! All these will I give you if you will obey me!”), paired with Glass’s composition, feels more sad than scary.

Bela Lugosi is unlike anyone before or since as the sharp-toothed aristocrat from Eastern Europe. I found myself wondering whether my great grandfather’s generation actually had more corporeal stillness, or if Dracula’s unearthly composure was simply another facet of Lugosi’s mastery. His foil, the crazy-eyed Renfield (Dwight Frye), is as seething as Dracula is sadistically controlled. And then you have the strong-willed Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan), a doctor whose strength of character allows him to embrace certain dark truths. “For one who has not lived even a single lifetime,” says Dracula, “You are a wise man, Van Helsing”

An uncle of mine, a fan of the vampiric, once made a point that has stayed with me— that Dracula is a sort of inverted Christ-figure. Instead of giving you his blood to drink, thus allowing for salvation, he drinks yours and keeps you away from heaven forever. So it is fair to see these characters eventual defiance of the Dracula as a heavenly allegory, as well as to accept the premise that to get to the light, you have to accept that real darkness exists. It’s an idea as transcendent as it is terrifying, which is probably why I made it through all 85 minutes of this one. I may not be as stolid with Dracula’s more recent incarnations. 

Horrortober: Dracula (1931)

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Horrortober Is Upon Us!

“October Country . . . that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain. . . .”  -Ray Bradbury

I love October, which might explain my love for Ray Bradbury and Halloween—or it might be the other way around. This October, I had the idea that we could write about some great, and maybe not so great, horror movies. Longtime Flyer film correspondent Addison Engleking loved the idea, and will kick off his month of columns next Wednesday with John Carpenter’s The Thing. But when I asked Eileen Townsend to participate, I made a startling discovery, as you will see from our Google Hangout Q&A: 

Chris McCoy: You have never actually finished a horror movie, correct? 

Eileen Townsend: I’ve seen the beginning and the very end of plenty of horror movies, just not the stuff in the middle. I like the scenes where they move into the scary house, and then the ones where they drive away, never to return. Basically uninterested in whatever happens in between.

CM: So, when you were in high school, and people got together to watch horror movies, you were pretty much out of the room? 

ET: Let me put it this way: When “Are You Afraid of the Dark” came on television, I read the encyclopedia in another part of the house. That is how I got where I am today.

CM: What is it that turns you off of horror movies?

ET: Loud noises, suspense music, death gasps, chainsaw massacres, people in masks, people taking off masks, weird shapes emerging from televisions, innocuous family members who turn out to be ghosts, eurotrips gone wrong. But I think really it’s that I know I’m watching a horror movie so something very bad is going to happen at some point and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. 

CM: Horror movies are one of the oldest and most successful film genres. Why do you think that is? What do you think people get out of watching horror? 

ET: In terms of horror movies that involve ghouls and demons and bats out of hell, I think the world building aspect of it is probably alluring. Like, we have all these infinitely re-definable sorts of things that go bump in the night. A vampire in 2015 is not the same thing as a vampire in 1970. If I weren’t so freaked out, I’d be interested, too. 
In terms of movies about ruthless killers who walk amongst the living, I think we need some fantastic vision of murder and torture to avert our thoughts from the ordinariness of evil.
A dark outlook, maybe.

CM: There’s an aspect of sexual punishment in a lot of horror movies, especially the 80s slasher genre.
Women who enjoy sex are the first to be killed, and virginal women are the ones who survive. 

ET: It’s always better to be reading a book in your bedroom than making out with dudes in a hot rod.
If you want to avoid MURDER. 
[It’s] a great example of how genre/fantasy movies often have a better cultural pulse than Films, capital F. When you’re making a movie about zombies, you’re already working with a level of imaginative hyperbole. There’s less preciousness about the kind of things that are getting said or done in B flicks, and that’s cool. 

CM: Are you bothered by explicit violence in all movies, or is there something about the horror movie that makes it especially troubling? 

ET: It’s not seeing the gore, it’s the suspense I can’t take. You could show me a movie called “The Surprise Party” with an hour and a half of creepy violin solos leading up to a 6 year olds birthday party and I would be equally as freaked out as I was during Saw. Hypothetically. I’m the sort of person who shouts “WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN?” during longer commercials.

CM: Personally, I can’t take the Saw/Hostel Torture Porn subgenre. A movie like Dracula or The Thing is great, but just gore for gore’s sake is troubling to me. And there’s something about the politics of Torture Porn, which originated during the Bush War On Terror period, that seems really gross and horrible.

ET: I don’t have any high falutin theories about why people like that stuff, except that it seems to me like it exercises our brains in a certain easy way. We see: SEX DEATH SEX DEATH FAST CARS and we don’t have to think much. It’s the film equivalent of bungee jumping. I think eventually people must lose sensitivity to that stuff, though, and they have to start sawing off prostitutes arms in more fucked up ways.  

CM: So, for Horrortober, you’re going to be trying to watch some horror movies and reporting back on your impressions. Does this constitute torture for you? 

ET: I’m going to need one of those eyelid-opening devices from A Clockwork Orange to make it through.

CM: So what’s up first in your list?

ET: I’m thinking Dracula, if only because I once wrote an essay for a book called “Vampires, Zombies and Philosophy”.

CM: Thank you for subjecting yourself to this experiment. 

ET: I don’t really know what I am signing up for. 

CM: Maybe we can get Contemporary Media to pay for your therapy in November. 

ET: I’m probably not going to sleep for all of October, so I’ll at least need bedrest.