HorrorFest 2021, Halloween, German Film Polling and Election Day on Monday Morning Diary (November 1)

by Sam Juliano

Halloween 2021 is now past us, but it was wonderful to see trick or treaters out there in our neighborhood in large numbers.  This pleasant surprise did its part to bring us closer to a sense of normalcy, and as always we got to see some creative costumes.  Jamie Uhler’s sensational “HorrorFest 2021” was the best yet, and many of us have lists from which we can explore over the coming months and year.  God willing we can hope it will happen again in the late summer of 2022, and we can only say “Thank you Jamie” for engaging us with your brilliant capsule reviews.  The email chain where they were first presented was a real joy to read!  This week we have a bonanza of seven (7) more, all persuasively posed, most on the positive side.

The German Film Polling concludes today at 5:00 P.M.  Voting Tabulator Extraordinaire Bill Kamberger informed me yesterday that an astounding forty-six (46) ballots have been cast, and we are excited to hear the results, which we be sent on shortly after polls close today.  Next up will be Canada and its rich animated history.

Speaking of polls, Election Day is tomorrow, and here in New Jersey our Democratic Governor Phil Murphy seems headed for re-election, a prospect we are fully endorsing.  Murphy appeared in Garfield on Sunday morning to rally the troops.  Wishing all a wonderful week.  Here in the Garden State we teachers are off on said Election Day and on Thursday and Friday for the Teacher’s Convention.

Final proof-reading on Paradise Atop the Hudson by the ever-generous and brilliant Bill Kamberger will mean the novel should finally publish in two weeks.  As my great friend and motivator Valerie Clark has opined, this is a very exciting time!

This past week J.D. Lafrance published a fabulous review of H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator at the site!  Jamie’s amazing seven film horror presentation follows here:

We did it. An honest to goodness 31-in-31, a single piece everyday. Nothing more, nothing less. Happy Halloween guys! Hope you’re seeing a bevy of trick or treaters and eating one piece of candy for each you give out! I’ll probably watch a film tonight and sometime this week offer a final wrap up and link to my updated complete list. 

 

Candyman (B. Rose… 1992) supernatural slasher

Candyman (N. DaCosta… 2021) supernatural slasher

The Candyman franchise, which totaled 3 films, is mostly know for its original entry that came in 1992. This is because the sequels were mostly junk, though the sequel is better than you may recall (‘better’ being as much about how terrible people think it is, I’m just saying its a fun enough time, nothing major), the release of a new one this fall did what the two most recent Halloween films did and just wiped the slate clean after it, acting like only the first film existed. The original, the tale of Tony Todd’s famous Candyman villian is a boogeyman looking to haunt anyone who says his name three times while looking in the mirror, hoping to avenge his dark past. A past that cast the film in interesting racial connotations: he was the child of former slave who had become a famous artist, but when he fell in love and impregnated a white woman, her father assembled a collection of white pieces of shit to cut off the hand he used to create his art and smear him with a honeycomb so it’d attract enough bees to make his death an even more tortuous one, stinging him dozens of times. Flash forward to 1992 the place where Candyman was tortured is Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, an island like enclave of government housing that impoverished blacks lived. But by the 1990s money had begun to surround the area, eventually updating the racial discrimination of slavery by segregated housing and development and giving them little choice but to eventually move. This is a reality the 2021 film lives, as this is what has now fully happened to the Cabrini-Green area in real world Chicago. When an artist begins research on his next show, he becomes fully immersed in the Candyman lore, leading to discovering the story which is now changed; Candyman is a spirit of a wrongly accused man who was beaten to death by cops in 1977 and only later exonerated. But, the point is in the spirit, the urban legend; black man in a racist society are regularly wrongly killed or beaten for crimes of passion that either aren’t actual crimes, or ones they never actually committed and (m)any of them can become haunting, vengeful ghosts in a society. It’s an interesting idea, morphing the number of Candymen potentially, and advancing the films racial animus and context.

The 2021 is very much the same film in spirit, but bares the impact of the original to inform most of its stylistic and ideological choices. Meaning, the original has always been more or less very well liked, especially in Horror circles, but in a post-Get Out world, black Horror cinema has become a cottage industry, with fans of the genre being overjoyed at the prospect of more films being made in a beloved genre that shows their concerns, fears and representation in a positive, or since it’s Horror, perhaps it’s more appropriate to say ‘honest’ way (this is best seen in the 2019 documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror). It goes without saying that this is great news, the genre finally moving away from the oft-stated joke trope that a black person, usually male, is generally the first to die in a Horror film and that’s the only way their race can be represented. But, as this movement grew it has sort of elevated films way above their actual quality, the original Candyman (1992) growing to one of its era’s greatest works, a fact I more or less always questioned. The revisit, however, was positive, I did like it a lot more than I did seeing it on VHS in the mid-’90’s as a 14 or 15 year old, and its subtler handling of the subtextual material seemed wholly smarter, and, as a result was scarier to these eyes. In time Candyman (2021) may age OK, as I can image its signposting will seem less overt as signposting continues to get heavier and heavier in mainstream genre films. This is potentially a backhanded compliment about what I feel about current ‘message’ cinema, movies that are dreamed up on social media to spout contemporary messages first and foremost and never really bothering to storytelling craft. But the new one does have a strength in director Nia DaCosta, a director with a bright future who has a very good visual sense. The new one has a few really striking shots, but she, like co-writer and producer Jordan Peele remains someone I think could deliver a masterpiece but is still yet to do so.

Fear in the Night (J. Sangster… 1972) psychological thriller

The great institution of British Horror, Hammer, has long been revered by Horror fanatics, a library of genre masterpieces that sprawl across a number of Horror sub-genre categories. But as the 1960’s—Hammer’s golden period was essentially 1958-1968—turned into the 1970’s, the quality began drying up. The studio was losing a bit of money and many of its cherished icons where aging towards retirement. They needed to change with the time, or, in their greatest tradition—adapt styles that weren’t originally theirs into something they could, with the Hammer twist, call their own. It was, after all, how they’d gotten to be such a revered studio in the first place: by taking the classic Universal Monsters and updating them into a colorful, often lurid British morose, they’d produced classics by the dozens. But that was rapidly becoming old hat as the Swingin’ Sixties raged, what could be next? I’ve long thought one road they should have really explored was giallo. But while the Italians were inventing the type, Hammer could have made interesting British facsimiles. Perhaps not as stylish, or as pervy, but Britain’s attention to class and understatement could have really made some cool giallo thrillers. Hell, Argento might have more color filters and stylish lighting, but Hammer’s original monster films popularized garish reds (is there a more iconic image in Horror than Christopher Lee drooling blood as Dracula as his bloodshot eyes glow similarly crimson?) and a whole assortment of color choices themselves.

Sadly Hammer never got into the giallo though, its two closest examples—Crescendo (1970) and Fear of the Night (1972) are now mostly curious grabs for obsessive aficionados rather than films to bridge them into a new era. Crescendo is the closer of the two; it’s more stylish, violent and sex obsessed, while today’s offering Fear in the Night more subtly psychological and attempting to unnerve. It comes from the pen of legend Jimmy Sangster (who also directed it with a straight forward aesthetic showing he was a writer first and foremost), it’s the tale of young Peggy (British scream queen Judy Geeson) who moves to the country with her new, older husband Robert to live on the grounds of a secluded and abandoned boarding school that his boss, headmaster Michael (British Horror legend Pete Cushing) used to run. A decade prior an accidental fire had happened that closed the school and Michael has been wayward ever since. The movie casts him as being slightly deranged because of it (complete with a missing arm that he now has a large fake appendage because of), with a younger, beautiful wife to match. Michael seems to be stalking and pestering Peggy, further unsettling her own tenuous psychological state. But, as I characterized it, it’s a giallo leaning riff, so all of these ideas are mere red herrings, with several eventual twists in store.

Overall, a few of the twists are obvious enough in buildup, and the artier, deeper subtexts of Peggy’s psychological unease drift too close to Polanski material (we’re supposed to guess if what we’re seeing is really happening or just Peggy going full Repulsion/Rosemary’s Baby), but without even half the astute creepiness or potential multiple readings. Everything is just a near miss, nice shots and near swells in anxiety producing ideas are tragic dead ends never fully explored and realized. It still holds together enough to warrant watches from Horror fans, but it’s quite a shame it isn’t a whole heck of a lot more.

Grave Robbers (R. Galindo Jr. … 1989) slasher

As I’ve aged as a Horror fanatic one thing that has always confounded me was the Slasher. So often I think that if you were to select a bushel of the most worthwhile entries in the sub-genre just how many aren’t the canonically famous works we see endlessly rebooted and continued as franchises or endlessly played on cable. For as good as Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street are, I see little greatness in the original Friday the 13th, Sleepaway Camp, Prom Night, Alone in the Dark, or a whole host of others. Even my appreciation for The Burning, My Bloody Valentine, Alice, Sweet Alice and The Prowler is often pretty tepid, especially compared to Horror fiends who revere them to high heaven. But it’s really a point I wanted to make in regards to how the sub-genre aged, by the late 1980’s big American slashers were boorish retreads, but still Horror fans praise Slumber Party Massacre 2, New Nightmare, Candyman (and many others) to outrageous degree. Sitting lost, or gathering dust, are the actual good ones; Intruder (1989), Anguish, StageFright (both, 1987), Evil Dead Trap (1988) and, today’s entry, Grave Robbers. Oh course this has much to do with where the films in question came from or their availability—always the chief point in thinking about artistic appreciation—Intruders was an independent, VHS only affair, and the rest are foreign, either European or Japanese releases, or in the case of today’s entry, Mexican.

The days before the internet hid gems such as Grave Robbers, a movie where our cold open shows a satanic ritual happening hundreds of years prior, a disciple of the dark arts attempting to supernaturally impregnate a women to bring the son of Satan to earth. He’s captured by religious leaders and tortured on the stretching rack and eventually killed with a special ax driven into his chest. Transported into the 1980’s, he’s accidentally resurrected when a couple of grace robbing dinks accidentally unearth his secured resting spot. Now, in near zombie form, he goes buck wild trying to again find a virgin young women to put the Antichrist inside, killing teens, a few cops, and other assorted locals in the woods and neighboring small town. Only engaging the Church once again will right this unleashed hellfire, the film eventually making quite an overt point of pitting a father to protect his untouched, still virgin daughter against Warlock the zombie killer.

This is just pure ’80’s schlock, a wonderful assortment of awesome kills and misguided heroism where character development is not attempted one iota. It’s not the point—the slasher genre wheezed out because it’d shown what the genre was in actuality, a delivery mechanism for outrageousness and cheap, fun gore. Developing tension, brooding, chilly atmospheres, memorable characters, and iconic killers to sustain franchises should have never been the point as it wore on, it was all about the crafting of a few sequences with skill after a basic, (somewhat original) premise in the first 15 minutes or so had been delivered. If done correctly, those later fun sequences could be done plentifully enough to form a coherent, working complete whole feature. That’s a rare gift and why so many late slashers suck, the technical skills in the creators were usually lacking. Galindo Jr. came from a family who had working in Mexican cinema so even with a script that would probably be sufficiently spelled out in half a page delivered a wholly entertaining, very stupid delight. Where else is Chekhov’s gun principle literally Chekhov’s uzi? I had a big dumb blast with this one, maybe the greatest Mexican slasher film of the original era.

The Dunwich Horror (D. Haller… 1971) supernatural

The Dunwich Horror is, quite simply, one of HP Lovecraft’s most enduring and frightful works, a novella construction that is more visceral and modern than many of his more illusive or supernatural stories. Of course supernatural forms build much of the story too, but its eventual execution has, well, many executions in it. A punny way to say people are maimed and killed in this one with great force and bloodshed, a strikingly different vibe than many of his stories which build Horror through intellectual abstraction. It’s the story of Wilbur Whateley, a hideous boy born from a deformed albino mother and a father not of this world, whom we eventually learn was conjured via a secret book called the Necronomicon (a book that appears in many of his stories, almost linking them). Alongside Wilber’s birth came a beastly brother that was kept alive and at bay via feasts from an ever depleting number of bovine livestock the Whateley’s kept on their farm. Over time the beast grew and grew until Wilber and company couldn’t contain it and he unleashed hell fury on the town. The town, to destroy the brother, had to turn to using a potion outlined in that very same Necronomicon. It’s a violent, fantastical story you could imagine cinema really warming too, which made this an appetizing proposition to me as I set down to watch.

What I found was the reason I felt describing the story in some detail above was important–it’s frankly not really the story that director Haller, screenwriter Curtis Hanson and producer Corman tell at all. Instead, in the wake of Rosemary’s Baby and The Devil Rides Out they transform Wilber from a smelly, deranged looking man-child into a svelte lothario (a young, hip Dean Stockwell) who seeks a virgin (Sandra Dee trying to shake her wholesome roles of the past) to impregnate just as he’s opened up a portal using the Necronomicon he’s stolen from the local university library and unleashed a beast we only believe is sensory. This seems to mostly be due to probable budgetary constraints, but the films reliance on Wilber’s use of tea drinking hallucinogens to entrap the virginal Nancy and colorful, psychedelic passages show they were also heavily veering from the original story to capture some of the young hippy market (humorously, the story they should have adapted is Color Out of Space then). In the end it’s mostly a mess of a film, the borrow from Lovecraft makes it seem arbitrary and anyone watching as a fan of the story would mostly be put off as I was. But then if you didn’t know the novella you’d take this all as it happens, which probably is even worst—our final reel is a head-scratching blunder that barely makes any coherent sense. Oh well, we still need a good version.

The Woman in Black (H. Wise… 1989) TV/supernatural ghost

Three years before the release of the TV adaptation and three years after the 1983 source novel—in other words smack dab in the middle of the six years between them—The Woman in Black had something of a kissing cousin released in the form of Depeche Mode’s 1986 LP Black Celebration. Both used the mournful, black garb one cloaks themselves to attend a funeral, but most appropriately, watching The Woman in Black last night I so often thought of lyrical passages in ‘Fly on the Windscreen’, where Dave Gahan croons ‘death is everywhere…’ time and time again. It seems the most appropriate way to view a very scary and atmospheric film like The Woman in Black, a film that, surprisingly has no actual deaths in it for the most part (‘most part’ used to avoid spoilers).

But that’s a point, this is a film that could have just as easily held its power made in a heavily censored and Hayes Code driven earlier era. The story of London solicitor Arthur Kidd who, after being forced by his boss, travels to the North East coast of England to see about the recent passing of Alice Drablow and settle her estate and affairs. She lived outside town alone, separated by a treacherous journey through the marsh, if you don’t time the tides correctly you can easily be gobbled up and drown, the rising fog totally obscuring any sense of safety. But the town, in knowning Alice was a reclusive widow, sensed that the whole arrangement was spooky, even haunted. At her funeral a ghostly woman near Arthur’s age stalks him but disappears whenever he tries to make sense of it, and after staying at the house piecing it all together, the women returns time and time again haunting him deeper and deeper. In time, Arthur learns the story, she’s the eldest of Alice’s two children, neither of which lived into adulthood. What is living, or rather, dead amongst the fog soon entombs Arthur, fully cracking his psyche in two.

The ‘death is everywhere’ line in Depeche Mode then seems wholly appropriate, this is a film fully enraptured and surrounded by a sense of death. The past ones as prescient as those surely coming, and given the films 1925 setting you start to attach even deeper, more darkly sinister readings. There is cloak of World War I over everything as well, as soon as the fog rises and surrounds the moor, the clattering of sounds rise. Locals say it’s the cacophony of ships and seagulls screeching, but it can be cannons and endless gas, the sounds the scream of death of those young men in the trenches that robbed England (and the world) of so much precious youth. Arthur’s youth, attachment to one of Alice’s children’s wooden toy soldiers and eventual breakdown seems to be a direct link to such a reading, adding terror beyond all that is already terrorizing anyone who views this truly great Horror film. Amazingly I read its production came from British television, the ITV Network to be exact, airing first on Christmas Eve 1989. Imagine that: the stockings are hung, you put the children to bed with promises of Santa Claus coming in the middle of the night, and you sit down for a nice program to wind down the day only to be absolutely wrecked with the foreboding stench of death. Everywhere. More amazingly, it was a massive hit(!), the holiday proving as sad and scary a time as any.

(the film is now available in a special edition bluray with has both the TV presentation in 1.33:1 and the widescreen, more ‘theatrical cut’ which reduces where commercials would have been placed. I’ll be buying this for sure!)

Black Widow (B. Rafelson… 1987) psychological thriller

This one, if I’m totally honest, is mostly only partially Horror, but it has an icy, eerie quality and I love it, so we’re including it here (especially in an environment where searching for the film ends up bombarding you with links to the new Marvel garbage heap of the same name). Another in the idea to trust going down respected directors filmographies, and finding overlooked gems; Rafelson is quite underrated, his great Five Easy Pieces and King of Marvin Gardens going back-to-back to start the Seventies after Head had punctuctated an era of the 60’s that was quickly in decline (not to mention was the Monkees last gasp pretty much), but then he mostly did entertaining genre fodder. His Postman Always Rings Twice remake features one of the sexiest, clothed love scenes you’ll ever see, while I’m dying to check out both his Blood and Wine and Poodle Springs. But in-between them all was Black Widow, a film so great that perhaps only Five East Pieces tops it over his career in my opinion. In it, Alexandra (Debra Winger) is a hot shot Justice Department agent that has sniffed something fishy when a string of rich guys turn up dead shortly after marrying wives with little background or known history. Soon, she’s tracked down Catherine, who was also Renee, Margaret and Marielle as she jumped from rich guy to rich guy. By now Alexandra has herself switched personas when Catherine is tracked to Hawaii, about to marry her next potential victim. Allure takes over as you’re not sure if a tryst is developing between them or if each is wholly onto the other and just trying to get a closer edge. Rafelson gives it all a glorious twist by making it a smart Vertigo riff, but where Scottie was smitten between Novak’s Judy/Madeleine transformation of his doing, here the red and green color signifiers are substituted for jealousy, lust and justice, not power and control. It’s enough of a psychological subtext that the softening whodunnit thriller aspects don’t really matter, here is the ultra scary Theresa Russell, as Catherine a fragile weapon of Horror as alluring and entrapping as her killer spider motif. A hidden gem with acres of subtextual, psychological depth.