Film Review: It Follows (2015)

The horror genre has always been kind to directors who want to showcase a particular style or indulge in directorial affectations. Directors from Jacques Tourneur to Brian de Palma to Stanley Kubrick to Sam Raimi used horror films to highlight their eccentric talents. It Follows takes the generic 1980's horror film (Halloween is the template here), passes it through a film school aesthetic, and what comes out at the other end is stylish, but ultimately rather dull.

The terror at the heart of teen horror movies isn't really a maniac wielding something sharp and stabby, it's sex. It's old news that this genre revels in t & a, punishes its sexually active characters with gruesome deaths, and makes the virginal into heroes. It Follows has the clever idea to cut to the chase by having its titular nasty be a new kind of STD--a sexually transmitted demon. If you have sex with an "infected" person they will pass on a curse to you. The curse is that you'll be followed (at a walking pace) by an evil spirit that will kill you if it catches you. The spirit or demon can take any human form, but is only visible to its victim. By having sex you can pass the demon on to the next person. So there it is, all the dread, guilt and anxiety teens feel about sex wrapped into one tidy concept. The execution is the problem.

The story unfolds in a very low-key manner by the standards of the genre. Jump scares are kept to a minimum, characters have aimless conversations that don't include the use of word "dude", and very little is done in a rush. It all has the feel of something done in film school that's self-consciously trying to avoid the cliches of the genre but can't find anything better to replace them with. The cinematography is moody, and the director plays with the time period it's set in (is it contemporary? Is it the '80s?), but the visual and tonal conceits can't paper over the weak internal logic of the story. We don't get a back story to the curse, which is OK, but the logic of how the curse works and how the demon is defeated seems arbitrary. Also, at the end of the day this is essentially a zombie movie with only one zombie, and I hate the zombie genre.

The Best Non-Horror Horror Films

Every October the internet is awash with suggestions for Halloween-themed movie watching. This isn't exactly one of those lists. Rundowns of the best horror movies have a year after year sameness to them due to the fact that the genre has been in a creative rut for a quite a few years. On the one hand you have Paranormal Activity and its dozens of clones, and on the other you have torture porn/slasher films that only exist to highlight the work of the prosthetics wing of the SFX department. So here's a list of films that provide the fear and existential dread of the best horror films, but without any supernatural content or masked men wielding knives/axes/garlic presses.

Onibaba (1964)

It gets scarier than this.

 Set in a marsh in rural Japan, a woman and her widowed daughter-in-law make a living killing lone samurai who cross their path. They dump the bodies in a deep hole in the marsh and sell the armour and weapons they've stripped from the bodies. Things go awry when the young woman acquires a love interest and her mother-in-law finds a "demon" mask. This is a seriously creepy and atmospheric film thanks to some amazing cinematography that's reminiscent of Val Lewton's horror films.


Innocence (2004)

"This doesn't look like Hogwarts."

The girls who live and study in this French boarding school make their first arrival at the school in coffins in which they seem to have been sleeping. Things get weirder. The school is in a walled park and no one is allowed out. After a peculiar course of study the girls are sent...but, no, that would be a spoiler. Marion Cotillard is one of the teachers in this sumptuous-looking film, which creates tension and dread by not giving us any clues as to what's really happening.

Winter's Bone (2010)

And they live in the good part of town.

Every minute of this dark crime drama is filled with dread. Jennifer Lawrence's character, Ree, has to prove that her father's dead, and to do that involves running a gauntlet of back country characters who'd probably regard Deliverance as a sitcom. The hills of rural Missouri are filled with crazed crackheads,  meth dealers, and garden variety bug-eyed rednecks, all of whom Ree has to negotiate with or cower in terror from. It's a hair-raising film that's almost devoid of violence.

The Parallax View (1974)

One of them gets down the quick way.

One of the key tropes in most supernatural films is that ordinary things aren't necessarily what they appear to be; see that sweet-looking doll over there? Turn away for a second and suddenly it's got it's hands around your throat. This political conspiracy thriller about a shadowy corporation that assassinates US politicians works a bit like that. Warren Beatty is a journalist who starts uncovering the truth but faces danger and double-crosses every step of the way. Director Alan J. Pakula brings the same mood of paranoid spookiness to this film as he did to Klute and All the President's Men.

Wake In Fright (1971)

Watch out! He's reaching for his pouch!

Yet another horror film trope is the character who keeps making terrible choices, such as taking midnight strolls in cemeteries, going into attics/basements to investigate odd noises, and admitting men into the house who introduce themselves by saying, "I'm Count...uh...Alucard. Yeah, that's it, Count Alucard!" The central character in this Aussie film (but directed by Canuck Ted Kotcheff) is an Englishman who has to spend one night in a godawful Outback town for a flight that will take him back to England and civilization. He then makes a series of bad decisions that land him in one horrible situation after another, all involving the very unappetizing locals. The film has a gritty, documentary feel, an unrelenting sense of impending doom, a big, brassy performance from Donald Pleasance, and cinema's only knife fight between a man and a kangaroo.

The Hill (1965)

Harry Andrews isn't keen on Connery's moustache.

A tried and tested horror film structure is to have our hero(es) battle/run from a seemingly invulnerable maniac killer or supernatural entity. In the last few minutes of the film the baddie is bloodily defeated and all is well...or is it? The Evil One inevitably leaps back to life and things end badly for everyone except the film's producers, who've thereby left the door open for sequels. The Hill is set in a British military prison in North Africa that holds deserters and shirkers and the like. The officers in charge of the camp are a collection of bullies and incompetents, and one of their prisoners is worked to death as part of a punishment detail. A few of the prisoners, led by Sean Connery's character, try and have the responsible officer brought to justice. It seems like an impossible fight, and just when it looks like they've won...This is probably Connery's best performance, and he's supported by an A-list cast of Brit character actors all of whom try and outshout and outact each other; it's like a thespian version of WWE.

Juliet of the Spirits (1965)

I'm telling you it's not a horror movie!

 The title character, an upper-middle-class Roman housewife, finds out her husband is having an affair and has a nervous breakdown. Her breakdown takes the form of seeing visions, and this being a Fellini film, the visions are eye-popping celebrations of Technicolor, sound design, and visual imagination. Fellini isn't trying for scares or even dread, but some of his imagery, especially in the final section of the film, makes you realize that he could have made an amazing horror film.


So there you have it; seven "horror" films that are largely blood and viscera free. And if you absolutely have to have celebrate Halloween with a horror film, check out Lake Mungo, an Australian film that could almost make this list because it keeps its supernatural elements to an absolute minimum and becomes all the scarier because of it. 

Film Review: The Haunting (1963)

Ever since Halloween (1978) the majority of horror movies have been all about the bloodletting. Nothing wrong with that, but some variety is nice. Variety arrived in 1999 with The Blair Witch Project, which counterpunched its way to huge success by showing nothing: no blood, no weapons, no hooded/cowled/goalie mask-wearing maniacs lurching around. Audiences were scared silly by imagining what was lurking just off-camera.

In 1963 The Haunting, based on a novel by Shirley Jackson called The Haunting of Hill House, accomplished the same feat. It had all the accoutrements of the classic supernatural horror story, including a gloomy, cursed mansion; an easily terrified female lead; and even a housekeeper given to dire warnings about staying in the mansion after dark. Beyond those elements The Haunting was a groundbreaker in a number of ways. One of the non-spooky aspects that's unusual is that the character of Theodora, played by Claire Bloom, is clearly a lesbian. This isn't stated directly, but it's very strongly inferred. What makes it more unusual is that she isn't punished in some way for her sexuality, nor is she required to be a heroine in order to compensate for being gay. Minority characters in 1960s films usually had to be extra noble or die, or sometimes both, as a way of making straight audiences comfortable. And Theodora isn't even made to look butch; her clothes are by Mary Quant!

The Haunting was equally innovative on the other side of the camera. Some of the exterior shots were done with a special high-contrast film stock that gives Hill House the look of a steel engraving and emphasizes its crypt-like design. The camerawork is also pretty bold, with an unpredictable and unsettling mixture of wide angle shots, oddly-angled scenes, and eccentric camera moves. Watching this film also makes you realize that ghost stories should always be filmed in black and white. Special mention should go to the sound of the film, which features one of the first uses of electronic sound effects.

The most startling thing about this film is how scary it manages to be without showing anything. The director, Robert Wise (yes, he's the guy who did The Sound of Music), uses sound effects, lighting, reaction shots, and one very bendy door to create horror and tension. Proof that this is very nearly a miracle of direction and imagination is that it's impossible to think of another film that accomplished this until Blair Witch. Ironically, Hollywood remade The Haunting in 1999, the same year as Blair Witch, with Liam Neeson. The remake went nuts on CG ghouls and so on, and it was a critical dud. Of course, how could any supernatural entity be scarier than Liam?

The actors are uniformly good, with Julie Harris very effective as the mousy woman who finds that Hill House has a special interst in her. Richard Johnson grounds the film as the sensible, but open-minded scientist investigating the paranormal, and Russ Tamblyn as the goofy guy is, well, goofy. Perhaps a little too much so. Claire Bloom is superb as Theodora; just watch her subtle facial reactions to what other characters say and do. The Haunting is well worth watching as it doesn't feel dated and it still packs a scary punch. And for another film that scares without showing much of anything, check out the superb Lake Mungo; my review's here.