The Devil in the Details

Let me say up front that I am not the biggest Stephen King fan in the world. In fact, I might hate him, if only in that impotent way that derives mostly from jealousy. I mean, what about Thomas Ligotti? Where's his fame and fortune to match his twisted imagination, huh? Sure, King has his moments, and the man is a quite simply a master at coming up with high concepts that move copies like nobody's business, but his writing just feels so amateurish to me, especially now that he's old and out of touch with the things he's trying to depict. It feels like the literary equivalent of white trash, regurgitating ideas seen in films like The Wicker Man and Blood on Satan's Claw but with zero subtlety, and with constants asides related to whatever King was into at the time it was written: direct references to favorite musical artists and TV shows, weird misogynistic comments, weird sex, and an overall lack of focus. He is a master at filling up pages with nonsense, nonsense...

Lokis: A Manuscript of Professor Wittembach is yet another Polish horror film, but unlike the previous one I looked at, the middling Wilczyna , I found this movie to be quite solid and far more entertaining than I initially expected. For dedicated fans of folk horror, this film has it all: local color, music and dancing, superstitions and legends, a real bear being paraded around as part of a bear-themed local ceremony, naked bathing maidens splashing one another in a wading pool, and my favorite: a little cackling witch, who warmed my heart in one of the best scenes in the film. It's all very cozy material. Returning to the Polish connection real quick: one reason this film succeeds where Wilczyna failed is that it's not immediately clear what the story is leading up to, whereas the first scene in Wilcyzna, not to mention its English title The She-Wolf, spoils everything that is going to happen barring only the specific circumstances of the ending, all in the span of about fi...

I hate the attitude that most modern creatives and their audiences have, where everything has supposedly been done before and thus hackery is totally natural and not shameful at all and normal for growing boys and girls everywhere yada yada yada. A pox on you, I say! That kind of attitude has never gotten us anywhere. Sure, it's nice to tell yourself that there are no new original concepts left when turning in some pedestrian genre flick, but I think films like Anna and the Apocalypse prove that new takes on an old story can be pulled off easily by those with any talent or even ambition to create something that has heart and soul behind it... is what I would be saying if it weren't for how predictable and formulaic it becomes by the end. Indeed, it's more than a little forgettable, but what I can remember sticks out as particularly strong and worth the hour and a half of my life that I spent watching it. Three stars, a handsome and witty film.  Damn, only one paragraph so ...

Wilcyzna is a film that I dreaded. Don't ask me why, I just did. After all those wonderful Australian films, each one more impressive than the next, this one looked dreadfully boring somehow. And then there's the English translation of the title: The She-Wolf. Upon starting it, I had my suspicions proven mostly right, but once the film gets all of the early exposition out of the way and becomes an actual horror film, it's really not half bad at all and I soon found myself coming around to it. The story is thematically centered around that familiar chestnut: the male fear of women and especially the expression of their sexuality. They were often, and still are in more cultures and subcultures than is comfortable, considered carnal creatures that could go feral at any moment; they could be hysterical, promiscuous, and conniving, all in equal measure. In prior centuries, this was considered a worthy subject to induce terror in the populace, but nowadays, of the stories even re...

Annnd once again we're checking out a folk horror film (trust me, I have no end of them to talk about.) Only this time, it's also a monster movie! Set in an Irish village surrounded by spooky forests that are said to be inhabited by strange, fungal monsters, The Hallow is chiefly concerned with the destruction of our natural environment, though in the guise of a rather good critter film of the Gremlins variety, complete with little creepy-crawly mushroom people that are as adorably dumb looking as they are terrifying when glimpsed briefly moving under the dim moonlight. It takes a European approach to this thoroughly American sub-genre and succeeds for the most part, although not without a few niggling issues. For a change, let's list those first: I don't like the way the protagonist basically gets 'bitten' by a monster (via spike through the eyeball, which itself is kind of a visual motif throughout the film which I found very unnerving) and begins transformin...

The first thing you're likely to notice about Allison's Birthday, a vintage shocker from the land down under, is its outwardly campy qualities: an on-the-nose title, a grainy, washed-out look, and an outrageous opening sequence that may elicit chuckles just as often as it frightens. But here's the thing, this little film is ultimately yet another rock-solid folk horror feature from Australia, this time involving a miniature Stonehenge, druids, occult ritual, transmutation, and of course, references to Lovecraft lore. It whips its mix of heavy metal exploitation horror and thrills in the vein of  Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Rosemary's Baby into something that has lost none of its ability to unsettle, despite its familiarity. As in its forebears, a near-constant tension is maintained, and the sense of sinister events brewing offscreen is impossible to shake, though one will have trouble telling from the outset exactly how the story will end. Characters are anyt...

Apparently, even bad books can make for great films in the hands of a master. Take for instance Bram Stoker's  The Lair of the White Worm:  originally a barmy horror novel that Stoker allegedly wrote while going insane from syphilis, it has been adapted here by none other than the cinematic madman Ken Russel, a man who was never one to back down from a challenge, and so his film is a conscious attempt to take a stinker of a horror yarn and turn it into a fun, charming piece of B-horror entertainment, and, for the most part, it succeeds admirably. Russel takes the structure and basic premise of the novel along with a few of its characters, combines them with elements from Dracula while playing up the unintentionally silly and overwhelmingly British aspects of Stoker's plotting, especially the habit of his characters to drop everything right then and there and have an impromptu cup of tea while they discuss their next move. Stuff that was unintentionally bad before and sort of a...

Next up on our list of Australian folk horrors is  Celia, a dark fairy tale of sorts   which opens with our lead, a young prepubescent girl, discovering that her grandmother has died in her sleep. From here, the story spirals outward, offering a cynical and satirical look at society that examines adult issues of political turmoil and paranoia through the games and rituals of its youngest. The result is an intelligent, often heartrending, film that was grossly underappreciated back in its day, and one that I couldn't be happier to re-evaluate nearly forty years later. Like Philip Ridley's American folk horror oddity  The Reflecting Skin, we see children struggle to make sense of senseless tragedy using scraps of things they've seen before mixed with fairy tales and folk superstitions. They play commies vs capitalists, perform voodoo rituals, and act out lynchings. They take scraps of real-world ideology, misinformation, and moral panics that they barely understand an...

November is a fairy tale that's at times sardonic, at others surreal and nightmarish, and never less than bewitching throughout. In the bleak fantasy world it depicts, those who live in squalor are forced to lie, cheat, and steal from one another to survive, while those who govern them simply hide away in their castles. Don't let its heavy themes and cynical worldview fool you, however: this film has a lot of heart and plenty of magic tricks up its sleeve. In the opening minutes of the film, we are immediately introduced to an obscure folkloric nugget: the Kratt, an automaton constructed of household garbage and given autonomy via black magic. The townspeople use these things to steal from each other, perform menial labor around the house, and just generally easing the burden of living in a filthy world ravaged by plague, inhabited by ghosts, werewolves, and even the devil himself. The lore is deep too. At one point, a snowman is brought to life in this fashion and while it pr...

A violent curse film in the style of Nightmare on Elm Street or Ringu , Kadaicha is yet another Australian folk horror contender. It feels like the charming sort of genre flick that you might discover buried deep in a video store circa '97, especially seeing as its only surviving copy is a VHS-era broadcast one. Watching this film next to The Dreaming, I am taken aback by how similar they are in terms of inspiration, but yet completely different in execution, despite both being horror films and quality ones at that. While it isn't quite as mature as a work of art as The Dreaming is, it's still one of the most entertaining films yet seen in the All the Haunts Be Ours box. You know the drill: first you have a spooky dream, then you wake up and find a kadaicha stone on your pillow. From there, you have anywhere between days and hours to say your prayers before the pied piper shows up demanding to be paid. This film came out in 1988, so it isn't the progenitor of any of ...

So here it is: the infamous ...Scary of Sixty-First. Sold as something of a horror-thriller in the vein of Roman Polanski's apartment films with a modern, anti-establishment edge, it has divided critics and audiences alike on release, and I'll say up front: it's easy to see why. The Scary of Sixty-First opens with two women apartment hunting in New York. Our 'lead,' Addie, in classic psychological horror fashion, is living out an utterly nightmarish existence. Her boyfriend won't pay attention to her, especially sexually, because he's either decorating for Christmas or playing cheap Facebook games (come on, these are not the kind of video games that distract people from sex) and her roommate for unknown reasons seems to be preparing to leave Addie behind and continue her adventures elsewhere, despite their brand-new digs. Things then threaten to spiral out of control when another unstable and mysterious woman enters into the picture, claiming to be an inter...

Well, ladies and gentlemen: we've finally made it to the Australian section of All the Haunts Be Ours, which incredibly boasts four selections total, which to my knowledge is more than any other territory represented therein (Actually, I think it's tied with the four British selections, so disregard.) Puzzling as this may be, as Australia isn't exactly well known for its folk horror tradition, this first selection has immediately set the bar rather high, as it's a cut above many of the other films we've come across so far and is impeccably crafted in every sense of the word.  As in many of the films I've covered so far, The Dreaming makes use of real-world lore and specifically the beliefs and traditions of the Australian aborigines. The title is taken from the concept of Everywhen, which is an ancient, primordial Earth populated by ancestral humans that often possessed supernatural powers and abilities. As with Tilbury , this film takes these ideas and updates...

The City of the Dead opens with a young college student named Nan making the sudden decision to cancel her upcoming vacation on a whim and travel to a remote village that is supposedly cursed, all out of a desire to write a better thesis on witchcraft. Hey, come on: be gentle. It was the sixties after all. In an early flashback, we see a witch being burned at the stake by locals of said village, who, with her dying breath, calls upon Satan to make her immortal that she might torment those that executed her, and their offspring, for generations to come. So when our naive heroine arrives to find the town seemingly deserted, all besides an innkeeper who resembles quite unmistakably said witch, looking not a day older and no worse for wear, she has no reason to suspect anything, but we instantly know something isn't right and thus the tension begins to build. I'll say it right now, the best and only part of this film I really liked was the first half-hour or so, right up until the ...

Have you ever heard of the Icelandic creature known as the tilberi? Not unlike the automatons I was only recently introduced to in the wonderful November,  these creatures are created by women of little means from various odds and ends mixed with communion wine in order to provide for themselves in times of hardship. During a time when women were considered doomed if they didn't have someone possessing a penis watching over them and bankrolling them, this could be extremely useful for lonesome witches and women of fearsome independence. The lore itself is interesting, if bizarre, but how would one go about adapting it into a modern horror story? Enter Tilbury, an appropriately Icelandic TV movie about the very same creature only now he's running amok in a time and place much closer to our own.  Let me just say up front that there was a lot I respected about this film even though I think I hated it. It was interesting in an academic sense, but it didn't suffer from the drea...

What do you get when you cross folk horror with eighties teen slashers? Why, Pumpkinhead  of course! It's the kind of title that causes your eyes to glaze over if you're anything like me. Sure, B-movies can be fun and all, but you never know which will be fun, which will be boring and which will be just plain bad, and at least in that regard, Pumpkinhead exceeded all expectations. The story of a man who wishes to get revenge on a pack of idiot teenagers who accidentally kill his son, this film has lots of visual charm and its simple premise is effective: don't make deals with ancient witches that live in the woods or bad things will happen. It's just the particulars, especially in the second half of the film that kind of drag the whole thing down. Honestly, at this point I would normally harp on the story a little more, but what more is there to say? The teenagers feel plucked straight out of a Friday the 13th sequel, only with a bit more humanity to them. When the res...

Here we have what is purported to be a classic of Norwegian cinema that has been little-seen in the West, all of which excited me greatly as I popped it in, completely blind as to what lie in store. Lake of the Dead can best be described as Agatha Christie's take on a ghost story if she partially confused vanilla ghosts with demons of folklore. Our protagonist is the Watson to a lowly psychoanalyst's Sherlock Holmes; he operates in secret, and we are privy to what is happening in any given scene only  after the fact, and in monologue form no less. I won't lie: the premise of a story wherein someone solves a murder case and prevents further murder from happening by interpreting dreams is pretty captivating, and did I mention yet that this is a film from '58 that sees a group of friends vacationing in a remote cabin in the woods and being picked off one after another by monsters? Talk about ahead of the curve. I didn't mind the fact that it was a mostly straight-ahead...