Cabin in the Woods (2011)
Dir: Drew Goddard
Writ: Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard

Firstly, Joss Whedon's career is immense (Buffy, Firefly, Toy Story and a billion accolades including prestigious sci-fi and fantasy awards the Hugo and Nebula, just for starters) and any movie/television series associated with his name will, by now, garner high expectation. Likewise, owing to Cloverfield, Drew Goddard on the writing bill was extra incentive.
To go much into the plot of Cabin in the Woods would be to give the game away. It is a good horror film, with some very imaginative creatures (basically a treasure trove for designers, as a friend of mine put it). And it is a good genre film, where the 'meta' content, or the running commentary on the horror genre, is an integral part of the film in a way that makes complete sense. This extra dimension to the film also has a developing plot which posits a horrifying idea. Plus any film which opens with Bradley Whitford (the West Wing's Josh Lyman) is in some way at least a winner. For fear of spoiling the twists and turns of this movie I will not reveal why in this film it is especially a winning appearance, but I definitely recommend it.

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)
Dir: Steve Glosserman
Writ: Steve Glosserman and David J. Stieve

Behind the Mask is a definite genre film. Leslie, a career serial killer, agrees to let a group of film makers document his mission to fulfill the legendary horror film formula and thus follow in the footsteps of his heroes Michael Myers, Freddy Kruger and Jason Vooerhees. The plot contains two parallel paths: the first is that of a classic horror film (bunch of partying teenagers stalked by a masked superhuman killer), and the second is genre-play. The two take turns in propelling the action, and are woven together well enough that the layering is not superficial: the classic trope of knowing what's going to happen before the character onscreen figures it out with agonising slowness is given a clever twist as the film goes on (watch it and you'll see). Not particularly scary, but certainly very interesting and fun. Makes you reminisce about your favourite classics, and not in a bad way.

Lake Mungo

Lake Mungo (2008)
Writ and Dir: Joel Anderson
Cinematography: John Brawley

Some time ago, a friend asked me to explain why I like horror. I feel the answer contains two parts of a whole, and might go some way to explaining the enduring popularity of the genre: firstly, the scares, and secondly, the satisfaction. In horror, the unseen and unknown forces in our world become tangible and immediate. We are allowed to look at what we otherwise only feel. In this sense, the analogy is a fantasy, a wish to know and recognise the forces in our history and our culture which shape our lives, but also the fear that confronting them would be more than we could bear. Bad horror has lost sight of this, but good horror taps into what the audience already brings to the table.


Lake Mungo is just such a film. 


On the first front, that of movie-going thrills, it is extremely creepy. It brought back long-ago memories of leaving the room during The Sixth Sense, or begging my friend to stop playing the scene in Jaws where the woman gets eaten, when I was probably not old enough to be watching those films.


On the second front, Lake Mungo fits into my favourite type of ghost story, one that explores haunting in a complex and real way by focusing on the relationship between people and history. Basically, the film is presented as a documentary about the Palmer family after their daughter Alice drowns during a family picnic. Formally, the film was spot on, which is why I've made sure to mention cinematographer John Brawley. In the DVD commentary the credit which the film-makers give the audience in terms of visual literacy is commendable, and certainly explains the success of the formal elements. They go to lengths in order to tap into the audience's recognition of 'documentary signposts': for the 'news footage' of the drowning, they staged the event and conscripted professional teams to carry out the search for and retrieval of the body. They also conscripted local news teams to cover the event as they would if it was real, and then used that footage in the film. The interview scenes involving the Palmers and their neighbours were largely improvised in order to achieve believability, the type of film was constantly switched according to how the 'real footage' was supposedly captured, etc. As for tricking me into believing it as reality, despite my better knowledge, it succeeded, and that made it all the more freaky. However, on this point I will briefly mention a potential bad decision: I was snapped out of the reality of the film by reflecting on the possibility that the Palmers were named after Laura Palmer, the girl who drowns at the beginning of the TV series Twin Peaks. It's not the only connection, either: some of the home-movie and photo footage of Alice Palmer is reminiscent of footage of Laura in Twin Peaks, and as the Palmers (in Lake Mungo) learn more about Alice's past, the story takes some turns that are again very similar to the Twin Peaks narrative. If this naming reference was a deliberate decision, I think they did themselves a disservice by taking away from the supposedly nonfiction approach.


One particular feature summarises the successes of this film: it dwells on visual material. It leaves pictures on the screen, zooms in, replays, and even redirects your eye and re-contextualises images. This is an extremely effective expression of our relationship to haunting,of our mind and memory's relationship to what we dwell on, and I think it is owing to this that the film is so creepy.

This is a film that does justice to the history of the genre, both of ghost stories and of horror, and it gives me great pleasure to see such a high quality Australian film.

Rosemary's Baby

Rosemary's Baby (1968)
Written and directed by Roman Polanski
Featuring critically acclaimed performances by Mia Farrow and Ruth Gordon

Roger Ebert's review of the film upon its release sums up many points explaining the film's success. If I can pick the most outstanding, he makes fitting comparisons to Hitchcock. However, he uses Hitchcock to illustrate a suspense-film tradition in which the plot rules the characters, which he compares to Rosemary's Baby, where the characters transcend the plot. I definitely agree that the film's success lies in the strong characters, credit for which is shared by Polanski and the film's principle players Farrow and Gordon. I also think that the film engages in another Hitchcock tradition, right from the start: that of suggestion, which manifests itself in big and small ways, and is key to Polanski's talent.
The glimpses we get of small stories happening not just in the lives of the main characters, but in each moment of the film's world, is a noticeable use of suspense in the Hitchcock tradition. what Hitchcock was good at was suggesting to us any number of stories that we could follow with our imagination even as the principle action of the film was happening (Rear Window, need I say more?). He suggested them with nuances in the interactions between people, and in the mis-en-scene of each situation. Polanski does this from the beginning of the film... most memorably, in the exchange between Roman (Rosemary's husband, played by Sidney Blackmer) and the people he and Rosemary meet as they walk to the apartment viewing. Just as the main characters are strong, so are the incidental ones, and that goes a long way in preserving the unfolding intrigue of the film.
Polanski walks a good line between giving us enough to tell the story, but not so much as to spoil our dreading curiosity. The story is not one of plot points as much as it is a portrayal of the characters' journeys after arriving in a new context, one which throws each of them out into extremes that we follow and even predict, but with aforementioned dread.
For this reason, the ending was necessary as an affirmation of our dread, but the real content of the movie was not the end but the end in the making.

The Haunting in Connecticut

The Haunting in Connecticut (2009)

Dir: Peter Cornwell

Writ: Adam Simon, Tim Metcalfe

Based on true events.

This is the film where I discovered that it is much more terrifying to watch horror films with my housemates. These are the same housemates who invited me to go on a ghost tour the other day, and with who I have spent evenings watching for UFOs or the 'void' which appeared to one of our number several weeks ago.

So in this context, The Haunting had plenty of cringe-scares, plenty of "why in the hell would you go in there!?", "get out of the god damn dumb waiter!" and "please don't reflect a terrifying ghost in that mirror!" moments.

In a way, it followed the same formula of The Mothman Prophecies... take a 'real life' story and condense it into a movie length narrative by focusing on the experience of a single person undergoing a pre-existing struggle, in this case teenager Matthew (Kyle Gallner), who is suffering from cancer... his mother's theory, posited at the beginning of the film and enforced by later characters, is that he is exposed to this world of the dead because he already exists between that world and the living. Throughout the film I was mindful of the fact that the story of Matthew's struggle with cancer, and the experience of his family, which was thankfully not ignored by the film makers, was horrifying enough, and they did well not to trivialize it into a mere plot device.

It is stylishly scary, and has enough substance in the characters, the plot and the spacing out of the terror to make it a good watch. The boy medium Jonah is memorable and well-dealt with, at the same time tragic, eerie and disturbing. The vision of him spewing a morphing sepia column into the air kept popping into my head during our ghost tour, which speaks highly enough of it. My only criticism is that, while the plot didn't veer off into the ridiculous, some elements were on the verge of being unnecessary, namely details about the previous occupant's occult practices which seem to mostly serve as fodder for 'scary' visuals (which are actually the least terrifying moments, for trying too hard) and the 'climactic' finale, which was perhaps a turn too far from interesting story ville into movie plot land.

The Mothman Prophecies

The Mothman Prohpecies

2002

Dir: Mark Pellington
Screenplay: Richard Hatem

Based on the book by John A. Keel

The book The Mothman Prophecies is not so much a narrative as a sort of manifesto, chronicling John Keel's years of experience as a ufologist and general researcher of the 'paranormal' and positing numerous facets of Keel's overall theory regarding contactees and the like, which ties itself loosely to the events occurring in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, during '66-'67. It's interesting, not least of all as a study of Keel himself.

So I turn on the film and it suddenly becomes a story. It is a story because it is straightaway a tragic love story, which gives the protagonist John Klein (Richard Gere) (see what they did?) a reason for involving himself in the Mothman saga which is more palatable to movie viewers than Keel's search for answers.

Not me, however. I loved Itchy and Scratchy.

My overall verdict is that while this adaptation achieves an appealing atmosphere and ties together the Point Pleasant '66-'67 story into neat narrative form, in doing so it unfortunately loses the wider scope that makes the time so fascinating, namely the ufo sightings, which it completely leaves out, and the experiences of contactees who it seems achieved small fame in their time for incredible abduction and contact stories. The questions raised in Keel's book and the small town community beset by oddities so frequently during a certain period that they become commonplace is far more engaging, and it would've been nice to see that captured in film.

In many ways, Men In Black is a lot more faithful to Keel's writing!

Friday the 13th: mid-binge (1-3)

Is horror composed of tropes, even if they are only tropes because I am coming to the film decades after its release, 'trashy' horror?

The first three Friday films follow a soon-tiresome formula: you watch a bunch of kids be kids in the woods, and then get picked off one by one, with a 'here he is again!' crescendo/de-crescendo pattern that increases in frequency as the film goes on, until it reaches an almost ridiculous pace. The 2009 remake had me missing The Blaire Witch Project, however the original (1980) creates an engaging universe in true gothic tradition. The wilderness is the most powerful character (and may i say, much of the credit for this surely goes to composer Harry Manfredini), and is responsible more so than any bloody killings or disfigured un-dead for the actual horror. Of particular note are the hilarious walk-on-roles: a power-tripping try-hard cop, a lovable ultra-geeky waitress and a collective of reticent locals.

All of these elements are watered down in the the second film, to its detriment. It lacks the variety of characters and doesn't quite nail the wilderness, but sticks pretty closely to the tropes of the original. The third follows suit right up until the final ten minutes. In both sequels the gangs of youths fall into the same character types (most notably the fool, increased in number from just one of the gang to a full three by the third film). The first film gave us a glimpse of the true potential of Jason's character, which was ignored in Part II, and only appeared again at the very end of Part III. Will the promise of Jason apparent in the original film be realised in the many sequels I have yet to watch?

On another note, my housemate David over at The Irony Mark hated the film I recently recommended, Plague Town. I maintain my position regardless.