horrorfest evening seven: the Gewissengeist film

Allow me to call your attention to a favorite subgenre of the horror film by giving it a name: the Gewissengeist film. That's "conscience" and "ghost" strung together, and everything sounds more impressive in German.

This is how you make a Gewissengeist film (and I wish you would. The formula works very well indeed):

1. Take a handful of excellent character actors, British whenever possible.

2. Trap them in a confined place: a submarine, perhaps, or a bunker. Wartime is an opportune setting, with WWII crossing the finish line with a conspicuous first place lead over other wars, probably because Nazis are so easy to turn into evil ghosts and zombies whilst retaining that weird photogenicity. It need not, however, be wartime as long as...

3. ...there is some terrible threat of physical danger from without (ie: the enemy or a posse closing in) to offset the growing supernatural threat from within.

4. Wartime, however, also affords plenty of chances for good people to do bad things, which leads us to the instigating plot-point: some -- but generally not all -- of the characters have, usually prior to the action of the film, been involved in an atrocity or travesty of justice in which innocents were killed. The ensuing psychological tension combined with an eerie, furtive, supernatural presence propels the action into madness, chaos, and, for the lucky few, catharsis and new beginning.

5. The entity in question is real; it exists independently of the characters. In my favorite examples of the subgenre, it rarely takes direct action (as in Below). It lurks and hunkers, rather, like Banquo's ghost; it goads and directs, threatens or warns, messes with machinery and minds, but you never see it clearly and may never be certain in the end exactly what it is. In lazier hands, it becomes the usual macabre specialist in creative gore-dispersal which Hollywood assumes that we want.

6. Lastly, this supernatural force may or may not be directly connected with the crime committed. Sometimes it is, but more often the general premise seems to be that it's your bad conscience which lays you vulnerable to curses and other malevolence from beyond the grave.


Below (2002. dir: David Twohy) is the quintessence of Gewissengeist, and an overlooked stunner. The ensemble cast is splendid, and the tension builds relentlessly without sacrificing subtlety. It's got genuine scares, tense action sequences, a perfect story. The submarine lends itself beautifully to the claustrophobia necessary for the Gewissengeist film to work its dark magic. Bruce Greenwood is the captain who must pay for his crew's terrible mistake, Zach Galifianakis has a fine turn as a horror afficianado with theories about "the malediction", and Jason Flemyng may be the best actor around to fill those all-important but glamorless character-actor shoes.


The Bunker (2001. dir: Rob Green) is less successful but still fascinating. Nine Nazi soldiers are stuck in a bunker in the last days of the war, and the Yanks are encroaching. This particular bunker was built on grounds of ancient evil, and you know what that means: something's skulking in the tunnels. More crucially, seven of the nine share a terrible memory which preys on them to varying degrees. The best thing about it is the flashback to the atrocity. Done in heavy, saturated yellows and greens and in slightly slower motion, the sound-scheme is brilliant: all noises are muffled except gunshots, the heavy drone of insects, birdsong, and the terrible clicking of a camera shutter. Taken together, it's absolutely haunting. The race to the climax unfortunately opts for loudness and gore over substance, but it's still a pleasure to be trapped for an hour and a half with this solid group of actors. (Jason Flemyng again!)


Dead Birds (2004. dir: Alex Turner) is both unique and wildly unsettling. Set in Alabama during the Civil War, it begins with a brutal bank robbery and follows the ragtag group of miscreants to a cursed plantation house. Nobody is innocent in this one, and no one finds redemption. The cast is stellar (Henry Thomas, Patrick Fugit, Isaiah Washington. Michael Shannon!) and the suspense'll keep you from sleeping soundly unless you wash your brain with a comedy before retiring.

POSTSCRIPT: As for Triangle, I'm going to amend my previous statement that it fits into Gewissengeist. Rather, I'm making up a new category for it: it's a Bardo film. It's all about conscience, to be sure, but no independent supernatural agent is necessarily involved, and really there's only one person whose guilt is being explored, so it's possible the whole thing is her mad, post-mortem rush through that liminal labyrinth of terrifying hallucinations and karmic feedback that the Tibetan Book of the Dead calls the Bardo state.

Other examples of the genre, off the top of my head, might be Siesta, Jacob's Ladder, and even, arguably, Inception.

last night's double feature: inserts and the delicious little devil

SPOILER ALERT

Inserts: (1974. dir: John Bynum) I remember when this came out. I was already a Richard Dreyfuss fan from American Graffitti, but of course I never saw this; this was rated X, and I was ten. Even if I had found someone willing to sneak me into a drive-in, I wouldn't have gone, since it's about porn, and porn embarrassed the crap out of me when I was a kid.

Folks will tell you the reason this was a failure was because of the X-rating, but don't be fooled. It's a failure because it's a goddamn failure. And, man, I was so looking forward to it. I'll watch or read anything right now that deals with Hollywood during that transition between silents and talkies. (I'm on the prowl for a decent book about Thomas Ince, if you have any suggestions.) I'm chomping at the bit to see The Artist, but this is the sticks, and patience is a damn virtue, right? And this, my friend, is a piece of crap.

I'd call it a bad movie based on a bad stage play, since it's written like a bad stage play and it all gets shot in one stupid room, but according to IMDB it was written specifically to be filmed, which just goes to serve as a further sad example of that ongoing moral lesson about how directors should not be allowed to shoot their own scripts unless they're Woody Allen, and not always then.

There's some decent acting: Dreyfuss has a few inspired moments, but many of his choices are already (in retrospect, granted) starting to look like practiced shtick. Jessica Harper and Veronica Cartwright do some shining, the latter as a good-hearted, heroin-addicted has-been, the former as an ambitious starlet. Stephen Davies looks like he's acting for the nosebleeds at the Royal Opera House, and Bob Hoskins is utterly predictable all the way through, but so is the damned script. I made a game of it. "Now he's going to find the overdosed body," I'd say out loud. "Now that'll be Clark Gable at the door." "Now he's going to turn the lights out, and it'll be a really lame and ponderous metaphor for the lights going out on the entirety of his career, the entirety of his life." The one thing that kept me hanging on, the one thing that kept me watching, was the hope that the Dreyfuss character (they call him the washed-up Boy Wonder; he doesn't have a real name anymore, get it?) would talk some more about Wally Reid, whose death obviously impacted him with some force. I was disappointed. There's one monologue early on in which he describes the moment in which he found out about the death, but Bynum pulls the camera in slowly on him while he's speaking it, and he's cleaning his fingernails as he does, and it's all too damned precious for words. Bah! Humbug, I say.



the Delicious Little Devil: (1919. dir: Robert Z Leonard) Mae Murray was a sexy clown from the silents whose relaxed carriage and lack of vanity still invites affection. She began as a dancer and enjoyed immense stardom as a comedienne at Universal and MGM in those early days, reportedly earning as much as $10,000 a week (which is almost exactly a gazillion times what I make right now, nearly a full century later, thank you very much) then ending her days in penury after a bad marriage to a wicked prince and failing to make the leap into talkies. This is an impish comedy about a nice girl who's too vivacious to keep a hat-check job but has layabout relatives to support and so goes into disguise as a scarlet lady with a scandalous past in order to secure a job at a nightclub. Directed by Murray's third husband, it keeps a jovial pace and allows her the space to win us, with her Peacock Walk dance, for instance, or her manic preparations in her dressing room, or with her facial gestures alone. (My favorite is when she lets her eyes widen and her face go slack and presses her lips together so they disappear.) Her straight man is one heavily-powdered and very young Rudolpho De Valintine, a relaxed and good-natured foil as the rich boy who loves her in spite of her sins.

my miniature robert ryan film festival

SPOILER ALERT

Caught: (1949. dir: Max Ophuls) Ryan is fearsomely magnificent as Howard Hughes, shallowly disguised. Barbara Bel Geddes is the innocent gold-digger who has the misfortune to marry him, and James Mason is the do-gooder pediatrician who falls in love with her. Max Ophuls directs, and the way it's shot is the real star. The script is also very good, although it falls into some cliche by the end, a convenient heart attack and even more convenient miscarriage, all provided thanks to the Hays Code. Last I checked this wasn't domestically available on DVD, but it ought to be, both for Ryan's performance and for the stunning camera-work.


Act of Violence: (1948. dir: Fred Zinnemann) The sounds of this suspense thriller (about a threatened vengeance for a secret wartime offence) are the sounds of nightmare: Ryan's dragging foot as he walks around Van Heflin's darkened house while Heflin and Janet Leigh crouch, terrified, in the shadows, or the sound of Ryan's boat creaking as he rows out relentlessly after his prey. Otherwise, it's grotesquerie in suburbia: a parade of drunks at a convention is another nightmare image. The closing noose of tension, those slow-collapsing walls, reminds me of Odd Man Out: as if the Heflin character took the killshot when he first heard the Ryan character coming, and from there on it's one long, noirish descent into hell.


Escape to Burma: (1955. dir: Allan Dwan) A project unworthy of its stars, alas. I love Stanwyck and Ryan together; he's big enough to match her strength, and she's strong enough to match his presence. This is a movie full of set-pieces, though, instead of a movie about people: there's a jungle pavilion bit, bits with elephants, stolen rubies, a tiger hunt, native bandits. The plot itself is just a MacGuffin for a big, kind of faded, Technicolor extravaganza: the Ryan character is being pursued by the authorities for the murder of a royal prince. He finds his way to Stanwyck's teak-and-elephant plantation, where passion is inevitable. They don't have much to say to one another; nobody does. Characters spend a lot of time walking across enormous rooms to pour drinks without conversation to fill the space. They're just waiting for the next action sequence.

horrorfest evening six: the dunwich horror and triangle

SPOILER ALERT

the Dunwich Horror: (1970. dir: Daniel Haller) Trippy, '60s interpretation of the great Lovecraft story, one which is probably unfilmable as written, but catches so strong a hold on the imagination that it is, I trust, destined to be re-interpreted by moviemakers for all of eternity.

This time, the plot is dumbed down to include a ridiculously passive virgin-for-the-altar character (pity poor Sandra Dee), and the gargantuan and goatlike Wilbur Whateley is shrunken and humanized into a man who looks very much like a hipster version of Dean Stockwell. It has been re-set in 1970, relegating the "I look like Sandra Dee, I'm 27 and still lousy with virginity" idea to the slop-bucket of the utterly absurd. That said, there is still evidence of the true story squirming beneath the mountainous blasphemy of updates and rewrites, like the inclusion of that raucous flock of whippoorwills who hunker and wait to catch the souls of the dying as they leave their bodies.

In any case, the revelation for me was that psychedelia was a nice, low-budget way of expressing a Lovecraftian monster in those pre-CGI days. When the brave redshirt girl marches up and opens the fearsome, locked attic-chamber to release the beast, -- and, no, you won't find this scene in the Lovecraft story,-- she is overwhelmed by psychedelia. Consider the description of this monster in the original prose:

'Bigger'n a barn... all made o' squirmin' ropes... hull thing sort o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything with dozens o' legs like hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step... nothin' solid abaout it - all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost together... great bulgin' eyes all over it... ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all a-tossin' an openin' an' shuttin'... all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings... an' Gawd in Heaven - that haff face on top..."

YOU try and film that without help from a computer.

Anyway, it's not a success, not by any standards, but it's an interesting failure, like a time-capsule from the Altamont era.




SPOILER ALERT

Triangle: (2009. dir: Christopher Smith) Ambitious Gewissengeist(*) horror outing by the director of Black Death, a man whose Christopher Nolan-ish, David Twohy-ish boldness in story and attention to detail attract me utterly. Flawed as it was, Black Death won me with its intrepid audacity (did I just say the same thing twice? consider it an attempt to emphasize the compliment). Triangle is more problematic, but equally bold, using both Time Vortex and Ghost Ship tropes, and using them rather well.

(The less you know about this film, the better, so stop reading now if you haven't seen it yet.)

A Time Vortex is a tricky thing, turning on a dime from suspense to Keystones Kops once you have more than a couple of versions of the same characters inhabiting the same space. Also, because it's plot-driven with an emphasis on action, an admirable attempt, the full dimensions of the characters have been sacrificed to favor pace and forward movement. Smith has made a crafty attempt to circumvent this flaw by casting extraordinarily well (would that all directors were so crafty), but the result is still not entirely effective. The other extremity of that particular stick is that once you know the ending, the "heroine's" maladroit and sometimes downright crazy-assed decisions become less inscrutable, but by that time certain skeptics in the audience may already have turned the channel.

*Gewissengeist: Conscience-Ghost

horrorfest evening five: two more classics

Island of Lost Souls: (1932. dir: Erle C. Kenton) I've never been completely sold on Laughton as an actor. He'll be going along subtly and smoothly, on his way to a great performance, then at a crucial moment he'll tip one right over the top, a wink to the audience, perhaps a bid to be loved and understood, I don't know, but I'm generally disappointed. In Island, he comes unutterably close to giving a seamless performance as the power-mad doctor hiding his sadism behind the objective mask of science. Although he gives us the odd wink, he also strides boldly toward that rare beast, the consummate turn.

It's a small masterpiece, this first of three Hollywood re-imaginings of HG Wells' Island of Dr. Moreau, and utterly chilling, even today. Unfettered by the circling-but-not-yet-landed Hays Code, the references to rape and violence are unconcealed and all the more unsettling because they are interspecific. Even if you've read the book or seen the later (and lesser) films, its twists are unexpected, and, clocking in on DVD at a svelte 70 minutes, it keeps to a good clip without sacrificing atmosphere, which it has to spare.




the Thing from Another World: (1951. dir: Christian Nyby, with possible input from producer Howard Hawks) Understated, jolly banter between easy-going, likable characters on an Arctic military base is interrupted by a crashed UFO and its blood-drinking Vegetable Man occupant. It's a true classic, this. You know in the Bad and the Beautiful when Kirk Douglas and Barry Sullivan have to make a B-picture about terrifying cat-men on a budget and hit on the brilliant idea that the way to make them terrifying is to make damn sure they're hardly seen? That's the key to this one, as well. Despite James Arness' imposing stature, he looks pretty silly in his carrot-man outfit, so we only see him in sudden, vicious glimpses, and it works like mad. This is a low-key movie with great moments: when the men trace the shape of the fallen ship below the ice and realize it's spherical, for instance, or in the end-recap from the reporter relaying his story back home, with his chilling refrain: "Watch the skies! Keep watching the skies." A gem of fifties paranoia to file alongside Invasion of the Body Snatchers.