Predictably, I’m kicking off my list with The Shining, arguably the king* of haunted-house movies. Stephen King complained that Stanley Kubrick’s adaption stripped away most of the motivation and plot, but I contend that the film (co-written by Diane Johnson and Kubrick) necessarily pares away distractions from a baroquely overplotted novel. While that elaborate web of motifs may work in a page-turning book, onscreen they would meld into a sloppy, tension-smothering stew of images. (And if you don’t believe that, check out the King-endorsed miniseries: it preserves as much of the text as possible, which makes it a flabby, slogging mess.) Kubrick’s film creates terror from nothing by winding up the three main players, emptying out that enormous labyrinthian space, and letting them blunder around in there. Kubrick’s The Shining is like a drum: it resonates because it is empty.

For once, I’m going to make a case for an American-language remake. In
The Ring, Naomi Watts brings a somber, unnerving note to her role as Rachel, a reporter following up doggedly on a story about an urban legend and a string of teenager’s deaths. The blankness that sometimes overtakes Rachel’s face makes the dubious plot turns all too convincing. The Ring not only fills the standard criterion of a haunted-house tale (by identifying one place as the site of a terrible deed and the locus for a ghost’s manifestation); it transcends the genre by removing all boundaries. No longer can we rest easy, knowing that the punishing spirit is safely stashed away in its house; this ghost can — and will — follow us anywhere. Even more chilling, The Ring devastatingly throws off the rules of resolution so familiar from campfire tales and old-timey short stories; we think we know how to quiet the dead, but we are oh so wrong.

It’s a well-chewed nugget of story: a motley group is called together to stay in — and to study — a notorious and putatively haunted house. But Robert Wise’s The Haunting (based on Shirley Jackson’s justly renowned novel The Haunting of Hill House) sets the standard for this trope. Instead of cheap jumps and scare chords, this film allows the pressure to simmer away slowly, letting us absorb not only the drab grimness of Hill House’s foreboding rooms but also the mounting tensions between the characters, especially between timid Nell and her roommate, the entrancing bohemian Theo. (note: Be sure you get the 1963 original starring Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, not the flabby 1999 remake.)

Stir of Echoes. This gritty little chiller defies a trope common to the haunted-house genre. Instead of a blandly comfortable upper-middle-class family stumbling upon a vacant ramshackle mansion and snapping it up for a song (without ever wondering about its dark history), Stir of Echoes starts off in a working-class Chicago neighborhood where telephone lineman Tom (Kevin Bacon) lives with his wife and kid. Tom is a forthright, no-nonsense guy who has little time for the mystical puffery spouted by his sister-in-law (Ileana Douglas), which makes his upcoming experiences all the more jolting. It’s a rough, plucky story about trying to carve out a life in rough times, even though death lurks in the corners.

A Tale of Two Sisters. Based on the Korean folktale Rose Flower & Red Lotus, this modern psychological thriller/haunted-house tale retains some of that folk-story pedigree in its balance and grace. The essence of the tale is as familiar as any fairy tale: two troubled girls cling to each other in the face of family strife, a most-unwelcome stepmother, and their belief that some evil force is manifesting itself in their rooms at night. It’s stylish and suspenseful without ever being dismissively slick, at times genuinely terrifying, and in equal parts devastating and heartening in its glimpse inside a family’s private moments.

In The Devil’s Backbone, director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Cronos) manages to deliver a genuinely harrowing ghost story wrapped in a surprising blanket of genuine warmth and heart. While his father is off fighting in the Spanish Civil War, young Carlos (Fernando Tielve) is consigned to an orphanage, and we join him as he explores the landscape, learning its mysteries and trying to carve out a place for himself. Del Toro is a master of atmosphere and darkness, but more than that, he knows how to allow character and time to shape a story until each moment is a dark little poem weaving together personal and political history.

In The Orphanage, director J.A. Bayona (funded in part and advised by del Toro) brings a similarly sorrowful tale to light; Laura (Belén Rueda) brings her husband and newly adopted son Simon to the long-abandoned orphanage where she herself grew up; Laura plans to refurbish the building and start a center for disabled children. Though The Orphanage delivers some chilling moments (including at least one that made us two seasoned horror-movie fans jump and holler), it also creates a curious and potent blend of sorrow and sweetness, an elegiac note in an often debased genre.

Okay, it’s not a house, strictly speaking, but director Brad Andersen’s low-budget high-tension psychological thriller Session 9 captures the essence of haunted-house stories. A small team works long hours at on the lonely grounds of an abandoned mental hospital; each member of the four-man team brings his own personal pressures to the job with them, but their tension is compounded by the rush job and by the oppressive atmosphere of the site. The hulking architecture of the actual long-derelict Danvers State Hospital lends its uniquely sinister air to the film, casting dread and a literal shadow over the landscape.

*See what I did there?

These reviews are cross-posted to The VideoReport.

Because the weekly print version of The VideoReport has limited column inches, I left out some fantastic haunted-house films, including: The Innocents (which makes a great double-feature with The Others); Beetlejuice; Ghostbusters; The Changeling; Poltergeist.

I want to give special attention to a little-known film that The Fella brought home for me this week: The Eclipse is an unexpected morsel of a ghost story, thoughtful and tender and punctuated with a few simple, terrifying moments. The craggy, cliff-like face of Ciarán Hinds (Persuasion, Rome, Margot at the Wedding) is captivating, and he brings great presence and heart to his very quiet character. Michael (Hinds) is a widower, but wait — it’s not the story you expect.

Indeed, The Eclipse is not at all what we expect from a movie haunting. Rather than a ghost story fleshed out with characters, this is a character study in which one character may be seeing a ghost. Even the direction is unexpected. The scenes are framed intelligently, attentively, but not flashily; the moments of ghostly appearance don’t hit the usual beats and jumps, but let us see the images presented simply — a surprisingly affecting (and just occasionally terrifying) method.

“Maybe the Phantom of the Opera just had migraines.”

David Fincher’s Zodiac necessarily throws these rules out. The Zodiac case covered many, many years of active police inquiry — and so does the film, showing us fourteen years of investigation, both by the police detectives (Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards) and by a journalist (Robert Downey, Jr.)

But the film really centers around Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhall), a cartoonist who became engrossed by the coded messages that the Zodiac Killer’s sent in to San Francisco’s newspapers. Zodiac follows Graysmith through the years as he studies, decodes, and researches the messages, trying to tie them to any of the suspects — and there are plenty of suspects.

Zodiac is a sprawling endeavor, trying to make sense out of a tangled mass of evidence. “Sprawling” isn’t usually something I look for in a movie, but Fincher makes it work with one simple, demanding choice: every single role is written and cast thoughtfully, intelligently, carefully, with the sense that these people are real, not vehicles for moving the plot along.

This is also true of the very difficult scenes of the Zodiac attacks. In the most vivid and disturbing depiction, which takes place during a picnic, Fincher uses close-ups and POV shots to narrow our focus: the entire outdoor scene shrinks down to a frantic, tight few feet. He forces us to identify in the most heartbreaking way with the terror and tension of the victims.

The A.V. Club recently inducted David Fincher’s Zodiac into their New Cult Canon, and with good reason. It’s a modern classic, a resonant story of obsession and uncertainty circling endlessly around a series of senseless tragedies.

[This review was cross-posted to The Video RePort.]

The introduction sets up a silly if juicy plot: a pert and innocent young pop idol named Mima leaves her musical career to pursue acting. Soon after, Mima starts receiving messages by fax and by internet (jarringly described in this 1997 film as “that thing that’s really popular lately”) from an obsessed fan or, um, someone… someone who knows every detail of her daily life, someone who witnesses the small humiliations of her new career, someone who describes the darkest aspects of her thoughts in the first person. And then some, um, stuff starts to happen.

If the first act of Perfect Blue feels like a partnership between Miyazaki and DePalma, the second act veers into the territory of David Lynch or Roman Polanski, tangling up the seemingly straightforward stalker-thriller with an interplay of reality and fantasy, muddling the timelines and narrative flow, and toying with our expectations about identity and agency.

Fittingly, Perfect Blue gained new fame recently as a possible inspiration for Black Swan. There are some glancing similarities, but that’s all they are — similarities of theme and story including the pressures of fame, deteriorating self-image, and the difficulty of discerning reality from desire. (Arguably, Black Swan contains a few momentary homages: the subway window, the bathtub scene.) You could put together a fun-but-harrowing Black & Blue double feature, but Perfect Blue would pair equally well with Polanski’s The Tenant or Repulsion or with Lynch’s Inland Empire.

* By namechecking Hayao Miyazaki, I’m not implying that Perfect Blue is suitable for children — oh, my goodness, NO. Yikes.

Then comes the most damning scene, an example of the kind of over-the-top quirkiness that sank the movie. FBI Bureau Chief Gordon Cole (David Lynch reprising his role from the series) meets with his field agents (Chris Isaak and Keifer Sutherland) to give them notes on their upcoming case. But rather than simply speaking or writing, Cole transmits his “notes” via Lil (Kimberly Ann Cole), a red-clad orange-bewigged woman who performs a coded dance of exaggerated movements and expressions. For a lot of viewers, this chapter points out everything that’s wrong with the movie, and I ain’t arguing. Lil’s dance feels like an asinine self-parody, a ham-fisted caricature of the show’s whimsy.

This moment is an affront; it’s garish and silly and clumsy, but it serves a purpose. Like the smashed TV, Lil’s dance gives us a flash of warning: forget what you think you know about this story. The message you’re about to receive is not what you expect.

We’re about to enter Deer Meadow, the shadowy opposite of Twin Peaks. Deer Meadow boasts no pleasant Double R Diner, no outstanding cherry pie, no quietly competent and welcoming sheriff, no damn fine coffee, no Special Agent Dale Cooper, and no beloved Homecoming Queen with a mysterious secret. The victim here is Teresa Banks, whom you may remember from the TV series: she was evidently murdered by the same killer who claimed Laura Palmer’s life.

But Teresa is no golden girl: she’s a short-time night-shift waitress in a seedy diner, her home is a shabby trailer, and no one seems to know much about her — or to care. As dim and dismal as this is and as sorry as we are to dig into Teresa Banks’ squalid life and death, it’s only priming us for the deeper sorrow of witnessing — of becoming complicit in — the last days of Laura Palmer’s short life.

In the TV series, Laura is a distant dream, a lovely portrait gazing out passively from the school’s trophy case or from her parents’ mantel, a brief snip of footage innocently cavorting with Donna on a mountaintop. She’s safely contained in memories and images. In Fire Walk with Me, Laura is unsettlingly tangible and willful. Her actuality and her agency undermine all the romanticized memories and projections that the series fueled. We’re forced to confront Laura’s despair and to face the sordid grotesqueries of her young life, the denial and culpability of her loved ones, and the terrible choices her trauma has led her to make.

That’s not to say that Fire Walk with Me is a great film; it’s deeply flawed, marred by terrible diversions into the absurd and the surreal, and by Lynch’s stubborn insistence upon his own inventions and argot. But it has its moments and they’re terrifically effective, in part thanks to Sheryl Lee’s bravura acting. Her Laura is dizzyingly mercurial, one moment passionate and the next cold and numb. Lee also gives Laura a subtle and unnerving trait: she never maintains eye contact. Laura always seems to look slightly askance, gazing at her companion’s chest or above his head even when she’s proclaiming her devotion. The gives her scenes a strangely potent aura of deep disconnection from her friends and family.

But those laughable diversions of Lynch’s have their own ineluctable power. Just between you and me and the whole internet, after watching FWWM, I spent a night shuddering awake from creeping nightmares, clutching the blankets to me and shrinking from noises in the dark. Even as I scorned and derided them, the images of this ridiculous movie got under my skin like few films can… maybe because it wrought such violent changes upon familiar characters and places, just as a dream does. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me divorces itself from the cozy comforts of “Twin Peaks” the series even as it exploits our familiarity with it. It’s as if “Twin Peaks” itself has entered The Black Lodge and transformed to its dark, dismal alter-ego, taking us with it on a ghastly adventure.

Take home David Lynch’s neo-noir mindbender and you’ll get:

- a murderous modern fable on the dangerous slide from love to violence;
- a twisted meditation on postmodern anxiety over the individual’s inability to retain ownership over their own memories and internalized identity in the face of modern narrative and media;
- an adolescent abstract of Woman As Inscrutable Object;
- a messy muddle of a story turned inside-out around itself;
- the languorous Patricia Arquette cast as the femme fatale, complete with Barbara Stanwyck’s hairstyle from Double Indemnity;
- a disheveled brunet Bill Pullman doing his very best Kyle MacLachlan impression as the suspicious husband;
- a weirdly intimate glimpse of David Lynch’s own furniture, which was used on the interior set;
- a soundtrack featuring David Bowie, Brian Eno, Lou Reed, Trent Reznor, and a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins song performed by Marilyn Manson;
- a sneaking suspicion that Michael Haneke’s Caché got a flash of inspiration from a scene in Lost Highway;
- a serious case of the creeps from Robert Blake’s indelibly disturbing cameo as The Mystery Man;
- really, really mad at me for suggesting you watch this, whether you love it or hate it.

Black Swan has a core of intelligence and wit, but the finished product is — perhaps intentionally — a bit crude, both psychologically and narratively. Natalie Portman plays Nina, a tightly controlled, deeply repressed soloist in a prominent ballet company who longs to play the dual leads in “Swan Lake”… but to do so, she must transcend mere technical perfection and open herself to passion and, perhaps, to an inner darkness.

For experienced viewers of psychological suspense films, the surprises in this film are momentary: jumps and startles rather than character-driven revelations. The biggest difference between Black Swan and more generic films of its ilk springs from director Darren Aronofsky’s gift for portraying jarring physicality. The images of Natalie Portman’s too-delicate ballerina wincing and smothering her pain brought little gasps of dismay to my throat, and I jumped at the little reveals even when they felt obviously manipulative.

Unlike so much of Aronofsky’s transgressive work (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler), Black Swan walks us step-by-step through some pretty familiar psychological-suspense themes: maternal oppression and conflict, professional rivalry turning into personal vendettas, identity crisis, repressed sexuality bursting out unbidden, the shifting lines between reality and fantasy.

Aronofsky even gives us a little metatextual goose suggesting that his coloring-inside-the-lines approach may be intentional. Early in the film, the ballet director, Thomas, gives a speech about the upcoming production of "Swan Lake" that foreshadows the events we're about to see played out, starting with "“We all know the story… Virginal girl, pure and sweet, trapped in the body of a swan" and ending with "Done to death I know, but not like this. We strip it down, make it visceral and real."

Over the next few weeks, Thomas creates a "Swan Lake" with some edgy elements that nonetheless looks strikingly familiar and traditional, as much a comfortable genre piece as Aronofsky's Black Swan turns out to be. It plays with longstanding melodramatic tropes of female competition and artistic hysteria and also toys knowingly with allusions, direct or oblique, to previous films covering similar territory, most strikingly The Red Shoes, Repulsion, Persona, Perfect Blue, and a whole handful of De Palma flicks. It’s a big splashy B-movie, half melodrama, half horror, all crafted with Aronofsky’s lavish attention and intention.

Despite Lars von Trier’s pedigree as crafter of upscale arty horrors, it feels odd to call AntiChrist a horror film… but it is truly horrific, and you should know that before you decide to rent it.

In the prologue, we learn that AntiChrist is predicated on the simplest, most brutally realistic horror: the horror of grief, of abysmal guilt, of mistrusting those we love best. But rarely is true horror so intensely wedded to wrenching drama. It’s engrossing and sorrowful and terrible… and deeply, truly scary. AntiChrist shatteringly portrays the crushing physicality of grief: no soft-focus gentle weeping and hankie-dabbing here, but the raw, biting panic and despair that could all too easily escalate into something still more horrible.

Be warned: as we’ve come to expect from von Trier, this film is stomach-churningly graphic (no, really. Really really really. REALLY), uncompromisingly bleak, and some critics decried AntiChrist as offensively misogynistic. I disagree, but that’s beside the point: the message to take away is that AntiChrist will not leave you munching the last of your popcorn as you hum a happy song. It’s grotesque, bleak, revolting, yet it has moments of real beauty.

It’s a polarizing and genuinely shocking work, and its brutal interplay of grace and gracelessness reminds me of nothing so much as a particularly nasty piece of Northern Renaissance religious art — though the religious symbols here are not so easily decoded, with good reason.

Say what you will about Lars von Trier, this is the first film in a long time to really scare me. Knowing his reputation, I was scared before I even hit “play.”

What do I mean? If a zombie film has no zombies, what the heck does the word even mean? Well, exactly.

Grizzled veteran actor Stephen McHattie exercises his gruff charm and silky-rough voice as washed-up radio host Grant Mazzy, who starts the morning with announcements of missing cats and snow day rosters, and ends it as the lone broadcaster detailing a mysterious outbreak of violence and illness. The tale is a masterpiece of mediated storytelling: Mazzy and his crew are glued to their helm in the radio station, receiving updates from reporters and civilians in the field, which means that the tension is built by voices and words, not gruesome action scenes.

And it works. Not only does it work; the tension becomes a self-feeding cycle as it gradually dawns on the radio troopers that their reports may be compounding the disaster. This is a lean, elegantly economical piece of storytelling that builds to a horrific crest by allowing us to invest in the players, to piece together their relationships and characters and to imagine for ourselves the horrors offstage… and then the action starts to spill over.

[This review is cross=posted to The VideoReport.]

[Soak this is: this unpromising trailer actually makes the film look much more competent and well-crafted than it is. Yup.]

I have to admit: The Room had an unexpected effect on me. It’s almost impossible to describe how odd this film is. It’s not just hopelessly inept (though it is certainly that), but deeply uncanny, as if a group of non-Earthlings decided to make a Lifetime channel movie (but inexplicably decided to make it from the perspective of a misogynist) using signifiers that they thought actual humans would recognize: red roses and pillowfights are romantic; saying hi to doggies and supporting young persons of indeterminate age means you’re a Good Person; pictures and portraits of spoons depict, I dunno, domestic comfort.

In The Room, all the conventions of film language (and indeed, of normal life) are a little askew, and it fills the whole movie with a pervasive sense of wrongness. At first it’s pretty funny to see just how wrong it is, how utterly incompetent Wiseau is as a writer, a director, an actor — how completely he fails to convey even the most mundane of daily life to the screen.

After a while, my laughter wore off and a deep despair took hold. I still have not entirely shaken it. (Wiseau’s appearance didn’t help: he looks like Fabio after a week in the grave, and even the way his grayish skin clings to his golem-like frame is pretty unsettling.) Listen, I LOVE bad movies. But The Room is a different creature than, say, Road House or even Bloodrayne. I can understand how and why those films got made, and how and why Boxing Helena got made, and how and why most of absolutely terrible movies get made.

But I don’t understand how and especially why someone spent giant sacks of money to make The Room*, and viewing it made me wonder why anyone tries to do anything. Seeing the film plunged me into a pit of existential angst, and it took days to climb back out. The Room is the abyss, and I have looked into it.

*Unless it’s a money-laundering project, which doesn’t brighten my world-view much.