Haven’t seen it yet, but from this review, Pontypool sounds like the best movie of 2009: “one of the most original and freakily disturbing films of Canadian origin we’ve seen since David Crononeberg first sent Shivers up our spines….[like] Night of the Living Dead re-conceptualized by William S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard while all three of you were on bad, scary LSD at a semiotics seminar whose keynote speaker turned out to be a zombie-Hunter S. Thompson.” (via.)
Here’s the trailer for Julie Delpy’s movie about 16th century virgin blood drinking Hungarian Countess Erzebet Bathory, (the inspiration for many fairytale villainesses.) She produced, wrote, and directed The Countess. Found on Pretty/Scary, who interviewed Delpy last year, “The film is about a woman that has never had limits to what can be done, and she is very cruel. But she goes through a terrible story, the real story that happened, yes, she has the reputation that she killed 600 women and bathed in their blood, these young versions. But there’s also the other side of the coin, which is that the king owed her so much money that they had to get rid of her, which is why they created this mythical monster, and vampire, and witch, and blood, and bathing in blood. I tell both stories. I tell the myth of the monster, and that maybe there is something else behind it.”
Dario Argento and the Paradoxical Feminism of Horror Films
Horror film is the greek mythology of our time — unavoidably moralizing. Especially when it comes to cartoonish fare like Nightmare on Elm Street or the Saw series, you root for the villain, dispensing gruesome O. Henry-ending comeuppance — slash the face of the vain beauty queen, paralyze the bully star athlete. Without unlikable victims, the film can’t go on. The viewer’s conscience is brustled. He feels remorse as spectator of evil, even if it is all staged.
Sometimes the most dramatic moments in a horror film are violence towards animals, as they represent the ultimate innocent victims. What did the puppy do to you? I haven’t yet see The Strangers, but Liv Tyler seems perfectly cast. She’s strong and beautiful, in a humble way. Impossible to dislike. You wouldn’t want her in danger, any more than you could stand a chainsaw weilding monster attacking a panda.
Nearly every film has an Athena, an Artemis, a Cassandra, or some figure combining the myths of all three. Either her boyfriend dies early, or he is maimed, paralyzed, zombified, etc. She must defend him, but first herself, relying on wits and strength she never realized she had. Here is a good essay reviewing several of my favorite films, and explaining how horror films subvert traditional gender roles by making a feminine character the hero.
Notably, there are also a number of films with the girl as the killer, the prototype being I Spit on Your Grave (set for a remake,) in which a woman savagely beaten and raped, kills her attackers off one by one. Hard Candy, with Ellen Page playing a young woman who literally castrates would-be pedophiles, is another one. I didn’t particularly like it, but its faults lie not with the premise, so much as the too-cute script.
At least since HP Lovecraft, horror has been indentified as the genre of repressed sexual fantasy. And I’ve heard more than several people compare slashing to penetration, but for now let’s stick to the theory of the final girl, as named by Carol Clover in “Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.” Her book was groundbreaking in that it pointed out the audience — male or female — does not identify with the serial killer, but the lone woman on the run.
Nobody does the “final girl” quite like Dario Argento, then again most of his main characters are women to begin with. His latest film, the third in the trilogy starting with Suspiria and Inferno — Mother of Tears — opened this weekend. But with surprisingly little fanfare considering he got a big shout out in Juno, and nearly every art school girl I know is obsessed with him. If you’re a fan it’s a must-see, and even if your not, it’s a good place to start. It’s missing the hallucinatory neon music box architecture and prog rock orgy that is Goblin, the band who scored his best known films. But absent of these campy stylistic details, one finally able to appreciate Dario Argento’s gift for suspense.
Sarah, an art historian, played by Argento’s extremely attractive daughter Asia, receives a recently unearthed tomb. Opening it and examining its contents becomes a literal play on Pandora’s Box. All the witches in the world — played by hot goth chicks of all ages and ethnicities — come to Rome to celebrate the new darkness. They are lead by the Mother of Tears (her sisters the Mothers of Pain and the Mother of Sighs, were killed in the previous films. This trio is loosely based on Thomas de Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis.)
Sarah discovers she’s a “white witch,” and therefore must confront the Mother of Tears herself for a magic-off. So there is no sense of WTF are you doing walking down those steps? She has to come face to face with the danger.
Argento’s films have always seemed very feminine, perhaps because the mother of Asia, Daria Nicolodi, often cowrote his scripts. There’s a very small list of women writing and directing horror, so her contribution is notable.
Incidentally, I saw two and a half films over this unpleasantly temperatured weekend. First Prince Caspian, (which is delightful) and afterward, I walked into the last hour of Sex and the City, playing down the hall. The script is dumb and Sarah Jessica Parker is annoying (but actually kinda pretty in it, in a Joan Crawford kind of way.) But everyone is there to see the clothes, and it delivers for that. Just as horror film scripts tend to be threadbare, just circumstances that might deliver a zombie sneaking out from under the bed every twenty minutes, SATC was written to show off shoes, and there’s really nothing wrong with it if that’s your thing
Related links:
- Final Girl
- Pretty Scary
- What Is a Feminist Horror Film Anyway? by Hannah Ax Wound
- Ax Wound, a feminist horror film zine
- Ginger Snaps, great feminist horror film written by a women
- Slumber Party Massacre, written and directed by women
Kay Linaker, writer of The Blob, died this week at the age of 94. Rare still is a woman making horror films. Here is a list of female horror directors. Ax Wound Zine heads up the community
The New Wave of Neural-Advertising in Michael Crichton’s “Looker”
Michael Crichton was a promising young director until his books started receiving Hollywood check-sized advances. His 1981 movie “Looker,” starring Albert Finney as a Los Angeles plastic surgeon and Breck-girl Susan Dey, (his love interest, disturbingly enough); sways like a sailor aboard a sinking ship, from misogynistic to feminist and then back again. Take some pre-Tron computer graphics, a time and space-defying raygun, and throw in, as the IMDB plot keywords states, a “Body Landing On Car” and you’ve got a middling techno-fetishing new wave thriller. (The trailer is here, if you are willing to sit through the IMDB ads.)
The L.O.O.K.E.R gun isn’t just a raygun but time-paralysis stunner than magically stops a person in time, giving the shooter invisibility. In retrospect I wonder if that might have influenced my favorite TV show in elementary school, Out of this World. Maybe it’s DARPA’s inspiration for “LED Incapacitator.” Some bad guys are using the Light Ocular-Oriented Kinetic Emotive Responses gun on the models at a Los Angeles agency, as they undress in their highrise apartments. The “Body Landing On Car” is actually a pretty amazing stunt with a lanky model in her undies falling out the window five flights on top of a tan Camero, post-stun. Is it suicide or…????
These same models once used Albert Finney’s services, although he told them, with no ulterior motives, that they were beautiful just they way they were. Still the numbers don’t lie. The modeling agency has the scientific tools to quantify a woman’s looks. For some reason models can’t plateau at near perfection– a 99.4 will eventually be a 99.2 again — and that is precisely why the models need to be die.
The music is great with a theme by a Kim Carnes-soundalike and a Muzak-version of Goblin instrumentals when the pretty girls are under watch. Lots of close-ups on doors with card swipes and plenty of digital animation — that neon-on-black 80s 3D-modeling. It was the first film to create a realistic computer generated human. It was also the first movie to create 3-D shading with a computer (via.)
In my favorite scene, the modeling agency madam shows Finney a commercial with a dot representing his visual fixation (this is of course the least plausible science, as everyone knows now men look at crotches.)
“I have this feeling like I live in the future. I think things have happened when they haven’t yet. It’s just so self-evident they will happen that I begin to act like they’ve already happened,” Crichton says in the commentary. I have to agree with Dan Swensen’s take on Cyberpunk Review, “Looker seems both surprisingly relevant and woefully dated at the same time.”
You have to give Crichton credit for the paranoia and early critique of neural-advertising. The idea of a focus group deciding the shape of a woman’s nose, just likely they would the font or color of an advertisement, is a scary one.
Plus, his film was one of the first to discuss plastic surgery, which was widely understood but a very private, potentially embarrassing matter. Ironically, none of the models in the movie could make it in LA today, where the advent of airbrushing has created demand for the most airbrushed-looking women. There is no such think as a perfect looking woman, which is why “99.4s” often worry about their looks a heck of a lot more than us civilians.
Crichton says he directed movies between writing books, because writers were advised against writing “more than one book every three years” (those were the days!) When you consider Looker, Coma, and the really fantastic Westworld, it’s not out of bounds to think he could have been, if not Ridley Scott, than maybe the sci-fi Brian De Palma.
Related links:
- Cyberpunk Review, which has a ton of lost classics (have you heard of “Magdalena’s Brain“? “Texhnolyze“?)
- More on Out of this World from YouTube (very funny clip)
- News on the Westworld remake (Breach writer/director Billy Ray is currently attached.)
All the cool kids are building ball pits (xkdc, last.fm.) You can too, just calculate. But watch out for the heroin needles (an urban legend made lame in Saw II.)
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