Good evening, friends. Happy Halloween. Read parts one, two and three.
Peeping Tom. 1960. Directed by Michael Powell.
What it asks us: what if turning people into art means killing them?
Michael Powell never made another movie quite like this one. He’s especially known for his collaboration with Emeric Pressburger, and though none of them is exactly a horror film (some come close) they all contain a heightened, sometimes melodramatic sensibility; Powell and Pressburger took to color film especially well and were famous for their use of it. A Powell film is typically full of bold reds and dark shadows, silent but emotive faces, repressed desires. A proto-slasher was inevitable.
Also inevitable, perhaps, was the particular form that slasher would take. Powell had a certain amount of ambivalence about the life of an artist; his masterpiece The Red Shoes explores that ambivalence, suggesting that dedicating oneself to artistic perfection might mean excising all of one’s humanity, even while the impulse towards artistry is as human as any other impulse. We need artists, and artists need to make art, but there is also the uncomfortable reality that artists need other people: to care for them, to support them, to inspire them. The art resulting from that care and support might not be a fair exchange. Artists look at the people around them and see raw material; you hope they’ll see people as well. Peeping Tom is about what happens when they don’t.
It’s frightening, to be watched. The idea that some cultures reacted to their first encounter with a camera by assuming that it could steal their souls is overblown, but there is a reason that myth rings true to people – it’s not that we think them primitive, exactly, but that we all sort of believe that it’s true. The camera is, often, a tool of violation, a tool of almost literal objectification. Preserving women in celluloid, unchanging forever, might imply a desire to preserve them, unchanging forever, in other ways. At the time of its release Peeping Tom was reviled, and though it’s been rightly reassessed in the years since it still shocks, and not least because of the uncomfortable feeling you get that Powell identified a little too closely with his protagonist. They were both artists, after all, both obsessive perfectionists, and both lonely and frustrated because of it. It isn’t pleasant to be inside that head.
If you liked this: Powell and Pressburger made some of the most beautiful, most moving films I can think of, and even the lesser ones are worth seeing. A Matter of Life and Death is probably my favorite. The Red Shoes is, again, their most complete treatment of the life of the artist and its costs; though it is a tragedy while Peeping Tom is a horror, it contains some of their most strikingly disturbing images and ideas. Black Narcissus and The Tales of Hoffman come the closest to being horror, and are both almost shocking in their beauty.
Witchfinder General. 1968. Directed by Michael Reeves.
What it asks us: what if the people who lay the highest claim to goodness are the most evil?
Religion holds a tricky place in horror cinema. The genre almost requires that it be made (and enjoyed) most by people who are at least open to the idea of things existing beyond knowledge or reason. Yet the genre also requires a tendency towards the questioning, towards a perverse desire to uncover the truth of things regardless of what that truth might be. Horror storytellers might believe all kinds of things, but rarely do they believe them comfortably: horror is about discomfort that never resolves. God might not be evil in the world of horror, God might not exist at all, but either way, God is not coming to save you. At very best, you’re on your own.
Witchfinder General is a period piece, but it feels very 1968 in the same way that something like Night of the Living Dead does. It isn’t conservative, the way some horror films of this era can be: it’s a picture of society breaking down, but the danger doesn’t come primarily from a violent mob at the bottom but from a small group of vicious elites at the top. The film correctly places the witch hunting craze as a problem not of a superstitious middle ages but of an unstable early modern period. It largely wasn’t a phenomenon created by ignorant peasants – who mostly used it to pursue existing petty grievances – but by the educated who sought to systematize a world that was changing rapidly. It’s a civil war film, made when many western countries were threatening to tip over, once again, into violence. It’s about how ruthless, predatory people will take advantage of the vulnerability created by social instability. It’s about how elites let us down.
And it’s not at all about the supernatural. For a film so concerned with belief, with religion and ritual, with witchcraft and evil, there’s no magic. There are no spirits, no demons, no suggestion of anything truly occult at work. The evil done is man’s evil, and can be explained by that alone. There’s no devil here, but no God either. There’s just us, which might be worse. Though the masses aren’t the source of the violence, they are disturbingly indifferent to it. One of the most alarming images in Witchfinder General is not of torture or death, but of village children roasting potatoes in a smoldering pyre that had just killed a witch. They aren’t fanatics, and they haven’t been swept into a hysterical fury: they are numb, uncaring. That lack of care is more frightening than any violence could be.
This is undeniably Vincent Price’s finest performance; he was always fun, but rarely truly frightening as he is here. There are only hints of his usual camp and bombast, just enough to suggest that his character rather enjoys the theatrical nature of his work. Most of the time he’s cold and methodical, which makes him seem all the more terrifyingly insane.
If you liked this: Witchfinder General has been rightly compared to the films of Sam Peckinpah; Straw Dogs has a very similar approach to violence and societal breakdown, and a similar kind of bleak nihilism. Vincent Price, star of Witchfinder, is of course a horror legend, though I suspect even he might admit that many of his films were not of the highest quality. His Poe adaptations with Roger Corman are fun and Corman always had an eye for talent, which helped elevate even his worst material. The Masque of the Red Death is definitely the best of these.
The People Under the Stairs. 1991. Directed by Wes Craven.
What it asks us: what if the things we need to live are controlled and hoarded by monsters who want us to suffer?
The landlord is probably the first source of capitalist exploitation that most people experience, and even people who aren’t especially political seem to understand their landlords as exploiters, instinctively. As with all rentiers, the landlord does not see tenants as customers who exchange money for a good or service; rather, the tenant is a worker whose job is to provide the landlord with an income. That worker is stuck where they are, unable to leave without immiseration, but the landlord has options: they have a reserve army of renters who will accept less because it’s more than nothing. The dream of ownership isn’t only a dream of building wealth; it’s a dream of power, of getting out from under the boot.
The Robesons are recognizable to anybody who has ever rented; they are the monstrous landlord made into literal monsters. Craven cleverly imbues them with the same pathologies of the traditional gothic (incest, cannibalism, child abuse) not only because that makes the Robesons worse but because the gothic has always been preoccupied with the horrors of an insular aristocracy; the Robeson’s violent and sordid domestic crimes cannot be unlinked from their initial crime of wealth-hoarding. We learn, crucially, that their family fortune was first built through a predatory funeral home: another business that people cannot do without, and thus has every incentive to extract and exploit as much as it can. They make their living off of other people’s suffering, quite literally.
Which means that the titular people under the stairs, trapped in the Robeson home without sunlight or kindness, are frightening but still, unlike their captors, human. As the Robesons are the monstrous slumlords made literal, their prisoners are monstrous slum dwellers made literal. Their descent into violence is a result of their isolation and desperation: exploitation has made monsters of them. The Robesons hate all their children, but they don’t want them going anywhere; they need them right where they are. The People Under the Stairs is better than any horror film I know at connecting the dots between public and private violence, between the exploitation of the landlord and the exploitation of an abusive parent. The anarchic ending of the film is overflowing with political possibility: the slum has been destroyed, and its denizens set free. Anything could happen, and it is terrifying and exhilarating at once.
And the Robesons look like Ron and Nancy Reagan. That was on purpose.
If you liked this: this is my favorite Wes Craven joint, but he’s one of those horror guys who did a little bit of everything. At his best he understood how to use the genre to speak, and to speak clearly: there’s a fury to some of his work that’s contagious. The Last House on the Left and the Scream franchise and the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and The Hills Have Eyes don’t need me to speak for them; those movies have gotten their flowers and then some. I’m very fond of The Serpent and the Rainbow, an unusual zombie film that reaches back to the original folklore. It’s one of the few modern zombie films that isn’t just a Romero remake. Red Eye was probably Craven’s last great film, and worth seeing.
Us. 2019. Directed by Jordan Peele.
What it asks us: what if there really is no difference between the people on the top and the people on the bottom? What wouldn’t people be capable of doing, if they knew that to be true?
Were you expecting a different Peele film? Too bad: this is my favorite one, and it’s the smartest and bravest film he’s made yet.
Because they’re us. They’re not other, the people we’re scared of, the people beneath us that we never have to see, the people we’ve stolen from. They’re not monsters, or mutants, or aliens. They’re us. They could have lived our lives with no trouble, and if we were forced to live theirs we’d be just like them. It’s an idea so frightening that I find many viewers are simply unable to see it; they can'tunderstand the final twist because they don't see how it would work, as the people below the earth were just monsters. It’s like the mind revolts at that knowledge, because if it’s true, then we don’t deserve anything we have. If it’s true, and they know it, why wouldn’t they try to take our places?
Us is anchored by a truly staggering lead performance by Lupita Nyongo, one that invites rewatching as you don’t appreciate everything she’s doing until you’ve seen where it ends. She invites interest but not identification; she is remote from almost everyone around her, almost cold, but can erupt with fear or fury. She’s terrified and terrifying. She is instantly believable as a person who will fiercely defend the life she’s built for herself and has spent years looking over her shoulder for threats to that life. She’s a mom, and this is a rare film that examines the intersection between the expectations of motherhood and class, the way getting the best for our children can come at the expense of other people’s children, the way we’re always performing for other mothers who are also performing for us.
The ending of this film is apocalyptic; the central family has gotten away but there’s no end to the way the world has changed. The tiger has gotten free of its cage, and there’s no way to know what might happen. The underground people might do anything, be anything: they are, at the end, leaderless but highly organized. They’re Americans. They’re us.
If you liked this: As everybody surely knows by now, Jordan Peele is one of the greats. He’s made three masterpieces and I’m sure he’ll keep making good horror movies for many years. Us is a variation of the home invasion horror film, which is a subgenre I like a lot: it makes for a good way to examine class divisions. The Purge series isn’t as smart or as subtle as Us, but those films are also interesting explorations of inequality in America, and the violence that both enforces it and results from it.
The Shining. 1980. Directed by Stanley Kubrick.
What it asks us: what if the person who is supposed to love you is really just bad? What if all of their demons are just excuses?
Jack Torrance hates his wife and son. Not the Jack Torrance of Stephen King’s novel, who is a good but flawed man with an addiction: he loves his family. This was very important to King, who saw himself in a father, a writer, who struggled to tame his worst impulses and feelings while caring for his family in a world that seemed to want him to be bad. He needed to believe that fight could be won. In his novel it is. In this film it’s lost, and it was lost from the beginning.
No wonder King hates this adaptation, why wouldn’t he? Nicholson’s Jack Torrance was always abusive, always a white-knuckling dry drunk. Shelley Duvall’s Wendy is highly strung and neurotic, not brave and beautiful and sexy. She’s someone who has been living with an abusive spouse for years, and is terrified of setting him off. The triumph of the film, what there is of it, is not in Jack finally refusing to hurt his wife and child. It’s in Wendy finally, finally leaving him.
Because for this Jack it’s not the hotel, and it’s not the alcohol, and it never was. It was always him. There was always going to be something that made him snap. Unlike in King’s novel, the horror isn’t really his. If it were, the question asked above might be something like “what if your demons were too strong for you?” The horror in the film is Wendy’s and Danny’s: Jack is the source of the horror. Kubrick isn’t concerned with Jack’s stumbles, or his guilt over the harms his drinking has caused. He’s concerned with Wendy’s guilt for not leaving Jack the first time he hurt Danny, her evasiveness when asked about the timeline of Danny’s injury and Jack’s sobriety and the fact that it doesn’t add up, her denial born out of fear. Duvall’s performance has been controversial, and King hated it as he hated the movie. I’ll defend it: it’s astonishing, mesmerizing. Wendy isn’t strong at the beginning, because bravery is something she has to learn. We watch her learn it: haltingly, reluctantly, slowly, true, but she does finally learn it. She saves her family and herself.
Jack doesn’t have a character arc, and that’s the point. He has always been exactly what he is, and this is what terrified King the most. Kubrick makes a point of it: a ghost says to Jack “you’ve always been the caretaker.” The hotel did not destroy him. He’s happy there. He came home, to where he always was.
If you liked this: there are so many god damned King adaptations out there and most of them are not great. Worst of all is the “official,” King-sanctioned TV version of The Shining, which is truly dire: it’s more faithful, which means it’s not as brave or as nasty. My favorite movie version of a King book is probably Christine, directed by our friend John Carpenter. Like Kubrick he saw through the narcissism of the protagonist to the violent, entitled piece of shit underneath, and smartly excises the last burst of heroism that King felt compelled to include. It’s a bonkers and very fun movie.
Come back on Halloween for the last part!