Good evening, friends. Happy Halloween. You can read part one here and part two here.
Lake Mungo. 2008. Directed by Joel Anderson.
What it asks us: what if we can never really know our children?
Loving children means letting them go, which is one of the most painful things to realize. Your job, as a parent, is to prepare your child for living without your care: the very best case scenario in parenting is the one where your child outlives you. This is a loving relationship that will only grow more distant over time as the child grows up and becomes their own person. That’s as it should be, but knowing it doesn’t make it less painful. Lake Mungo is about the worst case scenario, the one where the parents outlive their child, but the realization is the same and carries a similar kind of pain. They never truly knew her, never realized all of her unhappiness and never helped her with all of her struggles, and now it’s too late.
Their name is Palmer, which is surely on purpose, right? A pretty young teenager is dead, her family is left reeling, and they discover she had a secret life full of turmoil. This isn’t Twin Peaks, though – this Palmer family is imperfect, to be sure, but basically loving, which makes the story sadder in some ways. These parents would have helped their daughter if they’d known what was going on. They weren’t hurting her themselves, they only failed to really see how hurt she was until she died. Alice only becomes impossible to ignore when she’s dead.
It has to be one of the best horror mockumentaries out there – one that uses its found footage to devastating effect. The cumulative impact of the grainy video, the amateur family photographs, the early '00s cell phone pictures, the awkward family interviews: it feels almost too real. Too real, as well, is the family’s eventual eagerness to put Alice, her death, and the trauma of her final months behind them. It’s so, so human, so understandable, so sympathetic – yet so cold. Alice is, in the end, forgotten but not gone: the worst thing for a ghost to be. Her family might have resolution, but she has none. Her parents may have done the right thing in letting her go, as all parents must, but the terror for all parents is in letting your child go before they’re really ready. The horror in Lake Mungo is in the Palmers letting Alice go before she’s ready, without even realizing they’ve done it.
If you liked this: found footage horror emerged as a fad in the '00s, post-smartphone and post-war-on-terror. There’s something here, probably, about the surveillance state we all managed to sleepwalk into; there are cameras everywhere now, and we’re still getting used to how the ease of capturing reality and sharing it has reshaped our memories and relationships. It started before both, though: The Blair Witch Project was really the first of this kind of thing, and of course it’s a classic. Another I unexpectedly liked is M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit, which allows the documentary form to arise organically out of character, and to inform and deepen the horror in clever ways. It’s one of the few Shyamalan films which doesn’t completely disappear up itself.
Onibaba. 1964. Directed by Kaneto Shindo.
What it asks us: what if war is all there is? What if, when all of the safeguards of society break down, we turn into monsters?
Onibaba is a period piece that nominally takes place in medieval Japan but could take place after the end of the world. This is a post-war horror film, of the kind that maybe only a veteran of an absurdly futile and violent war who saw his hometown hit by an atomic bomb could make. The landscape in this film is at once endless and claustrophobic; suffocating and frighteningly porous. Former soldiers are scavengers, rapists, opportunists, or victims. Women on the homefront cling to each other for protection but fight over scraps of all kinds: over scraps of food, scraps of privacy, scraps of love. No one wants to be alone out here, but no other person offers real safety.
Place matters a lot in this film, which is interesting because you really see so little of it. You see as much of the marsh the women live in as they do; you see it in the way that they do. It seems like it could be hiding anything, that anything at all might come crashing out of the tall and billowing reeds. The heat is something solid, something that visibly slows people down in ways physical and mental. This adds to the atmosphere of sexual repression and jealousy; you could be watching a production of a lost Tennessee Williams play for all of the tired and emotional perspiring.
But as much as the place, the physicality of the landscape, matters to the story and to the characters’ states of mind, it is deliberately kept as spare as possible. This is a story about absence, about what could happen to people and what they might be capable of when nearly everything is taken from them. What you’re left with, after a war, is not necessarily peace. As the saying goes, when the old world is dying and the new struggles to be born, that is the time of monsters. A woman who has lost her entire family will do a lot to keep her only companion with her. Loneliness and boredom are some of the greatest dangers in the world; they are mouths that hunger, holes that want to be filled. At the end of the world, loneliness and boredom might be all we know – and what then?
If you liked this: Shindo made roughly a bajillion movies, most of which are actually not horror. One, Kuroneko, is a similar historical horror and is worth watching. It also stars Nobuko Otowa, so effective as the miserable and controlling mother-in-law of Onibaba. She was Shindo’s most frequent collaborator and eventual wife; they also made Children of Hiroshima, which deals with the aftermath of the atomic bomb more directly.
The Babadook. 2014. Directed by Jennifer Kent.
What is asks us: what if you can’t love your kid? What if your mother can’t love you?
Jennifer Kent said she made The Babadook because she wanted to get inside the head of a woman who would kill her own children. She wanted to immerse the audience in the point of view of a parent driven over the edge with exhaustion and resentment, wanted to make you as irritated by her kid as she is, as overwhelmed by her obligations as she is, as bored and depressed by her life as she is, and then switch gears and remind you of the horror that could be inflicted by such a person in such a situation. The deftness of the storytelling here is astonishing – rarely have I seen a viewer’s empathy manipulated so skillfully this side of Hitchcock’s Psycho. Amelia is an ordinary woman hollowed out by grief, who cannot separate her relationship with her son from the loss of her husband. Her son is alive, in a sense, because her husband is not, and she can’t forgive the little boy for that. All of the horror, all of the monstrousness, flows from that fact.
Not every parent is struggling as much as Amelia, but we all, whether we admit it or not, have moments of doubt. Being a parent can be the oddest mixture of loneliness and lack of privacy; you can be isolated from everyone but your children and overwhelmed by their constant presence. I can’t think of another film that conveys this feeling so well, but the power of The Babadook comes from the fact that it makes you just as immersed in young Samuel’s point of view, just as sad and scared for him as you were sad and scared for his mother, and thus scared of her just as he is.
It’s an oddly hopeful film, in the end – and thank god, because its honesty is almost too much to bear at times. Amelia finds some strength, finds the ability to love and protect her son, and most importantly finds a way to accept help. The monster is kept restrained, at least for a time, and that counts for a lot.
If you liked this: Hereditary, directed by Ari Aster, is another recent film that picks at the dark underside of mothering, and manages to show the horror for both the reluctant, unstable mother along with the anxious children. Jennifer Kent is skilled at showing the dark underside of things; her film The Nightingale is not strictly horror, but is harrowing in its exploration of the realities of colonization, misogyny, racism, and all of the intersections thereof. It’s a masterpiece that I never want to see a second time.
Beetlejuice. 1988. Directed by Tim Burton.
What it asks us: what if all of the tedium and frustrations of life continue after we’re dead?
Burton, to me, is a director who clearly loves horror but doesn’t necessarily love making it. His films are imaginative, and contain arresting and memorable images often reflective of horror traditions. But his films tend not to be scary, or rather, I’d argue, successfully scary. It’s all a matter of taste, of course – I know plenty of people who love his work. I love a few of his films, and I find a few more occasionally interesting. He is, like David Lynch or William Friedkin, a filmmaker who usually uses the horror language to say non-horror things. And that’s fine.
I wouldn’t call Beetlejuice itself scary, exactly – it probably scares me less than any other movie on this list. I love it, though – and not just for the images, which are some of Burton’s best. It’s a film that’s, among other things, about loving horror and learning to love horror. It’s weirdly and unexpectedly wholesome, in the end: everyone learns to live together, despite their differences. The Maitlands, despite their isolation and early death, find meaning and futurity. Lydia is effectively their daughter, someone who will continue their legacies and memories after they’re gone. She, and they, are happy, despite the aesthetic gloominess of their surroundings. They save her from a too-soon adulthood as the bride of a demon; her happy ending is one where she gets to focus on her schoolwork, a happy, ordinary kid who still dances with ghosts but has been cured of any death-wish. Lydia is like the spiritual antithesis of Laura Palmer: she’s a goth who’s actually normal, as Laura was a homecoming queen who was secretly tormented.
But there’s still an unease about Beetlejuice that lingers; things at the end are as right as they can be but not quite as right as they ought to be. The Maitlands are still stuck in a state between life and death, confined to the same house forever, not even able to change their clothes. I once saw the film described as a story about that annoying guy who never leaves the party, long after he’s worn out his welcome, and it really is – it’s a vision of death that contains not all the horrific things we can imagine but instead all of the most boring, most frustrating parts of life. Guests who won’t go home, Byzantine bureaucracies, rules that are never explained, waiting rooms and bored caseworkers: it’s neither soothing nor exciting. The afterlife is the DMV, forever, and what ghost wouldn't want to stay on this side of the divide if that's the case?
If you liked this: I find Burton overrated, most of the time, but his Batman and Batman Returns are the two very best treatments of that character (and of several of his antagonists, and of Gotham itself). He really knew how to use Michael Keaton.
Candyman. 1992. Directed by Bernard Rose.
What it asks us: what if the crimes of the past must be paid for by the living?
There is something very American about the ghost story, for all that America didn’t invent the ghost story. It’s a form that is primarily concerned with the ways in which the past can linger into the present, and that is a difficult thing for many Americans to contemplate. The history of white America is a very short one; many of us don’t know much about our families before they came here, and they only came a few centuries ago at most. We want to believe there was no past before us, that this vast and beautiful continent, rich in so many resources, was lying here empty for us to take. But it wasn’t empty, and the taking required crimes so great they can barely be faced. We are all, the guilty and the innocent, living in a haunted house. We walk every day on top of a burial ground.
Candyman is a horror film about housing (it won’t be the last one on this list, either). It is about gentrification; about how a community is first created through segregation, policed, then destroyed and covered over. It is about how scholars exploit poor people by studying them. It’s about a white woman believing herself to be innocent, believing that her innocence is armor, using Black women as shields, and then learning viscerally what marginalization does to a person. It’s about the stories we tell each other to make sense of the real horrors of the world: as much as anything else, this is a film about why we need the horror genre, and why it is sometimes uniquely positioned to speak to the voiceless and powerless.
Candyman himself is one of the great movie monsters, and Tony Todd embodies him with a dignity and charisma that elevates an already very smart film. He’s scary and seductive, pitiable and menacing, victim and victimizer, noble and devious. And that voice, man: it’s one of the best in horror cinema. His voice alone can scare you to death.
If you liked this: Tony Todd was always worth watching, though the Candyman sequels offer diminishing returns (as most horror sequels do). He was an incredible journeyman actor, popping up in all kinds of genre stuff: he is the heart of one of the very greatest episodes of any Star Trek series, and had recurring roles in several other very good episodes. He also played the lead in the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead, which did not need to be made and isn’t as great as the original, but isn’t terrible if only because Tony Todd is in it.
Come back Wednesday for part four!