Good evening, friends. Happy Halloween. You can read part one here.
The Fly. 1986. Directed by David Cronenberg.
What it asks us: what if your body turned into something you couldn’t recognize? What if it was because of something you did to yourself?
It’s tempting to call this a film about AIDS. Released in 1986, it is at heart about a man watching his body deteriorate, and deteriorate in a way impossible to prepare for yet attributable to his own actions. Cronenberg may be the filmmaker most interested in picking at the Cartesian dualism on which so much of our culture depends. In all of his films, the body is at the mercy of the mind, but the mind is also at the mercy of the body – neither is primary, and in fact they cannot be fully separated. The body is the mind is the body. And both, and this is even more frightening, are inseparable from their environment. The human person, to Cronenberg, is a porous thing, one with vague and shifting boundaries.
Seth Brundle fuses with a fly – and he gains great strength, voracious appetites, and powerful senses. He believes himself to be purified – put through a filter that removed all of the bad parts. His transformation was in fact a corruption, one that made him less than human but also less than a fly. Nature revolts at this corruption; Seth’s strength begins to fail, and his death follows inevitably. His transformation is at first seductive and Seth is sexier and more vital afterwards; he wants everyone to do what he has done. The fall from there is inevitable, as sure a case of hubris as any dreamed up by Sophocles.
Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis were married when they made this movie; it wouldn’t work without their chemistry. Their love for each other feels real, which ensures that their tragedy feels real too. For all of the outlandishness of the premise – man fuses with fly, becomes something else – The Fly is grounded in human feelings: love, lust, fear, jealousy. If Seth wasn’t a true human being, the monster he becomes wouldn’t be so frightening.
If you liked this: Cronenberg is a true horror master, one of the greatest to ever do it, and his films vary wildly in subject but are all concerned with the basic horror of having a human body. Dead Ringers, The Brood, Videodrome, Scanners, Rabid…you can’t go wrong. The original Fly from 1958 is worth seeing. It doesn’t reach the artistic heights of Cronenberg’s remake, but there’s interesting subtext in there dealing with the paranoia of the nuclear age, as opposed to the paranoia of the age of AIDS.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. 1992. Directed by David Lynch.
What it asks: what if there was an evil so terrible it could fracture reality? What if that evil was hiding in plain sight?
This movie was a flop, famously booed at Cannes. Its reception broke David Lynch’s heart, and it breaks mine a little bit. People appreciate it more now, as they should. Twin Peaks was a lot of things, but one of the things that made it so popular was its effectiveness as a prime time soap opera, one with a central mystery that sprawled outward into more mysteries. When Lynch announced a follow up film, fans of the show that had been devastated by its cancellation were thrilled – finally some answers, they thought. They’d find out what happened to Cooper and Audrey and their other favorites. What they got was a prequel that expanded the supernatural lore of the show but gave little new information or resolution – instead, it rehashed old ground. Fans were angry: why did Lynch need to show us Laura Palmer’s last week of life? We already knew what happened to her.
Lynch was smarter than them. We knew the facts of what happened to Laura, but we hadn’t seen it. We hadn’t experienced it with her. This is a film I might never watch again now that I have a daughter of my own; at the very least, I’ll have to wait a long time. For all that Lynch’s films are dark, for all that he picks at the darkness underlying wholesome American life, his films work because of their palpable moral outrage. Lynch never wanted Twin Peaks to move on from Laura, not only because he didn’t want to provide the satisfaction of solving the mystery but because Laura’s suffering shouldn’t be so casually swept aside. Her suffering, and the mundane, too common nature of it, is the point. That kind of suffering exists in too many places. The breaking up of reality that results from it is familiar to anyone who has experienced trauma: the fact that Laura can’t trust what she sees and knows, the fact that she veers back and forth between cynicism and fresh horror herself, the fact that it’s all happening in front of everyone but no one does anything to help her. It’s all too familiar, and all too much. Fire Walk With Me is one of the most unflinching portraits of child abuse and its aftermath ever committed to film; in some respects, there’s no wonder people didn’t like it. The horror here is enough to make you sick.
If you liked this: If you’re interested in Fire Walk With Me, there’s little reason you wouldn’t be interested in Twin Peaks, both the original series and The Return. It’s an uneven corpus to be sure, and there were quite a few cooks in the kitchen, but at its best Twin Peaks is the best television there is. The late David Lynch isn’t always classed as a horror director, but most of his films have horror elements, and they’re all worth watching. My personal favorite is Wild at Heart, which is just as frank about how violence and abuse can wreck the world, but finally hopeful that true love can remake it. Lynch never was a cynic; he really believed in the human heart, in the end.
The Crazies. 1973. Directed by George Romero.
What it asks us: what if the war came home?
You would never think of Western PA as a horror setting, but George Romero made it one. Some of his choice (maybe, at first, most of it) of this landscape as a location was due to structural and economic forces – it was cheap to film there. That fact doesn’t negate the thematic resonance, but is closely tied to it. It was cheap to film just outside of Pittsburgh because it was an area already starting to decline. The western edge of Pennsylvania is where the northeast gives way to the midwest; it’s the land that used to be a frontier. Now it’s just America, and the frontier is somewhere else. The Crazies is, among other things, a film about what America looks like on its way down.
Nobody that we meet in The Crazies is really a villain, or rather, everyone is equally a villain and not one. Everyone is either looking out for themselves or following orders, and the horror proceeds mechanically. The violence is strikingly, and deliberately, evocative of the just-winding-down war in Vietnam; several of the characters are veterans. The army tasked with containing and pacifying the small Pennsylvania town uses agent orange on the populace. A man is burned alive and looks shockingly like Thích Quảng Đức when he dies. Children are burned and shot and bombed from the air. The army makes an attempt at resolving the violence, in fact escalates it, learns the violence is spreading, and moves on. Ain’t that America, right?
It’s America, and it’s Romero too, because though this isn’t a zombie film on paper it belongs in the family with the director’s best treatments of that horror theme. Because Romero wasn’t only interested in how scary zombies are to the non-zombies. His films always explore what it takes, on an individual and societal level, to look at a human-shaped being and see a monster. He’s interested in how a person or a society can get from here to there, from empathy to sadism, because that process is how wars start and societies crumble. He knew what many horror directors have forgotten, which is that zombie legends as they first emerged in the Americas were born not out of fear of being attacked by zombies, but a fear of becoming them. It’s a slave’s fear – the terror that you can be owned so completely that you’ll cease to be yourself, the terror that even death won’t free you.
If you liked this: Well, it’s Romero, right? Night of the Living Dead is one of those classics that despite decades of imitators is still the standard; its ending still shocks. Day of the Dead is probably my favorite of the series, but they’re all good. Martin is probably the most interesting of the fully non-zombie Romero films. Creepshow, his collaboration with Stephen King, is a lot of fun. Really you can’t go wrong with Romero.
The Thing. 1982. Directed by John Carpenter.
What it asks us: what if nobody is who they seem to be? What if you can’t trust anything you see?
Like The Fly, this is another remake, and their origins as 1950s atomic panic fables aren’t the only thing the films have in common. AIDS is all over this film too, though like Cronenberg, Carpenter denies that the disease was a creative influence. It was in the air at the time though, and sometimes the zeitgeist can work on people without their realizing. You can see this in a lot of horror and thrillers of the late 70s and early 80s, when AIDS was already spreading but still unknown to the mainstream – this sense that the party was over, and the bill for all that hedonism was about to come due. Viruses, like monsters, are amoral and come for the just and the unjust alike of course, but America in 1982 was primed for a backlash to the sexual revolution. Chalk it up to the guilty libertarian streak in the American people; as much as we all want to go our own way, we’re always looking behind us for the punishment that must be coming.
So this is, regardless of the creator’s intentions, an AIDS film. The monster is everywhere, all around, and invisible. It can lay dormant for years, days, minutes, and then strike without warning. It takes over the body and replaces it with something that looks normal but is really evil and diseased. It has no mind, no stated intentions, but spreads ceaselessly and exponentially. Blood tests can spot it, most of the time – but they’re not always available. It leads to an uneasy and ultimately deadly paranoia, a paranoia that might be more dangerous than the original menace itself. As MacReady sadly says to his recorder: “nobody trusts anybody now. And we’re all very tired.” In Reagan’s America, who couldn’t relate? Who can’t relate now?
It’s a beautiful film, as all Carpenter films are beautiful. He’s a director who loves hallways and maze-like, claustrophobic interiors, and there are plenty of them here, but the austere Antarctic landscape is breathtaking. It’s a place where life shouldn’t be, and yet is – that boundary crossing is enough to make a horror story all on its own. The base – cold, closed, deceptively large yet evermore cramped – begins as a haven and becomes a tomb. The creature effects are impressive, yet Carpenter knew when to pull back from them: the monster is scariest not when it’s grotesque, but when it could be anything, anywhere. Lovecraft is all over this film too - it’s a cosmic horror, a reflection of our fear of our own smallness before a vast and uncaring world.
If you liked this: John Carpenter is as interesting a filmmaker as America has produced, and one who deserves to be spoken of in the company of John Ford. He, too, used the trappings of genre to explore the ugliest and richest parts of our American culture, and all of his films share a beauty and attention to detail that’s often imitated but only rarely imitated well. Halloween is probably his most influential, and comes closest to matching the over-your-shoulder paranoia of The Thing. In The Mouth of Madness and Prince of Darkness are the other two films in what Carpenter calls his “Apocalypse Trilogy;” they are all three explorations of the insanity that comes from uncovering the true nature of reality. Carpenter would be H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite director, were he not an unapologetic lefty. As it is, he’s one of mine.
The Wicker Man. 1973. Directed by Robin Hardy.
What it asks us: what if another person’s gods are as real to them as yours is to you? What wouldn’t they do, if that were true?
There’s a noble lie under-girding religious life in a liberal, multicultural world. In order for that liberal order to function we all have to take some dents to the armor of our faith. We all have to say, for the sake of living together “maybe I have it wrong. And it doesn’t really matter that much who’s right. If you let me go my way, I’ll let you go yours.” Atheists and agnostics, along with religious people, all have to make that bargain and accept that other people might have it right – the alternative is living in a state of constant conflict. Yet of course, faith doesn’t work that way. If I believe a certain thing about Jesus, and I believe that I’m only going to heaven because I believe it, doesn’t that necessarily imply that I believe the people who don’t or won’t believe it are damned? Maybe, but if I think that, I have to pretend otherwise, or else the whole liberal project falls apart. You can see why so many religious conservatives reject liberalism: they’re rejecting the bargain.
The Wicker Man is, among other things, about what happens when members of a minority religious faith reject that bargain. If the lives and livelihoods of the people of Summerisle depend on a human sacrifice, really depend on it, then how can they do anything but make one? How could you, knowing they believe that, expect them to do anything but what they do? The fact that the religion of the Summerislanders (like much neopaganism in real life) was invented wholesale by a deranged Victorian hardly signifies. They believe in it. They’ll do anything to live by that belief. They believe in it every bit as much as Sgt. Howie believes in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. They might even believe it more, as they are willing to do anything in service to their belief, while he is, finally, not.
Like a lot of folk horror, The Wicker Man seems to reach back into the past, but it’s really about the present. The good vibes of the counter culture had curdled at this point; hippies weren’t harmless anymore. The Sumerislanders’ religion is not an ancient tradition but a hodgepodge of modern ideas and images: that makes them more frightening, not less. Time, which can do almost anything, will over the centuries inevitably pacify and normalize any belief system until it becomes a simple part of life like many others, more or less important depending on circumstance. In a brand new denomination, everyone will have a convert’s zeal.
Howie’s horror, and ours, arrives when he realizes that the Summerislanders really meant it. They weren’t playing, or performing. They weren’t reaching back to half-forgotten traditions for the sake of it, like so many rustic villages might. They really meant everything they said, their faith was as real to them as the air they breathed, and it was finally Howie’s that was only words.
If you liked this: The Wicker Man forms what fans often affectionately refer to as “The Unholy Trinity” with two other folk horror films: Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Each of these has its charms, and they’re both worth watching, though The Wicker Man is the best of the three. Witchfinder General we’ll talk about elsewhere on this list.
Come back on Monday for part three!