I keep looking at that photo I ran with the last newsletter, of Eddie Murphy and Da’Vine Joy Randolph and the rest of the Dolemite cast walking across the street, wrapped in those incredible Ruth Carter costumes, and part of what I come back to is how easy it is for people making a movie to look ridiculous.
It’s a fine line. It’s this blind high dive every single time, this act of faith, that when you put all of the ridiculous phony parts of filmmaking together, you get something true and real that is so powerful that people fall in love with it and it matters to them and it can affect who they are and how they see themselves. And it doesn’t matter what kind of film, whether it’s “important” or “trash,” because every single time, you either pull off the magic trick or you don’t and it’s really and truly not in your control. We are lunatics, every one of us who has ever given over our hearts to this weird and wonderful thing that is movies, to believe that we can somehow type words on a page and put clothes on people and stand in front of fake backdrops and do these things all out of order under the weirdest conditions and it will, in the end, reach in and touch you emotionally because, sitting there in the dark, you are struck by something undeniable.
When you talk about the potential to look silly, the highest of the high-wire acts in filmmaking is horror. If you’re aware of my work as a writer of films, and not just about films, then it’s no secret that I love and revere horror. I think of it as an important genre, a major part of a film appetite, and one of the best ways to discuss the truth about things through the filter of the unreal. If you get it wrong, you just plain won’t scare your audience, and there’s no horror film that can survive that. The right metaphor can make any conversation possible, and some of our best horror filmmakers have used the genre to ask tough questions or to simply share a difficult world view. I think David Cronenberg has always been an enormously political filmmaker, pointed and prickly and absolutely horrified by the real world. The landscape for independent horror has never been more robust, and even if it takes some extra hustle to string together those thirteen opening-credits title cards, there are some really wonderful voices from around the world who contributed to the year in fear. Movies like The Wind, Satanic Panic, Sweetheart, Harpoon, Darlin’, Bliss, Knife+Heart, Body at Brighton Rock, Brightburn, Girl on the Third Floor, Nightmare Cinema, Culture Shock, Depraved, Little Monsters, Daniel Isn’t Real, and the truly gorgeous and bruised Tigers Are Not Afraid all make it clear that horror is in good hands these days. I may have grown up in the hallowed horror heyday of the ‘80s, but there was a lot of that stuff that was straight-up pandering garbage, made to cash in on our love of the genre rather than elevate it, and that list of films I just rattled off? Those are all movies made by real storytellers, working to reach in and punch those dark and private buttons, and while they work for me to varying degrees, they’re all worthwhile. They’re all going to give you something to carry away. They’re full of great characters and terrifying images and new spins on familiar things and whole new things to be afraid of. If all I watched this year was horror, I’d still feel like I got a great, varied year in film. Hulu’s Into The Dark series has been consistent in the sense that, like any anthology, there are stronger and weaker entries, but overall, they’re really delivering at a very high level overall.
My sons like horror and want to watch more of it, but they also run up against the limitations of what they actually enjoy versus what they think they’ll enjoy. Allen went to the theater with me this summer to see the press screening of Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark. I thought the film was good. Not great. Good. It works hard to build the wrap-around story in a way that is thematically a little richer than I expected, but at the expense of what makes the source material so good, that anthology punch. I would have rather seen a straight-up one-two-three telling of those original stories because the design work here and everybody’s technical contributions are top-notch. What’s funny, though, is that it doesn’t matter what I thought. Allen was TERRIFIED. Seeing a horror film in a theater was so different from seeing one at home that he needed to take a step back. He says he had a good time, but I saw his face on the way to the car. That little boy was startled by what happened. We forget sometimes the difference that the theatrical experience can make. Both he and his brother were rabid to see It: Chapter Two. I made the call that they were going to see it at home, though, just like the first one. I think the only reason they enjoyed the first film is because they had the ability to pause and talk and work through their reactions. In a theater, that first film would have pulverized them. I don’t think the second film works anywhere near as well as the first one, and most of the reason why is structural. You don’t realize how much they pushed off to the second film from the book until you really start watching the second one and it feels like they’re being chased through the adaptation. There are so many confounding choices in how they adapted and what they adapted that I found myself disconnected almost totally by the end of the film. Again, though… my sons really liked it, and they loved the adult cast and the way they played the variations on the young actors. It worked for them, and watching it with them, I had a better time than when I just watched it. Overall, I think It works as a sort of primer on horror, like Stephen King rewrote his own nonfiction work of criticism, Danse Macabre, into a piece of fiction designed to show off every possible type of monster and horror scenario, a Disney theme park ride through King’s own brain.
The films that really stood out for me in the genre this year were the films that seemed to shred the rigid definitions of it. One Cut of the Dead, for example, is a film that seems to tie writers in knots as they try to describe it. The problem is that if you watch it completely cold, you might not realize what you’re watching, and you might tap out. It would be understandable. The film opens and it’s pretty much every super low-budget not-very-good zombie film you’ve ever seen. It’s that for a good ten minutes or so. But it’s not that for the entire film, and that’s the trick. It is safe to say that the first chunk of that movie is meant to show you exactly what the bad version of this movie looks like so that when you see the good version, it will be that much more entertaining. It’s a film that depends on your familiarity with the form. The more terrible zombie movies you’ve seen, the more you’ll appreciate the wit and the execution of this one. The Perfection is a film that is abrasive and offensive and depends on impossible coincidence and I don’t care. It’s also a hoot. Yep. I said it. A hoot. You know exactly what that means, too. It’s audacious nonsense, and it’s trashy, deep down at heart, in a Verhoeven way. Allison Williams is on her way to icon status as Creepy White Girl thanks to this and Get Out, and much of what gives The Perfection its rancid appeal is her unhinged performance.
Horror has often given young women strong platforms to show what they can do with a lead role, and this year, both Samara Weaving and Kaya Scodelario shone in Ready or Not and Crawl. I really loved the segment that Radio Silence directed for the V/H/S anthology a few years ago, and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett bring that same rowdy inventive energy to their work on this class-warfare game of hide and seek that may or may not have a supernatural element to it. That question is just one of the many fun little things that keep the entire movie so lively and bloody all the way through, but none of it would work with the wrong final girl, and Samara Weaving seems not just hungry but positively ravenous whenever she works right now. Dark and funny and often gross, Ready or Not seems so sassy that it almost evaporates by the end. The class warfare stuff here is window-dressing instead of subtext. There’s no real point to it. You can’t take it too seriously. I think that’s part of its charm, but for a film as gory as this, it doesn’t leave much of a mark. That’s okay. Not every film is swinging for the larger point. There’s no real subtext to Alexandre Aja’s Crawl, and that’s perfectly okay with me. He made a movie about a flood, some big fucking alligators, and a girl and her father in danger, and he absolutely rocked it. The film takes its time for the set-up, so when that first alligator appears, even if you know what the movie is about, it’s a shock. It is so much fun and so aggressively built that I had to watch it again a week later to verify that I saw what I thought I saw. Aja has been inconsistent over the years, but when he puts it together, he’s capable of jangling an audience’s nerves with skill and control. Crawl may be an exercise, but it’s executed perfectly, and that matters.
There are several filmmakers working at a very high level of craft right now in the genre, and there were four films this year that felt to me like they demonstrated just how limber and beautiful this genre can be. Robert Eggers made a terrific debut with The Witch, and I’d argue that his follow-up, The Lighthouse, is the least typical “horror” film that I’ll discuss here today. But that’s what I love about him. His films are meant to dig deep in strange ways, unsettling you for more than they shock you. He works in miniature, keeping the horror close and intimate, and he’s not afraid to strike out into his own territory with the way he approaches his storytelling. While the basic set-up (a new lighthouse keeper has to learn from the old lighthouse keeper, who may be completely mad) isn’t particularly twisty, The Lighthouse is a film that never stops throwing new ideas or emotions at you, and it serves as a remarkable showcase for both Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson. This is the Eraserhead end of the horror pool, and I adore the film on an aesthetic level. Eggers exerts such control over his entire frame, and he is unafraid to push his images into the purely poetic. The Lighthouse feels like a nightmare I only half-remembered after waking, and I look forward to digging deeper into it in years to come, and to seeing where Eggers goes from here. It’s the same way I feel about Jordan Peele at this point. Wherever he goes, I’m interested. Get Out is one of those lightning-bolt movies, a terrific concept, perfectly delivered, and like many bands after making their breakthrough album, Peele’s follow-up was a little messier, a little less perfect. No matter. Us is loaded with ideas and images that are going to stick with me, and I can’t say enough good about the performances by Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, and young actors Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex. Even so, what Lupita Nyong’o does stands out, even surrounded by so much other good work. Her tricky double role is a brilliant physical and emotional display, and when you consider what a profound ray of sunshine she was in Little Monsters, it’s pretty clear that Nyong’o is one of the most exciting young movie stars working.
Mike Flanagan turned Doctor Sleep, one of my least favorite Stephen King books, into a haunted and fascinating piece about the ghosts we carry with us from trauma, and I’d like to write more this spring about the ways both Flanagan and Steven Spielberg approached the legacy of Stanley Kubrick’s Shining. Rebecca Ferguson does memorable work as Rose the Hat, but it’s Ewan McGregor as this broken little boy somehow finally shaking off the fear that he’s going to be the father who let him down so violently that made the movie matter. And if we’re talking about grief, you cannot talk about the year in fear without talking about Ari Aster’s startling, lush, and scathing Midsommar. Florence Pugh joins the ranks of actors like Jeremy Irons who got their Oscar nomination for a very good performance that is nowhere near as good as the genre performance they gave right before it, and I would imagine we’ll be talking about her work here for a while. While there is certainly some pointed material in Midsommar about sexual politics, the film feels much more to me like it’s about the way damaged people look for a community that will fill those missing pieces, no matter how strange that community may seem. While the Harga seems menacing and disturbing and deeply focused on death, it turns out to be the exact place that Dani needs to be to process the horrifying incident in which her sister killed their parents. Both Doctor Sleep and Midsommar push these characters to move through their trauma to something new, and one of the reasons I think Midsommar is so striking is that no matter how many times people bring up the obvious Wicker Man comparisons, that doesn’t do justice to the brilliant palette with which Pawel Pogorzelski’s photography paints this beautiful nightmare. It’s all about blasting that grief with this blinding light, washing away the sorrow in this flood of color, and it shakes off all the conventional and overused ideas of what horror is supposed to look like.
Look at the films I’ve mentioned here today. What a vibrant slate of pictures from all over the planet. So many cultures represented in different ways, and so many voices speaking up with honest observations about who we are right now and what scares us. That’s one of the most human conversations you can have, and these films are the way we have it. But I’m not above just plain having fun, and I want to wrap things up by paying respect to the gorgeous, feverish Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which is so overstuffed with images that give this lifelong kaiju fan chills that I almost view it as an art installation piece. I can’t believe a studio gave Mike Dougherty the money to make this fetish object, full of these perfect realizations of some of the most iconic movie monsters to ever exist. I honestly don’t care what the story was or what the humans did, because that’s not why I went to the theater to see Godzilla: King of the Monsters. What Dougherty delivered was something I’ve been aching to see since I was six years old and first spent the day watching men in rubber suits wrestle on miniature sets. I didn’t see the zippers when I was six. I didn’t see the way the water moves in a water tank. I didn’t see the obvious models and the visible strings. What I saw were giant monsters, nature unleashed on a scale that renders us insignificant, and that’s what we finally got realized at a staggering level this year. That movie is the way I’ve always seen the Godzilla films in my head, and somehow, Dougherty reached in and pulled that out and gave it like a gift to giant monster fans around the world.
There’s so much more to discuss from 2019, and I’ve got plenty of other things I want to talk to you about as well, so I’m off to keep writing, and I’ll see you guys back here before the week is done.
Image courtesy Universal Pictures/Monkeypaw Productions