Mark of the Vampire

Mark of the Vampire (1935)

Dir. Tod Browning

Written by Guy Endore, Bernard Schubert

Starring Lionel Barrymore, Lionel Atwell, Elizabeth Allen, Bela Lugosi

When a Czechoslovakian nobleman (Jean Hersholt, HEIDI. Yeah, fucking HEIDI.) dies under mysterious circumstances (his blood is missing, and he has two holes in his neck), the superstitious ninnies in town believe it to be to be the work of a Dracula or possibly Draculas. Police inspector Lionel Atwill (DOCTOR X, THE VAMPIRE BAT) thinks that’s hogwash, but he can’t deny that something sinister is afoot, especially since there are obviously at least a couple of Draculas (Bela Lugosi, DRACULA, Carroll Borland, Dracula: the play, also author of the Dracula sequel novel Countess Dracula) lurking around and menacing the nobleman’s virginal daughter (Elizabeth Allen, 1935’s A TALE OF TWO CITIES, THE MYSTERY OF MR. X). Who will answer the call to adventure? Why, Lionel Barrymore (best known for being consistently confused with Lionel Richie by me, but also star of MADAME X* and I dunno, IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE and stuff) as Professor Van Helsing Zelen, of course, a helpful fella who’s going to show up and have a lot of curiously familiar-seeming but impossible-to-place advice on what to do about this little Dracula problem.

OK, so yeah, this is a pretty laughably transparent attempt by director Tod Browning to recapture the enormous success he’d had with 1931’s DRACULA by… basically remaking DRACULA with different names and structuring it as some kind of weird murder mystery. He even got Bela Lugosi back, pretty much in the same exact costume, albeit with three new touches. First, he has some kind of weird smudge or birthmark or something on his right temple. Didn’t have that in DRACULA, so totally different character here, guys. Second, he has an accomplice, in the form of Carroll Borland, who might be a Bride of Dracula or a daughter or just a younger female co-worker or something, it’s never made clear I don’t think, although online sources seem to unanimously describe her as a daughter (more on that later). Third and finally, these particular Draculas are in the witness protection program under the pen names “Count Mora” and “Luna,” so that’s one thing which makes them totally different from DRACULA, right off the bat.

Other than that, this is pretty much exactly the same fucking thing, and only a scant four years later, so it’s not like the technology or staging or the culture has taken some radical leap forward and now the story can be told like you’ve never seen it before!! or something. It’s just DRACULA with two Draculas but less of either of them (they have, combined, a single line of dialogue, and it’s the last line in the film) and a lot more extraneous plot and sitting around, plus a bunch of “comedy,” if by comedy you mean people shouting and mugging and running around without any actual jokes, per se (otherwise known as Hong Kong comedy).

In fact, I think there’s a case to be made (and genre critics Kim Newman and Steve Jones make it on the DVD commentary) that MARK OF THE VAMPIRE may actually be some kind of low-key satire of the horror genre. Barrymore, anyway, is giving a campy enough performance to, at the very least, amble riiiiight up to the edge of parody. And if the broader comedy stuff is supposed to be “relief,” it probably gets about as much screen time as the horror it’s supposed to be be relieving. And then there’s that ending. That ending. But we’ll come to that in time.

First, though, the good news. Even though MARK OF THE VAMPIRE is in every way a shameless rehash of DRACULA with a worse story and a messy jumble of tones most of which work feebly if at all, and even with the extremely questionable ending which we’ll discuss in due course, I’m pleased to report that at least one thing does work: it has, if anything, an even more extravagantly lugubrious gothic horror atmosphere than its predecessor. And that counts for a lot. Shot by 10-times-nominated twice-awarded best cinematography Oscar winner James Wong Howe** (BELL BOOK AND CANDLE, HUD), gothic castles and rolling fog have never looked so sumptuously otherwordly, and Lugosi and Borland are both instantly iconic in their silent, predatory menace. A whole, whole lot of their role is just to stand around being eerily lit from below or slowly advancing towards the camera, but Howe and Browning are just the team to make that plenty sufficient to wrench a shiver out of an audience. And hey, there’s even a few bits of fun production value, particularly Borland taking flight in an impressively convincing bit of stage magic. This is strong work, and there’s no question about it. Unnecessary, derivative strong work, perhaps, but unmistakably masterful in its own right. It’s the very quintessence of this era of Hollywood horror filmmaking, replete with all the looming castles, roiling fog, and lazily flapping bat puppets you could possibly want -- a cliche, to be sure, but one of the absolute finest iterations of this particular paradigm ever to grace the silver screen. In fact, I’d be willing to argue that only THE WOLFMAN cinematographer Joseph Valentine comes close to giving Howe and Browning a run for their money when it comes to conjuring the perfect dreamworld of early Gothic Horror shadows and mist. And if that was what MARK OF THE VAMPIRE was peddling, I think it would probably be much beloved and much better remembered today.

But then there’s that ending to come along and turn everything on its head.

Which means that now is the time to reveal a major spoiler which I actually knew, but had forgotten going into this movie. See, MARK OF THE VAMPIRE is often called (though it is not credited as) a remake of Browning’s 1927 Lon Chaney-starring silent film LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT, and it employs the same twist. And if you’ve seen LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT, you know what that means. It means you’re either a filthy liar or you’re filthy rich and don’t know it yet, because LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT is very possibly the most sought-after lost film of all time. It’s increasingly unlikely that we will ever see it (there’s a rumor that Stanley Kubrick was buried with the last existing copy… that’s your cue, makers of NATIONAL TREASURE III), but fortunately we have enough archival material to have a pretty good idea of how the plot played out -- in fact, TCM put out a full length recreation a few years back using stills and intertitles taken from the original shooting script.

Yep, this one. I'm sure the movie is shit, but man oh man, is that an amazing image. 

So, if you know anything about that film, you know that this one shares an ending which is both an infuriating letdown and, in retrospect, a brazen, nearly giallo-level act of narrative insanity. I don’t know if they somehow pulled it off the first time around in 1927, but here it’s handled so awkwardly that it’s frankly stunning anyone thought this was a releasable, completed motion picture, even in 1935. It’s a ridiculous idea by itself, but the damage is compounded disastrously by a seriously fumbled reveal which makes the ridiculous downright confounding. Or rather, a total lack of a reveal. The “twist” arrives so suddenly and with so little fanfare that I genuinely got confused and had to rewind to make sure I didn’t miss something. It’s so abrupt that it almost seems like the reels must be spliced out of order or something, but nope.

Essentially, (SPOILERS for an 85-year-old move) after being menaced by supernatural bloodsuckers one too many times, Professor Zelen and a few other characters head down into the abandoned castle to root them out (I’m actually not clear if this is the same castle where our victims live and they just have an unfinished vampire-infested basement, or if the haunted castle is next door or something). The poor virginal noblewoman, meanwhile, wanders into her living room to find her worst fear realized: her father is in there, returned from the grave as a vampire! Then all the sudden Zelen grabs a minor character who’s wandering around the basement with him and forcibly hypnotizes him, and you’re like, “Huh? Did I miss something?” To which the movie answers, “No, you didn’t miss anything, it’s totally normal and understandable that there would be a secret conspiracy to hire actors, including an actor who is the exact double of the recently deceased nobleman, to play vampires in order to trick a murderer into ????, and everyone pretends to be scared and we go through this whole elaborate charade where the vampires stay in character even when they’re alone and no one’s watching and the guy being gaslit isn’t around, and then when that somehow doesn’t produce the desired results (and how could it not!) we drop the whole idea and just easily hypnotize the suspect at the last minute and he confesses to everything.” And you’re all like, “Wait, what the fuck did I just watch?” and the movie’s all like “nothing! Absolutely nothing! Literally every bit of actual content that you just watched was gaslighting bullshit and it didn’t even work or factor into the solution.” And then it has the gall to end on a cheap meta-joke about how Lugosi famously played Dracula, proving that lazy meta jokes about the horror genre are basically as old as the genre itself (I think we just forgot all that in the 1950s when we correctly identified meta-humor as the province of debauched communists).

I mean, that is some straight up craziness (made all the more brazen by the fact that it’s a remake of a twist that audiences reportedly hated the first time!). There’s no world in which that twist makes any sense, not just as a logical narrative but just as basic storytelling. What kind of unhinged madman just gives up on the plot of the movie with five minutes left and abandons everything and introduces an entirely new plot?*** I mean, Michael Bay, I guess, but even he wouldn’t have the balls to actually stick to one plot all the way through and then change course at the last minute. He’s happy to just change plots every twenty minutes or so and count on such a maliciously punishing ten day runtime that by the time you get to the end you can’t even vaguely remember how you began. MARK OF THE VAMPIRE, at a slim not-quite-full-movie-length 60 minutes, does not have that luxury.

In fact, even back in 1935 when you could expect a work of fiction to comfortably make it through a plot in less than six seasons of one-hour episodes, 60 minutes was still unusually brisk, and the film seems oddly truncated, moving along at a odd, halting pace and filled with characters and plot points which seem to appear and vanish haphazardly (Barrymore, arguably the film’s protagonist, shows up for the first time with his back to the audience and no introduction of any kind). When scholars noted that the early reviews listed the runtime at 80+ minutes, they naturally got to wondering if the excised 10 minutes maybe contained some, uh, important plot points that might have made this one a little better. Maybe it had a more consistent tone? Maybe Lugosi actually had dialogue?

One song-simmering rumor has it that in the original cut, “Count Mora” and “Luna” had a lurid backstory in which they enjoyed an incestuous relationship, which led the Count to strangle her and shoot himself in the head, resulting in their respective vampiric states. That has the advantage of explaining their otherwise vague relationship and explaining what the deal is with that weird smudge of Lugosi’s forehead, but unfortunately the more I look into it the more unlikely I think it is that MGM would ever have let a script like that come anywhere near being filmed. I’ve read a few reasonably convincing claims that perhaps the original story treatment did include this detail, but scholars who had access to the shooting script were unable to find any trace of it. Sadly I think Newman and Jones are likely correct that the excised material was mostly exposition and comedy. Probably the right choice, given how dire both those things are in the finished film, though a little of either more of either might at least have helped the finished product come out a little more defined. As it is, there’s a distinct whiff of a film which doesn’t really have a clear idea of what it’s trying to do, except ride on DRACULA’s coattails with LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT’s plot twist.

To be honest, it really looks like a bird shat on him.

We tend to think of remakes as a syndrome of modern creative miasma, the purview of cynical corporate hacks who consider it their life’s work to sell brand names, and consider any actual art generated in the endeavor to be an unpleasantly lamentable but grudgingly tolerated byproduct of that noble goal. But of course, every generation thinks they invented greed. Remakes and shameless cash grabs have been around since the very beginning of cinema, and probably art itself. The earliest I can comfortably identify is the 1904 GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, which features a gang of bandits robbing a train very much in the same vein as the film you’re thinking of, which is 1903’s THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, one of the most lucrative and influential films of the entire silent era. There’s also a unauthorized, 1908 shot-by-shot remake titled EXCURSION TO THE MOON (I’ll let you guess what it’s a remake of). In fact, it seems that early cinema was rife with unauthorized remakes and flat-out film pirating (entrepreneur and filmmaker Siegmund Lubin was said to have sold more copies of Melies films than Melies himself did), and in fact it seems that it was not until a 1914 amendment to the Copyright Act of 1909 that motion pictures became a specifically protected work. Before that, they were essentially copyrighted as a series of still photographs, making it very difficult to enforce any kind of intellectual property claim. By 1922 Bram Stoker’s heirs successfully sued Murnau for his brazen daylight robbery of Dracula, but Browning seemed to have no such problem here (possibly because he was the director of the original), despite the widely acknowledged fact that the two films are, at the very least, exceedingly and specifically similar.

Indeed, it is almost certainly only the inaccessibility of LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT which has made it the more intriguing of the two; film scholar William K. Everson viewed both films in the 1950’s (prior to a the 1967 vault fire which destroyed the last remaining copy the presumed destruction of the film in the MGM vaults sometimes in the 1960s****) and actually preferred MARK OF THE VAMPIRE. I’m sure if the situation was reversed and we just had a few tantalizing shots of Lugosi lurking in the mist to pique our imaginations, we’d all be rushing out to dig up Kubrick’s grave and wrench that last copy of MARK OF THE VAMPIRE from his greedy mitts. But that’s not the world we live in. We live in one where we get to see MARK OF THE VAMPIRE, and can agree that it’s pretty deeply flawed but also has some damn cool things about it, and the one thing it gets really right (an appropriately spooky black and white gothic vibe) is the most important thing anyway. Is it better to know the full truth and be a little disappointed, or to never know and preserve that sense of wonderful possibility? Reader, I cannot know. I do know this, though: whatever its flaws, MARK OF THE VAMPIRE does make a powerful argument against the common wisdom that catching mystery killers is as easy as hiring actors to dress up like vampires and live the part full time offstage***** to occasionally gaslight your chief suspect into confessing. I know, I know, it seems so obvious, but the world is a complicated place. Next time just hypnotize ‘em instead, that always does the trick.

FIN.

*DOCTOR X, THE MYSTERY OF MR. X, and MADAME X are, to the best of my knowledge, in no way related, and it’s a complete coincidence that three actors here all appear in movies with similar names. I only bring it up because I’m now fairly certain we can say with total confidence these were Malcolm X’s three favorite movies and he gave himself that stylish sobriquet in reference to his beloved “X” films from the late 20’s and early 30’s. I really feel like his encyclopedic knowledge of pre-code British crime cinema is too rarely discussed.

** Howe was born in Taishan, Canton Province, China, in 1899(!) and immigrated to the US at the age of five, overcoming grueling racism (his marriage to his white wife was illegal and unrecognized by the US government for a full decade) to become one of the most celebrated and influential cinematographers of all time. Somebody oughtta make that movie.

*** One possible answer would be FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD, in which a giant pissed-off octopus shows up out of the blue in the last five minutes. But it’s Japanese so that probably doesn’t count.

**** Or Not? Although there is a wikipedia page about this supposed fire in 1967, after literally hours of exhaustive searches and a half-dozen emails to various film journalists and historians, I can find not one bit of independent data which backs up any specific claims about a vault fire in the 1960s which destroyed the film. Multiple sites make this claim, but no primary documentation appears to be available about specifically when, and if, such a fire occurred. But the movie definitely does seem to be gone, and a fire around this period seems a likely explanation. UPDATE: Or double not? I asked film historian David Pierce about this baffling lack of evidence, and he voiced what I was beginning to suspect, telling me: “I've never been able to find additional detail on the MGM fire in Culver City. I think it unlikely that a huge number of films were lost, as most of those films were lost many years earlier. I reviewed the correspondence between James Card and MGM starting in the 1950s and the studio no longer had many of those films even then. I believe that there was no single catastrophic event with MGM; most of the films simply decomposed before they could be copied.“ On the other hand, he interviewed several people in the 1990s who remembered a fire, including Roger Mayer, so it’s still likely, on the balance of the evidence, that at least some films perished this way. Was LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT among them? I think at this point it's probably impossible to know. But optimists, take heart: according to Lon Chaney scholar Jon Mirsalis, the copyright expires in 2022, and it's just barely possible that someone out there is holding out til then before they publicly reveal they still have the original nitrate film (which, under proper storage conditions, could theoretically still survive), in order to cash in on their valuable property without MGM demanding a cut.

***** Borland, who seems to be a bountiful if not always reliable source of information on the film, claims there was a proposed alternate ending where Barrymore gets a telegram from the actors apologizing that they were delayed and would not arrive for some time, suggesting that the silent creeps were the real deal. That would also be supremely idiotic, but at least more satisfying that retroactively removing any actual supernatural elements (except hypnotism) from the whole plot.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	Not yet invented
TITLE ACCURACY	Hard to know what that means; the alternate title is THE VAMPIRES OF PRAGUE, which is a little more accurate. Is the MARK OF THE VAMPIRE that smudge on Lugosi’s forehead?
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	None
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	Almost certainly a remake of LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Vampires, Gaslighting
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Lionel Barrymore, and possibly even Lionel Atwill. Two Lionels for the price of one!
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Bela Lugosi, Tod Browning
NUDITY?	No
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Bat spooks everyone by emerging out of the darkness!
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	The Vampirism seems to be based out of a castle, but it doesn’t seem to be the building’s fault.
POSSESSION?	Yes, people seem to get hypnotized by the vampires
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Vamp into bat!
VOYEURISM?	The vamps seem to be perpetually lurking outside, keeping an eye on their victims
MORAL OF THE STORY	Sometimes we’re better off with the legend than the facts.

The Houses October Built

The Houses October Built (2014)

Dir. Bobby Roe

Written by Zack Andrews, Bobby Roe, Jason Zada

Starring Brandy Schaefer, Zack Andrews, Bobby Roe, Mikey Roe, Jeff Larson

THE HOUSES THAT OCTOBER BUILT is one of the best found footage horror movies I’ve ever seen. Now, I’ll grant, that’s at best a backhanded compliment, like praising “the most tolerable root canal” or “most reasonable Fox News commentator.” The found footage subgenre does not enjoy the most stellar reputation around these parts, and it has not lacked for opportunities to prove that reputation is, if anything, overly generous. In the 18 years since BLAIR WITCH PROJECT came out (and especially in the ten years since the subgenre exploded after the huge profits raked in by PARANORMAL ACTIVITY), I’ve looked intently for any hint that this genre had potential to do anything more than save shameless horror producers a couple of bucks on cameras and equipment at the cost of the very soul of cinema itself. I mean, you know that, you’ve been on the journey with me. From the rare cases of actual greatness (NOROI: THE CURSE) to the absolute wastelands of content (THE FRANKENSTEIN THEORY), from the interesting experiments (S&MAN) to the goofy larks (TROLLHUNTER), from films which were doggedly dedicated to working the concept (THE BAY) to the films which are almost comically lackadasical about it (THE DEVIL’S PASS), and, zen-like, through V/H/S, V/H/S 2, and V/H/S VIRAL, I’ve been watching these things, tyring to figure out if there exists any legitimate artistic merit to the conceit whatsoever.

And it’s hard to believe, but there was definitely a time when the subgenre really seemed to hold some promise of genuine revolutionary ideas. Back when V/H/S PART 1 came out --not so very long ago!-- I wrote,

“I think that horror, more than any other genre, might benefit from a found-footage bent; or at least a certain kind of horror might benefit. I mean, you’re not gonna be able to recreate the atmospheric lushness of a 60’s Hammer production or a well-made Giallo without the kind of sumptuous camerawork and faux-opulent production that gives them that unique gothic flavor. But, it might well be able to recreate the oh-shit-oh-shit-they’re-after-me grimy realism of films like TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE or THE HILLS HAVE EYES. Those films have a reputation for being grueling crucibles of punishment without respite, and I have a feeling that a well-executed found-footage story might be able to recreate that unrelenting nightmare feel pretty well. More than anything, the found footage conceit gives good reason to construct long, unbroken takes which deny the viewer the relief of having editing swoop in and save them. It’s certainly possible to do this with conventional photography (see: CHILDREN OF MEN, KNOWING) but with the found footage gimmick it seems to so naturally insert itself into the way it’s filmed that you get the benefit of the immersive long take without the distraction of the director rubbing your nose in it (see: ENTER THE VOID)... And even though found-footage films will never be pretty like traditional films, there is a certain advantage to using the fixed perspective and the limitations of the media to keep your horror hidden. Most films have to rely on darkness or deliberately evasive photography to keep you in fear of what you don’t see -- here, it’s a natural effect of the shaky cam and glitchy video quality. That certainly opens up some new possibilities for good fright scenes”

A mere five years later, that kind of optimism seems pretty naive. Despite the overwhelming proliferation of the found-footage subgenre, there has been a dispiriting lack of ambition on the part of most genre filmmakers to experiment with the medium or to utilize it in any sort of imaginative or unique way which might take advantage of the format. If anything, it’s been more of a temptation to just shoot the same played-out exploitation concepts, except minus the exploitation because the shaky camera obscures anything that might be called genre goods. There have been bright spots -- Gareth Evans and Timo Tjahjanto’s masterful sequence in V/H/S 2, the solid, gritty THE BAY, Ti West’s little experiment in subtly shifting motivated perspective in the original V/H/S-- but they have been spectacularly few and far between. Even when one or another turns out pretty decent --[REC], say, or BANSHEE CHAPTER --there’s always that nagging question about what role the found footage conceit played in its success. Did it enhance the experience, or did it just make a film which would have been good anyway uglier and more visually confusing?

the magic of cinema

Nearly two decades after THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, then, THE HOUSES OCTOBER BUILT* stands virtually alone in its commanding use of the format as both an unambiguously effective conduit for creating fear, and also a means to subtly play with horror filmmaking and tackle (or at least address) some interesting philosophical questions about our attraction to horror. It’s not a modern masterpiece or anything, and it unfortunately stumbles right at the finish line and fails to deliver an adequate ending, but as arguments for the potential of found-footage filmmaking to rightfully stand next to more classic styles as a worthwhile artistic choices go, I sure can’t think of many other contenders which make the case nearly this strongly.

You probably wouldn’t guess that from the opening, though, since it begins unencouragingly with a bunch of indistinguishable bros (and one significantly more charismatic woman) mugging for the camera and making dumbass jokes and playing pranks on each other on-camera like real people allegedly do in the crazy upside-down world of found footage horror. But even right away, you can’t help but pick up that there’s an unusual sense of easy chemistry between these people. They definitely seem to be performing for the camera, but that is what real people do, --especially real people not used to being filmed-- and the way they relate to each other seems surprisingly genuine. You really get the sense that these people know each other and really have been working together for some time on their stated documentary project: to travel America documenting their search for “the most extreme haunted house.”

And it’s reasonable that you would get that impression, because that’s exactly what we are looking at. Director Bobby Roe (Bobby Roe, THE HOUSES OCTOBER BUILT, “Raven’s Baseball player, uncredited” in SUPERMAN RETURNS) really is a director traveling in an RV visiting various “haunted attractions” along with Zack (co-writer Zack Andrews, THE HOUSES OCTOBER BUILT), Mikey (Mikey Roe, THE HOUSES OCTOBER BUILT), Jeff (Jeff Larson,  THE HOUSES OCTOBER BUILT), and Brandy (Brandy Schaefer, “Dancer, uncredited” in two 2001 episodes of Ally McBeal, THE HOUSES OCTOBER BUILT). These are all real people, really doing this real thing; Bobby and Mikey really are brothers, the people they interview are sometimes so real that they have to blur out their faces. It feels precisely like what it is: some ambitious (not artistically or intellectually, but definitely young and hungry) indie filmmakers trying to grind out a product on the cheap and have some fun on the way. You can absolutely imagine catching 20 minutes of this while flipping through cable channels and finding it exactly the kind of mildly interesting but shallow filler they would show some Thursday at one in the morning to fill another hour of the endless black hole of 24 hour cable programming. The fact that it seems kind of shoddy and superficial doesn’t come off as a bug, but a comforting sign that you’re in familiar territory. It feels disingenuous and artificial in exactly the way that real life, mediated through the medium of low-effort cable TV content, feels disingenuous and artificial. In other words, so fake it feels completely real.

And yet, of course, it’s also not real, because we’re not very deep at all into our exploration of the hidden inner life of seasonal funhouse workers before little threads of fictional weirdness start snaking their way into the picture. But the brilliant thing here is that they are, at least at first, completely woven into the fabric of the obviously real but grotesquely extreme world of independent haunted attractions, and consequently it becomes nearly impossible to immediately identify what is real and what is fiction. There’s an early scary moment when they antagonize the somewhat unbalanced workers at a haunted attraction, only to find their escape blocked by some intimidating clowns who stand menacingly and silently in front of their RV. I honestly have no idea if this moment is real or not; it’s pretty disturbing behavior, but still safely within the bounds of possibility, especially since we’ve already been learning through interviews with the staff of these events that they’re a pretty weird lot who take this business real seriously (one apparently real boss cheerfully describes them as “pretty far out there,” another awkwardly has to explain that he doesn’t do a background check on his employees and is, uh, “looking into doing that in the future”). It seems just crazy enough I’d believe it. On the other hand, as the camera pans through one of the many haunted houses we tour with the crew, we encounter various costumed characters, including a creepy silent woman in a cracked doll mask (Chloe Crampton, THE BRITTANY MURPHY STORY). She fits in with the other real-world masked characters so completely that you think nothing of her… until she suddenly turns up again hundreds of miles later, creepily standing outside the RV. “Isn’t that the girl from [the last haunt]?” they ask, half laughing, half uneasy. They don’t yet realize that their banal reality is being subtly infiltrated by horror movie fiction.

This mixing of real and unreal recalls the interesting-but-not-entirely-successful 2006 documentary/horror film hybrid S&MAN, which also artfully blends a real documentary about ultra-low-budget horror directors with a fictional mockumentary about a real serial killer infiltrating that subculture. The difference is that S&MAN may have more pointed intellectual ambitions, but THE HOUSES OCTOBER BUILT blends truth and lies much more seamlessly. It’s awfully hard to tell exactly where reality stops and fiction begins here. Unlike S&MAN, where the actor playing the villain immediately stood out from the real-world weirdos, authenticity and artifice are stylistically indistinguishable here, and you have only logic to tell you, at some point, where the fiction starts.

Which, of course, was once something of the holy grail of the found footage conceit, but since then has become a prize only rarely pursued by those who dabble in other aspects of the subgenre. It was certainly present from the inception of the concept, though: in retrospect it may be hard to believe anyone took it seriously, but it’s worth remembering that the great granddaddy of the whole subgenre, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, spent considerable time and effort creating an elaborate metafiction about the legitimacy of the “found” footage (almost certainly originating the term in the process) and seriously trying to convince viewers that what they were seeing really was real. I don’t think most people were fooled, but at least some people seemed to sort of believed it at the time, or at least enough to justify some public debunking which seemed to sort of disappoint fans. And BLAIR WITCH was hardly the first to court faux-authenticity as a cornerstone of its strategy to titillate viewers. An arguable forerunner of the V/H/S series, the FACES OF DEATH anthology series, absolutely billed itself as the real deal in a shady marketing ploy to sell their corny antics to disturbed weirdos long before the internet made finding footage of real death so easy that I’ve managed to do it unintentionally (and unwillingly) on more than one occasion.   

Now, HOUSES OCTOBER BUILT, unlike those other examples, never makes an effort to out-and-out lie to you about the reality of what you’re seeing; like Orson Welles’ famous War Of The Worlds broadcast, it never pretends to be real, it just does such an uncommonly excellent job of mimicking the particular rhythms of a familiar medium that your mind is primed to accept it without much scrutiny. By the end, the content has long ago crossed lines of believability which clearly mark it as fiction, but the style never acknowledges that fact, and even while your rational brain knows that this can’t be real -- that it never even claimed to be real-- a part of your brain can’t quite let go, allowing an eerie dissociative anxiety to pervade the whole experience.

And it is definitely an experience. There is an unavoidable immediacy to the film which is, if not unique to this sort of motivated POV filmmaking, at least a major advantage of it. We see what they see, and only what they see, enveloping the viewer in the shared reality of these characters and embedding us in this experience right along with them. So what if the characters are indistinguishable? They’re just vehicles to experience this shit for us, and their banal sense of humdrum reality just bolsters our natural suspension of disbelief and heightens our sense of being present on this journey with them. And that makes for a surprisingly intense ride, as the tendrils of strange and threatening forces, unseen but imminent, start to invade our comfortable journey.

In some ways, then, THE HOUSES OCTOBER BUILT is really a kind of summary class in the lessons learned about found footage filmmaking since BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. Small annoyances with the subgenre which have lingered unaddressed for years are efficiently resolved here, and the format is remarkably fine-tuned in small but important ways to simply work the way it ought to. It’s always clear who’s filming, for example, and it’s always feasible that they would be filming (they’re making a documentary, after all). Little things like that help enormously to make the action and geography clear and comprehensible, and provide some protection against the whole setup seeming immediately phony and alienating. Most of the time it’s pretty ugly, of course, but that’s ok-- even when the dreaded shaky cam inevitably comes out, the implications which the camera carefully intimates through fragmented images are enough. One of the chief complaints with found footage has always been that the incoherent visuals frustratingly obscure the good stuff, but here when things get visually incoherent it seems more like a strategy to allow our imaginations to run wild. We’re trading visual elegance for insinuation and immediacy; frequently an unwise tradeoff, but this time it works out. We see all we need, and we can imagine the rest -- especially as the unusually zippy pace keeps us moving briskly from one spooky image to the next, without the usual interminably uneventful buildup to a finale that most found-footage films employ.

It never reinvents the wheel, exactly, it just seems to have an uncommonly solid understanding for the mechanics of the medium, and how to get the most impact out of them. Like Ti West’s influential segment in VHS 1, for example, they get a lot of mileage out of a sudden unmotivated camera shift. While many found footage films like DISTRICT 9 or THE DEVIL’S PASS ask you not too think to hard about who is shooting this and how it’s being done, THE HOUSES OCTOBER BUILT’s** commitment to being fastidiously clear about which perspective we’re getting means that when we suddenly see something we should not be seeing, it has a real gut impact. It’s a simple thing, but to do it requires a certain level of sophisticated consideration (or at least intuition) about how motivated POV impacts the meaning of images. And that’s how a relatively benign shot of characters sleeping instead becomes an image of intense horror -- we get a sudden jolting sense that a line has been crossed. For the characters, obviously, but I think instinctively we also feel it in the medium itself.

And that line is the final thing which makes THE HOUSES OCTOBER BUILT an interesting film; it’s a movie which is deeply interested in the lines we draw to protect ourselves, and the seeming paradox of our fascination with pushing those lines. After all, this is precisely what our protagonists are engaged in; they want to experience extreme states of fear, and they’re going to great lengths to push those experiences further and further. This movie must have the most uses per minute of the word “extreme” since Surge went out of production (tear emoji). These folks --or at least the director-- want something which pushes the limits, which walks them right up to the line of genuine danger.

But of course, there is a line;  the “haunts” go “right up to the point of… they won’t let us touch them or bash ‘em over the head and drag ‘em off anywhere, so I have to stop at that point,” as one haunted house workers (a real one, I’m nearly but not entirely certain) explains. Scaring is all well and good, but we don’t want anyone to get hurt (we don’t have the insurance for it). But if there’s no real danger, what exactly is transgressive here? “What is an ‘extreme haunt’?” somebody, I think Mikey, asks. “I don’t understand how far you really can go without hurting somebody.”

Turns out, exactly this far. After that, it starts hurting.

But, that’s the point, right? We want to know we’re safe. And that means creating a superficially extreme experience without losing our sense of control. Of course, few things frighten us more than losing that sense of control. Without control, even the most mundane situations become terrifying: “That’s invading my territorial bubble, I tend to freak out if you start to tie me up…” says the same haunted house worker, thinking aloud about what he would consider going “too far.” But that is most definitely not the kind of experience we’re after. We want to go up to the edge, but only when we’re sure it’s on our terms. The crew here, of course, eventually finds themselves on the decidedly wrong end of that equation, and discovers that there is definitely a limit to how extreme they want things to get. Oh, big tough guys suddenly aren’t so gung ho about taking this to the next level? I thought you liked being scared!

They’re talking about these “haunted attractions,” of course, but they could just as easily be talking about horror movie aficionados like me. I’m too old to get much out of that sort of bravado now, but there was definitely a time in my life where I, too, would have said I wanted the most extreme experience. “We want the real stuff, the FACES OF DEATH stuff!” says a haunted house patron, neatly bridging the gap between a movie peddling its phony gore as reality and the real world haunts’ offering of phony scares. Why does he want that, why did I want it? In an interview about the movie on nerdist.com, director Bobby Roe speculates,

“I think it makes you feel like a kid again. I think that’s been the main thing that we’ve seen, I mean even adults, people who are 30 years old and they dress up again and it’s not just about, I think it’s more of a creative thing. I think it makes you feel 12 years old but the fact is that when you’re 12 years old, that was enough for you to trick-or-treat or go to JC’s haunted house or the charity haunted house and now as an adult you want it upped a notch. Now they’ve gone back to the touching or the spitting blood, they’ve really upped their game, and I think that a lot of places that we see that have upped their game the most are the places without the big budgets. Not your Universal Studios, not your Knott’s Scary Farm, it’s the Ma and Pa’s in Georgia, Texas that really have to up their game because they don’t have the budget for giant animatronics so they get really, really creative.”

Frankly that quote’s a little hard to parse (if the movie thing doesn’t work out, Roe may have a future as a speechwriter in the Trump administration), but I think what he’s grappling with are two impulses: one is that feeling fear has a surprisingly nostalgic component, the other is that it has something to do with the creative impulse.

The first point seemed a little silly --even trite-- until I thought about it a little and decided that he just might be onto something. When we’re young, the whole world is out of our control, full of things which are new and scary, even when they’re not intended to be. But as we grow old, we experience most things, everything becomes familiar and unsurprising and your ability to be frightened gradually diminishes, or at least alters. During October, I’m almost inevitably asked by someone what I think the scariest movie is, and the sad truth is that almost nothing you can put into a movie really scares me anymore. I can’t think of the last movie that really got my pulse pumping or got under my skin and invaded my dreams. And yet, I’m not so old yet that I can’t recall a time in my life when I could still feel that way. I vividly remember watching SUSPIRIA for the first time maybe a decade ago, or PULSE maybe, and being totally and completely absorbed into a perfect nightmare.

I don’t know if it’s exactly the fear that I miss, but I definitely miss the intensity of those days, the foggy memory of being completely and utterly absorbed, wholly immersed. Fear is such a basic emotion that it has the ability to do that to you, to command every single flicker of your mind and focus you intensely and perfectly. When we can experience that fear in a safe way, the effect is so powerfully centering that I think perhaps we experience something like what philosopher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls Flow, a sense of being in a zen-like state of perfect involvement in what you're doing. As adults, our attention and our anxiety becomes more diffuse, the things we fear broader and more persistent and ephemeral. I wake up every morning knowing that Donald Trump might very well start a nuclear war, or declare martial law, or ban women wearing pants, but I also have to get up and shower and brush my teeth and go to work. These horrors are simply too pervasive to capture the totality of my attention the way a scary clown or the murky darkness behind a closet door --or, much more pleasurably, a top-tier scary movie-- can for a younger person. Yes, I do miss it --how could I not?-- and I think I spent quite a few years chasing that dragon, trying to cook up harder and harder stuff that could bring me back to that sense of serene, perfect unease. As, I imagine, most horror fans do. When THE LOST BOYS doesn’t do it for you anymore, you graduate to CHILD’S PLAY, and when that seems tame you try HELLRAISER, and then maybe THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, and then FACES OF DEATH and A SERBIAN FILM or something. But you can’t recapture it. Fear, like wonder, like passion, like imagination, is tempered with age, and as much as we ache for the intensity of experience we had as kids, all we can do is re-enact the rituals and try and remember.

It’s a point which kind of recalls the 2012 documentary THE AMERICAN SCREAM, which approaches the same conversation in reverse -- from the perspective of a guy who finds himself obsessively motivated to create his own “haunt.” He also brings up a sense of chasing childhood lost, again subtly suggesting our adult intuition that perhaps fear is the last kind of truly simple, unfettered emotion we’re occasionally able to experience, and that hunting it links us in some way to a sense of primary-colored, wide-eyed rawness that we left behind. But the documentary also speaks to another point Roe seems to be grasping at -- as much as fear is about the threat of destruction, finding ways to bring out that fear in others is also very much a task of intense creation.

We’re not just into being scared, after all -- we’re into scaring others too, into creating elaborate fantasies which have such immense power over people’s primal emotions. And not just the professionals, either -- it's relevant that at least one of our protagonists pranks his colleague by sneaking up behind him with a chintzy mask. Despite explicitly setting out to look for “extreme” horror experiences, the scared friend is irate over the simple gag, and the scarer is no more pleased when the tables later turn against him. Fear is about control, and controlling fear --you own, but particularly other peoples'-- is deeply empowering. That impulse runs deep enough to not only attract, but compel creative people to dream up new horrors. The actors and artists at the haunts, both in HOUSES and AMERICAN SCREAM, are driven to this by complex reasons they can’t entirely understand, which are both deeply generous and possibly somewhat sadistic. One can’t help but wonder if, a few thousand years ago, they wouldn’t have been shamans and witch doctors, people driven to try and symbolically express the inexpressible unknown --which is the dark heart of all true fear-- through masks and dance and fire and wild unhinged extremes. To use fear and wonder and that perfect, unifying, elucidating, focusing power it brings, to control people, to test their own self-control, to help unify a group and to conjure the unknowable Lovecraftian infinities lurking inside the minds of mortals.  

Writer-producer-star Zack Andrews also points out you get a little high when you do it, because your brain releases powerful opioids. Which is a pretty dumb point, but admittedly probably doesn't hurt the appeal any.

Anyway, the movie would be a much better exploration of those themes if it didn’t end the way it does. SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING-- Asking around about extreme haunts, our Scooby gang comes to the attention of a band of renegade nomadic haunters, who stalk and capture them and run them through a series of cool haunted houses against their will. This fits nicely with the whole theme of control, and the way that losing that control, or even any wavering in certainty about it (are the “Blue Skeleton” gang who torment them some kind of magic murder cult, or are they just rowdy guys in costumes giving our heroes the wild time they asked for? We're not sure.) drastically alters the experience. But then in the end, everybody just gets buried alive. Huh. It seems like there was probably a more thematic way of ending things, especially since (DOUBLE SPOILERS FOR THE SEQUEL) it turns out in the sequel that they survive, presumably because it really was just another “haunt” that only wanted to terrorize them (like they asked for!) and not murder them.

Ending it with the presumed opening of the sequel would have been a substantially better conclusion to this one, and I don't know why they didn't do it. Maybe they thought it seemed too much like a cop-out “happy ending,” but it’s obviously the conclusion that makes the most thematic and narrative sense for this story, and they should have just trusted their audience to understand that fact and not demand an arbitrary nihilistic ending. This way really smacks of hungry young filmmakers who understand that (SPOILERS FOR THE VANISHING) THE VANISHING is the greatest horror movie ending of all time, but don’t quite understand why and assume it would work just as well stuck at the end of any movie. This ending is grim, certainly, but not very cinematic or satisfying, so I really wish HOUSES THAT OCTOBER BUILT had the imagination to finish what it started. But then again, I’m not in control here, am I? If I really wanted to be scared my own way, I’d get up the courage (and the money) to make my own movie, like these guys here and like the “haunt” actors and creators and the obsessed suburbanites of THE AMERICAN SCREAM did.

Now that would be scary. Maybe it’s time someone made a found-footage movie about it. If HOUSES OCTOBER BUILT is any indication, there’s still hope for both the format and the genre to be interesting and effective enough to really give the next generation of young kids something to scream over.

*Minor point, but it should obviously be the HOUSE (no “es”) OCTOBER BUILT, which is a much stronger title. Yes, it’s less accurate, but (in horror, anyway) if you have to choose between clarity and poetry, always choose poetry.

**Gah, every time I type it I die a little more. HOUSE! Not HOUSES!!

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	From The Producer of INSIDIOUS and PARANORMAL ACTIVITY. Oooh, that IS scary.
TITLE ACCURACY	They don’t really seem to be houses, but it basically works, at least literally. You know what I think of that fucking “es” by this point.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	Yes, the sequel came out just this October, but it doesn’t seem to be available yet.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Found-footage-clusterfuck, I guess “menaced by masked psychopaths” sub-genre, like THE STRANGERS or THE PURGE?
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None, although I like Brandy Schaefer a lot and would love to see her go on to be a major scream queen.
NUDITY?	Yes, they go to a strip club where the strippers wear zombie makeup
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	There’s a very uncomfortable scene where a masked weirdo follows Brandy into the bathroom and stands around menacingly, but no touching.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No animals, I don’t think.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	Yes, the “Blue Skeleton” mascot lady wears a cracked dollface
EVIL CULT?	There doesn’t appear to be a religious component, but there’s a religious intensity to the “haunters” commitment.
MADNESS?	Only the madness inside me which could make me write 5,000 words about some schlocky found footage debacle on Netflix.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Definitely
MORAL OF THE STORY	Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate… leads to found footage.