1922

1922 (2017)

Dir. Zak Hilditch

Written by Zak Hilditch, based on the novella by Stephen King

Starring Thomas Janes, Dylan Schmid, Molly Parker, Neal McDonough

 

If you’ve been hearing a series of rattling thrums growing in intensity over the last few days, I have good news for you: it was just the sound of me revving up the ol’ CHAINSAWNUKAH to carve into another year of horror movies (we’ll return to our Oliver Stone retrospective in due time)! As you perhaps noticed over the course of the last year, my output of long-form reviews has dwindled significantly from the old days when I could count on cranking out a good 50 or 60 reviews over the course of October and November (and usually into December and maybe even the new year). But that doesn’t mean I’m not watching these turkeys, it just means that I no longer force myself to try and drag 1500 words out of some turd zombie flick that even its original makers didn’t think about that hard. Instead, I’ll write up a significantly shorter –but no less witty and incisive!—capsule review for the ol’ letterboxd account. If you don’t follow me on letterboxd, well… why the heck not? Same great content, more digestible portions. Everyone wins! It’s like a SAW movie except instead of a convoluted death trap with a specious moral lesson, you’re just given the choice of trudging on with your dull, empty existence OR being privy to my enlightening opinions on, say, BACKDRAFT 2 (yes, they made a Backdraft 2. Yes, William Baldwin’s back!). And because they’re shorter than these long rambles on the blog, I can crank ‘em out like Stephen King!

 

Speaking of which, we begin our long-form journey today with one of the many, many, many things King has cranked out. To give you a sense of just how god damn many movies have been adapted from (let alone ripped off) his even more voluminous bibliography: seven days into the month, I’ve already watched three without even trying. And 1922 THE MOVIE (based on his 2010 novella of the same name, which appears in his collection Full Dark, No Stars) is among the more rarified company of movies adapted faithfully from King’s work. That means there’s lots of Stephen King-y-ness in this one, for better or for worse –and while that’s not by any means a categorically advantageous feature, I think in this particular case it’s for the better. Part of its advantage here is that you can count on Stephen King to embrace simplicity. Where modern media has increasingly become the exclusive province of high-concept, hyperactively overplotted, narrative-driven genre fare, King retains a zen-like ability to focus on the details of a simple premise. Like GERALD’S GAME or THE NIGHT FLIER, 1922 THE MOVIE doesn’t have a lot of story, and in fact this can’t even boast an outré premise like those two; basically, a farmer murders his wife and then gradually starts to feel haunted by what he's done, and that's it. But the meat of the thing is in the feel of it. It's simply a closely-observed but not necessarily realism-driven portrait of this particular guy, eager to get us inside his head and simply let us sit there as King and script-writer/director Zak Hilditch (RATTLESNAKE) run him through the ringer to see what will happen.

Now, about that farmer: I think it's probably necessary to preface this by noting that Thomas Jane (BOOGIE NIGHTS), in portraying this character, goes all in on a country accent just this side of Foghorn Leghorn, very much playing with the fire of unintentional comedy. I think he's trying to sound like Tim Blake Nelson (who they probably should have just gotten for this role) but he lands dangerously in the neighborhood of SLING BLADE. The accent is not, like, imaginary; I mean, it's not like Ewan McGregor or somebody just making up an accent which has never before come out of a human. And he’s at least consistent with it. But it's a lot of accent, and it's pretty jarring to hear it coming out of Thomas Jane, especially if you have ever heard him talk before. There are certainly some people who are not going to be able to make it past that basic fact, especially since he's narrating and therefore talking through almost the entire runtime. But although your results may vary, I eventually got on board with it.

The accent is maybe even appropriate in this case, because Jane's performance very much rests on a kind of faux-folksiness which is at the core of a lot of King's stuff, and is the key to understanding how to read him. King is not a journalist, and doesn’t seem to draw heavily on his own observed experience. He isn’t interested in interviewing farmers and spend six months working on a rural farm to get the details right. He’s interested in a simulacrum of simple rural America which has little to do with lived reality, but everything to do with a strand of romantic American storytelling that he and his work are steeped in. It’s not realism, but it’s certainly not frivolous imagination either; the storybook-simplicity of the protagonist (complete with broad, nonspecific “country” accent and omnipresent overalls) allows King to slip past reality altogether and tap into the fundamental tropes that underlie our cultural stories, and, grounded in fact or not, inform who we are. This gives his work a kind of mythic quality, and turns 1922 THE MOVIE away from the gritty contemporary docu-realism which is so much in vogue in the age of the digital camera --with its unflinching crispness and ability to capture real-world lighting, potentially evoking the world of youtube—and towards something quite different, a dark folk tale which uses its hacky artifice to draw turbulent and troubled emotions to the surface from the deep world of the collective unconscious. Farmer Wilfred* James doesn't strike me as someone you could encounter in the real world (even in 1922, which is when the story takes place, and I suppose as good a title as any) but he definitely strikes me as the very quintessence of the small-time farmer in American fiction. He is mythic, archetypal; the simulacrum of a certain subset of real Americans as filtered through a couple hundred years of American cultural soup.

Which makes this a portrait not so much of a person as of a certain strand of brittle Americana. Farmer Wilfred seems at first to embody a kind of paradigmatic American ideal. He's hardworking, humble, practical, quiet, skeptical of pretension and scornful of faddish frippery. The 'Simple Kind Of Man' that Lynyrd Skynyrd sang about, or, more ominously, the "forgotten American" that Trump idealized. But the unpretentious country farmer is only admirable until up to a point; when his wife (Molly Parker, THE WICKER MAN 2006) brazenly challenges the small authority he does possess, something rather vicious and aggrieved rises to the surface --rather easily, in fact-- and before long he's convinced himself that murder is his only option. And crucially, he lets us know that the convinced himself is doing a lot of work here; this isn’t the story of a good man who makes a foolish mistake when backed into a corner. This is the story of a man who uses the false pretense of being backed into a corner to give himself license to unleash the violent retribution he’s been nursing all along. Who is able to tell himself a story about his own victimhood which is convincing enough to validate his seething anger and justify lashing out. Even with the accent, Jane locates the bitterness and impotent rage in this quiet agrarian, lets us see how his admirable qualities subtly transmogrify into monstrous ones in ways that even he --heck, maybe especially he-- doesn't understand. And indeed, it is his very inability to unpack his feelings that is at the root of this transformation.

I’m not sure what, if anything, was going on in King’s world in 2010 that made its way into this story, but in 2017, and especially 2021, one can hardly help but read this as a commentary on the roiling cultural tension of modern America. There’s a reason I felt compelled to name-check Trump back there; Wilfred James reflects a rigidly conservative strain of American thought. He is solitary, traditional, fiercely resistant to change (he doesn’t even have indoor plumbing) and contemptuous towards outsiders, especially the despised ‘city folk.’ The whole inciting incident, in fact, arises from his wife’s desire to sell their land and move to Omaha, Nebraska, a place he is convinced (with no discernable first-hand evidence) is a land of the debased and fallen. He, on the other hand, is dead-set on passing the farm down to their son (Dylan Schmid, HORNS), who is mostly ambivalent about carrying on his father’s lifestyle but is sufficiently besotted with the neighbor’s daughter to allow himself to be manipulated into becoming an accomplice. It’s telling that the son is only tangentially interested in staying on the farm; despite Wilfred’s empty assertions that he’s acting on behalf of his kid, we know it’s empty posturing. It’s not about misguided paternal concern, it’s about standing athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’ He simply wants things to stay the same forever, even after he’s gone, and he’s willing –eager, even-- to kill anyone who pushes back on that idea. It’s about control, about feeling powerless in the world and consequently pathologically defensive about his dominance among the few people he can control. But that just means he’s going to lose his soul first, and then lose everything anyway.

 

But I hasten to add, although the film is very much about this, it’s in no way an overtly political or didactic film. It’s simply a dark character piece, and a pretty exaggerated one at that. But that doesn’t mean it can’t still get at something interesting and valuable about the real world. I don’t want to overstate all this, but it just seems to me so intrinsic to, and yet so often ignored about, the reason we tell stories in the first place. The movie, unlike so much unbearable art from the last decade or so, has no interest in demonizing this guy or scoring cheap culture war points. It has no moral desire to condemn farmer Wilfred, who is, after all, a fictional character, and indeed, by adopting his perspective it even provides us reason to understand him, even sympathize with him. His wife’s snide imperiousness, layered with a subtle layer of condensation, is pretty abrasive, and it’s easy to understand why she is so loathsome to him, just as Parker’s excellent performance gives us all the evidence we’d need to re-imagine this story from her perspective. Of course she’s a little vindictive towards this stifling, selfish hayseed – but this is his story, not hers, and we need to understand his perspective to understand why he responds in the way he does. By simply placing us in the perspective of this particular character, we learn something about him, and, by extension, others who idealize the things he represents, and, to a certain extent, ourselves, since there’s certainly a part of us who can understand him. This is, I suppose, what people mean with the phrase ‘everything is political,’ in the sense that politics is just the expression of the way we want to organize the world, and the values that we believe should guide that organizing. But to my mind, this is a far, far better method to get at these underlying socio-cultural issues through art than the recent spate of genre movies which seem so eager to simply state the moral aloud and sit back and wait for the congratulations to pour in.

Which is good, because some thoughtful character work is all you really get here. There's a little sprinkling of gross corpses and ghosts and stuff (which may or may not be real, and it's such a small part of the film that it doesn't really matter which), but the horror is really more psychological. It's not a film about guilt, exactly, it's a film about decay, about everything --physically and spiritually-- in our protagonist's life falling apart the harder he tries to hold on, mostly because he's trying to hold on, whether or not he realizes that last detail. It wants us to go on this journey and simply experience it all, rather than drag the story this way or that in service of perceived genre goods. Which does not in itself sound like something that would make me happy; over the last few years, horror, or at least any horror with real ambition, has gradually just become drama with spooky music, not necessarily to the benefit of either genre. And you could very reasonably level the same criticism against 1922, which offers very little genre content you could point to; there’s probably less ghost content than Hamlet, which I doubt anyone would want to defend as a horror story. But again, the film’s willingness to go broader and more archetypal serves to its advantage; as horror has become drama, drama has increasingly become undramatic, focusing on intimate details of small stories, shrinking up into an actor’s exercise in minimalist realism. Something like 1922, with its baroque gothic affectations, neatly avoids that trap and simply delivers big, operatic, unreserved emotions. Not histrionics or camp, and not without nuance, but still far more extreme and outrageous than any self-respecting drama today would attempt, and it’s away to get away with it (assuming you think it does) by virtue of its willingness to announce itself as a horror story rather than a drama, freeing it up from the dull confines of naturalism to churn up some tumultuous human emotions into a larger-than-life frenzy which is more interested in the overwhelming way things feel than the mundane way they are.       

 

And in its unhurried way, it's pretty good at getting those emotions rolling; the performances are uniformly quite fine (as long as you can get on board with the accents), broad, certainly, but textured enough to feel specific and meaty, and the atmosphere is bolstered by some surprisingly nice cinematography by Ben Richardson (BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, WIND RIVER), who clearly knows what he's doing in using the digital photography to get a lightly high-contrast, unobtrusively oversaturated effect which feels highly appropriate for the story's vaguely mythic affectation (making this a rare Netflix film which doesn't look implacably chintzy). The music, which I regret did not take much note of at the time, is apparently by Faith No More frontman Mike Patton, who, wow, I now see scored THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES also, which is weird. 

 

One might reasonably wish for a film this low-concept and generally lackadaisical about incident to get a little more aggressive with the style than Hilditch seems willing to do, but the drama is sturdy enough to make it consistently compelling, and sometimes it's maybe kinda nice to have a small-scale dark drama which has faith enough in King's keen eye for little details and complications which add character that it doesn't need to overthink things. I can definitely imagine this material feeling unendurably thin if you catch it in the wrong mood, but it mostly worked for me. Farmer Wilfred, you may be a murderous, conniving, unbalanced regressive, but I enjoyed spending this time in your head. Next time, though, maybe let’s do some kind of gimmick killer thing, huh?

* Everybody calls him "Wilf," which is weird; is it normal for people named "Wildred" to go by "Wilf"? "Wilf" sounds like the noise a dog makes when it smells something it doesn't like.

American Satan

American Satan (2017)

Dir. Ash Avildsen

Written by Ash Avildsen and Matty Beckerman

Starring Andy Biersack, John Bradley, Jesse Sullivan, Booboo Stewart, Malcolm McDowell, with Bill Goldberg, Bill Duke, Mark Boone Junior and Denise Richards whaaaaaaat?

AMERICAN SATAN is a fucking mystery. I never heard anyone, in real life or online, talk about it. Never saw an ad. Never saw a review. I stumbled across it only because I noticed it was listed in Malcolm McDowell’s filmography and so I looked up the trailer. But it’s not just some scruffy indie film funded on kickstarter; there’s more than a dozen listed producers and executive producers (including ROCKY director John G. Avildsen and Rob Zombie producer Andy Gould), and somebody obviously spent some money on this thing, providing it with a crisply professional crew, a gallery of recognizable actors in medium-sized roles, dozens of locations, and even a handful of huge crowd scenes. And a score co-written by Ko“Я”n’s Jonathan Davis! Holy moly! Spare no expense! They even claim there’s going to be a spin-off series? So obviously someone must have seen this, or at least someone must have had reason to believe someone would see it. But, ah. Why?

            Having now seen it myself… it’s still a fucking mystery. I can tell you a little about what happens in it, but I still can’t claim to understand it, or explain who it was made for. What I can say for sure is that I think teenagers are involved somehow, either on the supply or demand end. Because one thing that’s beyond dispute is that AMERICAN SATAN is an adorably earnest, mixed-up muddle of angst and anger and horniness and anxiety and teenage stoner philosophy, like it poured straight from the notebook doodlings of some earnest high school senior with dyed black hair and T-shirt that says “Fuck the world.” All of it is deeply and spectacularly terrible, but it’s also so adorably sincere and emo that I have no choice but to kind of love it. Can’t help myself. Oh jeez, I just realized – is the American Satan me?

The plot is less simple and clearly articulable than I’m about to make it sound, but in essence AMERICAN SATAN depicts the sad tale of youthful rocker Johnny Faust, lead singer of a band called The Relentless. Faust (yes, that seems to be his real last name – his mom is called “Mrs. Faust!”) is played by Andy Biersack, real-life singer of the band Black Veil Brides, a casting decision that makes sense --the role requires quite a number of musical performances-- until I tell you there’s a credit for “Johnny’s singing voice” and it’s another guy, vocalist Remington Leith of a band called Palaye Royale.* Which raises the question, what kind of crazy movie hires a non-actor professional singer to play the lead role of a singer, but then dubs his voice with some other singer? The mysteries of AMERICAN SATAN go deep.

            Anyway, we first encounter Johnny “The Doctor” Faust as a gloomy high school senior who lives in Columbus, Ohio with his mom (Dr. Christmas Jones herself, Denise Richards!?) and assures his mewling virginial Christian sweetheart Gretchen (beauty pageant winner Oliva Culpo) that although he has to move to LA to start a band, he’ll be back just as soon as he becomes a huge mega-star by playing unlistenable Hot Topic rock music and can afford to do what he really wants, which is to return to Ohio and marry her and settle down and live a life of quiet suburban domesticity. The first part of the plan goes amazingly well: he quickly meets a trio of bandmates (BooBoo Stewart, HE NEVER DIED, Ben Bruce of the band Asking Alexandria, Sebastian Gregory, Australian musician and actor), and the four of them recruit bassist Lily (Jesse Sullivan “Creature XXX” in the short film FUCKKKYOUUU) after a brief and unfortunate debate about whether they should let women in the band. But the second part of his plan encounters some turbulence due to the apparently unexpected perils of being a huge megastar, most of those perils instigated by the openly sinister Lily, who insists on maintaining an air of suspicious mystery when she is not manipulatively provoking trouble for everyone. Can’t a guy just become a huge superstar in a sensible, responsible manner and make enough money to buy a house in the Ohio suburbs for his sexless, blank-eyed high school prom date? Oh, the cruel caprice of fate!

            The movie does not treat any of this as a joke, by the way. It is, if nothing else, incorrigibly earnest and committed to making sure we understand the tragic gravity of this tale. And that’s part of what makes the movie so alluringly befuddling, because frankly put, the inherent wrenching tragedy of becoming a huge rock star and being deluged by money, drugs, and gorgeous naked groupies might be a little hard to relate to. But AMERICAN SATAN seems only barely aware that any of those things might conceivably sound appealing. This guy Johnny Faust is the most reluctant rock-and-roller it would be possible to invent; despite all the tattoos and the persistent gothy attitude, the movie insists on treating him as a naïve but obstinately fuddy-duddy wet blanket, who wants no part of the rock n’ roll lifestyle and would rather drink responsibly, get to bed early, file his taxes, and exchange promise rings with his abstinent, blankly wholesome high school sweetheart. He’s the most innocent cinematic rock star since everybody else in Queen except Freddy Mercury as portrayed in the movie BOHEMIAN RAPSODY. He seems apologetic and a little chagrinned even at going to a nice, quiet, oak-paneled restaurant bar booth for a few pints with his bandmate.

            And well he should be, as it turns out, for it is here that they encounter one Mr. Capricon, (Malcolm McDowell, TANK GIRL) who addresses the band (minus bass player Lily, who is always mysteriously and suspiciously absent when he shows up) with a sinister proposition: if they commit one murder, he will make them huge superstars. He seems, --well—a little devilish, but due to his British accent is demonstrably not the title character.

            Obviously this is a moral turning point. On one hand, instant mega-stardom would certainly expediate Johnny’s lifelong dream of investing in midwestern real estate. But on the other hand, is it worth a human life? They mull this over for an appropriate 30 or 40 seconds before deciding to kidnap some kid who they heard was a rapist and is definitely an asshole who calls them a homophobic slur, and lock him in their beat-up band van and set it on fire, symbolically burning the honest, humble home they had built together and becoming corrupted. Standard deal-with-the-devil stuff… except that Johnny immediately has second thoughts and sets the kid free. But then the dumbass would-be sacrificial victim, now completely safe, tries to run away and five seconds later manages to die accidentally entirely through his own stupidity. So I guess the band is off the hook, morally speaking.

But it still counts with British Satan, apparently, because they do become famous, and even their van appears again! Man, lucky break! But as they tour the country spreading their message of whatever it is that they’re shouting about in their songs, things start to turn rotten as they succumb to the lures of easy sex and omnipresent drugs, find themselves constantly under attack by angry protesters, and also, --oh yeah!-- discover that their music is inspiring a nation-wide wave of vengeful murderers. Which makes one recall that some guy who is probably the Devil seemed really invested in making them famous and may possibly have had sinister motives for doing that, especially since he continued to be real helpful even after they kind of bungled the whole “murder a guy” thing and are probably at most guilty of kidnapping and reckless endangerment, not actually murder.

This little incident with the original deal, in fact, is emblematic of the film’s spectacularly confused message. I mean, in theory, this is a pretty easy little parable about selling out your morals for fame and material excess. That’s, like, the only possible point of structuring your movie around a “deal with the devil.” But then it never quite sets this up correctly. Johnny –the only character the movie is even a little interested in—keeps getting unwillingly pushed into things, and the movie keeps refusing to make him responsible for his choices. There’s no hubris here to support a cathartic fall; he never seems like an ambitious libertine who lets his insatiable desires corrupt his soul. He seems like a humble small-town kid who doesn’t quite have the confidence to say no to peer pressure. Even when things start to get out of control and everyone is banging groupies and doing heroin and causing murders, he just keeps sort of mumbling that this isn’t a good idea and he doesn’t really want to do it. Does “He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall” apply if he’s sort of ambivalent about pleasures and just doesn’t know how to politely decline? It’s enough to make you wonder whether his last name is actually a weird coincidence and not a literary reference. Which, uh, --well-- let’s just say the screenplay doesn’t make one confident its authors had read a lot of Marlowe.

The pussy-footing refusal to allow the central character to actually enjoy --or even aspire to-- the copious debauchery depicted here is so pervasive as to feel out-and-out destabilizing, like there’s some crucial context that I’m missing. In fact, for long stretches, I kept wondering, is this some sort of weird Christian-propaganda cautionary tale? That would certainly explain its overwhelmingly and persistently sordid portrayal of what should be, by any reasonable entertainment standard, a wish-fulfillment fantasy. And it would explain why it’s so poisonously afraid of the spiritual debasement of the rock-and-roll lifestyle and so bizarrely uncritical of the implication that what Johnny should do is keep himself pure for marriage to his vacant-eyed young-Republican teetotaler hometown girlfriend. Ultimately I don’t think that’s what the movie intends (nothing I could find about any of the filmmakers backs up that hypothesis, anyway), but it’s hard to miss how blithely reactionary the movie feels.

This vague sense of judgmental hectoring is augmented by the fact that the movie is openly suspicious of bassist Lily, who is always agitating for trouble and mysteriously vague about her origins and never around when the Devil shows up. She’s proudly bisexual and liberated and confrontational, which one would assume a rock-n-roll themed horror movie would be enthusiastically in favor of. But we have a weird feeling she’s probably the Devil and she keeps goading them into situations where they get in trouble and is also revealed to work at a Baphomet-themed bordello which is just a few cenobites short of a HELLRAISER set, where she gets everyone hooked on drugs and debased sex with Satanic hookers and one of them dies. So… is the movie anti-sexual liberation, or… what? What are we supposed to make of that? It, ah, doesn't seem to have the most positive view of women, anyway.

Nevertheless, She Persisted.

 There’s definitely something that feels unhealthily repressed about the way the movie seems equal parts fascinated and horrified by rock and roll excess. I mean, there’s enough wild, out-of-control sex and drug orgies to make Hunter Thompson blush. In particular, the movie is absolutely drowning in female nudity (seriously, the most I’ve seen in a movie in years; Jean Rollin would find this excessive) but never in a positive or fun context where it seems like we’re supposed to be enjoying it, although obviously we are going to anyway… so? Johnny eventually ends up fucking everyone under the age of 80 who takes their top off in front of him, but he keeps weakly mumbling that he shouldn’t and it will ruin his life and his definitely-going-to-last-after-she-moves-to-college-wink-wink relationship with his virginal Christian high school girlfriend. But then he does it anyway, but looks sickened and horrified and disgusted with himself. The movie is obviously seriously getting off on this -- it spends like half the runtime salaciously ogling topless women banging the band-- but never for a moment allows it to pass without a stern lecture that this is degraded and obscene. And just in case we weren’t sure that Johnny is going down the wrong path, he also texts during a heartfelt teary speech at a funeral, which is very rude and Millennial of him. So surely this whole rock and roll thing is bad news, right?

            On the other hand, maybe not, because the movie can’t seem to make up it’s mind about whether the band is making the world better or worse, and it seems to be on-board with them in some occasionally eyebrow-raising ways. We learn that their music has been inspiring waves of violence as young people murder their bullies. Uh oh, sounds like they’re basically facilitating a wave of school shootings! No wonder the Devil wanted to make them America’s most beloved musical institution! Except that the movie seems weirdly ambivalent about whether or not that’s a bad thing. In fact, it offers several apparently earnest speeches suggesting that while it is, on the whole, probably a bad thing to murder people, well, maybe it’s time for society to change, and maybe murdering a few assholes will inspire a kinder, gentler society in the long run. Maybe this is what the revolution looks like, you know? Which is pretty, um, wow.

Similarly, it often seems like the Devil is making good points (McDowell gets some charmingly plummy speeches), and maybe even working with fellow supernatural being Gabriel (Bill Duke! What the?!), who is probably a good guy inasmuch as he speaks entirely in aphorisms. But come on, this guy’s literally the Devil and he’s played by Malcolm McDowell. There’s no way we’re supposed to think he’s right. Right? But then, if the Devil is trying to push their dangerous rock and roll excess, should we reject rock and roll and turn to Jesus? The movie sure doesn’t seem to think so; the Christian protesters and the angry rednecks they fight with are definitely not portrayed positively even though we know they’re right, this band literally is working for the dark one. At the end, after murders and arrests and random meaningless sex with dozens of teenage groupies and also possibly having sex with the Devil and getting hooked on heroin and overdosing and then coming back to life, when Jonny wants to get his head straight he goes to a Hindu guru. So, I guess the correct answer is Hinduism? But, like, the Devil and Angels are also real? And as long as you stay off the drugs, a few mass shootings are probably not such a bad thing after all? Like, what in the fresh fuck are we supposed to do with all this madness? A lot of people offer a lot of philosophy, and I have no idea who the movie thinks is right.

Like, this is definitely a sign things have taken a bad turn, correct? Can we agree on that?

 In fact, the movie’s oddly negative relationship with rock n’ roll recalls the strikingly negative portrayal of heavy metal music during the metalsploitation cycle of the 80’s. It’s hard to remember now, but in the 1980s, during the satanic panic, quite a few people genuinely believed that heavy metal music was dangerous and evil, and the metalsploitation movies of the time broadly reinforce that view, rather than challenge it, despite the fact that the presumed audience was heavy metal fans! As I noted back when I watched the quintessential metalsploitation classic BLACK ROSES in 2015,

“The only people on Earth who would conceivably enjoy this dumb movie are metalheads, so why would you write a plot where it turns out the parents are right, metal is dangerous and should be censored and condemned? My only guess is that [the filmmakers] … were banking on something I’ve long suspected: every true metalhead secretly wishes metal really was evil.”

With AMERICAN SATAN, we see something similar: although we have a movie whose whole hook is about rock music, which stars several professional musicians, and was directed by the CEO of a record label (more on that later), the life of a professional musician is almost without exception portrayed as miserable and corrupting, and the effect of their music is depicted as potentially destructive for the listener. But unlike with heavy metal, where you can see the appeal of the fantasy that listening to Dokken would summon slimy demonic puppets or whatever, I can’t see a similar tongue-in-cheek joy at playing into the stereotype here; watching someone despairingly bottom out just isn’t as much fun. That’s not the appealing part of the fantasy, right? That’s the boring second half of the VH1 Where Are They Now. And I can’t imagine even the most cynical rock n’ roll fan finds much appeal in the fantasy that listening to rock music would inspire you to become a school shooter, right?    

This is further complicated by the weird and inescapable parallels to real life: Beirsack really was a bullied teen from Ohio with some regrettable Batman-themed tattoos who dropped out of high school to move to LA and form a crappy rock act. This is basically his 8 MILE! So maybe this is a story shaped by the perspective of a young kid who indulged too much in his initial burst of fame and now looks back with disgust and regret at those years, and that colors the way the film portrays them? In a Huffington Post interview about the movie, Director Ash Avildsen (2015’s WHAT NOW) stresses this point: “With the exception of the physical manifestation of Satan, everything in the film is based on real events. Either myself, or these guys, or the producers have had these experiences in the rock music scene. It didn’t take that much crazy imagination, even though when people see it they’ll say ‘how did they think of that?”’ (Note: No human being has ever or will ever watch this movie and say “how did they think of that?”). Fair enough, so I guess this is all about gritty reality, then? But wait, in that same interview, Beirsack draws a clear distinction between himself and the character. While noting that their origins are identical, he says, “The difference is I didn’t make a deal with a deity… [T]here’s so many divergences in paths that you can take to success… You can sometimes forget where you came from initially… I don’t know what I would have done if I had the chance to become very successful out of nowhere. When you’re hungry and you want nothing more than to have that success, who knows what you would do if someone presented you with the keys to the kingdom?” So it sounds like he took a very different path than the one we see here.

In fact, while Avildsen is the founder and CEO of Sumerian Records (who, predictably, rep Black Veil Brides, Asking Alexandria, Palaye Royale, and Jonathan Davis, along with Between the Buried and Me (!) and briefly the Dillinger Escape Plan (!!)) and is obviously in a good position to have heard the tales of some of those “real events” the movie depicts, the whole approach has a weirdly dated feel. The legendary drug-fueled groupie-banging excess AMERICAN SATAN wallows in was a feature of 70’s and 80’s metal bands, and sure enough, those are the bands that get name-checked as a reference point. But the movie is aggressively set, like, RIGHT NOW. Avildsen is explicit on this topic: “…I wanted to have the music sound like what a big band might sound like today… I wanted to be like “Okay, what if Tool was a more mainstream heavy metal band with more raspy punk vocals?”. So I strayed away from having the band sound classic rock, I wanted it to sound modern and relevant. We weren’t ambiguous with the time frame… We wanted to make it clear that this was present day.” But do the kids today do this shit? I feel like Biersack’s actual bandmates are probably teetotalers who took their rock and roll money and prudently invested in it.

            In fact, I’d go out on a limb and hypothesize that the “real events” Avildsen is recalling were likely related to him by members of an older generation (he was born in 1981).** And that’s part of the movie’s weird vibe; it’s the story of a bunch of distinctly modern millennial kids who are for some reason living out a particularly 1980’s experience that doesn’t really exist anymore. The result of this generational mismatch is that the film curiously smothers a tale of unmistakably bygone 1980’s debauchery with a thick layer of fretful millennial anxiety. But those two mindsets sit very strangely together. In the cocaine-dusted innocence of the 80’s, a hedonistic focus on the pleasure of the moment made sense; placing a bunch of painfully self-aware burnt-out twentysomethings –who, remember, have on average way less sex than their 80’s counterparts did and with a great deal more stress-- into that same scenario feels bizarre and unnatural. In order to get the characters to work themselves into a respectable heedless decadence, they require some direct pressure from the Devil himself – and even then they still feel anxious and guilty and conflicted and certain that they’re ruining everything.

Speaking of modern anxiety, there’s also a truly wonderful amount of time spent discussing stoner occult conspiracy theories. I think someone even gets a dollar bill and does the thing where you fold it up and reveal a secret message. There’s definitely a lengthy discussion of the famous Apple 666/original sin conspiracy. Why? No idea. Maybe just generalized awesomeness? But probably for the same reason, whatever it is, that the movie includes about 60,000 words of intertitles during the credits quoting various musicians talking vaguely about dark magic. Like all movies with “American” in the title, it obviously feels certain that it’s really getting at something universal and potent about the cultural moment (or at least that it’s close enough to hide behind that claim as an excuse to trot out a bunch of tits and a promotional CD for the director’s label, which is, if anything, probably a more venerable tradition). But unlike AMERICAN GANGSTER, AMERICAN PSYCHO, and AMERICAN HUSTLE (“it’s about Capitalism, man”) or AMERICAN PIE and AMERICAN BEAUTY (it’s about sex, man”) or AMERICAN SNIPER (“it’s about brittle authoritarian masculinity… or maybe we’re just awesome?”), I genuinely emerged from the entire none-too-brief, densely-packed-yet-oddly-uneventful 112 minutes without a single solid guess as to what the point here is supposed to be. Is it about the dark side of ambition? About the corrosive effect of fame? About a sinister satanic conspiracy to corrupt the youth? A sinister satanic conspiracy to liberate the youth? About being careful what you wish for? About just, like, not doing heroin and maybe not fucking so many groupies?

There’s something like 25 minutes devoted to a weird tangent where a nice suburban mom talks her way into bringing her virginal teenage daughter onto the tour bus to be deflowered by Johnny (!), and then while they’re at it she ends up fucking someone else, maybe even Bill Goldberg (HALF PAST DEAD 2, who, unless I dreamed this, shows up as their tour manager or something?) and it’s this nutty thing, but despite the somewhat disturbing implications it seems like both mother and daughter are into it and maybe even having a kind of weird bonding experience. Again, this sounds like something that Poison had to deal with more than anything that’s happened to any band that became famous in the past 30 years or so, but I’ll take it: it seems to be a rare lighthearted moment of debauchery where everyone had a good time. But then a few scenes later, we cut to mom and daughter at home, when their husband/father finds out what happened, grabs a handgun, and blows his brains out! What the fuck, dude! Nothing narratively substantive comes of it but it’s such a weirdly specific little vignette that you gotta figure it means something—but what?

Oh yeah I forgot to mention, that Game Of Thrones guy is in there. Not Hodor, the other one. Hurley. No wait, that was Lost. You know the one I mean. That guy.

            The movie’s most baffling turn comes at the finale, which has already started to get a little narratively abstract (long story short, Booboo Stewart, who plays a guitarist apparently named “Vic Lakota,” does a CNN interview on acid where Larry King appears as himself, and may genuinely not have known he was interviewing a fictional band). ---PLEASE NOTE: I’m going to spoil the ending, I guess, although I’m not really sure what I’m even describing here.-- “Mr. Capricorn,” alarmed that Johnny seems to be increasingly ambivalent about the whole experience, starts dating his mom (?) and meanwhile Johnny has been fucking Lily, who of course we suspect is probably the Devil in disguise (man, what is it about this movie and weird parallel incest tropes?). In the big finale, Lily vanishes and Mr, Capricorn appears and tells Johnny that he wants him to commit a murder on stage to, like, ignite the revolution or whatnot. And to further provoke him, he reveals what we’ve suspected all along, that haha, it was he, Malcolm McDowell, who has hiding inside the nubile body of the Relentless’s bisexual liberated female bassist all along, spurring them forward to this climactic point (and although he doesn’t specifically mention it, that means our boy was banging beloved character actor Malcolm McDowell in disguise!). Oh shit!

            …Except not, because after this huge reveal there’s a little coda with one line of dubbed dialogue at the end which tells us that none of that was true. I guess the Devil was just lying and all that suspicious stuff Lily did was just a coincidence and she’s just a normal human, except sort of a bitch I guess (we’re told she’s a heroin addict who is now in recovery, and she never appears or gets mentioned again and nobody seems to think her behavior requires any further explanation).*** A baffling turn for an inexplicable character in a indecipherable riddle of a movie. Or, alternately, a desperate last minute re-write so they could spin off a series (and, less charitably, possibly also to safely assure us that don’t worry bro, no homo shit here). Either way, it kind of raises the question of, what did the Devil actually do here, anyway? I’m not sure how he helped them, and Johnny doesn’t even seem to think it would be altogether a thing bad if he did – the movie seems to ultimately adopt the stance that maybe God and the Devil are both a little right, and maybe the thing to do is to kind of let them balance each other out. Which, in practice, means that a few school shootings are probably a necessary evil, but we don’t want to start a whole revolution here, that would be going too far.

            Actually, I feel the movie would probably have benefited from going too far; as it is, it feels tentative and vaguely formed, with plenty of provocation but not a lot of real substance, or, hell, even any real narrative arc. For a movie with some real crazy turns, it’s an oddly passive, languid thing. Still, I kind of admire its goofy, earnest, mixed-up spirit. Almost certainly without meaning to, it captures something that feels kind of real about the teenage experience, when the world feels overwhelming and oppressive and everything –God, the Devil, Good, Evil, Sex, Partying, Sick Riffs, Identity, The Man, Society, The Future, Texting, Responsibility, Stoner Conspiracies, Porn, Bitchin’ Tats, and everything else in a young person's**** life just sort of spills over without any real structure or logic. It’s all very dumb, but that doesn’t mean it’s not deeply felt. That doesn’t exactly make for a good movie, but it does make for one which is probably more charming and unusual than a more traditionally good version would be. It stinks, but at least it smells like teen spirit.   

*I know this, of course, from my usual high level of background research; you can rest assured that I had no prior knowledge whatsoever of what a “Palaye Royale” or whatever might be.

** It occurred to me that this tracks with the fact that he might well have grown up around hard-partying celebrities, because his dad was John G. Avildsen (ROCKY, NEIGHBORS, the KARATE KID). But then I read this rather heartbreaking interview which makes it painfully clear that he never met his father and probably didn’t even benefit from his financial success (the one time he saw him as a child was at a family court hearing over child support, where John refused to acknowledge he was present. Jesus!). Although since the elder Alvidsen is a producer on this movie, one assumes they must have met at least once since that 2015 interview. But unless they made up for lost father-son time by exclusively discussing John’s partying with Stallone in the 70’s, I doubt he was the source for these anecdotes. So I dunno. Maybe he heard these stories from grizzled old roadies? He did work with Steve Adler from Guns N’ Roses in his 2015 movie WHAT NOW, so maybe this is all stuff that specifically happened to Steve Adler.

*** I notice actress Jesse Sullivan is the only person to be recast for the spin-off show; I’m not sure exactly what happened here, but that’s obviously a clue of some sort. It’s a shame, though, because she’s giving far and away the most interesting performance in the movie, although the fact that she’s the only character who isn’t utterly passive about everything probably helps.

**** I say young person, but the movie is utterly oblivious to the idea that there might be a perspective other than a young man’s; the only female character who isn’t a completely passive object for male characters to act upon is Lily, who is a destabilizing bitch, and also a sex object. I don’t think the movie is aware of this at all, but its complete disinterest in the inner lives of its female characters is another way in which it feels startlingly dated.

Gerald’s Game and the Shackles of The Past: Chainsawnukah 2019

Gerald’s Game (2017) and the Shackles of The Past

Dir. Mike Flanagan

Written by Mike Flanagan and Jeff Howard, based on the 1992 novel by Stephen King

Starring Carla Gugino, Bruce Greenwood, Carel Struycken, Henry Thomas, Chiara Aurelia

GERALD’S GAME may well boast the simplest premise of Stephen King’s entire career (and that’s saying a lot for a guy who once made a movie about killer big rig trucks*). Basically, the entire thing can be summarized in a single sentence: A woman named Jessie (Carla Gugino, SPY KIDS) finds her sanity unravelling after her husband Gerald’s (Bruce Greenwood, DISTURBING BEHAVIOR) sudden death during a sex game that leaves her handcuffed to the bed in an isolated house with no means of escape. OK I guess that’s kind of a wordy, meandering sentence that would be better served as two shorter sentences, but I said it could be done and now I’ve done it. I’ve now described the entire movie. That’s it, that’s essentially all that happens. There are a few wrinkles, and a winding flashback subplot, but for most of the 103 minute runtime, the action stays in a single bedroom, with only two people. It’s not entirely uneventful, but it’s not really a film which is motivated by events, either. It’s a film entirely about the mind of the protagonist, as she gradually drifts from shock to horror to despair to something more complicated, as she begins to consider the life that brought her to this sorry state of affairs.

It is, then, a simple premise which results in anything but a simple movie. Obviously, the hook here is the squirm-inducing basic conceit of being trapped in a vulnerable position with a dead body. That was how the book was described to me by some asshole kid on the bus when I was in middle school, and that premise alone was enough to remain vivid in my mind all these years later. In fact, I went into this assuming that was all there was to it, and consequently assumed it was based on a King short story. But no, it was a full 332-page novel; not an especially lengthy one, by Stephen King standards, but rich with psychological possibility, and, especially, rich with potential for King to impart his particular array of artistic idiosyncrasies upon it.

Indeed, it has to be about as distinctively and recognizably Stephen King as you can get. No other writer would ever have written this story this way (if they wrote this story at all!), and although I’ve only read a tiny percentage of King’s vast output, it feels to me like this is surely one of the most densely distilled versions of his particular artistic ethos. I’ve often quoted his line from Danse Macabre on this site: “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out.” His phrasing suggests those goals are mutually exclusive, but here, rather handily, they’re actually interwoven with surprising effectiveness. In fact, it almost seems like he worked backwards with the intent of building each layer in: the scenario itself is so inherently lurid and nauseating that “the gross-out” is never far from the surface, but on top of that, he adds two sharp jabs of quintessentially Stephen King “horror”: a very bad dog who wanders in and starts eating Gerald’s corpse (they even refer to him as “Cujo,” so no points if you were thinking the same thing) and a mysterious ghoul who may or may not be imaginary (muthafuckin’ Carel Struycken, aka “hey, it’s the Giant from Twin Peaks!” wearing prosthetics to amplify his already unusual frame) who –this being Stephen King— of course comes with his own goofy nickname (“The Moonlight Man”**), distinct MO (he collects bones and trinkets from his victims, which he carries in a tackle bag) and vaguely mythological backstory (he may be the physical personification of death, checking in to see if Jessie is ready to give up yet).

That handily takes care of the “gross-out” and “horror” camps, but the movie’s real heart lies with King’s highest category –he calls it “terror,” though I think “horror” would be a better word choice—something more ineffable, something that haunts, formless and therefore all-consuming. In this case, something which has been with Jessie, haunting her, since she was a child. A memory which she has, if not repressed, at least actively avoided confronting. I guess it’s maybe a kind of SPOILER to tell you what it is, but aw hell, you’ve already guessed it, or at least you will when the movie flashes back to an idyllic day with a 12-year-old Jessie (Chiara Aurelia, BIG SKY, BACK ROADS) and her father (Henry Thomas, LEGENDS OF THE FALL, DEAD BIRDS), alone in an isolated lakeside house very much like the one she’s now trapped in. And just in case you otherwise couldn’t relate to having your childhood tainted due to an unforgivable betrayal by someone you trusted, please note that the creepy dad is played by Henry Thomas – that’s right, Elliot from E.T.

 So yeah, I’m afraid there’s no way around it, this charming little slice of imaginative situational sadism is also saddled with some pretty heavy shit. I’ve never read the book, so I can’t speak to the sensitivity with which 1992 Stephen King treated this difficult subject, but the film’s screenplay, by Mike Flanagan and Jeff Howard, does an almost unbelievably graceful job of threading this potentially ruinous material into the pulpy whole. And they do this in a way which is superficially simple, but devilishly tricky to pull off: they simply take the character and her emotions seriously. Despite the luridness of the scenario, the film’s focus says firmly on Jessie’s inner life, and trusts that this close psychological examination under high stress is in itself a sufficient raison d'être for a horror movie.

Caring that much about character psychology is an unusual trait for a horror director –maybe even a genre director in general, since genre films tend to be motivated by incident rather than character. But it’s a trait that Flanagan has demonstrated since his first film, the terrific ABSENTIA, and it’s one he shares with King, who must surely be the most sentimental and soft-hearted horror author of all time. Flanagan –following King’s lead, I imagine, as the synopses of the two GERALD’S GAMEs look virtually identical—is able to handle the weight of Jessie’s backstory because his movie doesn’t just view her as a piece of meat to be tormented for our genre amusement, but as a distinct and complicated character, full of contradictions and surprises. Her trauma could easily be a mechanically expository plot point, but the movie pushes beyond simply asserting that she’s intrinsically fucked-up because she was abused, probing, in its most emotionally harrowing scene, specifically what was so insidious and disempowering about what happened to her. This helps us to not only understand the source of her pain, but also the complex system of coping mechanisms she has created to combat the pain. It shows us both wound and –maybe even more importantly-- scar tissue. Her childhood abuse is part of her, but it’s not all of her. It is not, as movie flashbacks so frequently are, a pat, simplistic missing puzzle piece that explains all her subsequent behavior. But once we understand it –and once she begins to confront it for the first time in her adult life—we can also see how it has lingered in the background, a huge unseen black hole quietly warping the orbit of her life in ways not always immediately obvious.

It certainly has something to do with her anxiety over Gerald’s S&M game, with its uncomfortably skewed power dynamic… but did it also have something to do with why she married Gerald in the first place? Did she subconsciously marry another man who would selfishly hurt her for his own sexual gratification, because her father so thoroughly twisted her idea of relationships in general? Or is that just reading trauma into something more mundane, projecting false meaning on a perfectly common dysfunctional relationship with poor sexual communication? And for that matter, who was the now-deceased Gerald, anyway? How well does anyone really know their partner? Was the S&M game a rare glimpse of Gerald’s monstrous true self, or was it just a normal bit of kink that he thought might add spice to their very normal lackluster sex life?

The fact that the movie is willing to let the character ask these questions, and treat them every bit as seriously as it treats its more genre-friendly ghoul, is at the heart of its strength. And the fact that it isn’t willing to produce pat, neatly-resolved answers gives the actors a real chance to shine. And it is actors, plural, because Gerald quickly shows up again after his death, not as a ghost, but as an avatar for Jessie’s inner doubts and anxieties, goading her to give up, and engaged in a constant debate with a stronger, more confident side of herself (portrayed by Gugino) who urges her to find a strength and canniness she also knows, on some level, that she’s capable of. Greenwood and Gugino, then, are both playing aspects of the captive Jessie’s psyche, with the poor woman on the bed torn between them. Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

Limiting the conversation to only these two actors keeps the feeling deeply intimate (King’s novel has Jessie keeping court with a larger group of other characters who never appear in the film), and both do splendid work. Greenwood (who looks fucking great at 61, by the way, and spends virtually the entire film in his underwear***) makes a very tricky performance --portraying a character who could be read a number of different ways, and then a slippery, shifting memory of that character, and also even sometimes a straight-up projection of a different character-- look easy and intuitive, offering an abundance of, wonderful subtle character work for the audience to chew on. But as good as he is, it’s Gugino’s movie, and she is hardly short of spectacular as the movie’s narrative and emotional anchor. She crafts a character who is genuinely complicated, capable of many contradictions: both fragile and resilient, canny and obtuse, disturbed and rational. She’s likeable enough to comfortably command our sympathy, but also not afraid to occasionally come across as a little prickly and abrasive, never allowing her complicating victimhood to transform into dull sainthood. It’s a performance which paints a deeply specific character, and, impressively, it’s matched by an equally vivid physical performance, which does a magnificent job of letting us feel the mounting discomfort of being confined in such a position as the hours stretch into days.

Flanagan, for his part, frames the film entirely from Jessie’s perspective, literalizing her mental projections because that’s simply how she’s perceiving things (Greenwood and Gugino don’t appear as blue ghosts or anything, though the editing engages in some thrilling continuity-breaking to illustrate their inherent subjectivity). Meanwhile, the traumatic flashbacks (our only escape from the bedroom) have a vivid, slightly unreal quality which blooms into full surreality during the worst moments of abuse, and follows her back to the present in the personification of “The Moonlight Man,” whose eyes mimic the blood-red eclipse she associates with that abuse. Like most of Flanagan’s films, it’s handsomely constructed in a mostly unshowy way, with clean, crisp photography (maybe a little too clean and crisp; it sometimes has an unpleasant digital sheen that makes one long for the days of genuine film stock) and bedrock-solid staging and editing which expertly lays out the precise geography of the bedroom-prison where every minute detail may offer some new challenge or aid.  

The result of the excellent acting and fine filmmaking is a 103-minute essentially single-location psychological study that just flies by, packing in terror, horror, gross-out, and a bruising human sympathy, and doing it so neatly and pervasively that it frankly left me exhausted, albeit in the most wonderfully satisfying cinematic way. I’m pleased to see, too, that this appears to be the general consensus, which is never a sure thing for a somewhat unusual film like this. The ending seems to be a little more divisive, and that’s understandable; apparently faithful to the book, the film concludes with a surprisingly lengthy epilogue which chronicles the aftermath of these events. This strikes me as characteristic of King again; he can end up loving his characters so much that he can’t part with them until he’s resolved all their concerns, even at the cost of efficient storytelling. Still, this is a rare case where we’ve been so intimate with the protagonist, and she’s suffered so much, that a victory lap feels earned and meaningful, if not strictly necessary. Besides, it’s worth suffering through for the final shot, where a tangent that seemed rather clumsily on-the-nose and unnecessary suddenly takes an odd dreamlike bent, running into the credits with a sort of triumphant mysteriousness that feels very appropriate for this material. Like the movie, it’s a strange, maybe even unique, note… but a satisfying and resonant one.

END OF PART I. Keep scrolling past the checklist for the thrilling second half!

*Quipped one local card, “Cocaine had long been Stephen King’s co-writer, and MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE was its attempt at a solo career.”

** In the novel, the even goofier “Space Cowboy.” Guess the filmmakers figured movie audiences aren’t that familiar with Steve Miller Band? Or possibly they just decided that “Space Cowboy” is a little much, even for Stephen King.

*** Ladies, never say ol’ Mike Flanagan never did nothin’ for ya.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	Some Games You Play. Some You Survive.
TITLE ACCURACY	Accurate.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, from the 1993 novel by Stephen King
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Survival horror? Psychological horror?
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None, but it’s nice they could get Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood for this.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Stephen King, and I’m about ready to anoint Mike Flanagan as well
NUDITY?	No actual nudity, but a lot of underwear.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yup
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Yes
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Oh yeah
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	Don’t marry anyone named “Gerald,” for God’s sake.

******************************

If the ending of GERALD'S GAME feels arguably overfaithful to the book, perhaps to its detriment, it's appropriate for the movie to be somewhat constrained by its source material, because of course that’s exactly the subject of the movie: the way that the past informs and, to a certain degree, controls the present. GERALD’S GAME is, if nothing else, a surprisingly in-depth and nuanced examination of that rather disquieting fact, allowing its protagonist to both face the pernicious –yet obscure—influence of past trauma manifesting in the present, and to question the degree of that influence. I think you could legitimately read Jessie’s ultimate understanding of her life as either a chronicle of inevitability (ie, she wound up handcuffed to this bed as the direct and inevitable result of events set in motion in her childhood) or as a repudiation of this kind of simplistic fatalism (ie, it’s her anxiety and self-doubt, not her rationality, which links two mostly-unrelated events into a false narrative of eternal victimhood), whichever interpretation you were most philosophically inclined towards (for the record, the movie seems to posit something closer to a middle ground).

I’ve always been fascinated by the delicate dance between past and present – you’ll notice my posts, especially about older movies, often devolve into history lessons—but it never really occurred to me until I watched GERALD’S GAME and IT: CHAPTER 2 back-to-back how intrinsically relevant to the horror genre this relationship is. Which in turn made me think OH SHIT MUTHAFUCKA IT’S OCTOBER AND THAT MEANS IT’S GODDAM CHAINSAWNUKAH SEASON AGAIN and as per usual, I like to take the opening shot as an opportunity to ruminate a bit on one specific aspect of the horror genre. Previously, we’ve looked at the psychological necessity of horror, and the role of transformation, voyeurism, repression, childhood, and paranoia. Now, though, we must confront the past.

And that word “confront” seems especially apt here, because the more I think about it, the more I see horror as a perfect means to examine our fraught relationship with the past. At the most basic level, a huge percentage of horror, maybe even the majority, is about literally doing just that: modern humans in the present coming into violent conflict with the angry echos of their forebearers, in the form of ghosts, zombies, vampires, mummies, and more or less any “undead” antagonist you can dream up.

The idea of our ancestors as active, influential parts of daily life appears to be about as ancient as any single element of human culture except perhaps veneration of fertility. Ancestor veneration, with the specific goal of producing positive intervention from the dead on behalf of the living, has roots in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Oceania that go back at least to the stone age (the Ancient Egyptians notably practiced it, and evidence of the practice in China dates back to at least 6000 BCE). Of course, if forebearers can intercede in our lives to our advantage if properly appeased, it stands to reason they could also act more malignly if they so chose. This does not mean, however, that all spirits of the undead are intrinsically or symbolically linked to the past; although traditions of ancestor-worship revolve around the dead, they don’t necessarily revolve around the past per se; if anything, ancestor veneration has more to do with calling on supernatural personalities to help shape the present, virtually indistinguishable from any kind of supernatural prayer belief. Likewise, many ghosts in folklore have motives and desires not necessarily linked to their past lives, and might appear to have more in common with other supernatural figures than with undead human intelligence.*

Nevertheless, at least in modern times, ghost stories tend to be intrinsically linked to history. The Headless Horseman in Washington Irving’s 1820 The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, for example, is portrayed as the ghost of a human tied inexorably to the circumstances of his death, forever seeking his lost head and consequently unable to “pass on.” Charles Dickens’ 1843 A Christmas Carol, as well as his 1865 A Trial For Murder and several other stories, also prominently feature ghosts who are trapped by the circumstances of their life or death, and intervene in human affairs in order to address some injustice related to their lives.** And those are just three examples plucked from the beginning of the late modern period. Today, we almost take for granted that modern ghost stories are, essentially, mysteries; the troublesome spirit had “unfinished business” on Earth that the human protagonist must uncover and resolve before the ghost can “pass on.” THE UNINVITED, THE CHANGELING, THE LADY IN WHITE, GHOST, THE SIXTH SENSE, THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE, THE RING, the recent WINCHESTER, even fucking CASPER THE FRIENDLY GHOST, are just a handful of textbook-perfect examples of this trope that immediately spring to mind.

The language we use here is very telling of how deeply rooted in metaphor this is; after all, what living person doesn’t harbor some psychological trauma: regrets about things done or left undone, the unhealed scars of emotional pain, nostalgic ache for comforts left behind. “Unfinished business” trapped in the amber of the past, just as thoroughly outside our ability to change as it would be for the dead. Just like the dead, we have moved on to another place, beyond the original setting of our pain, and yet we are unable to let go, to “pass on” into the future. We remain trapped in the past, desperate for some way out of the cycle of our pain, guilt, and regret.

Ghost stories are the most symbolically telling horror trope which explores the subtle (or sometimes not-so-subtle) threads of the past which remain tied to the present, but they are hardly the only one. We see more direct psychological portraits too, most obviously in slasher movies, which often explicitly root their antagonists’ behavior in past (often childhood) psychological trauma (often of a sexual nature). Look, for example, to any of the endless number of slasher films which eventually reveal that the killer’s psychosis is the result of watching his mom have sex with a sailor or something (most stereotypically, perhaps, in 1980’s MANIAC). The killer's particular murderous gimmick is often directly related to that original psychic trauma, essentially dooming them to perpetually re-enact the circumstances which have left them so broken, externalizing the way they are trapped by their past. We certainly see the seeds for this kind of "mad killer" sewn during the 1940’s and 50s, as Freudian ideas about the subconscious and emotional repression percolated through the culture; Hitchcock, with SPELLBOUND, MARNIE, and –especially—PSYCHO to his name is an inescapable touchstone here, though I would argue the disturbed protagonist from PEEPING TOM, sitting alone in the dark, endlessly re-watching the literal images of his traumatic childhood on film, makes for the most iconic model. Like the ghost of folklore and fiction, the titular Peeping Tom is no longer physically affected by his past, but he has not “passed on” from it, as the endlessly repeating film loops demonstrate.

And of course, slashers are hardly the only horror genre to find their protagonists doomed to relive past traumas; IT PART 2, THE BABADOOK, THE RITUAL, DREAM HOUSE, THE INVITATION, and about a million other horror movies all deal with protagonists who are equally scarred by the past, and who, even if they do not go on to become masked gimmick slashers, can find themselves trapped in cycles of horror. Their past continues to manifest itself, as in the intermittent visions of a previous traumatic episode that the protagonist of THE RITUAL envisions as he is subjected to an entirely unrelated stress, or in the full-scale fantasy world which the protagonist of DREAM HOUSE retreats to. These characters escaped from their trauma, only to find it somehow in front of them again, to be endlessly re-lived. This is even literalized in the slew of time-loop horror films which were, for some reason, fucking inescapable for the last fifteen years or so, including (SPOILERS for most of these films, since it’s usually a twist ending) DEAD END and MINE GAMES and THE REEDS and THE ABANDONED, TRIANGLE, LET’S BE EVIL, THE HOUSE AT THE END OF TIME, YELLOWBRICKROAD, TIME CRIMES, SALVAGE, DARK COUNTRY, THE DEVIL’S PASS, THE DIABOLICAL, BLOOD PUNCH, BASKIN, HAPPY DEATH DAY and arguably to a certain extent THE SHINING. There’s a queasy fatalism to these movies which rescinds even the faint bit of hope most horror characters –even the undead ones!—have at escaping their endless cycle of torment and “passing on.” In a time loop, you never had a chance, never had a choice; past and future are an unbroken circle that feed inevitably into one another.

Of course, there is also a strand of horror fiction wherein the focus on the past is less personal and more universal, or at least on a vast scale. Consider, for example, the Lovecraftian branch of horror, where danger bubbles up from the unimaginably distant past, and learning ancient truths which are best forgotten is liable to drive one mad (The Whisperer In Darkness, At The Mountains Of Madness, or see the "little people" stories of Arthur Machen which greatly influenced Lovecraft, for example The Shining Pyramid and The Novel Of The Black Seal). Even if we have forgotten the past, it has not forgotten us, and by the time it comes for us, learning the things we have forgotten will not necessarily save us. This too can be personal (NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, where the sins of the parents are personified and visited upon their children), or universal (one might read THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS or the recent US as metaphors for the cost of long-term bigotry, willfully forgotten but still seething under the surface, or look to almost any given Mummy film for a anxious sense of the inevitable penance that must come from centuries of colonial arrogance). Or, most potently and most elusively, see THESHINING, with it’s inscrutable implication that Jack has always been the caretaker of the Overlook hotel, itself a symbol of genocidal colonialist psychosis so blatant that we’re told it was built on an actual Indian Burial ground. There are, it seems, some things we are all guilty of, and however uncomfortable it might make us, however much we might want to forget, it was the past that gave birth to the present, and we will never be entirely free of it.

Still, even if the scars of the past persist, life does --usually-- manage to go on, unless you encounter masked gimmick slashers, mummies, dummies, mutants, vampires, sexy vampires, metaphorical vampires, space vampires, cyborg vampires, mutant vampires, daywalkers, nightwalkers, slow zombies, fast zombies, voodoo zombies, Rob Zombies, critters, ghoulies, CHUDS, Chuckys, Klaus Kinskis, extra-dimensional intelligences, Xtros, Bigfoots, or what have you. And that means that just like poor Jessie way back up there in what was once a review of GERALD’S GAME, all we can do is take stock of the past, own it, and try to work our way out of the mess we’ve made, into a better future. Lord knows, I’ve been trying to do that for a lot of years now. It’s a hard road, and even as we try to escape the past, it can be frightening to never really know what the future holds. But at least one thing is certain: it’s another year, and that means another CHAINSAWNUKAH! Join me, friends, as I plunge once again into the endless depths of B-or-lower-grade horror movies, and let us all welcome

CHAINSAWNUKAH VIII:

2019: FOR RICHER OR HORROR

* Belief in ghosts, though culturally ubiquitous, seems to have historically been more focused on the continued existence of consciousness than “unfinished business” from the past; ancestor veneration typically consists of offerings of material comfort to a spirit currently residing in another form of existence, rather than action specific to the life and actions of the departed. Consequently, the dead appear in, for example, The Odyssey, as residents of an underworld, sometimes visible or perceptible to living humans, but in general merely continuing a sentient existence in another world. They are not, generally, tethered to the living world by any particular element of their past lives, they simply continue on existing in another state, one which brings a new set of concerns that do not necessarily have anything to do with their history as flesh-and-blood beings. Long traditions of ghosts summoned by mediums, or as harbingers of prophetic wisdom, are similarly yoked to the future, rather than the past.

Still, the idea of a ghost with “unfinished business” is not of exclusively recent vintage. A striking early example in Western literature is the ghost of Hamlet’s father, whose purpose in appearing, unbidden, to his son, is more specific and rooted in the past: he wants Hamlet to address the injustice of his murder. Notably, while some scholars consider Hamlet’s father to be drawn from the template of a 12^th-century Jutish chieftain whose unjust death at the hands of his brother is chronicled in two medieval Danish histories, neither story mentions his return as a vengeful ghost, tying that particular element of folklore to a later period. In fact, a fairly lengthy online survey of medieval ghost stories and legends finds no shortage of subjects, but few which utilizes a ghost in the same way Hamlet does. Instead, ghosts are portrayed more in the manner we would associate with supernatural spirits; sentient creatures with their own supernatural motivations and desires relating to their current state of life, rather than their past, mortal existence (the exception, of course, is found in the large number of spirits who require religious absolution they did not receive in life, a slightly different though arguably linked phenomenon more rooted in contemporary religious belief in purgatory than the ghost’s specific sins). M.R. James, the great font of Victorian ghost stories, and himself a scholar of medieval spirit tales (he wrote a 1922 paper entitled 12 Medieval Ghost Stories, which drew from a series of 15^th-century accounts chronicled by an English monk) followed suit; the vast majority of his tales feature “ghosts” of a decidedly inhuman character, who, if they were ever “alive” in the traditional sense to begin with, have little interest in revisiting their Earthly existence.  

Consequently, I think it’s fair to say that while ghost tales have been part of human culture since time immemorial, the idea of the ghost with “unfinished business,” often of a revengeful nature, has become ubiquitous only in modern times.

** The ghost I refer to in A Christmas Carol is, of course, Scrooge’s former partner, Jacob Marley, who returns bearing heavy chains representing the weight of his sins in life. The other “ghosts” in the story, though, also have a curious relationship to time: though not human spirits, they represent and apparently embody time itself, as the past, present, and future. Ghosts as prophets of the future were, I think, a much more common trope in the past than they are now (see, for example, the doom prophesied by the grouchy ghost of Samuel in the Old Testament), but it is in a certain sense a logical extension of the basic metaphor that ghosts –representing our past— have a better vantage point to see the future than us simpletons trapped in the present.