The Guard From Underground

The Guard From Underground (1992)

Dir. and written by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Starring Makiko Kuno, Yutaka Matsushige, Hatsunori Hasegawa

            THE GUARD FROM UNDERGROUND (more literally translated, I gather, as The Guard From Hell) is a minor but crucial entry into the filmography of the other monolithic Japanese auteur named Kurosawa. It's minor because it is, in itself, not so hot. But it's crucial because of its place as a clear turning point in his early career. After his initial journeyman’s years directing comedies and Pinku eiga films —or, why try and class this up with fancy foreign lingo? I mean softcore pornos*--, Kurosawa had just made his first horror film with 1989’s SWEET HOME. He probably didn’t know it yet, but he was taking his first steps down a path that would define his career; while he hasn’t worked exclusively in horror since then, (he’s dallied with crime thrillers, yakuza films, sci-fi, drama and even romance in his lengthy, now-four-decade-long career!) it is the horror genre which made him an international icon, and it is within that genre that he established the distinct aesthetic for which he is most known for today.

But you’d never guess all that from a casual viewing of his first experiment with the genre. Far from his trademark glacial, clinical remove, SWEET HOME is a frenetic, special-effects-driven fun-house ride. If it gives us any glimpses of the Kurosawa who was to come, they are oblique and far outnumbered by material which seems distinctly unlike him. In fact, the movie is widely reported to be at least equally influenced by producer Juzo Itami (THE FUNERAL, TAMPOPO), who may have (or may not have; details in English are pretty sketchy) exercised an outsized control on the production and final cut, perhaps akin to the rumors which have always surrounded Spielberg and POLTERGEIST, minus, presumably, the mountains of cocaine. Of course, SWEET HOME’s atypical broad tone and zippy pace might just as easily be the result of a relative neophyte director still finding his feet and considering what he wants to do with the medium; you never really know these things. But at any rate, it’s beyond argument that the director’s first sojourn into the horror genre is scarcely recognizable as the work of the distinctive artist who would make such a big impression less than a decade later with CURE.

            So it is meaningful, then, that THE GUARD FROM UNDERGROUND, Kurosawa’s next film** after SWEET HOME, very much is the work of that same artist. Even in a somewhat embryonic state, the aesthetic is unmistakable, which makes this something of a historical landmark: the debut of Kurosawa the auteur, rather than Kurosawa the journeyman. Even if it had nothing else going for it at all, that would make it essential viewing for any true scholar of horror cinema. It’s all here, more or less, right from the get-go: the camera pulled back to a dispassionate distance, the quietly alienated performances which barely seem aware of each other, the detached sense of social isolation, the icy, patient long takes, the blunt matter-of-factness of the tiny bursts of violence.

            What is not here, on the other hand, is a more typical enigmatic Kiyoshi Kurosawa plot. His movies, by and large, tend to be motivated by inexplicable supernatural horrors; even when he’s dealing in recognizable sub-genres (serial killer flick with CURE, ghost story with RETRIBUTION) the details are often elusive and unexpected. Consequently, much of the horror stems from the nebulous, ambiguous nature of the danger, which never resolves into something comfortably comprehensible and hence retains its ability to haunt.

            THE GUARD FROM UNDERGROUND takes a very different approach. It's almost shockingly straightforward, and, at least on the surface, that makes it one of Kurosawa's most clearly classifiable genre efforts. In fact, in another director’s hands, this script might well seem so baseline generic as to need some kind of further hook. It is, well and truly, a slasher film, and one which mostly seems to be content to be purely that. And as such, it also seems content to play by standard slasher rules: we are introduced to a “final girl,” who will end up trapped in a foreign environment with some disposable body count characters, only to be menaced by a mysterious, frighteningly effective killer with a yin for colorful flair in his murders and a relevant backstory.

            All this is textbook slasher movie boilerplate, and all of it is very much present here. And not even in some deconstructed, meta-textual way; whatever else the movie may be trying to do, it is obviously genuinely committed to being a meat-and-potatoes slasher. Our final girl will be Akiko (Makiki Kuno, MUSHISHI), a recent hire at a Department 12, apparently a section of Akebono Corp, some sort of large and vaguely defined international business. Her job seems to be to advise the department on the purchase and sale of  paintings, which seems like it’s gotta be a metaphor but I’ll be damned if I can figure out for what. Meanwhile, the same day she starts work, the company gets another new employee: a hulking, silent security guard named Fujimaru (the debut role for now-veteran Japanese character actor Yutaka Matsushige, who has parts in RINGU, RASEN, ONE MISSED CALL, SURIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO, GODZILLA 2000, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s CHARISMA, two out of there Takashi Kitano OUTRAGE movies, and a movie called ADRIFT IN TOKYO, definitely not to be confused with TOKYO DRIFT). Fujimaru, with his silent, spacey near-catatonia, seems a little “off,” but we wouldn’t have cause for concern except that we heard on the radio that a disgraced ex-sumo wrestler is on the loose, despite having murdered two people already. That seems like it might be, --gulp!—relevant information.

            Fujimaru, of course, takes a shine to Akiko when he finds one of her lost earrings, but Akiko doesn’t realize she has a secret admirer until she discovers a makeshift shrine with her face on it in the, um, weird creepy basement (?) of this huge multinational corporation (she actually goes back to work that very day! Damn, these Department 12 employees need a union). But this is not just a sign of an unusually friendly office culture. Before long, Fujimaru has locked her and a handful of co-workers inside the building (which seems to be an uninsurable firetrap, where every door locks from the outside and the lighting is a sickly green that makes the Matrix look cozy) and is methodically embarking on a murderous rampage. So it’s pretty much DIE HARD if Bruce Willis was a crazed ex-sumo-wrestler-slasher.

            That probably sounds like more fun than it actually is, unfortunately. Despite plenty of precedent, I’m afraid this Fujimaru character’s sumo background doesn’t much inform his side hustle as a murderous security guard. For starters, he doesn’t exactly fit the physical body type you’re probably imagining when I use the phrase “ex-sumo-wrestler-slasher.” He’s definitely physically imposing – at 6’ 2’’, Matsushige absolutely towers over the rest of the cast—but lanky rather than bulky, even with his blocky security guard uniform accentuating his shoulders and torso and giving him a distinctly regimented look, somewhere between a military officer and a bellhop. And I’m absolutely devastated to have to inform you that he doesn’t seem to devote his wrestling skills to the task of murdering a bunch of nerdy office workers; he’s not, like, superplexing people to death, or whatever the sumo equivalent of that would be. And he never struts down a walkway to the ring flanked by a posse of belligerent hangers-on while shitty rock music plays, which popular culture has led me to believe is the single most important aspect of wrestling other than barely-suppressed homoeroticism and hating Vince McMahon.

           Fortunately it’s not a total loss; while he never wears one of those asscrack-hugging sumo-wrestling thongs,* his great strength affords him a wide range of options in the field of murder, and he nearly always settles on the most brutal one available. Like I said, this is a Kurosawa who seems perfectly comfortable --if never exactly desperate— to provide some cheap thrills.

This makes it an interesting experiment for Kurosawa, who accommodatingly plays by standard slasher rules, and yet doesn’t ever quite do what you’d expect, either. He knows how to stage a satisfying setpiece death scene, as when Fujmaru elects to bash a victim into every single dangerously fragile steam vent in a narrow hallway, or when somebody gets tossed into a locker which Fujumaru then crushes like an empty soda can. But he’s just as likely to indulge in his characteristically simple, matter-of-fact framing of shocking events, which make the sudden bursts of brutal violence seem shocking and unexpected.

It’s an interesting effect, and it works like gangbusters in some of his subsequent films, most notably CURE. But I’m mixed as to how well it works in this context; slashers tend to work best in a purely visceral flight-or-fight mode, and Kurosawa’s general refusal to play the game of amping this shit up may not be the best approach to the material. His unblinking straightforwardness in the face of bizarre horror is aces at pumping up dread, but maybe not the best approach at generating excitement in something so literal. Not that it’s boring, exactly; it’s positively zippy by his usual standards. But while a static, medium shot of the killer smashing someone to pieces with no music or editing packs a sickening sort of punch, it doesn’t exactly pump up your adrenaline.

Still, it does make for an interesting approach to the killer; there’s no doubt even from the start who he is --there's no whodunit angle here-- but Kurosawa’s purposefully restrained approach extends to the way he frames him. Slashers, of course, are really about the slasher. Sure, there are characters who will become his victims, but come on, we know Freddy is the star of the show, not Heather Langenkamp. And the camera tells us as much; even when the typical slasher is kept visually obscured, he still dominates the film, relentlessly taunting us to search the shadows for a glimpse of him. And when he finally appears, we can be certain to get a thundering money shot of an introduction, the camera lovingly framing the villain as the subject of our awed terror, and consequently the dominating force of a horror film.

Kurosawa does something distinctly different. He doesn’t exactly avoid showing Fujimaru, he just steadfastly avoids making him the center of attention. He’s usually going to be found in the middle distance of a shot, perfectly visible, not in any way concealed, but with no apparent awareness on the camera’s part that he’s important. Despite his hulking stature and fierce savagery, he tends to blend into the background, a passive object rather than a functional protagonist. Like Jason, he is an inscrutable force of nature, but a more opaque, less comprehensible one. He doesn’t seem angry, especially, doesn’t seem disturbed, doesn’t seem like he’s sadistically enjoying this or perversely disgusted by it. He simply does it. He remains calm and methodical, even as he’s bludgeoning someone to paste. Even his psychotic fixation on Akiko takes a decidedly remote cast, avoiding anything resembling carnality. He’s more black hole than raging inferno, impassively absorbing rather than lashing out. When he must appear as an object of the camera’s interest, he’s nearly always obscured in shadow (sometimes in striking silhouette) allowing his giant frame to define the character, rather than his boyish, unremarkable face. Kurosawa is very interested in his body, in the deliberate, savage violence of his movements – but not in the logic that motivates them. As such, he remains an enigma, a nonentity, defined for much of the movie, in fact, by his boss, a jovial older fellow who turns out to be surprisingly comfortable with the idea of having a loyal underling he can direct to murder people he finds inconvenient. In fact, the first murders that Fujimaru commits (beyond the lovers’ quarrel slayings which happened before the events of the movie) are done at the behest of his boss, further calling into question his basic autonomy.

There are, in fact, little hints here that this is all about something more than a crazed loner with nothing to lose who turns to violence. Much of the movie, maybe even the entire first half, in fact, is more about a different kind of horror altogether, the alienated, powerless dread of office life. Like many of Kurosawa’s movies, the horror seems to bubble up in some indirect, sublimated way from the rigid, alienating structure of Japanese society, here summed up within the microcosm of an office building (virtually the entire film takes place there), a blandly grim concrete-and-glass tombstone which literalizes both the isolating effects of the workplace inside (“Department 12,” apparently a new venture, seems to be connected to the rest of the company by a shared elevator and nothing else) and its stratification, with eccentric, arrogant HR head Mr. Hyodo (Hatsunori Hasegawa, GAMERA 2: ADVENT OF LEGION, Ultraman 80) sitting atop the heap and coldly judging his underlings to be pathetically wanting, while he apparently fools around doing nothing in his spacious, upper-tier office. And even within this crushingly dehumanizing environment, Akiko is an outsider, uncertain of her place within the culture and openly objectified by both her sleazy, sexually aggressive boss Mr. Kurume (Ren Osugi, CURE, AUDITION, HANA-BI) and another co-worker. In fact, Mr. Kurume’s lecherous advances hardly seem less appropriate than Fujimaru’s inexplicable fixation on her. Fujimaru, at least, has reason to see her as a kindred spirit: neither one of them fits in here.

Now, all that is rather more interesting to talk about than to actually watch, understand; like I said before, the film primarily aspires to be a simple slasher, and while loading it up with a bunch of hazy, gloomy metaphors adds a little psychological kick, it is, if anything, somewhat detrimental to any hope the movie ever had of evoking the visceral, fight-or-flight adrenaline rush which is the only thing that really matters about a good slasher. Which leaves us with a movie which is interesting, but arguably not a very good slasher. Not that it’s a terrible slasher, either; the overall quality of the slasher genre writ large is so dire that even moderately competent attempts probably work out to be in the top percentiles, and this is far more than moderately competent. But that said, is isn’t exactly gripping stuff, either. It is merely interesting, and more as an artifact from the career of a notable artist than as an independent object. ‘Which do you think has more value?” Akiko, the former museum curator, is asked, “Is it a masterpiece by a lesser artist, or a lesser work by a master?” Akiko thinks the former, because “the value of a painter can change in the future, but the fact that it’s the masterpiece of the painter never changes.” By that logic, THE GUARD FROM UNDERGROUND is clearly a lesser work by a master, and probably of little real value to most casual fans. But of course, she doesn’t point out there’s another factor involved in value: the interests of the buyer. As a huge fan of a particular master named Kiyoshi Kurosawa, I find quite a lot of value even in a lesser work like this, though I’ll acknowledge that much of that value is more academic than aesthetic.

*On 1983’s KANDAGAWA PERVERT WARS: “Also I don't want to spoil the whole storyline, but in the end we'll see a sexual intercourses between Aki's friend Masami and Aki's boyfriend Ryo and Aki will seduce that boy which had sex with his mother. How this will all happen? You'll know after you'll watch this movie, but one thing which you can say now - there is a plenty of erotic scenes in this film.” – IMDB reviewer Zenka_LT, 2009.

**IMDB lists an interim film called ABUNAI HANASHI MUGEN MONOGATARI which they claim is from 1989, but it seems pretty likely to me that this is actually 1988’s DANGEROUS STORIES, apparently an omnibus film featuring a segment by Kurosawa, as well as Banmei Takahashi (TATTOO HARI) and Kazuyuki Izutsu (BREAKTHROUGH! [2004]). Neither one appears to be available in America, and neither one has one single review on IMDB (“DANGEROUS STORIES” doesn’t even have a listed cast) so I think we can currently feel safe skipping that one until we can say with any confidence what the fuck it actually is, or if was ever even released, or what.

*** Research indicates that this garment is known as a Mawashi, and I was originally going to just write that, but I already went the pretentious route by calling Japanese softcore flicks by their Japanese name and I don’t want to give the impression that I’m some kind of basement-dwelling anime creep who could casually drop the term waifu at any given moment and feel confident they understand what it means. It ain’t like that, I swear!  

Hereditary

Hereditary (2018)

Dir. and written by Ari Aster

Starring Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, Gabriel Byrne

Part I: The Inheritance of Hereditary

            My friend Mr. Majestyk has a problem. And it’s a problem which does not, at first, sound very much like a problem at all. It it, essentially, this: the genre that he loves dearly is experiencing something of a cultural renaissance at the moment. After years of lurking in the exploitation ghetto, and still more years churning out imaginative and interesting films which were largely ignored and underrated by most of our alleged cultural gatekeepers, Horror films are suddenly chic again. They’re getting rave reviews from Variety, drawing hot new talent, starring serious A-list actors. A fucking horror film was nominated for Best Picture at last year’s Academy Awards! That would have been absolutely unthinkable just five years ago.* For most of the history of the medium (and indeed, going back to the very origins of horror fiction in the 19th century), everyone, including fans, generally agreed that the genre was an artistic ghetto; schlocky matinee stuff for the kids, an entertainment product to be produced in high volume at low cost by hucksters and hustlers, not craftsmen. Virtually no serious artist would touch the genre (and if a few did, well, those were just the exceptions that proved the rule), and an A-list actor appearing in a horror film was a blatant cry for help that they were deep in a career tailspin.

 And then somehow, everything changed, the world turned upside down, and in a few short years the genre went from artistic pariah to a hip launching ground for the au courant aspiring artiste. And suddenly, something like HEREDITARY was playing in mainstream theaters.

            It’s difficult to put an exact date on when this shift started. It had been gradually building for some time, and I’d be willing to argue that it had its origins in the DTV boom of the early 2000’s, when --long before Netflix was even a twinkle in Satan’s eye-- the need for constant new content on Blockbuster Video shelves prompted a tidal wave of hustling bottom-feeders to churn out low-budget genre content with just enough of an apparent hook to snag a few ignorant suckers into a rental under the false impression they were getting a real movie. Or not; whether or not anyone actually watched this shit was seemingly irrelevant to the business model. Blockbuster wanted content, and these films were mostly in the business of providing content to Blockbuster, with the hypothetical viewer a distant afterthought. Consequently, these films were almost uniformly horrible; lots of low-budget cash-in sequels to theatrical movies (FROM DUSK TIL DAWN 2 and 3, endless sequels to HELLRAISER and WRONG TURN and TREMORS and AMITYVILLE HORROR and so on) or zero-effort time-wasters (EVIL EYES [2004] with Adam Baldwin or FURNACE [2007] with Michael Pare, Tom Sizemore, and Danny Trejo) or that weird run of serial killer biopics they were doing for awhile back then (GACY, HELTER SKELTER, ED GEIN). Occasionally something decent like John Fawcett’s GINGER SNAPS or THE DARK would sneak in there, but if so, it was mostly by accident, a thousand-monkeys-with-a-thousand-typewriters sort of statistical anomaly, and certainly not an integral part of the business model. These films would sometime debut in a regional festival or two, but the business model was selling bulk units to video-rental chains, not selling tickets to consumers (the same way that approximately 70 billion new horror films so dismal that even I would never watch them appear every year on Netflix, entirely to shore up their overall numbers and make them look like they have an extensive catalogue when in fact they have about 20 movies you want to see and then another 800,000 that are movies in the strictest possible technical sense, but no human being would ever voluntarily watch.**)

            But somewhere in the mid-2000s, something interesting happened. As the conveyor belt of DTV genre crap became more efficient and demonstrated it was consistently profitable, producers throttled back on budgets, but made up for it in volume, and suddenly it became feasible for a lot of neophytes to get a crack at directing their own movie. This was before PARANORMAL ACTIVITY cleared the way for films which had no narrative or cinematic content of any kind whatsoever, and so, with almost no budget for gore and tits and rubber monsters, the aspiring filmmakers gradually started remembering the lessons of the old Val Lewton days: if you don’t have the budget to show us the goods, you’re gonna have to cinema the hell out of it instead. And thus, out of necessity, the germ of artistic ambition was born.

            This idea didn’t take hold immediately, of course. Cinema is hard, and churning out cheap crap was easy. But one man rose to the challenge, a man I think is probably more responsible for the state of modern horror than any other single person: Producer (STAKE LAND), director (BENEATH), actor (WE ARE STILL HERE) and noted cervidaeophobiac Larry Fessenden. Ol’ Fessywig didn’t have anything to do with HEREDITARY, and wasn’t involved with most --if any!-- of the movies which are typically associated with this modern movement, but I think he laid the groundwork for it. If you asked me to pick a single starting point for how we ended up with HEREDITY, I would point you to his 2001 film WENDIGO. It was not his first film (in fact, according to IMDB, he’d been directing short films since 1978, though his first widely-distributed feature was certainly HABIT in 1997) but it was a horror film that was made for nothing and barely released, but clearly aspired to a level of artistry which was unusual for its time.*** It’s patient and atmospheric, character-driven, deliberately ambiguous; it insinuates, never insists. And consequently, it will either entrance and unnerve you, or bore you into a depressive fugue state, which makes it, I think, the most direct primordial ancestor of modern films like THE VVITCH, IT FOLLOWS, and, yes, HEREDITARY. WENDIGO was not overwhelmingly successful or influential, but Fessenden, I’d argue, was: his production company, Glass Eye Pix, spent the ‘naughts slowly cultivating young talent (Ti West, Kelly Reichardt, Glenn McQuaid, Jim Mickle, Mickey Keating) who gradually evolved into a distinct cohort of ambitious and, eventually, semi-respectable auteurs.

It didn’t happen immediately, by any means; the “reception” section of Glass Eye Pix’s 2004 THE OFF SEASON dryly notes that, “Since the film's release it has been regarded as one of the worst movies ever, only garnishing 1.6 stars based on 395 votes on Internet Movie Database and receiving numerous complaints on the site's message board,” (to prove that claim, it offers four separate citations). But they got better, and as they got better, they started gradually receiving some minor critical notice, which in turn led to higher profiles, which led to slightly higher budgets, which led to some minor financial successes, which led to more producers getting interested in investing in small, ambitious horror films which had artistic aspirations beyond the Herschell Gordon Lewises, Don Dohlers, Charles Bands, and Fred Olen Rays of the previous generation of indie horror moguls.

            The process was slow, but it was steady. Ti West’s 2009 THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL may have been something of a tipping point; its deliberately restrained slow-burn style and its enthusiastically positive reception (for a horror film in 2009) seems to me to be the official inauguration of a new era in horror cinema, wherein the genre started to draw not just ambitious young horror buffs, but aspiring auteurs who, perhaps for the first time in the 100+ year history of film, saw the genre as a legitimate starting ground for a serious film career. 2011 and 2012 saw early films from Mike Flanagan (ABSENTIA) Benson and Moorehead (RESOLUTION) Nicholas McCarthy (THE PACT), Ben Wheatley (KILL LIST) and Peter Strickland (BERBIAN SOUND STUDIO), plus West’s THE INNKEEPERS, and Almodóvar’s THE SKIN I LIVE IN (as wells as something quite different but tangentially important, for reasons we shall see directly: the rapturously received horror meta-comedy CABIN IN THE WOODS.) Now, it’s important to note that these reserved, atmosphere-driven horror films were never overwhelmingly profuse; they were, and remain, a tiny minority of the released horror films every year (2012 also saw the release of THE COLLECTION, V/H/S and ABRAHAM LINCOLN, VAMPIRE HUNTER). But it was becoming increasingly clear that a hitherto artistic eccentricity was solidifying into a trend.

That trend became a genuine phenomenon, I would argue, in 2014, with the release of Jennifer Kent's THE BABADOOK, the point at which the critics finally noticed this isn’t just a great horror film, this is a great film, period. In fact, I said something very similar myself in my original review (and I happily stand by that to this day -- THE BABADOOK fuckin’ rocks). Despite being shot by a first time feature director on such a modest budget that it required a kickstarter to finish the sets, the movie bloomed into a genuine phenomenon (William Friedkin compared it favorably to PSYCHO, ALIEN, and DIABOLIQUE), a critical darling, and eventually, as all the truly great ones eventually do, a gay icon. This, it seemed, really opened the door for critics to start unabashedly heaping praise on a series of small-scale, atmosphere-heavy indie horror film from the subsequent years; IT FOLLOWS, THE CANAL and A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT in 2014, THE INVITATION, THEY LOOK LIKE PEOPLE, and THE VVITCH in 2015, EYES OF MY MOTHER, RAW, and I AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE in 2016 (and THE MONSTER, although I don’t know that anyone saw it), GET OUT and IT COMES AT NIGHT in 2017, and A QUIET PLACE, SUSPIRIA, and --our subject tonight-- HEREDITARY for 2018. Reading the plot descriptions, you wouldn’t get the sense that these movies have much in common. But they share with each other common stylistic choices, most notably a patient, sober ambiance with a strong emphasis on psychological drama. Which is to say, they have a shared investment in things that critics like: deliberate filmmaking, subtle acting, discreet thematic exploration.

What they do not always have in abundance is a lot of actual horror. In fact, The Guardian actually took the somewhat infuriating step of dubbing them Post-horror films. They’re long on patient, icy atmosphere, but real short on big genre payoffs. Which is where the problems begin for poor ol’ Mr. Majestyk. Partially, this is because he requires his horror films to be visceral on a level which I suspect puts him distinctly on the far end of the bell curve, and so some of these movies were just never for him in the first place. But the other problem is that he can’t help but notice that when the critics like a horror movie, it often seems like the thing they like about it most is that it’s mostly not a horror movie. These classy modern horror joints tend to garner reviews which praise everything about them except the actual horror part: ‘well, eventually it reaches the inevitable climax and slides into predictable genre fare,’ they’ll say, ‘but until it gets to the actual horror part, there’s lots of good acting and handsome photography!’ Which certainly sounds a lot like ‘I liked the fact that it’s mostly a solid drama about a sad person, and I forgive it for pandering to the audience by having a few crumbs of sordid actual genre content in the back end.’ No wonder the phrase "Post-horror" suggested itself.

Even when one of these movies does get praise for its actual genre content --and often using reckless, breathless superlatives (“Not since Marion Crane took the last shower of her short life has a horror movie so cruelly, effectively shattered an audience’s false sense of security,” gushes The AV Club’s A.A. Dowd about HEREDITARY)-- sometimes it feels like the impact may have been somewhat heightened by unfamiliarity. When CABIN IN THE WOODS was getting raves from the likes of The Washington Posts’ Ann Hornaday (“A pulpy, deceivingly insightful send-up of horror movies that elicits just as many knowing chuckles as horrified gasps”) and Christopher Orr of The Atlantic (“inventive cabin-in-the-woods picture since The Evil Dead and the canniest genre deconstruction since Scream”) one would be forgiven for getting the impression that it was the first film to ever have a little fun tweaking horror cliches, as if that old refuge of the scoundrel wasn’t basically as old as the cliches themselves (hell, JASON X offers satire about equally incisive and a lot less labored). (CABIN IN THE WOODS is great, of course, but come on). Similarly, when heaping praise on HEREDITARY and its ilk, the critics --and sometimes even the filmmakers!-- inevitably cite ROSEMARY’S BABY, THE SHINING, maybe DON’T LOOK NOW as comparison points. And those are great horror movies, but one sometimes gets the feeling they’re also the only horror movies these guys have ever seen. You know, the ones film students watch. It’s easy to say something is one of the most terrifying horror films of all time!!!! If you’ve only seen a half-dozen.

This lends a certain suspicion of smug hipster tourism to the loose movement, maybe not attached to any specific film, but certainly in the air. Are these Horror movies made by people who maybe don’t have a lot of affection or exposure to the genre, who just assume any hack can make a horror film, and consequently anyone who’s seen a couple Fellini movies should easily be able to beat them at their own game? Is this like some Brooklyn hipster who owns 36 Chambers and The Low End Theory and figure that pretty much qualifies them to be a rapper?

Oh, you make horror movies? That's cool I guess. I like to unmake horror movies. It isn't as played out.

 It’s easy to let yourself think so, but I dunno, I don’t think that’s exactly true. I mean, looking at the actual suspects on my list, they all seem pretty earnest to me. These directors may not have seen every single GHOULIES sequel, but it feels like they take their adopted genre seriously, treating the tropes with respect and legitimately making an effort to be at least as scary as arty. In fact, with the exception of the dull yuppie pity party THE INVITATION, I liked every one of those movies I mentioned above.

But while I’m willing to give their intentions the benefit of the doubt, I’m less able to overlook that being well-intentioned is no substitute for being well-versed. While these movies tend to be well-crafted (sensitively acted, handsomely photographed, effectively edited), they often seem to rely on some pretty threadbare horror staples, without any apparent awareness of just how played-out these tricks can be. The pioneers of the horror revolution (Fessenden, Ti West, Lucky McKee, Benson & Moorhead, even directors like Adam Wingard, David Buckner, John Fawcett) had ambitions to explore new frontiers in horror, try new things. They made films like JUG FACE, THE SACRAMENT, POP SKULL, THE WOMAN, things that maybe didn’t necessarily work all the time, but clearly aspired to forge some new territory, experiment with new techniques, construct new icons. The more recent crop, by contrast, seem to have a slightly different goal; they have ambitions to make well-crafted cinema, but not necessarily to invent anything new. Their films feel ambitious because they’re slow and careful and atmospheric and attentive to character drama, but how ambitious can a horror film really be if it is content to recycle the same basic horror shticks that have been around since time began, just slowed down? At their worst, as Mr. Majestyk puts it, “They just feel like a collection of atmospheric tricks that make them feel deeper than they really are, but without any real meat on their bones. They’re too tasteful to shock, too serious to entertain, too obviously symbolic to get under the skin. They feel like horror made for and by dilettantes. I’ve seen everything they attempt done with half the pretension and twice the crowd-pleasing”

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

Part II: The Actual Review Of Hereditary

I preface my simple review of HEREDITARY with all this backstory, not because the movie itself deserves to be made a poster boy for a minor trend in horror movies which has been brewing for nearly 20 years, but simply because I cannot otherwise express the overwhelming ambivalence I feel towards a film which is, in many way, very very good indeed. A film, in fact, which occasionally even touches greatness, and yet somehow never adds up to more than OK.

There are a lot of ways in which it excels, most notably in its cast, who are uniformly excellent, with Toni Collette in particular laying it all on the table in a performance which fearlessly flirts with out-and-out mega-acting (in a good way). And it’s crucial that the cast is so good, because for a long time, the movie is mostly a prickly, despairing family drama about the Graham family, and the mostly-unstated threads of alienation, guilt, and resentment which are making their lives miserable and hollow. Annie (Collette, xXx: THE RETURN OF XANDER CAGE) has just experienced the death of her mother, by all accounts a difficult, mentally unstable woman with whom she had long periods of estrangement. Annie seems more than a bit brittle and unstable herself, but appears able enough to at least keep up the rough appearance of normalcy for her calmly checked-out husband (Gabriel Byrne, GOTHIC, whose appearance in the movie is by itself reason to regard it with utmost skepticism****), her teenage slacker son (Alex Wolff, MY FRIEND DAHMER), and her weirdo 13-year-old daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro, in her film debut). The family gives every outward aspect of being able to indefinitely maintain this hollow veneer of emotional functionality, until they suffer a second sudden tragedy, which gives each family member a decisive shove towards their distinct individual dysfunctions, and before long the seams start to show. And that’s when it starts to become clear that for some reason witches are fucking with them using magic.

I had been told that director Ari Aster was a drama director making his first entry into horror with this film, but looking back at his history of short films, that isn’t exactly true; while maybe not horror, exactly, his button-pushing 2011 incest drama THE STRANGE THING ABOUT THE JOHNSONS should be ample evidence all by itself that his interest always lay in making audiences anxious and uncomfortable. That inclination is in strong effect in HEREDITARY, which mines most of its tension from the silently fracturing family, and particularly the escalating inability of mom to hold together and pretend to be OK. Colette brazenly goes all-in on the portrait of a woman simultaneously repressing her raging inner turmoil and spiraling out of control into a panicked, self-hating frenzy. A handful of times, she goes full Nic Cage with a fury that we’re subsequently never unaware is roiling away just below the surface, waiting for another opportunity to explode. It is, frankly, a performance which flirts with over-the-top camp (and may well cross that line if you’re not on the movie’s wavelength) but, for my money, maintains just enough control to lend the relentlessly solemn direction a jolt of jagged, unpredictable energy. Even before anything the least bit unnatural has occurred, the movie draws its ample source of lacerating emotional anxiety from the psychological demolition derby into which Colette is throwing herself and everyone around her.

Still, there’s a subtle difference between lacerating emotional anxiety and actual horror. For much of the movie, it’s content to simply evoke ROSEMARY’S BABY by enveloping its characters in a vaguely uneasy paranoid swirl which plays on their vulnerabilities and slowly breaks them down. But surprisingly, the movie pivots hard towards straight-up horror for its climax, maybe even its entire final act, dropping all pretense that this is some sort of subjective mental breakdown and diving whole hog into a generous sampling of standard witch movie tricks of the trade. And on one hand, I can’t help but feel magnanimus towards a deadly serious family drama with an A-list cast that’s willing, even eager, to straight up turn into Rob Zombie’s LORDS OF SALEM at the last minute.

 Alas, on the other hand, herein lies the problem: it certainly commits to being a horror movie, and makes a real effort towards being a shocking and scary one. But it contains not a single image you couldn’t find in LORDS OF SALEM, and it offers a lot less of them. And so Mr. Majestyk’s prophetic words come back to haunt us: “I’ve seen everything they attempt done with half the pretension and twice the crowd-pleasing.” There’s no way around it, the fundamental impact of seeing a bunch of naked old pagans and a skittering, impossibly-moving possessed person is no deeper or more profound in HEREDITARY than it is in widely-acknowledged trash like LORDS OF SALEM or THE POSSESSION OF HANNAH GRACE or whatever. And while it may be more artfully executed, I don’t really know that it’s better executed; fundamentally, it’s the exact same bag of tricks, working exactly the same way. There’s just less of it, perhaps as a concession to good taste, perhaps simply through lack of imagination or lack of exposure to LORDS OF SALEM. It’s pretty, but it’s still the same old witch movie shit.

I enjoy that sort of thing, of course, and I enjoyed it here; Aster and his frequent cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski (Camera intern, WATER FOR ELEPHANTS) make excellent use of long, achingly quiet camera movements to effectively undersell the usual eldritch grotesqueries, Colin Stetson’s (Saxophone and lyricon on the ARRIVAL score) music handily conjures pit-of-the-stomach dread,  and Grace Yun’s (FIRST REFORMED) oppressive production design lends a suffocating, nightmarish air without abandoning realism in any specific way you could put your fingers on. But there’s no way around it: these are the exact same ingredients, working towards the exact same goals, as LORDS OF SALEM. And if you had to pick between the two, wouldn’t you prefer the version where Bigfoot worships a giant neon cross, and there’s an evil baboon statue, and what looks like an ambulatory oven-basted turkey waddling around, to the one with just the basics? For me, the answer is obvious. HEREDITARY’s horror game feels like one of those restaurants in Northwest DC which exist exclusively so political insiders can buy crazy expensive dinners for wealthy visiting Midwesterners while at the same time being careful not to expose them to anything that will be unfamiliar and scary. It’s a $35 meatloaf entree; certainly tasty enough, and prepared with an uncommon artistry, but still basically just a fancy version of the same damn thing. And in much smaller portions. Hats off for the gnarly decapitation, though.

The obvious retort is that sure, we all love Bigfoot cameos and shit, but the whole point of spending most of HEREDITARY in a state of fraught emotional tension is that it invests in its characters and their inner lives significantly more than most horror movies, and consequently the impact of the horror is heightened without needing to throw the kitchen sink at the audience. We’re here to focus on psychology and philosophy, and subtly threading these themes into the story will deepen the experience, frighten us on a more profound, richer level. This certainly can be done; indeed, every aspiring young horror filmmaker who cites THE EXORCIST or THE SHINING, with their endlessly unsolvable mysteries of human frailty, is angling to do just that. But alas, it is here that the bottom drops out of HEREDITARY, and it manages to lurch from some very solid drama to some very solid horror and still end up with less than the sum of its parts. The drama is good. The horror is good. But there’s surprisingly little thematically which links them; they feel distinct and parallel, yoked together through superficial narrative contrivance rather than deep-rooted textual necessity. Unlike THE BABADOOK, which finds its crushing psychological frenzy intrinsically linked to its creeping horror, HEREDITARY feels compartmentalized, disconnected. It’s a tense familial drama with a horror movie stuck on the end, rather than a sleek vehicle of unease which manifests its central anxiety in ever-more-overt ways.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Collette’s character; [Minor SPOILERS follow] she dominates the movie, and while it expends a not-insubstantial amount of screentime on Alex Wolff’s character, I think anything less than calling her the clear protagonist would be disingenuous. It is primarily her emotional struggle that motivates the conflict of the movie, she is unambiguously the center around which the rest of the film revolves, and even if those two things were not so --and they very much are-- Collette’s performance is just so spectacularly dialed up louder than everyone else that any possibility of this being read as some sort of ensemble drama is flatly erased. The film is fundamentally, inexorably, about her. And yet, at exactly the point the film lurches from vague dread to clear-cut horror, she functionally vanishes from the movie, and all her thorny personal idiosyncrasies --which the movie is absolutely fixated on for most of its runtime-- entirely vanish with her, unresolved. Her ambivalent feelings about motherhood, her increasing agitation over a looming deadline at her work, her desperate, helpless desire to believe that there is some hidden reprieve from the debilitating pain of her loss... --in other words, the bulk of the film’s runtime-- none of it has any meaningful impact on the climax whatsoever. To the extent that any of it turns out to be relevant at all, it is in the most purely expository, incidental narrative way, and consequently nearly ever bit of the substantial impact it manages to exert in the body of the film evaporates into nothing right as the film is trying to gear up for its finale.

  This imparts a curiously arbitrary quality on the movie itself, a sense that this sure does end up being a lot of extraneous backstory to characters who, when you get right down to it, are basically just random victims of a sinister conspiracy, and only barely grasp what’s happening to them, let alone have any hope of fighting it. It doesn’t really matter if Annie is worried about her career or if her son feels guilty about their relationship; the same thing would have happened to them if they were relentlessly cheerful and open about their feelings. Their problem turns out not to be alienation and psychological trauma so much as it is... witches.

Frustratingly, the movie is clearly aware of this, and I say “clearly” in the sense that it all but patiently explains it out loud. It has one of those inevitable classroom scenes where the topic they’re discussing just happens to be incredibly germaine to the movie’s theme, and in this case, that takes the form of a conversation on the concept of “fate” in Greek tragedies, and the question of whether having no control over your ultimate doom is more or less tragic than a downfall which is solely the responsibility of its victim. And just in case you didn’t pick up on that oh-so-subtle hint, let me point out that Annie is a renowned artist known for depicting her own biography in tiny, excessively detailed miniature dioramas, simultaneously suggesting her own fevered desire to control her life, and the intrusion of imperceptible godlike forces that actually do control her fate.

Which all adds up to the film’s preemptive defense against the charge that there can be no stakes without active protagonists. “Sure, these characters are completely passive victims who at no point have any ability to save themselves,” it argues, “but isn’t that really more scary? After all, fear is fundamentally about a loss of control, right?” This theory motivates the whole affair; HEREDITARY is overtly, inescapably invested in the idea that true horror is about the total loss of control, and especially about stripping that control from people who are vitally fixated on trying to maintain it. I mean, it’s in the movie’s title; this is a movie about the inevitability of doom, and the utter hopelessness of any attempt to subvert fate. Aster is, essentially, betting the entire movie on inexorable fate being the supreme primal fear.

But unfortunately, I’d have to disagree with him on that one; having no control over your fate is arguably more tragic, but it’s certainly not more frightening. Where’s the suspense in a fixed fight?***** If this was all inevitable no matter what the characters did, what was the point in spending so much time telling us what they did? It’s no more terrifying than watching a character gradually die of an incurable disease. It might make for interesting drama, but it doesn’t add up to a very good theoretical foundation for horror.

Alas, then, that the movie ends up abandoning that drama just when it counts the most.  Because even if gloomy fatalism was the same as gut-wrenching horror (and it most emphatically is not) it doesn’t matter, because whatever you think of the horror, the film is unquestionably better as a drama, and that gets thrown overboard along with everything else by the film’s finale. And that’s a real shame, because Colette’s portrait of the repressed, guilty, ambivalent mother is too good to just throw away as an aside. And it’s especially too good to just wheel out as a tiresome feint that maybe this is all in her head (fortunately, the movie never really tries to push this wearying notion, it just drops that bit of exposition and lets you do with it as you will.) There is certainly no shortage in the world of films about wealthy middle-aged white people who are experiencing anxiety and alienation, but then again, there’s also no shortage of films about malicious witches, and HEREDITARY is better as the former than the latter, and too hopeless fragmented for the two to harmoniously co-exist. And unfortunately, bailing on the drama at the last minute leaves the climax of the film hopelessly undernourished, while the impressive head of steam Colette has been diligently working up evaporates silently and ignominiously before our eyes.

I’ll leave you with one little synecdochial detail that I feel neatly embodies the underlying problem here. As I alluded to earlier, part of Annie’s deepening panic is due to her career: she has an upcoming art show, and she’s behind on her work, so she keeps getting worried calls from the gallery managers wondering if she’ll be finished on time. No problem there, of course; there’s a rich tradition of horror movie protagonists who are boxed in by their work and simply don’t have the time to be haunted, adding another source of strain (See, for example, LOVELY MOLLY, DRAG ME TO HELL, THE BABADOOK). But HEREDITARY completely undermines this easy mechanic in a mess of confusing details. For one thing, Annie is already super rich, her husband is super rich, and even if missing a deadline here gets her fired from art forever (?) she’s obviously going to be just fine. Secondly, despite the stress of being haunted, if anything, Annie is just spending more time working than she normally would. If she’s pressed for time, it certainly has nothing to do with what’s been happening to her, and it’s hard to see what she could possibly be doing differently. And finally, despite their check-ins, the people running the show are, like, super sympathetic and accommodating, they keep offering her more time and reminding her that she needs to take care of herself, and that whatever happens they’ll make it work. It’s literally the lowest-stress scenario imaginable. If she thinks being rich and working from home at your own pace on a passion project on a flexible timeline is so overwhelming, man, she oughtta try a night shift at McDonalds sometime.

This is obviously not some kind of boneheaded oversight by Aster, of course; the point here is that the pressure she feels is a product of her own mind, not a product of her circumstances. Which is perfectly fine as far as it goes, I suppose, but now we’ve spent a significant subplot making a scenario less relatable, less anxiety-producing, and less relevant to the main plot, all in the service of telling us something already evident from Colette’s performance, which doesn’t end up being germaine to the film’s conclusion anyway. Like so much about the movie, it is, by itself, a well-considered and finely executed bit of character work. But a plot is a complex machine, and when you drop this ornate little bit of clockwork into the plot as a whole, it doesn’t mesh with the other gears at all, they strain against each other, push in different directions, and bring the whole enterprise to a grinding halt. There, you see what I’ve done, just like HEREDITARY, I’ve created a metaphoric miniature simulacrum for the plot as a whole. Aren’t I clever?

But still, the acting is really good, and the film is aces at evoking a disquieting atmosphere of implacable anxiety. There’s plenty to praise. Like the family at its center, HEREDITARY certainly looks elegant and functional, but underneath the sheen, there’s a surprising emptiness which only really becomes clear once it's pushed out of its comfort zone into areas which do not play to its strengths. We often think of great cinema as a collection of finely crafted ingredients; a great film is defined by having incisive writing, evocative acting, handsome photography, and so on. And this is what so many of these post-BABADOOK films are banking on, that horror, as an artform, can be elevated by a focus on stately, fine-tuned craftsmanship. But a work of art is not, in the end, simply a sum of its parts, any more than a fine meal is merely a matter of assembling a pile of choice ingredients; the parts must function as a whole, and the whole must be judged not by its components, but by how well those components function together to achieve a harmonious aim. And finally, of course, by the worth of that aim in itself. HEREDITARY, alas, focuses all its efforts on crafting its parts --and very fine parts they are, by and large-- but seems less interested in the way they work together. Consequently, its apparent strengths end up working against each other, and the harder it works, the less impact it makes. And besides, even if the whole did work, its final goal is just to be another witch-possession movie, and not even a very colorful one at that. Artistic ambition is a fine thing, and I am unable to wholly disregard the self-evident ambition on display here. But ambition is only so useful as the design to which it aquits its energies, and, alas, in this case I fear it is almost entirely misspent.

But hey, I’ll still probably check out the sequel. Horror fans like Mr. Majestyk and me might still have reservations about the wisdom of letting the cool kids crash our party, but fortunately, we’ll still watch pretty much anything.  

FIN

            * It is not, however, completely unprecedented: THE EXORCIST was nominated for Best Picture in 1973, but it was also the #1 grossing movie that year, so they kinda had to. JAWS was also nominated for Best Picture in 1976, and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS actually won in 1991, if you consider those horror movies (I don’t). And I’d forgotten this, but did you know THE SIXTH SENSE was nominated for Best Picture in 2001? Just like EXORCIST, though, it was a huge hit, the second highest-grossing movie of that year after STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE.

            ** It actually makes me think of that report a few years back that a full 30% of World Bank Policy Reports had never been downloaded even a single time. It makes you wonder if there are movies sitting on Netflix right now that literally no one on Earth except the editor have ever actually watched all the way through. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? 

            *** Not entirely unique, however; 2001 also gave us TROUBLE EVERY DAY and SESSION 9, which are, if anything, more successful attempts at subtle, arty horror than WENDIGO is. 2001 was mostly in the business, however, of producing things like JASON X, ELVIRA’S HAUNTED HILLS, ROUTE 666, THE ATTIC EXPEDITIONS, WISHMASTER 3, HORRORVISION, DEMONICUS and so on. Outside the US, to be sure, things were a bit better: we had Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s KAIRO (PULSE), Sion Sono’s SUICIDE CLUB, Takashi Miike’s ICHI THE KILLER, and Guillermo Del Toro’s THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE, but there’s no question that US horror was in a serious slump.

            **** Don’t worry, I love Gabriel Byrne too. But look at his filmography for a second. Can you think of any actor who is consistently as good, and yet has been in so many disappointing and crappy movies? I know he’s in MILLERS CROSSING and all that, but the guy’s gotta have the single worst miss-to-hit ratio of any A-list actor in history.

            ***** Or, if you prefer, as per our discussion in DOWNRANGE, the difference between a slasher and a torture porn flick. They may share many elements -- a colorful psycho creatively massacring a bunch of pretty young women-- but their central mechanics are spectacularly different, defined entirely by the victims’ potential to escape their predicament.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	Evil Runs In The Family, which is both an appealingly lowbrow tagline for this and kinda a spoiler
TITLE ACCURACY	Sure, it works.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None (as of now. But a 75 million buck box-office says that we can expect at the very least a DTV sequel someday)
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Possession, Witches, Family Drama
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Toni Collette,
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Gabriel Byrne, and you know, between this, THE SIXTH SENSE, THE NIGHT LISTENER, FRIGHT NIGHT REMAKE, and KRAMPUS, I’d say that Collette has some real horror credentials too. But she probably had too diversified a filmography to really be an icon.
NUDITY?	Lots, but I hope you’re into weird old people doing satan stuff if you rent it for the nudity.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No, but warning, a dog gets killed.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	Yes
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	Yes.
MADNESS?	Nah
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Yes
VOYEURISM?	There’s a curious zoom into a dollhouse to start the film, which lends a hint of voyeurism to the whole thing. Plus I guess witches are watching them, but the movie doesn’t seem to really do much with that.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Sometimes you’re just fucked for no reason, and there’s nothing you can do about it, and you can try or not, it really doesn’t matter. You know, white-knuckled terror.