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Unreal Screens: ‘GhostWatch’ and ‘WNUF Halloween Special’

The screen is a fascinating concept for horror filmmakers. The very idea of watching a scary movie projected onto a 20-foot white wall or through pixels and light of a television (or laptop monitor) aids in separating the audience from the frights being shown. We can jump at the monster appearing from behind a corner or curl up into a ball as an innocent teenager runs for their life from a homicidal maniac, but we ultimately know it isn’t real. It’s what allows for that cathartic release that so many experience from horror.

But what about when a film uses the screen as one of its tricks and hooks? Does that separation dissipate? Filmmakers have long experimented with breaking down that divide. Sometimes demons emerge from screens like in Poltergeist or Ringu, turning everyday technology into something that can harm us (there’s a metaphor in there, folks; I’m sure of it!). And other times, like in Scream 2, filmmakers turn the experience of going to see a movie in a cinema surrounded by strangers into a life or death situation. 

And then there are films like The Blair Witch Project, the Paranormal Activity franchise, or Lake Mungo that skirt the boundaries of their audience’s inherent disbelief in ghosts by presenting them with rustic, handheld proof. Your mileage may vary, but each has an unsettling quality that is enhanced by the rough video that comes with the territory of “found footage.” Most recently, laptop-based movies like Unfriended and Host have turned video chats into lo-fi haunts for ghouls from the other side.

Two of the most enjoyable have stretched that line between what is real and what is make-believe even further. Certainly harder than most, going so far as to create elaborate fake realities that in at least one case was so convincing it was banned. GhostWatch and WNUF Halloween Special may be wildly different in tone, but each are such fully committed cinematic stunts that they work more successfully to blur the lines between fact and fiction. One used real television personalities as the gateway to frightening a generation, while the other scratches at nostalgia to provoke an increasing sense of dread that something really is about to go terribly wrong.

Each film is so successful that somebody who wasn’t in on the joke could theoretically discover them in a stack of VHS tapes inside a spooky thrift store and assume they were the genuine item. Worse films—films that don’t trust their audience, or films less devoted to their endgame—would include a framing device, which would only seek to diminish their impact (I’m looking at you, V/H/S). But even those who know what directors Lesley Manning and Chris LaMartina are doing in GhostWatch and WNUF, respectively, will surely find much to admire in the way these films seamlessly come out through the screen. They might even, if just for a moment or two, be convinced that what they are seeing wasn’t just an elaborate hoax.

The story behind GhostWatch is legendary, but as Halloween rolls around every year, I discover how few people even know of its existence. Made by the UK’s BBC1 and airing “live” on the network at 9.25pm, GhostWatch purported to be a live prime time special: a Halloween-night broadcast from one of the country’s most haunted houses. Popular TV figures including talk-show host Michael Parkinson and children’s presenter Sarah Greene grounded the so-called documentary in reality, as did the use of video instead of film and utilizing of-the-moment technologies like infra-red. 

Audiences were so hoodwinked that they began calling the network expecting to speak to the on-screen switchboard, only to be told by actual BBC staff that it was just a movie. Audiences were so traumatized by the film that it was banned by the network for many years. One young man, Martin Benham, tragically died by suicide believing the spirit from the movie was in his own home’s rickety pipes—the calling sign of the fictional Mr. Pipes. 

Given what occurred following the release of GhostWatch, it’s probably not a surprise that it failed to make a larger cultural impression beyond the UK. Likewise, the novelty of seeing well-known performers playing themselves doesn’t have the same novelty to American audiences if the performers haven’t been regular features on your television for years already. But this was meta-horror several years before Wes Craven discovered self-awareness, and just seven years before many audiences were taken in hook, line and sinker by another ruse, The Blair Witch Project. Perhaps it was ahead of its time, but one of the most successfully convincing hoaxes since Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds should probably boast a greater legacy. It is often forgotten in horror roundups of the 1990s and has just two (albeit fresh) reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

But if GhostWatch took the nuts and bolts of national live TV broadcasts and used them to scare eleven million viewers in primetime, WNUF Halloween Special attempts something much smaller yet no less authentic. I had a genuine moment of uncertainty with WNUF, unsure if it really was something dug up from the archives of some local network—or maybe partly? We live in a world full of movies that want to play pretend in the 1980s sandbox, labelling themselves “cult” from inception and using digital 16mm effects. But here was one that genuinely looked like it had been taped off the TV in 1987 (helped immeasurably by the copious use of stock footage for its pretend commercial breaks directed by LaMartina and a few friends).

WNUF Halloween Special is theoretically a comedy, although how funny you find it may depend entirely on your interest in reliving your experiences of watching cheaply produced community television. But I suspect those whose childhoods are marked by rabbit eared television sets—screening snow-covered local broadcasts and do-it-yourself commercials for local pizza joints or small-town psychics—will find much to enjoy and be swallowed in by its fuzzy lust for nostalgia.  

Neither film was released theatrically, lending themselves to be viewed at home where the very television you’re watching them on could hold the power to decide whether they work for you or not. The Halloween Special, in fact, was initially released only on video cassette (although it’s now more widely available on Shudder). Some audiences today might dismiss these movies as far too smart for their own good, but both films hum with an impeccable attention to detail that is hard to replicate. 

Unlike movies with haunted cell phones or any number of ghosts in machines (literal or otherwise), GhostWatch and WNUF Halloween Special feel like something altogether different. They are portals to our fears in ways that other films can only dream. By bypassing everything that separates us from on-screen horror, they tap more directly into what haunts our memories. These are fascinating experiments as well as great horror entertainments. Whether it’s the famous chat show presenter or the small-town newsreader, beneath the gimmicks are lo-fi stories of possession that come out through the very screen we’re watching them on. And even if we still know they’re not real, there’s something about that that just gives me the creeps.

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Drugs, ‘Blue Sunshine,’ and the Failure of the Hippie Generation

The urban legends surrounding LSD during the 1960s were as frightening as any horror film. Tripping babysitters place infants in ovens; gun-toting police officers go insane after accidentally getting dosed; careless acid freaks permanently blind themselves by staring directly into the sun. They all feature the same alarmist hyperbole or outright fabrications seen in so many pieces of “straight talk” drug education propaganda from that era, and can be a wonderful source of campy good fun.

Writer/director Jeff Lieberman’s 1977 sophomore effort Blue Sunshine seizes on this absurdity by taking the nightmarish fantasies concocted by conservative groups and putting them in a world where they’re actually true. It’s a great bit of “Drugsploitation,” but the cult film is so much more than clever satire and suspense. Blue Sunshine is also a window into the disappointment, bitterness, and disillusionment felt by a generation towards the bloody demise of 1960s flower-power idealism.

The film follows Jerry Zipkin (Zalman King), a man who stumbles upon a terrifying epidemic of violence and mayhem that’s set to overtake America. Back in 1967, a strain of LSD called Blue Sunshine was created by a campus drug dealer at Stanford University and sold to 250 other students. The drug seemed harmless enough but triggers a terrible side-effect: everyone who dosed ten years prior turns into hyper-destructive lunatics. They appear normal at first but then come the headaches, terrible nightmares, and rapid hair loss, until finally these thirty-somethings devolve into an army of homicidal maniacs.

In an atempt to figure out how to stop the rash of killings sweeping the city, Zipkin tracks down Blue Sunshine’s creator, Ed Flemming (Mark Goddard). Unfortunately, Flemming is now a politician campaigning for a seat in congress, and is willing to do anything to silence Zipkin and have his past sins buried. 

Lieberman has said in interviews that the inspiration for Blue Sunshine came about simply from asking the question, “but what if they were right?,” regarding those old scaremongering anti-drug pamphlets from back in the day. That might be true, but his film also has an incredible amount happening just below the surface. A decade before its release, the hippie movement was in full swing and America was in the throes of the “Summer of Love.” This was a massive countercultural event where an estimated 100,000 flower children traveled to San Francisco to live and preach a philosophy of peace, free love, and nonconformity. 

“You could strike sparks anywhere,” writes Hunter S. Thompson in his masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. “There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, and that we were winning.” Thompson – a realist who believed deeply in his country but was also skeptical of almost everything and everyone – had been swept up in the movement’s wave of optimism. So when that perceived momentum towards a new utopian ideal suddenly halted and receded, he and so many others experienced a palpable sense of defeat. The Manson family, Altamont, and the losses of both counterculture and civil rights icons all acted as the death knells of the hippie movement, leaving a generation of lost souls in its wake.

In Blue Sunshine, we see that time and distance has transformed that sense of mourning into bitterness. This resentment is aimed not only at the lost potential of the period, but towards the reality that so many former hippies went on to become everything they strived to set themselves apart from. This is most obvious in the character of Ed Flemming. 

The person we see in the decade-old photograph uncovered by Jerry Zipkin is a man lightyears away from his present day incarnation. Sporting long hair, a seashell necklace, and the dazed (almost pious) look of a guru, he is a far cry from the clean-cut politician Zipkin later meets. The once radical Flemming has traded in his freaky hair and mind-expanding substances for well-cut suits and a chance to ascend to a new station that promises power and privilege. 

His arc is a familiar one. Many from that era abandoned more radical schools of activism and attempted to effect change by becoming a part of the system they used to speak out against, the argument being that they could change its mechanisms once they had been embedded inside. Unfortunately, it’s obvious within moments of Zipkin’s first meeting with Flemming that the politician is more interested in self-preservation than helping his fellow man. 

Initially he’s all smiles, handshakes, and “aww shucks” down-home charm. It’s the type of superficial front saved for potential voters, and it’s clear Flemming has the act pinned to a science. But the moment Zipkin asks about Blue Sunshine and his relationship with a local police detective who has inexplicably murdered his entire family, Flemming immediately shuts down. The man’s true face appears as his warmth evaporates, leaving a cold impersonal exterior. Suddenly sensing a threat to his political aspirations, he dismisses Zipkin, signaling for his hulking aid to intervene.

Whether or not he is aware of the terrifying aftereffects of the substance he created is unclear, but what’s obvious is this: when his drug-dealing past catches up to him, Flemming doesn’t give a damn about the tragedy that befell the detective’s family or its connection to Blue Sunshine. All he cares about is how it might threaten his professional career. Power is the one thing on his mind now, and nothing will take away his chance to grab it. He is a chilling character if only for the fact that he and his actions feel steeped in a realism that is familiar and discomforting.

Beyond Flemming, there’s also the unnerving and ingenious design of Blue Sunshine’s maniacs that hints towards a sense of disenchantment with the flower-power movement. Essentially inverted hippies – bald, blank-faced, and hyper-violent – these oblivious-ticking-timebombs have since left their bohemian lifestyles behind and become upstanding members of society. They are police officers, political aids, the neighbor down the hall that’ll watch your kids with nary a moment’s notice. They embody and exaggerate the shift in political and social philosophies made by so many people of that generation from one extreme to another. Liberalism to conservatism. Idealists to materialists. Counterculture to the establishment. 

In reality, the swing from one end of the spectrum to the other was (and still is) a subtle one, which is somehow far more unsettling. Over the course of the next decade, most ex-hippies went back to the suburbs, returning to their middle-class lifestyles. But others went on to become CEO’s, powerful lawyers, and (like Flemming himself) affluent politicians. The same people who tried to change the world by promoting harmonious coexistence slowly lost grip with their values and grabbed hold of a way of life that stood against everything they once believed. It’s not as dramatic as rapidly losing all your hair, taking whatever weapon is close by, and suddenly laying siege to everything and everyone around you in a berzerk rage, but it might be equally as frightening.

Blue Sunshine’s critiques of the hippie movement are certainly bleak, but it’s the film’s black sense of humor that ultimately keeps it from becoming (for lack of a better phrase) a total bummer to sit through. Just when things get a little too real and a tad too depressing, you get to watch a crazed maniac lumber Karloff-like through a crowded discotheque, tossing bedazzled dancers around like sacks of potatoes while the actor’s bald-cap does its damndest not to slide loose from his head. Moments like that are the sugar that makes Blue Sunshine’s socio-political commentary go down smooth. Coupled with that humor is also a thread of optimism that runs through the story in the form of its hero, Jerry Zipkin.

In a film full of turncoat flower children, Zipkin is the hippie that moved on from the movement but never lost touch with its ideals. He stands up for equal rights (the former lawyer recently quit his job at a prestigious firm due to their refusal to hire more women), is a pacifist (he makes a marked decision not to use lethal force during his final confrontation with Ed Flemming’s towering fixer who also happens to be a Blue Sunshine burnout), and even still sports the luscious locks so many of his peers have sheared off by then. If Blue Sunshine is a cinematic world where raving anti-hippies represent creeping conservative greed and selfishness, then Zipkin stands for the folks who never let those insidious influences take hold of them. 

Ultimately, what makes Blue Sunshine such a standout from that era is that it has something to say but doesn’t take itself so seriously that it enters the realm of hand wringing. Maybe that’s the reason it doesn’t come up in discussions of other “important” 70s horror movies, or maybe it’s the fact that it continues to be woefully underviewed. Whatever the reason, its reevaluation of the hippie generation and its legacy is a memorable one, and makes Blue Sunshine (like the drug itself) a movie that will stay in your system long after that first post-watch high.

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Gaslighting the Final Girl in ‘When a Stranger Calls Back’

What generates fear for a final girl? The terror in stalk-and-slash films tends to stem from the treacherous whims of its boogeyman, the villain who won’t stop until a trail of teen bodies lies in his wake. The Big Bad who hides the horror of his true self behind a mask. That’s not the case in director Fred Walton’s When A Stranger Calls Back. 

What stokes fear in this 1993 chiller isn’t the brazen butchery of a psychopath (Scream would go on to blend these two concepts perfectly a mere three years later). No, it’s the quiet cunning of an unhinged man eager to make his victims match his own absent sense of self. 

The Unkindness of Strangers

For Julia Jenz (Jill Schoelen), terror originates from the more unsettling circumstance — and for many women, a sadly all-too-true reality — of being repeatedly forced to question her own sanity. But the empowerment of Jenz stems from her deep-seeded resolve and a unique relationship seldom found in gaslit horror films. Unlike other final girls, she has someone who genuinely believes her.

Julia is tormented over and over throughout the movie’s 90 minutes. It’s not that she narrowly escapes with her life in the opening sequence, nor that the children she babysits are kidnapped, never to be seen again. She experiences a fate somehow worse than death because she cannot trust herself thanks to the insufferable mastermind behind her prolonged ordeal. 

Let me back up a little. 

This made-for-TV sequel riffs off the same babysitter and “man upstairs” urban legend as its predecessor. Despite the fact this movie takes place 15 years after the original, writer-director Walton keeps the premise fresh by doing away with technology altogether. He supplants the concept of “the calls are coming from inside the house” with a wholly new one; there are no calls at all because the stranger cut the phone line.

The movie’s thirty-minute opening is an exercise in pure, nerve-shredding tension. Shortly after settling in for a quiet night of babysitting, Julia hears a knock at the door. She refuses to open it, but offers to ring the auto club for the soft-spoken man outside having car trouble. One snag: the phone is dead. She fakes the call and tells the stranger help is on the way. 

She switches off a teakettle only for its eerie whistle to siren throughout the house ten minutes later. She makes sure the back door is locked, only for it to yank open the next scene. A note pinned to the fridge, suddenly gone. 

“Come on out, Julia,” he instructs as the scene reaches its climax. “I never told you my name!” she cries, until she finally snaps, her voice cracking at last, “Where are you? What have you done with them?” In pushing her over the edge – did she tell him her name after all? – he sows the seeds of doubt in Julia which plague her until she reaches college. That night she escapes with her life, but so does he.

Living With Trauma

Cut to five years later, and we’re greeted to another home invasion. This time, Julia’s not confronted by a man in her apartment, only evidence of him that sends her straight to the local police department. Her claims are almost laughably mundane. When she tells the police that she’s discovered a child’s shirt hanging in her closet, the police brush her off. She elaborates. A book of poems was moved on her bookshelf.

This only further stokes their incredulity. “Didn’t you say you keep your door triple-bolted and live on the third-story?” one cop asks, before another chimes in, eyebrow raised, “Lot of effort for someone to move a book.” They have a point. 

The news won’t report on an alarm going off when someone didn’t set it. No-one’s going to make a big fuss about a book being moved. Or a shirt you’ve never owned hanging in your closet.

The stranger knows that; and he knows the police won’t take her seriously. The saddest, most infuriating statement the film makes is eerily prescient to elements of the #MeToo movement: compassion for victims is only available through shared sympathetic experience. The sole person in the movie who believes Julia is Carol Kane’s original survivor Jill. She returns here as a women’s crisis counselor. Why does she help Julia? Why is she a counselor? Because she endured the same. 

Julia seeks guidance from Charles Durning’s retired detective John, the cop from the first film whom Jill loops in to help. “Every night I go to bed, hoping that tomorrow, somehow, things are gonna be different, that I’m gonna be somebody else, with a different life. Somebody with friends, a person with a future who isn’t alone. A person who maybe has someone, and then I wake up.”

Her earnestness (thanks to Schoelen’s understated performance) is not only endearing, but downright heart-breaking. Even after hearing the desperate cries of a woman on the edge of throwing in the towel – looking for someone, anyone, to tell her not to – John refuses to acknowledge her struggle.

Gaslighting the Survivor

When A Stranger Calls Back is a frustrating watch on this front. Every single man supposedly designated to protect Julia fails to even consider her claims, because they cannot fathom that a person would do this. She isn’t solely victimized by the stranger; she’s victimized over and over by each of the men who doubt the veracity of her assertions.

Every single man is careless with her life, unable to hear her desperately ask for help. The cops don’t bother to request the report from upstate about the events of five years earlier; “Call the university, tell them we have a hysterical coed on our hands,” says the detective. 

Later in the film, Julia is shot with the same gun she bought for protection; we will never know whether she or the stranger pulled the trigger. This time it’s Jill whom no one believes. She is now a stand-in for comatose Julia as the movie’s final girl and the co-ed’s lone defender. 

By the time you encounter scenes between Jill and Julia, it’s a blessed release. You’re so desperate for someone to show a modicum of basic human kindness and caring toward this oddball loner, that when the pair hug, it offers the viewer a relief. Understanding. A willingness to listen. That’s all Julia wants, and that’s what she finds in Jill. When she wakes in the night, to “something at the window,” she calls Jill immediately. “Julia, don’t assume anything. Put the phone down and secure the apartment.” 

But despite their fledgling friendship, the damage has been done. Those seeds sown years before now bear the fruit of the stranger’s making, threaded rotten into her cracked psyche. “I probably imagined this whole thing,” she sighs before hanging up the phone.

Finding Strength Within

Unlike heroines who engage their primal warrior instinct before slaying the bad guy, Julia’s arc, and indeed, the point of the movie, isn’t flamboyant. It dwells not in showy moments of bravado, but in simple acts that make her feel in control; much like the stranger whose micro-manipulations do the opposite.

For a woman whose teenage experience scarred her to the bones, she hasn’t been stripped entirely of longing, far from it. She’s both strong and vulnerable, desperate for a life and willing to fight. Trouble is, the stranger knows her weaknesses, her strengths, her peculiarities in such intimate detail, he’s able to manipulate them.

She pushes forward, despite the stranger breaking her spirit, her belief, again and again. She is tormented. She is stalked. She is beaten. She is hospitalized. Yet the terror Julia endures, somehow, never brittles her. She assimilates those traumas into herself. 

Gaslighting is hardly new terrain for genre heroines. Women in horror movies are frequently forced to question their own instincts and relinquish control to the “better judgment” of men. Their position as victim or monster seldom allows them room to occupy any other space, yet the film offers an inbetween. A duo of beat-up final girls, Julia and Jill both survive despite every man in the movie attempting to pigeonhole them as one or the other.

Conclusion

When A Stranger Calls Back examples the change possible when you choose to believe women. It’s a seminal predecessor to the ‘90s slasher resurgence, less interested in gore and butchery or the cleverness of intertextuality, more iconoclastic than most may care to remember. Its stranger isn’t hellbent on revenge, informed by an origin story he shares with the final girl. He’s a lonely man unable to assert control in the world, so he calls on those he believes he can subjugate.

That’s the movie’s parting gift to the genre; the commonality shared by its villain and its final girls. Neither is interested in flashy final act theatrics or a grand reveal wherein the motive is unraveled, moments explained in pain-staking detail by the stranger. In When A Stranger Calls Back, the final girls don’t dispense with the bad guy in a bluster of violence and pithy one-liners, and its villain stalks his prey armed not with a butcher’s knife, but with a desire to slowly dismantle the human spirit.

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Josh Criss’s ‘Leaving D.C.’ Goes Beyond the Found Footage Mold

As so often happens in Hollywood, producers learned the wrong lessons from Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez‘s The Blair Witch Project. They learned it was fast to shoot. They learned it required minimal crew. Most of all, they learned it was cheap. For more than a decade, horror fans were subject to a barrage of disposable found footage films. And most of these titles missed the thing that keeps The Blair Witch Project fresh. Never seeing the monster—but feeling its presence like the ticking of a time bomb—pushes the audience to new heights of stress. Rarely is a man in a mask as terrifying as the unknown.

One of the few films that took this lesson to heart is Josh Criss‘ Leaving D.C. In his debut feature, Criss expands on this concept, departing from his predecessors in new and interesting ways. Consider that The Blair Witch Project is a film designed to highlight a director. This can be seen in both a literal sense—as the character of Heather serves as director of her documentary—but it also can be seen in the structure of the film. Heather chooses the shots. She chooses what and when to film. The edits are either incidental, or imposed by those presenting the footage. Despite the mimics who blindly copied this aspect, she is simply acting in-character—and in her own best interest—as she continues to record.

Leaving D.C., on the other hand, is a film centered on an editor. Our protagonist, Mark, carefully curates his footage for his in-universe audience. The film—our film—drives this home with long and unbroken shots of the editing software he uses to review evidence. He, too, is continuing to film and continuing to edit his film for definite and in-character reasons: to stay in touch with his OCD support group after moving to West Virginia. First to impress them, then to justify himself, then finally to serve as his last connection to the outside world. 

Escaping the noise and congestion of Washington, D.C. for the rural life, Mark opens his recording with the drive to his new home. “I can’t wait to show you my new house,” he tells the camera. “My new haunted house.” He’s more right than he knows. Reporting to his OCD support group via pre-recorded videos, his life soon descends into preternatural chaos. He finds a cat skull nailed to a tree, strange people stalk outside his house, women beg for mercy, and something might be inside his home. 

Sensing both the need to fill the time between spooky segments and keep the cost down by showing fewer scares, many other studio-made found footage films pad their runtimes with extraneous content. We expect to see weak character beats that rarely connect to the story; needless drama between undercooked characters, or mundane sequences meant to sell you on the fact this “really” is found footage.

Leaving D.C. dodges each of these cliches. With Mark’s desire to impress or his outright fear, he cuts his footage to the quick. If Mark doesn’t care, the audience probably doesn’t either. There is a world where Mark’s eighteen hour cleaning sessions made it into the film. There is also a world where his clash with another support group member is shown in full instead of being hinted at in the gap between cuts. It would be right at home alongside the Paranormal Activity movies, and it would be a far worse film for it. 

Instead, Criss takes another route. The majority of found footage films are conventional films shot to suggest there is an in-universe cameraman. The best of this genre, however, present films that could not be shot in any other way. Leaving D.C. could not present its unreliable narrator in another fashion, and certainly not with the same degree of subtlety.

Claire’s visit brings this to light. She is a member of the OCD support group who visits for the weekend and the subject of Mark’s romantic fixation. From the moment she arrives, he is overbearing. He films her arrival despite her wishes, tries to hug her on camera, and records her bedtime routine with uncomfortable narration. “The lovely but tired Claire insisting on her own room,” he says, “even in my haunted house.” All the while, he promises this footage is something he will keep to himself.

Soon they are awakened by strange sounds in the forest, and Claire panics, desperate to escape. Mark tells her to stay. When we see her next, she is sacked out on top of her bed—on top of her sheets—as though she has just been dumped there. She is still wearing her shoes. Mark narrates as he stands over her, “Well, it took two valium, but Claire finally got to sleep,” he states. “Apparently realizing the foolishness of driving away from here in the middle of the night. I agree, it was very strange and very creepy but we shouldn’t let it ruin everything.”

We know Mark will go out of his way to present an idealized version of himself to the camera. Did he do the same here? Did he drug her? These questions create intrigue, and invite us to look for other inconsistencies. And while there are many problems with his story, one of the central contradictions is tied into his editing. 

If you aren’t paying attention to his timestamps, you would never suspect there was a gap, let alone one nearly two weeks long. On 8/25/2012, he finds the previously mentioned cat skull nailed to a tree, and someone lurks nearby in the woods. Mark shows off how he’s going to sleep that night (making it the third distinct filming on that day). We next see him shocked awake by terrifying sounds outside at 4:23AM. You would expect it is the same night following, but it is now 9/3/2012. 

Mark lies to cover this up, smoothing over his story. In footage from 9/3, he says this day is the first time he has recorded multiple logs in one day. This seems to further imply the events of 8/25 and 9/3 are continuous, when, of course, they are anything but. Did Mark stage the physically possible events to scare Claire into his arms, until something very real in the forest took its revenge?

Herein lies the most important lesson Hollywood missed, one understood by the top examples in this first-person subgenre. At its foundation, a found footage film could only ever be a found footage film. There must be a reason for a character to serve as our point-of-view. Their service in that aspect must reveal something about them, which in turn presents intrigue and chills unique to that character. In the case of The Blair Witch Project, that’s Heather’s increasing instability as both director and camerawoman. In Leaving D.C., Mark uses editing to facilitate being an unreliable narrator and to obscure the truth from his audience.

Leaving D.C. thoughtfully uses the medium to the hilt, and learns from the best of the found footage genre, to create a film that could only ever be shot in that style. The narrator being a character with his own concealed goals draws the audience deeper into the narrative, inviting them to peel back the layers of his footage. And unlike some found footage films, this balance of intrigue and the unknown inspires us to consider the mystery long after the movie has ended.

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https://youtu.be/7oXtwBehros

Joachim Trier’s ‘Thelma’ Serves Up a Supernatural Coming Out Story

In a genre typically considered “for the guys,” it’s time to give a nod to the ladies. Uterus Horror is a subgenre of horror films that focuses on the uniquely female experience of puberty and the act of coming into your sexuality, using horror elements to emphasize and/or act as a metaphor for that experience. These films are often ignored in theaters but quickly develop cult followings. Columnist Molly Henery, who named and defined the subgenre, tackles a new film each month and analyzes how it fits into this bloody new corner of horror.

After having fun talking about the many severed penises in Teeth last month, I decided to take on a more serious film for November. This month, it’s time to dive into Thelma. This 2017 film from Norway was likely missed by even the most vigilant horror fans, but it is a powerful piece that uses Uterus Horror to tackle multiple subjects including religion, sexuality, and repression.  

The film was directed by Joachim Trier (Louder Than Bombs, Reprise), who also co-wrote the screenplay with Eskil Vogt (Blind, Louder Than Bombs). Thelma tells the story of a young woman (Eili Harboe) just starting college. Clearly a sheltered girl with no friends, she soon notices Anja (Kaya Wilkins), a fellow student. As Thelma’s infatuation with Anja grows, she also experiences increasingly frequent and violent seizures that seem to accompany supernatural abilities. 

The opening of Thelma shows a young Thelma on a hunting trip with her father (Henrik Rafaelsen). They go out into the snowy wilderness, and as Thelma watches a deer, her father points the rifle at her head. While he doesn’t kill her, this lets viewers immediately know there is something about Thelma her father finds so threatening or terrifying, that he was ready to kill his own child. The film then jumps ahead to Thelma starting college, where she first meets Anja. 

It doesn’t take long to figure out that Thelma’s seizures are related to her interest in Anja and her strange abilities. In their first encounter, they don’t even speak. Anja simply takes a seat next to Thelma in the library to study. Thelma seems to cause birds to fly into the library window as she has her first seizure. It happens again after Thelma appears to have telepathically put an idea in Anja’s head compelling her to come see Thelma in the middle of the night. After Anja arrives, Thelma has her second seizure. Anja invites Thelma to see a dance performance. During the performance, she touches Thelma’s leg and Thelma is barely able to stop the oncoming seizure that rattles a massive hanging light above the crowd. The two kiss for the first time shortly after that, but Thelma runs away and cuts contact with Anja. 

Thelma is hospitalized to monitor her brain activity to see if her seizures are caused by epilepsy. After a couple days with no seizures, the doctors are finally able to trigger one by making her think of Anja. At the same time, we watch as Anja’s lights flickers, her music starts playing on its own, and then she is pulled into a shattered window before vanishing. 

Throughout all of this, Thelma has a reoccurring theme of religion and repression. Early on it is established that Thelma is a Christian who doesn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. The same day she meets Anja, Thelma has a dream of a snake slithering from outside into her dorm and wrapping itself around her. After Thelma and Anja’s kiss, she attends a party with a mutual guy friend. As a cruel prank, Anja and the guy pretend to smoke weed with Thelma. This leads to her hallucinating an intimate moment with Anja, when the same snake appears to her, coiling itself around her neck and entering her mouth. Christianity often uses snakes to depict the devil and evil. In Thelma’s mind, by allowing Anja to get close to her and by partaking in drugs and alcohol, she is allowing the devil to enter her soul. 

It’s apparent that the religion Thelma’s parents brought her up in has taught her to be fearful of being different. The way her body physically reacts every time she gets close to Anja quite strongly indicates a homophobic upbringing. There is so much self-loathing that, even though Thelma clearly loves Anja, her abilities are subconsciously activated because she has been taught that homosexuality is a sin. Even when Thelma’s seizures are diagnosed as psychogenic non-epileptic seizures, her research takes her toward a religious answer. This is an illness which is a mystery to most medical professionals, yet Thelma reads about how in the olden days it was often believed that seizures were caused by witchcraft, demons, and the devil. 

This likely explains why Thelma makes Anja disappear. She’s triggered into having a seizure in the hospital. She has been trying her hardest to resist her feelings for Anja, yet the doctor has brought up all those feelings in order to bring about the seizure. Thelma has the ability to make the things she desires with her entire being come true, and in that moment all she wants is for the temptation that her religion teaches against to disappear from her life. While she doesn’t do it on purpose, Thelma makes Anja vanish in order to make her homosexual feelings vanish. Unfortunately, all that does is cause her more heartache and strife. 

Seeking help from her parents only leads to even more devastation. She learns that her abilities manifested when she was only 6 years old, leading to an unfortunate accident. Instead of trying to help Thelma then, they drugged her to repress who she was. Thelma’s parents make the same mistake again, simply confining and drugging Thelma to keep her “safe,” and forcing her to pray her “demons” away rather than accepting her for who she is. 

https://youtu.be/GmXQK9aPC5E

The moment Thelma realizes her family’s actions are wrong is when she finally becomes free. She kills her father in her sleep, setting him on fire. While she didn’t mean to do this, it is obviously a very cathartic moment. She mourns the loss, but also realizes it never would have happened if her father had embraced her instead of actively trying to stop her from becoming the woman she was always meant to be. The moment she frees herself from religious persecution is the moment she finally learns how to control her powers. She is able to restore her paralyzed mother’s (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) ability to walk – and bring back Anja – without any seizures. By accepting herself, despite her family, she is finally able to be her true self and be with the woman she loves.

The story told in Thelma feels somewhat reminiscent of the original Uterus Horror film, Carrie. It is about a young woman experiencing love and sexual desire for the first time, which triggers a supernatural ability she didn’t know existed. There is also the theme of oppressive, religious parents who use Christianity to control their daughter and make her feel evil for loving a woman, and for her innate abilities. What makes Thelma stand out from other Uterus Horror films is that it also tells a beautiful queer love story. Instead of having queer subtext, Thelma uses the supernatural abilities and what triggers them in a way that highlights the dangers of religious oppression and homophobia. There is no mistaking the message these filmmakers are trying to convey. Thelma is a Uterus Horror film that shows the beauty and freedom in being unapologetically who you are. 

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Ted Nicolaou’s ‘TerrorVision’ Pulls No Punches on 1980s America

If TerrorVision is even discussed at all, it’s usually brought up as an example of “so bad it’s good” cinema. Writer-director Ted Nicolaou’s campy, gooey satire is both a twisted love letter to Atomic Age creature features and a wide-ranging critique of American life in the ‘80s. Each character represents a different aspect of the American psyche, from xenophobia to our fascination with the military and survivalism to our inability to detach from electronic devices and mindless entertainment. Nicolaou’s film never takes itself seriously for a single second, but as pointed commentary, it doesn’t take American society seriously either. 

TerrorVision is, admittedly, a weirdo movie that caters to some pretty niche tastes, but while its reputation has been somewhat rehabilitated since its release, it deserves an even wider audience than it currently enjoys. The film faced an uphill battle when it opened in theatres, especially given its unfortunate timing: the film was released on Valentine’s Day of 1986, less than three weeks after the Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy unfolded on live television. In the wake of such a disaster, perhaps the American public wasn’t in the mood to see itself lampooned in a sci-fi horror comedy filled with sex jokes and gallons of alien ooze. 

TerrorVision is best described as The Thing if it were directed by John Waters instead of John Carpenter. The film features a sleazy, slightly deranged version of the American nuclear family as they fail to thwart an extraterrestrial invasion. Cult horror film mainstays Gerrit Graham and Mary Woronov play Stan and Raquel Putterman, aspiring swingers whose taste in home decor heavily favors clashing neons and nude women. They have two children, Suzy (Diane Franklin) and Sherman (Chad Allen), whom Stan and Raquel seem to view as little more than an impediment to their sex life. Bert Remsen rounds out the family unit as Grampa, a paranoid survivalist who spends his days informing strangers of the benefits of lizard tail jerky. 

Stan is the stereotypical American dad, obsessing over his state-of-the-art new satellite dish and telling anyone who will listen about how many channels it gets. It’s through this satellite dish that the alien — “Hungry Beast,” a pet/garbage disposal unit mutation from the planet Pluton that will devour anything in its path — travels to Earth and begins to dominate the planet through television airwaves. In one of the film’s sharpest indictments of American culture, we learn that the insatiable Hungry Beast can be defeated if people simply stop watching television for about 200 years. The Puttermans can’t take their eyes off their TVs for a single minute though, even when they have no idea what they’re watching, so any hope of the Earth’s survival dies along with their attention span. 

The insipid shallowness of American culture in the ‘80s is on bright display in TerrorVision. Raquel and Suzy are most concerned with appearances. Raquel is an aerobics fanatic with an impressive wardrobe of spandex leotards and Naugahyde dresses for her swinger meet-ups. Suzy is an ‘80s fashion icon who combines Cyndi Lauper-meets-Madonna realness with a hint of her parents’ love for neon excess. Suzy’s boyfriend O.D. (Jon Gries) is a consummate metalhead, matching Suzy in her substitution of aesthetic for personality. He spends most of the film shredding his air guitar and making sure his (leather ensemble) looks could kill. Though MTV addicts may seem like an easy target, TerrorVision’s humor is a little too obscure to be considered a broad parody. The film is less interested in mocking specific tastes and styles than mocking people who lack the depth to develop an identity beyond their taste in clothing and music. 

Grampa and Sherman frequently hang out in Grampa’s military-style bunker that’s filled with grenades, machine guns, first aid kits, and the aforementioned lizard tail jerky. The ‘80s weren’t the only decade to see America embrace its jingoistic side, but with the popularity of toys and cartoons like G.I. Joe and movies like Red Dawn, the last full decade of the Cold War certainly felt like the apotheosis of militaristic and survivalist fantasies in 20th-century pop culture. Putting the lie to American supremacy and exceptionalism, Grampa — the ostensible expert in outlasting any manner of threats — is one of the monster’s first victims. 

No ‘80s satire would be complete without an exploration of American greed. TerrorVision takes aim at this materialism when Suzy, Sherman, and O.D. — the few remaining survivors at this point in the movie — decide that they want to exploit the Hungry Beast for money. They invite buxom horror host Medusa (Jennifer Richards) over to the house to meet the Hungry Beast and score their own television contract. Medusa is a clear Elvira stand-in, though she lacks Elvira’s good-natured self-deprecation. When the Hungry Beast devours the last of the survivors and chooses the scantily clad Medusa as the method by which he will take over the planet, the film is underscoring its mockery of Americans’ lust for sex and coy nudity. 

Zany, hilarious, and bizarre, TerrorVision is both a celebration and a subversion of the classic creature feature. It takes the ideal ‘50s family — a mom, dad, and two kids, all of whom are white, suburban, and wealthy — and feeds them to a sentient garbage disposal rather than letting them save the day and keep their warped American dream alive. Despite the “unhappy” ending, there’s an underlying sweetness and charm to the film that makes it gloriously fun and endlessly re-watchable. The Hungry Beast is a welcome combination of disturbing and adorable, while the cast’s elastic facial expressions and wild physical comedy turn the film into a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon. The satire is never mean-spirited; TerrorVision aims its off-kilter humor at every target it can find, including itself. 

TerrorVision won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it’s not the bastion of “so bad it’s good” cinema that so many people assume. This bright, kooky, and hilarious movie accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do, and it does so in an eminently engaging and entertaining way that has earned it a well-deserved cult status. From the deliberately gaudy production design to the stratospherically over-the-top performances to the gleefully silly special effects, TerrorVision revels in its low-budget weirdness and offers up a wacky yet intelligent critique of America in the ‘80s.

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The Public’s Perception of the Penis in Horror

What is it about dicks? Tallywackers, cocks, one-eyed snakes – I could go on, and since I’m here to talk about wieners and their use in horror films, I will. As a society, we have been trained to view the penis as controversial. There exists a double standard where penile nudity is scrutinized or even laughed at, which isn’t something that often befalls vaginal nudity. Luckily, the public’s perception of the penis is shifting, and penile nudity is not only becoming more commonplace in the horror genre, but it’s also being taken more seriously.

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We’ve all been in a theater showing a film in which a character flashes their schlong on screen, haven’t we? The mere sight of a person’s equipment elicits giggles from the audience because, unfortunately, we live in a society that has made it so that knobs are inherently funny. It begins in health class in middle school – or not, depending on which part of the world you live in – and it continues into adulthood. Outside of pornography, people laugh at peckers. Any person with a vagina can run around completely nude with their genitalia fully in the frame in horror. Yet, when it comes to someone with a joystick, it’s usually shot in a way that hides said downstairs appendage. And in the rare instance that someone does show their stiffy on screen, it immediately becomes the talking point (or laughing stock) of the film. 

When Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man came out in 2000, the discussions weren’t centering on the unnecessary rape scene or the slasher-y third act. No, the major talking point for people coming out of every Hollow Man screening was the infrared image of Kevin Bacon’s bacon. Never mind that those same audiences could have seen the damn thing sans CGI imagery in Wild Things two years prior. Just seeing a peter on-screen – even one you’ve already seen – was an event.

Hollow Man isn’t exactly considered “high art” in the horror world. Often viewed as, well, “hollow.” Critics found so little to like that it’s unsurprising that attention was focused on the more ridiculous elements of the film. Conversely, similar conversations would be had just two years later about Danny Boyle’s critically lauded outbreak thriller 28 Days Later. In that film, Cillian Murphy’s introductory scene showcases the actor’s uncircumcised ugly stick. It’s just a bizarre social phenomenon that people can walk away from a film as brilliant as 28 Days Later, but the final takeaway is “we saw that guy’s twig ‘n berries.”

Strangely, an extension that people are so proud of can simultaneously be the punchline of any film in which it makes an appearance. People with packages are so quick to boast about them, yet they’re also terrified to show them. What is it that keeps most from wanting to dangle their dongs in front of a camera? It’s almost as if they fear the audience will judgmentally scrutinize their love leg, metaphorically poking and prodding it as the witches did to that police officer in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria. That thought process isn’t entirely without merit, but it’s a way of thinking that should be remedied.

It could be argued that there is a conspiracy in the people-with-a-phallus-dominated film industry. After all, too much peen on-screen (or too hard of a hard-on) gets a film slapped with an NC-17 rating. But show a vagina? An R is totally fine. What does that say about the vagina? That it’s somehow “less sacred” or “less offensive” than the peter? Obviously, neither is true, but it’s insulting to people with vaginas because the implication is that it’s not as worthy of being put on as high a pedestal as the pud. That needs to stop.

Of course, there is the issue of size. The argument seems to be that when it comes to vaginas, there’s nothing there to show, whereas people with fucksticks have something to lose by exposing themselves. That argument is problematic because it implies that the vagina is “nothing,” which isn’t true. People with trouser snakes are afraid of people assigning their self-worth with the size of their flaccid frankfurter. This is ironic, considering that A) the flaccid length of a lightsaber doesn’t really say anything about its erect length and B) there isn’t the same scrutiny given to people who show their breasts or vaginas. Are people with vaginas self-conscious about the size of their labia? The answer to that question doesn’t matter. Rather, it is assumed by people with whackers that they don’t or that it simply doesn’t matter because, again, there’s “nothing there.”

Even when we have someone with a meat pole going full-frontal, prosthetics (or CGI) are normally used. This is especially true if the quivering member is meant to be erect. A prosthetic was used for Willem Dafoe’s putz in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist because Dafoe’s own jolly Roger was seemingly so large that “everyone got confused when they saw it.” Luke Evans supposedly showed his dick in Ma, but he has yet to admit whether it was a prosthetic. Hell, we got an entire underwater nude lesbian ballet sequence in Alexandre Aja’s Piranha, but the one bit of meatsicle we saw was Jerry O’Connell’s severed appendage, which was a CGI creation and played for laughs. 

And yet, the tide is seemingly turning. Full-frontal nudity of people with penises is becoming more commonplace, and it’s the horror genre that is spearheading the cause. Films like Hereditary, Under the Skin, and The Love Witch all have sequences of full-frontal penile nudity, albeit from side characters or extras. Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor features a shot of a semi-erect elephant trunk. Ari Aster showed us Jack Reynor’s rod in Midsommar. This isn’t to say that penile nudity has become normalized, but we’re on the way there. After decades of classifying penile nudity as taboo, it’s time for a change. An unsheathing, so to speak, leveling the playing field when it comes to genital representation that’s long overdue. It’s 2020, after all.

Brian De Palma’s ‘Carrie’ Celebrates Our Teenage Monsters

The book came first. 

At some point in my teenage years, outgrowing Mary Higgins Clark and Christopher Pike paperbacks, I picked up a copy of Stephen King’s Carrie. My interest in horror was slowly budding, as I emerged from the cocoon of my parents’ overprotectiveness, first with viewings of It, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show at sleepovers, Blockbuster rentals of The Craft, and finally sealed with rowdy screenings of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer at the local multiplex. Teenage girls like me were always represented in horror; scream queens and final girls ruled the genre. But there was something about Carrie that seemed even more intriguing and terrifying: the prom queen as a monster.

When I was younger, around 12 or 13, I’d found a book in my parents’ bedroom called Teenage Girls: A Parent’s Survival Manual that I found hilarious and offensive. On the cover was a photograph of a young girl, backlit in red light, her face in darkness, staring down the camera. In my memory, she has glowing red eyes, though that idea seems ridiculous now (she in fact, does not). I was simultaneously amused and horrified that my parents were reading a book that positioned teenage girls as seeming this evil and scary, something to be “survived.” Were we monsters? But more importantly, could we be monsters, the ones everyone else is afraid of? 

This idea was a fixation into my early 20s: my undergraduate thesis project was a short slasher about a cheerleading squad, a sort of Bring it On meets Halloween, in which the killer is a disgruntled squad member, titled, as a play on the concept, “The Final Girl.” It was messy and imperfect both on purpose and by accident, but there was something that I had to get out, some expression of powerful feminine violence in a highly gender-codified, hierarchical environment that had been brewing, bubbling with every viewing of the Scream movies, Slumber Party Massacre, Sorority House Massacre, Dario Argento’s Suspiria, and of course, the patient zero, Carrie.  

In high school, once I had read Carrie, I had to see the movie. I watched it with my best friend Kristen at, of course, a sleepover, and the split-screen moments in the prom scene were my first real “cinema!” moments, when the combination of image, sound, and rhythm grabs you with visceral, recognizable power. Prior to this, what I loved about movies like Scream and Clueless was the writing; I was somewhat unconscious to the ways they moved and looked and felt. But Brian De Palma will never let the audience forget for a second that the most important way a movie speaks is through the image, and its construction in time and space. 

I became obsessed with Carrie. Obsessed with the line readings, especially anything that came out of Piper Laurie’s mouth – and especially the line, “I can see your dirty pillows” (my friend Gena embroidered a pillow with the phrase for one of my late 20s birthdays). I was obsessed with the ‘70s gym shorts and high socks, and P.J. Soles’ hat and the way Miss Collins wallops Chris across the face. Obsessed with the hazy cinematography and editing, the split screen and split diopter shots, the camera whirling around and around Tommy and Carrie as they dance at the prom. The extreme closeups of Nancy Allen’s mouth with her crowded front teeth as she licks her lips, tugging on the rope attached to the bucket of blood; the long, long, long slow-motion shot as Sue discovers the rope. I was obsessed with the way Carrie, covered in blood, whipped around in a crouch, her hands locked in stiff claws, and the camera rapidly jump-cutting in on her pupil as she sends the car flipping over and over itself. I was obsessed with recognizing a visual parallel in Margaret White’s crucifixion and the creepy Jesus figurine. 

My senior year of high school, I decided to go as Carrie for Halloween. I found a cheap pink satin gown at a thrift shop and wore it all day at school, carrying a bouquet, wearing a tiara. That night, at a Halloween party, I made everyone gather in the driveway for my ceremonial blood drenching. I handed my friend Joanna a sauce jar filled with corn syrup and red food coloring as I had heard the Carrie blood was made of, and instructed her to pour it over my head. All I remember is that the drenching felt neverending. Not a shocking splash but a steady stream as she slowly poured it over me. I changed into gym shorts and a t-shirt, but the red corn syrup remained on my skin. My friend Andrew, who I’d known my whole life, licked my arm and was surprised it was sweet. A week later, he died in a drunk driving accident. That night was the last time I saw him. 

If this all seems extra personal, it feels important to talk about why I connected with Carrie so much as a teenager, and its influence. What King and Brian De Palma understand and convey so beautifully is that high school is hard. It’s filled with blood, and sex, and death, all while fumbling through the figuring out of yourself and others, and yourself in opposition to others, including your parents. Plus, everyone hates gym class. All of that is amplified in King’s book, written just a few years out of high school himself, and working as a teacher. It’s a story about a bullied, abused girl with supernatural powers that’s grounded in a recognizable and terrifying reality, because King knows how terrifying high school can be. De Palma, on screen, makes it erotic, operatic, funny, scary, and tragic, every emotion deeply felt and deeply real. The movie is camp, but sincere. 

I’ve seen Carrie dozens of times on VHS and DVD, my copy traveling with me during the ten or so times I’ve moved around the country since college, but the first time I saw it on the big screen was last year, at the American Cinematheque, in a screening series of Argento/DePalma double features put on by Cinematic Void. Even though I knew I would love it, it had been several years since I’d watched it in earnest. I was hoping I wouldn’t see something that I’d recognize now as problematic or exploitative.

This time around, nearly 20 years removed from being a teenage girl, I  found it profoundly moving. Margaret White isn’t just a crazy, homicidal religious nut, she’s a deeply traumatized woman who has turned to fanaticism as a coping mechanism to deal with her repressed sexual trauma. Chris is trapped in a psychosexual abusive relationship with Billy and lashing out at those around her. Miss Collins is an imperfect ally because she doesn’t trust anyone, and Carrie, well Carrie shows what happens when pathological shame, abuse, and psychological torture combust, but in small moments, she owns her own power, her own sexuality. “It’s me, mama,” she pleads with her mother, who declares her remarkable gift the work of Satan. Even the infamous line I giggled at in high school took on a new tenor. “Breasts, mama,” she says, “they’re called breasts, every woman has them,” gently asserting her right to her own sexuality. The locker room slo-mo shot isn’t just a brazen display of the male gaze, it’s a comment on the male gaze, a sly bait-and-switch from sensual to savage. 

The tragedy of Carrie, which both King and De Palma treat with the gravity that it deserves, is the idea that in high school, the worst thing to happen to someone is shame, embarrassment and rejection. It taps into our most primal desire to be loved and accepted by the tribe, which translates into safety and nourishment. Carrie is denied that, again and again. She never receives the comfort that she’s craving, except in small doses, and conditionally, from Miss Collins, her gym teacher (played by the great Betty Buckley). In the opening shower sequence, she reaches out, vulnerable, for help. Blood is coming out of her body, she doesn’t know why, and she’s scared for her own safety. The girls turn to savagery in response to her off-putting plea, pelting her with sanitary napkins. When she pleads with her mother, “Why didn’t you tell me?” looking for some comfort, she’s hit with a book and lectured that her body is sinful. After the massacre at the prom, when Carrie returns home and seeks solace in the arms of her abusive mother, she says, “they laughed at me.” The trauma she experienced is not the blood or violence or fire she inflicted, but that they laughed at her, that they rejected her. Carrie is a heartbreaking and tragic victim who turns into a monster as her self-preservation instincts morph into total annihilation.

Watching the film now, I can see that what moved me when I was in high school, whether I knew it then or not (I didn’t), was that this was a film about the inner lives of women, who are allowed to be everything in this instance: the villains and the victims, the empowered and the disempowered, complex characters, with whom you can simultaneously empathize and condemn. Grappling with the film 20 years later, I realize that what Carrie articulated for me is that, yes, teenage girls, sometimes we are monsters–but we usually have a damn good reason to be. 

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Episode 27: Tyler MacIntyre on ‘The Devil Lives Here’

It isn’t often that a low-budget horror film tackles the concept of parallel historical timelines. Then again, very few horror films also recognize the potential of a character named the Honey Baron, an evil slaveowner whose acts of cruelties reverberate across centuries.

This is the premise behind The Devil Lives Here, a 2015 horror film from Brazilian filmmakers Rodrigo Gasparini and Dante Vescio. Combining Evil Dead-esque scares with a mature thread of historical horror, The Devil Lives Here walks a fine line between high-concept and high-octane horror – and walks it well.

Tyler MacIntyre joins the Matts for a fun-filled conversation about international horror and the thrill of discovery that only comes with the festival circuit. Tyler also shares his own progress as a horror filmmaker and fan, beginning with his earliest days of watching VHS tapes and culminating in his own work as writer-director behind several cult classics from the past decade.

Tyler MacIntyre

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user3345809
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tmacfilm

Selected Filmography

Good Boy (2020) is now streaming on Hulu.
Tragedy Girls (2017) is now streaming on Hulu and available for rent on Amazon, Google Play, and YouTube.
Patchwork (2015) is now streaming on Shudder and available for rent on Amazon, Google Play, and YouTube.

You can watch The Devil Lives Here on Kino Lorber’s streaming platform, Kino Now. Check out the rest of our podcast episodes on our Podcasts page.


Queer Horror in ‘Knife + Heart’ and ‘Stranger by the Lake’

In the last few decades, and particularly since the 2010s, queer horror has become more prolific and more visible. For every coded character or relationship, there’s a corresponding loud and proud member of the LGBTQIA gracing the screen. When it comes to sexuality, however, the acknowledgment of the sex lives of characters is stubbornly trapped in the past.

It’s the cinematic equivalent of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” These characters may announce their sexuality, flash some pride flair, or gaze suggestively at their object of affection, but they rarely kiss or touch. And they certainly don’t fuck.

This is hardly surprising given the puritanical, borderline hysterical rhetoric surrounding bodies and nudity in North America. The stranglehold over movie ratings maintained by the MPAA – a group of religious and conservative hypocrites – practically guarantees that nary a dick, a good scissoring session, or some butt play will flicker across the screen. 

As a queer horror fan, this is frustrating. Compared to other genres, the sexual politics of horror movies are typically far more progressive and avant-garde. And yet, when I go searching for dick or hot and heavy man-on-man action in my horror, I usually come up short…unless I turn my attention overseas. 

International Queer Cinema

Enter foreign horror films.

For women attracted to women, there are two excellent texts: The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, 2016) from Korea and Good Manners (Marco Dutra & Julia Rojas, 2017) from Brazil. And for boys who covet other boys, the best options are Knife + Heart (Yann Gonzalez, 2018) and Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie, 2013). Both are French films made by out gay directors that showcase male desire and sex in explicit detail.*

*Technically Bruce LaBruce’s L.A. Zombie, a pornographic narrative produced in coordination with gay porn site Cockyboys, also qualifies, though for our purposes, we’ll just focus on the two French films. 

Knife + Heart is set within France’s gay porn industry in the late 70s. It is a slasher film wherein the cast and crew of an independent porn company headed by Anne Parèze (Vanessa Paradis) are targeted by a Giallo-inspired killer who wears a black leather outfit. While Anne is the protagonist and her relationship with (ex) girlfriend Loïs McKenna (Kate Moran) is at the center of the narrative, the film’s first two murders involve young gay men who engage in “risky” anonymous sex with the killer. 

Stranger by the Lake is set at an indeterminate time and follows Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), a sociable young man who frequents a gay cruising beach and the surrounding woods south of Provence. Franck doggedly pursues a sexual relationship with Michel (Christophe Paou), an attractive mustached stranger. Their relationship becomes physical after Franck sees Michel drown another man, culminating in Michel’s murder of Franck’s beach friend Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao), as well as an Inspector (Jérôme Chappatte) investigating the crime.

Knife + Heart

In both of these texts, sex is par for the course, although engaging in M/M sex is virtually guaranteed to lead to an untimely death. It’s not just that there is a cost for engaging in “risky” behavior such as cruising or anonymous sex; these films actively weaponize the desire for a little good “D.” Are you a cock hungry queer? If so, beware: these films suggest that your predilections can and probably will be fatal.

Take Knife + Heart’s first two murder set pieces: both are hyper-sexualized and involve the deaths of men in compromised positions during sex. In the introductary instance, a young twink picks up the killer at a dance club for anonymous erotic pleasure. Events culminate when the young man is stabbed to death in the anus by a switchblade disguised within a dildo.

The second murder occurs when Karl, the combative star of Anne’s films, is orally stabbed while fellating the aforementioned dildo. In both cases, the attack is a punitive enterprise predicated on a gay sex act (anal and oral sex) and the weapon of choice is quite literally a phallus. In these scenes, gay sex equals death.  

Gonzalez’s film eventually identifies that the killer is Guy (Jonathan Genet), a young man whose traumatic sexual history was co-opted by Anne for a blue movie. This reveal confirms that the film doesn’t condone the “sex equals death” equation in such black and white terms. Gonzalez, who also wrote the script, has a clear interest in exploring the cyclical nature of trauma and the malleability of memory and history, up to and including when it is captured on celluloid and projected on the big screen. 

And yet…despite the attempt to remove the fatalistic connotations of queer desire, even the film’s climax, set in a pornographic theatre that caters to anonymous gay encounters, becomes a site of danger. Not only does Guy nearly murder Anne’s new star in the blackout room, he is killed in performative – and reflexive – fashion: on stage, by the queer audience watching Anne’s revisionist film version of his tragic tale. 

It’s the perfect synthesis of Gonzalez’s thesis about the cycle of trauma. It is also a subtle condemnation about the dangers of cruising sites and the propensity for members of the queer community to kill each other (eerily foreshadowing the arrival of the AIDS epidemic in the following decade). 

Even in the cathartic denouement, which finds murdered members of the film troupe revived and back on set, the staging and lighting creates a sense of artifice that suggests this is nothing more than Anne’s fantasy – a coping mechanism to mask the horrors of her own traumatic experience the audience has just seen play out.

Stranger by the Lake

Contrast this with Stranger by the Lake, which shifts the risky behavior from the margins to the center of the narrative. While Franck is clearly a likable and sociable individual, Guiraudie’s script never pretends that its protagonist has come to the nude beach and accompanying woods for anything other than hooking up.

On the surface Stranger by the Lake appears to be a relatively straightforward film. It takes place over ten consecutive days, starting with Franck’s initial introduction to both Henri and Michel and culminating in the series of murders that wraps the film. The fixed geographical proximity (the film never ventures away from the lake or woods) and relaxed pacing led some audiences to declare it boring or slow upon release, while the underlying tension created by Franck’s dogged pursuit of a known murderer prompted critics to compare the film to Hitchcock.

While there are lengthy interludes about Franck and Henri’s burgeoning (non-sexual) friendship, a substantial part of their conversation focuses on the politics that unofficially denotes acceptable behaviour within the homosocial community. Stranger by the Lake is not shy about nudity, so Henri’s refusal to completely disrobe is a source of tension, as is his distance from the other nudists and the fact that he doesn’t swim or engage in sexual activity. 

These exchanges inform our understanding of the film, as well as queer cruising culture in general. Henri’s reticence to participate in the dominant cultural activity – sex – makes him an outsider and, to the other men, a threat. This is ironic given the fact that a murder occurs in the lake and barely causes a blip in attendance or extracurricular activity, a fact commented on by Inspector Damroder: “Two days later, everybody’s back cruising as if nothing’s happened. You guys have a strange way of loving each other sometimes.”

It is vital that this statement is made by an outsider. Damroder is not only an interloper within the closed community (a presumed straight man, like Henri), he is also quite literally there to police behavior. His critique of the queer community not only suggests that their response to trauma is problematic and abnormal, it equates cruising with the pursuit of love as though the two are mutually inclusive. This fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of the space, which acts as an outlet, a reprieve even, for the men to act upon their desires for anonymous, easy-to-access sex.

While Damroder’s observation is judgmental, there is a kernel of truth to it – or there is for Franck at least. Franck may be engaging in various sexual acts with strangers (in addition to Michel, he mutually masturbates with a man and, in a comedic sequence, he is sucked off by a persistent voyeur). Many of Franck’s encounters with Michel in the latter half of the film, however, concern Michel’s refusal to go for drinks or spend the night together. 

In this way Stranger by the Lake acknowledges the contrasting priorities of participants of the cruising circuit: the desire for immediate, often anonymous, gratification commingled with the emotional need for a longer, more conventionally romantic relationship. The sad reality for Franck is that his desire for some good dick outweighs his instinct for self-preservation, which ultimately leaves him in a vulnerable, exposed situation at the end the film.

Dangers and Desires

It should be noted that neither Knife + Heart and Stranger by the Lake (and by extension Gonzalez and Guiraudie) condemn or make a value judgment about the sexual needs or activities of the queer community depicted in the films. These are complicated, sexually charged texts that willingly engage in challenging conversations about the intermingling of sex and danger in the gay community. By centering the hunt for anonymous intimacy as focal points of the narrative (slightly less so in Knife, quite a bit more in Stranger), both films tackle the uncomfortable reality that in the gay community the opportunity to meet and fuck another man requires putting your life in their hands. 

One final point for consideration is the fantasy-like aesthetic of both films. In addition to featuring an almost exclusively homosexual cast of characters, Knife + Heart and Stranger by the Lake are both removed from a contemporary historical context. Knife + Heart is set in the late 70s, the period immediately before the AIDS crisis forever altered the conversation about queer sex and risk. On the surface, Stranger by the Lake appears to be a modern film, but its idyllic, isolated setting is removed from any visual signifiers that connote a specific time (up to and including Michel’s commendable porn star facial hair). This could be 2013 or it could be the 1970s. 

In both cases, gay sex is presented in a casual, non-fussy way that extends to the depiction of prophylactics. Protection in these worlds is either non-existent (Knife) or dismissed (Stranger). Despite the fact that both films take place in a reality-adjacent gay paradise, it is impossible to watch these queer-centric texts, which are so willing to interrogate the politics of “risky” sex, without the looming spectre of HIV/AIDS. This adds an additional layer to a reading of the films: despite the oasis-like removal of time and setting, the danger threatening these characters is simultaneously homicidal (from community members) and predictive (the implied health risk posed by disease). 

Conclusion

As it stands, Knife + Heart and Stranger by the Lake are two of the most audacious, explicitly sexualized examples of contemporary queer horror. Both films stand in stiff resistance to watered-down North American entries that attempt (and often fail) to deal with “risky,” anonymous gay sex. The closest possible comparison is William Friedkin’s problematic 1980 entry Cruising, which is more interested in the “walk on the wild side” experience of its straight protagonist than fleshing out the interior lives or motivations of its queer characters. 

In contrast, what we see in Knife + Heart and Stranger by the Lake is a willingness by Gonzalez and Guiraudie to interrogate and complicate queer desire in a candid, terrifying, and explicit fashion. That these films are challenging and nuanced and, most importantly, entertaining is laudable. Leave it to the French to give us politically conscious cinema hidden amidst a few choice meat tubes.

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