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Griffin Dunne’s ‘Practical Magic’ Is a Witchin’ Good Time

Griffin Dunne’s Practical Magic is impractically tender and angelic (as far as genre representation goes), and I mean that as a compliment. It’s a film that centers around death and yet is a celebration of life. Characters nurture hope in the darkness, find meaning within the macabre, and reveal empowerment in individual representations of our honest, authentic selves.

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For those unaware of the 90s charms this film conjures, Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman play the Owens sisters (Sally and Gillian, respectively). A terrible curse plagues all Owens women, accidentally enacted by a great-relative during colonial times. Whenever a man falls in love with an Owens lady, and marital bliss has taken hold, the male dies. From young ages, Sally and Gillian dream of finding their someday princes – but cruel fates will not allow for such happiness. Sally tries, which leaves her widowed and with two children, while Gillian pursues a life of sipping poolside tiki drinks and aggressively tanned boy-toys.

Then Jimmy Angelov (Goran Visnjic) enters Gillian’s life, subsequently exits after an abusive outburst, and reenters in the form of an evil apparition who haunts the Owens’ homestead because his corpse may or may not lay six-feet-under in their garden.

Thanks to classic 90s naivety, Practical Magic transforms what’s an observantly blackened tale (multiple men croak) into what’s cornier than Cupid’s favorite Hallmark special. As a hangman’s noose wraps around the oldest Owens’ neck, the score suggests moods akin to a pretty-in-pink tea party. As rituals are performed, the Owens sisters must improvise with household ingredients like when a pentagram is drawn using Reddi Wip from the refrigerator. Even the “sassier” scenes, when Gillian returns home and busts into PTA meetings on Sally’s timid behalf, are all so squeaky-clean and wholesome. It’s the kind of movie that favors togetherness over revenge, as enemies (mothers of children who chant “witch!” like bullies) come together in the name of ceremonial purification for a sweep-it-clean third act.

All that, plus a groovy midnight margarita dance sequence that hits out of nowhere, set to “Put The Lime In The Coconut?” Practical Magic is sweeter than cherry pie dipped in chocolate and topped with a mound of frosting (instead of whipped cream).

Of course, this is a movie about love. In its blissful, tragic, uncontrollable forms. How love heals us, damages us, and comes in customizable packages. Sally pursues her knight-in-shining-armor slice of suburban normalcy that many of us define as this Disneyfied version of perfection. Gillian would rather let her freak flag fly with European lothario types while cheesy porno background music plays. Aunt Frances (Stockard Channing) and Aunt Jet (Dianne Wiest) spend their lives together as companions who pass on their namesake supernatural trades, valuing domestic accompaniment. It’s this accountable one-size-doesn’t-fit-all approach that pushes against the very Lifetime Channel tone it skews, once again valuing a person’s unique gifts over conformity. Part parody, part love-letter to romantic variation. Like how I started saying “YOLO” ironically but then learned to love the admittedly-buffoonish phrase.

Practical Magic owes all its powers over audiences to Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, whose chemistry on-screen is the true…hehe…magic. Two characters atoning for the “sins” of their ancestral past, driving down highways represented by hilariously inept green screen backdrops, serving sisterhood with this devotion you can’t help but cherish. Women getting back to basics, taking matters into their own hands, and seizing control of the lives they’ve let others dictate. Not to mention, Kidman gets to have some performative fun when Jimmy rises from the grave, out of his rose bush entanglement, and possesses Gillian. Kidman’s devious smirk within a circle of chanting housewives plays like she’s having a ball, still provoking sweaty intensity.

I’d imagine an exorcism would knock the wind out of anyone.

What can I say? I’m just a dude who’s a sucker for sisterhood flicks about broomsticks, levitation, and saccharine-sappy endings (it seems). Practical Magic is about eating chocolate cake for breakfast and defying convention as outsiders deem appropriate. About breaking the shackles of our heritage by embracing those very things we’d instinctually scramble to escape. It’s not the tone of film I’d immediately gravitate toward, but that’s the glory of being forced to watch something you’d otherwise stash for a rainy day. Consider this critic bewitched by a sunshiny-bright take on what could have been another overdramatic ode to lust and heartbreak gone too stern. Sincerity and silliness, instead, win with Halloween vibes to boot.

This witchy-whimsical romance was brought to me for July’s Patreon review request, by – how shocking – coven enthusiast and possible spellcaster herself (jury is still out), Amelia, who guested on the Patchwork episode of Certified Forgotten. Congratulations, you’ve earned yourself another Practical Magic convert.

Pre-Code Queerness in James Whale’s ‘The Old Dark House’

James Whale is rightly seen as one of the masters of horror cinema; his two explorations of Mary Shelley’s infamous Creature – in Frankenstein (1931), and the matrimonial sequel Bride of Frankenstein (1935) – have gone down in history as some of the genre’s best. But the film that Whale made in-between these two masterpieces, The Old Dark House (1932), is a weird and wonderful outing which helped to cement Whale not only as a great creator of horror films, but as a director who explored camp and queerness in pre-Code Hollywood. It proved him to be someone capable of shifting from the comical to the poignant at the drop of a hat.

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The Old Dark House is a different kind of horror to the ones that Whale is most known for. Instead of literary classics, this film is rooted in a different horror tradition: seeking refuge from a storm, a group of travelers stumble upon an odd and terrifying family and must do their best to survive the night. Whale’s film is  full of things that might be seen as cliche, from the fact it takes place on a dark and stormy night, to the deep-buried family secrets, and screaming waifs. But the joy of The Old Dark House comes from the fact that it has so much fun with the band of travelers – all of them seemingly stock characters, from its damsels in distress to its well-to-do married couple and ominous butler – embracing and poking fun at those very cliches, and revealing hidden depths to them along the way; truly, no one here is quite what they appear to be.

Whale’s films often draw on ideas of queerness by presenting a perspective that gives sympathy to outsiders, people who are perceived as being unnatural. While this is at its most explicit in his Frankenstein films – the Creature and his Bride are literally created in a way that goes against the natural world – the same perspective is used with the “godless” residents of The Old Dark House. This sympathy is employed in tandem with ideas of camp to create a portrait of queerness that could thrive under the unregulated conditions of pre-Code Hollywood, not needing to worry about censorship or moral decency. Some of this is done in admittedly broad strokes. Ernest Thesiger embodies Horace Femm through gestures and mannerisms that might read as stereotypical now, and the actor possesses a nervous energy that might seem at odds with the more sombre notes of gothic horror that pervade much of the film. But it’s the way these elements play off of each other, a serious approach to the gothic tradition, and a knowing nudge-nudge-wink-wink to the audience, that illuminate the ideas of camp and queerness in the film. 

As much as Thesiger’s performances might veer towards the overly broad, The Old Dark House wears its subversion of gender and sexuality on its sleeves. The head of this dysfunctional family is portrayed by a woman (Elspeth Dudgeon), and it’s never treated as a drag role or played for comedy. This allows The Old Dark House to offer a level of serious commentary on the performance of gender that remains a rarity to this day. 

These ideas are explored in greater depths in the performances of Thesiger and Eva Moore, who plays his domineering sister. While he lisps and minces, Moore’s performance has a rough, masculine edge to it. That masculinity also manifests itself in repressed sexuality; her admonishment of Margaret (Gloria Stuart) as she changes out of her wet clothes walks a fine line between frustration for Margaret’s perceived sinfulness, but also Rebecca’s inability to act on her own desires. She describes Margaret’s clothes as “fine,” but her body as “finer,” full of anger with the fact that both things will rot. The declaration of a woman who, like so many others in the house, might be seen as godless.

It’s the house itself that seems to offer up a kind of queer space, somewhere between a sanctuary and death-trap. The characters who take shelter in the house are all seemingly aggressively heterosexual, and they’re placed at odds with the queer figures of the Femm family, from the queer-coded siblings Rebecca and Horace, to the strange, silent Morgan (Boris Karloff). As the film reaches its fiery climax, Morgan’s silence takes on a uniquely queer dimension. The pyromaniac third Femm sibling escapes and tries to raze the house to the ground. Even though he fails in this endeavour – and perishes in the process – the moment where Morgan embraces and then picks up the corpse of this deceased deviant is embedded with a kind of romance; the two men in a pose that reads like a kind of tragic tableau. Morgan’s silence becomes a variation on Rebecca’s anger, something that comes from a place of repression, the only way that Morgan knows to try and express his longing, through silent solidarity, and a kind of intimacy that he can only offer to someone who’s already dead.

The idea of intimacy and death are entwined in Whale’s films, most explicitly in Frankenstein and Bride. At the climax of the first Frankenstein it’s no wonder that the creature says “we belong dead.” He’s built from the dead, and he seems to think that’s where he should return. The striking thing about this is that Whale plays it for tragedy, presenting Karloff’s Creature as someone who exists outside of the norms of society, but who should be pitied for it, rather than vilified. In these films, the idea of the dead is used as a way of queering the creation of life. 

The Old Dark House also presents pathos and pity for its queer characters (as seen in Morgan’s silent intimacy), offering a focus on queerness that was rarely seen at the time. It also offers comic subversions and refusals to heterosexual norms. When Rebecca begrudgingly offers her quote-unquote guests shelter from the storm, she informs them that there will be “no beds,” the stark opposite of the kind of straight lust that would pervade horror films through the late 20th century as the genre moved towards slashers. Here, it’s the straight characters who are presented as outsiders; it’s clear where Whale’s sympathies lie in The Old Dark House; as is so often the way with his films, he finds himself offering sympathy to the characters played by Karloff.

The self-awareness that Whale uses to define The Old Dark House exists not only through the kind of characters that he presents, from the butch/femme dynamic of the Femm siblings, to queering of their father, but also in the ways that he toys with the ideas of genre and the conventions of the haunted architecture. The Old Dark House is full of striking images that offer legitimate chills; distorted mirrors making faces freakish, the intimidating movements of Morgan – before the truth about him is revealed – but the film also shows an understanding of how to poke fun at these conventions, letting Whale indulge in the camp excesses of the horror genre.

The film is driven by one of the oldest clichés in the history of horror: the dark and stormy night. The Old Dark House leans into these ideas, and the camp comes from the excess of cliché tropes in comparison to its more low-key spine-chilling moments. A window blows open and knocks a woman over in a delightfully over the top moment, putting the “stormy” into that classic cliché. In contrast to this, there’s a moment where an arm – attached to someone unseen – creeps over the top of someone in order to shut a door and trap them. Whale’s queerness is sly, drawing on the conventions that define it – femininity, camp humor, and the bending of gender roles. By hiding some of this within the conventions of a horror film, the camp becomes queer when it is considered alongside the other elements that Whale brings to the fore.

In the end, what’s most striking about Whale’s queer characters is the humanity that he imbues them with; so often, especially in horror and suspense films, queerness is shorthand for a kind of murderous rage. And even when those ideas are explored well – in Hitchcock films like Rope and Strangers on a Train – it can become a little draining to be confronted with it at every turn. The wonder of The Old Dark House is that it gives these characters weird and wonderful inner lives, an irrepressible queerness, and moments of heartbreaking pathos.

‘The Hole in the Ground’ Finds the Irish Horror in A24

Somewhere along the way, horror became synonymous with mental illness. Films about characters struggling with depression or clinical paranoia have dominated arthouse cinema. Any contemporary list of the best horror films of the decade reads like an appendix to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. These films and the unreliable status of their characters have even coined their own modes of journalism, with the phrase “A24 horror” serving as a kind of critical shorthand for anything slow-moving and subjective.

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But the more we see a mode of storytelling, the more familiar it becomes, and the more we look for ways to break outside the established norms. This is what makes Lee Cronin’s The Hole in the Ground such a compelling standout from the current mode of arthouse horror. Like Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook or Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s Goodnight Mommy, The Hole in the Ground crafts a complex and terrifying portrayal of single motherhood. Unlike those two films, however, Cronin’s film is at heart an extrinsic horror story. Its ability to filter folklore through the lens of personal trauma makes it unique, even in an industry inundated with psychological horror.

The Hole in the Ground opens on Sarah (Seána Kerslake), a young mother who has decided to move to the countryside with her son, Chris (James Quinn Markey). Sarah and Chris are both struggling to come to terms with her recent separation; while Sarah finds herself struggling with anxiety, Chris misses his father and pushes away from his mother as a result. This tension is made worse by the presence of Sarah’s neighbor Noreen (Kati Outinen), a troubled woman whose husband Des (James Cosmo) spends most of his time helping her recover from her wanderings.

In conversation with the townsfolk, Sarah learns that Noreen and Des once had a son, but that Noreen became fixated on the notion that their son had been replaced by a changeling, a malevolent Irish fairy that would swap the children of villagers with one of their own. When a sudden outburst from Noreen rattles Sarah, she begins to suspect that the elderly woman might be telling the truth. Chris has begun to change, to suddenly abandon his childhood fears and insecurities, and the boy that remains is someone unrecognizable to his mother. Maybe – just maybe – Chris has been replaced by a changeling, too.

While The Hole in the Ground may have many story elements in common with the aforementioned horror films, those films do not have an actress like Seána Kerslake leading the way. Kerslake imbues her character with endless compassion; even as she begins to recoil from her maybe-son, Kerslake roots Sarah’s conflict in her love and concern for Chris. We feel the love between mother and son in The Hole in the Ground in a way that is often truncated – or even lost – in other psychological horror films. That underpins Cronin’s script with an element of compassion that elevates the whole affair. Horror as a genre is so obsessed with showing a twisted form of love that it often forgets to ground its scares in the genuine emotion. Kerslake never lets us doubt that, creeping sense of dread or not, she’s giving her relationship with her son everything she’s got.

While The Hole in the Ground may center on the relationship between mother and son, Cronin goes to great lengths to establish the forest that surrounds them as its own unsettling force. There are obvious shades of The Shining in his opening shots; we follow Sarah and Chris in their battered yellow sedan as they wind their way across the countryside, with forest stretched in all directions. In the film’s most audacious shot, the camera spins in place, slowly rotating ground and sky until we are looking at an upside-down representation of Ireland. The importance of this opening sequence cannot be overstated; here Cronin establishes nature as the film’s default location and tone, setting the stage for the mythological elements that will bookmark the story.

When The Hole in the Ground was first released, some reviews suggested that the film was let down by its abrupt change of pace. For these critics, the explicit introduction of folkloric creatures served as a jarring departure from the film’s ambiguous psychological tone. It’s an understandable sentiment, but one that seems at odds with the work that Cronin and Kerslake have put in throughout the film. While the movie never overtly states that Sarah is hiding out from her abusive husband in the countryside, with its folkloric finale, The Hole in the Ground makes it clear that she and Chris are occupying a liminal state. Here, rural Ireland – and the creatures that inhabit it – serve as a smart metaphor for Sarah’s metaphorical loss of self in the months following her separation. Her return to urban living with Chris, should be read as a personal triumph, not a simple coda.

But even that might be overcomplicating the power of The Hole in the Ground’s ending. As horror continues to anchor itself in the personal, it loses the power of places. Many of us were afraid of a location – a patch of woods, an empty building – long before we learned to be afraid of the people around us. By leaning hard into the mythological elements of Ireland, Cronin and company remind us that the troubles of the modern world are not (and should not be) incompatible with the superstitions hardwired in our collective memories. In this way, The Hole in the Ground is able to marry the best of a modern trend – subjective psychological horror – without losing the more existential fears that drive some of the best films in the genre.

Hopefully, in time, audiences will discover The Hole in the Ground for the triumph of horror that it is. Lee Cronin might not benefit from the auteurist mythmaking that drives the careers of men like Robert Eggers and Ari Aster, but his debut feature proved that he has every bit the talent – and a great deal more empathy – than any of the leading figures of arthouse horror. And given this summer’s announcement that Cronin would be directing Evil Dead Rise for Sam Raimi and company, it may not be long before The Hole in the Ground finds its audience. For now, Cronin’s film will exist in its own liminal state, waiting for the acceptable horror canon to move beyond the confines of mental illness.

Podcast: Katie Rife on ‘Funky Forest: The First Contact’

When it comes to the horror genre, it’s important to cast a wide net. If, for example, you are presented with a movie like Funky Forest: The First Contact that has some of the most unique and grotesque depictions of body horror in contemporary cinema, but it is done through a comedic and absurdist lens, would you turn your back on that opportunity?

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If your answer is no, then you are the target audience for this week’s podcast episode. From instruments made from a shrunken human tree, to the world’s strangest P.E. game, the subject of this week’s podcast episode offers you the kind of horror imagery that you could typically only find in a big-budget ’80s film. It just so happens that the film is anything but scary, choosing to follow a group of sunsoaked weirdos through their bizarre journeys through space and time.

In the latest episode of Certified Forgotten, the Matts are joined by A.V. Club writer Katie Rife to discuss Funky Forest: The First Contact, the 2005 anthology film directed by Japanese filmmakers Katsuhito Ishii, Hajime Ishimine, and Shunichiro Miki. Blending surreal blasts of humor with Cronenberg-esque body horror – and more than a few A+ dance numbers – Funky Forest is unlike anything you’ve seen on the podcast before. Come for the miniature people, stay for the incredible (incredible) dance numbers.

The Funky Fanfare: The First Contact episode of Certified Forgotten is now available to stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or the podcast platform of your choice.

Sion Sono: Exploitation and Empowerment

Sion Sono is one of the more prolific Japanese directors, with over 50 films and television shows to his name since he started in the mid-1980s. Both a poet and a filmmaker, Sono found some success after the release of Suicide Club in 2001, his film that tackles the high suicide rate in Japan. The film’s most iconic scene is its opening, where 54 high school girls commit suicide at Shinjuku Station. Suicide Club became somewhat of a cult hit, appearing on many J-Horror roundup lists.

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It’s no accident that Sono utilized the female body to explore Japan’s high suicide rates. Even before Suicide Club, Sono’s fascination with women’s bodies was ever prevalent in his work, from his one-hour single location experimental film I Am Keiko to the pink film he directed and starred in, Teachers of Sexual Play.

In Sono’s world, women hunger for sex and men are controlling monsters. Young girls are usually preyed on by disturbing older men, and young boys are largely controlled by their perversions. His work is comparable to Takashi Miike’s when it comes to schlock, and both men are at the forefront of a cinematic movement in Japan that rejected the confines of what films in their country should look like.

For Sono, women are the key to this seedy truth. On multiple occasions, he’s mentioned that while he loves women, he also fears them. On-screen, he frees their bodies, giving women complete sexual liberation. But his thesis is constantly in flux, because he cannot escape his own greedy male gaze, and thus constantly struggles with having his (cheese)cake and eating it too.

The Exploitation

A large majority of Sono’s work features women breaking down the patriarchy, and asserting their sexual freedom. Many of Sono’s characters have horrendous, abusive fathers, and on occasion their mothers are complicit, absentmindedly ignoring how their daughters are being traumatized at their father’s hand.

Strange Circus is his most exploitive, revolving around a story written by a famous author about a  young girl who is repeatedly sexually abused by her father, and the mother who is driven mad by it. The villainous father figure is obsessed with status quo and gender roles, which leads him to destroying his picturesque nuclear family. 

Strange Circus gives Sono an outlet to explore gender identity and the destructive nature of gender norms. In the film, the young child who is abused eventually transitions to Yuji, who needs to kill both of his parents to truly be set free, and in the end, he does just that in a fantasy surrounded by a circus full of Drag Queens. 

But with that rejection also comes exploitation, not unlike one of Sono’s favorite filmmakers, Paul Verhoeven.

Take Guilty of Romance: a film that follows three women, all distinct in external personality, but internally they each have a hunger, driven by their desire to be sexually submissive. It’s not unlike Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, particularly with the character Izumi, a young housewife bored at home who finds herself working in the sex industry while her husband is away.

Antiporno is perhaps Sono’s most reflective piece. The film opens with Kyoko, a hungry artist. While being interviewed for a prominent magazine, she sexually torments her submissive and naive assistant. But at the halfway mark a male director yells, “Cut!” revealing that the women are performing for a pornographic film and that in reality their roles are reversed.

Guilty of Romance and Antiporno are intertwined. Both films are drenched in bright neon-like colors, and feature women who have unfulfilled submissive yearnings. These films serve as vehicles to renounce sexual oppression, but even so, their exploitive nature is hard to deny. Try as he might to escape it, Sono will always be the cisgender man behind the camera, shouting, “Cut!”, even while sexually freeing his women on screen. Sometimes, though, Sono manages to find a happy medium.

The Empowerment

It almost seems like Sono’s schtick is erotic violence, but his filmography is much more complex than that. 

Exte is Sono’s response to J-Horror’s resurgence in the late 90s and early 2000s. He plays within the confines of the popularized genre and uses Japan’s classic ghost, the yurei, to explore the fetishization of hair. Sono pits hairstylist Yuko against disturbed tricophile Yamazaki, who uses the body of a murdered girl to extract perfect extensions that he sells to local salons.

In similar fashion, Sono’s love letter to cinema Why Don’t You Play in Hell gives us Mitsuko Muto, who is a stand-in for the often fetishized strong woman you generally see in action films. Mitsuko drives many of the male characters in the film, from a yakuza gang leader’s pedophilic obsession with her to her father’s demand that she become a famous actress to make her mother happy in jail.

Perhaps Sono’s most powerful female character is Love Exposure’s Yoko, who is often dressed up in Virgin Mary imagery. In Twelfth Night fashion, she falls in love with male protagonist Yu Honda’s Drag persona, “Miss Scorpion,” which brings her to the realization that she is attracted to both men and women, which makes her a powerful queer character.

Unlike Guilty of Romance or Antiporno, sex is not what drives the women of these three films. In fact, in both Love Exposure and Why Don’t You Play in Hell, Sono pushes the men in love with these women to the edge of self reflection, ultimately embracing their partners as strong, powerful women.

CONCLUSION

In Sion Sono’s universe, women are constantly searching for body autonomy, and he provides his actresses a space to reject societal norms. In a world where women are often told they aren’t allowed to have control over their own bodies, Sono’s women are free to choose their own path, and it’s a beautiful thing to behold.

Reliving the Adolescent Trauma of ‘Sleepaway Camp’

Uterus Horror is a subgenre of horror films that focus on the unique experience of puberty and discovering sexuality as a woman, using horror elements to emphasize and/or act as a metaphor for that experience. Earlier this year, I began a column naming and defining the subgenre while also examining films under this umbrella. I previously discussed how Uterus Horror got its roots with Carrie and gained more recent popularity with the cult favorite Ginger Snaps.

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While the films I previously mentioned focus more on the puberty side of the subgenre, now I want to dive into a different cult favorite that focuses more on the sexuality side of Uterus Horror: Sleepaway Camp. “But, Molly,” you ask, “Sleepaway Camp is about a character who is biologically male and therefore doesn’t have a uterus! How can this be Uterus Horror?” The important thing to remember is that while Angela was born male, by the time we meet her character, she is a young woman. It’s also important to remember that Angela’s experience is very much the same as any shy, quiet girl going to a crappy 80’s summer camp for the first time. 

The main reason I named this subgenre Uterus Horror is to make men uncomfortable. Stories focused on young women and their physical and emotional changes are inherently uncomfortable for men to watch, partly because of the gorier physical aspects and partly because they historically aren’t told as much. These kinds of films about young men are typically called “coming of age” stories. For a long time, women were forced to see themselves in these stories because filmmakers weren’t making the same kinds of films about young women. Now that more Uterus Horror films are being made, it’s time for men to find themselves in women-led stories.

Sleepaway Camp is a controversial cult favorite horror movie by writer and director Robert Hiltzik. It opens with a family playing in a lake. As a father swims with his son and daughter, an out of control boat crashes into them, killing the father and one child. The sole survivor is sent to live with their clearly unstable Aunt Martha (Desiree Gould). Jump ahead eight years, and we see orphaned Angela (Felissa Rose) getting ready to go to Camp Arawak for the first time with cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten). It’s obvious that Angela has been very sheltered up to this point in her life, but now she’s old enough to venture out into unknown territory. That also means she’s likely old enough to have begun puberty and start experiencing her own sexuality.

The moment Angela and Ricky arrive at Camp Arawak, the audience is introduced to some of the more unsavory characters. This includes the camp cook who refers to all the young girls as “fresh chicken” and “baldies.” Instead of being disgusted by what he says, the cook’s coworkers laugh it off and go about their day, because what would an 80’s summer camp movie be without creeps sexualizing underage girls? It also takes no time for Angela to become the target for two bullies, fellow camper Judy (Karen Fields) and camp counselor Meg (Katherine Kamhi). A normal part of the camp experience, made more terrifying by a serial killer’s presence.

There is an immediately apparent cause and effect with the murders occurring at Camp Arawak. Each person who dies previously wronged Angela in some way. The camp cook tries to sexually assault Angela, then gets a giant pot of boiling water poured on him. A boy at a camp gathering makes fun of Angela for being quiet, then he is drowned in the lake. Another boy hits Angela with a water balloon and later is killed when a beehive is dropped into the bathroom stall where he’s taking a “wicked dump.” In a final confrontation with Meg and Judy, Angela is thrown into the lake and then young campers kick sand at her. This embarrassment leads to rapid-fire murders as Meg is stabbed to death in the shower, Judy is killed with a curling iron, and even the young campers are found dead in their sleeping bags. We are consistently led to believe the killer is cousin Ricky based on how quickly and sometimes violently he defends his sheltered cousin Angela, but we all know that’s not the case.

The only people who are regularly kind to Angela are Ricky and Ricky’s friend Paul (Christopher Collet). Understandably, Angela develops a crush on Paul, leading to a summer camp relationship. Every girl who has ever been to summer camp has experienced getting a crush on a fellow camper and, if they’re lucky, having a seasonal fling with that individual. Unfortunately, summer camp heartbreak is just as common, which Angela also has to deal with when Paul is caught kissing Judy after Angela shied away from Paul’s physical advances. 

The film’s now-iconic final moment shows Angela, naked, holding Paul’s severed head. The big twist ending is that Angela was not only the killer all along, but she was, in fact, born male. Her unstable aunt forced her to be a girl when the aunt took in the orphaned child. Based on the series of events, it seems likely that Angela finally wanted to show Paul who she was so she could be intimate with him. Paul, being young and a boy in the 80’s, likely did not respond kindly to learning Angela was born male, so Angela kills him to protect herself. Every single time she killed someone in this film, Angela killed to protect herself. The exception is Mel, the camp owner, who she killed because he beat Ricky until he was seemingly dead.

Angela’s story is always a point of contention with critics of the film, and it’s completely understandable. It can be looked at as if the filmmakers were trying to make a transgender character the villain, which isn’t a stretch since there is a long history of queer characters being portrayed as villains in film. With transgender individuals, there is an unfortunate cinematic stereotype that paints them as dangerous. Writer Harmony Colangelo wrote a fantastic article for Medium providing her opinion as a transgender woman regarding these harmful stereotypes and why she defends Angela’s character in Sleepaway Camp. 

I’ve never watched this film and viewed Angela as the villain. Much like Carrie White, Angela is the victim of an emotionally abusive home life where she was sheltered from the outside world, combined with bullying and harassment by both peers and elders at summer camp. When the murders begin at Camp Arawak, Angela is merely protecting herself from those who are doing her harm. Also, despite being born male, Angela is a young woman. She may have been forced into that gender by her aunt, but it is clear at this point in her life that Angela identifies as a woman; therefore, she is a woman.  

When we learn that Angela was born Peter and that she likely lived in a type of protective bubble maintained by Aunt Martha after the boat accident, the ensuing camp nightmare makes much more sense. Not only is Angela forced to fend for herself when she has never had to do that before, but she is also experiencing many things for the first time. She’s around a lot of other women for the first time and based on the way she stares at Judy that first day at camp, she notices that her body is different. Angela has been abused by family members in the past, but this is the first time her abuse comes at the hands of her peers. Even though Ricky does his best to protect her, Angela feels threatened by the bullies and does what she feels is necessary to defend herself. Obviously, Aunt Martha sheltered her so much that she never learned how to handle these situations the way most children do at an early age.

Angela is also getting attention from the opposite sex for the first time. From the camp cook, to the boys at the gathering, to Paul, Angela is having to get all of this attention while attempting to come to terms with her own sexuality. That is a lot for anyone to deal with, but Angela’s unique situation amplifies all of these thoughts and feelings in true Uterus Horror fashion. If it weren’t for Angela’s background and upbringing, these fairly typical camp experiences would have ended with tears in the bathroom stall and sad letters sent home rather than bloodshed. 

It’s important to remember that Angela is the victim of Sleepaway Camp – not the monster – which means it’s time to stop treating her like a prepubescent Michael Myers. It’s also important to remember that, despite who Angela was at birth, her experiences of sexual harassment and first crushes at camp are things experienced by almost every young woman. If you take away Angela’s origin story and look at the events in the microcosm of her camp experience, it is the experience of every young woman. Sleepaway Camp proves that you don’t have to actually have a uterus in order for young women to experience Uterus Horror.

Podcast: Ted Geoghegan on ‘Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead’

When it comes to a film like Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead, what you see is most certainly what you get. Noboru Iguchi‘s 2011 cult classic is a gassy, bloody romp through some of the most familiar tropes in both Japanese and horror cinema. The director of The Machine Girl and RoboGeish has always kept his exploitation heart on his sleeve, and that makes Zombie Ass the perfect addition to any late-night movie party.

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(It also contains enough ass-zombies to make you start wondering if your early-30s are too young to schedule your first colonoscopy. Seriously. Get those private parts checked, men of the internet.)

But just because a film is about zombies and farts doesn’t mean it isn’t worth a thoughtful discussion. Movies like Zombie Ass shine a light on the thriving exploitation cinema industries in other countries; when contrasted with American cinema, they raise interesting questions about the line between cheap entertainment – and something considerably more important for international audiences.

In this week’s episode of the Certified Forgotten podcast, The Matts are joined by horror writer, director, publicist, trivia host, and podcaster (whew) Ted Geoghegan to discuss his love of exploitation cinema and his near-accidental journey into the bargain bin horror credits of the early-2000s. Is there more to this movie than the juvenile joke you see in the title? You’ll have to listen to find out!

The Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead episode of Certified Forgotten is now available to stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or the podcast platform of your choice.

Certified Forgotten in Our Own Words: Matthew Monagle

Last week, Matt Donato made his case for Certified Forgotten as the newest horror publication on the block. This week, it’s my turn to reflect a little on our brand-new website.

On the one hand, Donato and I always knew that we wanted to launch a written counterpart to our podcast. One that would leverage the (relative) success of the podcast and provide us with an opportunity to bring the Certified Forgotten ethos to a wider audience. On the other hand, that approach meant having a clear idea of what this ethos meant to us.

It’s one thing to ask a podcast guest to choose horror movies with five or fewer reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but this approach has always been more the symptom than the underlying cause. To understand my approach to the Certified Forgotten website, you have to understand what draws me to these underseen movies in the first place.

The Origins of Certified Forgotten

Unknown to either Donato or myself, the seed for Certified Forgotten was planted at the 2013 New York City Horror Film Festival. Although our professional paths would not cross for another couple of years, we each attended the festival – shout out to the now-defunct Paracinema Magazine, who provided me with my first ever press badge – and found ourselves enamored with a handful of the same films.

Don Thacker’s Motivational Growth and Scott Schirmer’s Found created the template for a type of film that we would both gravitate towards in future years: festival standouts that seemed to fade into direct-to-video obscurity.

Years later, these two films would become a major talking point in our podcast discussions. When Donato and I decided to start the Certified Forgotten podcast, we knew that our wildly different tastes in horror movies would play well off each other. We also knew that we wanted to focus on the discovery of new films above all.

In our own ways, both of us are unceasingly optimistic film critics. We prefer to praise the films we love rather than condemn the movies we hate, so any podcast we launched would be rooted in this same spirit of discovery and positivity.

What we didn’t expect was how quickly our guests would embrace finding movies with five or fewer reviews. My initial worry that the criteria would prove too restrictive was almost immediately proven wrong; week after week, our guests would bring us some of the most passionate titles in their personal collections. If anything, the feedback we’ve received from our guests has been that they have trouble narrowing it down to just one choice.

And that got us thinking.

The Certified Forgotten Mold

For me, the perfect Certified Forgotten essay straddles the worlds of popular film criticism and academia. When I try to articulate the kind of writing I’d like to develop at Certified Forgotten, I think about the students I got to know during my time in Columbia University’s graduate program. Each of my classmates brought their own unique perspective to the discipline of film studies, but invariably, each of them was drawn to elements of film history that needed a champion.

Essays, class projects, and even dissertations were built around cinema that most people would never think to seek out. Their passion for these films – and their drive to convey the importance of each title to a larger audience – played a huge part in my developing skills as a writer. It also taught me that no movie was too small or too obscure to warrant a thorough examination.

This, then, is how I describe Certified Forgotten. I’ve often said on the podcast that I am drawn to movies that would be the subject of one kick-ass college paper. This sentiment reflects both the enthusiasm of the writers and the relative obscurity of the films. Plenty of people have written about John Carpenter’s The Thing or Wes Craven’s Scream, but the challenge-slash-satisfaction of finding something new to say about a truly underseen film is often the best part of writing about horror.

Since launching the website, we’ve been lucky enough to receive pitches from all around the world that cover a wide variety of domestic and international horror films. And as we continue to refine our taste – our “brand identity,” if you will – we feel that Certified Forgotten could be that home for the horror kids who have a movie they just need to talk about.

Conclusion

If there’s some how-to guide to launching a horror publication, I’m pretty sure that Matt Donato and I are doing everything the hard way. There are podcasts that receive a thousand downloads in a single day; we crossed that threshold for the first time after a year of biweekly recordings.

We don’t presume to be in the same tier as the Horror Queers or Faculty of Horror podcasts of the world. This means – to steal a phrase kicked around a lot at my day job – that we are in a position where we have to build the plane while we fly it.

But. If Donato and I do hold up to our end of the bargain – if we offer competitive rates, a distinct platform, and access to whatever small horror network the two of us have managed to build up – then Certified Forgotten might just become home to some of the most interesting horror writing online. After all, as author Tess Gerritsen once wrote, “Only the forgotten are truly dead.”

And we have such (web)sights to show you.

If you like what you’re reading and listening to, why not join the Certified Forgotten Patreon community today?

Certified Forgotten In Our Own Words: Matt Donato

Here we are. Certified Forgotten: The Website! I bet you’re wondering what to expect from this new venture into the Certified Forgotten shared universe. “What is Certified Forgotten?” That’s the same question I posed to both myself and co-founder Matt Monagle.

My idea was to answer with personalized definitions of what Certified Forgotten means to us, which I thought could contrast nicely in the same article. Monagle gave me some fancy SEO explanation as to why we need to split our mission statements into separate features, so here we are. This allows me, Matt Donato, to set the tone of Certified Forgotten.

Monagle, why have you allowed this?

My definition of Certified Forgotten, which Monagle may reference himself later in his accompanying piece, brings me back to 2013’s New York City Horror Film Festival. A year where Motivational Growth beat Relaxer to the punch and Found. slashed my soul to shreds. These low-budget indies rightfully earned accolades, bowled audiences, but never broke the mainstream barrier.

General movie-watchers support a boilerplate definition of “cinema,” that starts and ends with Hollywood presentations. There’s a perception that if films don’t open wide in megaplex theaters, then they’re not worth anyone’s time. Allow me to retort: no? Hence the formulation of Certified Forgotten.

Something’s Rotten in Tomatoes

Enter Rotten Tomatoes, the critical database and gavel-slam aggregator that dictates many a suburban Friday night. Certified Fresh means watchable, since site scrollers refuse to understand deeper Tomatometer workings beyond “red good, green bad.” No pondering how a “rotten” movie could boast an equal number of 5-star and 0-star reviews, while the next Marvel blockbuster logs an extensive collection of mundane 3-star “praises.”

My rant on the public misuse of Rotten Tomatoes would be a 3-day-long Ted Talk (or this article), and it would lament an even more unfortunate truth: if movies don’t draw pages of critic reviews, they’re written off as skippable trash.

© 2010 Lions Gate Entertainment

Alas, I’ve just described the fate of countless unfairly misrepresented indie horror titles. How? Because for a long while, Rotten Tomatoes lacked adequate genre representation across its critical ranks. Because many approved film critics subscribe to outdated preconceptions of horror’s “vile” or “senseless” nature and set premature crosshairs. Or maybe because site clicks are driven by popular franchises like the next Pirates Of The Caribbean extension.

Maybe you think I’m giving Rotten Tomatoes too much credit, but I assure you, my frustrations are valid. Hence why only deep-dive fans know a horror movie like Burning Bright despite it being a Lionsgate release.

There’s the context, so now my answer. What’s it mean to be Certified Forgotten?

Gone, But Never (Certified) Forgotten

Festival darlings that inked a bum distribution deal and were never heard of again beside a single press release blast. Personal favorites that landed during a period where “straight to VOD” was an industry kiss of death that chased “serious” critics away. Miraculous accomplishments in microbudget filmmaking that were never going to be considered by critics with Rotten Tomatoes access.

Certified Forgotten films dare to be different, don’t pander to industry norms, and prove that studio appeal means nothing to a film’s overall quality. Foreign or domestic, Certified Forgotten movies were failed by a system that doesn’t deserve to enjoy them years later. But here I stand alongside Mr. Monagle, championing films we’re granting a second chance.

That’s the vibe we want to keep alive in the writings on Certified Forgotten. We yearn to spotlight the titles others aren’t, and to reignite conversations around movies that are far-past due for their moment to shine. Not only that, but we encourage unique perspectives and experiences to shape our content. As much as movies can become lost, so can compelling voices in a homogenous sea of websites.

The Certified Forgotten Endgame

Here at Certified Forgotten, we don’t want to hear a pitch you could sell to any other horror blog. We want that brain nugget that’s been stewing for ages, where you recontextualize something obscure as only your words can capture. From antique classics to James Wan’s catalog, no matter how many logged Rotten Tomatoes reviews.

Monagle and I rarely agree on movie opinions, but our first “finish each other’s sentences” moment happened the other night when confessing our intentions for Certified Forgotten’s website. His answer reflected mine word for word, referencing the same now-defunct film analysis publication as inspiration.

It’s our pie-in-the-sky goal, but if we can somehow achieve that level of craftsmanship while helping you understand what Certified Forgotten means within your individual context? We could retire with swelling pride.

Then immediately get other jobs; there’s no nest egg-ending here. Then again, what are fame or riches worth when our legacy can tether to films like Cold Prey, Patchwork, and the one, the only, the immaculate, Demon Wind?

If you like what you’re reading and listening to, why not join the Certified Forgotten Patreon community today?

Podcast: Brian Collins on ‘Cold Prey’

For more than a decade, it feels like the slasher subgenre has been on the verge of a much-heralded comeback. After the late ’90s and early 2000s wave of meta-horror films, the slasher has languished in a post-Scream Hollywood, waiting for the right filmmakers to breath new life into an old format. It was a wasteland for slasher fans — unless, of course, you were already a fan of the Cold Prey series.

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In 2006, Norwegian filmmaker Roar Uthaug directed Cold Prey, a stylish little slasher about a group of twenty-somethings who stumble across an abandoned ski resort (and are slowly picked off by its last remaining inhabitant). Featuring likable characters and a dynamic lead performance from actress Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, Cold Prey has earned its spot in the Certified Forgotten Slasher Hall of Fame.

In this episode, special guest Brian Collins joins The Matts for a conversation about slashers, Norwegian horror, and the Herculean challenge of spending years of your life watching a new horror movie every day for the Horror Movie a Day website. And once you’ve listened to this episode, go back in time and listen to Episode 5, where special guest Rob Hunter walked us through the Halloween II-esque delights of the Cold Prey sequel.

The Cold Prey episode of Certified Forgotten is now available to stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or the podcast platform of your choice.