Imaginary and Real Horrors: Predators (2010) and The Thin Blue LIne (1988)

Predators (2010): written by Alex Litvak and Michael Finch; directed by Nimrod Antal; produced by Robert Rodriguez; starring Adrien Brody (Royce), Topher Grace (Edwin), Alice Braga (Isabelle), Walton Goggins (Stans), Oleg Taktarov (Nikolai), Laurence Fishburne (Noland), Danny Trejo (Cuchillo), Louis Ozawa Changchien (Hanzo), and Mahershala Ali (Mombasa): Overcrowded with characters and gifted with a hilariously miscast Adrien Brody, Predators is nonetheless mostly entertaining. Producer Robert Rodriguez's fingerprints are all over it, though Nimrod Antal is a slicker director than he. Lightly recommended.

The Thin Blue Line (1988): written and directed by Errol Morris; score by Philip Glass: Errol Morris' riveting documentary, backed by a hypnotic Philip Glass score, got an apparently innocent man out of jail. Randall Adams spent about ten years in a Texas jail for a murder that the film overwhelmingly suggests was committed by another man. The film shows how the justice system can go horribly awry, even after Adams finally goes free -- Texas releases him in such a way that he can't receive any wrongful imprisonment funds from the State. Thanks, assholes! One of the essential documentaries (and films) of all time. Highly recommended.

Grey Gardens (1975)

Grey Gardens (1975): directed by Ellen Hovde, Albert and David Maysles, and Muffie Meyer; starring Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale and Edith Bouvier Beale: Albert and David Maysles, brother documentarians perhaps best known for the Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter (aka the Altamont documentary), also gave us this disturbing piece about Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale and Edith Bouvier Beale, cousin and favourite Aunt of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. 

At the time of filming, the Beales lived in their decaying Long Island mansion (the 'Grey Gardens' of the title because rich people and Englishmen name their homes) . Jackie Kennedy had just paid to have the grounds and exterior of the house cleaned up so that mother and daughter wouldn't be evicted. 

The interior of the house is a colossal wreck, the power apparently cut off and perhaps the water too, ceilings falling in, seemingly only the one room where they sleep comfortably livable. They have money to feed the colony of cats that now live with them. Mementos of the past are scattered everywhere or arranged carefully in the bedroom.

The Maysles pretty much just document the lives of these two recluses in all their tragic, voluble, endlessly talking sadness. The documentary never stoops to bathos or exploitation, but boy, is it hard to watch. Highly recommended.

Last Days (2012) by Adam Nevill

Last Days (2012) by Adam Nevill: Impoverished English 'guerilla' documentarian Kyle Freeman makes critically regarded documentaries with the help of Dan, his cameraman, and Finger Mouse, his film editor. But when the wealthy producer of a line of successful, New Agey books and movies offers a $100,000 advance to make a film about an odd, early 1970's Doomsday Cult known as The Temple of the Last Days, Kyle jumps at the chance to get out of debt.

The only problem from a creative standpoint for Kyle is that the entire shooting schedule has already been set, the interviewees paid to appear. But he can work around that.

The supernatural stuff may be a bit harder to deal with.

Last Days is probably Nevill's most purely enjoyable horror novel. There's a lot less focus on physical suffering here than in Nevill's other long-form works. Oh, there's suffering. But much of it is psychological. And a lot of Kyle's psychological suffering comes from the tension between his mounting terror at the supernatural events swirling around him and his occasionally selfish, stubborn drive to make the film, gets the shots, tell the story.

The details of Kyle's film-making have been well-researched and deployed -- Last Days is almost a guide to making documentaries on a budget. Kyle, for his faults, is an engaging protagonist. And as the details of the Temple of the Last Days emerge, the reader becomes more and more unnerved.

The Temple resembles a number of 1960's and 1970's cults, quite intentionally -- as per usual, Nevill details his research in his Acknowledgements section. Even a glancing familiarity with the subject yields up Charles Manson and Jim Jones as influences; so, too, Est and Scientology. 

The leader of this cult, Sister Katherine, led her followers on a six-year odyssey from London to rural France to Los Angeles to Arizona. In Arizona, the Temple seemingly met its end in some sort of murder-suicide outburst that left Sister Katherine dead as well. But now, 40 years later, the remaining members of the Temple are dying under mysterious circumstances even as Kyle and Dan pursue the story.

Nevill maintains a rapid pace throughout, globe-trotting to a wide variety of places no one would want to visit. The supernatural elements build. The excitement of Kyle at having possibly filmed a ghost (or something) at their first location soon gives way to fear as the supernatural incidents and the traces they leave behind become more and more disturbing and potentially dangerous.

Things get a little bonkers at the climax, but Nevill mostly sticks a landing that's both horrific and bleakly humourous. Kyle's trip to Amsterdam to learn the origin of the evils of the Temple is a high point of the latter stages of the novel, a detailed revelation of something that doesn't eliminate the mystery of where that something, that SOMETHING, came from. There's also a clever bit of universe-building related to Nevill's previous novels that occurs early in the novel; I'll leave you to figure it out. Highly recommended.

Population Zero (2016)

Population Zero (2016): written by Jeff Staranchuk; directed by Julian T. Pinder and Adam Levins; starring Julian T. Pinder (Director): Approach this documentary as I did, knowing nothing about it, and enjoy it. Or look it up and enjoy it differently. Either way, this is a masterful job by the Canadian film-makers. That's all I'm saying. Highly recommended.

Beware the Slenderman (2016

Beware the Slenderman (2016): Documentary directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky: In the end, sometimes less is more with documentaries. In the case of Beware the Slenderman, less style and more substance would have made for a better documentary. It's still a pretty fascinating film, though. 

Beware the Slenderman deals with the 2014 attempted murder of one 12-year-old girl by two other 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Both of the attempted murderers seem to have come from loving homes and also seemed to have no prior history of violence prior to their premeditated stabbing attack on a friend. Over the course of police interviews and psychological examinations, the two girls' obsession with the manufactured Internet urban legend of 'Slenderman' became a key component to understanding the attack.

The interviews (including some Skype comments from Richard Dawkins on the nature of memes) are mostly informative and/or sympathetic. There are no interviews with the girls, though we do see and hear them in police interviews and in phone calls to their parents. 

It's interesting to see how a fictional urban legend created for a site devoted to creating fictional urban legends holds such sway over the girls. But it's also fascinating to observe how what was originally a figure of horror has been transmuted by various writers and artists and consumers on the Internet into a much more complex figure. 

The girls claimed that murdering their friend would give them access to the Slenderman's mansion, located in a nearby forest. Similar fantasies of salvation by the Slenderman (or 'Slender,' as the girls repeatedly, familiarly call him during their police interviews) appear in stories and threads and message boards. He's been domesticated, though it seems primarily by people who long to escape their mostly friendless, tortured childhoods, as the girls seemed to want to do.

The documentary does spend far too much time on various animated representations of Slenderman, provenance unknown. Some are probably from the Internet and others created especially for the film, but the film-makers don't bother telling us this in the body of the film. It's frustrating, especially as there are a couple of areas that need more exposition.

One such area is the origin of Slenderman himself, as a fictional story on the Creepypasta Wiki. What is Creepypasta? Well, the film just barely explains that, and it doesn't explain the origin of the name 'Creepypasta.' I'm guessing that leaves some people completely befuddled. What the hell does pasta have to do with fictional urban legends? The Creepypasta site isn't 'fake news': it's a collaborative fictional project that's already yielded at least one SyFy Channel miniseries (and a damned good one): Channel Zero - Candle Cove started life as a fictional message board thread about a vaguely remembered children's show.

The second such area is Wisconsin law -- specifically, the question of how it is that the Waukesha police were able to conduct hours of interviews with two 12-year-old girls who would subsequently be charged with attempted first-degree murder, all without parents or lawyers present. One police officer briefly mentions that lawyers and parents "weren't allowed" in the interviews. What? As the girls were subsequently charged and sent to trial as adults facing up to 65 years in jail based almost entirely on these interviews, I'm left going... what? What the Hell is going on in Wisconsin?

One missed connection is that between the Slenderman case and a 1954 murder case in New Zealand in which two teen-aged girls conspired to kill one girl's mother. That case, involving Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, was made into Heavenly Creatures, a much-praised 1994 film directed by Peter Jackson.

The film also pulls one narrative trick that would work well in a fictional film but seems awfully artificial in a documentary, this by withholding one key bit of family history for one of the girls until it can be sprung late in the movie. This is just too much narrative tomfoolery, too much artificiality. 

And as I don't believe that non-fiction films can be 'spoiled,' here it is: the father of one of the girls is a diagnosed schizophrenic. This information, and the information that that girl had herself exhibited increasing signs of dementia as early as three, really needed to be laid out early. Overall, though, this is a fascinating examination of many things -- perhaps most notably a truly wonky legal system. Recommended.

What We Do In The Shadows (2014)

What We Do In The Shadows: written and directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi; starring Jemaine Clement (Vladislav), Taika Waititi (Viago), Jonny Brugh (Deacon), Cori Gonzalez-Macuer (Nick), Stu Rutherford (Stu), Ben Fransham (Petyr), and Jackie van Beek (Jackie) (2014): Hilarious fake documentary from the people who brought you Flight of the Conchords centered on the exploits of four vampires rooming together in the Greater Wellington Area of New Zealand. There are jarring moments of violence throughout, but the movie overall is surprisingly genial in its portrayal of the vampires and their kith and kin. 

One of the things that makes the movie so enjoyable is its rigorous attention to the details of living as a vampire, spun at most points for maximum hilarity. It's hard to groom when you can't see yourself in a mirror, for instance, and for a young vampire, learning to fly can be a real hassle. The vampires are aware of fictional constructions of their habits -- they even crib one bit of hypnotic shenanigans from The Lost Boys, all the while mispronouncing 'spaghetti' as 'basgetti.' 

The laugh-out-loud moments are often truly gross -- Dandy vamp Viago's problems with tapping the vein of a victim lead to an awful lot of spurting blood, while new vamp Nick learns the hard way why vampires shouldn't eat chips. Meanwhile, 8000-year-old Petyr lurks in the basement listening to his headphones and refusing to attend house meetings. But he's a good listener!

I mean, really one wishes a 'serious' vampire movie would be this well-thought-out. The writers know their vampire mythology. But they also work some ridiculous changes on their sources, whether it's through Vlad's problems with shape-shifting or the eternal war between vampires and werewolves. What We Do In The Shadows is a sheer delight. Leave your reflection at the door. Highly recommended.

The Deep by Nick Cutter (2015) and The Blair Witch Project Dossier by D.A. Stern and others (1999)

The Deep by Nick Cutter [Craig Davidson] (2015): Nick Cutter, the horror-writing pseudonym of mainstream Canadian writer Craig Davidson, became a James-Herbert-Award-winning nom-de-plume with the horror novel The Troop (2013). The Deep is the follow-up, with a jacket design that mimics that of The Troop despite their lack of similarities. Well, they're both mainly set on, under, or near water. So there you go.

A new disease nicknamed "The 'Gets'" (from "Forget") is ravaging humanity. Victims go from being forgetful to forgetting how to breathe in a matter of months. But through a series of events I'm not going to summarize, scientists discover that the cure for The Gets may exist at the deepest part of the ocean floor, in the Marianas Trench. So about a gazillion dollars goes into building an underwater science lab and an above-water support base. Three scientists go down. Things get weird. Communications fail. Underwater disturbances make it impossible to get back down to the station to investigate. One scientist comes up, dead and horribly mutilated.

So the authorities, at the request of a cryptic radio message from one of the two surviving scientists, round up his estranged brother, a divorced veterinarian whose only son disappeared without a trace a few years earlier. The vet doesn't know why his brother would have summoned him -- they haven't spoken in eight years and were never close to begin with. The brother down below is a super-genius (and a bit of a sociopath). Has their relationship changed? Are all great scientists in horror novels sociopaths?

Only one way to find out -- so down we go, eight miles down, to the Trieste underwater laboratory and the mysteries within and without.

As in The Troop, The Deep's strengths lie in fast-twitch plotting and an exuberantly hyper-caffeinated approach to the synthesis of its horror influences. Cutter doesn't invent new horrors, but he does throw so many old ones at the reader in sometimes strikingly odd combinations that the effect is often one of horror born of a startling novelty of contrast. 

To cite one example, The Deep presents scenes of horrified claustrophobia that riff on antecedents such as John Carpenter's version of The Thing, Alien, and a host of other works that present isolated people under siege by Terrible Things. But in the midst of this, scenes reminiscent of Stephen King's "The Boogeyman" suddenly break out. And then we're plunged into a backstory of the abused childhoods of the vet and his brother. And then back to a new supernatural or science-fictional horror. And for the bulk of the novel, this sort of on-going juxtaposition of science-fictional, supernatural, and psychological horror actually works.

Unfortunately, the engine blows up with about 100 pages to go. The novel seems to lose sight of its above-water McGuffin, The Gets, which have never been fully developed as a threat to humanity. Indeed, the novel could have functioned quite well without The Gets, given how under-developed and under-shown this plague is. Cutter's synthetic horror cavalcade begins to replicate the content of his influences too closely, with a scene lifted almost verbatim from Carpenter's The Thing being just one example. There's also a lengthy bit involving mutated honeybees that's a weak riff on George R.R. Martin's "Sandkings." And a riff on a bit from Stephen King's "The Raft" that gets used once too often. A lovable dog also wears out its welcome.

These failures might have been survivable had the last fifty pages not degenerated into Basil Exposition's Nude House of Wacky Body Horror. We finally learn the secrets of what has really been going on. Well, sort of. But we learn these things from anthropomorphized antagonists who cackle and snark like the bitchiest of Joss Whedon's bitchy Big Bads. We get a very, very old science-fictional and horror trope as an explanation for the horror's existence in the Marianas Trench. We get about 40 pages of Cutter doing a bad imitation of Laird Barron, one with neither menace nor wit but only a gushy, goopy tide of bodily atrocities. We get a damp squib of an ending. We get characters behaving as stupidly and helplessly as characters can act. The end. 

Oh, for a couple of flame-throwers or a convenient nuclear bomb. They too would be borrowings, but they'd be welcome borrowings. Nuke the sight from orbit. Absolutely goddamned right.

Oh, well. The Deep really is a page-turner for 80% of its not-inconsiderable length. However, if you're one of those people who get annoyed by tiny, short little chapters in the manner of The Da Vinci Code or a novel meant for fourth-graders, steer clear. These are some of the shortest chapters you're ever going to encounter in a novel aimed at adults. Lightly recommended.

The Blair Witch Project Dossier by D.A. Stern and others (1999): As with the In Search of... style 'documentary' that promoted The Blair Witch Project on the SciFi and Space Channels when the movie came out in 1999, this book is better than the movie it promotes. The Blair Witch Project Dossier comprises fake newspaper articles, interview transcripts, historical records, photos, period illustrations, and hand-written letters and journals. It's old-school documentary horror of which Poe or Lovecraft might have approved. 

There's real wit here, whether in a name-check of one of Lovecraft's creepy backwoods characters or in subtle and fascinating implications dotted throughout the historical portions of the text. These things suggest a horror much larger and older than that which we see in the movie. They also offer a context for the scenes in the house that makes the events of the movie seem even worse. However, no explanation is offered for why those two bozos are fishing in two inches of water. Recommended.

Docudramamine

Paranormal Activity 3, written by Christopher B. Landon, based on characters and situations created by Oren Peli, starring Chloe Csengery (Katie), Jessica Tyler Brown (Kristi), Lauren Bittner (Julie), and Dustin Ingram (Randy Rosen) (2011): The 'documentary/found footage' subgenre of horror films, so popular right now, harks back to the 19th-century beginnings of what we now recognize as the horror story. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was told in the form of letters and diary entries; Bram Stoker's Dracula added fake newspaper clippings to that mix; Edgar Allan Poe played with fiction and fact within stories that were sometimes published as 'fact.'

H.P. Lovecraft moved the documentary style in a more holistic fictional direction, having his narrators tell ostensibly true tales about fictional events and mythologies and framing everything inside the conceit that the fiction was the real truth about the universe, and recognized fact the fiction.

I have a great fondness for these attempts at documentary horror -- at their best, they're much better than almost every other filmed attempt at horror in the last twenty or thirty years, in part because they move so resolutely away from the grapohic violence of the slasher films that have dominated the horror film genre since the late 1970's. Suggestion and subtlety are what work best in these movies, and Paranormal Activity 3 comes up with some lovely moments of 'found' horror.

The fictional backstory of the three Paranormal films situates the entire narrative within the subtext of long-term child sexual, physical and emotional abuse, abuse that spans generations and is part of the horror. It's a classic example of Stephen King's 'sub-text school' of horror, in which the supernatural stands in for something too mundanely awful to be depicted on film.

Thankfully, one can also say 'pooh!' to sub-text and simply enjoy the movies as a depiction of the pervasive and perhaps unkillable influence of supernatural evil. That the threatened protagonists are spiritually and intellectually unsuited to a confrontation with elemental and generational evil is part of the point of the movies, I think -- no one is coming to save them because they're too dumb, or too conditioned to an unintellectual passivity, to make any real effort to save themselves. They're reactive, not pro-active.

I won't bother with the plot of the movie, or even the characterization. It all makes more sense if you've seen the first two films, though if you haven't you may be a lot more shocked at some of the plot developments. There is clever, killer use of a camera mounted on a rotating fan within the story world, with menace building as we move at a set pace back and forth from foyer to dining room and back again, and things start to appear that shouldn't be there.

There's also one of the smarter, more realistic character reactions to a haunting that I've seen in some time -- a secondary character seems to have seen Eddie Murphy's hilarious bit about The Amityville Horror and reacts accordingly when threatening weirdness occurs. Highly recommended.