The Little Stranger (2018): adapted by Lucinda Coxon from the novel by Sarah Waters; directed by Lenny Abrahamson; starring Domhnall Gleason (Dr. Faraday), Will Poulter (Roderick Ayres), Ruth Wilson (Caroline Ayres), Charlotte Rampling (Mrs. Ayres), and Liv Hill (Betty):
In stripping Sarah Waters' very good, long novel of its first-person narration by protagonist Dr. Faraday, the film-makers turn The Little Stranger into a dull, decidedly unscary slog with an inert cipher at the heart of the action in Domhnall Gleason's Faraday. This is not Gleason's fault -- he has almost nothing to work with. It's a ghost story for people who find Perry Como music too exciting. Not recommended.
The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson: 60 years after its first publication, The Haunting of Hill House remains the finest haunted-house novel in the English language, its nearest competitor a very distant second.
There's not much to say that hasn't been said already. Maybe nothing. Re-reading it again, I noted at how deftly Shirley Jackson balances the entire novel between two possible explanations, with a number of possibilities between them, right to the last words of the novel. And nevertheless leaves Hill House itself a horrifying mystery to linger in the mind long after one has finished the novel.
The Haunting of Hill House has proven to be almost unadaptable. The great 1960's adaptation dropped a huge amount of relevant material in order to fit into a two-hour window. The solid 2018 miniseries pretty much threw in the towel on any attempt at a straight adaptation and instead constructed an alternate narrative with entirely different character representations and plot beats. And the 1999 film adaptation was an unholy abomination about which we will no longer speak.
Jackson's novel is about as densely packed as one could ask of such an elegant, often sardonic piece of work. Eleanor's story is a tragedy of forced servitude -- as the unmarried sister, she was expected to care for her ailing mother for nearly two decades. She's either the perfect foil for the house, or the perfect time bomb ready to go off.
Her fellow characters, ostensibly there at the behest of a professor to investigate the famous ghost house that is Hill House, are sharply drawn, though the reader must be aware of how often their personalities are refracted by Eleanor's shifting perspective.
You will have your own answers to the mysteries of Hill House, and your own reactions to the marvelous characters whom Jackson puts in mortal peril at the hands of... What? Hill House is a bit of a paradox in American horror: a Lovecraftian horror rendered in entirely non-Lovecraftian prose and parameters. But in Hill House, as in sunken R'lyeh, all the angles are wrong. Highly recommended.
The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteriess of Kyle Murchison Booth (2007/ 2nd edition 2011) by Sarah Monette; containing the following stories:
- Introduction by Sarah Monette
- Introduction to the Second Edition by Lynne M. Thomas
- Bringing Helena Back (2004)
- The Venebretti Necklace (2004)
- The Bone Key (2007)
- Wait for Me (2004)
- Drowning Palmer (2006)
- The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox (2004)
- Elegy for a Demon Lover (2005)
- The Wall of Clouds (2003)
- The Green Glass Paperweight (2004)
- Listening to Bone (2007)
- Story Notes by Sarah Monette (2007)
Overall: A well-written, revisionist 'nod' to the hermetic narrators and haunted academics in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James. Monette notes in the introduction that she wanted to bring psychological realism and more fully realized characters to stories in the tradition of M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft.
She succeeds in terms of psychological realism and character-building, with the caveat that it seems to me that Lovercraft was far better at characterization when a story called for it than Monette's dismissive evaluation suggests. Oh, well.
Our first-person narrator is Kyle Murchison Booth. He lives somewhere in New England in the first half of the 20th century in an unnamed city. He works as an archivist of rare books and documents at a fictional museum. He has a tormented family past. In his early 30's in the first story, he's morbidly shy, agoraphobic, and a closeted homosexual who seems to be a virgin when the book opens.
Booth checks a lot of the boxes for various characters in James and Lovecraft. Whether any of James' or HPL's characters were closeted homosexuals is a matter of interpretation. In any case, Booth is a sympathetic fringe figure, albeit one locked in personality stasis for much of the ten stories. He's pretty much the same character at the end as the beginning, though he's got a little better at dealing with the supernatural because the supernatural is what he deals with over those ten stories.
The horror elements are where the stories generally disappoint. In riffing on a variety of standard tropes, the stories often lack both actual horror and a sense of the unusual or new. We open with a demon-raising gone wrong in the way demon-raisings pretty much always go wrong. We have ghosts, bodies sealed behind walls for years, a poltergeist, a ghostly memory, a ghost whose attempts to kill people are really sort of pathetic, an incubus, and an evil paperweight.
OK, I like the paperweight, though as its victim is a dick, one doesn't feel much horror about the whole thing. So, too, the fate of several other victims of the supernatural. If the supernatural kills a lousy person, does anyone care? The most M.R. Jamesian story in the collection, "The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox," suffers from a similar problem. The supernatural ends up seeming like comeuppance for venial sins in this story and others. It's a sort of EC Comics-lite.
Throughout, though, the characterization of Booth makes him a compelling narrator. His isolation and self-loathing are the real horrors here, to the extent that the supernatural could be eliminated from the stories without any real loss of narrative power. This is a good collection. As horror is a subjective quality, you may find it scarier than I did. Recommended.
Paranormal Activity 4 (2012): written by Christopher Landon and Chad Feehan; directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman; starring Kathryn Newton (Alex), Katie Featherston (Katie), Matt Shively (Ben), Aiden Lovekamp (Wyatt), and Brady Allen (Robbie): Jesus, there are two more Paranormal Activity movies after this one. The Law of Diminishing Returns will not stop this franchise!
If you're scoring at home, the linear chronology of the Paranormal Activity movies goes 3, 2, 1, 4, 5, and 6.
There are a couple of good moments in Paranormal Activity 4. There might have been more had the movie been made five years later, when smart-phone video technology was better. Why do I say this? Because teenaged girl protagonist (Supernatural's Kathryn Newton, aka the angry, monster-fighting daughter of Castiel's human host) spends about a third of the movie carrying a goddamned laptop around so she can talk to her boyfriend and film supernatural incidents at the same time. Yeah, that isn't... awkward.
Anyway, the demons and ghosts are now nigh-omnipotent, which means that the movie soporifically muddles towards pretty much the same ending as the first three. Newton does what she can, but she's adrift in a sea of nihilistic found-footage nonsense. Not recommended, and really no fun at all.
The Darkness (2016): written by Greg McLean, Shayne Armstrong, and Shane Krause; directed by Greg McLean; starring Kevin Bacon (Peter Taylor), Radha Mitchell (Bronny Taylor), David Mazouz (Michael Taylor), Lucy Fry (Stephanie Taylor), Paul Reiser (Peter's Boss), Ilza Ponko (Gloria Ortega), and Alma Martinez (Teresa Morales): The Darkness isn't a good movie, but it's at least a better remake of Poltergeist (1982) than Poltergeist (2015).
The Taylor family (Mom Radha Mitchell, Dad Kevin Bacon, bulimic teenaged daughter Lucy Fry and autistic son David 'Bruce Wayne' Mazouz) vacations at the Grand Canyon. However, autistic son Mikey walks off with five stones from a secret Anasazi chamber. Removing the stones from the chamber frees five demons from imprisonment in the Phantom Zone. Well, whatever.
As it apparently takes months for these demons to power up, the Taylor family gets bedevilled at an ever-increasing rate by water taps that turn themselves on, bulimia, potential marital infidelity, and loud bumps in the night. Mikey now has an imaginary friend he calls 'Jenny.'
So a bunch of stuff happens that's a lot like Poltergeist, only with nods to the mysterious Anasazi civilization rather than Indian burial grounds. Mikey is enamored of his demonic friends. No one else is. Thankfully, the Internet is quite authoritative on the subject of Anasazi demons! Though based on the screenshots we see, Mom and Pop get all their information from the same web page.
Director Greg McLean made his name with Wolf Creek and also directed the underwhelming Belko Experiment. He achieves some nice horror effects here. He also seems to forget what establishing shots are at key moments. Oh, well. There's a wise Hispanic psychic and her wise psychic grand-daughter to help straighten things out with the help of some sort of demonic diving rod made out of coat-hangers.
The portrayal of autism in The Darkness isn't exactly offensive. It just seems... undercooked. Mikey is either robotically gormless or suddenly HUMAN. David Mazouz does what he can with the character, but you really start to hate Mikey, which I don't think was the intention. Lucy Fry is much better than she needs to be in the role of bulimic sister/demonic punching bag. Radha Mitchell is also fine in a somewhat underwritten part.
And Kevin Bacon! He's quite convincing as a sleazy, affair-prone, distracted white-collar (he's an architect) Dad and somewhat less convincing as Good, Self-Sacrificing Dad. His hair is crazy, though not unjustified -- he looks like a 50-year-old guy trying to look young and failing miserably when he remembers his pomade and failing really, really miserably when he forgets his pomade and his hair looks like a toupee made of badly-dyed straw.
I mean, it's really a bad movie, but it's an enjoyable bad movie. Recommended.
Rec 3: Genesis: written by Luiso Berdejo, David Gallart and Paco Plaza; directed by Paco Plaza; starring Leticia Dolera (Clara) and Diego Martin (Koldo) (2012): Enjoyable fake-found-footage Spanish horror movies Rec and Rec2 become a less enjoyable horror movie combining found footage and traditional narrative elements.
There are nice gory and goopy bits scattered throughout, but an awful lot of this is just rote zombie action set at a wedding. The interesting religious reveal at the end of the first Rec has become here a shovel hitting us in the face over and over again. Lightly recommended for people who have seen the first two and will see the fourth (and ostensibly final) installment.
The Big Sleep: adapted by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman from the novel of the same name by Raymond Chandler; directed by Howard Hawks; starring Humphrey Bogart (Philip Marlowe), Lauren Bacall (Vivian Rutledge), John Ridgely (Eddie Mars), Martha Vickers (Carmen Sternwood), Louis Heydt (Joe Brody), and Charles Waldron (General Sternwood) (1946): Perhaps the most indispensable hard-boiled detective film of all time -- only Chinatown rivals it, though The Maltese Falcon too has its champions.
Screenwriters Leigh Brackett (who would thirty years later work on the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back) and Jules Furthman and Chandler's original novel supply most of the verbal fireworks, William Faulkner having wandered back to Oxford, Mississippi in the middle of screen-writing to drink, hang out with his wheelbarrow, and inspire Barton Fink. Virtually all the dialogue crackles with wit and substance; the plot is twisty but ultimately perfectly logical (though depending on which version you see, the mystery of the chaffeur's murder may or may not be fully explained).
The performances are stellar throughout, with lengthy reshoots a year after the original completion of filming to beef up the badinage between Bogart and Bacall. Hawks directs with his trademark rapid-fire dialogue, and the black-and-white cinematography is beautifully deployed by Syd Hickox. If for no other reason, one needs to see The Big Sleep to fully appreciate the Coen Brothers' gonzo homage/parody, The Big Lebowski, with its warped parallel characters and situations (and use of the word 'shamus'). Highest recommendation.
Poltergeist: written by Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais, and Mark Victor; directed by Tobe Hooper; starring Craig T. Nelson (Steve Freeling), JoBeth Williams (Diane Freeling), Beatrice Straight (Dr. Lesh), Dominque Dunne (Dana Freeling), Oliver Robins (Robbie Freeling), Heather O'Rourke (Carol Anne Freeling) and Zelda Rubinstein (Tangina) (1982): Stephen Spielberg essentially co-directed Poltergeist and controlled its post-production, and it shows: this is very much a mirror image of E.T., released within a week of Poltergeist in 1982.
Much of the early material with the family soon to be beset by vengeful spirits works pretty well; we're in Spielberg suburbia, where the Dad is distant (figuratively here; literally in other Spielberg films) and the Mother is the spiritual head of the family. The supernatural starts with what seems to be a furniture-moving poltergeist ("Noisy ghost") but soon moves into high-tech pyrotechnics, rubbery models, stop-motion trees, and large accumulations of skeletons rocketing up from the muddy ground.
I can't say the Spielberg kitchen-sink approach works all that well in horror -- indeed, many of the later effects here would be spoofed to a certain extent by Evil Dead 2. There are brief moments of wonder, but the Spielbergian need to underline every effect and every emotional sequence with music, flashing lights, and endless close-ups of people looking awestruck quickly dissipates that wonder.
One of the elements of the main plot -- the disappearance of the little girl from her own house into an alternate dimension, with only her voice being able to be heard in our dimension -- is lifted pretty much wholesale from the Richard Matheson short story and, later, 1962 Twilight Zone episode "Little Girl Lost." Besides being afraid of old Twilight Zone episodes, original story-writer Spielberg was also apparently scared of trees, his face melting, clowns, and really large faces. And getting trapped in a crowd of skeletons. It's amazing how many of the horror tropes here previously showed up in Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lightly recommended.
