Three More Horrors

 

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019): Based on a popular series of children's books compiled by Alvin Schwartz, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark often shows its origins in an unconnected compilation of traditional ghost stories, anecdotes, Hallowe'en games, and the occasional plot synopsis of a work of fiction. 

Things drag occasionally over the first hour but pick up over the last 40 minutes with a terrific sequence in a hospital and another running from the police station to the haunted mansion to close the film. Produced by Guillermo del Toro, who also  co-wrote the screen story. Nixon's 1968 presidential victory and the Viet Nam war run as real-world horrors in counterpoint to the supernatural ones plaguing the teenagers in the movie. Lightly recommended.

Host (2020): In this Shudder original, several socially distancing friends decide to hold a seance over Zoom. Hilarity ensues. One of the first Covid-19 horror movies released, Host is short (less than an hour) and to the point. 15 years ago, it was difficult to believe that people would continue to hold cameras on themselves and others while crazy shit went on. Now, it's entirely plausible, thanks in part to the smartphone and to a general uptick in our camera-obsessed culture. A very enjoyable horror movie. Recommended.

Constantine (2005): Very, very loosely based on the DC Comics supernatural investigator/mage created by Steve Bissette, John Totleben, Alan Moore, and Rick Veitch and developed by Jamie Delano and John Ridgway. 

Constantine is now an American based in LA rather than a Liverpudlian based mainly in London. A few character names remain. The supernatural stuff is almost entirely reworked. Somehow it's still enjoyable for all that, with some surprisingly weird CGI used to depict the world of demons, angels, and the supernatural. Because the Matrix series had already been a big hit, Constantine now uses supernatural shotguns and flamethrowers when he battles demons as well as the more traditional spells and sigils. 

Keanu Reeves is fine as John Constantine, as written, and Rachel Weisz manages an OK American accent as a somewhat improbable LA cop. The real showstoppers are Tilda Swinton as the Archangel Gabriel and Peter Stormare as Satan. But they could have just called this movie pretty much anything -- well, except for the fact that Time Warner owned the rights to the characters. At one point, Nicolas Cage was attached to play Constantine, which would have been a whole other level of weird. Recommended.

The Dead Don't Die (2019)

The Dead Don't Die (2019): Writer-director Jim Jarmusch's bleak, hilarious homage to the zombie movies of George Romero is an occasionally meta-fictional delight, though the wall-breaking is generally left up to Bill Murray and Adam Driver's small-town cops. Don't get too attached to any of the characters, and don't expect anything all that normal to transpire in the small Pennsylvania town of Centerville (the Pennsylvania setting is another nod to Romero's Dead movies). 

Driver, Murray, Tom Waits as a prophetic hermit, Chloe Sevigny as another cop, Tilda Swinton as a Scottish undertaker, and what seems like a cast of thousands all gamely walk and occasionally stumble into the apocalyptic night. Perhaps a perfectly cathartic movie for these COVID-19 times. Highly recommended.

There's Something Wrong With That Kid

We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003): The novel's back-cover blurb makes no secret of the horror shown only at its climax -- a 1999 New York school shooting perpetrated by 15-year-old Kevin, the son of successful tourbook writer Eva Khatchadourian and advertising location scout Franklin Plaskett. There's nothing to spoiler in the bare facts. Nearly two years later, Eva struggles to make sense of her intensely problematic relationship with her now-imprisoned son in a series of letters to her "estranged husband" (so the blurb also tells us).

If it matters to the reader, Lionel Shriver is a woman -- she changed her first name in her late teens, as she hated her given name. The school shooting in the novel takes place 11 days before Columbine, and this does get repeatedly mentioned in the novel, as do a number of other real-life school shootings from the 1990's.

Anyway, it's the details of this detail-oriented novel that shouldn't be spoiled: Eva's lacerating and self-lacerating evaluations of herself and others drive the book. Is she a reliable narrator? Was Kevin born bad, made bad, or resulted from a combination of the two? Well, that's the novel, isn't it?

I note that some reviewers have referred to this novel as a "thriller," though there's nothing thrilling about it: I found it difficult to put down, but not because I was having a wild romp. You're stuck inside Eva's head for the entire novel, and that's going to be trying for a lot of readers. She isn't instantly sympathetic. I'm not entirely sure that she's even finally sympathetic, a judgement I'd extend to the two other main characters of the novel, her husband Franklin Plaskett and the eponymous Kevin.

Plaskett needs desperately to believe in the possibility of the American Dream's happy nuclear family. This desire plays out in the novel as an escalating series of what seem to be willfully ignorant (or deludedly optimistic) evaluations of Kevin's escalatingly awful actions as a child and as a teenager. But Eva's also evaluating how much these evaluations are 'real' and how much they're feigned as part of a desperate need to believe in normalcy. But Eva's also the only window into the text we've got. So we return to reliability.

Kevin himself is a marvelous creation, a Bad Seed who seems fully realized without at any point being explained. Is his growing darkness a matter of biology, upbringing, society, or all three? Is Eva's belief that there's something more recognizably and sympathetically 'human' beneath his facade of apathetic cynicism, a belief based on only a couple of incidents from Kevin's entire life, 'real' or just wishful thinking? But Eva doesn't indulge in wishful thinking in her narrative. Or doesn't appear to. Much. So we return to the evaluations the reader must make.

If Shriver hadn't already been an established mainstream novelist when she delivered this novel, I'd imagine it could only have been marketed as horror. Some reviewers seem to believe that the novel is 'useful' as part of a national (American) conversation about school shooters and what creates them. I don't think so, really, except as a warning against moral and psychological reductionism, and a warning to tread carefully when attempting to assess blame. This is real horror: unnerving, nonexploitative, harrowing, anti-cathartic for the most part, built painstakingly through the accumulation of telling, closely observed and minutely portrayed detail. Highly recommended.