Dear friend,
these past weeks I have often used the guidance of Scott Derrickson’s top 100 horror list
to choose my cinematic entertainment. At this point, the films included in it that I haven’t watched yet belong to one of these three categories: films that I just can’t find on streaming, classic movies from the ’60s and earlier (which - with exceptions - I don’t find very interesting), and films that are notoriously difficult to watch (which require the right mood).
The trajectory of this week moved quickly from the second category to the third one, as I mustered up the courage to go a bit further in my horror levels. It just had to be done at some point, and I trusted Derrickson’s and Mike Muncer from EOH
taste to reassure me that they wouldn’t be excessively extreme. But quite frankly I think I am very close to my horrorific limit. For convenience, and to avoid repetitions, I’ll mark with {SD} the films from the list mentioned above.
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The Uninvited , directed by The Guard Brothers, written by Craig Rosenberg, Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard, US, 2009.
I chose to watch this film (on Paramount+) knowing that this remake of Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters wasn’t great, but, even with my expectations lowered, I was disappointed. Maybe it’s playing a game of we know that you know, so why bother?, so it knowingly addresses the main secrets of the film in a very lazy way, and bets all on original secrets that I’m not sure fully make sense.
Sorry for Elizabeth Banks. ⭐️⭐️
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Black Sunday/La maschera del demonio , directed by Mario Bava, written by Ennio De Concini and Mario Serandrei, Italy, 1960. {SD}
The second category I mentioned above feels a bit like having to do homework, so an afternoon off after some medical appointments was a good occasion to mark a title off, knowing I could compensate with something stronger in the evening, if necessary; on the wave of last week’s Black Sabbath , I chose another Bava film, knowing from the start that it would be too similar to the least interesting segment of Sabbath: a 1960 Italian gothic horror film, set in a past century in Eastern Europe, adapted from a Russian story (this time, it’s Gogol). And this one doesn’t even have Boris Karloff. I liked the intro, the final part, Barbara Steele’s witch eyes, but the middle part was not particularly unpredictable, and I kept mixing up the two younger male leads. ⭐️⭐️⭐️
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Audition/オーディション , directed by Takashi Miike, written by Daisuke Tengan, Japan, 1999. {SD}
As expected, I found Bava’s black and white a bit too anaesthetising, so I felt the need to follow it up with something strong.
I tried to watch Audition once, almost twenty years ago, but I fell asleep (don’t judge please!) and woke up the moment the sack opened. I don’t remember what happened then, or if I ever slept again.Anyway, that experience kept me away from this film until this week, and still I spent all the time leading to that scene hoping that it had been a nightmare, and all the time after that scene trying to quiet down my stomach.
It is, I reckon, a horror masterpiece, but also I’m not sure about its gender politics: does our protagonist really deserve what’s coming to him? Is sweet Asami, after all, justified in what she does? Will I ever date again without worrying about kiri-kiri-kiri?
I don’t want to watch it ever again, but two days later I held the Blu-Ray in my hand and pondered whether to buy it. That kind of film. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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Martyrs , written and directed by Pascal Laugier, France, 2008. {SD}
Having survived Audition, the following night I decided to take another step into testing my limits. Despite it being known as one of the most notorious films of the so-called New French Extremity, I was reassured by my horror Virgils that it wouldn’t be just torture porn.
And it wasn’t.
Actually, for a long time it wasn’t even what I had thought it would be, and even when it became the film I expected, it did it in a very controlled way: a lot of suffering, but not a lot of morbid display of people suffering. And when a bit of light is shed upon this terrible ordeal, it feels like there is a point in what it’s describing.
So, it is a very well-made film, but as promised a very very hard watch, and I’m pretty sure I won’t rewatch it, ever.
Similar questions to Audition arise: is it really worth it to represent on film a sustained amount of violence (against young women), even if it is to make a point? Isn’t that still exploitation? I don’t know the answers. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️As an aside: what does this French Extremity even mean? The English Wikipedia page basically ignores the ‘French’ adjective and includes stuff with no real geographic limitation, ranging from A Serbian Film (absolutely not going there, thank you) to Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, from Michael Haneke’s The Pianist, to Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny. The French Wiki page (and the article apparently first assigning this label, by James Quandt) actually applies geographic constraints and also mentions them as French frayeurs - how is this not translated to a delicious French Frights, I don’t know.
But also, what does Martyrs have in common with Haute Tension and Ils? How are they considered extreme? I need to read more about this.
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Thesis , written and directed by Alejandro Amenábar, Spain, 1996. {SD}
The debut film by the director of The Others and Abre los ojos lacks, for me, narrative energy: it quickly becomes repetitive, going round and round to arrive at the same destination it could reach half an hour earlier. It’s a simple plot involving too many characters and reversals, none of which is interesting. ⭐️⭐️⭐️
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Kinds of Kindness , directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and written by Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou, US, 2024.
Part of the Poor Things! cast returns on the big screen six months later, to honour the darkest side of Yorgos Lanthimos, reuniting with the co-writer of his earlier and most original films.
An anthology film composed of three episodes about, secondarily, kindness, but mainly about rejection and the struggle to get accepted back. They are surprising (especially the first one) and upsetting (especially the second one), but the fact that a new story (with the same actors but different characters) immediately follows the previous one makes each of them much less powerful than it would be if taken on its own. ⭐️⭐️⭐️½ -
Friday the 13th , directed by Marcus Nispel, written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, US, 2009.
In my view, the most sensible approach to rebooting Jason’s killing spree: though someone could rightly request justice for Pamela Voorhees, she’s not the reason why people watch Friday the 13th; on the other hand, erasing her completely from the story would have felt wrong; so this is actually as a requel (a bit earlier than their time), remixing elements from parts 2 to Jason Takes Manhattan (as far as I know), to make something newish but very familiar. It even reenacts the ending of part 1 (which, if memory serves, was also the beginning of part 2). Sure, all the characters are basically the stereotypes that Cabin in the Woods would play with the following year, but I found it much more enjoyable than most of its predecessors. ⭐️⭐️⭐️
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Deathtrap , directed by Sidney Lumet, written by Jay Presson Allen based on the Ira Levin play, US, 1982.
After watching Sleuth a few weeks ago , I knew that the time would come soon to revisit this one, which still feels like its younger second cousin. They both feature sir Michael Caine and a past-his-prime murder mystery writer in a big house dealing with a second younger character, but this is much less of a two-hander than I remembered, especially during its first act. And when you re-watch it, already with an idea of where it’s going, the second part feels much more diluted than it should be and much less satisfying in its development. Still, a classic with great camera movements to compensate for its restricted setting, and wonderful performances from Christopher Reeve and Dyan Cannon. ⭐️⭐️⭐️½
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Mimic , directed by Guillermo del Toro and written by Del Toro and Matthew Robbins, US, 1997.
Like Thesis, this also feels like an early film from a director who, we know, was destined for much better films; this one screams ’nineties’ and ‘studio interference’ (Weinstein’s, specifically) in most scenes, but nevertheless I don’t feel it’s premise would ever really make sense. I disliked Mira Sorvino’s and Jeremy Northam’s acting, and it was weird for me to see Giancarlo Giannini (clearly a replacement for a different actor) muttering to himself in Spanish. But I also must admit that I was watching it at the same time as the results of the French elections were being made available, so this couldn’t compare with real-life scares, and it might have deserved a quieter night (maybe). ⭐️⭐️
In summary, 9 films:
- 7 horrors, or, honestly, maybe 8, and a thriller
- 2 remakes, 3 adaptations (two novels and a play), 4 original films
- 5 American movies (though the creative team of one is Greek, and another one has a Mexican writer and director), 3 European films (one each for Italy, Spain and France), 1 Japanese film
- Decades: from the sixties (1), the eighties (2), the nineties (3), the 2000s (3), and the 2020s (1)