Delay Late And Delollar Short

Hey all,

So the post planned for this week has to be pushed back, unfortunately. It's disappointing, I know, but there are so many things I had and still have to do that there wasn't much time for Halloween blog-related things. I don't intend on giving up on it any time soon, but today just wasn't going to work out, unfortunately.

-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part Twenty-Five): Tigers Are Not Afraid

(trailer)

Like I said last week, this was supposed to be where I talked about Robert Eggers’ new movie, The Lighthouse, but I messed up the dates -- it comes out this weekend -- so instead let’s take a look at a different movie that came out this year (in English-speaking countries, at least), Tigers Are Not Afraid, or Vuelven, directed by Issa Lopez. And while we’re still on the theme of “reflections,” we may as well start drawing comparisons to a similar magical realism movie with horror elements, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.

To be fair, the movie kind of invited the comparisons itself by having a quote from Del Toro in its trailer. Besides, if you were going to invite comparisons, you could do worse than a movie like Pan’s Labyrinth. But let’s start with the differences, first.

Tigers sets itself in the modern day, with its magical elements coming from the three pieces of chalk the main character, Estrella, comes into possession of. Each piece of chalk represents a wish that she can make, but she quickly learns that what she says and what she wishes to happen are never quite the same thing.

Also different are the child characters aside from the protagonist. Pan’s Labyrinth intentionally only had one child character (the baby doesn’t count), portraying its Spanish Civil War setting through the eyes of a child who could not be more isolated. Tigers Are Not Afraid, meanwhile, has four other children supporting Estrella as she tries to cope with the world around her. It’s a different dynamic; it promotes a sense of group unity that Labyrinth lacked.

What Tigers Are Not Afraid keeps, though, are a lot of the things that made Pan’s Labyrinth so strong of a movie. Magical realism stories like these are traditionally Hispanic/Latin American, and without meaning to say the originals do it better, these movies replicate those same sorts of feelings. The way the movie plays out, it’s plausible that the chalk simply had no effect at all, and that Estrella’s experiences with the supernatural were simply hallucinations, possibly as a result of trauma.

On top of this, Tigers also has to keep one final story plate spinning: its own nested story about a prince and a tiger, using it as an allegory for everything that’s happening. And again, it’s rather effective, and the two combine at the end for a final sequence.

The only reason this movie might be a difficult recommend (provided you’re not a heathen and deathly opposed to reading subtitles) is that it’s currently only on a fairly niche streaming service, the horror-focused Shudder. But if you do already have it or you otherwise have access to it, this should be on your list.

-F

Next time: Something different…

Raindrops on Roses (Part Twenty-Four): Suspiria (2018)

(trailer)

How do you look at a movie like Suspiria (1977) and think “You know what this needs? Less color and a more intimate soundtrack. And also it needs to be at least an hour longer”? Because that’s what this is. Just after the trailers play and the logos announce who made the movie, a title card appears: Six acts and an epilogue, it says. This movie has no shame.

One of the most prominent pieces of marketing material I saw for this movie was this quote by the director, Luca Guadigno. He says that this is not an attempt to remake the 1978 Giallo film, but to recreate the feelings he had when he first saw that movie. And look, I don’t want to read too much into that -- like, drawing one-to-one comparisons between the two films gets pretty difficult pretty quickly -- but it does open up the possibility of a new label for this sort of movie: the “spiritual companion piece”.

Still, though, an hour longer? Before I’d seen both movies, I had to wonder, what got added in that extra hour that justifies itself in some way. The answer, I think, lies in the extension of some of the original movie’s themes. For example, Suspiria (1977) goes out of its way to mention that Helena Markos was a Greek Immigrant to Germany, and was shunned by the locals for fear that she was a witch. The 2018 film expands this to set the film specifically in West Germany post-World War II and introduces a subplot involving a character looking for their partner after the war separated them.

A lot of the movie, then, goes out of its way to present itself as the more mature option, from its own “kills”, to its muted aesthetic, to how it’s mentally aged up its characters. But at the same time, changing the plot like this reinvigorates the mystery to those who have seen the previous movie.

Susie, Sarah, Olga, Markos, these characters are all here. But they’re in a whole different movie, and I noticed as I watched these films back-to-back, they complement each other really well. Whether you want a sometimes-too-long dirge about the holocaust or a bright and colorful mystery slasher, Suspiria is there for you.

-F

Next time: This is a little awkward. The intention was to talk about Robert Eggers’ new movie, The Lighthouse as a comparison to The Witch (hence the “reflections” theme) but it looks like I miscalculated. I’ll still talk about a horror movie next week, but now I need to figure out what.

Raindrops on Roses (Part Twenty-Three): The Witch

(trailer)

This is, like, the horror movie that got me into horror movies, if that makes sense. I hope it does, because, while The Witch (stylized at The VVitch for reasons we’ll get into) does do a lot of things right in terms of horror -- especially in creating and maintaining dread -- a sizeable chunk of its audience did not take well to it. It has the same problems, I think, that It Comes At Night -- a movie I talked about last year -- had. It was marketed in a way that lead people to believe it was something it wasn’t.

So what is The Witch not? Well, it’s not over-the-top, for one thing. It’s a very subdued sort of horror, the kind that you have to make when you’re working on a rather small budget and with uncooperative animals. The fact that it looks as great as it does is definitely a testament to how well they used the money the filmmaker’s had.

But when I say subdued, I also mean in how it presents itself. The titular witch, for example, doesn’t really show herself for much of the movie. I mean, she’s there pretty early on and the camera is never demonstrated to be unreliable so the audience knows she’s there throughout the movie, but the way the movie plays out, much of our protagonists’ misfortune could easily be attributed to mundane problems.

This is something that I think is actually to the movie’s detriment. It’s not decisive. It can’t seem to decide whether the events are all because of some hallucinogenic corn rot or because the devil himself is destroying a puritan family, and that threatens to tear the movie apart.

I criticize The Witch a lot, but that’s only because the rest of it is so great. Like Suspiria and other well-made movies before it, it has a very specific aesthetic in mind and uses that to carry most of the mood. This isn’t just in the muted tones or the dress or the cinematography, but also in the characters. How they talk, what they talk about, everything that could be done to transport the audience back to the seventeenth century, this movie tries to do, even extending to the marketing materials. People thought The VVitch really was how you spelled the title, because that's how people did back then.

“A New England Folktale” is the movie’s tagline, and it plays out like one. I don’t want to spoil more than I already have, but when watching (or rewatching, if you’re good and watching these movies before I write about them), look at each character’s most obvious wants. William wants to experience mortal grief to further his eternal reward. Caleb is going through puberty and the sexual ideas that go with it. Thomasin longs for the pleasures of England. Each of them (and the other characters) receives these things, but in a “be careful what you wish for” sort of way.

Plus, there are only, like, three jump scares. If that, like me, was your barrier from seeing more horror, this is certainly a good place to start getting past that to the good stuff in the middle.

-F

Next time: Suspiria (2018), directed by Luca Guadigno

Raindrops on Roses (Part Twenty-Two): Suspiria (1977)

(trailer)

Let’s start with this: “The only thing scarier than the last twelve minutes are the first ninety-two” is one hell of a tagline, even if it’s not strictly speaking true. From just looking at the plot summary, Dario Argento’s Suspiria, not to be confused with the 2018 version directed by Luca Guadagnino, takes the form of a pretty by-the-numbers slasher film, though that itself requires some moving around of the timeline a bit. It’s about seventeen years after Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho started codifying the genre, but calling Suspiria a “by-the-numbers” slasher movie ignores the timeline, where the glut of that genre that started after Halloween’s release a year later.

Mentioning Alfred Hitchcock is actually rather important, though. The genre of cinema Argento’s work falls under, “Giallo”, professes that it owes quite a lot to Hitchcock’s style of filmmaking. Giallo is a pulp-y style -- it’s Italian for “yellow”, as in, the color of pulp novella pages -- and strives to match Hitchcock’s methods of doling out information and creating suspense. And this is something that Suspiria does quite well. If there’s any reason to watch Suspiria, it’s for the atmosphere.

If you haven’t actually seen this movie yet (i.e., if you didn’t watch it in the week between when I said I was going to talk about it and now), at least take a look at this still frame:

It’s almost overwhelming to look at, and that’s the point. Almost the whole movie, especially during the movie’s more violent moments, looks like that. And when it’s not the environment, it’s the lighting, and even when it’s neither of those, the soundtrack provides an additional layer of tension. There’s a specific eighteen or nineteen note melody that is set to trigger an almost pavlovian response in its audience.

If there’s one thing that Suspiria (1977) does poorly, it’s in the other half of the Hitchcock method I mentioned earlier: the doling out of information. It’s a slasher movie, but it also wants to be a mystery movie, it wants to invest its audience in who is killing these people and how. Putting aside the forty-plus years of pop-culture osmosis that this movie has been through, there’s also the fact that the same theme, that same overarching nineteen note melody also contains hints of a rather spoilery word. I won’t repeat it here, just in case, but seriously, it’s right there in the theme. You’ll know what’s going on before the opening credits are over if you’re paying attention.

But that still sells the movie short, I think. Because it is an exercise in atmosphere more than anything else, and some might argue that knowing the answer to the movie’s mystery only makes it all the more intriguing of a film. There’s a reason it’s survived as long as it has. It’s still a pleasure to watch, and I’d recommend it to just about anyone who is interested in its sort of horror.

-F

Next time: The VVitch, directed by Robert Eggers