A funny thing about aging. In the 1960s into the 70s, if you were a young thing in 1960, by 1973, if you were 43, it was kind of like you were an old woman. You undertake dating and mating rituals that seemed decidedly middle aged, and seem corny now. Anyways, that thought again occurred to me watching janet Leight, now 43, try to entice sexual attraction from Rory Calhoun. Currently, he is in the friend zone, but she is bored with her husband and needs sex, and needs it bad. When they go to a state fair, Leigh sees a booth selling potions, and thinking she can get Calhoun to look at her again, he buys a magic potion. But that night, softening on her husband, she has a second thought, maybe if I just spice things up with her lepidopterist husband so that he will look at her again, that would be enough. Unfortunately, in this story written and directed by William Castle, is has poion in it, and he dies/. She then begins to panic, because she thinks she is seeing faces in the moths her dead husband pinned to the wall. She returns to the seller gypsy, who is not remotely a gypsy, who explains that the spirit of the dead roams until it finds a place to rest in, another person, and body. It is only by possessing the other that it can stop flying about and settle down. With this in mind, and hoping still that Calhoun will be interested in him, she calls him for help, he explains that he really doesn’t feel that way about you, but I will come help as a friend. She still gets all dolled up in a see through nightie and invites him over. Janet Leigh, this is Janet Leigh, at 43, tries her best, but no go. So she still has a roving spirit in her house. Next morning she wakes up to hearing a spinning and a fluttering. Now only in her night gown the bats away at a sort of tinnital presence with a flickering visual element, which is chasing her around the house. Seeing Leigh bat her arms up and down out of that gown is worth the cost of admission. She is shocked to see t hat the moth spirit form of her husband has destroyed his study. Now sweating heavily, in a black out scene, with Leigh’s neck muscles doing some impressive clenching, she calls Calhoun for help again, he is like, I thought I told you, but still he comes. Finally, Leigh just about sweats through and out of her gown as the spinning tinnital blur makes a full on wallpressing attack on. He shows up, the house is a disaster zone, but no one is where. The show ends with a close up of the deaths head moth on the wall, and there is Leigh inside it, at rest again. A very odd story by Castle, but nicely told, if at tv production value level, and with Leigh in a night gown, it has a classic air about it, even exploring what the heck is the visual equivalent of a tinnital attack.
A pretty young Japanese women hits the town in Tokyo, to meet up with a man to have tea, and then they go home have sex. The sex scene extends beyond the norm by following her leg up through her hip to her face to see her exhale in orgasm to then turn away, drop her head upside down and pshaw, why? because this will be the last sex, she thinks, in her life, as tomorrow she is to report to her life in the catholic convent in town. At least that is her impression. But turns out, she is wrong. The problem with convents and their rules of repression as to matters of sex is that, and this same theme played out in Euro nunsploitation, these are young women with urges and it is hard to drive them down. Even worse, there is an occasional eruption of eros hidden at the bottom of the order and convent too. When she is invested as a nun she stand nude in front of the altar for a veil to be lowered over her as if to symbolically remove her from the realm of the body, to live in a heaven on earth, it is startling reversal of the usual prostration of Euro nun horror. She even gets to kiss the crucifix, while nude, so that is pretty darn erotic. That night, she is woken from sleep in the dormitory. It seems that the girl next bed to her got all turned on by the ceremony and is having thoughts of masturbation, so to remain good she steps to the end of the hall to strip to her waist and beat herself with a whip. The newbie is confused, and all turned on by a very sexy sweaty woman whipping herself, but the girl in the next bed over explains, that is how we do it, if we get the urge, we whip it down. Next morning group bath is no less sexy, though the girls must wash through a wet t shirt robe, still. To see all these virtually exposed women washing in their crevices, this is quite the convent. One nun disappears because it turns out she had a baby from her lover, and the head nun, of course, by this point an old woman, who were thought to have transcended sex, explains to the women that if you don’t have sex, no baby will come out. But when another nun gets in an argument, how does this randy nunnery solve. They have the two stand tit to tit topless before each other and whip each other to the victory. This draws blood, and I have to say the close up shots of breasts, and hips being whipped, it is a strange sort of beautiful opera. But now the lust is up, the novitiate hears a noise in the greenhouse and comes up a nun giving cunninglingus to another, another nun later graphically shows her how that is done, with her tongue and fingers. Novitiate is sweating up a storm, voyeuring, Now the older nuns realize they have a kind of epidemic of eros sweeping through these young bodies so do a full search of the dormitory and are shocked, shocked, to see that one nun has a stash of magazine porn with a lot of dirty pictures, nicely shown, mother superior, though turning every page, cries out, how awful, they look like beasts, and then has the brilliant idea that the criminal might be hiding another porn pamphlet under her garments so almost comically when she strips a nun to find her wearing modern flowered panties, she almost faints at the evil of it all. How shameful, they cry, take those off, she obliges, her behind to them all. As per the conventions of the genre, a bishop or male leader gets involved to patrol the morality of the nuns, but of course he fucks one in his office, getting her pregnant. One nun jumps from the wall, where she had a bag with civilian night clothes in it to dress to run to a disco in town to dance and fuck. When two nuns break into the convent, one nun is surprised when one of them gets on top of her and enters her with a how did that get there penis. The escape nun is stripped to her waist and wrapped in barbwire for all the pull on her doing her maximum scratching. Her bloody writhing is slowed down by a camera that seeks to catch every drop of sweat and scratch up of blood, it is a highly baroquely erotic sequence. Things get dramatic and worse when we hear the novitiate’s history, born after Hiroshima, orphaned, etc, she was a bastard from a union between priest and nun, I think. At one point mother superior tries to push her over a cliff into the ocean below. Back at the convent she is charged with being a witch, and they use a method which they proudly declares goes back to the seventeenth century and sounds like an inversion of swimming a witch in Europe. They sit her in a chair, and ply her with too much water. Below her spread naked legs they have set a strange tray with a crucifix pushed into a field of clay, If by this feeding her water, she pees into the box, that means that she is a witch. All the nuns encircle her, the camera spins their rage, then we look down into the box and wait for the inevitable urination, voila, she is a witch. They then try to hang her but I think she goes out the window, to be speared by a gate spike on her. Meanwhile, in the grand finale, the hypocrite bishop is visited by the quite scary blue skinned ghost of the one he caused to kill herself, and I think he is killed. We are lead to believe that the Novitiate finally has had enough, and bolts, leaving the order. It is quite the spectacle in Japanese erotic masochism, served up out of the cover of nuns’ habits.
Starring james farentino as a defrocked priest, and Joan hackett, who I liked a lot, as the master of the girls school, this one is nice if rather aloof entry into the evil girls schools double subgenre of the era. I don’t exactly know why Farentino drops out of the order, they try to show why at the beginning, but he is only going to be dropping by because he has become a kind of demon hunter, and there is something wrong at the school. The girls area nice group, with Ann Dusenberryas the super cute one, and PJ Soles of Halloween fame, next year, the sassier one. But something odd is happening at the school. When encircled by her expressionistic drawings Dusenberry starts to strip in her room the curtain catch fire, and it is quite the inferno. The girls in their coats, chased out into the night, are confused, but have already developed a sense that something is wrong. The police and fire department come up with no evidence of wrong doing. Next up one girl in a rehearsal for graduation starts to speak when her robes catch fire. A teacher gets her hands burned when the typewriter she is using bursts into flames, She is the one who contacts Farentino, who is nonplussed for a time. Now and then an I think TV movie like this has a nice idea, and there is a sequence when he approaches the building to look things over when the camera pans down through the fog and the fog is so thick and atmospheric it tells him the answer right there, though he is too rational to get it. Throughout this all Hackett is supportive, but in the middle of a conflict, some of the staff, or her partner, I forget which, wants to shut down the school, it was struggling in any case, but if there is an arsonist on the loose, attedanced will empty out to bankruptcy level, it is a major stress. She holes up in her lepidopterist office refusing to give in and face up to reality. Farentino gets a weird vibe from her, but by and large the movie remains, what is the word, nonfigurative, abstract, we witness a series of mysterious fires, and no cause is ever discovered. At last, however, Farentino pulls out the priestly guns in confronting hackett beside the school’s indoor pool. Confronted, suddenly, Hackett turns blue, and begins to growl. In a real surprise, because she always played the diligent, serious one, it turns out that she is possessed by a demon, and it is as if the friction of her animosity through the air that has been setting fires to anything she feels threatened by or envious of. It is a stunning revelation, and areal surprise. But then, they are right next to the pool, does Farentino throws her in and see if like the Wicked Witch of the west she hates water, no, he goes total Fr Karras, he grabs Hackett, hugs her hard, and cries out take me, he feels the demon then come into him, in a process that I guess you can only call extracourse, and a strange way to work out the unspoken sexual tension between the two, and then HE is the one who, having taken the demon into himself, jumps into the pool. It then flares up like it has an oil slick on it, all the girls watch in surprised wondrous shock from the door, the indoor pool fire is quite the scene, and then the surprise it, Farentino completely disappears, Hackett is like what just happened, and that is that. The girls graduate, hackett gets to stand in front of the school’s Undying Monster windows, which in the English tradition will bend but will not break, and they move on. A mystereious little number, with a great ending, even if entirely borrowed whole cloth, except being wrapped in rationalization, from The Exorcist three years before.
At the time when Michelangelo Antonioni was taking on America with Zabriskie Point it could be said the youth film market in the wake of Easy Rider was filled with movies like Medium Cool and Strawberry Statement and Taking It, in which student demonstrations against this or that injustice of the system, involving taking over administration buildings, often ended in violence, but as a kind of burst of excitement to stage the finding of true love with your perfect hippie chic. We see the love among the ruins in Strawberry Statement with Kim Darby for example, it was the type. And then along coms Antonioni and from the first half hour of this movie you will think, he too is going to sock it to the man, and raise his fist for the revolution. In his depictions, the cops surround a black student union, and have to flushed out protestors inside with tear gas. We sit in one one of those insufferable bull sessions in which hippies sat around getting castigated by the Black Panthers for being bourgeoisie, at last the black girl in charge seems to have a sense of humor, All of this is watched by Mark, the tall and handsome Mark Frechette, a non actor walk on that Antonioni bumped into a liked because he was “twenty and hates.” At one point, inspired by the revolution, he goes buys a gun, and then takes his beat up truck back to college to watch the demonstration. It is not clear if he takes a shot at a cop, but I think he thinks he shot the cop, as a cop was shot. That, he knows, is the end of his revolution. He flees. And, wow, does he flee. At this point, the movie makes an odd pivot, it is really about him fleeing, than him revolting. Antonioni loses him in the maze of the billboards of American capitalism, lining the highway of his departure, we get 7 up, Schmitts beer, sandwich spreads, he sits by a smog inspection station, he walks under the flags of a used car lot, he poses by the statue of liberty head in a United Airlines lets get away from it all billboard about New York. Finally, he has an idea, he is near an airport, used mainly for private jets. Likely the Van Nuys airport, and sneaks onto the tarp and steals a one engine. And so he if off, and, boy, he really enjoys being up above it all, seeing all of LA in all its spread our highway spaghetti beauty. Soon, he comes out over the desert, unsure where he is going. At this point we cut to Rod Taylor worrying about the whereabouts of his daughter Daria, played by Daria Halprin. She, it turns out, has headed out to dad’s desert house I think in Arizona, unsure why. But she stops at a deserted western town asking directions, and of course shocks the old timers with her easy manner of dress. Turns out the town is really just a few trailers. If I remember she is looking for some escaped radical, but all she gets is a bunch of kids ruinning free who chase her onto a stage to spin about her in sexual curiosity. It is the first little spin of allegorizing like at the end of Blow Up that Antonioni springs, and though she gets back on the road the allegory radar is up. We are leaving reality, entering the desert of meaningless, over which allegory floats. At one point, way out in the desert she has to stop to cool off her car engine with water and gives us an eyeful bending over doing the work. This bend also catches the eye of Mark who just happens to be flying over. He then does an aerial love dance which looks like the menacing circle of North by Norhtwest, but is clearly making eyes at her. At last he lands, and so magically out in the middle of nowhere perfect looking hippie chic meets perfect looking hippie boy, and he agrees to ride with her some ways, sure, as he is good looking, and obviously girls come in his direction, that he might be getting some out of this. They stop at Zabriskie Point, which a sign says is a ten million year old lake turned to gypsum. They cavort, tumbling down hills of sands in the most famous shot in the movie. At the bottom they alsotumble into each other and after some preliminary pecks strip off to undertake what I imagined when I saw it first and still think now must be the most uncomfortable place on earth to make love it, given that fluid and lubricant is required, the middle of the desert. Antonioni then entwines us in their symplegma, a form that I think gestaltic of the time’s ambitions for communal love, and suddenly all the dunes are topped by hippie couples making love. In the parting shot I count 28 couples fucking. So, what can it mean? The truth? Or the truth of movies? That the whole revolution was just a device used by the popular kids to get more sex out of each other? That it really was all about love not war, sex not the violence back on campus. And yet I wonder, to put a desert between penis and vagina is to put a blockage of dryness likely precluding sex, so, is it really a surrender to the meaningless of it all. In any case, now officially have consummated as a hippie couple, daria agrees to go back to the plane to help Mark refill. AT one point they are stopped by cops, and what half an hour after making love Daria sees Mark secretly pull a gun and though the cop goes off she is like out you out of your fucking mind? The meet a willing old time who helps them then turn the plane by painting it into a vehicle of the revolution. Oddly enough the front engine is made the nose of a witchy demon’s face, the wings are popped out into two very flotational boobs, the under wings are on fire, it is a symbol of the sexual revolution, make love not war. But for some reason, Mark decides to fly it back to LA, I suppose to make the news. And the new he will make because the cops are all sitting waiting for him for his return, and sure enough he does return. And the story old as time clicks in, Mark lands but tries to make an averting gesture at cop cars in the runway so one of the shoots him dead. So in the desert of meaningless, he found love, and meaning, but that meant he flew back into it, and in it if you resist a cop in a vehicle, twas ever thus (as four years later Polanski would show in the contested ending of Chinatown). Two points. One, Frechette was so handsome that for a moment in the sun he was a hot property in the magazine and fashion world, gets jobs all over. He was also an off screen boyfriend with Daria and wiki says that they were declared the world’s first countercultural couple. But he joined the Lyman family cult in boston, described in Mindfuckers, and a few years later was killed in prison after being arrested for a bank robbery to fund the family. He tried to enlist Daria, but she balked, and returned to private life. Two. The idea of love and sex dropping without effort into a man’s lap is of course a male fantasy, as men do not like to work for it, the trope still endures in porn. Then and now I groused because it is only the man who meets the type of the geist of the zeit that gets that attention, us hoi polloi never get a lap drop. Then, too, it is mysterious trope, one being killed on the same day that one had perfect sex and had found love. The French call orgasm le petit mort but maybe it means true love is not something of this world. In any case, Daria continues on her way to dad’s Arizona rocktop mansion, a doozy of modenist excess. She sees that dad is already there talking some business partners into a new project. She is repelled by the bikini wives at the pool, she baptizes herself in a rock cave waterfall, and then though dad is happy to see her, she leaves. As she departs, having heard on the news that Mark was shot, we look back in anger at her dad’s house, and, suddenly, in her mind, she blows it up, one, two, three, four, five, six times. And then the explosion effervesce into a kind of floating Jackson Pollock blowing to smithereens, beach furniture, whole libraries of fluttering books, wardrobe, flying dresses, splinters of housing, all the food in the kitchen, all of those bikini’d women’s wardrobes, a cloud of Wonderbread, an avalanche of magazines, and the media, per se, in other words, the whole materialism trip man*, I think when I first saw it I thought Daria a terrorist who really blew up daddy, but it is obvious this is in her mind, and that Antonioni has picked up the rage of the famous generation gap which made it so hard for the postwar and the hippie generation to talk, but his conclusion, just because you want to blow up the world, doesn’t meant that that is going to do anything. As the sunset falls, Roy Orbison no less croons Zabriskie Point, which is, precisely, perhaps, that moment of meaning, which means nothing. (* watching this in 2026, the Washington Post reports that the Baby Boomers as they die will be willing to their offspring that largest transfer of wealth in human history, so so much for that, I always saw the demonstrations as a training ground for future capitalists).
Starring Teri Garr as a witch wife protecting her husband Richard Benjamin this one certainly starts out as a silly witch movie along the lines of Witches of Eastwick and such, that is, witchery as a harmless expansion of healing and good luck precautions in life. As we open Garr is having her husband, Behjamin, lie out at night for a few hours inside a spell created by various herbs and solutions, for unclear reasons But finally he begins to balk, and at last begs his wife to stop casting good luck spells over his life, so that he can live a bit more freely. You can guess the turn of the plot, he begins to have nothing but bad luck. But Margaret also has friends who are witches, and somewhat more serious in their avocation than she is. One of them, I think Susan, sees a spell for some sort in a very sharply illustrated old book, pretending to be a grimoire, and to work it out, because it seems hard magic, she goes visits Vivian Cross, the senior witch in town, played by Lana Turner. Turner has an odd practice featuring a kind of tarot in the sense of placing cards in such and such positions vis a vis each other with the humorous part being that they appear to be gingerbread cookies. I think Susan developed witchcraft to create a large egg to hatch as a demon, for unclear reasons, and it is funny to see it sit as classic plop art on campus and Joshua to agree to stand for a polaroid, she only uses polaroid, in front of it. He thinks it is all fun and games. There is some little kerfuffle that develops between the women which makes them want to use their magic to get even, never a good thing, though I did not quite get what the problem was. But one day Joshua gets up, and coming home from work that night he is accosted by an honest to goodness horror movie demon, a green slimny humanoid with lasar eyes and devil’s horns.It is a startling development, in such a lightweight movie. When Cross, Lamar, is called in, she has yet another deligfhtful current way to cast a counterspell, With a stylus and a magic slate she makes a series of symbols which stand for wherever in the mind or universe the demon dwells. As it is bearing down on Joshua’s car and roof and putting him into serious trouble, time is of the essence. And that is where the magic slate comes in. Seems all Cross needs to do is write out the spell, and then pull the sheet up. Voila, erased, and, correspondingly in the world, sudden the fabric of the night air as if tears, there is what appears to be some lightning but is in fact the demon disintegrating, and then as this demon has come in from the outer reaches and now is going back a kind of rocky avalanche falls down where he is sucked back into the ether, and, wow, for this sort of movie, it is a pretty sharp demonic sequence. But now Margaret, Garr, suspects malice from one of her friends, so she walks out of her front door next morning to kiss her hub goodbye and there is a dead chicken hanging in front of her door, a curse. When Garr senses that the other one, either Susan or Linda, is pissed off, she calls Joshua telling him to be careful. But their call is interrupted by a loud shrill whir that is being sent as interference to their line by Susan with some sort of device and this then back in the room with a ghostly painting where Joshua is standing this whir spell makes all the albums in his record collection come shooting at him ay a lethal speed. They knock him down, he dodges hit after hit, the records shatter, into shards, other hit him in the chest. To see a black vinyl record spin in a movie is a sign that death is near, so this sort of super instrumentalized version of it means that in addition to that intent the reason is someone is upset and had enough of Joshua being a broken record. The odd thing is that this sort of thingt might have stuck to Richard Benjamin typecasting because his trouble in Portnoy’s Complaint started when he came home to pick up his wife, Karen Black, to go to a big dinner at city hall, and she balks, berating him for being a broken record criticizing her. He came in to a record that was bumping idly in the space past the last groove, a sure sign of th death (in this case, relationship), and here he is again, dealing with broken records flying at him. Maybe by 1980 his smart alec humor had become dated and the sickofitness of it was subtly communicated in this self deprecatory way. In any case, he figures out how to break the spell, sitting next to a smoking phone, on a carpet littered withi broken record shards. I it quite a scene with the haunted stereo and record player doing a threatening take very similar to the eyes of Eichelberger as they dissolved to bloody headlights in the 1974 Great Gatsby. It seems that this breaks the war between the witch wives. But it turns out, for the big finale, Cross, Lamar, was being friendly with the junior witches because she wanted something greater. She is dying, and like all old witches she wants her soul to jump into a younger body so that she can live another whole life, it is call dancing in the skin, see Witches, 1966, and she chooses Margaret’s body as the body she wants. This is done primarly with picture magic from a hospital bed but when Garr gets wind of it, or feels the tug of another soul against her soul, she launches her own picture magic and I think her way of blocking the spell is to burn a picture of her. Then Joshua stands at bedside and watches Margaret flare up in a blue flame like in She and she burns brighter as the soul lavs her, and returns to Cross, Lamar, to die. This too is a surprisingly interesting rendering of picture magic, and of soul transfer. At one point Joshua is so shocked by it all he collapses, for a moment we fear he was killed, but it is Cross that dies, and the great crisis is over. The movie ends as it began, only now Joshua is totally on board with spousal witchcraft and has no trouble sleeping out in the backyard at night for however long the spell needs him to to work, ha. It’s a lightweight affair, but it is anchored by three solid performances, Garr, Benjamin and Lamar, which is quite a line up, and then its early triviality sudden blossoms into some serious witchcraft which actually gets fun and interesting,
Undertone drops down to that micro level of almost nothing happening which has made a success in recent years of Skinamarink. In the crawlspace of the mind between doing a podcast on the paranormal from her mother’s dining room table, and taking care of her bedridden hospice-dying-soon mother in a bed upstairs, Evy, Nina Kiri in classic good looking inquisitive brunette stereotype, slowly, very slowly, sonically, comes undone. Sonic hauntings are usually more insidious in that they creep in like a tinnitus and one can perhaps hear more apophenic words in it than one sees pareidols in figures in corners or in the clouds. Adding to the weirdness is that mother was a very religious Catholic woman whose faith in later years precipitated into an apotropaic effort to keep her house and her family safe, so not only is there a classic da Vinci’s last supper in the dining over Evy’s back as she podcasts, but there are ceramics of angels and saints on shelves. There is a byzantine icon on another wall, there are a number of crufixies, and, overall, such shelved figuration wrinkles up a lot of possibilities for seeing things too. But mainly the plot is about her work, and that is that with her partner, who seems to have moved out of town, they go over a series of ten files given him by an unknown source, and we get to listen to the haunting of another woman. Meanwhile evy has to go up now and then to feed her mother and change her mother, we see a glimpse of this less attractive chore once, and as things progress it is almost as if the echo or ring of the tapes she is listening to leak into the house and she begins to hear voices in other rooms and possibly even entertains the fact that while she is podcasting mother is up and about and collecting to her her favoriate little religious statues for safe keeping. This actually means that a small bedside table Virgin mary, who looks like it may have one been a night light, keeps showing up at mother’s table, then evy puts it back where it belongs, but then it is there again. When maybe a third time this happens, the statue seems in close up to scream, so Evy puts it away on the top shelf of the closet for good, though when she closes the closet door, which has a mirror on it, we get a glimpse of a ghost of mother standing in the room. The tapes seem to be preoccupied witih nursery rhymes that had horrible underpinnings in real life. We get a lot of them. But this means that there are a good many creepy Victorian illustrations of these stories, which reinforces the agency of the retrograde Catholic imagery to place us in a very culty place of imagining the spirit world. There is one picture of boys having to kneel atop their bunk beds for bedtime prayers at some catholic school which is choice, catholic school pictures from the pre 1970 era, a rich trove of creepy imagery. As Evy gets more spooked by unexplainable noises, and odd movings of objects in mother’s room, she hears by phone that, yes, she is pregnant, and is not sure what to do about it. At the very same moment, we get into the added little wrinkle zone of audio recordings going way back to the Exorcist, and the Paul is Dead era of the dying Beatles, and that is backmasking, or backwards playing words on the file tape. The Uozyba in emoc is rather too easily seen in reverse by the naked eye as come in, and then we get the name of a demon, Abyzou, who has shown up in some horror movies of later, and is like lamasthu, and Litllith, a baby stealing demon who seeks to curtail and cancel out any births so suddenly we, if noy Evy, realize that if this tape is magically leaking into her house and its contested mother-daughter space, Evy is going to be under attack by Abyzou, which does not want her to have that baby. Justin, Evy;s podcast partner, rolls out the whole research on Abyzou very effectively, scaring the daylighhts out of you with horrifying case studies of mothers killing their children, and even throws in the name of a very rare severe saint to seal the deal (this too a trope), saying the devil made them do it. After finding a decrepit old lamp turned on in mother’s bedroom, she gazes at her byzantine icon of Hodegetra or whatever Madonna, and seems to feel a twinge of abyzou entry in the visual rhyme between its needlepoint jitter and the polygraph up and down of the audio bumps on the recording, nicely done. By saying come in abyzou, the woman in the tape invites it in, for it to do ill, and it being 3am withcing hour (the witching hour is actually, in real life, 4am), we get a sense that the demon has been called in for real. At this moment you realize, holy shit, this podcasting from your mother’s dining room table, site of all that talk, this is really very similar to a séance, and it is very possible that by microphone and audiotape she has called the demon in. And then comes the movie’s most interesting trope. I love children’s drawings in horror movies, going back decades. Earlier, in a drawer, possibly done by mother, because hospice carers usually think elders are no good for anything beyond a coloring book, a drawing of a girl. Now it turns out that throughout the podcasts Evy has continued to rather absently draw drawings of a scary girl without even being totally aware what she is doing. And she cannot see the big picture because it turns out that the big picture is only formed when she has done all the drawings and we see them laid out on the table like a paper rose. I am not sure I have ever seen this before (though I did just quote kinderman with his case papers in The exorcist, the book). And when we see that, we then, through evy, also see, this part I have seen before, the wall at the stairs, the landing, the walls of the upper floor, all of it is scrawled with the same picture of a witchy woman, when Evy sees this, as a red light goes on in the house, and a ghost comes up on the tv, she sees it is her mommy, whom maybe she really hates and wants to kill, for maybe her wanting to kill her, and as she tends to her mother on what she now thinks is her death bed, we see her mother fully manifest in ghost form in the bathroom, the end. Evy is a theres no such thing as a vampire rationalist, so her disbelief, continually challenged, adds traction to the movie, the ton of strange visuals from children’s nursery rhymes to odd Catholic art all over the house add to the atmosphere, imo having a specific demon do the haunting is always a good idea, the movie runs into a bit of a problem as to wrapping things up at the end, because it has played it so cool throughout, but overall it works.
The witches of pendle is an odd entry into the folk horror boom in British movies in and around the Wicker Man of 1973, when an interest in witches spilled out into real life, and witches be a part of the goddess worshippings of the hippie gods. It is a dramatization of a 1912 trial of witches and for that documentary reason it uses actual transscripts of antiquated talk, deep dive in local l ore and life, and a cinematography of closeups to crop out any mention of time since. We come upon a young woman at a crossroads who quite naturally, as she was taught, takes magic protective action against a crow. She will later deny it, but we hear her and there is no doubt that her invocations of protective spirits sounds like witchcraft. When an old man in town is afflicted with seeing a close up of a demon every time he blinks or closes his eyes, the town thinks they might be infested, and who would be to blame. They chose the comely blonde girl and take her to the Three Raven Inn where the trial is heard. The movie is notable for, as far as I know, though there were some sensationalized instances in German or continental horror, the only detailed upclose depiction of the search of the witches’ nude body for marks of the devil upon it. That could be a wart or a birthmark, or sometimes a bruise, anything which if pricked and she feels nothing, exposes her as one kissed by satan. She modestly drops her dress, but clings to cover of her breasts. Then a rather too salacioius inspector prods her he creases and crevices, the backs of the knees, of course the armpits, behind the kneeds, back of the ankle, Satan ommonly leaves some marks, he explains, as he gives a full swipe over her lovely bare back. They lift up her breast, and check around, they drop to the nether regions, off camera, for to spread and spread again, and again in back, they inspect her hair, which they would have know of in delousing days, that intimacy of bodies that bore daily incursion of fleas, through all of this we see exactly one nipple, no it is a one nipple movie, prurient, but perhaps not quite enough to make of sexploitation. OF course, since what body does not have tags and warts, or freckles or moles, they find one and declare her a witch. Then having failed hat test, they bring her to the master of the big house, and it is one of those creepy Elizabethan glass palaces rendered creepy by the trope I call the Undying Monster Winter, as her case is examind again. But this time, the girl decides to blow up the town, and in particular take down her granny. She says that granny tells her orient dreams, I wonder what those are, and they always come true. Three nights she went with granny to a sabbath and she knows the devil because she has lived before this life. Sometimes she dreams that she is in hell, her hands have the power to crumble rats in them. Rats and frogs and other slimy things come out of her belly. She strips naked at night and rubs her skin all over, then James comes with a salve and rubs it all over her and it makes her think she is flying. Granny brings her a stick greased, so she can fly with it. At the sabbath they get fat from eating dead bears. And it is from these bears that granny boils up a potion, and it is with that potion when she sticks the stick between her legs she seems to fly, The attending officials are of course shocked, this is how it went, for some reason, hyseria, or panic, or resignation, charged women often did let loose with a tide of fantasy in court, just to shock the judges. The fact that a comely girl, recently viewed nude, makes it all almost intolerably erotic, almost as if she is describing a mastubatory fantasy. In other words, shetells the judges exactly what they need to launch a purge. I would argue that it is at this point where we see the judge by a great window, and see the great window fill the screen as we transition to a grander room and yet a third level of trial, that those windows signify that release. In one room in the castle we see the witch now given the reward as prize witness, a soft bed. In another window, lords convene, to hear more testimony. I sort of lost track of the process at this point, but I think the officials finally get their confession of a murder plot by t he witches to have their way, I don’t think there is a burning. Overall, it is more a careful procedural, attempting to be as authentic as possible, and it is, the pricking sequence, and then the known fact that hopeless women then indulged in condemning fantasy, it is quite true, and well done, leaving you to question at the end, what exactly was that all about?
Known for having received an Oscar nomination for the animation of Pat Matthews, and voiced by James mason, this one is significant for taking on an Edgar Allen Poe story which, being mostly aural, and the mania of hearing a beating, for requiring animation that penetrates to the internal mind. This one does first by casting all the animation as if lit from a light emit from far off left of stage, this sort of solarizes the scenes, to make them all seem ghostly. Then the animator chose to represent the worsening of the beating heart by capturing its interior crepitus in external forms of a spider web run amuck, moons carved out by foggy menace, broken china scattered on the floor, shadows creeping three times the length of a man sitting, reaching all the way across to a grandfather clock. All of these visuals capture the throbbing of a tinnital horror in the ear as visualized by the hypnagogic mind in the lattice position, on the verge of spinning. Finally, at one point, the clock tick takes over and walks the eye up and down a maze of stairs, this I think is the whoosh into nightmare. Finally, it is as if the house is hollowed out by the beat of it, driving him crazy, and so things end. Animation often exceeds even the surreal art of the time by being able to latch onto a local mental state and give figure or form to pure fear. This was the decade of the geometry of fear artists in England, and the Freudian abstract expression in the US, so it is no wonder people responded to it then, and now. That James Mason trembles between his earlier Gainsborough career and his career to come of grand old man in adventure and horror adds the perfect voicing to it all. Nicely done.
This very poorly compiled documentary purports to explain the so called Watseka wonder which happened in 1877 in Watseka Illinois south of Chicago where, very oddly, Lurancy Vennum became possessed, not by a demon, but by the soul of a girl in town who had died 12 years earlier, Mary Roff. One day Lurancy began to talk as if she was of another family, all her memories were of another family, a local family, the Roffs recognized who she was talking about, and it was decided for her to come live with them for them to have their dead daughter back in the form of Lurancy channeling Mary Roff. She lived in the Roff family for 111 days until she snapped out of it. You can read the Watseka wonder pamphlet published at the time on IA, as spriritualists of the time were quite interested in the odd wrinkle of the case. Among catholics of time it was still thought that a poor soul in purgatory, if it felt it was not getting enough help with suffrages of prayer and masses from living catholics, would come back up and haunt and possess people. I don’t know what model protestant spiritualists would use to explain this odd pairing. But you will not really find out in this shoddy documentary by Christopher Saint Booth, who seems to have gone to Watseka, but then shuffles before you what look like souped up versions of the old clippings. There is a lot of ominous music, and many of the favorite qualifiers of specious arguments, certainly, there may have been, it well could be, etc. all make things seem squishy. Since I have not found a number of the socalled old prints shown, especially one implying that Lurancy was really possessed by a devil, I suspect. We see a fake 1877 picture of Lurancy as Mary do an Exorcist style, head to foot levitation, I don’t think she did that. To reinforce the possibility the story jumps eighty years to Bavaria to listen to a tape from the anne Liese excorism case of the4 1970s. Surprised, the narrator reports “she was actually Catholic,” when, of course, she would almost have to be, if you knew anything about Bavaria. And again, magic, she was actually able to read through bandages, another actually. And then when the girls both died, we get the permission to expound, as that very well could have been the end of the story, but we jump to a story of a boy who did drawings in a state where his mind was awake while his body was asleep. Not only could draw sleep waking, the spiritualists scall it, I call it syngogy, but he could hear everything around him (this I think a symptom of very light sleep hypnagogy), and to a report that he grew worse we get another spiderwalk thrust of his body up, in a fake print. Then since he was speaking gibberish they introduce the Ovilus, which is a handheld device, that uses a dictionary of only 512 words by which it can create words and thus communicate with the other side. I don’t recollect how this had anything to do with Lurancy. But, as we bring down the curtain, there is a happy ending. Thirty years later, it seems that Mary Goff returned to possess Lurnacy while she was giving birth, to thank her for helping her tell her story, to spare Lurancy the pain of childbirth, such a nice ghost.
At two different points in her visit to camp Miasma, Kris, fledgling movie director, played with beautiful insecurity by Hannah Einbinder, rolls out a tirade on the transphobia of the original camp Miasma movies, and then when she and Billy Presley are screening the original, she points out, while they are watching, ok, this part is transphobic, one might have feared that the movie was going to be a tract on trans life and, as has been repeated in the press so much, is an allegory of sex after transitioning, for a particular part of the viewership it may serve fan needs. Maybe so, but the big surprise of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the third Jane Schoenbrun movie I have reviewed, is that it is so funny, so smart, so complicated, and so deep, psychologically, it is just a very rich dive into the psycho after life of the great slasher era of 1980 to 1983 in American movies. I know the Friday the 13th movies through and through, have reviewed every one, the original, three stars, part 2, two and a half stars, 3D, two stars, 4, the final chapter, two and a half stars, part 5, one star, Jason Lives, two stars, New Blood, two and a half stars, Jason Takes Mahattan, two stars, Jason goes to hell, I dunno, Jason X, two stars, and have watched them most more than 8 times, it is just a seasonal ritual. I am a decade wave too old to have been with Kevin Bacon at Camp Crystal Lake, but still, they came up quick behind me and stuck. Schoenbrun plays with the whole morass of the slasher world of the 1980s in a fun way. The movie opens with apparently video shot of a set on location, which is then over in the woods attacked by a man in a hazmat suit and an air duct box on his head whose slashing with a big Nordic pike is so Gladiator that he can make that decapitation blood spout like a whale. During the title sequence we take a nostalgic tour through the collectible afterlife of the genre, as film is reduced to still, to poster, to action figure, scrapbook of movie going (the only movie going I scrapbooked was A Hard Day’s Night), the cheap old ads in the corner of full pages of ads, the protests by the godly under the marquee, the collectible cards (I only collected 1960s American International cards, I remember the Colossal man best), the boardgame, the video game, the graphic novel, the whole nightmare of the swamp of endless reproduction reproductive of nothing spun out over the past 40 years. It is just so smart and fun, tracing out a former agency depletes by repetition to a harmless joke. And then, and then, some studio decided to do a reboot and Kris is the director. Kris is doing some deep story background research having driven up into snow country, I think it said in the northwest, to locate Billy Presley the original girl killed in the first movie, who is said to be hiding out at the camp itself, which she bought years ago, a recluse. She several times makes Norma Desmond jokes, but then when later Billy makes that joke she feigns ignorance, but there it is. Kris is my kind of girl, when she sees an old DVD of one of the later sequels at the store she gets all yummy, has to buy it, then even when checking into the motel, where the cop in the first movie ended up at the desk, she asks if he has a DVD player so he has to go digging for one. The whole sequence, the crummy roadside five and ten, the cheap motel, the antique media, it reminded me vaguely of the Ring. She screens a skinny-dipping scene which I know exactly which Friday 13th movie it comes from, well, four I think, but I am not going to hunt easter eggs, so that is funny too. While going to the scene of the crime in terms of summer camps is a trope, and was beautifully done recently in Black Phone 2, Schoenbrun makes it all the fairy tale of Kris’s excited mind, the mountain scenery is matted painting, the movie snow is thicker than in Bertolucci’s 1900 as she walks in. It is all so bleaky creepy that the camp is still there, in the snow, then, even more so, that Billy has made it into a compound in which various buildings serve her needs. Kris first pokes into the camp cinema, where a key scene in the movie is showing. Played beautifully by very cute Amanda Fix, this is a fictional version of the real fictional version in Friday the 13th where with tenderness Kevin Bacon makes inoutoftherain love to Marcie Cunningham, it is terrific that Schoenbrun chose this scene to be the trigger scene in the movie, and Kris just stands there in her winter coat transfixed, again, my kind of woman, It is by a walk into that scene that Billy Presley introduces herself in a 40s fedora and a tired mien that makes Gillian Anderson looks even older, Billy has made the main lodge into a luxury house, except that if Kris was sharp eyed she would see that the presence of a Christmas tree and old posters indicates a mind that has bricked in older age. She also announces to Kris that after she moved here she discovered that there was a big hole in the bottom of the lake, which mean, yes, Schoenbrun brings the bottomless pit into the problem. They proceed to eat Kentucky Fried Chicken in an atmosphere of candy dishes as she critiques Kris’ first movie which was panned for being a remake of Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain. Kris has her little tirade on gender trouble in the slasher genre but later her humanity is revealed more deeply as she concedes to being blocked about sex, and all bottled up by gender politics, while Billy just tells her the slasher movies were all about flesh and fluid, simple. Using change of day titles lifted from The Shining the camera sniffs about for the hole in the ice, then when Kris does further walking around another warning sign, Billy’s art studio barn is covered in paintings of abstract signs of the form of Little Death, the psycho killer of the movie, painted over and over and over again. All of this entirely tropaic and itsbeendoneness is handled deftly and with suspense by Schoenbrun. And then, a shocker, I am trying to think of another example, except maybe the early Hammer Dracula Prince of Darkness of 1966 in which so many years had passed since the original they had to rerun the original for fifteen minutes, but now we pause for Kris and Billy to sit through a good fifteen-minute stretch of a movie in the movie. the original Camp Miasma. All through it, Fix, as Squeak, shines, but fun David Lynch quote, PATRICK FISHER GETS TO PLAY CRAZY RALPH, warning them that they are all doomed, very funny. Though the tale telling at campside here is not quite as monumental as the retelling that started Friday the 13th 2, ok, so a quote, it plays out as well done. In the major rewrite of the lore here the killer Little Death is a trans person who switched sexes per days of the week and as a result ended up being bullied and finally drowned. Schoenbrun’s orphean lens into the past is a bit bent, born in 1987, as in mohawk punks using odd phrases like freak house bake oven misses the mark of how really dorky most of the kids were early on. Anyway, at a party the handsome aloof guy explains to virgin Billy that sex is like getting a shot at the doctor’s office, so off they go. One fun thing that really made me sit up is I have explored the Black Vinyl and Broken Record trope for years, Black Vinyl signals death, a Broken Record, but really one that bumps in the space after the last groove, that means death right now, and here both show up to stage the overthetop action hero kill-all-enemies slasher episode in which Little Death with his helmet and spear fountains the blood from all attending. At one point during the sequence, old Billy, watching next to Kris, though I was expecting more movie theatre infraction, gets side eyed by Kris for chanting, as little death appears, Rise, Rise, Rise, so she is nuts. Lots of blood, and heads, and fronts and backs, and I think the failure of any of the kids to defend themselves speaks to the fact that in the early movies in 1980ish it was the pre-fight back girl era as I have documented, and, so, for example, in Two, after the cutie gives her crotch a perfume spray, when she is attacked, she freezes, sitting duck. Kris is almost crying when little Billy gets killed, then the power goes out, she concedes, Ive never seen it like that. Well, special occasion special circumstance viewings can be like that. Kris is so worked up by it that Billy has to calm her down, there are hugs. Kris has formerly revealed that the type of queer she is is poly, look it up, I defer, and so she decided to take her top off and walk awkwardly to the fire to kiss Billy. The older woman helping the young man, mostly, is also a classic trope of the era, and here it is again with Billy asking Kris urgently what do you like? and Kris is pretty much unable to answer, she just does not seem to know much about sex. She has never had an orgasm either, I think I heard, that was a thing too, but when she is getting warmed up she has a vision of little Billy over her and freaks out. I don’t what what’s wrong with me, I can’t focus, famous, all too common words. So, we have here not only a potential May December fling but, far worse, a forming ampersand between the actress whose life was changed by the scene they just watched of young Billy being fucked, and the director who as an eight-year-old was transfixed by the exact same scene. This evinces a knotting that goes under the surface of most such talk. Lying on a bed of candy, before the fire, topless Kris admits that what turns her on is pretending to be the victim in a slasher movie, and she is disgusted at herself for harboring such a misogynist fantasy. During all this, Billy has begun to work Kris’s vulva with her fingers and at the end of her speech makes her come, I think for the first time. The joke then is that next morning Kris has to have a video meeting with the producers and she is so buzzed by the new freedom of self occasioned by orgasm, the instant life changing orgasm cliché, that she goes off on reporting that for real there is a place under the lake here where Little Death for real is awaiting resurrection, she describes his underwater bunker, filled with videos, we see that Little Death has breasts, we watch the light draw him up, he puts the DVD or is it VHS into the slit of a miasmic beast and Kris starts getting heated, it is happening again, he is rising the surface, she halfway strips, freaking out, and all her producers, and her agent are like, WTF, end of meeting, as meta goes off the rails. It too is a funny take on the aforementioned trope of sex lifesaving. Things get worse as Kris returns to the lodge to find that Billy has lit it up like a chapelle ardente of love all to tell her tale of Little Death. In this there is no longer any difference between film and life, between her being an actress in a movie, and life, she explains how hollow she felt being fucked by the forgot nobody, sex was as bad, she says, as I always imagined it would be, when he entered me, I was far away, but then, and this is called autoscopothesia, I think it showed up in Eyes of Laura Mars, she caught a signal, and suddenly she was seeing herself getting fucked through the eyes of Little Death approaching her. Her sight and her sight through him rattled back and forth, it was exciting seeing things strobe from two points of view, I was, in fact, Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain, Little Death being the curtain. And then she says that when she felt the spear coming down on her, and she was going to be killed, she came for the first time in her life, and, worse, it remains the greatest orgasm of my life ever, none after ever exceeding it. So, this one scene, and if you read my review of Friday the 13th you know I also zeroed in on that particular scene, Marcie talking of the rain of blood, Bacon getting harpooned from under the bed through the neck, and here it lies at the bottom of what is Billy’s deep schizophrenia. This is technically a kind of sick wire mixing of thanatopsis, seeing death, and eros, almost a Liebestod feeling of morbidity that bottoms out sex, but makes some people come. If you did not know it before, the French call the orgasm a little death, because, for a moment, after the click, and then slamming into another body, poof, suddenly you fall back into the abyss, far, far away, the little death. But she has placed a desire for actual threat of or experience of death, almost in the manner of performative aphyixiphillia as the fundamental thing that will make her come, very dangerous. Then, when Billy says it was like magic, she might mean real magic, because the earth rumbles, Kris is like, what is that? and what follows is a very complicated little hypnagogic sequence in which the snow of the moment zaps back into summer, Kris smiles, it is coming true, her fantasy, she then meets Little Death, I’m a big fan, but understands she must run so does, reduced to the damsel in distress braless in panties running from Little Death who then kills all her ZOOM associates who have come up to see if she is alright. Here too some of the increasingly unimaginative slashes of the original series are revisited, find your own easter eggs (but the archery butt was a major one). Turns out Kris is rather witchily in the middle of another candlelight seduction in one of the more vulnerable cabins. Billy instructs her that she has to see this through his eyes, and to share in Billy’s fetish psychosis, so she sweats, crying out I don’t want to die, until, in fact, Little Death comes in over the bed and spears them both (but not the double penetration like in two), her mouth fills with blood, both are spattered all over, and end up dead on the bed, her wish fulfilled. I don’t know, it seems to me one version of this movie, record of a bloody fling, could’ve ended here. But Schoenbrun must’ve felt some second thought need to finesse for fan service a more comic ending. A common problem, in movies. She does a musical interlude, not unlike Where have all the flowers gone? in Bugonia, of all the Little Death dead, but why? then we go back into the stomach of the beast at the bottom of the lake, and in a room down there we see in fact little eight-year-old Kris watching the scene where Billy gets killed. Now it is morning after in the bloody love bed. And…..rather disappointing for me, maybe not for the more doctrinal viewers, they wake up, then walk through wonderland to the store to shop for candy and covered in blood the lesbian cashier says cool outfits, they walk away behind some kids playing with kites, true love, the end. This movie is rare amongst horror movies by actually dropping down through the full three nightmare structure of what I call the Eldritch formation, in the gown prowl, if in this case Kris topless, she confronts her demon, she sees that this is no dream, this is really happening, this allows her to then go on and look at the monster in the pit in the eye, it rarely happens. But does one wake up from that, to join in the “community”? But this is my theory arguing against another mind, I do not hold directors to my terms, more than enough that Schoenbrun delves into the whole gender wars with humor and realism and madness and ridiculousness, it wraps up feeling like a very big movie. (Disclaimer, because tiktokers take the news as truth: the original Friday the 13th movies were pretty hetero, Jason was a down syndrome child, then called mongoloid, who was not looked after by his counselors, and drowned. In revenge, his mother, see Linda Cardinelli in Crystal Lake on October 15!, becomes the killer. But then as she is beheaded, her head bounces into the lake, Jason’s corpse grabs it and internalizes her rage somehow for it or him to rise up as a supernatural killer who worships her head in a cabin off in the woods. He only survived at the bottom of the lake because it is located in the hell on earth of the miasmic view of the world, that the gunk generates parthenogenetically spontaneously creepy crawly monsters from the miasma itself, a scientific idea debunked in the 1820s, but which lived on in horror til the 1980s. Unravel incestuous ablist fuckedness with transphobia if you will, but really, there were other movies of the time which were much more directly chargeable of the thought crime. My uncle was Down Syndrome so I did bristle, then, at that intersection. Rationalization kills).
