by Francis Friel

I made a list of 68 horror films I had planned to watch for this month’s issue. In the end, I was able to comfortably see eighteen of these.

Here’s the original list of stuff I thought I’d actually be able to watch:

TOAD ROAD, BIRTH OF THE LIVING DEAD, HOUSE OF BODIES, ASMODEXIA, THE VAMPIRE’S COFFIN, GREYSTONE PARK, MR. JONES, BAY OF BLOOD, CONTRACTED, THE INVITATION, GERM Z, IN FEAR, THE SLEEPING CAR, HONEYMOON, THE DAMNED, AFTER, DEAD SILENCE, THEY, CRUCIBLE OF HORROR, YOU’RE NEXT, WOMAN IN BLACK 2, MADHOUSE, THE OUIJA EXPERIMENT, DREAM HOUSE, NIGHTMARE FACTORY, AT THE DEVIL’S DOOR, DON’T BLINK, THE HOUSES OCTOBER BUILT, WEREWOLF: THE BEAST AMONG US, GRABBERS, SUICIDE THEORY, THE FOG, PROM NIGHT 2, CABIN FEVER: PATIENT ZERO, DEATHWATCH, DEVIL’S PASS, MINE GAMES, HERE COMES THE DEVIL, FROM THE DARK, THE CANAL, WICKED LITTLE THINGS, PONTYPOOL, STAKE LAND, WHITE GOD, OCULUS, THE LAST DAYS, FLU, WITCHING & BITCHING, SIMON KILLER, STONEHEARST ASYLUM, THE NURSES, THE DEAD ONE, DESCENDENT, VANISHED, SPARROW, NOBODY CAN COOL, BAD BEHAVIOR, VISIBLE SCARS, THE CELLAR DOOR, NIGHTSCREAM, THE CRY, PELT, DOGMAN, THE EVES, MONSTERS IN THE WOODS, SASQUATCH, PUPPETMASTER 1-9, LEPRECHAUN 1-7.

I feel that not getting through all this madness was to the benefit of my own sanity and physical well-being. Staring into the abyss of made-for-tv and straight-to-netflix nightmares was fun, and I am still gonna try to get to the rest of these soon. But in the meantime, here’s where we ended up. It’s not pretty…

JUG FACE
Directed by Chad Crawford Kinkle (2013)

This is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. This director, first of all, looks like Chris Diamantopoulos, a guy who’s made a career out of his phenomenally douchey face. Right away, we’re in some trouble here. I imagine him on the set, this fucking Kinkle guy, setting up the shot where the main character is having sex with her brother out in the woods, and him having some specific direction to give to his actors. Making it all very serious and very intense. I imagine him hiring the crew to dig out The Pit and then fill The Pit with Pit Water and Pit Blood and having someone design the Sacrifice Stump and hiring the effects and makeup guys to make just the right throat-slitting rig for when they keep sacrificing everybody. I imagine him agonizing over dailies, wondering if he needs re-shoots, or should he re-write some other things to make it match what he’s already got onscreen? Which would be easier? Which wouldbe cheaper? Can he even get that cast member back? Even for a day? Is Sean Young still available or is she busy shooting a pilot for SyFy? Is Lauren Carter willing to come back to get an insert of her getting molested by a family member or is she busy talking to her agent trying to figure out how to get her career back on-track? Look, all I’m saying is that this movie is a huge piece of shit and that the director should be ashamed of himself and I’d also be fine with him writing an apology letter to American Citizens who’ve seen his movie.

I guess one good thing (or surprising thing, anyway) is that they actually go through with all their ritual murders. No one’s saved at the last minute, the camera doesn’t shy away from how fucked up all this business becomes, and it does end up giving an air of gross creepiness to the whole thing. The problem is that I can’t tell how much of that creepy feeling is intentional and how much is a result of the director being a fucking psychopath.

Apparently this guy also made some weird incest-y devil possession movie before this. So at least he’s trying to build his brand.

I just had this vision of Kinkle getting his hands on this issue and finding this review and him being the type of director who gets mad at his critics and starts shit with them. This seems like a movie made by a guy like that. But then like he writes to me or finds me on instagram and tries to make it a big thing and then I get depressed and don’t want to keep going with the zine because now this idiot’s out there trying to fuck with this nice cool thing and it’s all ruined and I just go back to my weird day job and think “well, that was fun while it lasted.”

I’m having anxiety fantasies about this director. That’s how bad this movie is.

HOUSE OF BODIES
Directed by Alex Merkin (2014)

A bunch of camgirls work in a big house and some murders happened there and detectives are investigating what these websites have to do with the killings and I only made it nine minutes into this garbage movie. The opening credits sequence features near-pornographic shots of dead women and at the nine-minute mark a young prostitute begs her customer (who also works there?) to beat her up, which he then does in the most brutal couple of shots I've seen in any movie in a long time. I can only guess that things get worse from that point on. This thing also, somehow, stars Terrence Howard and Peter Fonda. And Queen Latifah apparently financed the whole thing. I don't fucking care. Avoid this thing.

It's also total amateur hour from top to bottom, which, in itself, is not necessarily a turn-off but in this case only makes things worse.

WOLFCOP
Directed by Lowell Dean (2014)

This was not nearly as bad as it could've been. There's this whole slew of HD low budget productions coming out of everywhere (this is from freaking Canada) and it's not the worst thing to give them a shot. I've written movies better than this but you better believe I've also written worse. The effects aren't bad, the acting is fine for what it is, and it's actually got a plot, in kind of a Troma sense. Generational occult conspiracies, shapeshifters who want werewolf blood, corrupt small town cops, sexy bartenders. It's not really trying to be anything other than what it is. I'm fine with it. It's fine. Relax.

This movie has all the top-notch camerawork and production design of a 2002 low budget local film festival reject. Lots of shots from slightly above the actors, harsh lighting, low-cut blouses, three-day-old stubble, bad day-for-night, and lots of jail cell bars made of what looks like either spray-painted cardboard or maybe just papier-mache. But, honestly, it’s like an hour and fifteen minutes long, so it hardly matters. Again: it’s fine. But it brings me to my real point: there’s an entire Parallel Hollywood going on that’s been around since the 60s and we’re still not doing anything about it. There are probably more movies coming out every year independently than are released in Cinemas but we don’t know about them, we don’t know where they are, we don’t know who these directors are, and we’re kind of not supposed to. And I’d say we’re dumber because of it. We don’t really have our own Jonas Mekas anymore to follow all these people who are out there making Wolfcop movies. But we for damn sure know that as soon as the Monday Night Football secret Force Awakens trailer ends that we can immediately refresh Fandango and get tickets for the 7pm Thursday night preview show. I work for a Cinema and this was a tightly-controlled secret operation for about five seconds before I came into work, went online, and saw that it had leaked. Of course it leaked. Because what we have now instead of film culture is geek culture. And it kills me that geek culture is obsessed with getting every last drop of nostalgic glee from the shit that’s always been around instead of trying to keep up with the new weird shit.

Don’t get me wrong. I get it. Disney just paid Billions Of American Dollars for their precious Star Wars and now they want their money back. I get that people care about Star Wars. I get that people care about Civil Wars and Infinity Wars and Wizards and Tributes and Dystopian Teen Nightmare Stuff but… ugh.

There are directors out there quitting their day jobs and doing whatever they can to make their movies and making No Money but they’re getting their stuff released. Either on Netflix or straight-to-blu-ray or indie festivals or handing out homemade dvds to their friends. And I think those people deserve our attention.

When we’re kids we think nothing of going out to shows every single weekend to see all our favorite bands. Bands nobody else at school has heard of. Hardcore bands from three states away, queer vegan punk bands who don’t release cds because cds aren’t vegan. Who hand-print their t-shirts and want to talk to every person at the show. And when you can’t see your band in your town because you live in some shitball backwoods garbageheap, you can probably write to them and get them to play at your house. Because they want to play. They want fans. They want to do what they want to do because it’s all they care about and it’s the most important thing in the world to them

FOLKS: Directors are the same way! They’re people! Why aren’t we constantly organizing mini weekly film festivals? Why aren’t directors booking tours and selling their own dvds? They would tour like a band, with their whole cast and crew in a van or caravan of cars, going state to state, sleeping on floors, meeting other directors, collaborating on future projects, making the kids in every town go “oh shit man they came through here last year and their movie was amazing with this OTHER GIRL who opened for them made a movie and it was like nothing I’d ever seen! You gotta check HER out!”

WHY AREN’T WE DOING THIS??

The Parallel Hollywood is out there and it demands our respect. Without them we’d have no Nouvelle Vague, no New Hollywood, no John Waters or Guy Maddin or David Lynch or Lynne Ramsay. We needed all those people!

Hollywood sells us their “this world is all there is”-style of products. But we know there are other options out there. We need to give these smaller movies respect and pay money to see this stuff. Even if you think the Wolfcops of the world are dumb, don’t forget that making a movie is, essentially, a near-impossible task. The amount of things that need to come together to get one of these fuckers up and running is enough to make most people never want to pick up a camera in the first place. But those who follow through and get something made and have the fucking guts to actually show it to other people need to know that there’s an audience that not only wants to sit down and watch their movie, but they want to support indie film in general. And to be honest, I’m not even talking about Sundance-level stuff. I’m talking about things people make in their own homes. Movies people make after hours at work with their co-workers as their cast members, documentaries about their own families, animated stuff they made using their little siblings’ drawings as characters…

Just wanted to get that off my chest, though. Wolfcop was okay.

EL ATAUD DEL VAMPIRO (COFFIN OF THE VAMPIRE)
Directed by Fernando Mendez (1958)

Okay, now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!

This is a Mexican vampire story that basically says “remember that dummy Renfield? What if the whole movie was just a bunch of Renfields!” And it totally works!

A couple of tough-guy grave robbers are digging up bodies looking for a vampire. They know he’s there because this is apparently a sequel to another vampire movie by the same director feature the same vampire character (who, I guess, was killed at the end of the first one and then buried in a normal-ass cemetery with all the other people in that town?).

They find the vampire (Count Lavud!) and he immediately starts brainwashing everybody around him. He turns everyone into his slaves so he can sneak around and do what he does best: seduce beautiful women! [RECORD SCRATCH] WAIT WHUUUUUUUUUUUT? Yep. Dude just wants to hit on the ladies. Which, simple enough, and dumb, but it fits in with the classic vampire mythology I guess. But it’s not the plot or even the script that made me love this one. It’s the direction. This movie is a classic case of doing the best you can with what little you’ve got. It’s a beautiful production (usually… more on that later) and the gorgeous black and white cinematography adds a lot to the atmosphere in what could have been just another cheap-o monster movie.

My two favorite touches are pretty basic movie-magic things, but they work every time. The first is that whenever Lavud looks in a mirror (or a mirror is held up in front of him) he’s not invisible like most vampires. He’s a skeleton! Has that been done in other movies? I thought it was great and I’m probably gonna steal it if I ever make a vampire movie. In fact I might make one just to steal that trick.

The other is a recurring motif (in some cases they might even re-use the same footage). In Classic Vampire Fashion, Lavud likes to fly around in the form of a bat and swoop down to sneak up on his prey. And every time he does, what we see is a big rubber bat, complete with almost-but-not-quite-invisible fishing wire flying the bat around. And the bat flies right into the camera and it smash-cuts to the vampire standing there spreading his cape and looking scary and dramatic. It’s a cool shot, and the directors thought so too because they do it like six or seven times throughout the movie. But goddamn it works every time. This movie really just made me so happy.

There’s a couple of clunky moments, though. The interiors always look like brightly-lit sets (which, yeah, that’s what they are, but they look like they are). The main location, the doctor’s office where they keep the coffin, reminded me of Rob Petrie’s house. And an outdoor shot looking into a café window (a really cool shot, by the way) is clearly shot on a soundstage, and leads to the most harshly-lit scene I’ve seen in a long time, when the woman runs from the café and out into the streets. The shot itself reminded me of the long shot at the beginning of M., but once the camera comes down onto street-level it becomes way too clear that the walls are flimsy and the bad lighting makes what could’ve been really cool shadow effects look like mistakes. But look: none of that matters. This is a great movie. I’m definitely going to try to see more by Fernando Mendez.

THE NIGHTMARE
Directed by Rodney Ascher (2015)

This Rodney Ascher is carving out quite the weird-ass little niche for himself. He’s like the Bizarro Alex Gibney. And I’m glad he’s getting back on-track after the fucking disaster that was Room 237. Wanna get in my face and tell me Room 237 was good and makes a case for all that weird shit? Cause I’ll get right back in your face and tell you to go read Rob Ager's stuff and then come back and tell me those fucking clowns knew what they were talking about. But moving on…

I saw Ascher’s first film online a few years ago, The S From Hell, and it became one of my favorite short films ever. It’s a ten-minute documentary about people who remember the old Screen Gems logo and how creeped-out they all were by seeing it everywhere throughout their childhoods. If you haven’t seen it, check it out. It’s Scary As Hell. The Nightmare takes that to a whole ‘nother level. This thing is absolutely terrifying. It reminded me of the Time/Life “Mysteries of the Unexplained” book series. Those books are filled with little snippets of stories, all purported to be true, all brain-meltingly scary and weird, mostly by how matter-of-fact they all are. They have chapter titles like “The Unquiet Sky” and “Unearthly Fates”. Lots of Kaspar Hauser-type stuff, UFOs, bigfoots, aliens, ghosts, crying statues, ancient and modern myths, etc. My favorite entry is in the one I call the Big Blue Book, the one that came out after the famous run of Big Square Black Books. The Blue Book is a sort-of compendium of all the weirdest stuff from the other books, with little new stuff thrown in. Here’s my all-time favorite entry:

                                    “On August 27, 1968, blood and flesh fell on an area of
                                    about one-third of a square mile between the Brazilian
                                    towns of Cacapava and Sao Jose dos Campos. The fall
                                    was reported to have lasted about five to seven minutes.”

Pretty fuckin’ weird, right? Did it really happen? Either no, it didn’t, or yes it did, and it’s got a really boring explanation. But the fact remains that the information in this entry is two sentences long and is mostly going out of its way to over-describe when and where this happened, but makes no attempt at explaining the event itself or even trying in the slightest to corroborate it. But the point is that it’s unsolved, and it’s weird, so we’re not looking for an explanation, exactly. We’re just looking to be creeped-out. The Nightmare is proof that we don’t want these explanations. And we don’t need the townspeople to give their accounts of what it was like to witness flesh and blood falling from the sky. Because digging too deep into this, assuming it’s a real event that really happened, will only open up a can of worms that is almost assuredly some terrifying shit that’ll keep us awake at night.

The interview subjects in Ascher’s new film are all suffering from sleep paralysis, a very real phenomenon that causes people to experience demonic hallucinations combined with an inability to move or communicate. I have actually experienced this twice in my life. The first was in the middle of the night when I was staying at my grandparents’ house as a little kid (between 4th and 5th grade). I was sleeping on the couch and woke up and saw the moonlight coming in the living room window directly across from me. There was a tree right outside that window, and I saw a large black figure drop out of the tree and look right at me, then point towards the back yard (in my head, and in re-telling this story, I’ve always described the figure as “Spider-Man”). The figure then walked towards the back of the house towards the yard, then in the same instant that he was out of my line of vision / disappeared from the window, it was now in the living room with me and walked directly towards me way too fast. And that’s where that memory ends. I don’t remember him getting to me, I don’t remember falling back to sleep, nothing. Just the image of him approaching, then nothing. But I remember feeling completely helpless to the point that I thought I had died and that this was the normal process of what it’s like to transition from being a living person to a dead entity. It was the scariest unexplained moment of my life until something similar happened to me a couple of years later.

This time I was in 6th or 7th grade and I was taking a nap in my house in the afternoon. We lived in a large old farmhouse in rural Indiana for a few years when I was growing up (in between stints of living in Philly). The big front bedroom off the side of the living room was my mom’s workspace but it also doubled as a guest bedroom, so it had a big bed in it. I was sleeping in there one afternoon when I woke up suddenly and realized I was trying to scream but couldn’t make a sound. I tried for what seemed like five full minutes to make a noise but nothing would come out. I realized that I also couldn’t move my body and when I was finally able to move, I rolled over and saw what looked like a small figure sitting on the bed, who then rolled off the side of the bed the instant I saw him. As soon as the figure was gone I was able to scream. So yeah, this shit is completely fucked-up and scary. And it takes you completely by surprise.

It’s funny how many of the interview subjects seem completely at peace as they describe the most disturbing scenarios. These are people living pretty ordinary lives, except that sometimes they are terrorized by demons in the middle of the night who scream in their faces and threaten them over the phone. The total randomness and lunacy of some of their recounted experiences often reminded me of the strangeness of the first wave of Whitley Strieber’s grey alien/“visitor” books, with their lines like “my parents didn’t believe me when I told them, but… they were coming out of the stove.” It’s weird, unsettling details like that that will often make me even more of a believer in certain instances.

And these interview subjects, while being for the most part laid-back, are definitely unsettled by their experiences. At one point a guy is telling his story and hears a noise coming from somewhere in the house and he stops cold, turns his body to look behind him, and stops the interview dead in its tracks, he’s so suddenly afraid of… something. Or someone. His story in particular actually involves alien-like creatures who have visited him since he was an infant (his earliest sleep paralysis episodes occurred in his crib). His creatures are probably the least-threatening we get to see in the film, but that’s only because the rest of them are truly, pants-shittingly crazy.

It’s almost not worth it to try to describe some of this stuff, because a lot of it is presented (expertly, I’ll say) in such a dull, matter-of-fact way that makes them all the more real and unnerving. The demon hissing threats into the phone, the quick cut to the witch-looking thing screaming into the woman’s ear, the Freddy Kruger hands ripping the one dude’s balls apart, the little kid who discovered that the demons had actually prepared him for the hallucinatory visits via news broadcasts… it all sounds bizarre, and it is, but these people, as far as I can tell, are all telling the truth about what they experienced. Whether these things could be said to have “happened”, in the more traditional sense, is beside the point. These events were real enough to have altered these people’s lives in a profound way.

The directing by Ascher, in his usual style, works better than in any of his previous films. The intimate lighting, the dark, abstract recreations of the visions and the late-night conversational nature of some of the interviews lends the entire film an air of intimacy that made it even scarier. It’s a very quiet film, almost calming in some cases. But the silence is broken in an instant, and nothing can save you now.

GOING CLEAR: SCIENTOLOGY AND THE PRISON OF BELIEF
Directed by Alex Gibney (2015)

On the one hand, this is basically just a rip-off of The Master, the PT Anderson joint about the 1950s self-help cult that turns into a gang of brainwashed lunatics and uses their guard dog Joaquin Phoenix to beat up their “enemies.” On the other hand, this movie takes a pretty ingenious tactic: it stages its story as a sort of mocumentary, in the style of Forgotten Silver or the celebrity interview segment of Being John Malkovich. They even got Alex Gibney, who is an actual Hollywood political documentarian, to attach his name to the Director’s credit (IMDB lists him only, and doesn’t indicate who the real director was). And they call in some heavy-hitters to play wacked-out versions of themselves in this alternate-universe version of Hollywood.

So here’s the plot (again, it’s pretty much the plot of the second half of The Master): in the early 1950s, a science-fiction novelist named L. Ron Hubbard publishes a book called “Dianetics”, which purports to be a bible, or manual, for a belief system/religion called Scientology. What they believe is that humans are capable of transcending their normal “imprisoned” state of being and “going clear”, which means to attain enlightenment. We do this by psychically travelling back in time to experience a past trauma (either in this life or in a past life), learn from it, eliminate it, and move beyond it. If we do this enough times, we become free from stress and are able to accomplish extraordinary things. We basically have super-powers. And it sounds amazing.

As you move “up the bridge” or further up the food chain of the religion, slowly you are given more pieces of the puzzle, such as the Scientologist creation myth: thousands of years ago, the world was just like it is now, and we had all the same technology as now (rather, as the 1950s, when all this stuff was written). The only difference was that we were a part of a huge intergalactic political system, and planet Earth was essentially a prison planet. All the evildoers were transported from their home worlds to Earth by way of massive jumbo jet spaceships then dropped into volcanoes. The volcanoes erupted and spewed the evil souls all over the planet, where they then would possess other living things. Fast-forward to today and these evil spirits are now inhabiting us!

Where the plot kind of falls apart is where it gets into all this business about how they went after a bunch of Hollywood celebrities to lend more credence to their cause. It leads to some pretty funny sequences, especially for what’s essentially a horror movie, but still a weird sidetrack in a movie with almost way too much plot crammed into just over two hours.

The funniest sequence actually derails the plot completely for ten solid minutes, detailing how the cult, eager for some way to make themselves look legit to the American public, started recruiting actors from shitty network sitcoms like “Welcome Back, Kotter”, and actually scored John Travolta, who then spent the rest of his career secretly working Scientologist propaganda into all his future roles. It makes no real sense in the larger context of the story, but it’s an interesting enough place for the story to go, I guess.

But boy, the movie makes up for this particularly weak plot-point by pulling out its biggest guns: major movie stars actually playing themselves as brainwashed cult members. Tom Cruise makes the most notable appearance, acting absolutely manic at one point in a shitty-looking “training video” for the new cult members. It’s like his entire career was leading him towards this one weird extended cameo as a wacked-out lieutenant in a seafaring space cult. And apparently not only do these actors play themselves, but it seems like they’ve been shooting this thing Boyhood-style over the course of their entire careers. We see footage of Travolta and Cruise and even garbage director Paul Haggis throughout their lives doing Scientology-related things. Obviously, it’s simple enough to superimpose their faces into old (or old-looking) footage, but it looks completely convincing. Some Zelig shit, right here. 

In high school I read the book “What They Don't Teach You at Film School: 161 Strategies For Making Your Own Movies No Matter What” by Camille Landau & Tiara White, and in their book they say that the biggest hurdle when making a film is getting anyone to actually see it. They stress getting the word out by any means possible, even if you think you’re maybe going too far sometimes. Well, “Alex Gibney” (or whoever directed this thing) really took that to heart because the big thing in the news related to this film’s release were the protests by “real-life” Scientologists claiming the film was a smear campaign, didn’t get the facts straight, etc. I’m into all that kind of stuff. If you have a weird little high-concept arthouse movie and you somehow managed to squirrel Tom Cruise into it, for goddamn sure you’re gonna do whatever it takes to get asses in seats. And apparently Cruise is an extremely good sport, because the movie even makes the claim that this fictitious religion was partly responsible for the breakup of his marriage to Nicole Kidman.

Again, it’s an original way to tell a story like this, but we’ve seen this particular story before. It even takes the Master plot-point about changing a line in the book and recycles it almost wholesale.

The one interesting stroke the film takes is that the Hubbard character is actually long-dead by the time the film begins, and the movie really follows his successor, a weird little penis-man from Philly (naturally) named David Miscavige. I’ve never seen this actor before but this Miscavige character is seriously creepy. Like, Duplass in Creep creepy. It’s this weird mix of cult leader, corporate CEO, and game show host. Or a not-quite-as-intense Patrick Bateman. Or a serial killer Michael Scott. There’s a scene where he’s addressing a stadium full of believers and he salutes a gigantic portrait of Hubbard that made my skin crawl. I don’t know what it is about religious fervor that gets under my skin so intensely, or religious horror, but it gets me every time. The Exorcist does the same thing to me. And The Sacrament, to a lesser extent.

So check this one out. It’s a weird little piece of work, and it doesn’t always hold together, but it goes to some strange places towards the end, and ends up being a critique, I think, of what happens to people who believe way too strongly in things they have no hope of really understanding. And of people who want nothing more than to lead and control other people. And it’s one of those “alternate universe” movies that sometimes hits a little too close to home. You can almost see how this shit would go down in real life. Tom Cruise and all.