Deeper Red

The heroine of Crimson Peak (2015), Guillermo Del Toro's return to horror filmmaking, is named "Edith Cushing," a name with a double dose of allusion. "Cushing" signifies the film's debt to Hammer Studios and the great Peter Cushing, a debt that seems relatively small to my mind. "Edith," on the other hand suggests Edith Wharton, whose savagely genteel melodramas of the turn of the 20th Century the film takes as primary texts for its first act. Wharton, it should also be said, was a crackerjack author of ghost stories which, germane to this particular film, are rife with repressed sexual desires and economic anxiety. Like Wharton, Crimson Peak's heroine is a patrician writer of ghost stories, though from Buffalo, New York rather than the big apple. The allusion is on point. This is a very self-aware movie.

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Stomp

See if you can follow me on this: some years ago, I was presented with the prospect of a movie in which both Chow Yun-Fat and Keith Richards were to appear together. More than that, they would be playing pirates. I thought at the time: “How can that possibly be bad?” I still think back on that thought in idle moments when I consider the films that resulted, but more as an exasperated expression of disbelief. If someone had told me beforehand that those movies would suck—and suck they most assuredly did—I wouldn’t have believed it. My mistake was in underestimating the power of corporate Hollywood to turn everything it touches into a big steaming pile of shit. This is a cautionary tale.

When I first read about Guillermo Del Toro’s latest film, Pacific Rim (2013), my first thought was that fatal, “how can that possibly be bad?” Once burned twice shy, I guess, because I tamped down on that as hard as I could and tried to keep my expectations low. Then the trailer promised giant robots fighting giant monsters like the biggest Toho monster rally you ever did see, and given that I once ran a video store whose sign had Godzilla looming on the Tokyo skyline, this was a pitch that was in the sweet spot for me. I could feel the glee rising in my chest. But also, there was a nameless dread. I’d like to say that Del Toro’s name was reassuring, but that would be a lie. Auteurism only goes so far and Del Toro has always been less interesting at bigger budgets than he is on his small, personal projects. This is a movie that must do a half a billion dollars at the global box office to make money, so it’s the sort of movie in which “input” from the suits in charge of the money was a given. So as the movie began, I was a more than a little bit apprehensive.

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Maternal Instincts

The ghost story is the most ritualized card in the horror tarot. The elements of a haunting almost always follow a set path that delves into the sins of the past. There's always a past, pieced together by the protagonists from old newspapers, mouldering town records, or unearthed diaries. Ghosts are most often avatars of past traumas, reliving some private inferno again and again until someone comes along to appease them. Or not. A friend of mine doesn't like ghost stories much. She thinks they're too much of a strait jacket. I dunno. I dig them. Once I accept that the theme is going to be the same as in every other ghost story out there, I can groove on the variations. Ghost stories have been enjoying a renaissance in the last fifteen years or so as filmmakers have wedged the tropes of the ghost story into modern, technological settings, fueled by the imagery of the J-horror boom and bust. The latest of these is Mama (2013, directed by Andrés Muschietti), and it's more or less of a piece with other similar movies like The Orphanage or The Possession. The contemporary ghost movie is a glum affair, and this is no different. What IS different with this movie is the way it codes its narrative. It also indulges in stylistic tricks derived from producer Gullermo Del Toro's cinematic legacy.

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The Eyes Have It

I have a phobia about my eyes. You know all those injury to the eye scenes in Lucio Fulci movies? Yeah? I can't watch those. It squicks me out. And don't even get me started on the scene with the needle in Dead and Buried. Do you know the one? Where the nurse enters the room of a burn victim and inserts a huge needle into his one unbandaged eye? Where the camera holds the shot just long enough to see the needle quiver in the man's socket? That scene sent me from the room, screaming. My own eyes are not the best. I have an astigmatism. I wear glasses. I can see my eyes getting worse as time goes by and the next glasses I get will be progressive lenses. I may, like my grandmother before me, develop cataracts if I live so long. I may end my life blind. This thought terrifies me, and not just because I'm an artist and graphic designer by trade. Some people dream about losing their teeth. I dream of losing my eyes. So I'm an easy mark for movies like Julia's Eyes (2010, directed by Guillem Morales), whose central character is going blind.

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Monsters and Mazes

When Pan's Labyrinth (2006, directed by Guillermo del Toro) was first in theaters, I remember thinking that I really needed to wait a while before writing about it. Here it is nearly six years later and I'm finally getting back to it. Waiting was probably wise. Pan's Labyrinth is a film that needed to sit in my consciousness for a while because my initial viewing of it was overwhelming. I was aware of the fact that it was a legitimately great movie, but I wasn't prepared to deal with it. I'm not sure I'm up to it even now.

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Lights Out

Even though I'm the right age to have seen it when it first aired, I don't remember seeing the original Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. I saw plenty of made-for-tv horror movies when I was growing up and I remember them fondly. Those movies had an aura of weirdness all their own. They generally creeped rather than shocked, though that's not a universal--I mean, I'm still freaked out by that damned Zuni fetish doll from Trilogy of Terror, after all. These movies are a nice counter stream to the splatter films that were in the drive ins and grindhouses of the day, a refuge, as it were, for the Gothic as it retreated from movie screens. One of these days I should probably hunt down Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, because the remake (2011, directed by Troy Nixey) is interesting.

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