Shat on the Altar: HORROR AT 37,000 FEET, THE DEVIL'S RAIN

William Shatner, the Hawksian organizer of men in a far-flung future without currency. Shatner, determined player of crisis-bound priests, rock-like teachers, a race-baiting hate monger, an Esperanto-speaking Christian soul so pure he converts a succubus, and an Arizona sheriff named 'Dances with Tarantulas.' Shat, so so.. many things, all of them great, some of them even pretty good, but most so very strange that, if you look deep (and it's always worth looking deep with old Shat), you might find a whole other Shat self waiting below the gum line to spit forth a torrent of surprise micro-thesping! 

For your consideration: two films from the early 70s occult revival in which you will see him drink from a flask and scoff at God while on a flight frozen-in-mid air (at 37,000 feet!); and bare his chest and risk his family to hold onto a stolen devil book one minute but then drop his protective amulet the next. What a man is Shat! Courageous, callous, stubborn, fearful, pompous and pugnacious, he's a relic from when scientists and captains had resonant voices and one could be impulsive and brutish yet catlike and dancer nimble. The Neil Diamond of science fiction icons, Shatner is his name. And in the late 60s-early 70s, we kids couldn't have been happier about it - Bop Bop! 

I know there are those hardcore Trekkies annoyed by Shatner's macho fey arrogance as Kirk; using his cast mates hatred of his prima donna behavior on set as evidence, they disimiss him as a hammy egotist. They seem to prefer the dry, safe, nostril-breathing baldness of Patrick Stewart. I am not one of them, I am not even a Trekkie, but I do enjoy the first three seasons, the Kirk era. Shatner elevates the project to greatness. Stewart, as an actor, can be fun when snogging with Steve Railsback in Lifeforce or snogging with Wolverine in X2, but Stewart is too sane as Picard, too much Polonius and not enough Hamlet. Shatner's Kirk is a live wire. 

Maybe my loyalty to Kirk is because of watching Trek reruns every evening, as a small child in the early 70s.  To me, because of this familial connection, Shatner can do no wrong. He was to the TV as Neil DIamond was to my mom's album collection--a fact, a staple, a comfortable but sturdy foundation on which to grow one's taste and eventual collection. So it is with every generation perhaps. For mine, Shat's blowhard egotism is part of the charm. Kirk is always just a bit hammier than called for, his expressive resonant voice... his... unique... pauses...followedby... rapidcascades.... ofwords, have brought decades of amusement to a beleaguered nation. (See: Sex, Drugs, and Quantum Existentialism). And even when starring in dopey films like the two I shall discuss here, or artsy experiments like Incubus, Shat goes for broke, every time. Terrible or triumphant, he never phones in a syllable. Lugging Shakespeare-style oratory into the rarefied sphere of cowboys-vs.-Satanists, or fighting against ancient druid altars in the sky, he gives 100%, no matter how half-assed the vehicle.

So how half-assed does it get? Let's see!

HORROR AT 37,000 FEET

1973 - TVM / CBS

**1/2

In order to earn the primetime slot, a 70s TV movie had to explore at least three pop cultural themes. In Horror at 37,000 Feet, we get: 1) the curse attached to an ancient artifact (ala King Tut); 2) social commentary (i.e. the Salem witch trials); 3) the ensemble cast disaster movie, i.e. Airport. Swirl 'em all together and serve!

The ensemble cast was a huge staple of 70s TV, providing welcome work for familiar-faced old movie and TV actors, nearly-ran and upcoming starlets, and granite-jawed authority figures like Christopher Plummer or David Jansen or Chuck Conners. Since they'd meet as strangers coming together for the first and last time for a voyage, we got their full character trait dossier in a few friendly exchanges between passangers.

Many of them will get picked off and those who make it will end up bonded heroes (see also: Day of the Animals).

The vehicle this time is a jumbo jet luxury cargo-passenger "airplane" hauling a massively heavy Celtic altar exhumed from its sacred grove in Ireland, and but a small scattering of passengers. They make the weird blonde lady put her dog in the cargo hold. And the downstairs storage freezes --the dog is frozen solid! (Why did we need to go through that, so the studio could show off its frozen dog prop? It's upsetting!) And then, the plane become suspended at 37,000 feet, trapped in a crossfire of wind tunnels, providing an ingenious explanation of why the plane interiors never once give the impression of movement, or engine roar, or the inside of the plane being anything but a breakaway set. Luckily the stewardesses all wear hot white go-go boots. Shat, playing a bitter, soused ex-priest who lost his faith (zzz) rocks some writerly glasses while sewing, and sports a toupee far more natural than usual. These little things help and the film needs all it can get. I love Shatner unconditionally but man, is he terrible in this. Richard Burton might have got away with it, maybe it was written with him in mind. But it's painful to buy our Kirk as a misanthropic drunk bitterly ranting about "homo-sapien" as a bunch of savages and noting, prissily: "I didn't lose my faith - it lost me." He doesn't sound drunk, profound, or pleasant to be around. His bitter laughs sound forced and bitchy. He doesn't want to be in this film and is taking it out on us. Has he ever even had a drink or seen a drunk person? 

I ain't complaining about how bad it is, though. I love a kind of zero point surreal experience where some smoke wafting up from a hole in the carpet and the occasional Val Lewtonian shadow substitutes for any kind of monster or concrete threat (which is great, since the whole point of the 'mounting menace' is to keep you glued through the commercials, worried you might miss the monster). The strange fascination with sub-zero temperatures on a plane (just touching the door makes pilot Chuck Connors' whole arm go numb) goes well with the array of locked-in ensemble types waiting for their chance at a terse "Why doesn't somebody do something??!" line. Playing like the unrehearsed table read of an off-off-Broadway one-act drama, directed by someone who has never been on a real plane, there's a sense of disaster always about to happen, as if a dozen actor tantrums are edited out between each line. And what kind of stewardess would confiscate a first-class passenger's flask, and not bring him a sip of champagne? That's taking it too far! 

Shatner is just one of many characters though - no one person really stars. There  Chuck Connors as the square-jawed pilot; Shatner the boozy priest who lost his faith; Lynn Loring his Mia Farrow-ish wife; Russell "The Professor-and" Johnson; Paul Winfield as the nattily-dressed physician whose dogmatic rationalism will soon be put to the test; Buddy Ebsen a cranky millionaire always ready with a homespun witticism; and--providing the bulk of the supernatural exposition--the baby-voiced Mrs. Pinder (Tammy Grimes). A wild-eyed pagan with straight dirty blonde hair and aversion to fire, she knows all about the stone's colorful human sacrifice-enriched past and makes the most out of every evil syllable of dialogue. Her dog, named Damien, stored below by the altar is clearly given no ketamine, the swines.

The only real sore spot is Will Hutchins as a spaghetti western B-cowboy with a terrible towhead mop top wig and rodeo shirt and a habit of shouting all his lines. Yeesh Watching the pathetic way he hits on one of the lady passengers is the most terrifying thing in the movie. Thank 'god' for Mrs. Pinder and her crazy eyes and straight dirt blonde hair, Connors and his  granite jaw of Connors, and of course, the Shat and his faux-drunk sneering at his fellow passenger's atheist-in-a-foxhole panic. Determined to be utterly worthless, he snaps to life when the other passengers contemplate child sacrifice. As Mrs. Pinder says, it just pisses the evil one off by trying to trick him (they try to switch the girl with her doll first). What the altar and its attached warlock wants the blood of one of its ancestors, the psychic girl (Jane Merrow) whose rich architect husband (Roy Thinnes) brought the altar as a souvenir from her ancestral home, against her wishes. The very fact a cargo plane has such a big cabin, and is flying passengers as well as a 11,000 pound altar seems very odd. Does this kind of flight even exist? Seems like that altar should be shipped by a freighter. But hey, it saves on passenger manifests (i.e. no extras needed) and allows more room for the camera and later, the possible child sacrifice fire in the now frigid cargo hold. Will the terrified passengers commit the ultimate transgression or be turned into green puddles before the dawn can come up in time to save them? But first a word from Alpo.

Horror at 37,000 Feet moves pretty fast without the commercials, and fans of Italian horror can luxuriate in the colorful red lights of the cockpit and everyone can appreciate the wild-eyed hysteria with which Loring rises to the occasion, furiously cutting off Jane Merrow's hair to wrap in the child's doll and wrapping it up in her clothes. "And some of your fingernails," she raves, as if possessed. When that doesn't work, it's time to actually sacrifice the child! Great hammy stuff with Shatner wobbling around and all the actors wondering what do in this under-rehearsed closed-in space to 'portray' their types without any directorial input. Shatner out matches Buddy Ebsen in the finger bending department. "Here, take another pain killer,' says the co-pilot to Connors, "no pint in saving them." Shatner realizes he can terrify Mrs. Pinder by waving his Zippo lighter in her face. "Fire... To burn.... witches!" Yikes! He's  not very PC --he even sneers at people who "believe jimson weed will make them immortal!" Dude, take it from an old jimson weed-head, no one thinks that. But Shat should know, having counseled the first and only 'mixed bag' drug addict that same year in Go Ask Alice.

Those of us who were around in the 70s and remember seeing this with the family are far less likely to wince over all this stupidity. We might care though, that the film can no longer hide its poverty in an analog cathode ray blur, or hide its lack of logical sense via the amnesia of regular commercial breaks. For those of us who were kids at the time (I was seven), Horror is a fond touchstone for those days when everyone watched the same shows (there were only three channels and no VHS and families only had one TV) and it gave the all something to laugh about together. For us this is as precious a memento as a family album. Maybe more so.  For us, though the clarity doesn't do the film any favors, the DVD is a must. If only Satan's School for Girls or Death at Love House would one day get the same respectful remastering treatment they too deserve1. May Cheesy Flix die a thousand deaths fo blurring Kate Jackson worse than a bad reception! Still, better than nothing.

 Though I hear 'nothing' is getting better all the time.

-----------

THE DEVIL'S RAIN

1975 - dir. Robert Fuest

**1/2

I've seen hellfire and I've seen face-melting rain/ I've seen green puddles with air bubbling up through them / and it wasn't impressive, even via nostalgia's glowing tolerance. But if you were a kid in the 70s, The Devil's Rain falls into the unholy and powerful relic category of stuff unseen yet dreamt of. Its TV spots were an inescapable part of local prime time TV in 1975, when I was eight and very impressionable and into monsters and devils. I still remember the weird the melting faces, Borgnine with goat horns, and the robes - both kind of a turn on and scary at the same time. I also remember I had a bizarre childhood dream I was part of the coven, melting under the rain, and even now a lingering prepubescent jouissance echo hits me imagining it. Those of us on the playground heard from our older siblings Devil's Rain was lousy, but my dream was amazing, and if I wasn't so savvy about Satanic cinema even at eight years-old, and it was the 80s instead of the 70s, and a careerist child psychologist heard me describe my dream, he'd probably think I was abducted by Satanists and arrest my parents and teachers. But in the 70s it was anybody's game, a whole Middle America demographic had gone to the devil with touchy feely sharing: cocktails, bridge, Jaycees, smoking on planes, turtleneck and medallion conclaves of wife-swappers, communes and encounter groups; there were all-night block parties leading into softball breakfast picnics of still-drunk adults and kids high on their very first sunrise and sleep deprivation. It was grand indeed, total freedom, and even the devils were cool. And church was just an excuse to act rambunctious.

That sub-sexual supernatural power of not being able to see a film like Devil's Rain as a kid is of course a substantial amount of the appeal for me and my Generation X comrades, the last group who experienced the high of unavailability, of R-rated movies being forever out of reach (once they left the theaters) and so projected upon with our most lurid imagination. Just seeing the TV commercial for an R-rated horror movie was enough to give us sexy nightmares and make the world seem full of strange telekinetic magic and unimaginable 'adult' terror. Our constant imagining created a parallel subconscious repository so powerful it later spilled over into our adult reality, dragging us by our budding sexual drives towards a dreaded obsession that finally led to the 'satanic panic' witch hunts of the 1980s and the rise of nervous overprotective brand parenting we're still hurting our children and ourselves with today.

Turns out, in real life, seeing it now on DVD as an adult, I realize the film is too strange, too 'off' and too slow to be scary or sexy, but it is creepy, kinda. The daytime Satanic ceremonies in the Arizona desert, the boarded up church in the middle of a nowhere ghost town, the upside down pentagram stained glass window, the ultimate futile weakness of Shatner's moxy in the face of Borgnine's mojo, the weird Psycho-style mid-film protagonist shift, it all generates a collective creepiness. as does the idea of looking for your parents and finding they've become life-size animated black-eyed wax effigies urging you to bring them 'the book'.

Earnest Borgnine is an odd choice for the head Satanist, but Shatner is great as the cowboy whose parents are sucked into the coven, which has taken over the whole ghost town. Meanwhile Joan Prather is psychic for no good reason except to allow her to 'see' the flashback to colonial times by looking into cult member John Travolta's dead black eyes, and to provide an interesting scene where she performs an EKG for a crowd of psychology students while Dr. Eddie Albert explains that ESP is very real and he's in the process of discovering what brainwave controls it. Tom Skerritt is her husband and eventually wrests the lead away from Shatner like Sylvia Miles from Janet Leigh.  

Any film that gives Hieronymus Bosch and Anton LaVey screen credit deserves some halting respect but I love lots of other things about this screwy picture, from the ESP angle right down to the way Scientology and plastic surgery are precognitively critiqued by the sight of a ceremonial robe-clad very young John Travolta's face melting in the rain. My only complaint is the unnecessary, depressing final 'twist' so I try to remember to stop watching beforehand, like somewhere during the last 20 minutes which is all just rain and melting. I still like it better than Fuest's higher praised work, like Dr. Phibes. Mighty Shat makes shit shows like this soar, son! Drink to that... or be damned like a black Cadillac chasing James Brolin through the dusty desert... with no driver!! Now that's a movie, even if it ain't got no Shat screaming on its altar.

See also: KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS! 

Age of Asherah: ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

"The movie appeared at a moment of optimum spiritual chaos in American life. Rosemary’s Baby remains an iconic memory trace of a time when anything seemed possible, including the birth of the Anti-Christ”. - 

Gary Indiana, “Bedeviled”, Village Voice. 

"The creepy nature of the film is not in its special effects, but in its realistic premise. The story takes place in a real apartment building (the Dakota) that has a real reputation of attracting eccentric elements of New York’s high society. The evil coven is not composed of stereotypical, pointy-nose witches but of friendly neighbors, prestigious doctors and distinguished individuals. They are elegant, rational and intelligent and are connected to important people. The realism of the movie forces the viewers to ponder on the existence of such groups, to a point that some feared that the movie, after its release would cause an all-out witch hunt" --Vigilante Citizen

“This is no dream, this is really happening!” - Rosemary Woodhouse

The first film perhaps ever to exploit our deep dread of old folks, 1968's Rosemary's Baby gazes deep and diabolically into the murky waters wherefrom skeletal hands of grandparents reach up to pat their captive breeders' kicking bellies. With real life abominations against women, like the 2012 male-only hearing on women's reproductive freedom in the US, and the stoning to death of women whose hair is accidentally exposed at fundamentalist Muslim markets (so I hear), it's ever-trenchant--and the end goal, conscious or not, is the same: co-opt the womb, destroy the chthonic Kali Durga shell around it before it expands wide enough to envelop you and grind you to pussy-whipped vagina dentata oblivion. At a certain depth, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Satanism become indistinguishable, the same old testament wrath of the 'jealous' god (Moloch disguised as Yaweh), the same flood called in to wipe out the old advanced civilizations and leave us collectively barefoot and pregnant, unable to change a lightbulb for centuries to come, in other words, we learned how to repress the feminine from God his self. Read the Old Testament and it's pretty clear that God, back in those days, was a monster, demanding ever greater blood sacrifices and burnt offerings, thousands of doves nailed to the wall of the church, one of each of the animals on the ark burned alive after waiting a whole extra year in the Ark even though it was dry outside, that kind of thing. Comparatively, Satan seems pretty cool, the Prometheus who turned us onto mind expanding drugs when our creator just wanted our brains docile and unquestioning. 

And that version of God, the old one, had a wife. The Old Testament had female characters like Lillith and Asherah--AKA Mrs. God, Yaweh's female counterpart, all excised from the record.  A million witch burnings had to happen to restore male supremacy, and even then it's in doubt. So who can blame the devil worshippers for being so well-hidden from the public eye?  To the long extinct Asherah worshippers, matriarchal pagans or just women in general, Christianity is as the KKK is to African-Americans, or Nazis to the Jews, Andrew Jackson to the Native American Nation, proof that if you go too far in any direction you become your own opposite. 

A typical early Christian demolishing an Asherah pole (by Dakota O'Leary)

To reach a perspective high enough to see these patterns clearly, let us overlay over the pre-biblical murk of the past, a snapshot of NYC in 1968, a time and place, if there ever was one, for the ashes of Asherah to reform into our realm. Rosemary generated real uncanny paranoia that made the collective unconscious a dangerous place, and finally broke through into the collective consciousness in the Satanic panic of the early-80s. 

But no matter who many women go under man's thumb, Woman, Asherah, Mrs. Old Testament God, never can or will. She can, on the other hand, become a vengeful Medea for being locked out of the men's club Illuminati narrative; are we the brood she bashes for revenge? This feeling of being excluded from knowledge has leaked out into her children too -- if there is an Illuminati they never asked us to join. Like Rosemary with the cult, no one even asks if she wants to be a member. She has to literally break through her own hidden exit to find out what's going on in her own womb. And since we see the entirety of the film from Rosemary's point of view, we have to guess, just as she does, until the very end, where babies really come from. The entirety of the film is absent direct visualization of any devil practices (dream aside), the paintings at the Castavets are removed when Rosemary comes over, like she's a child kept in the dark about why she came from her mother but has her father's features, until she's old enough, or distraught enough, to break through.

Understandably, that paranoid hallucination conspiracy angle was jettisoned for most of Rosemary's imitators, to be replaced by external signifiers like robes, horns, pentagrams, possession, smoke and mirrors and screaming naked virgins. Far from being scarier, this external projection and performative evil came as a great relief, like Hammer's Devil Rides Out (also from 1968). Those films are for more fun than Polanski's. Those are the ones we return to again and again on Halloween. Once we see the horns and the licentious ceremonial dancing, the fear stops, replaced by fond amusement. 

 

Polanski knew to never show such iconography or mindless externalized malice, and even the "this is really happening" dream sequence is kept surreal and strange. Polanski knew a Satanist with a gentle smile and a natty bow-tie and no real malice in his eyes could be far scarier than one that 'looked' scary, i.e. with a goat horn cowl and black cloak. We're never allowed (not old enough?) to see Rosemary's unholy baby, or the rapist devil (a hand and yellow eyes aside); the old people chanting around her in the dream are naked, no robes (a motif repeated with the witches in Polanski's Macbeth); and no horns or forked tail can compare in uncanny dead to the mystery and horror of the human reproductive system, or a flock of naked old folks standing around your bed while you're writhing in a drugged stupor. It's so creepy it's almost never been repeated in these imitations, yet it's all right there - no wardrobe budget needed.

If you know this blog you know I've had my own drugged demon visitations (see here) -- I believe the boundary line between the real and the vividly imagined is traversable in ways our minds as yet cannot consciously grasp, but who knows if certain ancient cults haven't figured out how to do just that, to creep in through the basement of our psyches and partially manifest? They can't all have been wiped out by the flood and then Attilla the Hun, then Genghis Kahn and then the Christians. 

For instance just last night on Late Night with Craig Ferguson he was talking with an author about how characters sometimes break away from you when you're writing them - they show up in places and do things you don't consciously expect as you're writing - as if they notice you writing about them. I had that happen to me writing my first novel wherein my character realizes some people he met the other night at a coke party are Yaqui crow trickster shamans, and right at that moment I could feel real Yaqui crow trickster shamans sensing me writing about them, and they began to begin to stir in their far-off nests, sending psychic representations forth through the gossamer tubeways of thought to climb out of the page to get me, like they could blind me or destroy me with their unified field of chant just as the coven had done to Tony Curtis in RB. Were these the same shaman who guided Carlos Castaneda? That you only had to start writing about them and they'd flutter up through the interdimensional tubeways into your unconscious and take over the typewriter?

But there's more to the story of Rosemary's Baby than just combined creative unconscious drives commingling to blind God long enough that a dream lover spawn might sneak across the uterine expanse of Mother Gaia's unburnt-at-stake dimensional dividers (after all, souls, even those of non-devil babies, have to come from somewhere). 

It wasn't just Polanski's film /cross to bear, and his wasn't the only life it allegedly destroyed. Rosemary had as a producer the legendary master of ballyhoo, William Castle, and, by 1968, Emergo just wasn't gonna cut it. He needed to go deep for a new signature gimmick, one for the turbulent times. He decided to do as the Castavet cult does in the film, to stop with the cardboard horns and skeletons, the axes and insurance politics, and go right for the unconscious, the power of paranoia, of conspiracy and curses. I'm not saying, 'mind' you, that he made up a Macbeth-style curse hanging over the film's production, that his linking of strange on-set accidents and tragedies to the film's subject matter was straight up Castle ballyhoo for the age of Aquarius. But if he did do that, if he started the rumor up, in the vein of Tut's tomb opening curse, then maybe the daemonic tricksters of alternate dimensions noticed him weaving a paranoid associative rumor nexus and sent their Satanic kidney stone calling card across the gossamer web that connects myth, dream, mind, soul, and nerve endings... to 'help' Castle along, as it were. 

David Parkinson writes about the hate mail Castle received for the film, the curses leveled at him, and how Castle and composer Krystof Komeda were both struck down with crippling, painful ailments shortly after the film premiered, and then the murder of Polanski's real-life wife Sharon Tate (who co-starred in Eye of the Devil, see: The Blonde Devils of '66,) and the untimely womb ripping of their child, (he omits the eerie similarity to the violation of Rosemary in the film and Polanski's own rape charges), to end with a link to John Lennon's death in 1980:

John Lennon had spent the spring of 1968 with Mia Farrow at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in India. During their stay, Lennon had written "Dear Prudence" for Farrow's sister (who shared a name with Sharon Tate's Yorkshire terrier) and it featured on The Beatles' White Album that November. Charles Manson claimed that the LP contained coded messages about the impending race war he hoped to provoke with the Cielo Drive slayings. Lennon himself met a violent end in December 1980 when he was gunned down in New York — outside the Dakota apartments." (more) 

For Polanski, a child survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, the coven aspect of Levin's novel surely tapped into the paranoia of his childhood hardship. Part of the Nazi's rationale for their homicidal anti-Semitism was that Jews were a mystical black magic Protocols of the Elders of Zion cabal, and just as educated women had to lay low for centuries lest they be burned at stake, so too this feeling of a secret conspiracy lingered in the Jewish intellectual community, creating separateness, enforced perhaps by Aryan rivals for Jewish business (or property disputes--as in Salem), or disgruntled employees getting passed over for promotion in favor of some kid fresh out of Yeshiva school, or ghettoization (as in Merchant of Venice), or--if you're goy-learning your Jewish fiancee was being pressured not to marry you by the mother of one of your Jewish friends. So which came first? The secrecy and elitism, or the goy intolerance necessitating a strength in numbers that must be hidden from the non-Jewish population, lets they believe the anti-semitic conspiracy theorists? 

In America, we can't imagine what it's like to be invaded, to have an openly evil and oppressive system turn human compassion and morality upside down, to obliterate all traces of rhyme and reason, to be persecuted for something done centuries before we were even born, all our possessions confiscated or destroyed, starved and beaten. But for Polansk,i this is a formative experience. He knows all we see and hear of 'reality' as Americans constitutes only the tip of a black iceberg. Behind closed doors, who knows what monsters sit, working spells and deals to ensure they win all the marbles before the game is even started? If we knew those spells, wouldn't we use them, too? Didn't we, in a way, already? (we in this case being SWM Christians like myself).

Between 1933-1941, America benefitted indirectly from the Nazi's intolerance. Most of Europe's intellectual Jews, gays, physicists, artists, and filmmakers fled to our shores, bringing their strange occult customs, their atomic bomb formulas and expressionistic lighting designs.

But after the war, America turned away from seances and toward atomic age anxiety, less devil cults and more giant bugs and rockets to the moon. Then the suburbs were born (they didn't exist before WW2), a place where junior could play catch in the back yard and parents with rakes smiled from cross the street and cheered the space race on to the moon. Occasionally a dad could go insane (as in Nicolas Ray's Bigger than Life) or kids could grow up into spoiled brats (as in Douglas Sirk's All that Heaven Allows), but childbirth was holy... and the country club was 'restricted.' 

Babies, housewives, and old people could never be, you know, evil --not in the straight white Anglo-Christian suburbs. 

A few exceptions came and went. There was The Bad Seed, and a spate of crazy old broad movies launched by the success of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? But Jane and Rhoda were psychotic, flash-frozen at childhood, before their brains developed the foundations of the empathetic response --we knew this from the get-go. They might be terrifying in theory, but it was an understandable evil, the suspense was waiting for the rest of the characters to realize it. But they were lone gunmen. And we knew where they lived.

But what about the sane, gentle sweethearts bringing you vitamin shakes to help your pregnancy, or the 'no arguments, young lady' condescension of top shelf pediatricians played by stalwart salts like Ralph Bellamy as Dr. Sapirstein (who tells Rosemary "And please don't read books. Don't listen to your friends either.") Sapirstein could be espousing the Muslin fundamentalist sexist line, or America's before the dawn of the sixties. He might as well add "and for the love of Mike, don't vote or wear slacks." Rosemary's only form of revolt against this trap is her short hair-cut, an expensive 'very chic' affront, which to Guy is tantamount to her drawing on the wall in crayon, defacing his valuable property. As she's getting dangerously thin, pale, and pain-wracked, the effect of the short hair is to evoke the camps all over again... even right there on the UWS.....they're always there. 

In conveying Rosemary's gradual awakening from compliance ("you're gonna think I really flipped,") Polanski exploits our willingness to grant power to unseen forces, almost as if it's in our DNA to do so (and maybe it is). The link between paranoia and pregnancy is made unilateral, and with Polanski's film we see how patriarchal 'big city' condescension and secrecy can completely dominate even a free spirited young woman from Iowa whose determination to be hip is both her saving grace and undoing. Taken in total, "Rome's" story has devils of both the psychoanalytical interpretation variety (paranoia brought on by pregnancy-related estrogen surges) and the physical arrival, up from the subconscious realm, of an actual devil ("Hail Satan!") Like in a Lovecraft story, the womb functions as an interdimensional airport with connecting flights from unconscious hell to conscious reality, on the wings of combined chanting and herb-spiked dreams. Rosemary's Baby is the opposite of a film like Inception - which is a story about people invading other people's dreams. Baby is about a dream incarnated into reality. It happens all the time, like when writing a novel or something and you realize 'you' are really dictating your unconscious's voice, so that the finished product might get that voice's owner, your shadowed anima, closer to actual merging with your daylight consciousness (if only your ego wasn't always in the way, waving its rosary and uttering empty prayers).

HIDING MAKES YOU UNKNOWABLE.

When we sense something is being kept from us, that thing gains in power as our conscious fears project onto it (trying to pre-program our response) and projection is exactly how the coven operates: they chant together and use combined mind projection to astral travel along an associative nine-dimensional curve via an item belonging to the victim into that victim's nervous system. This is the same 'reality' that paranoid schizophrenics and remote viewing agents live in. It's an ocean wherein all dreamers are linked together, like fish, drowning sailors, whales, swimmers, and dolphins are all connected via an oceanic matrix of nonlocal conductive consciousness ('salt water'). 

But not everyone swims, drowns, or paddles. The Satanist sails on the surface of this sea (hence Rosemary's dream of being on a boat and seduced by a Naval officer, like Nicole Kidman's fantasy in Eyes Wide Shut - see Make-Up Your Mind Control). The psychedelic shamans surf until they're wiped out (whoa bro, you rode that wave?!); unconscious dreamers snorkel or bob in the waves, and the schizophrenics drown, and the mystic swims. (to paraphrase Joseph Campbell). Rosemary's dream begins on the ship and winds up bobbing in the waves, then sinking, before clawing her way back to land (finding the secret passage between the apartments). In the end, she joins with the cult because her maternal instinct is too strong to resist. The secret passage behind the cupboard at the end of the hall is like a mirror of the interdimensional womb/chanting gateway by which the horny devil entered her boudoir. "What have you done to its eyes?!" she asks, horrified. "He has his father's eyes," Castavet answers. And its the eyes of Guy's rival for his coveted part that are affected by the telepathic sabotage of the coven. The oceanic matrix connects all parts of all things. They should name the child after the blinded rival actor, and close the circuit.

It's interesting to note that in both Rosemary and the Exorcist there is a mother alone with her child and an absentee father (allowing room for a 'new' one), and a kindly older male friend who dies in mysterious circumstances. The males are all either dysfunctional, absent, or very old and full of strange oaths and bearded like the bard. Is God Dead? so trumpets Time Magazine!

The last proper dad we see in the film, played by Maurice Evens, is the proper authority figure of the old school of monster movies, the backstory exposition scientist, the merry fire-toasted Van Helsing type, outlying some grim history: "Adrian Marcata lived there, so did the Trent sisters." It turns out of course that Marcata / Mocata, it's all the same old man in the painting above the Castavet's mantle. 

The name Adrian Marcata should of course remind Hammer fans of The Devil Rides Out and its villain Bob Adrian Mocata, played by Charles Gray (below left), which came out the exact same year but, compared the resonant contemporary realism of Polanski's film, seems to be from a much earlier era. Even Rosemary's utterance "Hey, let's make love," while they're eating dinner on the floor in their empty apartment, is straight out of the 70s, while in Devil Christopher Lee is throwing magic beans at giant spiders. Yet the two evil patriarchs - the same, just manifesting different powers. The devil may be thwarted in Rides but he wins in Baby -- and he does so by keeping a low profile, hiding his deeds even from the camera. 

Mocata / Marcata 

The first time we see Roman Castavet AKA Steven Marcata, he is wearing a Satanic dark red velour shit that contrasts sharply (especially in the recent brilliant hi-def version) with the dark surroundings. He sits off by himself, in a big chair far enough away from the couch whereon Rosemary, Guy, and Minnie are squeezed together to indicate his mastery over them, as if he's on stage, and just his talk about having been all around, every town on earth, makes him seem ageless, omnipresent (even as its folded into his folksy homilies) his ability to seem familiar with Guy's work is standard suggestive manipulation ala fortune tellers at the carnival. And if you've ever been in rich people's parlors where the furniture is all the way across the room, you may may have noted that they don't shout; it's kind of up to you to sharpen your hearing enough to comprehend what they're saying, amazed, perhaps, that you can. You realize you're so used to boorish loud people you've forgotten how to talk in a low voice to someone whose ten or 20 feet away. 

The cynical self-serving unconscious bluster of Guy is apparently sensed by the Castavets, which is why he's brought into their fold and not Rosemary. They sense in her a deep goodness that he--self serving prick that he is--lacks. What she is, on the other hand, is naive and easily smitten - the common thread associated with 'goodness' as mere lack of experience (otherwise she'd wise up to his snake oil charms) When the news announces "Pope Paul VI arrived at 9:47 AM" - he excitedly shouts, "that's a great spot for my Yamaha commercial!" as if he has some say in media buying or that the pope doesn't exist outside the TV, he's just trying to weasel in to anywhere he'll get exposure. We later hear some of his true vitriol come out while he's rehearsing with his crutch, shouting the line "I'm in love with no one, especially not your goddamned fat wife!" as if anticipating Rosemary's swollen belly. He's bad at hiding things, and such a weak actor he can't even commit to the part of the concerned doting husband.

 It's a part that also shows Cassavettes' limits as an artist and actor which fits the character he plays and which would typecast him for decades: the charming swine who genuinely thinks we were all awed by his projected street savvy warmth.(1) Polanski nails all that down around Guy so all Cassavettes can do is squirm and pace the room and seem utterly confused by the fact that Rosemary's growing less and less charmed by his patronizing grin. She's growing out of him, while he doesn't change his act. His is a kind of evil we're familiar with, for it stems from vanity, like the fallout of getting by on your charisma for so long you're no longer able to function without it. When your looks fade, you find yourself without the one thing that masked your dysfunction. Such a person is so ripe for Satan's book it's easy to imagine Satan helped make him attractive to begin with. Any relapsed alcoholic knows too well how the devil is patient, willing to work a long con, planting a seed then coming back when it's a tree and chopping it down. 

But that kind of paranoia leads to madness. As we let ourselves get obsessive over the obscure elements of the film, it begins to take its place in the 'evidence' of a global Satanic conspiracy (for realsies). Take the central dream/rape sequence, a benchmark in how surreal dream sequences can enhance reality rather than diminish it. Most films' dream sequences are cop-outs, places to dump the sexy weird shots or artsy ideas that don't fit the story but which the producers want so they can use them in the poster and coming attractions. Only great surrealists like David Lynch or Luis Bunuel understand that dreams are the real part, it's life that's the mirage. When Rosemary momentarily comes out of her trance to note that "this is really happening" it's terrifying in a way no film has been before or since, because suddenly we can't really fathom which parts of what we see and hear are the dreams and which are reality. Polanski knows the power of the mind and the flexible nature of space and time and that in these areas lurk real horrors.

The blue laser eyes and telekinetic devil children of later films are just the opposite, which is not necessarily bad. In externalizing and materializing the threat, we can laugh at our own fears and so in some small way, allay them (i.e the smiling black man with the yellow eyes in The Devil Rides Out). But with no monster in sight, no matter how far we look, and no 'seen murders' (no blood), there's actually a crisper sense of dread in Rosemary. Of all the horror films of the last 20 years, only The Blair Witch Project has fully exploited this same murky power. 

"death is no dream..." - Rezső Seress

The conspiracy theories of authors like David Icke, re: the Illuminati and Zionist banking cabals, work on a similar level to these terrifying ambiguous dreams, all suffused with strange symbols and meanings. Irregardless of its authenticity, the Illuminati-Zionist-Rothschild-Bildenberg banking conspiracy is a vibrant, fascinating myth, operating between truth and fiction, allowing us to see through reality until it dissolves into a a series of stages, mirror reflections, or stereograms. As Peter Tork once said: "the mind can't distinguish between the real and the vividly imagined." He said that in HEAD, also from 1968. And the reverse is also true - the mind cannot see itself except through hallucination, and what's the difference between a graphic artist working with a computer to create a hidden 3D pattern in a stereogram and a shaman chanting a spirit into existence? Nada. Just try doing eye surgery on yourself without a mirror, or cubism with one eye shut. This is why we have therapists -- to show us what we really are under all the bluster, make-up, and pageantry.

But there is also the 'anti-therapist;' filmmakers and SRA inflictors --who understand the significance  of performative or mimetic rituals we see today only in indigenous tribes or at Burning Man. It is the ultimate power of self-deception. 

HERS IS THE POWERLESSNESS, THE AGONY & THE GORY for Eve-a and Eva-a

There's a practical reason, apparently, why Satanists and CIA brainwashers inflict sexual abuse and physical torture on their children, The intense trauma creates in their growing minds a dissociative state, resulting in split personalities, where the daytime conscious one has no memory of these rituals. 

I myself noticed the way intense agony creates a split in one's consciousness when I dislocated my knee cap. The extreme sensory pain launched my perspective into a split where one side of me in agony at the slightest movement, screaming involuntarily, on the other me standing slightly back, floating over my prostrate form, hearing my own screams but muffled, as if I had earplugs in. The greater my body's physical distress the more the contemplative serenity increased. 

Surely the breathing exercises of Lamaze also tap into this, as well as Stockholm syndrome: the agony of childbirth shifts the consciousness of a woman into that of 'an' expectant mother to 'the" Mother-- her triumph for enduring the unbearable pain the flush rapture of being finally free of all that weight, floating like an angel in your own loving arms. Torturous initiations for boys becoming men; menstruation for girls; hazing for frat guys--all coincides with the journey from mythic third eye visualization, 'the becoming', the five senses perceiving 'the becomed' sixth in a kind of recoil motion, vomiting the soul up into the mythic outsider "observer" position, the subject moving from being a Rosemary-style child guest, kept out of the adult swim, to being initiated into a cosmic truth too ambivalent and full of surface hostility and danger (such as Christian persecution) for children and innocent Iowa girls to grasp without first heating up their rigidly naive flyover state consciousness through pain and tribulation.

Most devil movies end with the coven being swallowed up in flames (ala Suspiria, Inferno, The Devil's Rain, Ride with the Devil, etc.) which is mocked in Babt bywhy the burning church painting Rosemary finds when she finally breaks through the hidden door into the Castavet's apartment is so wry (and which she recognizes from when it was "really happening" below decks in her dream). There are no flames for the devils, the fiery climax is frozen in amber and it's the Christian church that burns down therein. When Marcata declares that God is dead you feel that he just might be right. At any rate, now that they're in charge, he advises them to accept Rosemary's outmoded belief (her "oh my god" outburst) in order to not become as barbaric as the Christians before them. The party Rosemary bursts in on is, after all, hardly threatening. They're eccentrics - they're funny - such as the miffed old lady trying to rock the cradle, and the weird guy from Japan. In finally solving the mystery, of merging into the unconscious realm, inverse to the way her baby has broken through into consciousness, Rosemary doesn't trigger the usual inferno that burns down the devil's house in all the other devil films, she just realizes God's church is already burned down, metaphysically, in reality, and in memory. Enlightenment isn't always a matter of restoring patriarchal supremacy, or conquering evil on behalf of good, it can also be about finally telling your husband to fuck off, and recognizing no amount of negativity has ever killed a devil yet. But slowly rocking it back to sleep, with a loving, forgiving gaze? Momma, that's murder. 

NOTES:

1.  (He's magnetic as the jazz scene beatnik TV detective Johnny Staccato in 59-60).

Genealogy of Flies: LORDS OF SALEM (2013), HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (2008) + My own Salem Witch Connections

"Only bad witches are ugly." - Glenda

Much as I love WIZARD OF OZ there's something messed up about Glenda's shallowness. Look at these bangin' old broads (above) bringing tea and cookies, and hell yeah the tea's probably spiked with tannis root but when these sexy evil bitches show up at your door you should be fucking honored. They're not there to get all petty on you with who's good and who's bad, ugly or pretty. Glenda's the ugly one for perpetuating a stereotype started by the church to keep a sister down. In Salem, for example, a horde of hot witches were hung for their presumed evil, including some of my ancestors.

If they weren't evil before you hung them, they are now, o paranoid projector of your own subconscious devils!

Now they're coming back, in my DNA, arm-in-arm with every kid whose life was ruined for getting caught expanding his mind in the Reagan-era 80s. Fear us, then, o descendants of the evil and corrupt Salem and Texas judges, all smug in your hypocrite robes and stetsons. We are watching you as you sleep, through Meg Foster's crystal blue orbs. Your time shall be soon.

In other words, sons of sinuses blocked and lungs a-resinated, hail the new flesh and toad of newt, hail MacBeth, Val Lewton, the Cramps, Bob Dobbs, Nic Cage, Sammy Davis Jr., Lamont Cranston, D.H. Lawrence, and John Doe.

LORDS OF SALEM (2012), Rob Zombie's nearly abstract, post-vaguely-modern 70s devil film, tosses cauldron-ward the old 'conspiracy to impregnate unwitting chick with the devil's child' thing-- already tossed back a few years earlier by Ti West (HOUSE OF THE DEVIL - 2009)-- adds the actual Salem and spoon of film references, heats to overflowing, goes in the other room to change the record, becomes obsessed with finding the right cauldron stirring Velvet Underground song, and never comes back (1). Does it end up a stew? Well, what is it trying to be? If it was trying to do for devil movies what SCREAM did for slashers, then it failed. If it wasn't trying to do that, if it was trying to be a SHINING for New England, then why the tattoo-parlor ambiance? Why the vintage punk thrift store symbolism that means nothing? Why the EXORCIST-cycled dialogue, (bringing "cunting" back home)? Why the carny ride haunted house tableaux that go nowhere, as if we're meant to glance their way, gasp, clutch our date's arm, and walk on through the dry ice fog and strobe lights to the next attraction? Aside from the goofball cranberry juice elevator flood, and the climactic gold room of dusty corpses, Kubrick would never be so obvious. So what is LORD OF SALEM really trying to be, aside from a showcase for Rob's tattoo and customized neon artist Florida posse to display their wares?

It's being Rob Zombie, the Kubrick of the Daytona trailer park, the Neo-pagan who goes on a killing spree at Burning Man, and everyone mistakes it for performance art.

Dude, they were so high, those who mistook it. Take it from me.

You can't take it from them. They're all dead.

Or hungover.

Left to its own devices, without all the post-modernist post-punk flippancy royalties can buy, LORDS does generate some hypnotic power, some echo of that great stretch of THE SHINING, set to the avant garde vocalizing drones of György Sándor Ligeti, involving 'the woman in room 237.' Zombie's own version of that same ominous inexorable creep towards some dreadful finish has a uniquely palpable abandon; the psychic force of the gathered middle-aged actresses--heavily and picturesquely filth-encrusted--creates a combined psychic release. Compare this with most lame attempts to create a Satanic ceremony: wherein half-asleep actors gather in black robes, read Latin, light candles and splay a topless virgin on the dais rather than do real research on altered states of consciousness achieved through hallucinatory herbs, smoked and drunk, taken in conjunction with prolonged periods of group chanting.. Like Ken Russell before them, those who'd depict witchy states of consciousness just show flashes of weird sick MTV images and a bloody Jesus and a nun naked but for bloody habit, strobed over a dosed pupil... and hope for the best.

Only bad witches are ugly... yeah, right (Glinda in the Jezebel fire) - collage 2015 by-EK 

Zombie does well in portraying this ceremonial ghastliness, the bad witch ugliness, but for it to resonate we need a stark contrast of beauty, which we don't get. In THE SHINING, the movie Zombie apes, the beauty comes from the hotel decor and from the devouring omniscient ambivalence of the Colorado Rockies. They loom like giant fangs, like the Overlook is in the mouth of a giant arctic Venus flytrap. They provide a stark coldness which makes even the unfathomable vastness of the cavernous hotel interiors warm by contrast.

But when a gold-flecked theater shows up at the end of SALEM (referencing Overlook's 'Gold Room' and MULHOLLAND DR.'s Club Silencio), though it offers quite a show, it conforms not to Kubrickian displays of mind control, nudity and submission/surrender, nor stark terror/beauty, but back to those old images of evil that are speckled with the cruel dust of the demonization process begun a thousand years ago by the Catholics. As Moncure Daniel Conway's Devil Lore book notes:

The great representations of evil, whether imagined by the speculative or the religious sense, have never been, originally, ugly. The gods might be described as falling swiftly like lightning out of heaven, but in the popular imagination they retained for a long time much of their splendour. The very ingenuity with which they were afterwards invested with ugliness in religious art, attests that there were certain popular sentiments about them which had to be distinctly reversed. It was because they were thought beautiful that they must be painted ugly; it was because they were—even among converts to the new religion—still secretly believed to be kind and helpful, that there was employed such elaboration of hideous designs to deform them. (c. 1879)

Of course Zombie makes sure that same damnation is applied equally to the hideous Puritan torturers, here re-imagined with big pointy caps and excessively unguided facial hair. In other words, both sides are twisted, evil grotesques. Then--in modern Salem--our protagonist Sherri Moon is supposedly descended from the judges, but is in practice just a smarmy, skin deep-pagan, and so is Zombie apparently, for he forgets we have to believe these torturers of witches were genuinely under psychic attack if the witches are to be actually evil, too. You can't have it both ways! If you try, the whole thing falls apart, for there's no clear 'side' you necessarily want to be on. Puritan evil vs. Heathen evil leaves no tension, so we may just admire the artsy detail of the tableaux, clutch our date's arm again and follow the crowd off to the next tableaux, already wondering where to eat after we leave.

The turf is ours by right...

This spectacle might keep our interest more adroitly if the lead actress was stunningly beautiful, like Jocelin Donahue in HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, or Mia Farrow in ROSEMARY'S BABY, or Cristina Raines in THE SENTINEL, or even just interesting, vivacious, charismatic, but the leading actress in Zombie's film is of course his wife, Sherri Moon Zombie. And she was all those things a few years ago, in HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES and DEVIL'S REJECTS. Now gettin' too old for this shit. As Glinda might say, a hard-lived life leaves no loveliness.

Decked out like a Williamsburg hipster, Moon's character, Heidi Hawthorne is an enigma only to herself. Way too old to either believe in the supernatural or stop dressing like an extra in ALMOST FAMOUS. She considers herself a badass, clearly, and has a good job as a Salem radio station DJ. She still snickers like a dirt bag middle-schooler at any hint of genuine insanity, balls, magic and/or evil--such as when the metalhead from the band Lords of Salem is a guest on her show. She's the type of girl who has Celtic symbol tattoos but openly sneers at anyone who tries to point out what the markings mean. She is just the sort of person any self-respecting punk rock contingent recognizes as a slumming poseur and ostracizes a priori just as she des the truth behind all the witchy symbols she surrounds herself with. She's got nothing going on but thinks she's all that, and that's the biggest red flag of all.

Of course we know why we're supposed to be so intrigued by Heidi: the director still loves her, and he mistakenly presumes we're as bewitched as he is. Well we were, Rob. Ten years ago, she was freakin' sexy as all hell. But Rob we're fickle. Ain't no ring on our finger. And that's part of the problem when you cast your wife all the time; sooner or later she's going to be too long in the tooth to play the babe she still thinks she is, and you're going to be the one to have to tell her, and then you'll have to start auditioning younger leading ladies all while dodging hurled frying pans.

This kind of short-sightedness is all over SALEM; we can tell what 70s devil movies Zombie likes and wants SALEM to be but he misses key subtexts. Like a carny trailer camp cargo cult, he imitates the surface and adds his own trashy aesthetic and crosses his fingers the two will gel into a religion. I'm not knocking him because I admire him for that last part. He clearly loves all this shit. His obsessive yen to recreate these lightning moods is admirable and must be appreciated by any classic horror fan. It's the meaning that eludes him. For example, he goes for an Antonioni/Miike vibe in longly held static long shots of Heidi walking her dog on a lonely street or in a park in late-afternoon or playing records with her bearded buddy, but fails to inject genuine observation and complexity into these long shots the way Miike would, nor can he generate uncanny frisson even in his Kubrickian Steadicam POV shots, injecting them instead with anemic attempts to make Salem a goth Austin with just a smidge of Detroit decay. He misses the chance for some great 70s-80s Italian synths in the LORDS' score, and instead goes for an annoyingly minor key two-note piano of the kind that made the back half of EYES WIDE SHUT so annoying. He misses the chance to make Heidi herself interesting: she's supposed to be a recovering drug addict but any AA or NA person will roll their eyes at how un-an addict she is. She even drinks at one point, super dangerous behavior from any kind of recovery (did Rob not bother to learn that?) though it doesn't strike the film as a big deal; and her apartment is way too clean for someone in early recovery. Why isn't she smoking or chugging coffee like a real AA-er counting days? I got a headache just watching her get up and walk her dog without a coffee first. If Heidi's an addict I'm John Paul Jones (the Zeppelin bassist, not the seaman... you got a dirty mind).

The Moon wanes: 1000 Corpses (2003), Rejects (2005), Salem (2013)

I mean no disrespect to Sherri Moon. I love her in DEVIL'S REJECTS. Her line after bluffing a room of hostages with an empty gun ("it's all mental!") is my personal mantra. She displayed a great relish for evil in that film and had great stringy-sexy hair and a flash of gleeful malice in her eyes and nice curves and an ease with using them to drive a man so crazy he forgets to defend himself (you could see why Zombie married her). Her thin lips weren't even an issue then, but now they're even thinner, too thin for the big screen; she seems tired, and way too old to be riding on an URBAN COWBOY-style electric goat in neon flames (her poor bones!), or going down on strange priests in the midday pew (unbecoming!). She seems to be a middle-aged woman trapped in a tricked-up spiral of horror iconography, determined to stay unaware of the maturity that at last has found her.

I know what it feels like to make out with thin-lipped women. It's like kissing a skull. Scary! Is that why he puts her in skull makeup paint? I hope he's trying to convince her to use some collagen. None of these 18 paragraphs would exist had she done so. You think I'm a fucking lippist now, but if not me, whom? And who else are collagen lip-augmentation shots for if not for her? Who but a classic horror fan may say so, may hold her to the same barroom benzedrine social standard the rest of stardom is bound unto? I'm no fan of collagen but just 'cuz some girls overdo it to ducky extremes doesn't mean a small dose should be shunned by those who need it. Her later skull make-up helps her look like some scraggly skate punk who got caught in the rain on his way home from a Stockholm death metal show (below) muttering "fråga inte!" to his parents as he drips up to his bedroom." as he passes his parents on his way upstairs. But I doubt that's the look she wanted. It's just the look she had, so she ran with it - again not an un-admirable motive, that old Buddhist saying: when you're falling, dive.

Pastiche Without Purpose

Maybe SCREAM auteur Wes Craven had it easier since he focused on 80s slasher films, so ignored horror history prior to HALLOWEEN and after SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Zombie goes back to the silent era's HAXAN through to the occult crazy 70s, Kenneth Anger's LUCIFER RISING, ALUCARDA, every Spanish and Italian Exorcist rip-off ever made, then buzzes THE HOWLING, and various old films Heidi watches while asleep in her apartment like KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL and CAPTAIN KIDD.

Burnin' up his fuse up here alone

There are a million ways these textual links could have been made to resonate, such as having Heidi actually evince some knowledge of classic film trivia, to be able to quote them or talk about them, to fold quotes into her lexicon. Instead they seem like these tapes were all left behind by an ex-boyfriend and she just has them on to remind her of him, and because she's too passive to pick a channel.

That's what made SCREAM so unnerving; these characters knew what was coming--they'd seen it in the movies. As kids kept awake at night all through the slasher 80s, vowing in our slasher-fueled anxiety that we would never drop the knife by the killer's prone body, we resonated with those SCREAM kids. SCREAM used the dread inspired by those earlier movies, which had by now settled in our collective dream unconscious, and re-activated it, showing even a kid who knows HALLOWEEN by heart and has already thought through his bedroom defense, might be killed anyway. It was a terrifying thought.

Zombie can only admire that collective unconscious and that terror from a safe distance. He's a fan, not a player. He doesn't know why he likes them - so he just apes the box covers. He's the R-rated Tim Burton, i.e. for a director he makes a good set designer. They both gravitate towards familiar narratives--remakes of their favorite films--because they have no gift for story structure or pacing: they just want to create the fantasy setting they dreamt of inhabiting as children. Once they do, it's like one of those Halloween parties where people in fancy costumes just stand around awkward all night.

Luckily Zombie is free of the awful whimsy-packed orchestral pomp of those Danny Elfman scores Burton uses. Now you think I'm whimsist!? Fuck yeah, because it pollutes the real madness. Whimsy is the way an insecure artist of the macabre, or MST3000, chews your food for you.

Oddities seems such a lonely world

Sadly, what the mise-en-scene of Heidi going through her day most resembles is the Science Channel's reality show, ODDITIES. I've got nothing against the Oddities Store itself (down the street from where I used to live) but the customers and employees on the show are way too sane and boring, which makes their yen for weirdness strangely sad (to me anyway). They cover themselves with tattoos and piercings and wear red white and blue dreadlocks, old-timey mustaches, and tall stovepipe hats and fang implants, but when push comes to shove, perhaps, some of them might be overcompensating for an inner lack of... what? True insanity? Nic Cage only needed one symbol of his individuality in WILD AT HEART, his snakeskin jacket. But Cage 'really' is a badass ---the eyes, Manolo, they never lie. Some people choke themselves with symbols of badassery and yet turn pale at the sight of a cigarette. They'd have been too scared to use the bathroom at CBGBs, but then they'd be wearing their CBGB souvenir T-shirt proudly for the next 20 years, they'd even wait in line for tickets when the same (now cleaned and laminated) bathroom shows up as an exhibit at the Met, and recall the good old days when punk music was, like, real.

Now you think I'm an anti-faddist. Well no. It's just that I'm really crazy. And while I don't trust carnies and their little hairy hobbit hands, their undiagnosed Hep-C and permanent smell of diesel oil, I trust normals even less. Dude, the truly crazy try to be normal. They fail! And the result of their failure are the real eccentric tics; the vice versa are only sad - or am I jealous of 'stability?' Around 1983, vefore I started wearing black fingernail polish, growing my rat tail, and wearing combat boots with white circles I painted on them in white-out, I guess I was similar. Are you calling me a poseur now? Yeah, maybe.... but I escaped it, through psychedelics, alcoholism, and being in a band, and... hmm, no, that's it. Just those three things. Goddamn it! I was depressed, is the thing, undiagnosed - as was all the depression not suicided over. That level of depression will make you reckless in what you do, you scramble for the intense experience, and CBGBs and City Gardens are like soothing beach trips. When you're a drunken acidhead, it's the same, but now you're free.

CBGB's: Smell on Earth

Rob Zombie's clearly a real wild man in that sense, but he covers every inch of his mise-en-scene with so much hillbilly dirtbag neo-pagan blood chic you wonder what lack of true insanity he's hiding. None of what he films looks like a real place, with age and use proper to an old city like Salem, the way the sticky thickness of 30 years of rock band promo stickers and graffiti are layered like redwood rings at real college dives. And too much detail all 'of a piece' as they say, looking new and pre-fab rather than real isn't scary. Carpenter created the first HALLOWEEN with a spray-painted white Shatner mask, a trash bag full of painted leaves, a butcher knife, a knitting needle and a few suburban houses.  Zombie had carny parents. He lived on the road; he didn't know from suburbs, so he's excused in that sense. Carnies vouchsafe their authenticity only through their oddities collections, like sheepdogs for a sheepherder. And who cares if the more obnoxious gawkers get sewed screaming into the next exhibit? Rob Zombie understands if we don't, either.

But Heidi is a tourist.

There some indications here that Zombie can make the post-modern jump, and that's what's frustrating. He jumps but doesn't stay on the other side of the line long enough for the ref to take a measurement. He just decorates the jump-off point in punk rock iconography and gestures off into the fog and whoosh -- he's gone onto the next wild attraction. But in one great scene, Heidi is chilling out at her friend's house and suddenly she's coughing up blood, and faceless doctors appear in the room and Charles Laughton's voice on the TV jibes with the demons almost as effectively as in MYRA BRECKINRIDGE or the films of Nicolas Roeg or Alex Cox. "This just may be to your benefit," Laughton says, as the merciless CAPTAIN KIDD (above). For this tiny stretch, it's sublime work.

Later her bonding with the weird fat devil baby (whose lopsy-topsy mutatedness is a perfect dark evil mirror to Laughton's leering image onscreen) mirrors that of TV and viewer, umbilical extension cords plugged right into us and hell, and with its embryonic red eyes and slit middle you'll wonder if this demon embryo is a metaphor for an abortion or if his froggy face is supposed to be the ski mask in TORSO, and the priest looks like he might be a reference to the stitched-into-eternity Dr. Freudstein in Lucio Fulci's HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (1981)... but we have no clear idea why or if its conscious on Zombie's part, or the make-up guy's.

Top: Salem / Bottom: House by the Cemetery

My Mary Easty/ Rebecca Towne Nurse Connective Genealogy 

(on my Dad's Mother's Mother's Side)

For an aside: I have to mention, as always when discussing Salem and genealogy (characters here are descendants of the hung witches and/or judges and executioners) that all these descendant movies are fascinating on a personal level for me because the one side of my family tree that kept immaculate records is from Salem, having arrived in Boston in 1631 (with fellow passenger Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island): This side of my tree includes nuggets like these (copied direct):

The family of John Perkins 1583-1654 - freeman 18th May 1631
Married Judith Gates, born Newent, Gloucestershire, England
Children:
1. "Quartermaster" John - b. 1614 0 d. Dec, 14, 1686
2. "Deacon" Thomas 1616-1686 (not the witch hunter, he died before that)
3.  Elizabeth 1618-1700 / married William Sargent (5 children)
4. Mary 1620-1700 - "She was accused of witchcraft, sentenced, but the execution delayed and the citizens recovered from the delusion." (+5 more)

The Family of Elisha Perkins (born - 1656 - Topfield) died - 1741 in Methuen
Married Catherine Towne - 1680
--
Children:
(9 total), including: John (third son) born Aug. 12, 1685 - died June 22, 1750
married Mary Easty (whose mother Mary Easty and Aunt Rebecca Towne Nurse were hanged for witchcraft) --etc.

I have other relatives farther up in the years worth mentioning: Joseph and Ichabod Perkins, who "were in Capt. James Jones' Company which marched to Concord at the alarm of Paul Revere in 1775. And 34 other Perkins of Topsfield and Ipswich and cousins of Goulds fought in Revolution (MP)." Etc. I didn't even know Ipswich was a real place! I wish there was a reason for me to research a paper there, and find the population to be a hideous bunch of fish god cult worshippers. And then grow gills m'self and swim off with a fine bonny lass!

This branch of my family tree owned a lot of property and decent fortune up in the Boston area, but lost it all when it was inherited by two brothers who whored, gambled, and drank away in a few years what it had taken their forefathers five generations to accrue. If women had been allowed to inherit property, I might be a rich scion making my own damned horror movies today!

Alas, the same streak of olde Enlgish alcoholic mysticism that would help me be a 'good' horror auteur prevents my actually getting it together to do so. My whole freaking life is jerry-rigged in this fashion.... how is that for a lingering curse and/or inherited magic, o Rationalization Guru? Do you not see yet the link between chemical dependency, magic, and right-brained visionary artistic ability? Why are all great writers tripping alcoholics, and all hacks cursed by sober sanity's boundaries?

Top: Horror Hotel / Bottom: Alucarda

I know that in all likelihood these ancient aunts of mine were not really witches, but falsely accused by the children of a family wishing to possess the Perkins' wooded bordering acres. But like most Fordians I say print the legend. Maybe my ancestors and the other witches were likely just sexually repressed settlers who found an outlet in the darkness at night, dancing and humping trees. But that's not as fun to imagine, and what else gives history any interest aside from the possibility for something still unknown, something still hidden from us by the dry, dusty historians who get to mould our past? We wouldn't even care today if they were just falsely accused of, say, adultery. So if they weren't necessarily witches back in the day, time has made them so, time and three dozen horror movies that let me know as a 300 years-later ancestor the grisly events might repeat themselves any moment --that all I'd have to do is draw a pentagram on a solstice and Aunt Mary Easty would come roaring up from wherever to make me party with her on her persecutor's grave like in the under-appreciated WITCHOUSE and countless others. Not that I would, because what if it worked, or worse, didn't?

From top: THE DEVILS, SALEM, SHINING, SHINING, SALEM, SALEM, ROSEMARY'S BABY, young Ruth Gordon publicity shot.

Another redeeming trait of the film is just how GILF-ish are the three witch sisters (see CinemArchetype #20): Judy Geeson (GOODBYE GEMINI) has still got it and delivers her bloodthirsty lines with relish, as only a saucy older Brit lady can -- you should check out her amazing half-forgotten 70s sci fi TV series, STAR MAIDENS (my analysis here); also slamming it home with crisp hot fire, Dee Wallace (THE HOWLING) and Patricia Quinn (the gonzo maid in ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW) as the palm-reading sister Megan. And as the dirtiest and most evil witch coming back from the past, Meg Foster. As we've seen them in younger incarnations (doing the time warp / "again"), their aged state seems temporary; soon they shall drink the blood of the 'young' and--with a mere press on the magic wand DVD remote--return once more to their former lovely selves.

WELCOME TO ARROW BEACH (but too pretty to eat) 

I also like that Zombie's main idea of 'a devil' seems to be the aforementioned Baby Bok Choi, a two umbilical cord-cabled Weeblo of the highest order, cunting up the idea that Satan is the original Nephilim rebel, the James Dean of our ancient creators: Lord Enki to some, maybe Merlin, maybe Im-Ho-Tep or Amon Ra or Set or Odin, to others. Here he's more like the failed abortion attempt of  a Nephilim, a baby the Watchers tried to drown with the Great Flood but succeeded only in burying under so much silt he just ended up tunneling downwards and finding sanctuary in firey subterranean caverns, which he decided he'd call "Hell" and rule in, because that would really piss off his parents. Hey his mother still lives up on the moon! Don't believe me,  feast your ears and eyes here!

From top: Moon Maiden Mummy Mother of Lucifer; alien grey, LUCIFER RISING, 2001, LORDS OF SALEM, TWILIGHT, Aborigine drawing, 2001, SALEM

Also, check out my review of the History Channel's documentary, The Gates of Hell, which I loaded with pretty intense photographs from the 70s occult revival.

As for actual Hell, Zombie does well imagining the way our own death is linked to rebirth and transfiguration instead of just the same old Heaven/Hell polarity there's some aspects of Buddhist mythology with Hell being a bardo wherein impure souls are like dirty swords cleansed by thrusting deep into a fiery forge. It's not permanent--it just feels that way if you fight it. Submit to the flames with compassionate non-attachment and soon you will be hammered anew into shape for admission into Valhalla, or wherever (now I've moved over to Conan's riddle of steel but whatever). There's a little of that concept floating through Zombie's film, but it would have been better if he'd bothered to have one unsoiled image, one un-ugly person, one heavenly beauty.

The only sympathetic characters are an exposition-mouthing scholar and his wife, living in a beautiful apartment that looks like it will resume being a Brentano's as soon as filming is finished.

--------

I'm no fan of Ti West's, not after he subjected me to the awful hipster hair and cheap shocks of THE INNKEEPERS (2011), but HOUSE OF THE DEVIL has a few things going for it, some ideas which Zombie might have gleaned but didn't. The main thing Zombie really needed, which Ti West is clearly a proponent of, is tick-tock momentum. That's the 'honest' way of building suspense, wherein dread builds through the careful setup of a particular place over a single evening or 24-hour period, in linear time with no flashbacks and minimal cuts across time and characters. As in its most textbook example, the original HALLOWEEN (it stems from Carpenter's main influence, the great Howard Hawks). After a prologue or night before or a few set-up scenes, the momentum of the remaining bulk of the film usually starts in late afternoon as the sun begins to wane and cast ominous shadows, and the editing seems to slow the progression of time down. Rather than the constant flashy cross-cutting back and forth and sudden wake-ups from nightmares that 'cheat' on situations, tick-tock momentum is a style of storytelling most horror filmmakers never pick up on, even when they rip off HALLOWEEN. West, however, does. Zombie doesn't. Yet these two films have such similar plots they warrant close comparison. They should get together and compare notes.

For example, unlike the relentless "oddity" parade of SALEM where it all seems weird but isn't (the definition of tacky), in HOUSE the setting seems normal but isn't (the definition of the uncanny). All the believable little early 80s-late 70s details are there, and the film is twice as creepy because of them. In SALEM, by contrast there's something a little too lush, too big for Heidi's pad to believably be part of a quaint boarding house, and unless she has a maid there's no way a recovering junky like her should have such clean floors. And she would smoke cigarettes and drink a ton of coffee, or something...

The girls in HOUSE by contrast are believably tied up in petty matters that seem huge to them because they're broke and/or just starting to take care of their own finances. They're believable, and they're girls in a dark autumnal college in upstate New York, where every sunset comes earlier and earlier and bring a deeper and deeper chill the moment the night falls (with a thud).

The girls in HOUSE rule: Gerwig sports some great feathered hair and a cozy college sports shirt and in her late afternoon fast food joint scene with Samantha (Donahue) you feel the ache of an upstate New York fall winter in your bones and want to be able to curl up with them both in a cozy dorm room and not have to go anywhere; you feel the sense of desolation creeping up like tendrils of cold around her broke buddy Samantha for needing to take this babysitter job so badly. Mary Woronov and Dee Wallace (double dose of Dee!) are on point, stunt casting-wise, of course: they were born to this

Alas, in HOUSE the mean fail. The 70s-80s Satanic panic tick-tock momentum vibe of West's mise-en-scene is undone with the sudden arrival of a distinctly modern crustpunk (A.J. Bowen), who comes rolling up on Gerwig's car like an angry Williamsburg hipster fresh from teeth gnashing class. And another anachronistic blow follows with the the old man who hires Samantha, played by Tom Noonan, who is just way too mumblecore, too naturalistic. He has that 'gentle' voice no actor in the 70s or 80s would ever use at least not when trying to sound normal, like a man, like an adult. His blank slate stare and flat wispiness worked in MANHUNTER, where he was trying to seduce a blind girl by being all Fred Rogers, and it might even have worked in SALEM as one of Sherri Moon's dopey fans, but not HOUSE, which is already too subtle.

The combination of him and Bowen derail all the careful build-up provided by the women and setting. Add this pair up alongside the insufferable twerp (Pat Healy) with the terrible hipster hair in West's follow-up, THE INNKEEPERS, and you get the feeling he is insecure around his male actors. They seem like they didn't get the memo of whatever the film is about, or what upstate NY is about, or what the 70s-80s was about, or what acting is really about, outside of twee mumblecore rom-coms. They know nothing about projecting themselves into a room or a situation. Ti West should just keep all men out of his films, like I do, until he finds an actor with some gravitas he's not afraid of, like Scorsese found De Niro, or Tarantino found Samuel Jackson.

The Right: Greta Gerwig note correct hair and clothing)

The wrong: A.J. Bowen (note anachronistic townie hat, beard, and clothing)

Both the scores are also problems: I would love HOUSE OF THE DEVIL twice as much if it had some Carpenter-style synths instead of its creepy but familiar orchestral passages; when analog synths do come across its clear the composer is overthinking them, and doesn't know how to underplay, minimally, and that electric guitars are never good for establishing retro-80s mood. LORDS has moments with kind of making like a Morricone and other times of just sucking with a banal two-note minor key piano. But the hypnotic devil album they play is pretty great, like it's trying to break your sound system and leap through the room and crack open a cold-brewed abyss --a whole slew of great ideas in regards to how one might use the radio to impregnate listeners' minds with Satanic brainwashing come washing across us like a growling Juno synth wipe.

 But then Zombie shuts that aside, too. Maybe he presumes we've already seen PONTYPOOL? We haven't!

In the end, West may be too cool for his own good, and cowed by manly-voiced men; and Zombie is still a music video maker who hasn't yet figured out the rhythms of narrative, but hey! Kudos to both for their subject matter and attention to detail. West's HOUSE wins handily as the post-modern devil pastiche of choice, though LORDS is solid and gorgeous to look at, with more consistency in the cast. These old Brit ladies give it their all and make us gradually lose all interest in the by-then scabby and deranged Heidi as she moves forward into the Satanic mass as via airport moving walkway. Indeed I can see this film ruling like hell if 40 minutes were cut out and Sherri was ten years younger, and the whole thing was timed to the complete Velvet Undergound and Nico like LUCIFER RISING is timed to Bobby Beausoleil's masterfully celebratory soundtrack. But otherwise, what are you left with, in either film, besides admiring Zombie for finding the true Satanic Mass sturm und drang of "All Tomorrow's Parties" and admiring West for his loving recreation of a time and willingness to plunge deep and impressively into tick-tock momentum despite a composer and two male stars with no idea what decade and state they're supposed to be from?

So my advice: West, don't be afraid to put some real men in your films once in awhile, and Rob, that narrative momentum thing will come your way yet. You're already better than the late great Ken Russell. Almost. At any rate, you're already way better at mix-tape movies than Cameron Crowe (see my rant on mix tape movies, Aural Drag). And West, you're the only guy doing tick-tock momentum these days, period. Not even Carpenter still does it!

So, be proud.
As the shrouding darkness crowds the burial mound
and the score carpets the surrounding ground, and the sisters wake
and bake
and bait the beguiled bear to deep and dark despair, be proud.
Peel the newts and stir the baby bok choi in its bubbling cauldron bathwater, til tender
enough to breathe to life. And dry behind / the door.
No witch or cultist ever ages except between shoots (or after shots); no soul is worth stealing once its stolen a million times over by the camera. Magic disappears with the ability to constantly rewind. availability and scrutiny creates demystification. Karl Malden has all the time in the world to lift the shade from the lamp to get a good look at Blanche's wrinkles. Only one place is left where the black arts still occur: that foreboding wet hot jungle corridor deep within each of us...

Long as we're women.

PS - The dog lives! Kinda!

---------

NOTES:
1.  A descendent of mine, a Boston seaman in the War of 1812, was also almost "eaten first, due to his young tender flesh" when he and his crew were shipwrecked. Apparently that's what one did back then, ala the Donners. Only one didn't make such a fuss about it. Luckily they were rescued almost at the last minute before they actually killed him. I'm sure that trip home was plenty awkward. Anyway, I can joke about it now.... because my family lived through it. So this sheet says.