Spooktober ’22 #1: The Blair Witch Project

An existentialist horror classic

“There’s no one coming to save you! That’s your motivation!”

Thoughts on a horror film every week for the month of October, both new and old.

No one will ever be able to replicate The Blair Witch Project. This is true in the broadest sense, in that audiences will no longer believe a movie is truly “found footage”, especially after the myriad rip-offs and knock-offs in the early 10s. But in the most literal sense, the very methods and form used to create the movie have been supplanted both by higher quality video and audio, as well as the fact that, well: the cast was essentially psychologically terrorized over the course of weeks in a sort of “Method filmmaking”, as directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez described. Watching The Blair Witch Project almost 25 years out – long past the hype cycle and a few attempts at turning into a proper franchise – have only strengthened the core of why it still resonates so strongly. Marketing gimmicks are temporary. Bone deep mental disintegration worms its way deep inside your mind and festers.

Of course, not everyone sees it that way. While praised by critics, it’s proven much more divisive amongst audiences in part because of how barebones it is. There aren’t really any overt scares, at least nothing that we can see. We sure hear a lot: snapping twigs, a baby crying, maybe someone being horribly killed. Among the genius of the movie (something that’s been cited time and time again) is how much is really left to your imagination. Even the thing that could be chasing college kids Heather, Josh, and Mike isn’t set in stone. Myrick and Sanchez offer everything from the Blair Witch herself to a child serial killer and even float the possibility of the locals fucking with the kids. One thing’s for certain: there’s something out there, and it means harm.

As we get further and further away from 1999, the idea of reality has only evaporated further and further. So much of the discourse surrounding The Blair Witch Project was the idea that these events actually happened; it was heightened by the actors each using their own names for characters and by staying out of the spotlight once the film debut. There were documentaries, websites devoted to shaping the central myth that what you saw was real, even though it still carries normal credits and disclaimers (not to mention that were it actually true, it would have amounted to a snuff film, and while Hollywood is amoral, it’s not that amoral). Found footage itself has basically lost the veneer of reality through establishing tropes and casting familiar faces. But in a paradoxical way, this makes it easier to slip into the world of the film. The footage is all handheld consumer grade film, the kind college students would be able to get. It looks rawer because it is, all the imperfections and “amateurness” kept in. Cameras have only gotten better and in some sense, we’ve lost this sort of scuzzy feel. The footage just looks too good. But then again… how many times have you scrolled by a video reuploaded through 3 different social media platforms, degraded by compression, showcasing a purportedly real-life event? More things are staged than ever before, so what does it even matter if it’s not real to begin with? Josh calls it a “filtered reality” and later, suggests that Heather keeps filming because it makes it easier to pretend it’s not happening. Judging by the way she screams back “It’s all I have left!”, he may have a point.

What matters is that it’s convincing, and the movie does not work at all if you don’t believe the actors. A recurring criticism (especially of Heather) is that they’re all annoying college kids goofing off but look at the opening scenes. Here, they’re casual, laidback, playful even. There’s an unforced chemistry and charisma to all of them, little touches like zooming into some marshmallows or Heather declaring she hates scotch. These establishing scenes give the later ones when they turn on each other a great impact, because we know that’s not what they’re normally like. Josh’s especially is upsetting, because we see his friendship with Heather earlier on, and his repeated shouts of “There’s no one coming to save you” pour more and more salt into the wounds of her mistakes. Heather herself – it should be said – has proved a competent director, despite what the public opinion says. After all, she got them the interviews, filmed openings, lead them to Coffin Rock. Perhaps she got them lost but if she did, well… there’s also a demonic presence insistent on torturing them, so you can’t blame it all on her. Heather Donohue is willing to make her abrasive as things get worse, but there’s a deep sense that she knows she fucked up and she’s being constantly reminded of it, but she can’t change it as they spiral closer and closer to her doom. Her final confession is iconic in part because of her despair and terror, of seeing how frayed she is and how she wishes she could’ve made a better decision. It’s possible that wouldn’t have helped anyways. Maybe you can’t hate her if you don’t believe that she could exist.

The Blair Witch Project is a psychological drama masquerading as a horror film. It’s not necessarily “scary” so much as it is deeply upsetting and uncomfortable to witness. Part of that is knowing that – yes – the cast really were operating on little sleep and food, being tormented by the directors (one line late in the film could be aimed at either the spiritual presence or the directors themselves). But that weariness translates into a sort of existential dread that comes with knowing you’re deeply lost in the woods and that every day will bring more of the same. It’s in seeing people turn on each other in some of the most vicious ways, clawing at each other while gripping tightly for support. The lines between reality and fiction dissolve as much as their own sanities until by the end we’re seeing pure, animalistic terror. You can’t recapture that. Maybe you shouldn’t try to.

Available on HBO Max, Hulu, and digital rental platforms.

Spooktober #4: Censor

For the good of the people?

I’ve always been bizarrely fascinated with censorship codes. Maybe it’s living in America, where we don’t have that sort of legal control over media unless it’s like, abuse material (historical examples notwithstanding). Of course, it’s not like America’s own censorship board doesn’t wield a large amount of control over theatrical releasing; think about how the NC-17 – supposedly for more “adult” movies that weren’t porn – ended up becoming near exclusively associated with sexual content to the point that it basically doesn’t exist. All this is done in the name of protection, but who is it really protecting? How does one even determine the right amount of vein slashing and rape that’s acceptable for a motion picture? It’s all very technical stuff.

As you can imagine, Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor was catnip for me, following – as it does – a censor for the BBFC during the 1980’s video nasty moral panic. In brief, “video nasties” were extremely violent (often sexual) exploitation films that burst in popularity when VHS became popular. The credits show that they included everything from more “classy” pictures like Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer to infamous faux-snuff film Cannibal Holocaust; it falls in part to Enid (Niamh Algar, in the titular role) to determine if the film is releasable, and what cuts could be made to allow it in. She takes her job extremely seriously; as she tells her parents, she’s not doing it for entertainment but to “protect people”, as much a product of Thatcherite conservatism as it is lingering guilt over the disappearance of her sister. That deeply repressed guilt starts to bubble back up after viewing a film that strongly resembles the circumstances of that disappearance, throwing her off kilter and beginning a descent into mental collapse.

Bailey-Bond’s film is first and foremost about “vibes”, specifically in capturing the specific era of 80’s Britain in the midst of a moral panic. The BBFC offices here are all drab washed out lighting betrayed by the recurring screams from the women in the films the censors watch. These films themselves are shot in a squarer aspect ration complete with VHS grain to recreate that exploitation aesthetic. Interspersed are hallucinatory sequences reflecting her own fractured state of mind, awash in neon lighting, consciously returning back to the scene of the crime. Although it’s critical of the idea that exploitation movies caused a rash of violent, Bailey-Bond and Anthony Fletcher’s script doesn’t argue that they’re totally harmless. After all, the censors themselves have to expose themselves to some truly awful scenes day in and day out, fake though they might be. Enid professes to not be affected by them, treating it purely as a job, but the film suggests she’s internalized more than she wants to admit.

It all comes to a head in a brilliant final act, in which her two worlds collide and her denial comes spilling out. All this time, Algar has become convinced – without much in the way of evidence – that her sister is actually the actress in the film, and without spoiling, it becomes a cutting statement on conservative hypocrisy and the need to convince oneself that they’re the good guy here. Censor could’ve been a touch longer – I personally would’ve loved to see more of the censorship process itself – if only for Bailey-Bond and Fletcher to expand on their ideas more. Still, this is an audacious debut, one that establishes Bailey-Bond as a filmmaker to watch and Algar as candidate for Best Actress.

Spooktober #3: Noroi: the Curse

A movie I haven’t quite been able to get out of my mind.

The mockumentary – and, to a lesser extent, found footage – is a surprisingly underrated format when it comes to horror. Perhaps it’s due to the genre’s main association with comedies. Or perhaps the cheapness and extensibility of found footage created a default state for filmmakers. After all, why go to the trouble of drafting a world when you can just pretend someone stumbled upon this horrifying video footage (never mind the question of “who assembled this footage just so”). A true fake documentary holds greater potential, because of the nature of having to assemble something. Think Ghostwatch, where a British television special on hauntings accidentally becomes something realer. Or Lake Mungo – beloved by many, more appreciated by me – which uses a talking head format as a starting point for a ghost story.

Noroi: The Curse commits fully to its premise, presenting itself as an unreleased documentary by paranormal researcher Masafumi Kobayashi. It blends typical documentary footage and in person interviews along with archival footage of variety shows and news reports, all shot on 2005 era video cameras with the according VHS tracking from old tapes. Perhaps it’s just my love of analog horror in general, but I do think found footage and mockumentaries of this nature lose a little something when the quality is too good. Recent found footage films like Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum enhance themselves with corruption or streaming drops where the audio continues while video freezes. The goal in my mind is to look like something conceivably made outside of a studio, save for the clips used from live television. Seen today, the quality of the footage makes things look even eerier, in part because it feels “realer” in a way.

Of course, aesthetics aren’t everything. You can only do so much with low quality cameras and shaky audio before you actually need to provide a story. And this is where Koji Shirashi’s film shines. Initially, we appear to be following three different unrelated tracks: there’s a woman named Junko Ishii who’s neighbors are unnerved by her and her son. There’s Kana Yano, a girl with seemingly legitimate psychic abilities demonstrated on variety shows. Finally, there’s the actress Marika Matsumoto (the voice of Rikku in Final Fantasy X!) – playing herself – who has a terrifying encounter at a shrine.

It Slowly, Shirashi and co-writer Naoyuki Yokata begin connecting the strands. There’s a man named Matsuo Hori, a psychic also suffering from some form of mental illness, who had dealings with both Kana and Marika. Strange loops make begin to appear, as do a creepy looking mask. Kobayashi begins to research a demon named Kagutaba, and the trail of death following Junko Ishii, all leading back to a village and a ritual that has gone wrong. While a little long and perhaps prone to highlighting the creepy things in the background (something that could be explained as just Kobayashi’s style), the film casts an unnerving feeling throughout. Once the stories begin intersecting, a sense of dread starts to enter, and it builds it up slowly but steadily. It’s riveting as you put the pieces together, and Shirashi’s style cultivates a genuine feeling of authenticity. There are no winks to the camera, no cheats in the concept. It builds to a finale hinted at in the beginning that explodes in horrifying power, leaving you completely unsettled. If nothing else, you’ll never see masks – or hear a baby’s cry – the same way again.

Spooktober #2: Audition

A movie about lies that is itself a big lie.

One of the most iconic images in horror cinema

Spoilers for Audition, but if you’re reading this you probably already know what’s up. Additionally: Spooktober will take the form of 4 posts about horror films I really love (because a post a day was far too ambitious). Look forward to them!

Audition is a film about deception. There’s, of course, the thrust of the inciting incident of the narrative itself: a producer holding a fake audition to find the perfect wife. More infamously, there’s the structure of the film itself: at this point it’s probably more known for starting out as a serene Japanese drama before suddenly shifting into gory horror. Takashi Miike’s breakthrough film doesn’t exactly lie to the audience, and neither does the marketing. But through near total restraint and careful pacing, Miike and screenwriter Daisuke Tengan take protagonist Aoyama’s ignorance of red flags and implant it into the audience themselves. There are signs sprinkled all throughout that things are not what they appear to be. The fatal flaw is that the characters would rather live in the lie than get off the path to ruin.

Talking about Audition is naturally a little bit hard, but at this point the ending is as infamous as Psycho‘s first grand kill. It’s essentially impossible to view it in it’s pure, first time format unless – as Mike D’Angelo suggested – you hand someone an unmarked DVD containing the film and nothing else and have them watch it right there. In broad strokes, the film is about a widowed producer, Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), who – with prodding from his friend – holds a fake casting audition to find himself the perfect wife. He finds this in Asami (Eihi Shiina), who at first appears to be everything he could ask for. There’s just something “off” about her…

Having advanced knowledge actually presents quite an interesting shift in viewing – one that probably occured for all who were familiar with Miike before this film: surprise at how un-Miike like it is. Miike has of course directed over 100 films at this point, ranging from bizarre and violent to family-friendly; in the West – perhaps due to the inherent publicity from controversy over the most extreme of them – he’s famous for violence and a slightly hyper-active style. Audition, by contrast, stays almost completely rooted in a rather naturalistic and quiet mood for the first half or so. This is the key to the whole thing working, and the key to the film itself. Just after the titular audition scene, Aoyama is contacted by another worker, who reveals some mildly troubling news: he can’t seem to find any of the references Asami has left on her application. This is a rather mild slip, but Miike consciously shoots it as an omen of things to come. Time and time again, Aoyama is given an out: his friend even explicitly tells him that something about Asami unnerves him and that it would be a bad idea to continue things further.

Both Aoyama and Asami are, in some ways, lying to themselves as much as they lie to each other. Aoyama would rather believe in the non-existent perfect wife, despite the many deeply troubling signs. Asami – to a lesser extent – is willing to believe him when he says that he will love only her (it’s unclear whether she knows at this point of both his son and his dog). Seen from this angle, Aoyama’s punishment in the finale almost comes across as justified for his hubris: he’s unwilling to believe Asami is anything other than perfectly compliant and submissive, that she could ever be capable of violence until she finally turns it back on him.

Perhaps the greatest deception of all is that Audition is “torture porn”. On the one hand, it’s easy to believe given how infamous (and graphic) the finale is. Strangely enough, that finale is actually kind of bloodless if you compare it to something like Hostel, with all its guts and gore spilling across the place. It helps that Shiina underplays Asami’s psychopathy: she calmly straps herself into an apron, preparing her surgical field with deadpan efficiency. Her manner of speech is as if she’s just administering punishment, not revenge (a point for the “it’s all in his head” team). This isn’t to say there’s no blood, but rather compared to Miike’s reputation, it actually feels somewhat realistic for the actions taken. He even cuts away from the needles entering Aoyama’s eyeballs, letting us see Asami and imagine for ourselves what’s happening.

Miike has never made another film like this, though he surely has it in him from a formal perspective. What makes it so effective after all these years is the sheer nature of it as a deceptive film, tying us back to the characters themselves. We can wish all we want that it’ll end at him waking up, that someone will make different decisions, that it was all just in his head. Reality won’t let that happen, and as Aoyama does, we accept the punishment for thinking things could end any other way.

Spooktober #1: Under The Skin

Kicking off a month of horror with a modern masterpiece

An attempt to publish an article on a horror movie everyday this month, starting with one that may not be “pure”, but is just as unsettling.

Alien perspectives are hard to imagine. We only have ourselves as a frame of reference for what extraterrestrial life could be like, nothing except for our previous interactions with each other to go off of. Despite a limitless imagination, science fiction – when introducing sapient life – tends to default to what we believe is the proper “form” for what living beings should be. With a few small changes, aliens generally tend to behave like foreign countries interacting with each other: a base line familiarity of social interactions and biological functions. But how can we properly depict alien perspective if we can’t even escape our own?

Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin is perhaps the first film to truly attempt to answer this question. Its first hour is an assault of images and noise – attempt to learn human speech, English as it sounds to someone who doesn’t understand, the atonal droning and skittering of Mica Levi’s iconic score. This is not the view of someone divorced from reality or alienated (for lack of a better word) from humanity, but someone fundamentally inhuman at their core, intrigued and perturbed by what they see.

The main character has no name but is perfectly embodied by Scarlett Johansen. Her looks and demeanor are key to the whole thing working, with great subtlety in her actions and choices that may not reveal themselves on first glance. Take the various scenes in which she lures men into her void in part by taking off her clothes: she never makes any sort of pose or movement that could be defined as “sexy”. Her body language – while relaxed – remains stiff. She isn’t attempting a seduction so much as mimicking the concept; one could easily imagine her having read or been briefed on the idea, after which she goes through the motions, not because she understands what it is but because she’s been told it’s the best way to gather her prey. Most importantly is the complete lack of emotion she displays all throughout the first half (other than confusion or interest).

This is put to especially disturbing effect when she comes across a foreign swimmer attempting to save a couple who have ran into the sea to recover their dog. When he washes up after a failed attempt, she takes a rock and smashes his head with it, dragging him off to her lair while we’re left with the crying of the couple’s abandoned baby. There’s no manipulation on her part (other than the basic amount needed to convince people she’s normal); it’s best described as a crime of opportunity, the rest simply just noise to her task. We never get a direct explanation or description of what she thinks of her prey. At most we see a fascination with them, a curiosity bordering on amusement that nonetheless is unable to fully comprehend the subject at hand. Unlike most alien invasion stories, in which the assimilation is pretext for taking over the world, she is a hunter, finding game to transport. There’s no malice, no belief that her race is superior to humans (except, perhaps, in the fact that she’s harvesting them in the first place). Her behavior is fundamentally unknowable because we humans are fundamentally unable to imagine a being who doesn’t at least share a little simlarity with our way of thinking. Even as she seemingly abandons her mission – troubled by one particular attempt who chillingly describes the feeling of sinking – and begins maybe identifying with humanity, she never fully gets it. In the end, she’s still mimicking it, until by the end she’s a wild animal, unable to understand why this is happening but reacting on instinct.

It should be noted that none of this is stated within the film itself. Glazer adapted it from a Michael Farber book of the same name, which explicitly makes her an alien who’s goal is to harvest humans in a metaphor for factory farming; in doing so, he jettisoned basically any sort of identifying characteristics or clarity from the story and the characters. That actually enhances the material a lot, even though it’s no longer really an adaptation. By turning almost completely to imagery, Glazer has left the metaphor a lot more open, if you indeed choose to view the film through a symbolic or metaphorical lens. Perhaps the greatest strength of removing any sort of “depth” – as it were – is that all you have left is the experience of the main character. You’re left with a character who feels unknowable, impossible to connect to but who’s behavior still retains some sense of logic and reasoning. In reducing the story to its base elements, the humans themselves become little more than animals, hunting and preying.

Under The Skin would probably be a masterpiece just on a pure audiovisual level. There is truly, simply, nothing on earth like it, and there will never be anything else comparable. It is perhaps cinema as an aesthetic tool, first and foremost; a work that wants to submerse you within a strange new perspective and give you an experience you’ve never had before. One could pull various symbolic threads – the reverse predation of men and women, animal farming, existence itself, and on and on, and none of those would be wrong. But what sticks with me most at the end, are the images. The sound of a baby crying on a cold, stony beach, its parents washed away by the water. An inky black room, into which men are lured and sink into the abyss. Discordant strings and bare percussion highlighting your unease. It may not be a “conventional” horror film, in that it tries to be scary. But through a series of unnerving sequences, and fear of this person, it reaches a new level of unease and consciousness.