A man attacked by a rabid bat in the Mojave National Preserve will probably die if not found and treated by health officials. Eyewitnesses say the bat landed on the mystery man's neck outside the desert park's book store at the Kelso Depot between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The man wandered off, oblivious, and the bat fell dead from rabies.
Jamestown was a gruesomely failed start to the English colonization of America. The people were malnourished and disease-ridden and too dumb to eat the bountiful fish and fruits all around them. Most of the settlers were dead within the first year, and in the second hungry winter of 1609-10, the starving survivors chopped open the skull of a newly dead 14-year-old girl and feasted upon her brains.
The idea that there are no new ideas is an old idea, but a true one; there are no new ideas. For confirmation, look no further than the state of horror movies–remakes and a bunch of found-footage clones (in which the camera is part of the story, characters are doing the filming and the movie is supposedly assembled from what they shot) abound. The last notable major horror release was a reboot of Evil Dead, and the only standing franchise that provides a serious box office threat is Paranormal Activity. There were no real horror remakes to be found at the Tribeca Film Festival, but almost half of TFF's horror features (three movies out of eight) are found footage. All three account for the staleness of the subgenre, attempting to cut what is now a seemingly endless loop of POV clichés on top of tropes that date back even further. (Would you like a jump scare? OK, here are two dozen.) However, only one of them truly transcends the format's trappings.
Fede Alvarez's remake/reboot/reimagining of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead and Evil Dead II respects its source material in a manner that feels perfunctory at times. It flashes to references like it's ticking off a list. Sentimental necklace, check. Chainsaw, check. Necronomicon, check. Flying camera, check. Mirror scare, check. Possessed hand, check. Emotionally manipulative demons, check. Sexual assault by tree, check.
Somewhere in Stoker's gorgeous heap of near-absurd imagery, jaw-dropping transitions, domestic melodrama, and suggestive narrative half-threads is a metaphor for the career of its South Korean director Park Chan-wook. In staggers, loops and layers, Stoker's story follows the passage into adulthood of India Stoker (gangled by Mia Wasikowska, whose obsessive performance warrants obsession) while wondering, in an elliptical and inconclusive sort of way, if she is innately evil.
This week sees the release of three new horror movies: Warm Bodies, Girls Against Boys (both in theaters) and The ABCs of Death (on demand). But it is not enough anymore merely to be a horror movie — now horror movies, in conversation with what came before them in their respective subgenres, must add something new to the conversation, or at least purport to for the sake of "angle." All three of these attempt to do so, with various yet decided degrees of success. Let's explore.
Here is how stupid John Luessenhop's incompetent sixth installment in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise is: An alternate sequel, the film picks up where the 1974 original left off (literally with the police responding to a call from the pickup truck driver who rescued final girl Sally) and concerns a baby who is kidnapped from the demented family of homicidal cannibals. When we meet her in the present, she is played by the 26-year-old Alexandra Daddario and surrounded by horny college-esque kids. She should be at least 38.
Horror movies make death easy. Lots of people find them hard to watch, of course, but they ultimately make the loss of life a consumable commodity – with the swipe of a machete, the slash of a knife, the plunge of a handful of razors, humans expire. A series of these makes for a fast-moving popcorn picture.
"We always had to make a conscious decision to make the same movie over again, only each one would be slightly different," says Steve Miner, the director of the second and third Friday the 13th installments (and associate producer of the first), in the franchise's oral history, Crystal Lake Memories. Indeed, by 1982's Friday the 13th Part III, the series was already repeating itself: once again, we watched a formerly bullied giant mama's boy stalking dumb kids in a rural setting, killing some in ways he had killed their predecessors (through-the-bed stabbing from below got a reprise). The climax virtually repeated that of the first film's except it was Jason who was doing the slaying and his now-decomposing mother who did the final-scare popping out of the water. They just traded roles, of course — shifting bodies around was business as usual.
The walls rot like flesh. A man in an engraved triangular iron helmet is the protagonist's guardian-slash-executioner. He manually operates a carousel where people suspended by chains through their pierced bodies are the horses. A princess party in a mall led by a creepy clown disintegrates to snarling children with faces painted like cats feasting on raw, probably human meat. A spider configuration of heads and arms that look like they came out of the manufacturing plant in Björk's "All is Full of Love" video swiftly attacks.
Paranormal Activity 4 runs on cheap thrills. After some time set aside for exposition that can be summed up as, "Something weird is going on in a house inhabited by at least one person who is tech-savvy enough to set up surveillance," the movie starts pummeling us with jump scares. If you've ever seen a horror movie, you should be familiar with the jump scare, the trick of a simultaneous on-screen surprise accompanied by a loud sound. These are effective (if always annoying) when used sparsely; in Paranormal Activity 4 they make for a monotonous rhythm.
Maybe the craziest thing about American Horror Story's second season, which premiered last night on FX, is that it isn't a second season, really. The series is an anthology, meaning that despite the likes of Jessica Lange, Lily Rabe, Zachary Quinto and Evan Peters returning, we're getting a whole new set of characters in a whole new storyline that (supposedly) has nothing to do with what happened in the haunted-house-based first season.
Sinister, which opens wide on Oct. 12, has a perfect 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of this posting. Granted, it's early still, and only 20 reviews are in (notorious horror hater Roger Ebert has yet to weigh in), but the film is inspiring gushing notices. There's no question that Scott Derrickson's film is among the best horror films of the year, but that is faint praise because it's been a really shitty year for the genre.
In William Friedkin's Killer Joe, Gina Gershon's character Sharla is forced to give head to a chicken leg, a penis stand-in held at the crotch of Matthew McConaughey's anti-hero Killer Joe Cooper. Like the peeing scene in Last House on the Left, the marathon gang rape of I Spit on Your Grave, the wire torture that caps Audition and the turtle (and everything else) in Cannibal Holocaust, it is one of those scenes – a bit of celluloid that will define the film's legacy. The image of Gershon's bee-stung lips wrapped around a chicken leg is not something you see everyday or any other day, for that matter, and if you remove yourself from any emotional connection, you can appreciate this as a minor innovation in the catalog of things movies have done to freak people out, a stand-out in the canon of cinematic depravity.
To love horror movies is to live a life searching for a fix like your first highs and rarely getting it. For me, those first loves were slashers like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween. Since I saw those movies, I've had hopes for every over-hyped horror film, and those hopes are almost always dashed. Then I saw V/H/S.
