Category: Movies

drama, Horror, Movies

Is God Is Review: A Feminist Revenge Story Where Sisterhood Becomes a Weapon

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I saw something on Threads about how Is God Is would be leaving theaters last week, so I booked myself a double feature at the 34th Street AMC theater, where I had to sit in the front row because almost all the seats were sold out. The movie just released on May 15 and is getting great reviews, so I didn’t understand why it would be fading from theaters so fast. But when I checked showtimes today, it was still running in a number of theaters. And that makes me glad. I want a lot of people to see it because it’s an impressive directorial debut for writer and actress Aleshea Harris.

Director Aleshea Harris on set.
Director Aleshea Harris on set.

I think it was probably easier for Harris to translate her vision on-screen since Is God Is started as a play and has been staged multiple times in the last few years, hailed as a bright new voice. The movie’s set in the Dirty South where twin sisters Racine (played by Kara Young) and Anaia (played by Mallori Johnson) work as janitors in an office building. The twins were horribly burned in a fire during their youth, which they don’t really remember, and Racine is left with a scarred arm, while Anaia is less fortunate, having burns all over her face that she can’t hide.

I think it was probably easier for Harris to translate her vision on-screen since Is God Is started as a play and has been staged multiple times in the last few years, hailed as a bright new voice. The movie’s set in the Dirty South where twin sisters Racine (played by Kara Young) and Anaia (played by Mallori Johnson) work as janitors in an office building. The twins were horribly burned in a fire during their youth, which they don’t really remember, and Racine is left with a scarred arm, while Anaia is less fortunate, having burns all over her face that she can’t hide.

Kara Young as Racine (left) and Mallori Johnson as Anaia (right).
Kara Young as Racine (left) and Mallori Johnson as Anaia (right).

The twins are introduced as having fire in their veins, and they tend to their burns with ice cubes during the story in contemplative moments. Apparently, that’s an old home remedy that’s been recommended for lightening burn scars. I don’t know if it really works, but I like the idea that the twins run so hot that they have to physically cool themselves down. The special effects burn makeup was done well and always looked the same from scene to scene. Makeup artist Richard Redlefsen says on his Instagram, “Burn scar makeups always have to have a fine balance between clinical, horror, and in this case beautiful. The sculptural forms really sell the scarring trauma, so less is more. I wanted the scarring to disappear, and we see the real beauty after we meet Anaia and focus on the real meaning of the sisters’ journey. The makeup should be an afterthought.” 

Left to Right: Kara Young as Racine, Vivica A. Fox as God/Mother, and Mallori Johnson as Anaia.
Left to Right: Kara Young as Racine, Vivica A. Fox as God/Mother, and Mallori Johnson as Anaia.

Racine is the twin who got all the mean while Anaia is known as the more emotional sister, and the women are fired from their jobs after Racine loses her temper with an office worker who’s horrified by Anaia’s appearance. With nothing else left to do, the sisters arrive home to find a letter addressed to Racine from their mother, who wants to see them before she dies. The twins grew up in a series of rough foster homes and always thought their mother had died in the fire that had disfigured them. Now they have a mission, and during an evening where they debate options through psychic twin messages (shown on-screen in white handwritten font), they decide they’ll roadtrip to see their mother (played by Vivica A. Fox), who they refer to as God because she made them. I wonder how Harris conveyed the psychic twin dialogue in the play. I’ll have to keep an eye out for future productions so I can see how this is done in the play version.

The movie is a modern Western as the twins travel through the South in their dilapidated car, serving as their horse, with backpacks and a grooming kit each. I love the moments where they’re shown sleeping in their car, brushing their teeth in unconventional places, or peeing outdoors as nods to the old buddy Western films that my dad and grandpa liked. And there’s such a joyful moment as the twins pose and dance beneath the Welcome to Virginia road sign that reminds me of past road trips I’ve been on, the hours or days it takes to cross one state and that spark of happiness you get once you pass the border into a new state.

They arrive at their mother’s house, seeing her on her deathbed as she’s attended to by three helpers who are braiding her hair with nail clicks, reminding me of a Greek chorus in Euripides’s plays (definitely one of the influences on God Is God). Fox gives a commanding performance as she tells her daughters their origin story and how they all received their burn scars from domestic abuse at the hands of their father. This scene gives one of the best pieces of dialogue that’s been going through my head on repeat the entire weekend: “He pull the curtain aside. And just stands there, no smile or nothin. No frown, neither. Face as plain as a slice of wheat bread.”

Then God delivers her last request: Kill him, and make it really bad as revenge for what he did to us. The twins debate this with little dialogue and lots of psychic twin language before embarking on the quest to find their dad in the sunny climes of LA. Their mother provided them with the name of the last woman who played into their father’s hands, and from there, they find his onetime lawyer who got him off of domestic violence and attempted murder charges. Eventually, the twins find where their father lives, in a gorgeous mansion kept neat and tidy by his new wife (Janelle Monáe) with his new perfect family. It’s such a contrast to the twins’ hardscrabble upbringing as they glimpse a pool in the backyard after struggling to find water after a grueling Greyhound bus trip.

Two women with braided hair crouching against a weathered wall in an abandoned space, looking anxious and alert.

There’s lots of violence as the sisters mete out revenge, but I think what’s so chilling is how plain and ordinary their father (Sterling K. Brown) is when they finally meet him compared to the evil he’s caused in the world. He’s still quite sinister in his actions and speech, though he changes into slippers from his outside shoes like he’s Mr. Rogers. It feel like a statement on the nature of evil, showing that it’s all around in the mundane details of life.

This movie brought up intergenerational trauma and is definitely Southern gothic, just like in S. A. Cosby’s novel King of Ashes, and I’m loving how the same themes come up between my reading and viewing. It makes me feel like I’m going in the right direction, my choices coming instinctually, like how you’ll drive on a dark road at night just trusting that the highway will spool out indefinitely in front of you.

Horror, Movies

Obsession Review: Feminist Subtext Gives This Horror Film Staying Power

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Went to see Obsession this weekend, and it was a dark, heavy horror film that seemed to come out of nowhere. The director and writer Curry Barker is a twenty-six-year-old YouTuber who got his chops doing comedy bits with his friend Cooper Tomlinson on their channel that’s a bad idea. Then in 2024, he released a sixty-two-minute found footage horror movie Milk & Serial online that was enormously popular and got the attention of producers. He made Milk & Serial with an $800 budget, but Tea Shop Productions producer James Harris was able to secure about a million dollars to shoot Obsession. I’ve got a soft spot for DIY artists, and learning the background of Barker just makes me like the movie even more.

Curry Barker while shooting Obsession.

The Obsession actors were wonderful and really elevated the material, particularly Inde Navarrette, who played Nikki, the object of desire in Obsession. The story rests on “The Monkey’s Paw” premise: Be careful what you wish for. Bear is the male lead (played by Michael Johnston), a young man in his twenties who’s living in his dead grandmother’s house with a cat and appears to be suffering from failure to launch. He hangs out with a group of three friends at the music store where he works, a fantasy dead-end job if I ever heard of one. Can you imagine a music store staffed by an owner and four employees in their twenties surviving in this economy? You’d think there would be a deep passion for music suffusing the dialogue, but that never really happens. Odd but perhaps effective since the scope is narrow in this movie, giving it a suffocating, claustrophobic feel once the film gets rolling along.

Inde Navarrette as Nikki in Obsession.

Bear carries an unrequited love for Nikki, one of his coworkers at the music store and part of his core friend group. Everybody seems to be aware of the torch he carries, even Nikki, but as far as Bear knows, only his coworker Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) has the details about the situation. Ian’s great piece of advice to Bear is to neg Nikki and tease her about how she used to be called “Freaky Nikki.”

The four coworkers have a regular standing date for trivia night at a bar, where Bear intended to reveal his feelings for Nikki, but before that happens, he finds his beloved cat dead. This ends up being a troubling part of the movie for me, because it comes back to the cat carcass again and again, and I’m firmly in the corner of no animal abuse. I just don’t like it. I’ll forgive it in this movie because it is innovative, and I can see how the obsession moves from soul to soul.

Bear decides not to go to trivia night so he can mourn his cat, but as he looks at pictures of Nikki on his phone, she calls him, cajoling him into joining the group. She mentions that she dropped her crystal necklace down a sink drain and that she’s putting in her two weeks at the store because she needs to do something different with her life. Nikki is an aspiring novelist and working on a love story but says she needs to feel love first.

This establishes a deadline for Bear; he only has so much time to act before he no longer sees his crush on a regular basis. Bear pops into a magic shop, intending to buy a replacement crystal necklace for Nikki, and Barker really nails the aesthetics of this store, which appears in two scenes, where all the witchy goods are displayed: crystals, tarot, herbs, and a bewitching red-and-white box called One Wish Willow that costs $6.99. (Apparently, these scenes were shot in the magic shop the Green Man in Burbank, California.) I can practically smell the incense as a bored witch talks to someone on her headset while giving Bear a desultory rundown of what different types of crystals mean. Bear’s attracted by the One Wish Willow, even after the witch tells him people have come back with lots of complaints about that product. He ends up purchasing it and joins his friends for trivia night, where Sarah and Nikki talk about their books in progress and whether it’s appropriate to write at work. Bear gets several chances at the bar to confess his feelings to Nikki but suffers a bout of nerves each time and backs down.

After trivia night, half the group wants to continue partying while Nikki just wants to go home, so Bear offers her a ride home. Bear is given the perfect opportunity to declare his feelings after several stop-start conversations inside his car outside her doorstep. But he does not. No, once Nikki leaves for good, he opens up his One Wish Willow and wishes that Nikki would love only him out of everybody else in the world.

One Wish Willow: Be Careful What You Wish For!

And then she does, and the horror starts. She reappears in a stalkerish move right outside his driver’s side window, and in a flash, it’s apparent that Nikki’s whole personality has changed. Gone is the independent young woman with her own agency, making a major life decision to support her art. Now everything is centered around how she can be with Bear always, and Inde Navarrette excels at putting the creep into Nikki. Her wardrobe changes to pick-me girl fashions, and her face crumples at any perceived rejection from Bear. She obsessively watches him, and Bear enjoys this for a while as they go through their honeymoon phase, exclusively spending time with each other, but there are telltale glitches showing that the real Nikki is not on board with these changes: the aforementioned cat scenes and moments where she pops out of her adoring haze to say, “What the fuck?”

Nikki (Inde Navarrette) and Bear (Michael Johnston) in Obsession.

I found a feminist subtext to Obsession, and I think that’s why the movie is sticking with me. In the friend group at the music store, it’s the two young women Nikki and Sarah (played by Megan Lawless) who have grand plans for their lives and are taking steps toward making that happen, while the guys, Bear and Ian, seem content to remain at status quo. These are some lazy-ass guys who want the cool girl by their side for drinking games and their hobbies, yet completely lose their shit when their woman’s so devoted she can’t even pee or poop without her man around.

The crazy wears thin after a while, and we get to see a subverted version of the Alison Bechdel test. Sarah and Nikki were originally friends, but the new Nikki now sees Sarah as a threat and won’t allow her to have any interaction with Bear. This woman exists exclusively for Bear and nobody else can interfere. The grisliest scene provoked an intense response from the audience in the theater, many uttering, “Oh my God,” over and over again, and I found myself doing the same.

That’s the horror of a perfect woman built by man. Be careful what you wish for.

Horror, Movies

31 Days of Horror: Umma (2022)

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I was on a JetBlue flight to California for my pick yesterday (October 6), and my choices were severely limited. You would think with the month being October, they would have come up with some Halloween-themed programming. That was not the case. After some mad texting with my sister before takeoff, we settled on Umma since neither of us had seen it. Umma was a very short movie with Sandra Oh as the lead, who I love, and I was initially excited because the JetBlue notes said Sam Raimi directed the film. How odd, I thought. That’s something that ought to have been on my radar, a new Sam Raimi horror movie. But lies! He did not direct the movie—JetBlue must not use a fact checker for their programming notes. Instead, he produced it, which I found out later when I had proper Internet access. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQdXvvtu-iI

Somehow, sandwiched between five kids to the front and back of me, I started my movie about thirty minutes into the flight. And I was underwhelmed.

The adjectives I would apply to this movie overall are pale and thin. It’s a bit of a nothing story with Oh playing overprotective mother Amanda, who is a beekeeper making her money selling honey and doing quite well after a social media post goes viral. She has plans to expand the business with her daughter Chris (Fivel Stewart) to keep up with skyrocketing demand for the product, but Chris has other ideas for her future.

Amanda has a peculiar illness where she’s allergic to electricity, most likely stemming from abuse as there are several flashbacks with imagery of hands being electrocuted. That results in Chris and Amanda living in an old farmhouse lit by kerosene lamps, which gives the movie a beautiful, old-timey aesthetic. I’m not sure how they tend to all the other beekeeping and honey-making duties without electricity, but somehow, we’re led to believe that they get it done. Amanda does get help from her accountant and business partner Danny (Dermot Mulroney) who shoulders a good part of the work. He has a niece visiting him for the summer, River (Odeya Rush), who helps to show Chris what a normal young woman’s life looks like. Chris is socially awkward after being homeschooled by Amanda and has absorbed her fear of the outside world.

There are glimmers of real promise in Umma—some of the acting between Oh and Stewart are magical and crackled off my tiny JetBlue screen. I also appreciated the theme of filial piety and nods to Korean mythology. I got just a taste and wished there had been so much more. There just wasn’t enough story, I thought, for the whole movie to hang together. Iris K. Shim wrote and directed this film, and looking up her previous work, I’ve added her documentary The House of Suh to my list of movies to watch. I do hope she will write and direct another horror movie. She’s working with some wonderful elements, but I don’t think the big picture has been fully realized yet.

The rest of my weekend, I was fully immersed in my astrology retreat and didn’t watch any other horror movies, though I collected a lot of ideas. There was a huge contingent of horror movie fans at the event, and I’ve got a huge list of films and series on my To Be Watched list: Martyrs (2008), The Ritual, Kill List, The Dark and the Wicked, The Servant, and Trollhunter. Just when I think I’m well-versed in horror, I realize how much I still have to learn. So it looks like my 31 Days of Horror series will have to extend into November, but with the amount of titles I’m adding to my TBW list, I might have to turn this project into something larger. Maybe there’s 365 Days of Horror in me.

Horror, Movies, Uncategorized

31 Days of Horror: The Sadness (2021)

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After the twisted, delirious showing of Titane last night, my sister was on her A game trying to deliver tonight. She selected the Taiwanese zombie film The Sadness, a Shudder original that’s available to stream on that channel. Kristi was chortling because of a review posted by a horror aficionado who said this was the type of movie that people walk out of the theaters on and that even he, a gorehound, found deeply upsetting. Definitely not a  movie I would pick out for myself, but rules are rules. So I finished my dinner before we started watching and kept my yellow notebook beside me to jot down notes in if things got too extreme. www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwZMZOS_dh0

Kat (Regina Lei) and Jim (Berant Zhu), a likable couple, wake up to what will be their last normal morning, though they don’t know it. Kat and Jim have a little tiff because of the trip they’ve planned for the next week. Kat works a 9 to 5 and has to negotiate hard to take off any of her allotted ten vacation days a year; meanwhile, Jim is freelance and has to take work when he can get it. And a big job has arrived for just that week of planned vacation, and he can’t afford to turn it down. They go about their morning doing the usual mundane things—getting dressed, rustling up breakfast. In foreign movies, I’m always so jealous of what the characters are eating for breakfast: bowls of noodles, an eggroll and pork-fried rice, or in this case, a bao dumpling with hot sauce. I should try one of these variations when I get back from California next week, just for something different.

There’s a tense, ominous atmosphere already with news about the Alvin virus spreading, and much of the public not believing in the doctors who say it’s something akin to rabies. And though this movie is violent and disturbing, there are some shots that are just heartbreakingly beautiful, which was really jarring to my emotions. One comes while Jim takes Kat to the train station on his motorbike. In slow motion, they pass a gruesome scene with police cars, an ambulance, and the aftermath of blood and violence, and Kat touches Jim’s back, just a reassurance that they are okay during this moment of chaos. However, that just marks the beginning of the chaos.

The Alvin virus infects humans and rapidly turns them into zombies unlike any I’ve ever seen. These zombies move quickly like the ones in 28 Days Later, but they do it with a rictus of a smile on their faces and talk dirty, saying the most vile things. Once I got over that shock, I realized that these zombies were also capable of sexual violence and almost seemed to seek it out.

It’s a Grand Guignol of a movie with slaughteramas that are almost beautiful with thick sprays of blood, but then the flesh creeps when the zombies lower their suspenders or pants and you realize what’s happening off-camera.

Horror, Movies

31 Days of Horror: Titane (2021)

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I was a big fan of Julia Ducournau’s Raw when it came out in 2016 and have been waiting a long time for a follow-up from her. This year her Palme d’Or-winning feature Titane is available to stream on Hulu, and so that’s how we spent our Tuesday night. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzq-_f1fW_s

The body horror that’s part of Ducournau’s style emerges within the first twenty minutes of the film, as well as some of her commentary on the hell of being a woman. And she goes harsh. There were several scenes where I had to put my hands up in front of my face. (Always peeking through my fingers, but the hands are up just in case.)

I saw a lot of similarities between Raw and Titane right away. The protagonist of the film is named Alexia (Agatha Rousselle), just like the sister of Justine, the main character of 2016’s Raw. And Garance Marillier who played Justine in Raw appears as a Justine in Titane as well, though for a shorter period of time. It makes me wonder what the significance of these names are for Ducournau and if this will be an emerging theme in later works.

Alexia is involved in a terrible car accident when she’s younger caused by her father trying to discipline her while driving. She suffers a traumatic brain injury and has a steel plate put in her head that appears to alter her personality. When Alexia is finally discharged from the hospital, the first thing she does is hug and kiss the car involved in her accident. She has more affection for it than she does for her own parents.

Several years later, Alexia has grown up into a tattooed young woman who works as a model at car shows. Rather than just posing with the automobiles, Alexia writhes and moans Tawny Kitaen-style on her car, putting together an erotic dance that outshines all the other car models. She’s obviously the star in this niche world. Alexia’s fan base is rabid as she signs autographs, and she’s even chased by one of her overeager worshippers and lets him catch her. This is how the audience learns that she’s a serial killer. Sexual urges seem to lead Alexia into murdering her victims; she starts to engage aggressively with different partners, but then it’s almost as if something shuts off and she gets bored, leading to murder.

News programs appear in the background of early scenes detailing missing children and the recent victims of a possible serial killer, which makes me wonder if Alexia has been killing for a very long time. Alexia still lives with her parents, but after she discovers she’s pregnant with very odd symptoms, she locks them in their room and takes off. In a train station, Alexia discovers that there’s a police sketch of her likeness in connection to the recent murders, but near those are also a photo of a boy who went missing years earlier. With a horrific bathroom makeover, Alexia is able to masquerade as a skinny boy and is reunited with her “father” Vincent (Vincent Lindon), the hyper-masculine captain of a fire brigade.

The pregnancy and Alexia finding acceptance for who she is through Vincent happens in the fraternity-like atmosphere of the firehouse. When the firemen are not battling disaster simulations and situations, they hold rave parties near the firetrucks, and Alexia treats them to one of her special car dances. Some are disgusted while others love it.

I’m with the latter half. Titane was gross, fun, and I completely loved it.

Horror, Movies

31 Days of Horror: Satan’s Slaves (2017)

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Another rainy night in New York and tonight’s choice was the atmospheric Satan’s Slaves directed by Joko Anwar and available to watch on Shudder. Apparently, Anwar was so taken by a 1980 Indonesian movie of the same name (which inspired him to become a filmmaker) that he clamored to do a remake/prequel to the movie. Once he showed producers his vision for the film, he got financial backing and was able to shoot Satan’s Slaves in only eighteen days. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhc0d6kYmQ8

In Satan’s Slaves, a family of six struggles to survive after their mother has fallen ill and become bedridden the last three years. The mother Mawarni (Ayu Laksmi) used to be a famous singer, but she hasn’t worked in eight years and no more royalties are coming in for the family. The father (Bront Palarae) has mortgaged the family house, which looks like it might have once been palatial, and is now bankrupt after caring for his sick wife. Mawarni rules over the family with a silver handbell that she rings whenever she needs something, and that serves as her voice throughout the movie, a rather aggressive one.

Mawarni dies and the family buries her in the Islamic tradition, with the local holy man asking the father if they ever pray since he’s never seen them in the mosque. Oldest child Rini (Tara Basro) serves as caretaker for the family when their father travels after the funeral to attend to business matters. That’s when the children begin being haunted by their mother, all but the youngest Ian (M. Adhiyat), who can only communicate using sign language. Mawarni terrorizes her children through the radio or their toys—and these moments provide some very creative, genuine scares.

The plumbing goes out in the house early on, and the family becomes dependent on water from the well, which is located in their bathroom. It’s so completely different from the Westernized bathrooms that I’m familiar with and that added a lot of creepiness for me. Something is in the well and seems to be beckoning the children, yet they can’t really avoid that area of the house. They need to get water for basic necessities, and they have to use the bathroom. So I just ended up being terrified whenever one of the kids had to pee.

Grandma (Elly D. Luthan) comes to visit and ends up dying in the family manor after writing a letter. Thereafter, her presence enters a scene every once in a while, represented by some asthmatic wheezing, which is unnerving. These two matriarchal spirits seem to be locked in battle over the family. Rini searches for the person that the letter is addressed to and finds a hippie writer named Budiman (Egy Fedly). He tells Rini that her grandmother disapproved of her mother as being a singer was not a dignified career. When her only son married Mawarni, she never gave her blessing to the couple. Mawarni was unable to get pregnant for a long time, and the grandmother believed that she asked Satan for her children. Budiman says she joined a fertility cult which will takes a member’s last child as a sacrifice on their seventh birthday. And guess whose birthday is coming up in three days? Ian’s.

 The hippie gives Rini an occult magazine that looks like the Indonesian version of the National Enquirer, and she takes it to the family home but doesn’t really believe in all that it contains. Later, though, she sets up one of her mom’s old records and discovers that when she plays it backward, she can hear chanting in an ancient language.

She asks the village holy man what she should do as the family continues to be haunted by their mother, and he tells her to pray. And pray she does, which sets up one of the most delicious scares of the movie.

The plot gets a little Scooby-Dooish after that when the hippie tries to get a revised version of the article to Rini, telling her what to do in order to save her family. But it’s done stylishly with faceless cult members surrounding the house with synchronized movements.

Anwar has followed up with a sequel to this movie after Satan’s Slaves became a huge hit in Indonesia and Malaysia: Satan’s Slaves 2—Communion. It just came out this year, but I’m unable to find yet on any streaming platforms. Perhaps it will be around for next year’s 31 Days of Horror in October.

Horror, Movies

31 Days of Horror: The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015)

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Today was my choice for our daily horror movie, and I went for The Blackcoat’s Daughter, which was available to watch on Showtime. My reasons: It has Kiernan Shipka in it, who I love, and takes place in a Catholic boarding school. I’ve always been attracted to those boarding school settings that are perfect for witchcraft and covens. If I see a plaid skirt, I’m in. It’s been a dreary day in New York with lots of rain coming down from the remnants of Hurricane Ian. So with a Chinese food order on the way and my legs tucked under a leopard blanket, we started the movie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRc_-iK3RVE

At an upstate New York Catholic boarding school called Bramford Academy, two girls are left during the start of winter break: Kat (Kiernan Shipka), a freshman who seems disconnected from most of her classmates and staff, and Rose (Lucy Boynton), an upperclassman who believes she is pregnant and has lied to her parents about when to pick her up.

Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton).

Kat seems to have a vision about her parents dying in an accident and engages in increasingly odd behavior as the girls rattle around alone in the academy with only two older nuns to watch over them. At night, Rose hears moaning coming up through the heater vents, and when she goes down to the boiler room, she finds Kat prostrating herself in front of the furnace.

This sequence comes to an end with some disturbing contortions from Kat while sleeping, the kind I associate with demon possession. And then we cut to a new storyline where the subject switches to a third girl named Joan (Emma Roberts) who has escaped from a psychiatric hospital and is trying to put some distance between herself and it. There’s no indication whether this storyline is happening simultaneously with Kat and Rose’s or precedes or comes after it.

She’s picked up by a man named Bill and his wife in a creepy scene where I kept waiting for some sort of sexual overture to happen. Instead, Bill (James Remar) pays for Joan’s hotel room while they are on the road heading to a town that’s just past Bramford. And while visiting with her in her hotel room to get her story, he tells Joan that he believes God put her in his path. This all happens while Joan sits in a towel with a prominent puckered scar on her shoulder that matches another on her chest. Later, he shows her a picture of his daughter Rose, who’s now deceased.

There’s some more back and forth between the characters’ storylines, and the audience now knows that Kat and Rose’s story comes first. In the second section featuring Kat and Rose, Kat continues to be creepy. She tells Rose twice, “You smell pretty.” We see Kat’s calendar marked with winter break and then there’s a big heart drawn over February 14 earlier in the month. An alternate title for the movie is actually February, what I think of as the bleakest month in some parts of the United States. But the heart makes me think that maybe Kat was trying to flirt with Rose? I don’t know—there’s not much to work with here.

Through Kat’s perspective, the audience sees a black-horned shape that haunts her in nearly every scene. When she tries to call her family, she gets a disembodied voice telling her to kill everyone. The nuns, Rose, and Kat sit down for lunch, and Kat has a breakdown that ends in a murderous rampage. She turns up Ed Kemper–style in front of the furnace in the basement boiler room and is shot by a frightened cop.

After this, we’re back to Joan’s storyline, and going by the prominent bullet scar on her body, I’m guessing she’s supposed to be Kat. I’m not sure if the Joan section makes much sense to me. I can see similarities in the hair, but the two actresses appear to be around the same age so the difference in the timeline doesn’t gel for me. But I understand the impulse to try and tie the story up neatly. A lot of this movie left me cold, and I don’t think it was just the rainy day. I liked the puzzling little details that seemed to fit together neatly by the end of the movie, but I couldn’t really find much heart pumping the story along. This was the first feature film by director Oz Perkins, who comes from quite a horror pedigree as he’s the son of Anthony Perkins. He’s also directed I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House and Gretel & Hansel. I quite liked the retelling of Gretel & Hansel; it was so atmospheric and gothic and real feminist horror, I thought. But I haven’t yet seen I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. Maybe I’ll slate it for later in the month, on the days when I’m traveling. I like it that Perkins has chosen to do horror focusing on women’s stories and want to see how he further develops.

Horror, Movies

31 Days of Horror: Hatching (2022)

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Thirty-one days of horror started three years ago when we were at the height of quarantine. October has always been a favorite month with lots of events—readings and get-togethers with my chapter of the Horror Writers Association, haunted houses, and always a big Halloween party on the thirty-first. But with everything still closed at the end of 2020, we had to come up with another way to celebrate. So my sister and I decided to watch a horror movie for each night of October, where we took turns picking a film each night. The only rule was that neither of us could have seen it before. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS1oDoElwqc

It’s become a wonderful experiment where I watch things I would never normally pick out for myself, and there’s a huge sense of competition because we always want to outdo each other with our choices. There have been a few stinkers, like The Lighthouse and Climax. But generally, it has elevated my horror game. We usually end up watching a fair amount of foreign horror films because those end up being the movies we haven’t seen yet. And a lot of times those are really scary for me because they don’t follow the American horror tropes that I know so well.

My sister had been thinking on her choice for a couple of days and selected HATCHING, a 2022 Finnish horror film that’s available on Hulu. I watched the trailer and was looking forward to sinking my teeth into this one. It had a Grimm fairy tales feel to it, but also included sports and modern twists. We had to restart the movie at the beginning because somehow the settings were tuned to English narration. We were getting a very creepy monotone voice saying things like “IFC logo appears with blood dripping off the I; girl appears in blue leotard; there is tickling.” Disturbing already and worth a laugh, but we prefer to hear the foreign movies in their original language with English subtitles. And sometimes I can even understand some of the words with my hodgepodge knowledge of German, Spanish, and Italian.

Once we got HATCHING properly started, I was creeped out by the perfect polish of this perfect Finnish family in their perfect house. Lots of blond hair, two children playing, and fuzzy zoom-ins of Mom and Dad kissing while their daughter looks on fondly and her brother rolls his eyes. Then the tableaux is shattered as a bird strikes the living room window.

We zoom out of this stylized family portrait in its IKEA-style setting and now see that Mom’s holding her phone on a selfie stick as she cobbles together content for her vlog. She’s an influencer using her family as props and intends for the focus to always fall on her. However, it’s her daughter Trija, her oldest child on the precipice of puberty, who steals the film. And it’s a wonder to see. Siiri Solalinna plays Trija, and the many expressions this young actress uses to portray this people-pleasing daughter are like quicksilver, portraying so many facets of her character.

My favorite is eye-of-the-tiger Trija when she’s training hard as a gymnast for her first big competition, something that Mom (Sophia Heikkilä) has been amping up on her channel. The intensity of her eyes as she jogs could burn down trees. Mom ends up being a stage mother of staggering proportions, forcing her daughter to practice routines until her hands are blistered. Trija finds an egg in the creepy woods and bonds with it while her mother is away during the weekends for “vlogging” conferences—yeah, right.

Eventually, this egg hatches into something, and I can’t say I was in love with the look of the thing when it emerged. It was giving me goofy Howard the Duck vibes, but it does morph through the course of the film becoming something deep and meaningful for Trija as this mother-daughter saga unfolds.

There are some genuine gross-out moments where I was holding my hand over my mouth, feeling my gorge rise. I thought, You’re not going down that road. But yes, director and writer Hanna Bergholm did, and I’m not mad about it.

All in all, a wonderful film to start off 31 Days of Horror.

Horror, Movies

Farmhouse Scares in Annabelle: Creation

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I’ve been trying to see a movie a day, like the tagline for MoviePass says, and decided to go see Annabelle: Creation because it was the only thing that really fit into the time slot I had. Plus, I love horror. A horror film almost always dominates at the box office, but people are surprised by how well those titles do. I’m not. We live in nerve-racking times with terrorist attacks and super hurricanes, and I think people are comforted when they go to a theater and see a horror film—they’re guaranteed to see how bad it can really get, and then they emerge unscathed and think, Well, that’s not so bad. I survived that.

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I saw the first Annabelle movie on DVD after it got lackluster reviews, but now, I don’t have to worry about that. A $17 ticket really makes you think about what you’re going to see because it’s more expensive than the DVD or rental, and you don’t want to throw money at crap. Plus, you usually make a movie an event with friends, meaning dinner and drinks and what-have-you, and who wants to have a bad experience and blather about what crap the movie was? No, you want to be excited and lit up about what you saw, to talk about it in rapturous tones. I’m more willing to take a chance with films using the MoviePass because all I lose is time, really. But even then, I don’t think it’s a bad loss. You’re in a two-hour experience of suspended concentration if you do a movie right and focus, not futz around on your smartphone.

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Now, I did see The Conjuring in a theater, where Annabelle was introduced as a brilliant prologue to the film. Well done. And it was an exciting experience, everything you want from a horror film. Unexpected scares and heavy audience participation. When I saw my fellow audience members for Annabelle: Creation (mostly teens), I figured I’d hear a lot from them. But no, they completely surprised me. I was the one laughing at heavy foreshadowing and stuck in a creaky seat that made noise no matter how I positioned my legs. The rest of the audience was silent, like in a French movie theater.

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Annabelle: Creation explains how the evil doll became so in the first place, and it’s a period piece like all the movies in the Conjuring franchise, though there are some bits of dialogue that struck me as post-2000 psychobabble. I loved seeing a farmhouse that looks like it’s straight out of Grant Wood’s American Gothic with fields, a barn, a well—settings that are so scary and thoroughly wrung in this picture for full horror potential. Here, the characters are a passel of orphans—the most tragic of tragic—who descend on a doll maker’s home. The main character Janice is struck with polio and starts in a heavy leg brace, then moves to an old-fashioned wheelchair à la The Changeling. All the actors in this film did a fine job, especially Talitha Eliana Bateman, who can be winsomely sweet and vulnerable or Bad Seed evil.

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The only time I was really drawn out of the movie is when the origin of Annabelle is summed up in a two-minute voiceover by one of the characters, who wears a painted face plate over half her face, kind of like a dolly-painted version of what the Phantom of the Opera wears. It was a great visual since she’s married to the doll maker and it’s Annabelle the doll who’s the manifestation of evil. But rather than having all the information delivered so quickly, I’d rather have had hints as to what was going on throughout the movie. But Annabelle: Creation was rather ambitious, attempting to pull together elements from The Conjuring, The Conjuring 2, and Annabelle. I was thoroughly confused by the ending scene, though I heard some of the kids say, “Oh, I get it.”

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Afterward, a woman asked me, “Excuse me, Miss. Do you understand what happened?,” explaining that she had seen all the Conjuring films but didn’t get the ending scene. I told her I had, too, and didn’t get it. Later, I googled the ending, and maybe someday I’ll view the franchise entries all at once and try to piece the information together, but I prefer it when a movie can stand alone. I think the writers and director were just really excited and wanted to cram as much as they could into one film. Maybe that’s a product of the moviemakers realizing how expensive films are now for audience members, and they just wanted to guarantee as much bang for our buck as possible.

Horror, Movies

Sister Love Grows Rancid in Raw

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I blundered into Raw not even knowing it was a horror film, which was the most delicious surprise. Buried under deadlines early in the week, I depended on my friends to pick the movie and didn’t check reviews, summaries, or anything. We went to see the eight o’clock showing of Raw at the Angelika on Houston Street, and luckily, I didn’t get anything at the snack bar. This is not the type of movie where you want to have nibbles by your side.

In the French horror film Raw, studious, square Justine (played by Garance Marillier) is taken to veterinary school by her parents, and early on, it’s established that they are strict vegetarians. She’s dropped off in the parking lot of what looks like a sad, gray industrial complex, where her older sister is supposed to meet her. Justine’s parents aren’t surprised when the older sister’s a no-show, and Justine trudges off alone, dragging her red suitcase, to find her dorm—quite different, I think, from how American parents would be portrayed, dropping off their progeny at college.

 

Justine finds out that she’s rooming with a male instead of a female, but he tells her he’s gay so the school counts him as a woman. Not sure what to do with herself, Justine goes to bed, only to be woken in the darkest hours of the night by a team of screaming people dressed in graffiti-covered lab coats with masks covering their faces. They toss all the rookies’ beds, clothes, and other belongings out the windows, trashing their rooms, and Justine and fellow first years are made to crawl through some underground complex until they arrive at a raging party, where Justine is finally reunited with her much cooler older sister Alexia (played by Swiss actress Ella Rumpf). This is just the first part of a hazing ritual that all the rookies have to go through.

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Similar events happen after that, including one where Justine has to eat a rabbit kidney. She balks at this after being a vegetarian for so long, but her older sister bullies her into doing it. The kidney makes her ill, giving her the dry heaves, but that’s nothing compared to the bloody rash she wakes up with. Watching Justine’s itching reminded me of what happens when I go camping and forget the super-DEET bug spray. Just the sound of her fingernails on skin made me cringe. I get baseball-sized welts after mosquitos bite me, and sometimes the itching is so bad that I’ll go after the bites with a hairbrush, resulting in hamburger skin. But that just happens in an isolated patch. Poor Justine has hamburger skin all over her body once she’s done itching.

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Shortly after that, she starts having cravings for meat. They start out mild, with her stealing a hamburger patty from the lunch line and then wolfing down shawarmas with her roommate. But they soon progress to cannibalism, where she experiments with human flesh after an unfortunate waxing incident. It was gag-inducing to watch Justine snacking on a dismembered digit like a chicken wing and hard to look at the screen. I panned across the audience and saw people rolling in their seats, covering their eyes or hiding their faces against their partners. After a few seconds of the eating, though, you do get desensitized. I kept telling myself, it’s just a hot dog, it’s just a hot dog, and it turns out the actress playing Justine had to do something similar to psych herself up for the scene. Marillier told W Magazine, “You know, it was sugar. I was eating candy. If there was any difficulty, it was finding the reality in the scene so I wasn’t thinking, I’m just eating sugar.”

 

For showings in Los Angeles, staff handed out barf bags to the audience after fainting was reported from Canadian moviegoers. I’m not sure how the two correlate or if that was a marketing scheme, but the gore isn’t gratuitous. Some of the body horror is uncomfortable, but I think that’s because it’s woven in with some gruesome rituals that females engage in for the sake of beauty.

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My favorite part of Raw is the intense sister relationship between Justine and Alex. It’s well portrayed with moments of extreme tenderness and thuggish brutality. At one moment, Justine and Alex are getting drunk together and laughing, and in the next, they’re trading bite for bite in a parking lot fight, with one bite in particular reminding me of a hellish scene in Cape Fear. There’s jealousy and competition—the essence of a sister relationship. I wish Raw was around years ago when I compiled “Top Five Sister Horror Movies” because it’s definitely a contender. I might have to revise my list.