Black Christmas

Video World was tucked off into a topiary-barricaded alcove of the Stony Point Shopping Centre, a swift five-minute Schwinn sojourn from my front door.

No bigger than a boutique, this early-80's video store was infinitesimal in comparison to the cancerous sprawl of the Blockbuster Video chain that had begun to malignantly metastasize its way through America’s suburban strip malls, eventually putting all the mom-and-pop operations like Video World out of business. I was fortunate enough to push through my preadolescence before the big blue-and-yellow Blockbuster awnings started cropping up all across my hometown. Walking into Video World was like immersing myself in a Betamax Shangri-La. Every last inch of wall space, from floor-to-ceiling, was lined entirely in video cassettes. At 8 years old, I had officially found my home-away-from home. Each 4 by 7-and-a-half inch VHS cassette contained a different story, just waiting to be told – and I made it my mission to watch them all. Or as many as my allowance would allow.

Hidden at the rear of the store, buried behind comedy, family, drama (but before you reached the “private room” of adult films at the very, very back) – there remained a single row of videos off-limits to children. Little boys and girls were not allowed to rent the videos from back here at the shadowy edge of the forest.

The horror section.

A kid like me couldn’t help but feel a shift in the atmosphere upon entering the aisle, suddenly surrounded by so many R-rated movies. The carpet seemed to darken, stained somehow. Even the air had a miasma of decrepit breath to it, thicker than the air in the childrens section. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be here, which only made me want to explore even more – go deeper, take just another couple steps in, see if I could make my way past the A’s, past the B’s, even the C’s, until I was utterly immersed in the aisle, enveloped in images of terror from all around.

This – this was where fear resided.

Every kind of fear you could think of, or not think of, was right here – captured on magnetic tape and sealed inside its own cardboard box – little gift-wrapped packages presented in a tableau of carnage.

Deadly Spawn. Faces of Death. Def-Con 4. Xtro. The Stepfather. The Driller Killer. The Stuff. Texas Chainsaw Massacre II. I Spit On Your Grave. The Dead Pit. Black Roses. Headless Eyes. Magic. Black Christmas. He Knows You’re Alone. Class of Nuke 'Em High. Cellar Dweller. Mother's Day. The Prowler.

So go ahead, kid – I dare you. Slip a video off the shelf.

Pick any horror film and take the cassette into your hand. Rub your finger over the cardboard cover with its softened edges. Feel how fuzzy and worn the corners are?

Now look at the cover.

Video after video displayed a frozen moment of terror – either a snapshot of a victim caught in that instant just before the axe comes crashing down upon their cranium or of some hideous monstrosity still covered in the gory remains of its last meal. Too many to list – but I can still remember them all. The corpse of a college coed sitting upright in a rocking chair, a clear plastic bag wrapped around her head. A pair of eyeballs slithering away from the very sockets of their owner. The silhouette of a man wielding a butcher knife, only inches away from stabbing his stepdaughter and her defenseless dog.

Most of these movies have long since drifted off into a sea of beta-obscurity, lost forever in a back catalogue of forgettable movies. But somehow, their cover art remains indelibly rooted within my subconscious. Their Photoshopped tentacles have wrapped themselves around the deeper recesses of my brain and refuse to let go. The image of Freddy Krueger from the front cover of Nightmare on Elm Street II. The pool of melted human remains from the front cover of The Stuff.

Even to this day I can conjure up distinct images of grotesqueries from any number of video cassette covers, like photos displayed in a gallery. Your friendly neighborhood video store is presenting its own art show of terror. A monstrosity exhibition.

I was too young to actually watch any of these movies at the time – but I didn't need to. The cover artwork was enough. The shock of the image had a searing effect on my subconscious, imprinting its visual signature on my little boy's brain in far more damaging (and therefore effective) ways. The sleeve activated my imagination by exposing it to images of visceral horror more unnerving than the movies themselves.

This was the true horror here: Not the films and the stories they told, but the preadolescent-mind taking that snippet of information from the front cover (an act of violence, a look of terror, a monster) and letting a narrative develop from there.

For the curious 8 year old who gets lost in the woods of his local video store, entering into the horror section is like being a kid in an anti-candy store. Look – but don’t rent. All a child has are the covers. For an adult in the decision-making process of what-to-rent, the images on the video sleeve are a point of entry into these movies – while for the child, they are the movie.

The images alone are their total and finite experience with the film.

There is nothing else beyond that singular isolated picture.

Viewing these movies becomes completely moot for the underage viewer. It is, within these proposed rules of engagement, totally unnecessary to watch the actual film in order to receive its intended effect. On the contrary, most of the time it’s better not to watch them. The story told by the filmmakers is rendered null and void by the personal interplay between our brimming imagination and the video sleeve itself – taking the raw material of an image and fabricating our personal narrative around it, tailoring them to fit our individual fears. Our imaginations are completely unhampered by hammy acting and sloppy special effects. Budgetary constraints and a lack of talent are no longer an issue. We are absorbing the visual vocabulary of the video's cover art to conjure up a more personalized horror. It is ours, all ours. We created this nightmare. We are making up our own horror movies – and we are the stars now.

Which is all to say: Mission accomplished. As a devout horror fan, I want to lay claim to the idea that the impact of these movies didn't begin and end with the viewing of the movies themselves, but the very ritual of engaging with the tangible aspects of these VHS tapes. The act of entering into the video store and walking down the horror aisle was integral to this ceremony, if not vital – immersing myself in the visual stimulus of over a hundred different horrific images, navigating the aisle until zeroing in on that one video cassette cover and letting it tell its own story within my imagination.

FUTURE-KILL
Written and directed by Ronald W. Moore.

Future-Kill

Designing VHS covers for horror films is a lost art of inducing terror in children too young to watch the movies themselves. As effective salesmanship, these individual images were here to tempt the prospective renter into taking their movie home for the night. The need for an illustration so visually arresting that it convinced us to choose it over all others quickly became a game of graphic design one-upmanship, these sleeves presenting an image that presumably distilled the very essence of the movie onto the front cover – though, more often than not, the cover tended to be the best part of the movie.

Take H.R. Giger's poster for the 1985 film Future-Kill. Writer-director Ronald W. Moore allegedly begged Giger to design the poster art for this sci-fi/horror schlocker. Giger himself had absolutely no involvement in the actual production of the film whatsoever – but his slithery image found its way onto the movie’s cassette sleeve, luring naive renters into watching this fraternity brothers vs. mutant punks yarn. That black and white tendril of a finger stretches over the face of some alien-like mutant, more mechanical than organic, presenting the prospective renter with an unfulfilled vision of horror Future-Kill itself never quite ponies up to. The movie itself had little relation with what its cover promised, much to the dismay of those duped into dropping two bucks for a one-night rental. Future-Kill is often criticized for its cassette cover bait-and-switch – but it does testify to the power of a striking icon. The film itself dissipates from our memories, while Giger's cover design still lingers.

TROLL
Written by Ed Naha. Directed by John Carl Buechler.

The cover for 1986's Troll is one of the more deceptively simple boxes on the horror section shelf. The image on the front cover is a close-up of – yes, a troll, complete with deep-set eyes and pointed ears. Both of its gnarled hands are gripping a child's rubber ball laced in yellow, red, and blue rings. The creature seems to be holding the ball out towards the viewer as a gift.

The tagline, printed alongside the troll's forehead, reads – "Come closer."

The quotation marks are there to indicate that the troll itself is saying this, as if to beckon me to take the ball out from its hands. It's mine. I lost it, it rolled away from me, he found it and now he wants to give it back. But to do so, to take back my ball – first, I must take a strep forward. I must somehow reduce the distance between the two of us and render myself even more vulnerable to this strange little creature. By obeying the troll's invitation, I had to willfully disavow everything my parents taught me: Don't talk to strangers, don't take candy from strangers, don't listen to trolls.

Two individuals, the troll and myself, were now locked in some sort of struggle – his video box in my hands, my ball in his. A decision had to be made: Should I or shouldn't I obey the creature’s innocuous request? What would happen to me if I came just a little bit closer?

Watching the film itself years later was inevitably a letdown. Nothing within the movie even came close to matching that considerable level of dread conjured up by its VHS sleeve. Not a young Julia Louis-Dreyfus, not an elderly June Lockhart – not even a stoned Sonny Bono could strike that same cord of terror within me that I had first felt by merely holding onto the box in the video store, however many years ago, suddenly forced into a life-or-death game of tug-of-war with this runty-looking troll.

Probably one of the principle arguments for Paramount dumping the virus road-trip horror film Carriers onto DVD just before Christmas was to capitalize on the newfound fame of leading man Chris Pine, the rejuvenated Captain Kirk of JJ Abrams’ Star Trek reboot. Carriers had less impact in theatres than a common house cold upon its initial release. To be honest – there really wasn’t much of a release to speak of. The film didn’t even play in New York where I’d patiently been anticipating its arrival. Sadly, the film quickly sniffled into obscurity – until fate beamed up and cast Pine as Shatner’s heir to the command chair. It wasn’t until I myself was on a plane coming home from Dubai with fourteen hours to kill that I discovered the film on my roster of in-flight movies and decided to give it a shot. Not like there were many other horror movies to pick and choose from in economy class. This Abercombie & Fitch teen-ensemble shocker was it.

My argument to you for actually watching this film, however – isn’t going to be Pine.

It’s Christopher Meloni.

That’s right. You heard me. Christopher Meloni. As in – Law and Order: Special Victims Unit’s Christopher Meloni. Lantern-jawed, eggplant-foreheaded, switched-at-birth-with-that-other-character-actor-Elias-Koteas Christopher Meloni.

In fact, I’d like to go on record and argue that Christopher Meloni is one of our most underappreciated character actors around today, shackled to a quasi-memorable role in a ubiquitous prime time procedural. And I’m going to use Carriers as a shining example of yet another role in an ever-expanding roster of bit parts for Meloni that continues to testify to his surprisingly diverse range as The Best Thing about Most of the Movies Meloni’s Cast In.

My admiration for this man began with the surreal display of his (unbeknownst to me and most) comic chops as Gene, head cook at Camp Firewood in the cult fave Wet Hot American Summer. His off-the-wall performance seemed to be in direct opposition to the melodramatic broad-strokes of Law and Order, as if Meloni himself were subtly expressing his own frustrations with being pigeon-holed in a role that has carried him through two decades of prime time television. Compact that with the one-two punch of Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle and Harold and Kumar Escape Guantanamo Bay, where Meloni provides a pair of bit parts so completely bizarre, so utterly out-of-sorts with his weekly gig solving crimes of rapists raping rapists raped by rapists for NBC – suddenly it became clear to me that, below the imposing shadow of Detective Stabler, there lies an actor who clearly loves his comedy. Who can improv alongside the likes of The State’s David Wain and Michael Showalter and never flinch. Who can just about steal nearly every scene he hams it up in.

Such is the case with Carriers. But rather than add another bizarro-buffoon to his growing list of offbeat comic roles, Meloni goes off in an yet another completely different direction, offering up a restrained portrait of a father struggling to save his infected daughter at whatever cost from a virus that sadly leaves no survivors. Meloni’s performance is, by far, the best element of this otherwise interesting (if not ultimately flawed) horror film – and it is, by far, yet another reason why this man deserves our props as an unappreciated actor overshadowed by his most immediate and noticeable role.

Carriers itself is a chunky stew imbalanced by its niche ingredients. Blend certain disparate elements of the horror genre together, such as the attractive-teens-in-peril ensemble films of the ‘90s (Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend), alongside the trendy epidemic scare films of the ‘00s (28 Days Later, Quarantine), with a dash of post-apocalyptic survival horror (a la Cormac McCarthy’s The Road) thrown in for good measure – and suddenly you’ll slowly begin to gain a taste for the strange flavor combinations of Carriers. Pathos to pubescence is the name of the game here. Proving that even philosopher Joseph Campbell theories can look hot in a tank top, Carriers is a hero’s journey for the Greek system, a frat-style road trip movie where our hot undergrads encounter a cross-section of quirky (and infected) characters along the way.

One of the more surprising elements to Carriers is that the majority of horror has come and gone before the film (rather slyly) opens. What we are witnessing onscreen are the after-effects of an anonymous plague that has already wiped out the majority of mankind – all well before the opening credits. Infection spreads through the usual modes of bacterial-transport – saliva, blood. Breath. Those (un)lucky few left behind, like our four clean-cut college coeds (Pine, Lou Taylor Pucci, Emily VanCamp, and cutie-pie Piper Perabo), stay alive by distancing themselves from any or all survivors at whatever cost. Anyone is a potential “carrier” of this highly contagious bug, so better to avoid company at all costs. The ensuing loss of humanity amongst those pockets of survivors will be familiar to anyone who’s seen an epidemic/survival horror film from The Road Warrior on. Looting, lynching, and shooting-first are all common practices between fellow travelers nowadays. How our quartet of travelers has miraculously survived in the face of every-man-for-themselves marshal law, let alone near-extinction, is beyond the point. These kids are just about the hottest things this side of the apocalypse. Consider Carriers as the teenie-bopper antecedent to The Road, where the underlying question our hapless baby-faced travelers ask themselves, just as Viggo Mortenson did on his own walkabout through post-apocalyptic hell – Are we willing to lose our own humanity in the name of survival, dude?

One thing to admire about Carriers, oddly enough, is its own sense of restraint. What horror there is to witness in this film is through its survivors’ eyes. What violence finds its way onscreen is minimal at best. Innocently pinned with a PG-13 rating, this film prefers to display its terror in the passing tableaus of death, providing numerous drive-bys of ravaged neighborhoods – eerily reminiscent of those despoiled New Orleans quarters left behind in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Writer/director/brother-team Alex and David Pastor use our recent visual vocabulary of boarded up homes spray-painted with the tallies of dead left inside to find an immediate corollary to our present-tense sense of dread, successfully imbuing their movie with a level of unease that ultimately trumps the more immediate shock-tactics favored by most modern day horror films.

In fact, Carriers wisely chooses to strip away the familiar zombie-metaphor from its plaque-upon-humanity storyline in order to draw a clearer connection between the horror onscreen and our current horrors of the everyday. This plague doesn’t turn its victims into mindless rabid monsters. It simply kills them. And in a media driven culture that spouts the horrors of Ebola, SARS, swine flu, and the West Nile virus nearly every night on the six o’clock news, Carriers has something of a leg-up on its rivals in virus-based horror purely in its simplicity. Get the bug, get sick, get dead quick. Simple as that.

And yet – the one film Carriers most strangely apes is the bacteria-saturated 28 Days Later. Not on the zombie-end of the narrative-spectrum, mind you – but the final third of Danny Boyle’s film, where man’s-inhumanity-to-man overtakes the storyline and survivors are left to fend themselves off from none other than other survivors. Carriers chooses to isolate that section of Boyle’s superior film and extrapolate on its possibilities for a full 84 minutes, hoping to have 28 Days’ cake and devour it too… Sans the hordes. One scene could even be faulted for nearly replicating 28 Days’ rape-by-horny-military-men set-piece, the two films uncomfortably crossing cinematic paths for a brief moment.

But back to Christopher Meloni. Relegated to Carriers’ first third, Meloni’s subdued role offers a level of pathos uncommon for any film of the teen horror genre. Not that there’s much competition between him and his youthful cast-mates. Our gang finds Meloni’s character blocking the highway before them, the two groups suddenly stuck in a standstill. What we as the audience find is a father desperate for help, willing to do anything to save his infected daughter – an obvious fool’s errand, hopeless from the get-go, which only adds to the heartbreak of his self-imposed mission. The level of tragedy in Meloni’s final scene is almost unfair (and totally unexpected) for a film like this. I defy you not to feel for the man as he reaches the forgone conclusion of his character’s arc – one that arguably we could see coming, but feel affected by nonetheless. Or at least I did – which is much more than I can say about the rest of the cast. Carriers’ four nubile leads never achieve the sincerity accomplished by Meloni, regardless of whether or not they have the rest of the film to pout and whine over their need to survive. We as the audience not only mourn the loss of Meloni’s character, but the loss of Meloni from the film itself.

Ultimately, however – and here’s a little soap-boxing, so forgive me – the shortcomings of Carriers do not compare to the lack of faith Paramount had for its own film.

Hell, if you’re a studio head who just-so-happened to have some micro-budgeted horror flick collecting dust on the shelf that just-so-happened to share the same baby-faced star as one of the year’s biggest summer blockbusters – well, you’d be pleased to discover you finally had a chance at recouping some of your costs on said no-budget horror flick. Why even bother giving the film much of a release when you can simply sit on it and pray that one of its leads becomes famous in some other movie, quietly slipping it onto the video store shelf without as much as even a whimper of promotion?

It’s becoming increasingly aggravating how most major film studios have lost faith in their horror films. Originality is being sacrificed for repetition. Somewhere along the way between green-lighting a unique project and its release, executives tend to cut ties with their fledgling film (Carriers, A Perfect Getaway) by barely giving the film any distribution, only to watch it die on the vine before it even has the slightest chance of finding its own audience. They continue to play it safe by offering us up the same sequels year-after-year (the Saw franchise), recycling past horror classics (Friday the 13th, Nightmare On Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween) without even attempting to offer us up a new classic.

The true heartbreaker here isn’t that Carriers is a flawed film – but more that studios are choosing to dump such like-minded movies onto DVD, with barely a big screen release to speak of, while continuing to mass produce the run-of-the-mill remakes and sequels that bog down the genre and soften our expectations.

I’d take a flawed movie like Carriers that attempts to take risks and partially succeed than yet another rehash of Saw any day.

So – here is my contribution to the Awkward Press end-of-the-year Top Ten blowout. Given that Jeffrey requested we pick a topic near and dear to our hearts, I went ahead and came up with the Top Ten Horror Movies of 2009 That You Probably Didn’t See. Considering most of the horror movies you probably did see in the theatres this year were absolutely dreadful (Orphan, The Fourth Kind, Saw VI, Drag Me To Hell, The Collector, The Final Destination, Friday the 13th, Halloween II, Sorority Row, The Unborn, The Uninvited), with the potential exception of the box office phenom of Paranormal Activity – chances are, you haven’t seen or even heard of the following horror movies. Unless you’re a total horror film geek like me.

10. THE BURROWERS
Written and directed by J.T. Petty.
(Watch the preview here.)

J.T. Petty is one of those filmmakers that seems to volley between making interesting, complex, thought-provoking horror films (such as the amazing S@Man) and bizarro mainstream direct-to-DVD sequels (such as the unnecessary Mimic: Sentinel). The Burrowers is somewhere in between – a Tremors-inspired western yarn, complete with shades of Pitch Black and Young Guns thrown in for good measure. While the movie suffers in the center, it is most definitely a fun film that prefers patience over cheap thrills. Considering Petty is a compatriot to such New York-based indie-horror filmmakers as Ti West and Larry Fessenden, it’s exciting to think what scares he’ll be coming up with next year.

9. THIRST
Written and directed by Chan-wook Park.
(Watch the preview here.)

I’ll admit that Thirst was just not doing it for me for the longest time. The first two thirds of the film just seemed to drain the life right out of me. For a vampire film, you’d think this would be a compliment – but no. Thirst unfolds at such a glacial pace you’d pine to put these vampires out of their own philosophy-pontificating misery. Chan-wook Park’s insistence on style over content (see his contribution to the Three…Extremes anthology) can send him into such gluttonous visual excess akin to middling Dario Argento – that what ends up suffering the most, beyond the audience, is his own storyline. But – and this is a big ol’ but here – make it to the last third of the movie, and it’s as if this vampire flick has received its first taste of blood in a long, long time. The final two set-pieces of this film are fun enough to make up for what rolled out before it. The first, set amidst a friendly family game of mah jong, recalls Hitchcock at his most perverse – while the brilliant final scene is equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking. Be patient with it. Thirst goes out with a bang.

8. SAUNA
Written by Iiro Kuttner. Directed by Antti-Jussi Annila.
(Watch the preview here.)

I can’t quite say I know what Sauna is about per se, given the fact that at a certain point this horror film from Finland makes little if any narrative sense – but on a sheer level of tension and what-the-fuckery, this is a must-see. Chalk the mysterious storyline up to cultural differences, but as best as I can tell – Sauna is about two opposing battalions, one Finnish, the other Russian, in the thick of the twenty-five year Long War of 1595, sent forth with the task of drafting up a new map to determine the borders between their two countries. In the process, they come upon a netherland of sorts that… Well. Just see it. Sauna references another war/horror-film, Elem Klimov’s WWII masterpiece Come and See, streamlining the madness of battle into a simple yarn about ghosts and… bath-houses.

7. PONTYPOOL
Written by Tony Burgess. Directed by Bruce McDonald.
(Watch the preview here.)

Pontypool gets on the list for concept alone. The less you know about the film, probably the better, merely because any explanation would make the film sound a bit hokey – but suffice it to say it’s what George Romero would have come up with if he decided to adapt the writings of William S. Burroughs for the big screen. By rooting the action of the film in a radio station, we are privy to a series of random outbreaks of violence all happening within the world well beyond the central location of our talk show host’s sound booth – but only through the live call-ins and increasingly grisly updates from spectators we never see. With the majority of carnage happening off-camera, Pontypool conjures up echoes of Orson Welles’ War of the World radio play – where the sound of the human voice in peril is enough to send chills up the audience’s spine.

6. VINYAN
Written by Fabrice Du Welz and Oliver Blackburn. Directed by Fabrice De Welz.
(Watch the preview here.)

Something akin to a family vacation through the murky rivers of Apocalypse Now, Vinyan is an interesting attempt to filter the downward descent of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness through a domestic lens. A married couple loses their son during the Southeast Asia tsunami, sending them into a tail-spin of mourning. When the mother, played with intense sincerity by Emmanuelle Beart, discovers the possibility that her child may still be alive somewhere in Burma – she drags her husband deeper and deeper into the wilderness, not to mention her own madness, in hopes of finding her son. Vinyan suffers for its artistic pretensions here and there, but as writer/director Fabrice Du Welz proved with his previous mind-fuck of a film, Calvaire, the pastiche of the familiar (here being Lord of the Flies and Francis Ford Coppola’s aforementioned classic) along with beautiful camera-work and locations, along with an ending to die for, Vinyan is well-worth exploring.

5. TRICK ‘R TREAT
Written and directed by Michael Dougherty.
(Watch the preview here.)

Oddly enough, Trick ‘r Treat is a rather wholesome horror movie. I mean no disrespect by saying it’s actually quite charming. It is in fact one of the cutest, quaintest horror movies I’ve seen in a long, long time. It is steeped in nostalgia. Think Norman Rockwell meets Norman Bates. Interweaving a handful of different narratives all happening simultaneously within one sleepy proto-American small town – Trick ‘r Treat chooses to tug at the sentimental heart-strings of horror aficionados rather than rip them out for all to witness their still-pulsing-ness, going down the checklist of what makes the Halloween holiday so special to the inner-kid within us all. Local folklore turned ghastly urban legend? Check. Creepy kooky neighbor all the neighborhood kids dare each other to ring and run? Check. Sexy Snow White? Sexy Little Red Riding Hood? Sexy Cinderella? Check, check, check. There are no huge surprises in Trick ‘r Treat. But that seems beyond the point. You feel a sense of appreciation and love for horror from behind the camera, making its way onto the screen. What we have here is a 90-minute Hallmark card to a holiday that brings out the creepy kid lingering within every monster-movie fan. Safe and sentimental, for sure – but sweet as an apple with a razorblade slipped inside.

4. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY
Written and directed by Oren Peli.
(Watch the preview here.)

Have you heard of this movie? Not many people have. I’ll personally take The Blair Witch Project over Paranormal Activity any day, given that Blair Witch continues to resonate with me even years later, rooting its horror in a mythology that I could still recite to anyone who asked me today – while I pretty much forgot nearly everything about Paranormal Activity’s airy-scary cotton candy quality the morning after seeing it. But man oh man – I haven’t had this much fun in a packed theatre in a long time. If you haven’t seen it (all three of you), do yourself and favor and be sure not to view the trailer beforehand. The best scares are given away.

3. GRACE
Written and directed by Paul Solet.
(Watch the preview here.)

A bad suggestion on my part would be to recommend a double-feature of both Deadgirl and Paul Solet’s stomach-churning Grace. While the thematically queasy-qualities of these two films could easily connect them together, not to mention the fact that both storylines revolve around, well, said-unsaid undead characters – what makes this proposed double-bill really not such a hot idea is that, while Deadgirl, written and directed by men, focuses on the male gaze on the feminine body as an integral component to its central storyline, Grace filters the intensely feminine matter of motherhood through the male gaze of its writer/director. We as the audience are not watching a movie that generates a fear-response towards motherhood – we are watching one filmmaker’s personal expression of his own fear, his own disgust of motherhood.

But hell. There is a lot to enjoy here. Madeline Mattheson learns that her baby has died in utero, insisting that she still carry her child to term. Upon delivery, Madeline’s reluctance to let her newborn/stillborn daughter go is rewarded by the discovery that Grace isn’t in fact dead all. For all intensive purposes, Grace is quite alive… And now she’s hungry.

It was nearly impossible for me to distance myself from the notion that this movie was made by a man. Viewing scenes of granola-fed lesbian midwives seemed to have an air of masculine-campiness that, for me, tended to undermine the film’s otherwise unnerving storyline. Of course, horror has always been a male dominated genre – but when I reflect on such films as Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, which Grace clearly descends from, I believe there are those films where the director’s masculine viewpoint is there to comment on the inherently feminine narrative or at least create a tension between the action onscreen and the way in which it is captured. With Grace, Solet seems only capable of further distancing himself from the women in his narrative, thereby objectifying several of his incidental characters that clutter his film. A singular standout would be Gabrielle Rose’s turn as the perverted mother-in-law, imbuing what could have easily descended into camp with a strong sense of pathos and heart. You’ll never look at a woman breastfeeding the same way – believe you me.

2. HOUSE OF THE DEVIL
Written and directed by Ti West.
(Watch the preview here.)

Avid horror movie fans (such as myself) seem to be an oddly sentimental lot. It should be said that a fair amount of the movies listed here made it to my Top Ten because they elicited some sense of necro-nostalgia in me, conjuring up memories of watching horror movies as a kid – which I think is a commonality amongst most horror film fanatics. Most pine for those simpler slasher times of gore-yore, wishing to return to the 70’s/early-80’s heyday of horror, where low budget constraints and poor lighting quality have now in retrospect become something of an aesthetic hallmark. With contemporary horror filmmakers having not only to contend with digital video and other technological advances behind the camera – on a narrative level, there are far too many innovations (cell phones, internet) that render the babysitter-in-distress scenario of John Carpenter’s day entirely moot. Which is why House of the Devil’s return to the 80’s, not only on a narrative level but on a filmmaking level as well, is a total must-see for any horror film fan who grew up on a steady diet of Friday the 13ths and Black Christmas.

Ti West has crafted a love letter to grindhouse cinema, much in the same way as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriquez did with their double-feature – but, rather than punch his tongue all the way through his cheek (much in the way Tarantino and Rodriquez did), West never lets his retro-concept get the best of him. The key difference between House and Grindhouse is that, West lets his retro-tendencies transport his audience directly back to the 80’s, immersing them in the period and all its lavish details, rather than simply give a meta-pastiche wink-wink as Tarantino and Rodriquez’s film does. House of the Devil doesn’t comment on the 80’s as much as it seems to exist in the 80’s. A true taste-test challenge would be to screen House to an uninitiated audience member right alongside, say, 1981’s Jaws of Satan or 1980’s He Knows You’re Alone – and see if they could tell whether or not it was in fact shot in 2008/2009 and not 1979/1980.

What’s most impressive about House is its insistence on patience. The slow-burn of the first three-quarters of the film permits one’s imagination to conjure up the worst what’s-to-come – so that when the film does reach its own eventual, inevitable reveal, it’s arguable that the conclusion we’ve all had time to conjure up within our minds far out-frightens the actually climax of the movie itself. But still. House asks something of its audience which so few contemporary horror films have the courage to do: Be patient.

Next: Clay's shocking and disturbing pick for the #1 horror film of the year!