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[Movie] The VVitch

Hey you! Yeah you! I’m raising money for Act for Change, and in exchange I’ll drunk watch Gods of Egypt and chronicle my suffering for your enjoyment. Details here.

I don’t even do the horror thing, why do I keep watching these movies? It’s all David Annandale‘s fault, basically.

I saw this trailer for The Witch some months ago, and my immediate reaction was
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Because gosh that looks scary and tense and I bet there aren’t any fart jokes. (I was right. There aren’t.) But then David started retweeting all sorts of interesting pieces about the film, about it being different and comparing it to It Follows and FINE. I got curious.

I didn’t think it was as scary as It Follows. I saw the movie with Sunil because he is a god among men, and did not actually attempt to burrow into him until about twenty minutes from the end. Which as horror movies go for me is pretty tame. No jump scares, which I appreciate. But the tension in the film was just unending once it got rolling.

Plot is simple: family gets kicked out of their Puritan village because dad doesn’t agree with the elders 100% on religion. They strike out into the wilderness to make a new home for themselves. Times are hard, and bad things keep happening, and happening, and happening, and then shit really goes sideways.

Several things were striking about this film. First off, despite the reason for the family being out by the creepy woods being religious differences, the patriarch of the family isn’t the villain; he’s religiously not any wackier than the rest of the Puritans at the time, as far as I could tell. The family is one of generally good people who make little mistakes such as lying to each other in an effort to avoid conflict, that balloon into terrible familial conflict later.

Much has been made about the historical accuracy depicted. As a non-expert, I can’t confirm or deny this, but it certainly feels like the work’s been put in to make this feel like we’re just following a 17th century Puritan family around. The language and accents took me about 10 minutes to get used to, because it was very different from modern American English. That was actually pretty cool.

The horror is played very close to the chest here, in a way I could appreciate. While it’s very clear what happened to the missing baby, much of the rest is left ambiguous. Is the rabbit we keep seeing actually a manifestation of evil, and we’re afraid because we’re seeing it through the eyes of a family that’s isolated and afraid? Nothing blatantly supernatural starts happening until very close to the end.

The film rests almost entirely on the backs of six actors, who comprise the family that’s heading for a terrible end. Everyone did excellent work, but Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays the oldest daughter Thomasin, was particularly excellent.

I don’t tend to be a fan of witch-as-monster stories; they just never sits right with me, considering the history of innocent people getting executed for witchcraft in the early modern period. In the light of day, I can’t say I feel any better about it, though in the moment I was too busy squirming in my seat to think about it over much.

A little spoiler here for the end.

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movie

[Movie] Under the Skin

7dcMy reaction to Under the Skin, summed up by well known philosopher, critic, and Hero of Canton, Jayne Cobb.

Because I am an adult and make excellent life choices, I decided to see this movie at 2230 on Sunday, even knowing that it would mean getting less than five hours of sleep before work on Monday. Because I’d heard wonderful things about it, and I have yet to see something that involves Scarlet Johansson that I haven’t loved to pieces. And the concept behind the movie also sounded so interesting–psychological thriller about an alien stalking Glasgow and doing terrible things to unsuspecting human men until she discovers some inner well of humanity? Sign me up.

I have no idea now, why people are calling this movie a psychological thriller as opposed to horror. I’m guessing because (at least in America) it’s not horror if it doesn’t involve jump scares and copious amounts of blood. Well, I don’t watch a lot of horror movies because I don’t really like either of those things all that much. But they also don’t really tend to leave me feeling fucked up for hours and days afterward. I claim Under the Skin is horror because it managed to fill me with existential dread for well over a day and kept me from sleeping. The last movie that did that? Kairo. The original Japanese horror movie, not that shitty American…whatever it was.

There is nothing about this movie that wasn’t fundamentally disturbing. Scarlet Johansson spends a lot of time staring at the world with dead eyes…except when she’s attempting to lure a hapless (and completely lonely) man to her exceptionally creepy and very water-damaged house. I can’t tell you precisely what happens to the men because it’s never explicitly stated, but it starts out with naked, boner-sporting fellows sinking down into a bottomless pool that the alien simply walks across like it’s solid, continues on to them being sucked out of their goddamn skins so literally there is an empty fucking skin floating in the water, and ends with what sure does look like ground meat and bonemeal slurry going down a chute.

The dialog is minimal, which only leads to the feeling of complete unease. The score is not going to win any prizes for beauty, but it does what it’s supposed to do with efficiency, which is make the audience feel intensely unsettled at every possible moment. The score was composed mostly of sustained chords, which were incredibly discordant and became less so as the alien experiences her shift in personality. The movie takes its time with long scenes, not terribly unlike the alien walking slowly backwards as she lures men into the dark room where they’ll ultimately get turned inside-out for the the crime of just really wanting to fuck a pretty woman. (A pretty woman, I’ll note, doing one of the least sexy strip teases that has ever been put to film.) It’s long, and drawn out, and at times you want to beg it to have mercy and just. Fucking. Stop.

But it is, by the way, fucking gorgeous. Large portions of this movie could easily act as a tourism advertisement for Scotland; forests and shorelines and the countryside all have their moments to shine. Except for the bit where the take home message seems to be: Come to Scotland, it’s a magical place where you might be picked up by a woman in a molester van and then get liquified after 24 hours of terrifying captivity on a bottomless swimming pool.

One thing I found interesting was the amount of nudity in this movie, which surprised me considering the R-rating. Full frontal nudity of both the male and female variety, and much of the male variety involved erections. But I think it’s because I’m used to an R-rating meaning lots of violence. That’s the American way, right? And there is really very little actual violence in this movie, for all it involves men getting sucked out of their own skins. There’s one really horrible scene at the end–an attempted rape that leads to something even more awful–and the rest of it is disquietingly non-violent and unsexy both. This movie refuses to offer you relief from the horror of what is happening by making it titillating in the slightest.

Continue on if you don’t mind spoilers:

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horror movie video game

Silent Hill: Revelation and Pyramid Head

io9 has posted the new trailer for Silent Hill: Revelation.

It looks like it’s based off of the third game of the Silent Hill series, which is probably my second favorite. Honestly, it should probably my favorite, but I played Silent Hill 2 first and it’s just kind of stuck with me. James is just so wonderfully ineffectual as a hero, I can’t quite get over it.

Heather, the heroine of Silent Hill 3, is infinitely more badass and has a lot of snappy dialog. I’m really hoping that’ll come through in the movie, since she isn’t one to just stare in horror and make the ‘I’m just about to vomit from an overload of fear’ face that seems to be the way most women emote in horror movies. She’s competent.

Though of course, who knows how close this will come to the game. I’ve already got a bad feeling, here, considering it sounds like Heather calls the Kit Harrington character “Vincent.” He sure as hell doesn’t look like a priest in the evil cult of Silent Hill. I’m getting a horror movie teen romance vibe from it, and that really misses the point of the entire story being about Heather through and through. There’s no room for a love story; it would be unnecessary and distracting from how cool the character is, even if the guy gets to be the damsel in distress for once. (And if he’s not, expect ranting.)

Perhaps unusually, I didn’t hate the first Silent Hill movie. It didn’t make an enormous impression on me – I can barely remember most of it – and it’s not as if I own a copy or have gone out of my way to see it more than once. But I remember it had some style, and I appreciated that there were certain things done incredibly well, like the nurses, Pyramid Head, and the creepy air raid siren. From the brief glimpses in the trailer, the nurses still look great. I’m reserving judgment on Pyramid Head, since I’m always worried he’s going to get overused or have his menace sapped by doing un-Pyramid-Head-like things. (Such as the bit where he seems to be driving some kind of machinery in the trailer.)

Because this is the thing about Pyramid Head. He’s terrifying in the same way old school, shambling zombies are terrifying. He’s not in a rush. He’s virtually indestructible. And you know no matter how fast you run, he’s going to eventually catch up and then you’re going to end up cut in half by a sword longer than you are tall. He doesn’t really make any sound, either. It’s all just the scrape of the sword on the ground, screeee screee.

True story: I’m too much of a weenie to play horror games. So when I say that I played one, what I actually mean is that my best friend Kat actually played it, while I sat behind her and offered frantic, helpful advice like, “Run! Run! Why aren’t you running? Shoot it! Shoot!” etc.

The first time we played Silent Hill 2, we were stuck on the roof of the hospital. I went and looked at a gamefaq to figure out what we were missing. Well, we were just supposed to go to one part of the roof, look at the diary pages there, and then we’d get a cut scene with Pyramid Head but it was okay because he wouldn’t actually hurt us.

Okay, there were the diary pages. Cut scene any moment now. Any moment… now. Any moment… now?

screeeeeee screeeeeee

At which point I screamed, perhaps louder than I had screamed in my entire life as the game camera whipped around to face Pyramid Head. Loud enough that I scared Kat into throwing the controller and jumping over the back of the couch.

I don’t know what it is about that monster. He still scares the hell out of me even when I know he’s coming. He’s a force of nature. Evil, horrifying nature that involves wearing a leather apron that is, for all I know, made out of human skin. And has a giant metal pyramid obscuring his entire head, which you’d think would be hilarious only it not.

So we’ll see. I imagine that I’ll end up seeing this movie, hopefully with Kat. But not in 3D.

Because of course, like all things today, the movie is going to be in 3D. Though apparently it was actually filmed in 3D rather than given a computer shop job. Fascinating, but not enough to make me want to endure having glasses perched over my glasses, or spending an hour and a half feeling like I’m going to vomit into my hat.

Though for the life of me, every time I see Silent Hill: Revelation IN 3D all I can think is this:

(Weird Al Yankovic: Nature Trail to Hell in 3D)

Threat level: Pyramidalicious (pessimistic but willing to be surprised)

Related: I’ve been to Centralia, the town that inspired Silent Hill.