THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER

I am not a fan of pop culture. Seriously. I tend to hate that shit. Every day people mention pop music stars and the latest young actors, top-grossing movies, fad novels and such...and I have no idea what they're talking about. I just do not follow current trends in modern media. Basically, except for a brief period of my youth, I never have eaten at that trough.

To make it plain, I ignore the latest in hit films and, since the media is packed with ads and promotions for movies that I consider garbage, I tend to avoid the advertising for all modern movies. This means that I often miss hearing about films that I might enjoy because of the fact that I remain ignorant of them due to intentionally avoiding the constant bombardment from vast corporations promoting their vile shit.

Thus, I missed hearing about a 2016 movie called THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER. The movie was written and directed by "Oz" Perkins (Osgood Perkins, son of the later actor Tony Perkins and Berry Berenson). Set at a private all-girls Catholic school, the story reveals itself as a particularly creepy tale of madness, obsession, and (possibly) demonic possession. Told partially in a series of flashbacks, the story unfolds slowly and effortlessly, although with a kind of cool tension.

And cold is the key word for this film. Everything about it is chilling and sterile. The setting of the film at the Catholic girls prep school is the ultimate of alienation and abandonment. Amid this frozen landscape (both within and without) we are introduced to a pair of students who find themselves trapped at the location because each set of parents failed to show up to gather the girls at winter break. (Yes, the school director attempts to locate and communicate with the two sets of parents, to no effect.) So the girls must wait to be collected by their parents for another day, during which everything changes for them both.

Kat (played by Kiernan Shipka from MAD MEN--yes, I have seen some pop culture TV now and again) is convinced via a nightmare that her parents have been killed in an auto accident and will never arrive.  Rose, (performed by Lucy Boynton, an actress I had never seen before) has intentionally misled her parents to think that she is to be picked up later because she wanted to see a boyfriend before she left for home. So the two girls (one older than the other by a couple of years) are left in the silent halls with only a couple of nuns for company--the girls staying in their structured dorm, the nuns in a brownstone on the campus.

And there is the appearance of a third youthful woman (played by Emma Roberts) inserted into the plot whose story seems disconnected from the others, told in a setting that occurs several years after the initial storyline. Alone at a bus station, she's offered a ride by a married couple played effectively and coldly by Lauren Holly and James Remar (who normally delivers villainous roles, but not here).

I found both Perkins' script and direction to be exceptionally good. The feelings of sterility and alienation that he communicates via images and dialog are effective. The story he tells is also deceptively simple, which adds to the power of it as it unfolds.

If I had any criticism of it after this recent viewing, it would be that the theme of the movie could be considered routine in some ways. But again, I am a hard viewer to please, so I often find fault in most movies.

I do think the movie is engaging in most ways. Keep in mind that it is a horror movie, and an effective one. It's not a romance, and it's not a feel-good yarn. It's a horror movie, with accent on the slowly unfolding, implacable monstrosity. 

Lucy Boynton as Rose.

Kiernan Shipka as the creepy Kat.

Lousy Movie

I went to see the new horror film MAMA last night.

It was an awful movie.

The problems of the film were many and the movie was infected through and through with poor concepts, bad execution, and lousy writing.

First and foremost it borrowed too heavily from earlier and much more effectively produced films. The influence of both THE GRUDGE and the execrable remake THE WOMAN IN BLACK are painfully evident as the film unfolds. In addition, aside from the focus of the movie: two abandoned children--the movie doesn't have any really sympathetic characters.

What it does have is a marginally neat monster, which borrows far too heavily from the Japanese import, THE GRUDGE. There's not a whole lot of difference between the vengeful ghost from that movie and the oh-so-similar ghost in this one. As you watch the movie, that sameness and lack of originality dog your thoughts constantly. Whenever there's a creepy scene or a patented cinematic surprise moment, your only thought is: Oh. I saw that used in THE GRUDGE.

Yeah, yeah. Just like THE GRUDGE.

The screenplay was also extremely weak. It opens with a dramatic setup leading to a contrived plot development that descends into the-writer-pulled-the-line-out-of-his-ass story. Nothing makes any real sense. Characters say and do things that are against type, against logic, against reason. Time and again the story depends completely on wild coincidence, especially concerning the revelations of an otherwise completely throwaway character encountered in two scenes and never heard from again--her reason for being is obviously to insert a piece into a very poorly rendered puzzle.

All in all, I consider the movie to have been a complete waste of my time. There are some cool computer-generated graphics with the monster, but other than that, it's a film I could have done without having seen.

Oh, well. You never know.

This is the short (introduced by the movie's executive producer, Guillermo del Toro) that got the attention of the studios and allowed the film to go forward. It's an excellent little piece and could have spawned a decent film. Alas.

My favorite horror movies.

For someone as historically fond of horror as I, there really aren’t a great lot of horror movies that I find effective. Very few actually frighten me, and very few are worthwhile as cinematic achievements. Most horror films that I’ve watched over the years were frankly rather lame and very disappointing in failing to evoke a feeling of unease, or to achieve any emotion in me as something worth seeing.

Here are the exceptions.

The Body Snatcher

This Val Lewton-produced gem is one of the darkest movies I’ve seen. The movie is at once disturbing because there seems to be no solidly delineated good or bad. Everyone in the film moves about in a kind of gray area between light and dark. The villain of the piece, Gray the Cabman, is capable of great cruelty, and yet is somehow sympathetic in his loneliness and thirst for companionship and (perhaps) some kind of revenge for a past wrong. The apparent hero, Dr. Toddy MacFarlane, a surgeon, is not so good as we are first led to expect. And even his assistant, who provides a romantic interest for the audience, can be led astray by duty. For its visual accomplishments, and for Karloff’s performance as Gray, this movie deserves a place on my all-time favorites list.

Night of the Living Dead

George A. Romero’s landmark horror film is easily one of the most emotionally wrenching stories I’ve ever watched. Cheaply made, starring no one who made a name as an actor, the movie presents a claustrophobic and paranoid atmosphere that has been pretty much unmatched in all the years since I’ve seen it. And this is the seed of his zombie mythos, the beginning of an entire genre of film that scratches at the itch of paranoia in every person. His zombies are frightening in their sheer plainness, and implacable in their thirst for the destruction of the living.

Dawn of the Dead

Romero returned some years later with this fantastic sequel that doubles as a superlative commentary on the consumer society of the USA. This time, the heroes are not confined to a fragile house, but are able to roam in a kind of wonderland of commercial delight inside of a shopping mall walled off from the zombie hoards who wait outside. Finally, in this movie, we see the zombies not as someone coming to get us, but as ourselves willing to destroy those who are different. This film rivals its predecessor in its effects of generating a sense of horror and dread.

The Haunting

If there is a more atmospheric horror movie, I have yet to see it. The Haunting is a series of visual and auditory illusions whose whole effect is to completely unsettle the viewer. One identifies immediately with the most vulnerable of the characters, and the witnessing of the downward spiral, mentally and physically, of this person is one of the most disturbing experiences in all of modern cinema.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

The greatest horror novels and films prey upon human paranoia. Finney’s novel that spawned these films is a classic, rivaled in the category of paranoid fantasies only by Matheson’s I AM LEGEND. Both of these versions of Invasion are superlative films, and while generally I disdain remakes of classic and perfectly fine movies, in this case the remake was worth the doing. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is both effective science fiction and evocative horror. The fifties version relied on the Red Scare, perhaps subtly or maybe on the surface—but who’s to know. The paranoia of being ratted out for being different (leftist) could also be the germ that created the fear in some viewers of that era.

The later version has a cast at least equal to that in the 50s film, and a script that goes the original one better in having the courage to end with a far more horrifying and downbeat ending. The small changes in the storyline were startling and make the film different enough so that what was familiar is made strange enough so that the experience is new.



The Woman in Black

This is, to my way of thinking, the most frightening ghost story ever put to film. Based on the very popular novel of the same name, and the stage play, The Woman in Black is a ghost story with a grain of logic behind it. This is the key to creating a good ghost story—if one is to accept the perfectly ridiculous idea of a ghost, then one must be presented with a kind of twisted logic to make it all seem believable (on some level). This movie does that, and brilliantly. The ghost in the film (the Woman in Black) appears tenuously, at first, her presence building and building as the protagonist of the film slowly realizes just what he is dealing with. The movie has the single scariest ghost encounter I have ever witnessed, and every time I see it (even in daylight), I never fail to be literally scared and to feel the gooseflesh creeping up my spine.


Alien

Alien is probably the scariest pure science fiction film I’ve seen. The movie relies not on a single fear to generate dread, but on many different fears. There is the fear of the unknown, the fear of one’s own body, the fear of betrayal, the fear of violence, fear of the dark, claustrophobia, and on and on. Ridley Scott has succeeded in crafting not only one of the finest horror films ever made, but also one of the best science fiction films ever. This one works on so many levels that it’s hard to understand how it works so well. Add to all of this the most disturbing film monster of all time, and it’s a recipe for total horror.