Four trauma-horror films

Stories centering on trauma have the potential to inject some complexity into horror/slasher flicks. In a genre where so many characters are slaughtered quickly and damn near anonymously, a film that focuses on the aftermath of surviving Jason or Freddy could be a welcome salve. But first and foremost, a genre pic has to deliver the genre-pic goods. So awful films like Halloween Kills (David Gordon Green [the contemporary Hollywood director with the most squandered career potential?], 2021) and Halloween II (Rob Zombie, 2009) constantly pull away the focus from the trauma story to revel in, wait for it, the quick and anonymous slaughter of characters.

Halloween Kills is particularly repulsive in this regard. Whatever weightiness may have been gained in the survival story (and not too damn much of that given the corny script co-written by Green and Danny McBride) is utterly extinguished by the exigency of requiring Michael Meyers to torture and slaughter a cast of hastily dispatched minor characters. And hooray for progress - an elderly interracial couple, a gay male couple, and a teen boy who wears a dress are all murdered after their allotted five minutes of screen time.

I've been told for years to watch the director's cut of Zombie's Halloween II and have fielded all sorts of claims for it. It's a de facto experimental/avant-garde film financed by Hollywood. It's neorealist. It's a profound mediation on class and trauma. It's one of the best films period of the 21st century. Me, determined to climb whatever mountain of drugs these people were on, I made it halfway through my second screening until my stomach could no longer take it. 

There's a level of commitment here lacking in Green's disaster. But again, Zombie must linger on ever-gorier murder which leaves less time to develop the trauma story, a story that offers little insight into trauma to begin with. And even more time is wasted during each slaughter since Michael (a dead ringer for Rob Zombie this time out) is beset by visions of his mother and his younger self carting around a white horse and imploring him to kill. I presume these are the putative experimental portions of the film. But Zombie tethers these visions tightly to Michael's point of view so that dream and reality are neatly compartmentalized according to the dictates of conventional continuity form. As such, the story remains drearily straight-forward. Then there's the godawful psychobilly band that plays not one, not two, but three (3!) songs (or so it felt like) in a late-second-act party scene. ARGH! 

And for those who couldn't care less about compelling stories of trauma and will brook no complexity or weightiness in their slasher flicks, I get it. I adore the time-wasting spontaneous outbursts of song in musicals and sex scenes in pornography; you dig the gore in slasher flicks (this is to leave out avant-garde films which are nothing but wastes of time to most moviegoers). And as with porn, the ante with gore must be perpetually upped. I applaud cream pies and speculum porn and my beloved The 1,000 Load Fuck (more info here and obviously NSFW!); you applaud a dying woman forced to watch Michael jam every knife in the kitchen into her already dead partner's back. And with all the seriousness I can muster, if such a scene helped you through any trauma, I think that's great for you. Hell, I'll even support federal funding for Halloween Kills in that case.

But I've done my due diligence with this genre and I can do so no longer. Life is nasty, brutish, and short and I still think the vast majority of horror/slasher flicks add horror to the world rather than illuminate or mitigate it. I still think they make the basest fundamental attribution errors, catering to a populace that finds the murder of eight people fascinating or even sexy but the murder of 8,000 unworthy of contemplation (a tendency satirized venomously in the terrific Hulu series Only Murders in the Building). I still think they're soul-draining and reactionary in their dread of difference and sexuality. I still find attempts to conceive of the final girl as a feminist hero risible and unimaginative. You have your prejudices and blind spots. I have mine. Allow me them, i.e., suggesting I see the theatrical cut of Zombie's Halloween II would be a sadistic act indeed. 

By glorious contrast, Lamb (Valdimar Jóhannsson, 2021) and Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021) are both horror films (also a slasher film in Titane's case!) that concern the trauma of losing a child but respect that narrative by diving deeply into each respective story, revealing myriad facets to the trauma along the way. Where the Halloween films are mind-numbingly paint by numbers, Lamb and Titane are outrageous and unpredictable. Therefore, I won't reveal any spoilers here. But both remind me of the most moving moment of my favorite television show, The Simpsons. 

In the 1997 episode "The Principal and the Pauper," Principal Skinner is revealed to actually be one Armin Tamzarian after the real Seymour Skinner arrives in Springfield. A flashback explains that Tamzarian and Skinner were in the Vietnam War together. When Skinner is missing in action and presumed dead,  Tamzarian comes to tell Skinner's mother Agnes the news. But instead, he pretends to be Skinner. Remarkably, Agnes pretends along with him. She tells him to go to his room and whispers, "Upstairs. Third door on the left." This was the apex of American postmodernism in the 1990s, positing that fakery and persona play were an unavoidable fact of life.

Similarly, Lamb and especially Titane are about the necessary lies we tell ourselves just in order to wake up in the morning (in this respect, they resemble M. Night Shyamalan's typically brilliant and consistently surprising Apple TV series Servant). Each story turn, no matter how preposterous, houses a touching moment in which damaged characters make do and still wind up making deadly mistakes. And because there is no need to keep a franchise alive with an indestructible murderer, Jóhannsson and Ducournau can afford to spend some time situating the madness into the textures of daily life. The characters and their milieus are given their due rather than their stories coming at us in half-assed chunks in between bouts of Michael Meyers' supernatural prowess.

A colleague recently warned me never to let anyone try to tell me films like the titles in the Halloween franchise contain some sort of profundity. I am relieved to finally be taking his advice.

Oh yeah and before I blissfully forget them forever, The Empty Man and Malignant sucked too.

Halloween II: C

Halloween Kills: D-minus

Lamb: A-minus

Titane: A-minus

Old (M. Night Shyamalan, 2021)

The severe betrayal of The Last Airbender and the more routine disappointment of After Earth were clearly glitches. Ever since 2015's The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan has held on to his title as the best Hollywood director standing and the incredible Old proves that any contender will have to come up with a Showgirls to approach his level. I won't say much here because a talent as formidable as Shyamalan deserves more than a blog post and I want to avoid spoilers so as to preserve the many shocks coming your way. But Old continues his knack, most legible in my beloved Lady in the Water, for creating meta-narratives - stories in which the characters are trying to figure out the stories. Thus, the first act becomes blissfully foreshortened and lends the impression that Shyamalan is not adept at traditional storytelling. (As if that matters. A colleague once complained that Unbreakable had only two acts. Um, yeah, that's part of why it's so great!) In actuality, he's enormously economical, dropping brief bits of narrative information in the first ten, twenty minutes of the film that will become necessary to push the story forward later on. A tight, resourceful, consistently surprising mainstream horror film that doesn't exploit gore and trauma and refrains from wallowing in sexual puritanism? I believe in miracles. 

Grade: hardcore-ass A!

From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953)

Yet another aggressively okay Oscar pic, its sole sticking point a mildly episodic structure that makes the climactic bombing of Pearl Harbor seem like an afterthought. Good performances all around. Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed (who took the Best Supporting Actress statue) seem miscast until you seem them in action. Columbia president Harry Cohn initially insisted on Joan Crawford for Kerr's role. But according to J.E. Smyth's BFI monograph on the film, she lost the part because she insisted on choosing the cinematographer (although I've always heard that she insisted instead on Sheila O'Brien, her personal costumer designer at the time). Zinnemann didn't want Crawford because "with all due respect, if you looked at Joan Crawford, you wouldn't find it impossible to believe she sleeps with everybody," whereas he wanted to preserve some ambiguity on the matter. I also learned from Smyth that Sinatra was called  a "New Deal crooner" by right-wing papers. And...that's about all I can say about this perfectly nice but eminently forgettable flicker.

Other Hollywood films which deserved the statue much more: my gawd Angel Face, Torch Song, Sweethearts on Parade, Seminole, Take Me to Town, Meet Me at the Fair, All I Desire, Calamity Jane, The Bigamist, Give a Girl a Break, One Girl's Confession, Kiss Me Kate, The Naked Spur, The Moon is Blue, The Band Wagon, The Sun Shines Bright, not to mention such ineligible masterworks as Duck Amuck, Eaux d'artifice, etc.

Grade: B

Marty (Delbert Mann, 1955)

Best Picture Oscar winners merit the oxymoronic expression "extremely okay." They're so aggressively average, aiming so intently at the status quo, that they leave one with not much to say. They're just...there. And so with Marty. If you care about acting, Borgnine gives a spirited performance as the titular Bronx butcher shamed for being a bachelor at 31. The working-class milieu is trenchantly observed. The story is an early and welcome primer on the evils of ghosting. The third act feels rushed which occasions the disappearance of Clara (Betsy Blair), the gal Marty falls for, from the narrative. Overall, it's a solid reminder of how oppressive the 1950s could be. But wow, there are at least two dozen Hollywood films from the same year that tell us far more about America and/or are stylistically more adventurous, none of which were nominated for Best Picture, starting with Night of the Hunter and The Long Grey Line on to terrific westerns by de Toth, Mann, and Vidor, Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow and Donen/Kelly's It's Always Fair Weather (a great double feature!), and two of Joan Crawford's greatest films. Instead, this not-half-bad-but-not-half-good-either flicker took the statue. 

Grade: B

The Many Saints of Newark (Alan Taylor, 2021)

The problem with Peak/Prestige TV's serial narrative form is that, at some point, the shows have to end. And like the de facto soap operas that they are, they can't end, not without upsetting their rabid audiences. The Sopranos circumvented this problem with the (genius, godlike) decision to have the show stop as if it were a Warhol film rather than end like a traditional narrative. Naturally, that pissed off most of the fans. But they needn't have fretted. In the franchisescape that is mainstream media today, you simply have to wait fourteen years for another installment. Hence, The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel which David Chase is trying to pass off as a standalone film. 

Qua film, it's a mess. Taylor/Chase parade so many characters in front of us for the first twenty or so minutes that even seasoned Sopranos freaks will need a family tree (a common problem in many films, though, cf. Sidney Lumet's 1966 film adaptation of The Group). Eventually, though, it settles into a story about not a young Tony Soprano (Michael Gandolfini) but rather his idol Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), infuriating some fans all over again. 

But The Many Saints of Newark is not a film; it's a cog in the Sopranos franchise, one that will no doubt inspire another series especially now that David Chase has another HBO deal. After all, Chase will have all of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to play with. So it doesn't matter how uneven or clipped or messy this particular film is. It will get ironed out with The Sopranos II c. 2023.

I will say that the use of music in The Many Saints of Newark continues Chase's mastery of distance. Van Morrison's title track from Astral Weeks plays over a romantic scene with Dickie and, at first, it sits uncomfortably on top. But the romance soon turns horrifying so that the Morrison track serves more as an ambiguous portent than a bucolic reverie. Even more bewilderingly, the scene ends with Mountain's hard rock "Never in My Life," a complete sonic 180. But it's a sound advance from the following scene with a young Tony in his room listening to Mountain through purloined speakers given to him (forced on him, really) by Dickie. It catapults the viewer out of the scenes in an attempt to gain some distance from the psychoses of these character-idols.

And there's a hilarious moment when Dickie visits his uncle Sally (Ray Liotta) in prison. Sally has become woke in lockup (meditating, eating healthy foods, listening to bebop) and asks Dickie to get him a copy of Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool. He brings him one along with other albums such as The Happy Trumpet by perennial dollar-bin artist Al Hirt ("He's on Carson all the time."). Sally tosses it aside as "not jazz" along with the rest of Dickie's clueless choices (anyone know what the other album is in the first screen grab?).

 Still, I'll be able to accurately assess The Many Saints of Newark only once HBO Max makes the inevitable/perpetual third act available. 

Grade: B+, the classic holding pattern grade