Review: The Blackcoat's Daughter

The Blackcoat’s Daughter has to be one of the finest horror films of this decade. A true original, a masterwork seemingly lost in a tide of pointless prequels and unwanted remakes. If I had to describe the filmic landscape of The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I would say a combination of the cold Canadian backdrop of the films of David Cronenberg, the diabolical nightside philosophies of The Witch, and the slow creeping dread and sense of impending doom of the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Hideo Nakata. The Blackcoat's Daughter is the first film from director Oz Perkins, who also directed the ghostly slow burn, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. Based on these two films, I think the chilly, icy, quiet branch of the horror genre may be seeing a resurgence in the capable hands of Oz Perkins.

During the dead of winter, two stranded students are enveloped into the sinister manipulations of evil forces that lurk behind the everyday. A tale that is both darkly hypnotic and seductively vague, The Blackcoat’s Daughter is not a safe film to watch during the midnight hour. It is a study in unease and will have you looking at shadowy corners, both hoping and dreading that something is there. Highly recommended.   

Black Cats and Black Graves: The Films of Lucio Fulci.

                              

 

 

In any discussion of the great horror directors, the name of Lucio Fulci must be high on the list. His dark landscapes of fog-enshrouded cemeteries, plagues of rotting zombies, malevolent spider attacks, and obsessive ocular violence, are a must visit in the dismal night covered country of horror cinema. Fulci’s zombie trilogy, The Gates Hell, The Beyond, and The House by the Cemetery, were a formative viewing experience in my life. Seeing The Gates of Hell at around the age of 12 or 13 both scared me so much I ran out of the room around the halfway point of the movie, and fascinated me with its operatic violence against the body and it’s just overwhelming doom-laden gothic atmosphere. The Gates of Hell was the gateway drug that turned me into a horror film fanatic. His later zombie film The Beyond further pushed the envelope of surreal filmic transgression. The Beyond stands with toe to toe with Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as the pillars of the zombie film. Fulci then hit us with The House by the Cemetery, which on first watch I have to admit I was kind of baffled and confused by. More a haunted house film than a zombie invasion film like The Gates of Hell and The Beyond. But on subsequent viewings, I have come to love the subtle deliriums and just bizarre plot twists of The House by the Cemetery. In all three films, there is this kind of unseen chaos, inflecting the film and the viewer. The characters move through the films like they are lost in some foggy haze, and the films end with a shocking bewilderment rather than any kind of finality. The human body is not the only thing on attack in these films, it’s as if the zombies are carriers of a primal chaos, attacking both reason and narrative. At the end any of these films, you are left in a place of dark confusion, slowly you realize that in fact, you the viewer, were the one that was under attack.

Fulci first burst onto the horror scene with what may be his most famous and influential film, Zombie. Fulci takes Romero’s undead apocalypse scenario from his Living Dead series and brings it back to the zombie’s genres roots by taking place on a secluded tropical island, paying subtle homage to films like White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie. Zombie is maybe the most ‘pure’ zombie film alongside Bianchi’s Burial Ground. You show up for outrageous gore and shambling corpses, and the film outright drowns you in bodily corruption and death. Zombie is an unimpeachable classic of the genre and not to be missed. Also, I must recommend a more obscure Fulci film that deserves a second look by horror fans. And that film would be The Black Cat. A clever homage to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat is a remarkably fast-paced, suspenseful murder mystery, which is a definite departure from the surreal zombie films he is more known for. To anyone who thinks Fulci is a hack who could not direct a mainstream horror film with a more recognizable plot and realistic characters, I urge them to watch The Black Cat. The film follows the general plot of Poe’s story, a man, who may or may not be a murderer, is under attack by a malefic black cat. The black cat may be some kind of demon or may just be the paranoid delusion of a tormented mind. And something that I found absolutely charming about this film is, the black cat that is featured in this, under a backdrop of sinister music and growling sound effects, is a delightfully beautiful cat who seems more interested in preening for the camera and looking gorgeous then actually trying to look like an evil cat. And the cat has a ton of screen time, every second outshining all else in the film.  While the film is a dead serious horror film, the cat is so damned cute that it steals the show. It’s so cute that you would be tempted to take it home, let it into your family, where it will haunt your every move, and trap you in its sinister manipulations. I think that may be the paramount thing to understanding why Fulci’s films work so well, he was a director who knew what the audience wanted, he knew who the real stars of his films were, whether black cats or undead zombies. He made horror films for horror fans, he would deliver exactly what you wanted, and leave you trapped in its nightmare.

The Unearthly Beauty of the Cinematic Other

After watching Alien: Covenant with a friend, we got into the usual conversation people have following film viewing, what was good and what was bad about it. He hated it, thought it was full of bad acting and nonsensical plot driven decisions. Which it is. But then I argued that the film had merit. It did contain some rather startling and brilliant imagery. My positive review was pretty much based solely on the scene down in the underground chambers, where David summons one of his alien offspring to come forth. It stands straight up, a disturbingly blank white face dripping with crimson blood. And David looks at it like a father or a mother would, with pride and maybe even a bit of tenderness, and whispers about how you must blow on its nose, to earn its trust. It is just such a strange and bizarrely intimate scene. That is a scene that will live forever in my mind. The rest of the film may not be that great, but what do you do with a bad film that contains a moment of absolute beauty and perfection, that many great films try for but just miss? Similarly, I also love Alien: Resurrection for the scene where Ripley is carried, coming in and out of consciousness, in the arms of a Xenomorph, like a sleeping lover, into that pit of flesh, tentacles, and other biomechanical protuberances. There she is swallowed ever so slowly into the maw, her face enraptured as in a dream, as if her cosmic destiny had finally revealed itself. The rest of the film is barely watchable. But that scene stands with the first 40 minutes of the original Alien as filmic masterpieces of cosmic mystery and perverseness.

This kind of beautiful imagery trapped within a low-rent film is not limited to the Alien series. It seems to be almost a tradition in the science fiction film. Who can forget the hairy long-tongued monster from The Brainiac carrying out his foretold doom? The invasion of evil crawling brains from Fiend without a Face? The hypnotic alien with a vaginal face bringing the end of the world from Goke: Bodysnatcher from Hell? All those films have these scenes that seem lifted from some odd fever dream. I would say that the Alien franchise certainly contains less campy fun and offbeat imagination then films like It Came From Outer Space or The Mysterians. But even in big-budget science fiction, the bizarre and dreamlike image can still be found.

Review: Burial Ground

Severin Films recently released a Blu-Ray of one of my favorite horror films. The all mighty Burial Ground! A film basically about upper-class sex perverts trapped in a mansion while under siege from weapon wielding undead hordes. Gut eating, incestuous perversion, and strange atmospherics are on the menu in this Italian classic from 1981, directed by Andrea Bianchi. To me, Burial Ground is the most “pure” Zombie film. It does not waste time with subplots or attempted social commentary. Its focus is on the body, decay, desire, and an all pervasive strangeness.

Zombie films, at their best, shine a perverse light on social norms. The walking dead, devouring the living, is both an inversion ( the dead eating the living ), and an examination, of how we as humans live on a day to day basis but tend to sublimate for our own comfort. We eat what once was living tissue to survive, we eye each other's fleshy bodies with lustful and malicious desire. We don’t want to be confronted with the facts of our own mortality, so the Zombie, literally busting down the door to kill us, taps into these really primal fears we have about our brief and tenuous lives. The whole idea of a walking corpse is just surreal and disturbing. The realization that the Zombie is this looking glass version of us, rotting and dead, but still driven with this all consuming hunger, is where the Zombie film gets its power to disturb. Burial Ground, in its pulpy straightforwardness, is, in fact, one of the more interesting and transgressive films to come out of the 1980’s.

For my money, Burial Ground may have the best looking Zombies ever put to celluloid. Special effects master Gino de Rossi delivers these skeletal, maggot ridden, shambling, walking corpses that are the stuff of nightmares. The musical score is fantastic, a combination of 80’s synth and odd jazzy numbers, and is one of the weirdest scores for a film I have ever heard. It perfectly sets the mood with this unsettling morose and doom laden synthy dirge. And you can’t talk about Burial Ground without mentioning one of the all time weirdest performances. Peter Bark as the young Michael, with his much-quoted line, “ This cloth smells of death “, and his constant groping of his mother is just amazing perverse. Peter Bark has developed quite the cult following and has earned a place in horror film infamy. Severin Films did an amazing job with their Blu-Ray, I never realized how colorful and beautifully shot Burial Ground really is, having seen it mainly on bad washed out and drab VHS copies. I think Burial Ground tends to be overlooked by the Fulci and Argento films of that era, and think it’s long overdue for Burial Ground to get another look. Highly recommended.