Hello boils and ghouls, lady-ghosts and gentle-wolfmen. In honor of Halloween, I bring you: A Bunch of Movies and TV I Have Watched Recently. All of them either spoopy or suspenseful. And in addition to giving them all a grade, I will also rank their level of spoopiness from one (1) skull (not spoopy at all) to four (4) skulls (maximum spoop). Please enjoy!
Gerald's Game
After the disappointing remake of IT, I am happy to report that Gerald's Game, another adaptation of a Stephen King novel, is legit scary on multiple levels. King's novel was about a middle-aged married couple, Jessie and Gerald, who, in an attempt to spice up their love life, retreat to a secluded vacation home for a weekend of sex and overpriced wagyu beef steaks.
After popping a little blue pill, Gerald (played with white-collar menace by Bruce Greenwood) handcuffs Jessie (a superb Carla Gugino) to the bed with real, police-issue handcuffs (no trick locks here). But when his attempt at kink gets overly aggressive, the two begin arguing and Gerald has a heart attack, collapsing on the floor. That's where the real fun begins.
King is a master at the horror of confinement. Think about it: Cujo is about a mom and son trapped in a car by a rabid dog; Misery is about a writer kept under lock and key by his biggest (and most insane) fan; The Shining is about a man going stir crazy in a secluded and snowed-in hotel. Well, Gerald's Game takes it to a whole new level where survival means being able to reach a glass of water on a nearby shelf in order to stay alive another day.
But beyond the "handcuffed to a bed and no one can hear you scream" aspect of the film, the story has another level: Jessie's repressed memories of being molested by her father at a pivotal moment in her preteen years--an incident that set the stage for her deferment and submission to aggressive men in adulthood (e.g. Gerald). The film handles Jessie's flashbacks to the incident in a minimally exploitative (yet still devastating) way.
And there is yet another level of horror to the film. As night falls and Jessie's exhaustion and thirst get the best of her, she imagines a man in the shadows of her room...or is it just her imagination? You'll have to watch it to find out!
Gerald's Game, while perhaps not destined to be a horror classic, is both a good movie and legitimately terrifying. I highly recommend it for horror and suspense fans.
Grade: B+
Spoop-o-meter: 3.5 out of 4 skulls
***
A Dark Song
Anyone who's fooled around with a ouija board at a slumber party knows that you shouldn't fuck around with the occult. Even if you're a stone-cold atheist, attempts to contact the dead or tap into world's beyond this one feel....wrong. Like you're poking around someone else's bedroom at a party. You KNOW you shouldn't be doing it, as curious as you might be.
A Dark Song is a slow-burn horror movie about a woman, Sophia, who hires a man, Joseph, to help her participate in an elaborate dark magic ritual to contact her dead son. When I say the ritual is elaborate, I mean that Sophia and Joseph spend months secluded in a house, fasting intermittently and developing a sort of Stockholm Syndrome type relationship with one another.
And then people...or things...start showing up inside the house...
The plot of A Dark Song isn't all that complicated and the horror lies in the tension that ramps up to an explosive and genuinely terrifying climax. If you're a fan of occult horror or haunted house movies, you will likely not be disappointed. Be prepared to be thoroughly spooked.
Grade: B+
Spoop-o-meter: 3.5 out of 4 skulls
***
Lore
Based on the popular podcast, this 6 episode series on Amazon Prime is more fascinating (and, at times, gut-wrenchingly sad) than spoopy. The episodes, narrated by Aaron Mahnke (who is not a good narrator. His voice is halting and irritating. Think: William Shatner + uptalking), focus on folklore from around the world and its ties to the modern world. For example, in what I think is the best episode, "Black Stockings", Manhke ties the 2009 murder of a woman, Caroline Coffey, by her husband, Blazej Kot, to the Irish lore of changelings: fairies that kidnap humans and leave an imposter behind that looks exactly like the human, but behaves strangely. Kot's defense team argued that he suffered from Capgras Delusion--a medical condition where a person is convinced that one or more of their loved ones have been replaced by imposters.
In another episode, "Echoes", Manke traces our fear of insane or mentally unstable people to the rise of the frontal lobotomy in the mid-Twentieth Century and how it was used to control and sedate people who exhibited behavior and emotions that went against the norm (yes, he gives a shout out to the sad case of Rosemary Kennedy).
Lore is, in this way, less about the horror of the supernatural and more about the horror of what humans are capable of doing to other humans and how we justify our atrocious behavior. Lore is a good show for folks who want a little spoopiness this Halloween season without full-blown jump scares or gory torture porn.
Grade: B
Spoop-o-meter: 2 out of 4 skulls
***
Mindhunter
A Netflix original series, Mindhunter follows two (fictional) criminal profilers, Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) as they interview (non-fictional) serial killers in the 1970s in an attempt to understand the psychology of men who commit horrendous crimes in order to possibly prevent future murders.
I loved this show, which is directed by David Fincher and strongly resembles his film Zodiac, which is one of my favorite movies. I binge-watched the 10 episode series in 3 days. Your mileage might vary though. There have been complaints that the show is too white and too male, although, I'd argue that since the show is about serial killers, who are overwhelmingly white and male and who overwhelmingly kill white women, this is less an artistic choice and more a reflection of reality.
That said, the show goes places some viewers won't want to go. Although there is minimal visual violence, save a few gory photos, there is a lot of discussion--often in the killer's own words--about depraved acts, such as, I don't know, cutting off a victim's head and fucking the body. The show is rife with discussions that are both misogynistic and about misogyny. And the worst part, to me, is how obvious it all is. Guy wants to fuck a 12 year old girl. He does, she gets upset, so he bashes her head in. Another guy has a controlling and abusive mother who delights in humiliating him. So he "humiliates" other women by killing them and fucking their lifeless corpses. I watch this show and I'm like, 'well yeah, of course stuff like that happens'. It's not really a shock--and that's what's so shocking. While ostensibly about the psychology of sociopaths, Mindhunter's subtext is about gender and sexual politics. #notallmen are rapist and serial murders...but #yesallwomen have felt like prey at times in their lives.
Mindhunter, perhaps more than any other movie or show on this list, is not for the faint of heart. And not because of jump scares or violent images, but because of the show's direct stare into the Evil That Men Do and the clinical observation and categorization of that evil. Fans of true crime will eat this shit up, as I did. Others, stay away.
Grade: A-
Spoop-o-meter: 3 out of 4 skulls
***
Raw
Here's a movie for fans of gross-out horror and also feminist horror. This French language film directed by Julia Ducournau is about Justine (Garance Marillier, all gangly limbs and wide eyes), a freshman student at a veterinary college who is forced to eat raw meat as part of a hazing ritual (oh, those vet students and their hazing!) despite the fact that she's a vegetarian. Soon after, she's eating shawarma on the sly with her gay guy friend, Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella) and eating raw chunks of salmon out of the fridge as a midnight snack.
But shawarma and salmon don't cut it for long. Justine is hungry for flesh--both in a sexual way and in a literal way.
Like many coming-of-age horror films, sex and death and tied closely together in Raw. And as with many horror films with a young, female protagonist (think: Ginger Snaps, It Follows) these cravings push against the self-control young women are expected to exert with matters related to their bodies. Young women aren't supposed to eat too much or be too sexy. Justine, after tasting animal flesh, quickly bursts through those taboos--she gets drunk and kisses random girls and boys at a party; she seduces Adrien and can't stop biting him during sex; she gets in physical fights with her older sister who is also a student at the school.
Raw is not for those with weak stomachs. Though certainly not the grossest horror film I've seen, it's got some pretty stomach-churning scenes (thanks to a great props department). It's not "scary" in the sense of jump scares, but it is, well, raw. For fans of female-driven horror, Raw is definitely worth the watch.
Grade:B+
Spoop-o-meter: 3 out of 4 skulls
