horror
Funny/Scary/Brilliant Genre Games: The Cabin in the Woods
I like horror movies. Actually, I used to love them, even to the extent where, in fifth or sixth grade, I began to write a history of the horror genre in book form. Around seventh or eighth grade, I grew out of my obsession, not exactly because my tastes had been broadened, but because the genre was quickly getting old. A genre that once could reflect social anxieties and also be a lot of fun had turned into something cynical, cruel, and, worst of all, really boring. With the advent of torture porn, the new extreme horror movies did not seem to change much of anything; they just made it gorier. Yes, you had your exceptions like Saw and Scream 4, films that worked on a postmodern level that either explored human nature or the industry itself, and those were great. Neither, however, were really game changers. They could be clever, even great, but were just short of actually revitalizing an ironically dying genre. At least, not in the last decade or so. (You could argue, definitely, that the first Scream in 1996 was a game changer.) But, here we are, in 2012, and while every other studio is rebooting, remaking, and sequeling horror movies to death, Joss Whedon (Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog) and Drew Goddard (writer of Cloverfield) have something entirely new up their sleeves. Something that, while perhaps part of the postmodern meta-humor fad, is actually something different. Something fun, something funny, something terrifying, and something brilliant… this way comes. And it is also something I cannot really divulge.
Your five gloriously stupid young pretty people, your usual archetypes, are headed to, as the title suggests, a cabin in the woods. You have your alpha-male (Chris Hemsworth, pre-Thor), your sex-pot (Anna Hutchinson), your guy-who-actually-smokes-pot (Fran Kranz), your attractive bookish type (Jesse Williams), and your virgin (Kristen Connolly). Behold! The five most overused archetypes in the horror genre ever! All lines up and ready to be slaughtered. Not much else needs to be said about the fates of these poor pretty people, but terror ensues as these unwise people do stupid things, just as the audience predicts.
You know that feeling where you kind of relish the terrible fates of the pretty people in the horror films you watch and enjoy? Schadenfreude, the German expression that translates as “the pleasure from the misfortune of others”? Well, Whedon and Goddard feel it too. However, they seem to have gotten bored with the usual tropes and clichés; but they also seem to be fascinated why we love the stuff, even if it gets old, boring, and stupid. If Michael Heneke (director of the German art house horror film Funny Games) and Wes Craven (Scream) had a film baby, The Cabin in the Woods would probably be it. It is equal parts a derisively hilarious deconstruction of the horror genre (a bit broader than the Scream series, which deconstructs slasher films specifically), and an analytical exploration as to why we, the sadistic audience, love every minute of it.
The acting is not bad at all. For what it needs to be, the acting is clever, which is greatly aided by the fact that the characters, while intentional carbon copy archetypes taken from the Book of Character Archetypes for Movies, are smart. Sometimes they do the idiotic things we, the audience, expect them to do, and sometimes they do something a little smarter. And we have Richard Jenkins (the Visitor) and Bradley Whitford (The West Wing) in the film too, which is pretty great.
The film wink-winks so often to the audience that, if the film were a person with eyes, they would need a very strong prescription for contacts. Even with the incessant postmodern level of construction, the film still remains, to some extent, unpredictable. The humor is devilish and hits you in a place one does not usually expect, but in an extreme jovial level, and in a way that, after you realize you are laughing (hysterically, in my case), you kick yourself a little because you feel like you should have expected the film to toy with you in this way.
Michael Heneke’s Funny Games is a cruel, merciless look at why audiences love horror movies, but the film’s extreme realism and self-satisfied laugh (and the fact that the villains break the fourth wall) make the director just as complicit in the enjoyment of the violence as the audience. Heneke rubs your face in it in a mean spirited way. Goddard and Whedon, however, have a similar treatment, but they ease it up so that they are laughing right along with you. Craven, in all his nightmarish genius, deconstructs a specific sub-genre of horror and does it well. Goddard and Whedon broaden the spectrum and seem to concentrate more on critiquing the voyeurism itself when watching horror movies. What Cabin does that Funny Games does not is fully admit that they love the stuff just as much as the audience that has come to see the carnage. It ends up being the product of two filmmakers who have become so bored with the tropes and clichés; they decide to make a change. Written by a couple of fans for millions of fans.
In a nice way, the film works as criticism of the genre and of the audience, but sans the pretentiousness that a film with these themes would have done. From making the broad generalizations about the horror genre and its over trodden tropes to making very specific allusions, Goddard and Whedon go back and use some of what we have seen before and tests to see if it still scares us. And when they know that it really doesn’t anymore, they high five and push it further, really asking why we audiences keep coming back. What makes it work? What is it about horror films that lead the audience to sadistically cackle at innocent people’s deaths? Thankfully, the two do not force an answer down the audience’s throats either and leave it to the viewer to decide.
After all this praise, how did I feel about the film? I loved it. It has been a very long time since I have seen a horror movie that made me laugh as hard as I did (manically, for that matter), make me jump as high as I did (a good foot in the air), and test me intellectually as much as it did. That is not to say the film is snobby or pretentious, just that it raised questions and asserted ideas that made the audience think both about the genre and about themselves. And it’s a film that is far less cynical than most of the meta-horror films that have been released recently (such as Scream 4). It was the most fun I have had at the movies in a long time.
The Cabin in the Woods can be thought of in two ways: as a very fun horror movie that is very clever in its deconstruction of the genre, or a very smart analysis and piece of criticism, both of the audience and of the genre itself. Deconstructing and criticizing are different things: Scream can deconstruct the slasher genre and fancy it up, but to criticize it, it had to point out how boring it really got and all of its errors and mistakes. Funny Games merely criticized, and maybe laughed in the faces of, the audiences who took pleasure in violence in film. The Cabin in the Woods is a kinder, but just as intelligent play on the two, able to stand on its own where, arguably, my comparison of Cabin to the two films is completely inessential to this review. (But, it is too late, so whatever.) Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon have directed and written a meta-masterpiece, capable of being smart without being snarky, scary without being cliché-ridden (not in the same way, at least), and funny without being stupid. The Cabin in the Woods might be, might be, the horror film to end all horror films of the last decade. That last comment is probably hyperbolic on my part, but Cabin is the first film in a very long time to send shivers down my spine, make me laugh hysterically, and exercise my intellectual acumen: all at the same time. The Cabin in the Woods is fun, frightening, and fantastic.
Grade: A
Mysterious “Skin”: The Skin I Live In
As they say, Beauty is only skin deep. Obsession, on the other hand, is a virus that infects the mind and deteriorates any sense of logic or ethical morality. Such is the case of the stunning, disturbing, eloquent, poetic, horrifying, and melodramatic film The Skin I Live In, written and directed by Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar. Loosely based on the story Mygale by Thierry Jonquet, the film is at once a return to Almodóvar’s familiar themes as well as an exploration into new ideas and a spin on old tropes.
Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas, reuniting with Almodóvar for the first time in over two decades) is a brilliant plastic surgeon who has created a new synthetic skin that is the closest to indestructible that we have ever come to knowing. After years of testing and experimentation, the doctor has reached a part of the scientific process that he is satisfied with enough to show it to his medical peers. What his colleagues in the scientific community are unaware of, however, is that not only is the skin made unethically (Banderas has a lengthy explanation on how the new skin has hybrid cells), it has been tested unethically.
Like any good mad man, especially one with a medical degree, he houses his human guinea pig in an enclosed area in his house. Vera (Elena Anaya, Almodóvar’s Talk to Her), a beautiful, frightened young woman is caged in a spacious, sterile environment, a woman who has the striking resemblance to the good doctor’s late wife. Underneath her skin hide many secrets of both her and the doctor’s pasts.
Almodóvar is well known for his domestic melodramas and films about the search for self and identity. Gender identity, sexual identity, etc. are explored here. However, while this is familiar ground for Almodóvar, there is a new element added to his list of themes: horror. Thematically and (somewhat) aesthetically inspired by Georges Franju’s French horror film Eyes without a Face, the plastic surgery aspect of the film is blatantly an homage to Franju. However, while the homage is overt, Almodóvar does not try to update it in a gratuitous way, at least not initially. The medical scenes themselves are fairly classical in their style, with steady camera work and sterile, monochromatic coloring. The allusions made to Franju’s film are one that are of clear admiration for Eyes without a Face, a film that also dealt with a similar kind of identity crisis, but via a B-movie environment.
Part horror film and also part erotic melodrama, the sexuality that is injected into every frame of the film is intoxicating, euphoric, and even sometimes horrific. But sexuality serves as symbolism here, as Almodóvar uses it to explore his favorite ideas of sexual identity and power. (Choice scene: The teenage orgy in the garden outside of the doctor’s house. Almost as if Almodóvar is recreating a dirtier version of the forests in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dreams, with the randy nymphs incarnated as horny teens.) The power divide between men and women is juxtaposed here between Vera’s simmering sensuality and the doctor’s initial reserve and respect. The erotica featured, though, is made with a sense of snarkiness as well, as if the director is teasing you with what he already knows. Not quite an example of dramatic irony, though; just the director being clever.
The film’s look is at times majestic and at others sterile and immaculate. There is a harsh juxtaposition of the synthetic and the natural in set design regarding even the spaces of the house that the doctor both lives and tests in. Blending natural stone and marble architecture and decoration, with elements of wood and foliage, the laboratory and the room where Vera is kept are both stark and naked of any real descriptive qualities. The room, despite having housed Vera for several years, is still not home to her. It is the same as a kennel, essentially, devoid of remarkable nuances that the rest of the house has. The laboratory has an artificial and frighteningly immaculate sheen to it. While this perfection may make sense on a realistic and scientific level, the sheer cleanliness and sterility, matched with the color palette that Almodóvar uses, offers something disconcerting about the area to the viewer. It has shades of blue and white around it, its walls not entirely of silver or chrome. It is, essentially, too clean. The cinematography, by José Luis Alcaine, is steady and beautiful. Vivid colors are employed and represent various moods and feelings in the film. The sterile feel to the ugly procedure is complimented by its sterile cinematography, with perfect tracking shots. And because of its roots being from Eyes without a Face, the camera lingers on the face of each actor for the perfect amount of time, capturing reactions and expressions flawlessly. The chiseled features of Banderas are contrasted, quite often, with the silky smooth features of Elena Anaya. To sum it up, the look of the film has been created with, ahem, surgical precision.
The performances are unsurprisingly top notch. Antonio Banderas plays Ledgard with precision and madness, fluctuating back and forth between the façade of sanity and their internal insanity like Dr. Hannibal Lecter, except without the Chianti. After having been exposed to Banderas only by his roles in English language films, it is pleasant to see him back in his environment. Banderas seems like he is more comfortable playing a role in a Spanish language film, one where he can much more easily play with the cadence and intonation of his character to achieve a specific effect. The moral ambiguity of the character constantly is brought to light, and one wonders how obsessed they would be if they were in his situation. His madness and passion for the project, though, is completely believable and riveting throughout the entire film.
Elena Anaya has a soft, sensual beauty that is completely intoxicating and maddening in the film. Artificially created or not, one becomes jealous of how beautiful she is and how fragile she is. Her fragility though, just like everything else in the film, is nothing but a façade. She can fight and survive like any female character, but the layers to her story are as fascinatingly synthetic as the skin she lives in. Her flawless beauty, though, may become oddly problematic by the end.
A note on the ending, sans spoiler: Did not care for it. It seemed to regress in style and tone by then.
By the end of the film, the title is obvious and fitting. The title, The Skin I Live In, seems to encompass all of the tees that Almodóvar has fun playing around with in this film. And what a film it is! Disturbing, complex, and beautiful, Almodóvar combines his favorite variations with new elements of horror and a little sci-fi, and reunites with Banderas. The Skin I Live in is a brilliantly twisted exercise in the horror of self-identity and obsession. As fashion designer Alexander McQueen once said, “There’s blood underneath every layer of skin.”
Grade: A-
Back in Black: The Woman in Black
In an era where the torture porn flick and the erstwhile remake rule the horror genre, it’s kind of nice when someone decides to go back and “honor” the beginnings of horror with some classic, traditional gothic ghost storytelling. The last time this was done in such a specific fashion was in Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others starring Nicole Kidman. Traditional, scary, and fascinating. It was done again, without the Gothic English setting to an extent in Insidious, the one where its first half was one of the best horror films I’ve ever seen and the second was the campiest. Insidious is a good example of “Not every character in a horror movie has to be a dumbass”. Patrick Wilson’s character didn’t always feel the need to chase after ghosts and he actually turned on the lights when investigating something. Sadly, its second half seemed like it was from a completely different film. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good either.
And now we have The Woman in Black, the latest ghost story that was based on the novel by Susan Hill. It has also found itself as a stage play. It’s been adapted into a television film. And now it’s come to the big screen with Harry Potter himself. Set in a creepy village that holds a creepy house to its name, Radcliffe plays the naïve widower and single-father of one, on a mission from his law firm to go through all of the documents in the creepy house so it can be sold and, ultimately, erased from the memories of the townspeople. The owner of the house has recently died, of course, under mysterious circumstances. And the eponymous ghost haunts the village and lures the village people’s children to their death.
Daniel Radcliffe is fine in this film. He is not great, nor is he terrible. I admire his eclectic choice in work, from coming of age dramas (December Boys) to nudity on stage (Equus) to a full-fledged Broadway musical (How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying) and now this. I admire the fact that he’s trying to prove himself as a good actor, that he isn’t just Harry Potter. And in this, The Woman in Black, he is beginning to shed his image as Harry and really hone into being Daniel. However, he doesn’t actually shine in the film. The script, written by X-Men: First Class scribe Jane Goldman, calls for Radcliffe to look over papers very contemplatively and to look very dramatic about children. And, at this, he does a fair job. But, who could ever really do a great job with that kind of material. The material isn’t bad, it just limits the actor. It would limit anyone in any horror movie. Let’s face it, horror movies are rarely when you find great performances. (Exception to the rule: Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, but that’s more of a psychological thriller, isn’t it?) Here, as a young lawyer on his last chance under the name of Arthur Kips, he strains somewhat, but never reaches the overacting many fear of in horror movies.
And here’s where it comes to a screeching, screaming halt. The film, which seems to be lovingly seeped in Edwardian mystery, is traditional. Really traditional, almost to a fault. It’s so well acquainted with the tropes of haunted house movies and Gothic literature that you end up seeing every jump and jolt a mile away. Every little sub-plot you can predict. It’s still fun, but it’s not surprising in the least. It got to a point where even the cinematography was getting cliché, and I would keep groaning, mentally predicting what was to happen. Every aspect of the story was so traditionalist it was cliché. The man who goes to the house and doesn’t listen to the village people who tell him not to go. And then the village people suffer and basically say “told you so”. The skeptic who doesn’t believe there’s a ghost in the house. The ghost wants some revenge of some sort and will not rest until she gets it. Et cetera, et cetera. There was nothing original about it, and it’s hard to say whether this was the fault of the film itself or the source novel.
This isn’t to say that it’s a bad movie; it’s just not very good. And it is effective to a degree. Several times, the suspense is effective enough that I could feel the dread eating away at my mind, my flesh crawl, and I would indeed jump. But the burdened by its predictability, it was hardly scary enough to leave a lasting impression. The sound design, though, was top notch. Sound design tends to be fairly important in horror movies. Whenever a character turns around to encounter either a) the ghost or b) the ally, there’s always that increase in volume. The old house is effectively decorated and old and scary looking. Huzzah.
I find it quite interesting and funny that Hammer Film Productions produced this film. The company responsible for making Christopher Lee a star and that made such great B-horror movies is back, apparently, once again settling into the area of B-horror movies. And, I guess, that’s what you could call the Woman in Black. It isn’t terrible, but it’s not very good. It can be a lot of fun. But it never really scares you or is able to manifest true fear in any of its visual design or story. Despite its plot being interestingly told (almost in an epistolary way), it’s so traditional that it fails to keep your interest for the entire time. While it’s not to see a traditional ghost story on the screen again, one would hope for something scarier, something darker, and something less predictable. But, at least the Gothic horror story is back; back in Black.
Grade: B-
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I Like Things That Look Like Mistakes 