Black Gate

I’ve mentioned that many of the films I saw at this year’s Fantasia were haunted-house stories. Or: horror movies that revolve around a specific architectural location. That’s an intriguing coincidence in the year of COVID-19, but perhaps speaks to filmmakers finding a way to limit budgets and get the most use possible out of their locations. Which brings me to 2011, a film set in a single apartment and a kind of ghost story that begins and ends with the horror-thriller form. But this only becomes clear at the very end, for mainly this is an experimental and ambitious film that wanders through different genres and types of stories.

It’s the first movie directed by Alexandre Prieur-Grenier, from a script written by Prieur-Grenier with Maxime Duguay and Emmanuel Jean. An unnamed insomniac film editor (Émile Schneider), living in his Montréal apartment, works on assembling a movie called A Burning Flesh. As he does, different kinds of things happen to him, forming multiple plot strands out of which the film 2011 is woven. Bound up with these things are the editor’s dreams, and a grasp on reality that grows shakier as the film goes on.

To start with, there’s the mystery of the tenant next door, who may or may not be breaking into the editor’s apartment. This is the aspect that’s most dreamlike, and perhaps least certain. The apartment next door may be empty, or may not. There may be noise coming from it, or may not. This strand is central to the movie, but doesn’t develop in a linear way — the editor sporadically tries to investigate his neighbour, but there isn’t any sense of him getting closer to figuring out what’s happening in the other apartment through the film.

Instead much of the forward narrative motion of the movie comes from the development of the film-within-a-film the editor’s working on. The director, Hugo (an intense Hugolin Chevrette), visits repeatedly and they view scenes the editor’s put together. That movie’s elliptical, too much so for me to grasp its relevance to 2011 at one viewing. What is most narratively important is that the editor struggles to work on it and grows obsessed with an actress.

The editor in fact has a girlfriend as 2011 begins, but his romantic life also provides plot material. In addition to the two women already mentioned, after he spots a violent argument between his landlord and his wife (Tania Kontoyanni) the wife starts an affair with him. This is dangerous, as the landlord is a bruiser with a bad temper.

There’s a lot of story here, plus the inset scenes of A Burning Flesh, plus dream sequences, plus the editor’s work on a kind of mural decorating the entryway of his apartment. Reality breaks down, and a sense of physical threat grows. But the movie never quite resolves into a simple genre tale, in part because it doesn’t quite build any kind of story. There isn’t a sense of a structure developing, or even really of a character or characters driving events.

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Since the resurgence in interest in the Norse and their far-traveling raiders during the Romantic era of the early 19^th century, the depiction of Vikings in popular culture had been pretty consistent, as a bunch of rugged, hard-drinking, manic-depressive berserkers with a lust for life and horns on their helmets. But except for the silent epic The Viking (1928) they didn’t really get a lot of Hollywood screen time until the 1950s, when a few films established or burnished the visual tropes that are still touchstones today. Here are three movies that demonized, caricatured, and lionized the Vikings—and it was the last, which valorized them on a grand scale, that made the most lasting impression.

Prince Valiant

Rating: ***
Origin: USA, 1954
Director: Henry Hathaway
Source: 20^th Century Fox DVD

When I was a kid, Sunday morning meant the eagerly awaited color comics section of the Akron Beacon Journal, and the comic I always turned to first was Prince Valiant. Hal Foster’s adventure tale, set “In the Days of King Arthur,” was gorgeously designed, told an endless story of nearly adult caliber, had engaging characters, was epic in scope and yet ambitious in its attempt to get the details of medieval life credible and accurate. (Its historical setting was highly fictitious, of course, but the Arthur tales are legend, not history.) Prince Valiant was arguably the greatest American adventure strip of the 20^th Century.

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Religion’s a recurring subject for horror, and for a lot of reasons; there’s a lot in there to be scared about. More, from at least the 18th century onward writers have followed Edmund Burke and Ann Radcliffe in linking horror with the sublime. When horror fiction in the West has grappled with religion, naturally enough it’s tended to use Christian symbols, ideas, and sometimes even theology — whether in something as simple as the crucifix turning away a vampire, or in something more central to the story, as showing the birth of Satan’s child in The Omen or Rosemary’s Baby.

Of course, horror from other traditions may use religions closer to hand. Thus Kriya, an Indian film written and directed by Sidharth Srinivasan. A little like 2015’s Ludo it uses horror movie ideas and images in an Indian context, in this case placing black-magic versions of Hindu rites at its core. It’s Srinavasan’s third theatrical feature, but his first horror film. For me, as an outsider to the tradition he’s examining, it worked quite well.

It opens in a nightclub, where a mysterious, beautiful woman named Sitara (Navjot Randhawa) invites the DJ, Neel (Noble Luke), to take her home. Neel finds her home is a palatial estate, where Sitara’s dying father (M.D. Asif) is lying gagged and bound. With him are Sitara’s mother Tara Devi (Avantika Akerkar) and younger sister Sara (Kanak Bhardwaj), as well as the family servant Magdali (Anuradha Majumder) and an older priest, or pandit (Sudhanva Deshpande). Sitara wants Neel to take part in the funeral — certain rites can be performed only by the son of the family, and as there’s no son, she hopes Neel will fill in. But there’s something deeply strange and sinister in the old house and the weird family. As the night goes on the wrongness of the place becomes clearer, and Neel senses the wrongness even as he’s pulled deeper into it.

This is not exactly a haunted house story, but is certainly a story about a house-bound horror. As such the sense of place and the physical state of the location is important, and Kriya does not disappoint here. The sprawling mansion exudes a palpable sense of decay, the skin-crawling feel of a thing slowly dying, a shell that cannot be lit by the few small lives within it. The story mostly takes place over the course of a single night, and that night is thick and dark, manifesting in deep shadows everywhere inside. According to Srinavasan, in a fascinating extended question-and-answer panel alongside some of the cast, the building’s a 150-year-old building from the time of the Raj; I didn’t notice any overt thematic overtones to colonialism in the narrative, but I suspect there’s an implication there about Sitara’s family, their aristocratic aspect, and their relationship to power.

But if there’s a Western architectural vocabulary underlying the house, the sense of an Indian setting is nevertheless deep, and central to the film. The plot is fundamentally an interrogation of Hindu practice, and religious practice in general. And the horror of the film, not just the supernatural aspect but the motive for the inhuman things done to human beings, has to do with belief and ritual. Again, from the Q&A, Srinavasan observed that “Kriya, loosely, relates to last rites or rituals.” Part of the theme of the movie is to do with what happens when precepts are followed without being understood. (Also in the Q&A, the cast spoke about the Hindi dialogue as being especially elaborate, often quotations from religious texts.)

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The Japanese image of the three wise monkeys is as early as the 16th century: one monkey with hands over eyes, the next with hands over ears, the third with hands over mouth. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil; thus the monkeys’ names, Mizaru, Kikazaru, and Iwazaru, ‘not-seeing,’ ‘not-hearing,’ and ‘not-speaking.’ There’s a pun in Japanase on zaru, not, and saru, monkey, so collectively the trio’s simply ‘three monkeys,’ or sanzaru.

Thus the title of Sanzaru, an American horror movie that played at Fantasia. It’s one of several ghost stories from this year’s festival: one of several films about a house, and an old person dying, and the family that returns to them. In this case, though, the point-of-view character is the patient’s nurse. Dena Regan (Jayne Taini) is an old woman dying in her Texas estate, and a Filipino nurse named Evelyn (Aina Dumlao) has moved in to care for her. Along with Evelyn comes her young nephew Amos (Jon Viktor Corpuz); also present on the estate is Dena’s son Clem (Justin Arnold), and as well Dena’s daughter Susan (Tomorrow Shea) visits for a minor part in the story. Things go missing; Clem sinks further and further into depression; Dena’s mind deteriorates; old secrets come to life. And there are presences in the house from beyond the grave.

We know from early on that there are ghosts; we get their perspective in an early scene. We know that one of them is named Mr. Sanzaru, but the relevance of the name doesn’t become clear until much later in the movie. And it is then we understand or fully feel the themes of the story: the importance of knowing and confronting wrong things, not just to stop wrong things from happening but to be able to move on from them.

The number of ghost stories at Fantasia 2020 gave me the chance to see how similar material takes different shapes in different stories; to see how the genre works. Every story has a specific tone, partly a mechanical function of pacing and lighting and editing rhythms, and partly from the character of the specific haunted location. But different stories have different themes, different things on their mind. Sanzaru’s interest is in secrets and how they come out; in how dark things in the past, left to fester, can limit the future.

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By Day 10 of Fantasia I’d started to skip the panels and special presentations. They all looked interesting to greater or lesser degrees, but while the movies were only available while the festival was still going on, the panels would stay up afterward. Still, Day 10 was an exception, with my schedule free for a panel I was particularly interested in: “New York State Of Horror,” hosted by author Michael Gingold. It took a look at how and when New York City became a setting for horror films — something unusual in the early decades of filmmaking, when horror was typically set in ancient European locales. King Kong (1933) was an obvious exception, but Gingold observed that Rosemary’s Baby was the real trail-blazer for New York horror stories in film, followed in the 70s and 80s by more tales of urban terror. It was a good discussion, with contributions from directors Bill Lustig and Larry Fessenden (Depraved). You can find it here.

Following that came the 2020 edition of the “Born of Woman Showcase,” a collection of short genre films by women filmmakers. Previous editions had presented exceptional work, to the point I’ve come to see these showcases as highlights of Fantasia. This year had nine movies, ranging from science-fiction to crime to horror.

The first film was from the United States: “Come Fuck My Robot” was directed by Mercedes Bryce Morgan, and written by Morgan with Reuben Guberek, Katrina Kudlick, and Hunter Peterson, “based,” as the credits say, “on the original Craigslist ad.” A nervous virginal young man (Nicholas Alexander) answers an ad from an oddball engineer (Ian Abramson) who’s seeking a male to have sex with a robot the engineer’s created (Catherine Tapling). Absolutely nothing about the scenario unfolds as either expected. A charming, funny story about identity and consent, and about AI and gender, it’s well-acted and comedically well-timed.

Next, also from the US, was “Blocks.” Written and directed by Bridget Moloney, it follows Ashleigh (Claire Coffee), a mother of young children, who begins vomiting Lego blocks. We see her going about her daily life with her husband (Mark Webber) and friends and her friends’ kids as the vomiting becomes more common and the number of blocks grows accordingly. Anchored in a very realistic depiction of Ashleigh’s everyday life, in which the block-vomiting is the one irreal aspect, the movie works because it’s observation of Ashleigh is so sharp — whether she’s chatting with her friend about sex toys or going to other childrens’ parties or reading to her kids about intersectionality. In other words, there’s a life to her beyond the status of ‘mother,’ which helps prepare us for the conclusion of the film and what she does with the blocks, an understated but effective choice.

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‘Weird’ is less of a concrete descriptor than might at first appear. There are multiple subcategories of weird, and different things called weird can produce very different experiences. This is especially so when a work of weirdness mixes different weird things.

Thus Milocrorze – A Love Story (Mirokurôze, ミロクローゼ), a 2011 film written and directed by video and performance artist Yoshimasa Ishibashi. The winner of Fantasia’s awards for best director and most innovative feature film in the year it premiered, it was revived for this year’s festival, where I saw it for the first time. It is not like most other films, for both better and worse.

It begins by following a boy named Ovreneli Vreneligare who lives in a brightly-coloured eye-popping wonderland with a talking cat, and who falls in love with a woman named Milocrorze (Maiko). He hatches a plan to seduce her, it briefly works, and then things go astray. This leads to a dramatic shift in tone, as the movie leaves him to follow a TV huckster named Besson Kumagai claiming to give young men infallible relationship advice; the first of three roles played by Takayuki Yamada, Kumagai’s a 70’s lounge lizard who bursts into dance routines at odd moments. While dancing behind the wheel of a car, he blows into a group of people, and then we leave Kumagai and start following one of them.

Specifically, we follow a wandering samurai named Tamon (Yamada) who is seeking his lost true love. This becomes the longest part of the film, as we follow Tamon in and out of flashbacks (and through a tattoo studio featuring renowned director Seijun Suzuki in an extended cameo part) to a climactic fight sequence in a brothel and gambling den. Then we return to Ovreneli Vreneligare, now an adult played by Yamada, as he finds Milocrorze again.

You can look at the connections between these stories in a number of ways, but the first thing that has to be said is that the movie is consistently pleasurable to look at, in at least three different tones. Ovreneli Vreneligare’s candy-coloured dreamland is the most striking. The hyperactive modern world of Kumagai is a needed burst of energy. Then that’s followed by the melodramatic, weirdly-lit, deeply artificial world of Tamon, centred around its extended fight scene that drops in and out of slow and fast motion. There’s always something happening in this movie.

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One of the fascinating things about art is the way it speaks to its exact moment. That’s even more fascinating with film, which has such a long gestation time; write a movie, shoot the movie, then edit the movie and work on it in postproduction, and it’ll come out years after it was conceived. Which is why it was fascinating to see so many films at this year’s Fantasia that revolved around haunted houses. Occasionally the haunted building might be something like a school (as in Detention), but there were a lot of stories this year about people trapped in a structure, often with family, perhaps in a family home they’d returned to. Which strikes me as resonating with many situations I’ve heard about these past few months. The first movie I saw on Day 9 of the festival, The Block Island Sound, was an example of this trend. So was the second.

The Dark and the Wicked was written and directed by Bryan Bertino, and set on an isolated farm in Texas (Bertino’s own family home, in fact) where an old man (Michael Zagst) is dying. His wife (Julie Oliver-Touchstone) tries to tend him, with the assistance of a visiting nurse (Lynn Andrews). But he’s going to die soon, and his adult children Louise (Marin Ireland) and Michael (Michael Abbott Jr.) have returned to be with him. Only to find some other supernatural force also lurks in the dark farm. Horrible things happen. An old priest (Xander Berkeley) comes by to offer assistance, but is rejected. Louise and Michael will have to find the power to deal with the darkness on their own. If they can even understand what they’re dealing with.

The first thing to understand about this movie is that it is purely a horror movie. It’s not horror mediated by some other aspect (like the dark-fantasy fairy-tale feel of Detention, or the family drama of The Block Island Sound). This is a movie about a place that has become the locus for clearly supernatural evil, and the story and look of the film follow from that. It’s drenched in lovely dark shadows. Natural vistas have an element of the sublime in the last light of the sun, but are empty of human life. We watch the characters flail about in this landscape, and know there will be no happy endings here.

There is in fact a good sense of balance to the mystery and the rules by which the supernatural evil operates. The dreamlike half-understood logic of the wickedness is a specific and effective horror on its own. We have, in fact, almost no idea what that logic is. But it does exist, and the characters’ refusal to try to understand it, their reluctance to accept anything supernatural is happening, is terrifying on its own. I would say that this feel fades a bit at the end, as the effect of the supernatural crescendos and the feel of rules that limit it fades. For much of the movie, though, there is a sense that the evil cannot simply wipe the characters out at any moment; that it can be fought, and indeed that it can be understood, but that the characters are choosing not to do either.

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Day 9 of Fantasia began for me with The Block Island Sound. Directed by brothers Kevin and Matthew McManus, and written by Matthew, it’s a horror movie named for a body of water off the coast of Rhode Island. It’s the rare horror story that deals with inhuman mysteries on the northeastern coast of the United States while not feeling Lovecraftian at all.

The plot revolves around a family native to Block Island, where a small community largely of fisherfolk lives year-round, tripling in size in the summer tourist season. It is not summer as the film opens, and an old fisherman named Tom Lynch (Neville Archambault) is beginning to act very strangely. Tom’s adult son Harry (Chris Sheffield), who lives with him, is getting worried. Coincidentally, when a mass of dead fish washes ashore on the island, Harry’s sister Audry (Michaela McManus), who has moved away from Block Island, is sent by her bosses at the EPA to investigate. Accompanying Audry is her subordinate Paul (Ryan O’Flanagan) and her young daughter Emily (Matilda Lawler). They stay at the family home as they investigate, and things become more and more unreal.

If the story’s about family, so’s the production; Michaela McManus is the sister of Kevin and Matthew, while in a Q&A after the film Sheffield described himself as an unofficial third McManus brother. At any rate the focus of the narrative is clearly on the Lynch family, as they reunite with plenty of long-held arguments still between them. Tom’s a hothead, who, as Audry percipiently observes, is always looking for someone to blame. Audry for her part is conscious of having left Block Island for another life, and is not especially happy to be back. And then there’s Tom, who may be slowly losing his faculties. Or may have something more disturbing afflicting him.

The movie’s not Lovecraftian, as I say, in part because it’s centred so intensely on the dynamic of the family — an emotional landscape utterly unlike anything in Lovecraft. It’s also far more class-conscious than Lovecraft, or at least conscious in a completely different way. If Audry’s vaguely like the academics who come to a small New England town to investigate some disturbing goings-on, her role in the story becomes something quite different: she’s involved, in ways Lovecraftian academics aren’t.

Worth noting that the look and feel of the film is also different from the twice-told narrative frame-structures of so much of Lovecraft. There’s an almost tactile sense to the film, a visual precision and a detailed soundscape — the washing of waves, the hush of wind — that between them convey a deep sense of place. That place has an atmosphere born not of isolation, though one does get that from the bare trees and the grey ocean, but of lives hard-lived. Tom’s home feels like the real home of a real person, living and working in a small town. The location of Block Island itself is shot such that it comes alive as a lived place, not defined in terms of its institutions so much as in the context for the lives and histories of the main characters. You believe that these people grew up here.

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One of the lovely things about covering Fantasia is the chance to see genre classics I missed the first time around, often brought back to the screen in a restored version. Again in 2020, notwithstanding its streaming-only nature, Fantasia revived a number of great films from prior years. While my own inefficiency with scheduling meant I ended up missing Johnnie To’s A Hero Never Dies, I saw many of the others, including Wilson Yip’s 2005 movie SPL: Kill Zone (also just Kill Zone, originally SPL: Sha Po Lang, 殺破狼).

Written by Yip with Szeto Kam-Yuen and Jack Ng, it follows Hong Kong cop Detective Chan (Simon Yam), who’s trying to settle a personal score by taking down mobster Wong Po before Chan retires. Unfortunately for Chan, Wong’s played by Sammo Hung. Unfortunately for Wong, the man about to take over from Chan, Ma, is played by Donnie Yen. Mayhem ensues.

Although, in truth, there’s a little less mayhem than you might expect. Yip leans strongly into the melodrama of the story, holding most of the fight scenes for later in the film. Chan’s our main character for the first part of the movie, building up our sympathy for him as we see Wong’s ruthlessness — but then after the introduction of Ma, we come to see things from Ma’s perspective, and we see how Chan’s obsession with Wong leads him not just to push boundaries but to shatter them entirely.

Chan leads a small unit of cops trying to get the goods on Wong; they get their hands on video tape that seems to incriminate him in a murder, but doesn’t tell quite the story they need it to tell. So they cheat, trying to use the tape to frame Wong, even if that means taking out witnesses who know the truth. The cops are dirty, and you understand why they’re dirty, but you’re not allowed to forget that they’re dirty.

This gives the story enough heft, enough moral complexity, that the melodrama becomes more interesting and the story becomes far more than a collection of set-pieces. Add to that some strong performances: Sammo Hung’s alternately sinister and sympathetic, while Donnie Yen gives a convincing portrayal as a basically decent man trying to decide what to do in a compromised world. Watching Yen, in fact, I found it hard not to think what it would have been like to see him as Superman at around that time — a forceful but good man, one who the audience is drawn to emphasise with due to a mixture of warmth and strength. On the other hand, Hung’s playing a fat crimelord who’s actually both a mass of muscle and a skilled martial artist, a man the cops can’t legally touch but whose weakness is the wife he truly loves, and who keeps a psychopathic-but-supremely-skilled assassin as his enforcer. Which is to say I no longer need to wonder what it’d be like to see him play Wilson Fisk.

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