Some Kids Horror Movies That Weren't

 So I guess horror is kinda my “thing” on this site. That was never the plan. I have just as many opinions of cop dramas or game shows, but my suspicion is who gives a fuck. But everyone loves horror!

It’s fitting in a way, though, that I would find myself cycling back to this topic because that’s exactly how I spent my formative years: cycling back to the horror aisle. Not to rent anything, just to look at the movies’ VHS/DVD covers, which is all I was permitted to do. I would read the synopsis, look at the pictures, and fill in the gaps on my own. Sorta like fanfiction when you’re only a fan of the cover art. I got very good at imagining better movies, because by the time I hit my teens I finally got the chance to watch everything I’d been fantasizing about and practically all of it sucked. Consequently, as an adolescent, my only real criteria for ‘good horror’ was: does it deliver on the brutality promised by the poster/marketing (without too much character bullshit)? Some did (High Tension, the Hills Have Eyes remake, 28 Days Later) but most didn’t (and don’t). I didn’t like surprises, unless the surprise was more gore. But what got lost in all the thrill-seeking was an appreciation for ‘kids horror,’ those childhood appetizers. Now, in my adulthood, I find myself unconsciously on the lookout for great horror movies aimed at younger audiences. The standards of quality are substantially lower for the tikes, and not for no good reason neither, which is why I started to look elsewhere (kinda): R-rated (or hard PG-13) horror movies that shouldn’t’ve been. Here are some suggested titles.

Return of the Living Dead Part II - The closest thing we’ll ever get to a screen adaptation of Zombies Ate My Neighbors, which is a shame because it’s not as good as it would’ve been if it were a kids movie. It’s one of the earliest horror movies I can remember seeing (I saw it before Fright Night and am still of the opinion that the poster design better suits this one). Looking at it now, it’s pretty dumb, but as a young lad (7 or 8 maybe?) it hit all the right notes. It was spooky and funny by the standards of a third grader - that talking zombie head killed me.

Annabelle Comes Home - I don’t begrudge audiences their reactions to this one - it wasn’t marketed properly (besides, who isn’t just fucking done with these movies at this point?). They wanted something self-serious like the original and like the other sequels pretended to be. Instead, what they got was a self-contained, John Hughes-ian haunted house ride (that employs more practical FX and fewer jump scares than the original). I can only imagine how enamored I would’ve been with the Ferryman if I’d seen this at the right age - I’m pretty enamored with the whole thing as it is.

Krampus - Considering its PG-13 rating, some might say it’s already aimed at a younger audience, but personally I think it’s a lil too mean spirited for kids. Make the humor more PG but keep the horror PG-13. It’s got everything that makes Gremlins a staple of the holiday, but with superior VFX, creature designs, atmosphere, and, y’know, it’s actually scary (by the standards of a child, really fucking scary). With just a few touch-ups it could easily be an A+.

Sleepy Hollow - I’ve never agreed with gore being a firm boundary for an R-rating. Nudity/sexual content I can understand, or even profanity, but there’s an argument to be made that gore is all about context and execution, speaking largely from personal experience. Brutal violence is one thing, but there’s none of that in this movie, just lotsa dark red goop. I can tell you that, as a child, I never thought of this movie as a “grown up” horror movie. Depp’s lighthearted performance, the simpleminded plot, the broadly-stroked atmosphere -- it felt to me, even at that age, like a far cry from “adult” horror like Silence of the Lambs or Candyman. The gratuitous splatterfest only heightened the already outlandish Halloween-y shenanigans.  

Digging Up the Marrow - It’s kind of a tough sell. I like it just fine as it is - hell, I love it. But I can just as easily imagine these colorful monsters popping up in some The Gate-esque childrens adventure, and part of me wonders if that wouldn’t be preferable. On the one hand, you could dispense with the found-footage format, which is kinda tired even in this instance, and on the other, who wouldn’t love to see a band of Goonies butting heads with Ray Wise? Besides, as much as I dig the picture, looking at it from an adult perspective, the creature designs do ride the line between “scary” and “scary?” 

Spawn - It can only go one of two ways: either lean into the camp (which this sorta does), or shoot for a dead-serious hard-R. There’s no wiggle room for a hard PG-13 with this subject matter. The end result is exactly what this is: too dark for lil kids and too stupid for everyone else. But, like Krampus, it’s easy to imagine hitting that sweet spot with just a handful of tweaks. Incidentally, Shazam! gives us kind of a preview of what this movie could look like if done right.

Pet Sematary 2 - Another Return Part II situation: it’s a bit much (or not enough?) for us cynical adults, but it possesses all the ADHD qualities needed to hold the attention of a kid whose diet consists of Courage the Cowardly Dog and Aaahh!!! Real Monsters.

Good Movies, Bad Opening Titles: Richard Linklater Edition

 

Saint Fraud: The Derivative Excess of Rose Glass' Debut

 

  Take Shelter quietly predates the 'Arthouse Horror' boom of the 2010s. It came out in 2011 and didn't make the splash that It Follows, The Babadook, and Get Out would. It's a tense, creepy, and profoundly sad look at the effects of mental illness on a man and his family...OR a look at the effects of intrusive prophecies on an unsuspecting diviner. I'm still not sure if the visions mean his mind is snapping or if the world is about to. Jeff Nichols is elusive with the mystery and trusts us to interpret it our way, taking one of the most exhaustive tropes of the horror genre ("are they crazy, are they not?") and giving it a fresh, minimalist spin akin to a drama like Sling Blade.

   Saint Maud, on the other hand, takes a dizzying more-is-more approach. It never asks us if we think Maud is crazy, it outright gawks at this tragically insane religious woman.

  Critics like to lazily throw out the word 'derivative' because it sounds fancier than it is and it's so cuttingly dismissive that you think it wounds more than it does. I don't mind when things are derivative so long as they're done creatively. Like, Whiplash apes Scorsese and Thelma's style but doesn't make a lesser movie than they would have and leaves enough room to establish itself, too. Barry Jenkins' inspired use of The Demme Close-Up or any of the esoteric remixing by Tarantino are wielded with such swagger that they totally transform them. Then there's P.T. Anderson's emulation of Scorsese in Magnolia trickling down like stormwater into Sam Levinson's alchemical mimicry of both in Euphoria - which deserves its own post for being a kind of pop-cultural ouroboros. I could almost say the same about Saint Maud here in this post but it's distractingly, intricately derivative to every fault. There's no personality beyond what it's picked up from other movies in the zeitgeist of the last decade.

  Once everyone realized that nearly every movie in the infuriatingly labelled 'Elevated Horror' boom of the 2010s was just one movie after another artfully exploring grief and trauma as well as grief and trauma and grief...and...trauma, they got pretty tired of 'em; Saint Maud is late to the party and dressed like it's 2017. It's the kind of movie that checks so many A24/Arthouse Horror boxes that my eyes rolled out of my head and dangled by their ocular nerves on my cheeks.

  After a brief prologue where a Nurse is cowered in the corner of a hospital room where someone is dead in front of her and she's clearly traumatized by it (I guess that's gonna come back later? [it does]) it smash-cuts to a tall title card with sharp music and the letters fade from white to red because horrormovie.mp4 is what you're watching. We fade to a soaring close-up of an ambiguous, viscous red liquid [it's tomato soup] that looks a lot like blood [it's tomato soup] but it's bubbling unnaturally [it's tomato soup] until it cuts to reveal someone was apparently cooking...blood? And they...put it in a bowl...? I'm still not entirely sure but it sure set the mood for [a grilled cheese] something creepy.

  I'm not gonna run the whole movie down but it almost never stops being predictable and annoying like that. There's even a song that sounds suspiciously like the closing track from Hereditary's shimmery Reborn and it further cemented that Glass is intent on forgoing a personality of her own, right down to her smothering chiaroscuro which the ignorant classify as 'atmospheric' by default. No, it's just visually one-note here.

  On paper it doesn't work either. It makes a lot of the same predictable beats as every other spiraling character study. Just like Joker but unlike Taxi Driver (which both have been compared to) it's about a character who isn't really worth studying. There's nothing interesting, surprising, or relatable about them. They're both mentally ill and going untreated so we can watch their trauma violently explode.

  Rose Glass spends more time trying to make Maud creepy than she does trying to evoke sympathy for her. Her justification, I guess, is that Maud is obsessed with God and Jesus Freaks are good fodder [aka low-hanging fruit] for mockery and ridicule. I was never creeped out because Maud is clearly in the wrong movie; she needed a lighter, more sympathetic, nuanced touch. Neglected characters are one thing in a plot-heavy movie but in a character study where the light is shining right on them, it's just shameful. Glass' movie is just as hysterical and high on its own fanaticism as any Jesus Freak I know (and just as annoying, too). Imagine if DePalma wanted us to find Carrie's mental anguish scary instead of tragic, he'd be just as bad her bullies. So with its dismissive, judgmental atheistic bent, you never wonder if God is truly present when Maud hallucinates his divinity. So there's no mystery and no dramatic stakes whatsoever but, sure, let's keep watching this woman deteriorate.

  Glass' frequent, laughable imagery via Maud's hallucinations come across so tryhardy that Baz Luhrmann sent flowers. The visual motifs operate on two modes: briefly eerie until the insecure punchline cut lets us know "she was just seeing things" or they're so over-the-top and silly that they diminish any and all mystery altogether. They're just masturbation, a case of style pretending to be substantive but it's all fucking nebulous. The ending, especially, is a roaring thesis statement that, I guess, is consistent. The last frame is meant to scare us but it's another cheap jumpscare (with equally dull cgi to match) that it's just one more annoyance.

  There's a scene where Maud is fucking some guy and Glass juxtaposes her POV of riding him, hands on his chest for balance, with her POV of giving chest compressions to her dying patient from the prologue. It's an evocative, uncomfortable mix of imagery, the first moment where I liked what she was doing creativ---dang, Rose hallucinates that her hands crushed his chest and she screams as he spits up blood--we predictably cut to him, very much alive, asking her what's wrong. Clearly Maud's coping mechanisms are unhealthy and she has intrusive thoughts but it's done like a cheap jumpscare and undercuts any effect it'd had on me, both for the horror and the drama.

  And, since this is trauma porn, the guy has to roll Maud over and rape her because cheapness ain't in short supply with this goddamn[ed?] movie.

 D+

Albums of 71

If you chart the quality of both music and film on a map starting roughly around 1967 and through the mid 70s, you'll end up with a lot of what I return to today. A bulk of what I listened to in high school all stemmed from this magical period. Given that we are now 50 years removed from 1971, it's hard not to anticipate doing one of these for every year at least until 79. 

1. Black Sabbath- Master of Reality

Henry Rollins said you can only trust yourself and the first six Black Sabbath albums. No more is this evident than on their third album. 

2. Marvin Gaye- What's Going On

The whole album is a meditation, a hymn, a prayer. In a time of Vietnam, Nixon, protests, and feminist activism, this album manages to sum the whole year up in a spiritual elegy and lay a path for what was to come. 

3. The Rolling Stones- Sticky Fingers

Sorry, Exile. Your older brother is just better. Beyond just Wild Horses, Can't You Hear Me Knocking and Dead Flowers, it has an essential component to what makes an album a classic- a great closing track. Let the airwaves flow. 

4. Can- Tago Mago

When Radiohead started getting experimental in the late 90s, this is the band that they felt like the most. Can's Vitamin C appeared in Inherent Vice much to my delight. I still feel this band is underrated. 

5. David Bowie- Hunky Dory 

If I were to make a list- I will someday- of my top 20 songs, Life On Mars? would be in the top 3. Hunky Dory is what I consider Bowie's first great album. 

6. Leonard Cohen- Songs of Love and Hate

The opener Avalanche is my favorite song of his. The sparseness of the album allows his poetic lyrics to fit snug into the melodies. I have to be in a certain mood to listen to his work. Like Nick Drake, I associate Songs of Love and Hate with Winter. 

7. Paul McCartney- Ram

The big 3 solo albums from the band were released within 2 years- All Thing Must Pass, Plastic Ono Band and this effort by Paul. Animosity and resentment colored both Paul and John's works as they traded barbs on songs. Despite this, there was still that momentum at the tail end that led into their solo work. 

8. John Lennon- Imagine

Yeah we've all heard the song countless times. Most recently in a cringe inducing rendition from A list celebs. 

These songs have John charting his emotional map at the time. His anger at Paul with How Do You Sleep?, the wistful Crippled Inside, Jealous Guy, the hard edged Gimme Some Truth, and the poppy Oh Yoko!

9. The Who- Who's Next

Not as theatrical as Tommy or Quadrophenia. Nor as tongue in cheek as The Who Sell Out. Who's Next arrives right between those pieces of the bands prime era. Bookended by two rebellious anthems, Baba O'Riley and Won't Get Fooled Again, the album's mid section is where the underplayed gems are. 

10. Pink Floyd- Meddle 

Echoes and One of These Days number among my favorite things they've done. The middle section isn't nearly as consistently strong as the opener and closer. It's almost a mini album in itself. A soft, folk flavored whisper from one end of sonic bliss to the other. 

11. Carole King- Tapestry

Singer/Songwriters of the 60s and 70s are a constant in the stuff I listen to. I came to Carole King's Tapestry late. What piqued my curiosity was that, like Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, it felt like a compilation album of her hits. Best listened to on rainy mornings. 

12. Genesis- Nursery Cryme 

My favorite cover out of all the albums here and another case where two monsters of a prog band's early catalog are collected: The Return of Giant Hogweed and The Musical Box. The band is commonly cleaved into two era: Gabriel and Collins. I've always been a Gabriel fan and this is his first great album with the band. Why don't you touch me? 

13. Van Der Graaf Generator- Pawn Hearts

Pawn Hearts wouldn't be the album I'd give to someone who hasn't heard of them. That would be Godbluff.

If I wanted to recommend a song to a newbie to the band, it would by Plague of the Lighthouse Keepers. 

14. Yes- Fragile

Are we seeing a reoccuring pattern? Like Sabbath, Zeppelin, Elton John, Bowie and Genesis, this was yet another beginning in a fertile period of creativity for a band. Fragile was the first album to feature the classic Yes lineup: Jon Anderson on vocal, Steve Howe on guitar, Chris Squire on bass and Rick Wakeman on keyboards. 

15. Led Zeppelin- IV

No Stairway! Denied! 

It's the song of theirs, along with Black Dog and Rock and Roll that wouldn't make my Zeppelin mixtape. They've just been overplayed to death. Even upon first listen, the mysticism that I appreciate about the band is better found on Houses of the Holy and Physical Graffiti. Still, cuts like Going to California and When the Levee Breaks are reason enough to recommend it. Even if the latter is a direct lift of the Memphis Minnie tune. I mean, come on it's Bonham.