LamiaCalls

The Dark and the Wicked (2020): The grown children of Texas farmers come home to support their dying father in his last days, but a demonic presence is hanging over the house, filling the family's heads with terrifying hallucinations and the urge to commit brutal acts of self-mutilation. This film is style over substance, but the style was genuinely extremely good, so...I liked it, I think? The plot is paper thin and the veneer of "elevated" horror is hardly worth analysing. It's a haunted house story. Terrible forces do terrible things to ordinary people and there's no way to stop them. But the focus is on slow, building dread over action; the atmosphere is stark and lonely, full of sweeping shots of the farmstead that are sometimes so underlit you have to squint and other times so overexposed it sears your eyes, all clearly done intentionally; the soundtrack doesn't miss a single trick to get your heart beating faster. Everything is beautiful and horribly off-kilter.

Do I see myself wanting to rewatch this? No, probably not. The fucky lighting made my eyes hurt and there's nothing about any of the characters that makes me crave more time with them. But the movie gave me exactly what I wanted: to feel so scared it was a genuine struggle not to close my eyes and cower away from the screen. Only one other movie has so far given me such an intense, lizard-brain fright, and that was The Tunnel. We all have our specific fears; I guess "inhuman figure approaches slowly, jerkily, inexorably out of the darkness" must be mine.

It Follows (2014): Hahaha, and then after that realisation I decided to watch a film where an inhuman figure approaches slowly, jerkily and inexorably for like ninety minutes straight. Three guesses what kind of emotional state I was in after this one. 😅

It was great, though! It's about a murderous horror that is sexually transmitted; once it has latched onto you, the only way to get rid of it is to pass it on to someone else. Until then, it follows you. Everywhere. At a slow and steady walking pace. It can take on any human form, it knows where you are at all times, and it never stops. You can buy yourself time by getting far away, but sooner or later it will catch back up; if it gets its hands on you, it will kill you. So, obviously, our college-age protagonist Jay catches It after sleeping with a guy she's been dating, who it turns out seduced her under a false identity out of desperation to save his own life. Her sister and a handful of childhood friends rally around her, and together they try to find a solution to the curse while staying ahead of the pursuit. It's a really interesting, self-aware but not satirical twist on the "sex = death" slasher trope, and also REALLY FUCKING SCARY. (I mean, we've established that slow pursuit scares me shitless; others' mileage may vary, idk.)

On the other hand, the main girl looked so much like Hilary Duff that it kept throwing me out of the story, and the time period was jarringly out of whack. Everyone drove vintage cars, had 80s wall phones and 90s TV sets on which they watched 1950s horror movies, the internet didn't seem to exist but one character had this bizarre, kitschy little clamshell e-reader on which she was reading Dostoevsky...apparently it was supposed to feel "timeless" and "dreamlike" but I just found it distracting. Not enough to negate how much I liked the actual storyline, but it was an irritating little niggle, and in general I found a lot of the aesthetic choices in this movie odd and unappealing. Horror movies can be scary, thematically interesting AND pretty! This one only scored two out of three, and that just felt like an unfortunate waste.

Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor (2023): A true crime vlogger takes her real estate agent girlfriend and her schizophrenic brother to stay several nights at a remote manor that was the site of a grisly domestic homicide, and that also (she learns, to her very great misfortune) turns out to be connected to the infamous Abaddon Hotel tragedy. snickfic promised me 1) a lesbian main couple and 2) even scarier clowns than the ones in the original movie, and has proved faithful on both counts. These were some seriously NASTY clowns, and I really liked the main couple with their Mulder and Scully-Against-Her-Will dynamic. I thought the true crime fan angle was a very good justification for the whole investigation setup, even as it set my teeth on edge (in a fuck-you way, not a scary horror way - I have some strong views on the true crime genre and the fannish community around it, but we are not going to get into that here, because life is short and outrage is cheap and I should be in bed right now instead of blogging about horror movies in the first place).

Anyway, yeah, really enjoyed this! Don't have much to say about it, but really enjoyed it.