Horror Off-Season: Haunt

Haunt is another 2013 movie that hit VOD in early 2014.  It's also another debut, this time of director Mac Carter who's previous directorial work had been on a documentary.

Haunt as a film is a good old fashioned ghost story.  Something you'd expect to hear around a campfire or from some old lady at midnight at the local social lodge (Those are things, right?).  I enjoyed it, it wasn't bad, but I feel like it missed in a few ways.

First, the story (which I liked plenty), is about a house.  A haunted house.  In the mid-80's a couple, both successful doctors, moved their family into a large house.  In 1984 almost the entire family died tragically:  The son died in a car accident at 16, then the youngest daughter drowned, followed by the eldest daughter committing suicide, and finally the father in a mysterious incident at the house.  Fast forward a few decades and a new family, the Ashers, is just moving into the house.  The teen son of that family, while out for a walk, befriends a local girl named Sam and the two become involved quite quickly.  While their relationship blossoms, increasingly odd things happen around the house, culminating in the two of them delving into supernatural investigation.  Since it is a fairly straight and folksy ghost story I do want to try to stay away from spoilers so that's about all the detail I'll go into.

On to the odd: During the film the behavior of the Asher parents struck me as strange.  They seemed to be the most accepting and trusting parents ever portrayed.  As an example, one of the first few nights the Asher's son, Evan, meets Sam she follows him home.  Not wanting to go back to her house she sleeps the night in his bed.  In the morning he just brings her down to the family who had no idea she was there and they were completely unperturbed by it.  Everyone's cool with strange girls following their son/brother home and sleeping in his room.  Not this is really a bad thing that detracts from the story, but it just seemed so odd.

There are two more aspects I feel like they also missed with, and they're both part of the visual aesthetic of the film.  First off, a lot of lower budget supernatural horror movies seem to feel like they have to compensate for being a slower creepshow by nature and find ways to up their pace.  So when things that should be low-key and creepy happen, these movies try to amp them up and make them more intense.  Specifically what I'm talking about are shots where, because there's a ghost around, the movie will drop frames, random frames will be zoomed in and grainy or with weird color effects.  Basically this technique where they decide to make their movie resemble a mid-90's alternative rock music video.  I dislike this.  I feel like it cheapens the effect of supernatural elements.  The House at the End of the Street did this a lot, and it didn't even have any supernatural elements to its story, it was just being weird.

Second, I think ghost effects in movies tend to follow whatever precedent was set by the last really successful ghost movie regardless of their own aesthetic or what would actually look good.  The Ring ensured that every ghost story would have frame-skipped jerky moving ghosts for years.  I think Haunt is taking its cues from Mama, which featured a fast moving but very smooth ghost with lots of floating whispy strands of hair and clothing.  And while I adore Mama, I don't like this in Haunt.  The design of the ghost is very sensible.  It relates to the backstory, it looks creepy...it's a totally competent ghost...but then in post they made it all floaty and it has those whispy bits around it which makes absolutely no sense.  Considering the ghost isn't actually on screen in full view very much, this is a really minor gripe...but it really just rubbed me the wrong way.

That aside, it's got some fairly chilling implications and I really did enjoy the story teller narration that bookends the film.  It's not really great by any stretch but I would definitely call it good enough and nothing about it is particularly objectionable so Haunt gets a "well done".

--PXA

October Horror 2013: 9 - Ju-On (2002)

Ju-On is the original Japanese horror movie that inspired 2004's The Grudge.  The film itself is a sequel to 2 direct-to-video j-horror movies.  I remember The Grudge and The Ring being pretty big back in the day, though I never really felt a major need to watch the originals until I started getting really into horror and then figured that comparing the source material to the native interpretations would be a nice exercise.

For the most part the story is the same, although as is often the case for adaptations of j-horror many elements are trimmed to make for a tighter narrative.  But the core story of a husband killing his wife, son, and pet cat before killing himself, causing their house to become cursed place of sadness and rage.  Anyone exposed to the house becomes a bearer of the curse until it kills them, and they can also bring anyone they care for into the curse.

The flow of time in this is somewhat difficult to lock down.  The film opens on the murder, but the scene is quite obfuscated with heavy effects, close shots, and many cuts.  After that we go through a series of almost short segments, like an anthology, following each person affected by the curse.  I think the first segment happens before the first, though I'm at a loss to explain the need for a social worker in the first segment if the wife is at home as in the second.  It could be a weekend/weekday thing, but then why would the husband put on a suit and go to work?  But then again, if they're backwards and the first happened afterwards, why would the old woman continue living in the house?  I had similar issue with The Grudge, since these two sequences were almost exactly alike apart from the nationalities of the characters.

From there it's mostly straight forward until one sequence in which a man has a vision of something happening in his future, that sets up what happened prior to the next segment which takes place years later.  After that it's possible some of the last few bits happen in parallel.

It was a good movie, I was confused a bit because of the time lapses, which may or may not have been helped by the subtitles.  What was particularly difficult was that apart from the opening scroll and the title cards before each segment with people's names, very little on-screen text was subtitled.  As is often my issue with foreign films I had some trouble following along and had to discuss the movie while it was happening to keep everything straight.  Also, I have a hell of a time keeping peoples' names straight in Japanese movies because their names are so dissimilar from Western names that I have no basis on which to associate the name with the person.  In a Western film if Brad, Frank, and Jenn are in a room together...it's easy to figure out which one is Jenn, but in a Japenese movie and Takashi, Katsuya, and Kayako are in a room...I got nothing.

Anyway, it still pulled off some great creepy bits and really did unnerve me in a few parts.  Some of the scenes where the ghost manifests as a black cloud look really bad, effects wise, but the acting and the sounds the ghost makes when showing as a full person are profoundly creepy.  It's also got more to it, so the variety in haunting is nice.  I do like the increased production values in the remake, and there are a few places where this one looks cheap or much older than it should be, but it's still very solid and I liked seeing where a lot of the elements of The Grudge originated.

Next up was supposed to be Don't Look Back, but Netflix apparently expired it off streaming so we're going to have to substitute something else.

--PXA

October Horror 2013: 4 - The Others

This one was really good, not going to dance around that one at all and try to play the somewhat non-committal "Yeah, it was ok.  Nothing spectacular and nothing horrid" tone my writeups have been tending to take.  We got to the movie really late after getting home from Barrett's Haunted Mansion and a semi-interactive adventure called Zombie Apocalypse which was right down the street.  So we started the movie pretty low-volume hoping to not be too loud for anyone, which caused a problem because of just about everyone in the movie whispering almost the entire time.  The only major complaints I have are that everyone was whispering and that both Nicole Kidman's character and her daughter were kindof a bit of a bitch.  The daughter more often I think because she was pretty mean to her brother a lot of the time.

So the movie is set in England in the 1940's sometime after World War 2 and stars Nicole Kidman as Grace, a woman with 2 children alone in their large manor.  Grace's husband, Charles (Christopher Eccleston), had gone off to fight in the war on the side of England but has likely been killed.  A few weeks prior to the beginning of the story the house servants had suddenly left without informing Grace or collecting their final wages, leaving Grace alone in the house with her children Nicolas and Anne.

We open with the arrival of 3 people, led by a Bertha Mills (Fionnula Flanagan) who claim to be responding to a request for new house keepers to assist Grace in taking care of her children who suffer from extreme photosensitivity and require special treatment.  This treatment consists of a bizarrely ritualistic way of life in which all doors in the house are closed and locked before another door is opened, and all curtains must be closed in a room before allowing the children in.  Most of the light sources in the shots are implied to be leak from around the curtains (which is explained as the children being tolerant of a low level of light) and hand-held oil lanterns.  Grace claims that during the war the electrical power was continually being knocked out so the family just decided to leave it off and rely on natural fuel sources for light and heat.  I would add that, probably for practical reasons, a lot of the movie felt much brighter than it should have been for a house that is being deliberately darkened.  It's not bad and I stopped noticing quickly but it seems strange that this movie is better lit than Sinister, which took place in a house with electricity.

It's all a very interesting setup that lends a very oppressive and uncomfortable atmosphere.  I was initially taken aback by the adversarial posture that Grace takes a lot of them time but it really fit her character when I think about it.  She's effectively cut off from the nearby town by an oppressive fog, and the spooky happenings during the movie are spurring a belief in ghosts in her children that is clashing with her strong Roman Catholic faith.  The children, Anne particularly, feel like they're being treated unfairly (which they are, being punished for telling the truth of things but then being told to tell the truth) and begin to draw away from Grace and gravitating towards Mrs. Mills.  Grace then sees the new servant as a competitor for her daughter's affections and possibly even an active force driving a wedge between her and Anne, so she lashes out at the new servants.  It's all drama which I normally wouldn't care for since I did sign up for a horror movie but it's really well done as a backdrop to the things that go bump in the night.

There aren't actually a tremendous amount of explicit scare scenes in the film, they mostly just serve to ramp up the tension as Grace unravels and the servants are revealed to have their own agenda.  The character drama and the implication of things happening plays amazingly on the imagination and even though you're not really imagining ghouls and etc, there's a certain amount of feeling things are not quite right needed for the ending to work, which to me it did.  While the ending was not exactly something completely groundbreaking and new, it brought the movie together really tightly and paid off the excellent atmosphere building that had been going on.  Very spooky and focused.  I'm glad we finally got to this one.

Next up is The Shining from Stephen King week.