Horror Off-Season: Oculus: Chapter 3

Ok, so the Oculus short hit my radar a few years ago when I first saw Absentia.  Director Mike Flanagan had mostly focused on character dramas until that point, though he had dabbled in horror before.  First as DP on 2004's amazing cult cheesefest Chainsaw Sally, and then again as writer/director in 2006 with his own short film Oculus: Chapter 3 - The Man With the Plan.

Originally planned as a 9 part short film anthology focused on the film's Lasser Glass mirror, only Part 3 was made due to budgetary constraints.  Following the success of Absentia, Flanagan was able to direct a feature length adaptation of the story.  That version premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in Sept of 2013 and Relativity Media secured distribution rights for an April 2014 US release.  Unfortunately, that deal seems to have included pulling sales of the original short, which I feel is a tremendous missed marketing opportunity but rumor mill has it that the short will be included as bonus material on the DVD/BD release of Oculus.

Filmed for about $2,000 over the course of 4 days as primarily a monologue and clocking in at roughly 32 minutes Oculus: Chapter 3 is an amazing example of a less-is-more horror ideology.  And beyond that, it's goddamned scary.

The film is set entirely in a single, white room with a small table and a battery of cameras on tripods at one end and an easel at the other with the very imposing mirror on it.  The single character, Tim Russel (played by Scott Graham), wears jeans and a grey baseball collar t-shirt.  To say sparse would be an understatement.  Tim is here because his father was one of the previous owners of the Lasser Glass and also its most recent victim.  Tim believes the mirror is haunted/possessed/evil and somehow compelled his father to kill his mother and himself.  He's set up an experiment to prove the mirror has supernatural powers in order to clear his father's name.

During the run of the movie Tim explains the nature of the experiment he's running as well as external controls and checks.  A system he feels will protect him from falling victim to the mirror as well.  He also recounts the mirror's bloody history and the tragedy that fell on each previous owner.  These are simple stories, but quite eerie.  As the experiment goes on Tim becomes increasingly erratic, losing time, yelling at his friend on the phone, rambling, etc.  The cameras in the room are all hooked to monitors on a table, and the perspective jumps between them and an omniscient camera leading to great creepy shots where Tim is in frame and a monitor doing something different.  It throws into question assumptions of truth...which image is real?

Flanagan relies fairly heavily on his tight depth of field and editing to obscure elements making what really should be dumb instead very scary due to context and execution.  Both tricks he would also use in Absentia to make the not-very intimidating Daniel Riley freaking frightful as the gape-mouthed ghoul.  The final sprint is an absolute bedlam of amazing that begs me to never look at alarm clocks the same way, and the repeating line from the trailer ("I've met my demons and they are many, I've seen the Devil and he is me...") is really disturbing when it finally appears.

It's not a great looking movie, which isn't surprising given its budget and time.  But it looks good for what it is, and the execution is stellar for a scary movie.  The compressed insanity at the end left me actually speechless for a bit after the short ended, it was kindof a drive-by.  Though it is very tight, I feel like bits could have been shaved off earlier in the movie to make Tim's decent a little less breakneck, but it still works very well as is.

That said, there's very little wrong with the movie and I'd highly recommend it.

--PXA

Let's talk about remakes

I've briefly mentioned my opinions on horror movie remakes a few times on this site and other forums, but I've never really felt the need to go into detail because it always seemed to me like it would be more of a complainy rant than a well thought out opinion.  However, I feel compelled now to make a case for my opinions simply because it doesn't seem like anyone else is and I'm getting a bit tired of the bashing remakes take.  Put simply:  Remakes deserve consideration.  That's it.

Remakes tend to be made for one of two reasons: Translation or subject matter update.  A lot of updates are pretty crappy, they're made with the goal of using the notoriety of the original film as a built-in fan base for the new movie.  Often, these are lackluster flicks with some superficial nods to the source material: Nightmare on Elm St, Friday the 13th, Prom Night, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, etc.  But these are bad because they're straight up bad movies, not because they had the audacity to remake a classic.  They are generic, poorly plotted, boring slashers.

It's not that big studios are incapable of making a decent horror movie, or even horror movie update. Dawn of the Dead, Halloween, The Thing, and Fright Night are all decent remakes of older movies.  They're not amazing or earth shattering but they don't have to be, but a remake can be amazing.  The Thing in 1980 is widely regarded as one of the best horror movies of all time.  It's on lists constantly and people keep praising its atmosphere and special effects.  Also, it's a remake of the 1951 film The Thing From Another World based on the novella Who Goes There?.  What if horror fans at the time had dismissed as just another remake?

Another reason for remaking a movie is to translate the original story into another language.  This is the one that seems to inspire the most vitriol.  The opinion seems to be that if you are unwilling to watch the movie as originally presented you are somehow unworthy of seeing that story.  But for the most part any audience will want to watch a movie in their own language, the original foreign audience as well as our English-speaking audience.  There are always subtitles, which is how I watch most of the foreign movies I check out, but I feel like they break the immersion.  In horror where the movie's atmosphere counts for so much, floaty words on the screen make me incredibly aware that I'm sitting on my couch and pull me out of the movie.  If being remade in English can help someone really get into a great horror story and get creeped out or disturbed, it seems like a perfectly valid reason to make a movie.  It shouldn't matter that a movie is a result of someone translating something to their native language, if it's still a good movie.

And some of these are good movies.  The Grudge and The Ring were huge hits and make lists of people's favorite horror movies all the time.  I've even spoken to a few people who prefer The Ring over Ringu because the production qualities are higher and native English is more comfortable.  But still the first thing you hear when someone mentions the upcoming English remakes of Suspiria or Martyrs are Americans ruining great movies.  The Suspiria remake is set to star Isabelle Fuhrman, who was absolutely phenomenal in The Orphan, in the lead roll.  The slated director, David Gordon Green, has a bit of a reputation for quirky indie comedies but he hasn't failed at horror of any sort yet and his direction seems competent so I'm willing to give him a chance.  I'm more interested in speculating about whether or not he's going to ape the visual style or go for something more subtle than just harping on it sight unseen.

That's really my whole point.  It's depressingly negative to just prejudge remakes because of something so petty as their language or that they're remakes.  Movies should be allowed to suck on their own merits and the "The original was so much better" or "This was way better in the native French/Polish/Sanskrit" arguments sound an awful lot like the hipster complaint that their favorite band is too mainstream now.  I just really like this "Horror" thing and it seems self-defeating to spend time talking about a movie's audience instead of the merits of the movie itself.

--PXA

Horror Off-Season: 13 Ghosts 1960 and 2001 compared

13 Ghosts is one of my favorite movies.  It stars a post-American Pie Shannon Elizabeth and a pre-Monk Tony Shalhoub.  The movie is a remake of William Castle's 1960 13 Ghosts, which is interesting in itself in that it involved a pretty cool and specific gimmick: Illusion-O.

Rather than write a standard review, since even the remake is over a decade old at this point I thought it would be fun to sort of compare/contrast the two and see how the material was updated 40 years later.

So, first off, William Castle was famous for inventing tons of gimmicks to get audiences into his movies and get his movies talked about.  Just to name a few:

• Macabre (1958): Lloyds of London insured each audience member for $1,000 in case they die of fright during the movie.
• House on Haunted Hill (1959): Emerg-O, where a glow-in-the-dark skeleton was suspended over the audience for a climactic scene.
• The Tingler (1959): Percept-O, where he had theaters install electric joy-buzzers in some seats to give people electric shocks during a section where the monster came off the screen and into the audience.  
• Homicidal (1961): The Fright Break, immediately before the climax audience members who were too afraid would be allowed to leave the theater and be treated and calmed by a nurse in the lobby. 

Illusion-O was an early form of color filtering, where the majority of the movie was in standard black & white while certain scenes with ghosts in them where tinted blue and the ghosts were overlayed in red.  The audience could choose to either watch with blue tinted glasses or red ones, supposedly provided by the character Dr. Plato Zorba (Cyrus Kriticos in the remake).  The blue glasses would make the ghosts invisible and the red ones would make them stand out.  These glasses mirror the glasses in the movie the characters have to use to see the ghosts, and makes for a really interesting interactive element where you can choose how you want to see the scene.

Basic concept
The brief concept of the movie is largely the same as the original:  A rich relative dies and leaves his house to his nephew, who is struggling to financially support his family consisting of an attractive daughter and a son with an odd obsession.  In this house are 12 distinct spirits, and the nephew has been branded as the 13th.  In the original the supernatural happenings are more or less incidental to the main story arc, which is the lawyer's attempt to find the uncle's hidden fortune.  The remake obviously places a greater emphasis on the supernatural aspect making it the main focus and inventing a ghost-powered mechanism.  This is pretty obvious as the opening scene in the remake is Cyrus and Dennis in the act of entrapping a ghost named "The Juggernaut", a scene that establishes the uncle's character as a ghost hunter with massive resources and also a lot of the internal mythology invented for the movie.  The original opened with a short title sequence and then started the story with a short bit of Cyrus lecturing at an archeology museum.

The Family
The characters are pretty similar in archetype, as mentioned above but the remake differs slightly.  The original had a "complete" family of Cyrus and Hilda as husband and wife with son, Buck, and daughter, Medea.  The uncle is Plato Zorba and the lawyer is Ben Rush.  Elaine Zacharides is the maid at the house and Cyrus has a friend named Van Allen, they serve as exposition speakers.  The remake has a "broken" family, because the wife has died and the husband has to continue as a single father...something that wasn't nearly as accepted in 1960.  So the father is Arthur Kriticos with son, Bobby, and daughter, Kathy.  The uncle is Cyrus Kriticos and the lawyer is Ben Moss.  The remake invents the characters of Kalina Oretzia and Dennis Rafkin to serve exposition, but they are unfamiliar to Arthur and more closely related to the uncle, Cyrus.  They've also invented Maggie Bess to serve as Bobby and Kathy's nanny, although I think the motivation for the character's creation was really to have a sassy black female played by a popular musician.

What's interesting is that in the original, Cyrus was characterized much more as husband and family man.  He had a slightly adversarial relationship with his wife and seemed firstly concerned with the family unit as a nebulous whole and then his wife.  When the character becomes Arthur in the remake he's very much the father and is concerned with his kids over all else.  His emotions and reactions to any threats confronting his kids are much more powerful and immediate while Cyrus seems restrained and sometimes even uninvolved with the situation.

The Ghosts
The original's ghosts are all fairly unique, and they explain some of them in the story.  None of them are particularly hostile towards the family, apart from one scene in which the ghost of a chef in the kitchen throws a kitchen knife at the wall and almost hits Cyrus.  The ghosts don't really serve any particular point in the narrative except to be spooky, and they don't even have particularly involved backgrounds.  The two that are explained the most are a lion tamer, who's head was bitten off by a lion (and the lion) and a chef who catches his love with another man and kills them both.

One of the things that I really liked about the remake is the ghosts were central to the story about the house being a machine, and they all had rich backgrounds which were alluded to in the movie itself and expanded upon further by a DVD extra.  The ghosts all are made to fit distinct archetypes from a "Black Zodiac" created for the film.  Since the whole story is more focused on the supernatural aspect they spend a lot of effort creating and showing this internal mythology with quicksilver flares, spoken spells on reel-to-reel tapes, written spells carved into the glass walls of the house, cubes, even the glasses take a more consistent and frequent role.  I noticed that in the original there was only a single pair of glasses, often worn by Cyrus.  Buck seemed to be able to see the ghosts pretty well without the glasses, as evidenced by him telling his parents to move out of the way of the knife before it was thrown in the kitchen scene. 

In Closing
Neither movie is particularly scary, but I think if you're in the right mindset and especially with the glasses the original has a lot more potential even though the entire story and supernatural aspects in particular are a lot weaker.  The remake suffers from everything being so well designed and just "Damn, isn't that COOL?!" to really get under your skin and unnerve you.  However, I think that also makes its production design and visual style strengths as entrance to Bro-horror.  Although I wouldn't call this bro-horror in the strictest sense because it does hit some very good emotional cues.  A lot of people absolutely hate Matthew Lillard, but I don't think he's that bad of an actor and the way his character, Dennis, grows attached to Arthur's family and even sacrifices himself in the end is quite touching.  It's also got a lot of depth to the universe because of the spell rules and the backstories given to each ghost, it all feels very solid and fleshed out.  I would almost want to see more movies that play around with the mythology established for this remake of a William Castle gimmick movie from 1960.