31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 31 (Halloween [2018])

Boo.

At last. We're here. Spooky night itself. I just have to finish this and then I'm free! Free from spooky analysis, at least. We've even got a really good movie that I just finished not 5 minutes ago. I watched it in the dark and everything. Honestly surprised at how few kids interrupted movie time for me to give them their treats, but that's just how it be with small town life. We're even going out on a really high note! It's that Halloween movie that came out exactly a year ago today! I had to watch goddamned Halloween 4 instead of going out to see this and writing about it last year. Not so this time. Now we're here for real, and I've finally seen the thing. Wow. It's one hell of a movie. I'm gonna talk about what I liked about it for an amount of time, and then this whole wild Halloween marathon adventure will be over. Hop on in, it's the train to SPOOKYTOWN!


It's another one of those Godzilla 1984-like situations here, where the people in charge just go "right, fuck all this other shit, only the first movie happened and we're building on that for the anniversary.". Rather surprisingly for me, this also includes throwing out Halloween 2. It's been two years, but I'm pretty sure Halloween H20 counted Halloweens 1 and 2 as canon. Here, though? Nope, we're just following up on the 1978 original. No Laurie Strode as Michael's sister, Dr. Loomis lived past that Halloween night, just... a sequel to the first. They even lampshade it which got a chuckle out of me. Okay, movie, I'll let that one slide. There are a lot of little cute callbacks to the original, some of which have a point beyond just whooshing a nostalgic chuckle out of you. (Okay, their variation on the bedsheet ghost is a good twist that has you laughing in a morbid moment of tense anticipation. Which is exactly on tonal point with the scene from the original it's referencing.) I like the cinematography and editing a lot, too: there are some fun cuts, and a lot of cute tricks like continuous shots, both tracking and static. It's a very slick and put-together movie, but I'm not one for pointing out cool film school tricks. No, I'm here to be the passing-grade English student that I am and point out thematic resonance and stuff. So. The ballad of Michael Myers and Laurie Strode, 40 years later. Let's get into that for a bit.


Oddly enough, the theme I got from this is that Michael Myers exudes a sort of aura around him, which manifests itself in quite a few different ways. Notably, the aura of fascination over him and his crimes. This shows in the opening moments with the British true crime podcast duo, who are an effective device the movie uses in several ways; exposition to get us up to speed with the current status quos of both Michael and Laurie, and then as fresh bodies for Michael to murder in a pretty fucked-up scene at a gas station bathroom. I was honestly surprised they got killed off so quickly, but I guess they'd served their narrative function and were used for the scares. More interesting is Dr. Sartain, this movie's version of Dr. Loomis (and Laurie even textually says this) who fills the same narrative function... to a point. Recall that Loomis spent time trying to understand Michael Myers before deciding he was evil incarnate and had to be locked away. Sartain has spent 40 years studying Michael, trying to understand him.... and it's both a fascination and obsession. It ends up making him turn heel and knife a sheriff to protect Michael, even going so far as to briefly don the mask. The fascination and obsession in understanding Michael turns Sartain into Michael. Last, but certainly not least, we have Laurie Strode, in this movie a paranoid recluse who's all but alienated her family from her anxieties over Michael coming back to finish the job. Her wounds are more psychological, of course, but in the end the movie is basically mirroring her with Michael in a strange way. She's obsessed and determined to kill him, just as he's obsessed and determined to just kill in general. At least two shots of the movie go out of their way to reference iconic shots from the 1978 movie, only with Laurie in the place of Michael. I see what you're up to there, movie. Very slick.


If I have a complaint here, it's that Laurie briefly falls into horror movie trope levels of letting her guard down during the climax where Michael is attacking her stronghold. I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, I don't want to be a naughty nitpicker and wagging my finger because OH NO THE TRAUMATIZED CHARACTER UNDER SEIGE BY HER NEMESIS ISN'T ACTING WITH FULL LOGICAL EFFICIENCY, DIIIING. On the other hand, Laurie has been preparing for this for 40 years. She should kind of be a step above basic tropes like "investigate the noises instead of staying in your bunker and waiting with your gun for Michael to come to you". On the other hand, she is traumatized as hell from all of this... It's a very tricky tightrope to walk! In the end, though, it all works out and this is a really great sequel to Halloween... but it's by no means the end. They've got sequels planned for 2020 and 2021. For the love of god. Okay. We'll see how those go, but as for me? I'm done. That's another Halloween marathon in the bag. Here's where I'd usually make a terrified joke about NaNoWriMo tomorrow, but honestly I'm relieved for that! It means I get to watch things that aren't spooky and write about totally different things! You have no idea how much of a mental breather that will be for me! Anyway, this is me, signing off. See you for... let's be real, unless something big pops up, it'll be the Games Of The Year list in December. Until then, y'all. Thanks for reading.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 30 (The Simpsons: Treehouse Of Horror II)

Back to this again. It's a bit of a short thing, given I only have 25 minutes of TV to work with, but I'm on a deadline due to other things going on tonight. That and I'm a little burnt out from this spooky month. I am looking forward to tomorrow's view, though, as it's something I've never seen before. You can probably guess what it is, but in the meantime here's the second Simpsons Halloween Special, from 1991. Somehow it has been three years since I did a Simpsons Halloween special. That was the first one. It managed to give me a lot to talk about, and I even worked in some personal Simpsons history. Again, as with Beetlejuice, my insistence on doing things in order means we hit a Halloween special that never was my favorite. It's fine for golden era Simpsons, sure, but just doesn't stand out in the nostalgic mind compared to the later ones. Still, we're going to take a crack at it. What's fun about these early specials are both the Marge warnings at the top, and the idea that they have a framing device. Both of these get dropped pretty early on, but the former at least makes me remember that pearl-clutching people lost their shit at the Simpsons being a bit irreverent and rude. For fuck's sakes, I think there's one scene with blood in this entire thing. It's goddamned tame by today's standards. Our framing device is simple, almost perfunctionary. "Oh no the Simpsons ate too much Halloween candy and had nightmares". Let us delve into some of these nightmares.


They're not titled segments or anything, but Lisa's nightmare is just the Monkey's Paw. The Simpsons get a cursed monkey paw and make wishes that backfire. Actually, that's not even entirely true. The subtle subversive comedy of it is that the wishes only backfire if they would benefit the Simpsons in some major way. We see this when Maggie makes the first wish for a golden pacifier, and Ned Flanders gets the paw at the end. That's the gag. It works fine for them, but for any other substantial benefit it's curse time. This is evident in the wish to make the Simpsons rich and famous, which also serves as a little meta-commentary for Simpsons mania. The Simpsons are a big name, they're on fucking everything, and people are sick to death of them. Oh. Oh you sweet summer children of 1991. You have no fucking idea. Even Lisa's wish for world peace gets shit on with a Kang and Kodos invasion. There's a lovely bit with Homer's last wish, and then everything goes fine for Flanders. It's a fun retelling of the Monkey's Paw, and it's actually saying some things which resonate with the state of the Simpsons now. Wild. What's next?


Oh it's just that one Twilight Zone episode with the spooky kid that sends you to the cornfield, but it's Bart with the powers. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the anecdote connecting the Simpsons with this specific Twilight Zone story. Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart, previously had a part in the Twilight Zone movie during the segment remaking that spooky psychic kid story... and her character dies by being trapped inside a cartoon. Ha. Ha ha ha. Holy shit. Despite a few cartoonish existential horrors, for the most part this one plays its joke simple enough. Ha ha ha it's Bart doing wild shit with his unlimited psychic powers, and everyone's acquiescing to him. (Okay, but the Bonerland callback gag is something else entirely.) Then it becomes a story about... taking Bart to therapy? And bonding with Homer, who he'd previously turned into a jack in the box? And this is the nightmarish part which makes Bart end up screaming. Wow. Fucked up. Uhhh let's go to the last one?


It's Frankenstein. But with Mr. Burns. Pure capitalism at work, as he hopes to make robot workers who will work harder for him, presumably to make him richer. I got a chuckle out of "Behold, the greatest breakthrough in labor relations since the cat-o'-nine-tails!" because ha ha ha capitalist hell world. Anyway they steal Homer's brain for the thing, and what should be a violent dissection of his brain becomes utterly comedic and yet not lacking at all in grotesqueness. The top of his head rolls off like a ball once it's cut off, and Mr. Burns severs the spinal cord and puts the thing on his head, with the immortal line "LOOK AT ME, I'M DAVY CROCKETT!". Of course the plan for unfettered capitalism is ruined because Homer is the laziest thing alive, even in a robot body, and we get a big twist of Mr. Burns grafting his head onto Homer's, ha ha ha special end. Yeah. It's fine. A few good jokes, a general fun time. I honestly don't have any more to say. Only one day left, and then we're free. See you tomorrow for spooky times.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 29 (Beetlejuice)

I probably shouldn't be covering this specifically, in terms of a nostalgic thing I remember from my childhood. If we were going to go from that angle tonight, I'd have to be doing the animated series, which I watched every Saturday and found to be a totally irreverent and strange thing that nonetheless entertained me, even if it was all full of puns that would make one groan. No, instead I dusted off a Beetlejuce DVD (which had three of the cartoon episodes on it anyway as extras) and fired up a weird Tim Burton movie. Oh, Tim. You're a filmmaker whose work I... kind of like, sometimes? I enjoy your Batman movies, but if we're going to be honest with my nostalgia then the sheer joy of seeing Batman Forever when I was 10 kind of beats you out. The best thing the Tim Burton films did, in my eyes, was inspire Bruce Timm to make his own cartoon. See, there I go, tying it all back to how I should be talking about the cartoon adaptations instead of the movies. Okay. Look. Let's get back on track with the rambling, for just a bit. This movie's fine. It has its issues and I'll get to those, but I get the vibe it's going for and the vibe it's going for is pretty neat in places! Let's discuss those places.


Funny enough, other pieces of media were jingling in my head as I watched this film. It's impossible for one of them to be an inspiration for this, given it came 30 years later, but the other could have been rattling in Tim Burton's head as he came up with it. I speak, of course, of both Zombie Land Saga and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Stick with me here. When I wrote up Zombie Land Saga, I called it a piece of reverse dissonance: an absolutely horrific premise played as a comedy. That's the same tone I get from Beetlejuice: we get to know the Maitlands over the course of a few minutes, they're a happy couple, everything's going great, and then they fucking die. They're dead! Instead of shambling reanimated corpses, we have the restless spirits of once-living people. It's a ghost story, yeah, but played as morbid comedy. Death is played for laughs here, and that's where we get to the Douglas Adams parallels. The afterlife of this film's setting is so utterly bureaucratic that it's hard not to think of Adams here. The Maitlands die and all they're left is a confusing handbook written in befuddling jargon, rather than explaining the rules of their spiritual life straightforwardly. There's waiting rooms and queues and goddamn offices on the other side. Death is no peaceful repose, it's an eternity of stressful working as a fucking office clerk for dead people. Holy shit. Maybe that's hell. Working in a fucking office for all time. It was enough for our title character to go off and become a goddamned freelancer, so there we go. Actually let's talk about him and some other stuff before we go.


He's some kind of huckster, obviously, advertising himself like some sort of anti-Ghostbuster, all flash and panache and supernatural TV ads. He's also just kind of the worst, which surprised me from my memories of the cartoon show. Sure, he was kind of a jerk and a prankster, but this movie guy is outright fucking terrible. Especially to women. Let us just say that certain aspects of this movie have not aged well. Especially the climax of trying to marry Winona Ryder to like, get out of being dead or whatever. This comes out of nowhere, is also kind of resonant with the idea of death's rules and regulations not being explained to you, and is really gross. Speaking of gross, Jeffrey Jones is in this. Eugh. What I find interesting is Delia Deetz's weird abstract idea of modern art, and how it both kind of fits the Tim Burton aesthetic and is also treated with some derision by like everyone else. Weird. That, I guess, is a good place to leave off with this one. It has some wild stop-motion stuff in it (because Tim Burton), some good ideas, some bad ones. Yeah, it's like... fine, I guess. Really it just makes me wish I were watching the nostalgic cartoon. I may have watched the wrong Beetlejuice tonight. NO SHIT WAIT--

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 28 (Annihilation)

Whoa. We've got a real big one here. I mean, wow. This is only my second go-round at this movie, since I watched it about... ten months ago, I want to say? Which makes this weird strange sometimes visceral thing associated with the holiday season for me. Make no mistake, the grim and gruesome shit that occasionally pops up, along with some of the existential horrors present, make it a perfect fit for this season... but it's far more than just a spooky mood piece with some gory bits. This movie's practically drowning in symbolism and metaphor, and you could deep dive through it for thousands of words. I'm not qualified to do that, and these are only quickies, but I did a little digging online myself to find some stuff worth talking about. As long as I get a post's worth out of it and don't massively misread the movie, I'm fine. My sources are resonant enough that I shouldn't do the latter, and as for the former... have you been here before? I'm the goddamned champion of dragging a point out with needless bullshit in order to hit a reasonable quota. For god's sakes, I'm doing it right now with these run ons that delay us out to make a decent-sized opening paragraph. It's a wonder I'm allowed to do this. Well then. Annihilation. What do we make of that?


I'm not being coy, I'm literally analyzing the title again and making a big deal out of it. Annihilation is the key word of the whole movie, and most of the big crunchy themes in the film are metaphors for it. The relationship between our protagonist Lena and her husband Kane, "annihilated" by both his disapperance and her infidelity, for instance. Totally something you can read into, but there are far bigger metaphors. Ones that work on multiple levels with multiple pieces of the film. Cancer, for instance. An annihilation of healthy cells. We open the movie with Lena teaching a class about cancer cells. Dr. Ventress, leader of the expedition, has a terminal cancer. Sheppard's daughter died of leukimia. Then there's the Shimmer itself, a strange and weird expanding thing that keeps growing, taking over the life within it and changing it. A tumor on the world itself. Change is another powerful metaphor within the film, and you can see how all of these things are intertwined with each other. In a dark sardonic way, what is change but the annihilation of who you used to be? The Shimmer is literally changing the DNA structure of things inside it, refracting them into all sorts of strange forms. what remains is different from what came before, and what came before is... you guessed it, annihilated in one sense of the word. The movie is asking questions of our capacity to change, as well as our own capacity for self-destruction. Every member of the expedition suffers their own form of self-destruction, and it all hinges on another theme; trauma.


As much as we as people change, trauma is a thing that sticks with us. This is something explored within the film, in its own way, as the different traumas of the characters are what ends up being their... annihilation. They change, yes, but the trauma remains and it is what undoes them. Sheppard, whose child died from random factors she couldn't control, is killed by a random bear attack she didn't see coming. Anya, hotheaded under pressure, loses her cool and is also killed. Josie, holding on to life, becomes part of the Shimmer. Dr. Ventress's own body betrays her, her cells destroying themselves. It's only Lena who manages to survive her own trauma, her own annihilation, by accepting that part of herself. Only then can she escape the rainbow alien mirroring her (Okay, I had to mark out for some mirror stuff). The final shot shows us Kane and Lena, irrevocably changed by what they experienced in the Shimmer. Whoever they were before going in, they've been annihilated... and yet, something of them remains. Enough of them remains to embrace, ready to live on, to move on. To change even further. So yeah, this was a pretty basic analysis and you have my apologies if I glossed over something, but wow. This movie is a hell of a movie. Check it out, make your own reading, your own deep dives, and like... enjoy and stuff. God we really only have three of these left, huh?

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 27 (Godzilla 2000)

I swear, Toho's Godzilla output post-1984 was designed to trip me up and confuse me. The movie titled Godzilla vs. Biollante isn't a big dumb campy monster brawl movie, but a thoughtful introspective look at Japan's changing times and its spirituality. Godzilla 2000, a title that doesn't promise much other than Godzilla in the year 2000, is the kind of campy monster movie. This is also, somehow, Toho's "response" to the 1998 American Godzilla. Which is a movie I actually kind of like, for nostalgic teenage reasons. Yeah, according to the history, Toho was kind of done with Godzilla in the 90's and they let Roland Emmerich and Tri-Star play with him in the hopes they'd do something interesting. Given that Godzilla 1998 is about as beloved as, say, Castlevania II, Toho was pressed into giving the big stompy boy another shot. What they crafted ended up going for another six movies, a whole "Millennium Series" if you will that culminates in some sort of goddamned 50th anniversary special where Godzilla fights all of the monsters. I hear things about it, so we won't tread there. Instead let's see what we can make of Godzilla 2000.


Well, it fires on all cylinders from the word go. No slow burn, no thoughtful human drama setting it up, just... HEY FUCKERS IT'S GODZILLA! TWO THOUSAAAAAND!!! I should clarify, the original version was released in 1999 but it was still called Godzilla 2000. This will be important in a moment. What have we got here? A bunch of Godzilla trainspotters, in a sense, called the Godzilla Prediction Network, who go out hunting for Godzilla so they can warn people to evacuate or whatnot. It's interesting, then, that the trio here kind of slot into the same roles as people from the 1998 Godzilla? You've got the sciencey guy, his science colleague, and his reporter friend. Sure, the science colleague role is his daughter instead of a potential second love interest, but you can see the parallels. In doing more research, it's strange to see that certain plot elements from later episodes of Godzilla: The Series (the Saturday morning cartoon that was the sequel to the 1998 film, for those of you keeping score at home) show up here. Hmm. For all the Internet will rally over yelling that the 1998 film "doesn't count", a lot of it sure did show up in proper Toho Godzilla, huh? Hmmm. Anyway, I gotta give props to the opening bits here. We've seen Godzilla attack by night before, but this is a foggy night. The hazy half-formed glimpses of a giant thing attacking from a veil of fog? Holy fuck. This is atmospheric as all hell. It's definitely something I've never seen before.


Speaking of things I've never seen before, A GIANT FLOATING ROCK! That's Godzilla's nemesis in this movie. A giant floating rock that gets lifted out from under the sea by a research team, and is actually some sort of alien spaceship which lay dormant underwater for millions of years until science re-activated it with light. There's a line from the scientist who led that team where he laments his folly, and I'm like... Wait, that doesn't quite track with me. A folly is when you go against Japanese spirituality to play God and put your daughter's essence into a giant plant monster. You were just like, exploring the ocean and found a cool meteorite. Not quite the same. It's when the alien ship hacks into Japan's computers to assimilate data on Godzilla and Earth and whatnot that we get our window into the current anxiety within this movie. It's so cute, this. You probably got it already, but like... a movie made in 1999 that has all of the computers going berserk and freaking out. It's Godzilla taking on the metaphor of anxiety over fucking Y2K! The shit where we all thought every computer was going to self-destruct because they'd roll over to 1900 or some shit! Oh my god! That's such an of its time concern, and it only adds to the charm of this movie. It really just wants to be a fun sort of "don't take it too seriously" romp with alien spaceships and the Y2K bug as alien infection (and indeed, the aliens' goal is to kickstart a new 1000-year empire, right at the cusp of the year 2000, so add in a bit of era changing only for the calendar year). Oh, and think of this too: th ship eventually assimilates Godzilla's DNA and mutates itself into a Godzilla-like creature with amazing regeneration powers. Kind of like the movie drawing inspiration from 1998's film? God, even the design of the monster, Orga, kind of looks like the Amercian Godzilla if you stare hard enough. It's wild, it's gonzo, it's a little visceral near the end... and it's actually kinda fun. I wouldn't call it my favorite Godzilla film, but you know what? You can have a good time with it. I think that's enough talking about giant monsters for this year.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 26 (Godzilla Vs. Biollante)

FEED ME, SEYMOUR!

Boy, this one eluded me for a bit. I mean the things it's doing really just flew right past me on the first watch. I won't lie. It took me no less than a messup leading to an anxious episode, a few days of thoughtful pondering, and plenty of study and discussion before I was ready to give this another go. I won't go into that any further, and will instead ask a simple hypothetical: What does Godzilla vs. Biollante represent? Luckily for me, there was a nice big easy metaphor for me to hang my coat on with every other Godzilla film I've covered. The original is an obvious parallel with Japan's horror over having atomic weapons used against them. Godzilla 1984 reboots the series and uses the original to parallel with the anxieties of the Cold War, and Japan being caught in the middle. Shin Godzilla is, among many other things, tackling the specifics of government's responsibility in the midst of a natural disaster. Godzilla vs. Biollante, on the other hand, has no immediate massive historical event for you to hang your metaphors on. Well, if you're from North America and not thinking very hard about it, that is. Even the title may fool you into thinking this is one of those sort of goofy kaiju battle movies, and if you go in expecting that you will be disappointed. What is here, upon much closer reflection and attempts to understand the particulars of another culture's sensibilities and anxieties of the time, is quite interesting. Allow me to lay out a few of them, in brief.


The major thing underpinning it all is the generational change. The change in emperors in 1989 led to a change in "eras" of Japan, so to speak. So, 1989 was the start of the Heisei era in Japan, and this led to certain anxieties over Japan's place in the world and what this changing of the guard would mean. So, this manifests in a few ways in the movie. You have the older characters musing on their place in this new age, and a focus on the youthful energy of the next generation. You can see this with the military commanders: Gondo of the old guard is a burned-out man with some skepticism of the new way of doing things, and it's Kuroki, the new guy in charge of Godzilla defense, who proves himself with lots of new ideas and inventions and whatnot to protect Japan from Godzilla. Not all of them work perfectly, mind, but he's proving what the new guard can do. This theme is far stronger when we get to the character of Miki, who's an esper with psychic powers. Psychic powers? In a Godzilla movie? Yeah. Makes you go "huh?" at first, but it fits with this theme. Think Gundam and the Newtypes. Never seen Gundam? Well uh. Newtypes are the natural evolution of humanity as they venture out into space. Very abridged version as I'm not here to talk about Gundam, but Miki and the espers are the heart and soul of the new generation, with their powers attuning them both to sense Godzilla and giving them a sense of the spiritual world... which brings us to Biollante.


Putting Biollante's origin on paper makes it sound completely ridiculous. A scientist who lost his daughter Erika five years prior combines the regenerative cells of Godzilla with both the DNA of a rose and his dead daughter, creating what eventually becomes a massive goddamned floral kaiju that transforms into an Audrey II-looking thing by film's end. Now what in the fuck is going on here? The answer is an innate sense of Japanese spirituality. Erika isn't really gone in the traditional sense. Her father, Dr. Shirigami, has her cells, and according to Japanese spiritual beliefs every part of us is imbued with our soul. He's bringing her back to life, and effectively making her immortal thanks to those Godzilla cells. It can be tempting to read this as some sort of Jurassic Park-like moral about the folly of genetic engineering, but Shiragami's fault isn't so much playing God as it is going against the natural harmony of spirituality. Indeed, by giving this creature life with Godzilla cells, Godzilla resonantes within Biollante as well. They're the same cells, so they're the same creature and that essence takes over eventually. Godzilla is a vengeful engine of destruction, and so Biollante throwing down with it is eventual. The kaiju fights, though brief, are real brutal and visceral in this one. If you do enjoy a good monster spectacle, these bits are pretty good for that. There's so much more I could cover, like the espionage subplot that takes up a good chunk of the movie (presumably because the people in charge really wanted some James Bond-esque action)) but I think I'll leave a lot of it for you all to discover. If you're looking for a long and drawn-out clash of the monsters? This ain't it, chief. If you are looking for a surprisingly thoughtful and introspective film about Japanese sensibilities circa 1989 which happens to have some monster fights? This is a good one to throw on. Nice one, Toho.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 25 (House [1977])

Wow. Whoa. Wow. Whoa. Wow. Whoa. Before we begin, I'm going to be upfront. I am not going to do this movie justice with words. I don't have them. I do not have the words. I'm going to say something about it, but it won't scratch the surface of what in the holy fuck I put in front of my eyeballs (with great difficulty and generosity from others), not by a fraction. I've wanted to cover this one for years. James Rolfe (remember him?) covered it for his Monster Madness marathon one year and it stuck in my mind. "That one Japanese horror movie from the 70's that's totally bonkers or something, I should do that for 31 Screams.". Well. Here we fucking are. The hand on the monkey's paw curls. I have watched House, and I don't know what the fuck. It's not that this movie is bad. It's not even that it's absurd. I'll make a bold claim, but it's a true one. This is the single most surreal thing I have ever seen in my life. I use that word in its literal sense. Surrealism. A bizarre mix of elements, often jarring and nonsensical. House is as fitting a definition for this as I've ever laid eyes on.


I use both surrealism and the phrase "laid eyes on" in their literal senses. House's plot, as James Rolfe notes in that handy video I linked (which gives you a visual idea of how wild this thing is, but more on that in a second), is pretty standard. Teenage girls visit an old house and a bunch of supernatural shit happens. Okay, I'm oversimplifying. Even the girls are strange and surreal, only referred to by nicknames for their traits. So we've got Gorgeous, Fantasy, Sweet, Kung Fu, et cetera. It's an odd choice, but it works. Somehow. Right, let's get to it. Let's just say it. The cinematography and editing of House is fucking surreal as almighty fuck. Like it might as well be on the fucking moon for how unconventional and gonzo it is. I am literally ill-equipped to talk about all the tricks it does, but let me try and rattle a few off the top of my head. Lush backdrops and matte paintings. Flawless edits without cuts from one scene to another. Characters from a totally different scene popping into frame at the end of the preceding one. The frame rate dropping randomly for an entire scene. A flashback done in old film reel style that the girls riff over as we watch. That's barely scratching the surface. If you can handle a spooky film, please for the love of God just look at this thing. It's incredible and I am simultaneously blown away and completely baffled at what I just saw. Still, I have to make a stab at analysis.


I didn't even get to the horror of House yet. Make no mistake, despite the never-ending cinematic trickery making it feel like some kind of lucid dream, this is a horror movie. It keeps your interest for its first half-hour with its surrealism, but you also know it's a horror movie so you're wondering just how horrific it can be on top of that. WELL. Let me tell you some tricks. A girl's severed head laughing before biting another girl's ass. A piano eating a girl's fingers before eating the whole girl as she comments on her own devouring and her fingers continue playing. MORE WILD SHIT INVOLVING MIRRORS AND FIRE. There's a lot of very specific Japanese symbolism and thematic resonance at play too, like the nature of generational passing of the torch and spirituality. Well, that first one is corrupted because the old guard in this movie is Gorgeous's aunt, who is literally a ghost that eats young unmarried girls and remains alive because of a promise made to her husband who died in World War 2. The resentment and bitter feelings of a ghost from the turbulent years of the war, literally eating the next generation who grew up without such horrors. Holy shit. It's a grim story, amidst all the absolutely surreal stuff, but it's one worth looking at. That's... that's really all I have, I think. My words can't do it justice. Maybe the words of others can, but it has to be seen to be believed. See it. Believe it. God, what a thing.