The Haunting is a 1963 horror film directed by Robert Wise of STTMP fame. OK, he also did The Sound of Music and West Side Story and The Andromeda Strain and a bunch of other films, but I wanted to impress you with my knowledge of that particular acronym. Anyway, the basic story is: haunted house, four people sleep over in the house, one of them so choked up with psychic pain that she's eventually assumed by the house, which causes her to commit suicide. Sounds great, right? Sucks dick.
The biggest problem with the film is that nothing scary happens in the haunted house. Sure, there are some creepy noises and doors that close on their own, but no demented furry action or elevators filled with blood or any of that stuff. The biggest special effect in the film is a door that bends inward, as if made of rubber. Actually, no "as if," since the effect was accomplished with a rubber door, but the effect is pretty convincing and spooky. Of course, that's the only really scary thing that the house does. Apart from creek and be filmed from wacky angles. Apparently the New Wave was thoroughly infested with poltergeists.
As for the troubled individual - she's a doormat of a woman who's taken care of her invalid mother for the past 11 years and whose life, especially her romantic life, was consequently ruined. Fans of American serial killers may remember another individual warped by constant doting care of his aged and infirm mother. Whereas Ed Gein took to grave robbing, necrophilia, and dancing in the moonlight naked save for a ghoulish garment woven from dead flesh (a fine metaphor for life, that), this chick gets googly-eyed at a professor type and offers endless insufferable voice overs that sound like they were lifted straight from the book. Much like Dune, her character's inner dialogue, which was no doubt a key part of the original novel, has been turned into a voice over which, in being dreadful, is the only thing in the movie with an iota of dread.
The movie also has Russ Tamblyn, the 3-D glassed shrink in Twin Peaks, acting as a bemused skeptic. He has a little on screen heat with Claire Bloom, who looks quite tasty in a bitter, self-loathing sort of way. She was Hera in Clash of the Titans and Gertrude in the BBC/Derek Jacobi Hamlet, but it's been so long since I've seen either of these, I can't say I remember her. Anyway, these two are barely in the film, and instead of their real chemistry, we get tons of the shitty voiceover.
Basically, The Haunting is The Shining, but bereft of anything scary, interesting, or exciting, and with a rubber door.
The doormat is played by Julie Harris, who played Ophelia in Alfred Ryder's unforgettable 1964 filmed Hamlet. Yeah, I had no clue myself about this one, either. Julie was also Nora in a screen adaptation of A Doll's House, so clearly she was seen as an exessively passive woman.
Alfred Ryder was in apparently every cop show in the 70's, and played Professor Crater in STTOS' The Man Trap. I remember the episode, but not him.
A few moments later...
Wow, after reading the imdb comments, I discover that Claire Bloom's character is a lesbian. I hate when I don't get shit like this, but in my defense, I have to say that Julie Harris is extremely unappealing, and Russ Tamblyn so charming, that I just didn't see any chemistry between Harris and Bloom. Shit, I hate missing things like that, but then I'm no good at understanding interpersonal relationships, so what do I know.
Actually, I know exactly what the deal is - being sophisticated and metropolitan and generally anything other than hick or midwestern or simple is fucking code for gay in movies from this time, and jesus, that can get confusing. I mean, I'm sitting there thinking that Claire Bloom's just cool and sophisticated, not gay cool and sophisticated. And with her little banter with Russ Tamblyn, the only other actor in the film with a fucking pulse, I just thought it was a sex deal because the other two suck so very hard. And when Bloom starts being a bitch to Harris, I just assumed it was because Harris sucked such goat testicle, not because of a spurned advance.
God DAMN, that annoys me.
Anyway, the imdb comments tend to be "excellent atmospheric horror - who needs all them cgi or all that nasty gore to be scary?" While I have no problem bashing gratuitous cgi, I do like blood and guts to a certain extent, and am generally annoyed by the disdain it's shown. Anyway, I found nothing chilling about the flick. You want a scary psychological thriller in b/w? Go see Night of the Hunter, that's a fine one. Better yet, fucking Carnival of Souls fucking rocks the party!
These people are really bitching about the rise of the slasher film, which brought with it buckets of blood and the realistic-to-surreal presentation of harm done to the human body. Think gouged eyes, decapitations, open arteries spurting red syrup. It is true that there are many very bad slasher films. The entire Friday the 13th series is unbelievably bad. But there's more there than just blood and guts. And that blood and guts stuff, it's there for a reason.
Last House on the Left comes out in 1972, and was directed by Wes Craven, who later started two different successful horror film franchises - the Nightmare on Elm Street series and the Scream series. Last House on the Left is a very brutal film. It's the story of some teenage girls who fall in with a Manson-family-ish group of whackos who rape and kill them in some really nasty, brutal scenes. These guys are then themselves whacked in equally nasty, brutal scenes by the avenging parents of one of the girls. This movie is intense in an "I Spit on your Grave" sort of way - horrible, explicit violence showing unblinkingly how awful one human being can be to another.
What happened in those 9 years between The Haunting and Last House? Fucking Vietnam, that's what. People saw graphic footage on a regular basis, in awful color, displaying just how horrific real people can be. Bloodied stumps, great red gashes, all sorts of bodily integrity violations were being depicted in news films of the war. These images entered the film canon.
Naked two year olds wandering around with half the skin burned off their bodies. Once images like this have been shown in full color in motion pictures, how can they not be used in cinema? Art is one of the ways we deal with reality, and how can images like these just exist without commentary, without interpretation? These images demanded a response. Craven will talk about it, that his style of realistic violence was a reaction to, among other thigns, Vietnam. Regardless, horror films didn't start the red red kroovy, but they certainly started using it with greater abandon as the restriction on filmed content eased.
Tom Savini has done countless gore effects for films like Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Deranged, Friday the 13th 1 and 4, Texas Chainsaw 2, and a film released in Canada as Soif de Sang (god bless the imdb). There's even a Simpsons reference to him as the master of gore effects. As a kid, he loved movie monsters and movie monster makeup, shit like Frankenstein. He also served in Nam. There, he saw a bunch of very realistic and bloody damage to the human body. In an interesting coping mechanism, he began to create artificial versions of the real wounds that he saw. His model was the real thing, and he ended up bringing realistic and extremely graphic gore to the screen through his practical special effects.
Vietnam was a horrible thing, and that horror ended up on screen. Yes the movies became bloodier and more grotesque in the atrocities committed to human bodies. But it was all firmly rooted in reality.
The other thing I want to note about the slasher flicks is that they tend to use more realistic killers. That is, their killers are generally real people as opposed to apparitions, often based on serial killer Ed Gein (who inspired, among other films, Psycho, Chainsaw, and Silence of the Lambs, three of the most notable horror films ever), or are otherwise psychologically deranged, ectoplasmless human beings.
That is, you don't have to suspend your disbelief in ghosts in order to enjoy these films. Which is a bit of a problem for me, particularly when the ghosts are doing nothing more than banging around hallways. Having heard freaky noises, I know that they're usually an unfortunate combination of one's imagination and the wind or creaky joints. A guy with a chainsaw dicing up a coed can't be explained away so easily.
Slasher flicks come from a desire to be more realistic, to show the horror that can and does exist. Perhaps it's distilled to less-realistic extremes, but the foundation is very much tied to reality. There are no such things as ghosts except in stories, whereas a grave robbing ghoul who killed people and made dresses out of human skin really did exist. His name was Ed Gein.
The other interesting point about The Haunting in the imdb's comment section argues that the film is basically A Doll's House with ghosts. That is, Harris has been so ruined by the social roles forced upon her that she has no choice but to accept ghostly residence in the haunted house. So the film is a critique of the limited social roles available to women. I can see that, I think that's kinda neat, and if I didn't want to beat in Harris' skull with a baseball bat after every single fucking voiceover telling me that she's scared and conflicted, maybe I could enjoy the film on that level. But, alas, I have been so corrupted by countless slasher films as to wish that bloody fate upon Ms. Harris. Also, the fact that she chooses, even when faced with the possibility of living a cooler, liberated lifestyle a la Bloom, to be sucked into her own neurosis kills my joy. Now, being sucked into neurosis and such, these are things that I generally enjoy in a film, but it's hard for me to see this as a critique of society when there are clearly other options available to Harris.
Anyway, I've written way more about a movie I didn't like than I intended, and I did want to hit on another movie, The Night Porter, since I was talking to Gomen about it.
The Night Porter takes place in 1957 Vienna, where Dirk Bogarde, ex-Nazi, resumes a passionate affair with an ex-campee, Charlotte Rampling. Bogarde's friends, ex Nazis themselves, decide that she needs to be whacked to prevent her from testifying. Bogarde doesn't like this, so he sets up fort in his apartment where he and Rampling fuck and fuck until they run out of food, start to starve, and then fuck some more. Then he gets dolled up as a Nazi, she as a schoolgirl, they go outside and get shot by the other Nazis. 1974 Italian.
The imdb comments that don't like the film tend to be either "trivializes the Holocaust with this preposterous relationship!" or "Soft core porn with a bit of S/M and Nazis to make it art house fare."
The thing doesn't have nearly enough sex to qualify as soft core porn, and the S/M angle is more creative than the abbreviation sounds. Yes, there is a chain in the movie, but no whips, and most of the pain stuff tends to flow pretty naturally from the scene, it's not a contrivance like handcuffs and "Who's a naughtie doggie?" spankings.
As for the reality of the relationship, well, I buy it. Victims falling in love with their tormentors? Yup, it happens. Did this scenario in particular ever happen? Beats me, but there was not nearly enough done to round up Nazis after the war, so I think the meeting's plausible enough, as is the society of ex-Nazis. The love thing? It's pretty bold, but hey, stranger things have happened. There's this one guy who lived in Wisconsin who....but anyway.
Dirk is great in the movie as a somewhat effete ol' fuhrophile. He played von Aschenbach in Visconti's Death in Venice in 1971. DiV and TNP are fairly similar films. The basic idea in Porter is that art and sex and, generally, passions consume the main characters with such power and irrationality that they end up willfully destroying themselves in their enjoyment. You'd rather be holed up under siege with your little Bergen-Belsen Betty than let her get die while you live to fuck again. Art in these films is something akin to sex, as it's presented as a similarly consuming passion. So there's also lots of ballet and opera and such that gets gone to.
Which happens in Thomas Mann a lot, too, though Mann's a lot better at making a coherent and convincing point about a person consuming themselves in art and sex. In Night Porter, there's a lot of sex and a lot of the opera, but the twain don't quite meet so well. Night Porter also toploads all the artsy faggy shit, so it can be hard to take at the beginning. Also like Mann, there's a little dalliance with discussing homosexual behavior, similarly poorly integrated into the plot.
At the end, though, you like Bogarde enough that you dig on the whole Tristan and Isolde sad, ill-fated lover deal and generally go for the film. There's also an interesting scene in which Rampling's entertaining a bunch of ss officers by singing an old Marlene Dietrich torch song at them whilst wearing pinstriped slacks, suspenders, an ss hat, long black gloves and nothing else (not even shoes! What if there's broken glass on the ground?). So she's singing to Bogarde and his crew and he presents her with the head of another camp guard she didn't like. Bogarde then talks about how this is analogous to the story of Salome. But she's really hot dressed as a sexy Nazi, so I guess I buy it a bit better than it sounds like I should.
That's pretty much what I'd say of the movie. Bogarde and Rampling are so fucking good they sell it, no matter how ludicrous it seems, and it doesn't seem that ludicrous to me. Anyway, their performances are good, and I now want to see lots of Dirk Bogarde films. I also like just saying his name. Dirk Bogarde.
So, if you've made it to the end of this extended entry, I might as well entertain you with something appropriate, a very good passage from Mann's The Magic Mountain. In it, the protagonist listens to music whilst holed up in a tb hospital/resort in the mountains. I think he's listening to Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, but I'll let you judge that. Anyway, first Hans is listening to Aida....
The consoling power of beauty to gloss things over did its listener a great deal of good and contributed much to his special fondnes for this segment of his favorite concert.
It was his habit to relax from this terror and radiance by playing a second piece of brief, but concentrated charm - much more peaceful than the first, an idyll, but an exquisite idyll, painted and assembled with all the intricate economy of contemporary art. Purely instrumental, with no vocals, it was a symphonic prelude of French provenance, scored for a small ensemble, at least by modern standards, yet fitted out with all the tricks of modern tone coloring and cleverly calculated to set the soul spinning a web of dreams.
This was the dream that Hans Castorp dreamed: He was lying on his back on a meadow sparkling in the sun and strewn with colorful asters, a little mound of earth under his head, one leg pulled up slightly, the other laid across it - and, let it be noted, they were the legs of a goat. Just for the pure joy of it, since he was quite alone on the meadow, he let his fingers play at the stops of a woodwind he held to his lips, a clarinet or reed pipe, from which he coaxed gentle, nasal tones, one after the other, purely at random, and yet in a satisfying sequence that rose carelessley into the deep blue sky, beneath which the foliage of a few solitary birches and ashes flickered in the sun as the breeze brushed past. And yet his tranquil semi-melody, his impulsive doodlings, were not the only voice in the solitude for very long. Insects humming in the hot summer air above the grasses, the sunshine itself, the soft breeze, the rustling treetops, the flickering foliage - the whole gently swaying, peaceful, summery scene around him became a blend of sounds that gave ever-changing, constantly surprising harmonic meaning to his simple pipings. The symphonic accompaniment sometimes fell away into silence; but goat-footed Hans continued to blow his naive, monotonous air and lure exquisitely colored, magical tones from nature - until finally, after a long pause, a series of new instrumental voices entered, tumbling rapidly, each higher than the other, their timbres rising in self-surmounting sweetness, until every richness, every fullness held back up to now, was realized for one fleeting moment, which contained within it the perfect blissful pleasures of eternity. The young faun was very happy on his summer meadow. There was no "defend yourself" here, no responsibility, no war tribunal of priests judging someone who had forgotten his honor, lost it somehow. It was depravity with the best of consciences, the idealized apotheosis of a total refusal to obey Western demands for an active life. To our nocturnal musician's ears, this one piece's soothing effects made it worth many others.
Posted by mattb at December 03, 2003 05:02 AM