Black Gate

I had two movies to see on Friday, July 29. The first, perfectly fitting the small De Sève Theatre, was The Witch in the Window, a quiet character-centred horror film. The second was another live-action manga adaptation, Ajin: Demi-Human, a fast-paced explosion-oriented semi-super-hero story which fit the larger Hall Theatre as well as The Witch in the Window suited the De Sève. I had certain hopes for both, and in both cases those hopes were wildly exceeded. These are two excellent movies, of very different kinds.

The Witch in the Window is written and directed by Andy Mitton, whose very fine film We Go On I saw two years ago at Fantasia. Like that movie, this is a humanistic and even warm horror film, a personal meditation on fear and death. The Witch In the Window follows Simon (Alex Draper), a divorced father who has bought a house in the Vermont countryside; he plans to fix it up and flip it for a profit. To help him make over the house he brings along his son, 12-year-old Finn (Charlie Tacker). Finn recently slipped his mother’s control online and saw something deeply disturbing, so Simon hopes to bond with him as they work on the house. Finn’s less interested in this, but in any case Simon’s plans have an unexpected complication: the house is, allegedly, haunted, by an old woman who was a previous occupant and died staring out an upper window. As the two work on the house, the presence in the house becomes impossible to ignore. Can either escape the witchery of the spirit?

This is very much a classic haunted house movie, with a definite old-fashioned (but intensely effective) approach. There are no jump scares. There is no gore whatsoever. We are frightened for these characters because we are frightened for these characters. We know them, we care about them, we don’t want to see horror-movie things happen to them. It takes a certain kind of self-assuredness to try to make that sort of horror film, I think, and here it pays off. This is a movie that dares to bring the traditional haunted-house story into the modern day. It doesn’t shy away from cell phones and the internet — in fact, a cell phone’s central to one of the film’s spookiest moments. The movie’s not afraid of the modern world, which is something it embraces in its story, something resonant with its themes: the refurbishing of the old, the evocation and transformation of a spirit.

Note that the cinematography’s accordingly excellent, as it must be: atmospheric yet precise, establishing both age and technology as needed, old wood and power tools and portable lights. There’s a sense of the architecture of the house, of its layout, of its narrowness and shadows. There’s a sense of the forested grounds around it, warm and green yet isolating. The sunlight of Vermont, its moods and angles, is captured so well as to almost be another character. The framing’s unobtrusively correct; the film grammar here is as knowing in its tones as the prose of an M. R. James story. This is a movie confident enough to let some of its most frightening moments (especially early on) happen without drawing attention to them. If you’re observant, you’ll notice certain things in the frame that the characters do not, and as they play out the scene oblivious to the horror watching them the tension grows, and you can only wait, and wait, and wait.

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On the evening of Thursday, July 26, I made my way to the Cinémathèque Québécois, well east of the main Fantasia theatres, for a screening of a film classic. Fantasia was presenting Mario Bava’s classic 1964 horror-mystery film Blood and Black Lace (Sei donne per l’assassino). It’s one of the first giallo films, a genre of surreal thriller particularly identified with Italian directors. This was the original 88-minute Italian version, restored by Arrow Films for their recent blu-ray edition of the film.

First came a short written and directed by Frédéric Chalté, “Le otto dita della morte.” It’s a trailer for a never-made giallo film, and a fun four-minute run-through of the genre hallmarks. Full, rich colour; split-screen images; a gloved hand; it’s a clever homage to the giallo tradition. The soundtrack was I thought particularly strong.

Bava’s Blood and Black Lace has a script by Bava, Giuseppe Barilla, and Marcello Fondato concerning murders in and around a fashion house. The house, managed by the duo of Max Morlan (Cameron Mitchell) and his lover, the Countess Christina Como (Eva Bartok), is based in a rich old mansion and employs a number of beautiful models, one of whom, Isabella (Francesca Ungaro), is murdered by a killer in a featureless mask. Her diary comes to light, a key to the secrets of the fashion house, which involve abortions and blackmail and cocaine. More murders follow as characters scramble and conspire to get the diary. One character’s tortured. Meanwhile the police are helpless. It all ends in death and betrayal.

The plot’s complex, but not as strange as the movie’s reputation led me to expect. While intricate, it’s perfectly comprehensible, and even possible for a watcher to work out ahead of time. The biggest surprise is the lack of exploration of character — there are a lot of faces at the fashion house, but few show a detailed personality behind them before they end up dead. In this way the narrative of the movie comes to feel a little dreamlike; it’s not confusing, but the way characters are introduced and then disposed of is unusual. At less than an hour and a half, it moves quickly enough that it’s difficult to anchor oneself in any one character — it’s hard to find a traditional lead character here until the film’s over and we realise the killer’s motives.

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I had two movies on my schedule for Wednesday, July 25. The first was The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion, a Korean action movie with super-hero elements. The second was a German-language Swiss movie called Blue My Mind, about a teenager moving to a new school and finding herself undergoing a strange metamorphosis. Both films were about young women, and both leads had elements of the inhuman to them. But these things were expressed in very different ways.

The Witch is written and directed by Park Hoon-jung. It begins with mysterious assassins killing gifted children, and one child escaping under cover of night. Ten years later, Ja-yoon (Kim Da-mi) lives in a small town with her adopted parents, hiding her telekinetic powers. But then she wins a nationally-televised talent competition, and the mysterious forces that threatened her when young find her again. Agents of various sorts draw closer to her and her family. Can her powers save her, and them?

This is a fast, intelligent, well-shot film with elements of thriller and super-hero story. It explodes into violence at the end after a build-up of increasing tension, and we neither miss the action earlier nor feel it unearned when it comes. Over two hours long (with a listed running time of 126 minutes), it passes by like a shot. The craftsmanship’s excellent and the pacing’s near-perfect, both in terms of the selection of scenes and also in the rhythm of the editing. Emotional moments come up and are allowed to breathe, but give way to more action-driven sequences in a way that feels natural.

Kim’s acting has to be mentioned here, as her Ja-yoon drives the film and keeps things interesting. She’s quick, funny, and interesting; when we find out what the actual story is behind her and her powers we get a new dimension of understanding to what we’ve already seen, but the point is that Kim’s able to give everyday scenes with Ja-yoon’s family and her best friend (Go Min-si) real interest. Park helps that by keeping a constant sense of tension, establishing mysterious villains and adroitly cutting to them to keep the audience on edge.

I will admit at this point that I’m talking around the story of the film, and that is because there’s a fair-play twist fairly late in the story that’s executed quite well and recontextualises much of what we thought we saw. It’s perfectly logical and, when it’s sprung on us, instantly makes perfect sense. I’d say it’s a good twist because it’s not simply a plot twist — character and theme are definitely involved, and all these aspects of the story benefit. I can say no more, except to observe that The Witch has a well-written and sharply-conceived script; and this twist feels of a piece.

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After a comment I made on John O’Neill’s Facebook post regarding John Searle’s July 25 Black Gate article Conjure Puberty: The Sword and the Sorcerer (from 1982), Mister O’Neill asked me to do an article on some of the other films of that decade. Naturally, I said I would be happy to. I decided to write about only a handful of the films I’ve seen: my impressions and opinions are based solely on what I remember about them, having decided not to watch said films again.

In the 1980s I was in my 30s and naturally of a different “mindset” back then. If I ever do watch any of these films again, that could possibly inspire another article about what I think of certain films now that I’m in my mid-60s. My only source of research is Wikipedia, just to refresh my aging memory as to plot, year a film was released, cast, director, etc. Some of these films I’m sure are held in high regard by many people, and I’ll be probably be shooting a few “sacred cows” here. But remember: this is all based on thoughts, memories and impressions from three decades ago.

All that being said, let’s get started. Shall we?

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Late in the evening of Tuesday, July 24, I made my way to the J.A. De Sève Theatre for my one film of the day: Violence Voyager, an 83-minute animated feature by Japanese writer-director Ujicha. We follow an American schoolboy in Japan, Bobby (Aoi Yuki), as he and his friend explore some hills near his home. They find a strange, nearly-abandoned amusement park, but upon entering find themselves caught up in a terrible scheme. They and other children are captured, mutilated, mutated, and (in many cases) killed. Can Bobby free himself and others, and destroy the horrible place called Violence Voyager?

The first and overwhelming impression of the movie is of a dissonant strangeness. There’s a tone like a children’s story that seems destined to give way to something darker, and indeed it does, but then that darkness itself is hardly taken seriously. There’s a weird unconcern with traditional narrative effects at the same time that the structure’s remarkably tight. It’s not like much else I’ve seen, for better and worse.

Consider the animation style. It’s an unusual form called gekimation, which involves moving flat images. Lips don’t move, faces don’t shift. Shapes are moved about, and cuts give a further illusion of movement. This works better than one might think, especially once a few minutes have passed and the viewer’s assimilated the approach. Occasionally actual fluids or the like are used as visual elements as well, but mainly one watches painted pieces of paper slide over backgrounds. The art style’s intriguingly organic, with every brushstroke visible. I personally thought it was interesting without being attractive, but I can see how it could appeal more strongly to others.

As a story, there’s a sort of tension between horror and satire. It is genuinely transgressive, with all sorts of horror inflicted on children. There are genuinely surprising images here, as for example a rack of dead nude children (and the explicit nudity in some sequences is occasionally more surprising than the violence). And yet it feels muted, almost, by the thoroughgoing irony of the film. It avoids outright death-metal grotesquerie in place of its own kind of strangeness, and somehow never feels as confrontational as it seems to aim for. The early air of an optimistic children’s cartoon is never wholly abandoned, and rather than heighten the air of monstrosity, I find it functions as an alienation effect — it swathes the movie in a distancing irony, lessening the immediacy of everything we see.

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It’s unfortunate that Alpha was delayed for a year, given little promotion, and released among more attention-grabbing late summer fare, because it is a literally awesome film — as in the jaw drops in awe at the beauty of it.

The story is a basic one: the young hunter out to prove his leadership who goes through an ordeal trying to get back home with the help of a dog companion. The basic beats of the tale won’t surprise most viewers. But Albert Hughes (the first time he’s directed without his brother Allen) shoots it with intense passion, as if he’s striving for 2001: A Space Odyssey levels of vast transcendentalism — while also appreciating the action/adventure qualities of One Million Years B.C.

It’s rough, strange, dream-like, and both one of the best dog movies and prehistory movies ever made.

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Yesterday I reviewed three of the movies I saw on Monday, July 23. Today I’ve written up my notes on the post-film question-and-answer sessions with the director of all three, Shinsuke Sato. All of what follows comes from my handwritten notes, and so may contain errors that crept in due to my hearing or transcription skills. Further, Sato spoke in Japanese, which was translated into either English or French depending on what language the questioner used, and while my French is competent enough that I caught most of the answers in the first two sessions, by the time the third session wrapped up it was near or past midnight.

First came zombie-apocalypse horror film I Am a Hero. Sato was asked how the movie was accepted by the producers and backers, and he said that it was rare to have this sort of film in the mainstream in Japan. Since roughly 2000, TV stations have been financing films, and they prefer material aimed at a more general audience. This film was backed by Toho, who wanted to make something that could not be made by a TV station. It was a good fit for Sato, as he’d made the two live-action Gantz films with Toho a dozen years before.

Asked if it was important to him to be respectful of the manga, he said the manga was unique; the film ran the risk of coming off as a simple zombie movie. Sato wanted to make a zombie film a little unlike any made before, while the manga creator put a certain amount of pressure on him by asking him simply to make a zombie film he would like. Asked about how he came up with the idea of zombies with a personality (carrying on with what they were obsessed with in life), Sato said that was in the manga, although he imagined a few of his own for the film. He said it was important for him to make Japanese zombies, creatures in some way distinct from American zombies. Zombies often come as hordes, individuals indistinct from each other, but he wanted to have each be individual.

He was asked about an early scene in the film, when Hideo has to confront his girlfriend, Tekko, who has been turned into a zombie; and specifically how he created her uncanny movement. Sato noted that Tekko was a high jumper in the original, and that he wanted to capture that energy. As the first zombie to appear in the film, she would have a high impact. He said he used three people to get her across, the actress, a stunt double, and a contortionist who is in the Guinness World Records. Asked about the lack of narrative payoff for the character of Hiromi, Sato said he’d cut a scene at the end that would have explained she was a hybrid who was the key to curing the virus. He decided it was more important to keep the focus on Hideo’s character arc rather than ruin the flow with explanations.

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I had three consecutive movies I wanted to watch on July 23. All three came from director Shinsuke Sato, all three were live-action manga adaptations, and all three were followed by question-and-answer sessions with Sato (the first at the De Sève Theatre, the second two at the larger Hall). I’ll write up what he had to say about his films in a separate post tomorrow. Today, my impressions of the movies themselves: the zombie apocalypse thriller I Am a Hero, the supernatural epic Bleach, and the science-fictional super-hero movie Inuyashiki. Note that I have read precisely none of the original works these movies were based on, and can speak only to the films I saw.

I Am a Hero (Ai Amu a Hiro, アイアムアヒーロー) was written by Akiko Nogi based on the manga by Kengo Hanazawa. Hideo (Yo Oizumi, Tokyo Ghoul) is a 35-year-old assistant to a manga creator, his aspirations and dreams dead or dying. Then the world suffers a zombie apocalypse from the spread of a deadly virus. Survivors flee to the top of Mount Fuji, because the virus can’t survive in the rarified air high up the mountain. Hideo scrambles to flee urban Tokyo, which is degenerating into mayhem; along the way he picks up a sidekick, a schoolgirl named Hiromi (Kasumi Arimura). Hiromi’s bitten by a zombie but instead of dying shows some strange powers and falls into a coma. The hapless Hideo — “the entire world changed, but I didn’t,” he groans — brings her along as he finds a community of survivors holed up in a mini-mall, and struggles to survive the tensions and suspicions he causes within the group.

The movie’s entertaining but oddly structured. The scenes early on, as Tokyo falls prey to the zombies, are fast and filled with explosions, with an epic scale that drops away for the rest of the film. Hideo’s discovery of the survivors in the mall in particular feels like a real slackening of the tension. And the climax of the film isn’t especially satisfying — it’s a big fight, but not a particularly imaginative one, and the challenges aren’t met by any new development in character or theme. It feels like more of the same rather than a rising to a satisfying end.

Moreover, on a basic plot level, more’s left unexplained and undeveloped than I’d like. Specifically, Hiromi’s powers, established early on, don’t return. She herself never wakes up from her coma. Apparently there was a scene shot for the end of the film which would have established that she held the key to a cure of the virus, but that exchange was dropped for the sake of the flow of the ending; I can understand the thinking, but that information needed to be put into the film somewhere, I think. As it is, Hiromi seems to exist mainly to show that Hideo has some spark of heroism latent within him, as he tries to save her from the madness of the world. That’s fine to a point, but effectively turns her into a plot coupon with no agency of her own.

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I had four movies on my schedule for Monday, July 23. Three of them were the work of one director. But before I got to those, I had an intriguing horror film at the J.A. De Sève Theatre to watch first: The Dark.

That screening was preceded by a short written and directed by Benjamin Swicker, “A/S/L.” I didn’t know what the title meant (an internet abbreviation for ‘age/sex/location’) and briefly thought I was about to see a film about American sign language; I was not. A middle-aged man chats up a young teenager on the internet, gets her to invite him over, and then finds out that all is not what he had thought it was. It’s competent enough, and brief, but I don’t think it gives too much away to say this is basically a vehicle for some admittedly spectacular gore effects. As such, it does the job.

The Dark was written and directed by Justin P. Lange. It’s the story of Mina (Nadia Alexander), a damaged and possibly undead girl who subsists in the woods, known by others only as a monster who kills any who enter her territory. Then one day fate brings to her an abused, blinded boy, Alex (Toby Nichols), who she doesn’t kill at once. In fact the two wounded children develop a strange bond. There’s a search afoot for Alex, though, and both police and volunteer seekers are coming into her woods. The two children go deeper into the wild, looking for some refuge together.

This is an atmospheric but highly graphic film that lets the images carry the story for long stretches. It doesn’t avoid having the characters speak to each other, but seems to invest each line with meaning. For example, it seems weirdly resonant that the first line of the movie is “You have to pay for that.” There are a lot of dark deeds done in this movie and a lot of those things come back to haunt the doer — and sometimes the sufferer. This is a movie about the cycle of abuse and characters trying, however instinctively, to move past it. But the world doesn’t make it easy, and the choices the characters make aren’t always ideal. You can literally see the damage the characters have suffered on their faces in the form of disturbing make-up effects. Whether that damage will destroy them is essentially the theme of the film.

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