Black Gate

Macbeth is one of the earliest true horror stories, in the sense of a story whose main aim is to play with the emotion of fear, and there’s a notable comic-relief scene with a gatekeeper right after the first gruesome murder. That scene became the subject of a famous essay by Thomas de Quincey arguing (roughly) that the horror’s made greater by contrast. So from the point where horror first began to emerge as a genre, storytellers have been conscious of the effect that comes from balancing horror with the everyday, and even with the comedic.

Which was in my mind on the next-to-last-day of the 2020 Fantasia Festival, which began for me with two horror-comedies. The first was a Canadian film called Anything For Jackson, which looked like it would lean more to the horror aspect. More precisely, it looked a little like Rosemary’s Baby, only in this case perhaps intentionally funny and maybe actually scary.

Directed by Justin Dyck and written by Keith Cooper, it stars Julian Richings and Sheila McCarthy as Henry and Audrey Walsh, an elderly couple still mourning the death of their daughter and her young son Jackson. As the movie opens, they’ve abducted a young pregnant woman, Becker (Konstantina Mantelos), a patient of Henry, an obstetrician. Henry and Audrey have an evil ritual that will implant Jackson’s soul in Becker’s child’s body. Whether Becker likes it or not. Becker doesn’t want a child and doesn’t want an abortion, but she also doesn’t want this. Yet her attempts to escape are only one of the complications and challenges the Walshes encounter.

This movie works because Dyck and Cooper nail the tonal balance of the horror and the comedy. The first shot is a long take, about two and a half minutes, of a nice slightly dotty older couple going about their morning routine and then abducting a terrified young woman. The shift from gentle comedy to something deeply wrong is managed well, and the movie consistently gets that shift right not only from scene to scene but within a scene as well. The pacing and the scripting are exactly right in exactly the ways they have to be.

The film looks nice, too, colours muted and shadows thick. Winter snow echoes the emotional coldness underlying the story, and emphasises the Walshes’ home as both a place of confinement and a kind of sanctuary (for the Walshes). But over the course of the film horror imagery grows, as the Walshes experiment with the Satanic text they’ve found — possibly the oldest book in the world, we’re told — and more and more innocents stumble into the story.

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Brazilian director José Mojica Marins died earlier this year at the age of 83. He made low-budget films across a number of genres, with his horror work best known. His character Coffin Joe (Zé do Caixão), introduced in the 1963 film At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (A Meia Noite eu Levarei sua Alma) is a kind of national ghoul of Brazil. Fantasia decided to honour Marins by making three of his films available on-demand through the festival, and scheduling a talk about Marins with his friend Dennison Ramalho on the last day of the festival; you can watch the talk here. I, who had never heard of Marins before this year’s Fantasia, decided to remedy my ignorance by watching the three films they were hosting back-to-back-to-back: At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, 1968’s The Strange World of Coffin Joe (O Estranho Mundo de Zé do Caixão), and 1971’s The End of Man (Finis Hominis). They’re three very different movies, and together made a fascinating experience.

What I’ve since learned about Marins from various sources: he was born in 1936 in São Paulo, and grew up making amateur 8mm and 16mm films. He released fumetti (comics with photos for illustrations), founded his own film company at 18, and in 1958 put out his first completed feature, a Western. He self-financed At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, which was based on a nightmare he’d had. Unable to find an actor for the lead role, Marins played it himself; he was already a striking figure, with fingernails grown out several inches, and for the film he added a beard, top hat, black cape and suit. Joe was an undertaker who grew obsessed with having a perfect son by the perfect woman, a character who threw overboard all morality and received ideas of good and evil in pursuit of his will — an explicitly Nietzschean monster. Joe was instantly popular in Brazil, returning in sequels and hosting horror TV shows. Marins would go on to make films in other genres until 2008, though (so far as I can tell) he remained on the margins of the Brazilian industry.

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul is a black-and-white film in which we’re introduced to Joe, an undertaker in a small town, and follow him through a story of murder and rape in which he tries to father his ideal son. There is a fortuneteller who predicts a bad end, and a curse, a nasty bit with a spider, a climax in a graveyard at midnight. There’s an energy to the movie, and a definite fascination to Joe as a character — a monster in the gothic tradition, a human being who aspires to be something more than human.

The Strange World of Coffin Joe is an anthology film. The first segment, “The Dollmaker” (“O Fabricante de Bonecas”) gives us the story of an old dollmaker with three beautiful daughters; three youths plan to rape them, but their plans don’t work out as they expect. The second, “Obsession” (“Tara”), is a silent piece about a balloon seller who becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman; she is murdered, and he breaks into her tomb to violate her corpse. “Theory” (“Ideologia”) begins with an appearance on TV by controversial professor Oãxiac Odéz (played by Marins), who argues that humans are driven by instinct and not by intellect or by emotions such as love; this leads to a colleague and his wife, who disagree, being imprisoned and tortured.

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Film noir’s usually thought of as an urban genre. Its standard setting is the mean streets down which a man must go who is not himself mean. But a city’s not necessary; the Criterion Channel recently hosted a collection of Western Noir, films like Rancho Notorious and The Walking Hills. The ingredients for noir — violence, criminality, a morally bleak world — can be brought together anywhere.

Thus The Oak Room. Directed by Cody Calahan, with a script by Peter Genoway based on his own play, it’s a rural Canadian noir that plays with narrative and genre. You can see the preoccupations of CanLit — fathers and sons, hopelessness and a lack of escape, the harshness of the land. But you also see noir: an atmosphere of violence, a sense that everybody’s compromised, shadows and night. There’s no femme fatale here, no women at all, in fact; but there is a concern with truth, as characters tell each other stories and teach other how to bullshit. What’s true and what’s false and why the characters are telling each other the things they do become increasingly important, questions even of life and death.

There’s perhaps less a plot to The Oak Room than a structure, a framework filled with stories and discussions of storytelling. It begins one night in the middle of a snowstorm with a man walking into a bar off a highway in western Ontario. The customer, Steve (RJ Mitte) has a history with the bartender, Paul (Peter Outerbridge). Steve’s come to pick up his dead father’s things from Paul, who’s been holding them. Paul isn’t shy about telling Steve he’d be a disappointment to his old man, but Steve starts telling him a story, about a man who walks into a bar in rural Ontario one night in the middle of a snowstorm.

Why he tells the story, and what happens in it, become a large part of what The Oak Room is about. The conflict between Paul and Steve plays out on a number of levels, and goes to unexpected places. In particular there’s a story that gets told around the middle of the film about Steve’s father which gives a theological tone to events by illustrating a specific kind of damnation. It echoes the theme of mortality, but it also gives the movie a weight, a sense of the meaning behind events and why these stories matter.

On the flip side, that story’s image of damnation could be described as what happens when you have no story to tell yourself about your life and future. This is a movie about storytelling, about the motives for telling stories and about the ways stories have a power over their audience. It’s more cynical than most stories with that theme, though. Stories here delay and obfuscate and set up their audiences as marks. You could call it a movie about the danger of storytelling, but also a movie about how you need stories, and how you can use them.

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The Western’s an American genre in origin, but Europeans from Sergio Leone to Charlier and Moebius have done interesting work in the form. Usually, though, European Westerns follow American heroes. That is, the European creators are still telling American stories. Savage State (L’État Sauvage), a Western from French writer/director David Perrault, does something different, following a French family trying to get out of the American South during the Civil War. It’s a nice idea. Unfortunately, the execution’s lacking.

The movie starts in Missouri in 1863. After a brush with occupying Union soldiers turns violent, a wealthy French family decides to flee the American Civil War and return to France. Patriarch Edmond (Bruno Todeschini) hires a gunslinger named Victor (Kevin Janssens) to accompany him, his wife Madeleine (Constance Dollé), his three daughters, and their free Black servant Layla (Armelle Abibou) who is also Edmond’s lover. They set out for the coast accompanied by a couple other family retainers, but a woman from Victor’s past (Kate Moran) who leads a gang of bandits threatens to bring ruin on them all.

Let’s start with the good: the movie looks spectacular. There’s a long tradition in Western films of stunning landscape cinematography, and we get that here. The first act, largely taking place in aristocratic interiors, is less interesting; but the journey through the wilderness, lush in a way that Westerns usually aren’t, presents one sumptuous location after another. Mountain scenes give us sublime vistas. Deep green forests yield to snow as the journey progresses. It’s a nice picture to look at.

But if that’s the good, all the rest is the bad and the ugly. In particular, the story is at best thin and unconvincing. At worst, it’s a misfire. Nothing builds in any logical way or develops coherently. Character remains underdeveloped. Choices are baffling.

The idea here should be simple: fill the journey that is the spine of the film with thematically-resonant incidents that say something about character. This doesn’t happen. In fact the journey takes a while to get started — as noted, the whole first act — and then doesn’t end either in France or at an American port city, but in a ghost town in a mountain valley. So the movie starts late and ends early.

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