Hallucinatural: MIDSOMMAR

One of the cooler and more noteworthy things about the critical buzz for Ari Aster's highly trippy new horror folk film, MIDSOMMAR (2019), is the widespread recommendation that one should not do psychedelics before seeing it. There have already been a few freak-outs in the theaters showing the film. (I won't link to the reports, because lightweights have no place on this site) but I am fascinated that psychedelics at the movies have become commonplace to the point it's not a question of whether one should trip at the cinema or trip, but a question of which tripped-out druggy horror films are best seen straight. "Sober audiences may feel like they’re tripping," notes Fast Company's Joe Berkowitz of Aster's new film, "but tripping audiences will probably feel like they’ve died or perhaps were never born at all."

I agree with Joe: Midsommar Delivers the Most Realistically Trippy Drug Scene Ever, for Better and for Worse. It didn't occur to me to go see it tripping, but now I sure wish I did! I'm a fan of that 'never born at all' feeling, isn't that what movies are all about? (3) Between Midsommar, The Beach Bum, Climax, and last year's Mandy, its heartening to see the ways psychedelics have moved from a kind of dirtbag-disreputable guilt-by-association into hipster mainstream respectability. Creating spiritual transformations when the time, dosage and place are all just right; and nonfatal nightmares of self-realization when they aren't, gone are the Judy Blume-style inaccuracies of after school specials like Go Ask Alice. Instead, in a culture where young college students roll joints at diners without having to look over their shoulders for cops, paranoia and knee-jerk condemnation has been replaced with a mainstream hipness to the importance of set and setting.

In the past, when psychedelics were represented on film it was always with a patina of gaudy mummery: naked broads in body paint would frug through a kaleidoscope as bad acid rock jams ate up the minutes. Hallucinations were usually embodied by actors or latex puppets, completely divorced from the context in which they were perhaps originally hallucinated thanks to the impossibility of getting the full scope of expanded consciousness across all the telephone game hands it takes to put script onto screen. (6) Drugs were associated strictly with a certain swath of music (Grateful Dead, Electric Prunes, Ravi Shankar), and mired in an ever-oscillating mix of naive idealism and burnt-out paranoia. Before we could really write down the specifics of our transformative drug hallucination, the hallucination would be gone. The trick of a true hallucination is that it lurks beyond the ability of language or the social order to fully define and circumscribe it. Strangers to psychedelics think hallucinations are along the lines of seeing a white rabbit hopping through the subway, but a seasoned tripper knows it's never so simple. There might be a rabbit there, but he turns into a white handbag if you look at him too long, either that or he just pops up out of the crowd for a split second, then is gone again, so you're never sure he was there. A hallucination never stays in one place or time long enough to really 'capture' it. But we all--writers and artists--sure have to try. A lot of us prefer to stay home alone rather than going out clubbing, so we can spend the night trying to record our visuals via painting, or ranting into a microphone, or scribbling poetry - but that carries its own risks. With one to bring you off the ledge one could think oneself into a bad trip pretty fast. Thus the bulk of drug-taking imagery in cinema has always been--until recently--of a Lowest Common Denominator kind of vibe, both naive and skeevy, a bunch of easily-influenced kids shimmying to a guitar solo like lemmings to a cliffside chimera OR like Warren freaking out in the gallery, 

With Midsommar and its tale of a gang of backpacking master's degree students joining a friend at his family's remote Northern Swedish very psychedelically-astute commune for the titular holiday (up where the sun never sets), we finally move past those breakwaters. Gone are the banal psychedelic cliches we're used to. Instead, thanks to CGI and director Ari Aster's modicum of restraint comes the imagery of psychedelics as they actually are, i.e. anchored to the expansion and contraction of the breath and the nature of seeing and hearing via the human nervous system. (Is one 'hallucinating' when they become aware that the entire planet 'breathes' in ever expanding/contracting waves of energy?).

As the backpacking guests at the weird Swedish commune take mushrooms and then drink some unknown herbal tea, we have to pay attention to the details of the frame to see the way the deep black interiors of the flowers in the lead girl Dani's hair widens and contracts just like a tripping pupil, or the way the tendrils of the vines wrap around her May Queen throne stretch to accommodate and encourage her ever-more tarot-style royal movements. The sacred space and time generated by ritual circular movement is made palpable in the flow of energy up the bark of trees, or between people entraining their breath and movements to the music guiding them in an endless May Pole dance during which she can suddenly speak and understand fluent Swedish. Or are she and her last surviving dancer talking with words at all, or just ESP-ing?

Ever quick to invent new phrases, I dub this new trend 'hallucinaturalism' - i.e. going for what a drug trip visual actually looks like, the way hallucinations actually work, not as a black light lava lamp excuse for gaudy excess but a space beyond time where we can see the breathing of flowers, the growing of plant tendrils, the spiraling out of the breath, the rays of the sun, the soul leaving the body.

The Ingestibles

“The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.” ― Joseph Campbell 

"Who is to say what is real and what is not? 'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind." - Terence McKenna

Am I myself getting of ahead? Surely the plot should be pretty familiar to you if you've ever gone to visit a rural commune with a friend of a friend, for either a weekend camping/party at some friend's parents' farm, or a remotely located rock festival with a tent area. Such areas make the perfect tripping zones: no cops, no cars, no drawer-searching rehab-calling parents, and--unless there's a pen with a bull stamping around in it or a sudden influx of speed freak bikers- no real danger unless you accidentally get run over by someone backing out of their parking spot, or you OD. 

But even so, one can find one's mellow being harshed by one's buzzkill girlfriend, the type who invites herself along, and then makes frowny faces every time you want to do whiskey funnels, or shrooms, or acid, or whatever (she doesn't want you to do them without her, but she doesn't want to do them yet... and it's always "yet" for her). Our main backpacker heroine is a kind of damaged co-dependent bi-polar buzzkill Dani (Florence Pugh). She's tagging along on the trip up north with her passive-douche boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor), the kind of guy who's too cowardly to break up with her (it's so close to the triple suicide of her sister and parents he's worried about seeming callous). He also can't figure out how to not invite her along as he in turn invites himself along with his anthropology masters degree buddies to the solstice midsummer celebration at the agrarian commune of their Swedish friend Pelle (Vilhelm Bolmgren). They're expecting a kind of cross between Burning Man and an Amish barn raising party. Well, they get all that and more too, in the clear light of day, forever (the lack of a setting sun or nightfall is one of the film's most uncanny elements).

Bobby "Haxan Cloak" Krlic's avant garde string-heavy score might veer strangely close to Colin Stetson's for Aster's previous instant horror classic Hereditary - especially near the end, when the Phillip Glassy synth drones and cascading triplets come flowing into a kind of transformative sound re-baptism - but he gets just right the paranoid long-bowing bottom-dropping coccyx- tingling drones; the Lygeti-esque solar wind socking; the encounter group breath work flowing through the barn door cracks to just the perfect level of strange. On the downside, the cast lacks a force like Toni Collette to center things; and it doesn't really add up to much beyond the sum of its parts; and if --at 2 1/2 hours--it still feels like so much of the film is missing; it's got the 'truest' hallucinations ever in cinema, and maybe the best druggy ceremonial group sex scene ever. 

Encompassing all that is interesting, beguiling and terrifying about such 'communes' --the collapse of privacy, the loss of independent thought, the way 'breathing method' panting seems here a seamless part of conception, and the lack of abjectification within the ranks (no one sits it out) --Midsommar leaves us reeling in a kind of dream daze that the rest of the film takes and--if not runs with--certainly walks in imperceptibly slight slow-motion ceremonial steps right into the fire and flowers.

Dani's moaning and screaming at last finds its entrainment absolvement
MIDSUMMER NIGHT MOAN 

“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” ― Joseph Campbell 

"It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature." -Albert Hofmann

There's a feeling of being totally unmoored from one's place in the world very common today--when constant texting for validation from peers isn't enough to fill the 'god-sized hole' (as we call it in AA) and our leaning on a current sex partner or best friend to somehow make up that vast chasm of disconnect is a sure way to sink like a stone. For a lot of us, especially if we're not on SSRI meds, or not working anymore, the despair and isolation are so great that thoughts of suicide, on repeat, like a stuttering record, are our only salve. Dude, if even Ativan doesn't work (we see a bottle in Dani's cabinet - man, I'm so jealous), you know you're fucked. And if your pair-bond doesn't fill the hole, then what? You can join AA or some other group - but that's kind of a cult, and can be one if you wind up at the wrong meeting and let some weirdo sponsor you because you're too passive to say no. Or you can meditate... on drugs.. chant your way clear of the orbit around that damned hole. 

Accepting that one can never fill the gaping black hole at the core of the self is the only way to escape its gravitational pull. 

Paranoia and a feeling of secure group belonging, a kind of tribal security, are--one would think--opposites with a huge grey area in between. It's that grey area where most of us exist, never quite committing to the rapture of the group mind via becoming one of a tribe (a "worker among workers" as they say in AA) nor spinning off into complete isolation (wherein you paint your windows black and don't answer the door or phone anymore, and spend your nights screaming into a pillow as hands come out of the walls and just being able to put on your shoes and go outside for a six-pack seems like some impossible dream).

On psychedelics, one isn't necessarily free of one's issues, they're just magnified. But with the right group---a primal scream therapy group at your therapist's office every other week for example--you can magnify your woes to such a large degree they disappear from the horizon.

If you have taken drugs like psilocybin, LSD or ecstasy at a big hippy commune or outdoor music festival or pagan commune or weekend party on some sprawling farm, you may have been, dancing away, surrounded by happy hair-twirling hippies high as hell, and suddenly--out of the blue-- gotten paranoid. You think you might be sacrificed to some ancient god during the height of the ecstatic rave orgy and even if you could escape the parking lot, you have no idea where the nearest cop is, or if he's in on it, or even how to dial a phone in your current state. Every girl seems to be hitting on you through her ecstatic breathing. Tendrils of pink azure longing tap your chakras and fill you with her scent and wiles, but not in a good way - in a Monarch 7 Eyes Wide Shut kind of way. Every guy you know seems to trying to lure you someplace remote so they can hit you up for shrooms -- their neediness and jonesing like daggers in reverse. Only your reflection in the mirror reminds you that you're even you, and how far over the rainbow you are. A few shots of Jaeger and a deep breath, a song you like, a chance to go onstage and sing "Sweet Jane" and maybe you're okay again. The trees wiggle indiscriminately.

CULTS Are for KIDS

“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims...” 

― Joseph Campbell

"Without a gang, you're an orphan!" - Riff - West Side Story

Whether via hot coal walks or bad acid trip paranoia, initiation ordeals leave us tightly united to the group without the need for a common enemy. Rather than bonding through collectively hating on some outcast-- which is like the cheap knock-off Elmer's of social binding--it is through this initiation one finds acceptance (which when it goes too far and frat dicks get ahold of it becomes 'hazing'). (2)

AA gets it (I mean Ari Aster, though it goes both ways) Between this and Hereditary he's proving himself the champion auteur of the New Dysfunction - one where drugs are so numerous the zone between one's shrink and her litany of anti-depressant and anti-anxiety meds and the herbalist with the plastic baggy or the 'tea' - cease to exist. There's no 'normal' to start out with anymore, only degrees of dysfunctional isolation and co-dependence. In neither film do we ever hear from anyone like a policeman, a narrator, a court appointed grief counsellor, a psychiatrist. As in films like The Shining- the socially conditioned polarities of right and wrong, linear time and the concept of future obligation cease. Like psychedelics themselves, the 'snap' of cabin fever frees us from the kind of rote empathy that locks us into the social order. Madness moves us beyond such things - life and death and the degrees of 'goodness' are lost in the presence of a kind of Hanging Rock/Quetzalcoatl sun god green man archaic pre-Christian hunger for human sacrifice. We become like Jack Torrance, or James Mason in Nicholas Ray's Bigger than Life, hankering to sacrifice his son like Abraham because he won't learn math, the in-denial mom refusing to so much as call a family friend for aid since father knows best.

Maybe you've seen 2000 Manics (left), The Cabin in the Woods or the Wicker Man (either version), and shuddered with the realization that in an alternate pre-Christian reality, macabre human sacrifice could become as routine and accepted as, say, fireworks on the 4th of July, or the lighting of a Lincoln Center Xmas tree. The scene at left is terrifying because we see the ease with which such a tableaux can fit easily into the apple pie and potato sack race shenanigans of a town centennial. As with Hereditary, Aster brings to the horror genre reflections of our own subconscious paranoia -that there's a secret society right there in plain sight, as banal as an old photo album of your grandma's showing a bunch of old ladies showing off their arts and crafts talismans, or a group of blonde farmers all dressed in white with big loving smiles and flowers in their hair--their actions too ancient, to rooted in archaic magics to be called evil in the pejorative sense. There is Machiavellian lip-smacking, no sordid rapey undercurrent. Everything is ritualized and slow according to the natural world, with which the commune is deeply in tune. They move in accordance of the breath, and the understanding that screams of the dying can be drowned out with group screaming in sympathy, that the most harrowing howls of pain and anguish can be matched and calmed through the entrainment of the support group and that all such negative emotions can be dissolved into the group like salt in the sea.

Between Chris Hemsworth's seductive cult freak in Bad Times at the El Royale and Tarantino's new Manson film, as well as new TV docs signifies the enduring appeal of the archetype of the holy madman is back, tapping into the aging millennial's desperate need for a blood-and-flesh tribe, a version of the fantasy of belonging they found in Twilight, Harry Potter, and so forth and the dozen other 'magical school' franchises glutting the market. They crave a world where they feel included, loved, protected, in a hermetic magical zone, able to face danger and the threats of life knowing a strong group of cool and capably friends have their back.

You or I might get this through being in a band in college, or belonging to a street gang, the military, or even sports team, but for the drowning psychotic the god-sized hole of desperate feeling of orphanhood is too much to navigate the give-and-take of a clique. For such people, being swooped up in the rescue gear of the cult-building mystic is a true godsend (ala Phoenix's character in The Master), the fragile ecosystem of social mores instilled in them by a failed family unit and educational system gets washed away with this shining all-inclusive paradigm. The ocean of support and 'being held' they receive more than makes up for things like the total loss of independence, personal property, and connection to the outside world.

Why it's so seductive in Midsommar's case is that we're not dealing with the usual Hammer Films gathering of British extras in robes cavorting and waving around goblets and bunches of grapes while Charles Grey glowers behind an altar - we're dealing with drug effects we may already be familiar with. Psychedelics' abilities to bond a social group and/or weird one out along the same line, is something we already know. At their best, they induce a harmony with nature, though a nature that is inscrutable in its demands - the sun and light of love they feel goes hand in hand with a clear-eyed and unflinching view of death, and a view of sex and mind-altering drugs completely free of all Christianity's and conservative parental hysteria's restrictions and taboos. We can't help but feel the attraction, the druggy pull of inclusion and oneness when, say, tripping really hard out in a park on a sunny warm day.

Coming out of the theater into the summer evening or late afternoon, walking home from the Alamo in the soggy summer heat, we may be grateful we're safe in the city, and sober, more or less, and happy more or less, in our world of pair-bond-cohabitation, our online communities ever a click away, aware finally that pursuit of balance not happiness is the key to... happiness. And that air conditioning, vaping, CBD gummies, anti-depressants, ant-anxiety meds, sleeping pills, herbal teas and Coke Zero, taken continually, makes everything all right, but not so all right we fall into mania and therefore, inevitably, a massive crash. If, like me, you spent the first 30 years of your life on a treadmill running from all-consuming massive depression, you know what heaven is - being able to stop.... running. The question then becomes... then what? What do we do now that we don't need to do anything?

GOATS

"And goats have kids / like people have kids / like me / and you!"
- 70s Sesame Street song ("What Kids are Called")

"Mythology, properly understood as metaphor, will guide you to the recognition of your tiger face. But then how are you going to live with these goats?" - Joseph Campbell (full)

One thing I kept thinking about on the walk home was, what are these folks lives going to be like in the winter? Just as the days are endless in midnight sun Sweden, the freezing winters are eternal darkness. I couldn't help but feel the eerie echo of their Viking ancestors, imagining roaring fires and furs and elaborate homemade woolen wear. I thought too of the goats. Not that we see many of them, but enough. What is up with goats, in general? Wither their strange supernatural power? Their susceptibility to supernatural forces both coming and going is more than passing strange. My mom is currently reincarnated as a goat at the Carl Sandburg House goat farm in Flatrock NC, where she volunteered for years. If you see a goat named Nancy, tell her her son is glad she's found peace in a nice and supportive trip.

But why are goats such able vessels for human and daemonic spirits? Is it because we attributed this power to them, based on Pan, satyrs, the frolicking horned one, etc? From Hunchback of Notre Dame (where a little black goat is actually tried and accused of witchcraft to the recent The Witch) to my own part in the big Goatman scare in the Maryland woods in the early-80s. Which came first, the power we ascribe to the goats or the power they already have? Why is group of goats called a tribe or a trip?

Or does this shit go far deeper. If you don't think goats are supernatural you've never seen one standing out on a tree limb like a high wire act (above) when you know there's just no way that's even possible?

Sorry this ends so randomly. So does the film though; if it's not more than the sum of it's parts, its parts are still good. Maybe that's what tripping is like too. You may find nirvana, the pieces of your life coming together in a perfect mandala jigsaw puzzle you'd normally spend lifetimes completing, but with nothing else to do, one can't help but break it all up so you're not bored for the next 50 years.
Or you find the Hell of self-conscious empty needy anguish, the 'alone even in a herd of friends' despair, so amplified to become untenable, so that crawling into a lit fireplace seems the only available recourse. Either way, it's over then too. You can declare you're 'done' with psychedelics, that you've 'passed' the acid test like the man forced Ken Kesey to say after he got busted. Or you can try to minister to the onslaught of needy mouths as they sense someone with 'the answer' and a free tab, like a flock of hungry seagulls around a lone guy throwing breadcrumbs into the wind (ala Javier Bardem in Mother) or you can barricade yourself from the beaks and mouths and hole up with a lover or two and a bunch of recording equipment and art supplies like Turner in Performance. Or you can join a commune, experience the oneness, and maybe it's not a cult after all (no messiah figure). Either way, someone has to do the dishes, and it's not going to be me.

Shout out to Ryan for the req!
=========

PS - second viewing thoughts (1/13/20) on Prime: (Note: contains Spoilers) 

This second time I was more aware of the key central relationship of passive aggressive bullshit from the boyfriend and the relative hunched-over postures of the non-members. It wasn't Florence Pugh's character at all, it was the boyfriend. He was just a pussy with no guts to break up with her NOR to commit fully, so he hangs in the doorway like a little shithead, thinking he's somehow doing the right thing. The whole movie is a kind of rape-revenge movie only there's no rape, just a boyfriend doing the kind of shit we expect from sophomores or juniors, not grad students. I wince, as I was that boy more than a few times, my girlfriends would sense my wariness and spend weekends trying to convince me to stick around. Looking back I see how I mistook squeamishness and fear of the unknown for somehow being 'a good guy.' It was actually shrooms that gave me the guts to break up with at least three girlfriends, despite one being super hot, one getting super violent, and one being super enabling and sweet-natured. Damn, it feels good to be able to judge this guy as totally deserving of his eventual burning, his symbolic casting out as the demon in the bear skin. 

Ask not whom the devil drives to his first day of school... He honks for thee. 

RECOMMENDATIONS / Further FOLK HORROR:

A cool movie with a similar plot arc, believe it or not, is 1978's THE LEGACY!

CinemArchetype 15: Human Sacrifice 
Bell, Book and Hallucinogenic Tampon: THE LOVE WITCH
13 Best or Weirdest Occult/Witch movies on the Amazon Prime
The Goat of Menses and the Fox in the Atheist Hole: THE WITCH
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call Summersisle: THE WICKER MAN (201o)
Genealogy of Flies: Lords of Salem, House of the Devil (+my own Salem ancestry)
All the Missed Mystics: Nicolas Roeg's GLASTONBURY FAYRE (1972)
Bitches' Sabbath: WITCHING AND BITCHING
Acid's Greatest Horror #1: ANTICHRIST (2009)
Avenger of Whatever: KILL LIST
Sever me Member: EX-MACHINA, THE CREEPING FLESH
Why don't we just Go Ask Alice? 
Alice 2.2 - The Looking Glass Dolls
The Ancient She-Shaman and her Shrooming Exhumer: SZAMANKA 
The Man in the Grey Flannel Darkness: BIGGER THAN LIFE

and David Del Valle's Lovecraft/Satan piece from back in Acidemic #6: Sympathy for the Devil:
Give my My Skin: BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW and the Devil Films of the 70s (2009)

NOTES
1. yes I practice meditation daily with a light-sound machine, I recommend it 

6. My recent DT hallucination of Veronica Lake swimming in ice below the tiles in the ER waiting room, beckoning me to jump in, would no doubt by the time they made it into a movie, be represented by a real actress dressed as Lake standing, dripping in the middle of the room, pointing at me and making a drowning noise, in other words completely divorced from the floor waxer brush prints from which my brain's pareidolia center and my recent drunk viewing of Sullivan's Travels worked with my heated brain to conjure Lake dancing in icy water below the floor. I was there at 4 AM and the floor had just been waxed. Would that image last through CGI effects team interpretation, presuming the animator has no experience with such mental states? Consider how much better films like Altered States, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Naked Lunch might have been with a more vivid and alert recreation of drug hallucinations rather than this kind of broad cartoon literality? Nothing against those films per se, especially Naked Lunch. I imagine Aster doing them all very different - i.e. with this CGI breathing subtlety. 

Erich K's HEREDITARY Witchcraft Conspiracy DSM-IV Reader

I'd forgotten about all about conspiracies, Saturn, Satan and schizophrenia until I finally saw HEREDITARY, which brought it all cascading back, buckling the thin walls of sanity I'd set barely nailed up after exiting the paranoid conspiracy zone writing some of the posts linked below. Not that this amazing new horror movie is just conspiracy paranoia-tingling, no, no no! It's also a deep character study that takes its time to get going and, true to the name, rides the raft of inherited mental illness all the down the DNA river into the tributary to the sea of true madness. There's a recently deceased mother with "a lot of secrets" and a whole family tree of suicides and despair and then Toni Collette, the daughter, and also the scariest yet most sympathetic mother in a horror film since Essie Davis in The Babadook, coming to terms with things like her son not trusting her just because he once woke up one night to find himself and his sister covered with turpentine and mom standing over them while they slept with a book of matches in her hand. She was sleepwalking! He doesn't believe her, not even now. We don't see it, but it's a haunting slow burn image that ranks with those moments in Paranormal Activity as far as making all our unconscious eight-hour stretches in bed suddenly seem so unsafe we wonder how we ever managed to sleep at all. (If you've ever encountered a sleepwalker, then you know how terrifying it is, that flat dilated black pupil look in their eyes). This movie does what great horror movies do, it takes these nuggets of forgotten uncanny everyday living and slowly compiles them alongside enough sudden calamities and random bits of disturbing 'accident' that it's much more than a mere thrill ride, it's something that slowly builds until it turns by extension your life into a horror movie, like a virus. While you were distracted by one narrative, it snuck around behind you with another, and pushed you out of your safe viewing distance into something like terrified rapture.

The debut feature from young Ari Aster, the film successfully gets the whole "there is no difference between inherited paranoid schizophrenia, manic depression, and witchcraft" route (the kind mastered in Rosemary's Baby and duplicated almost nowhere else since... until now). Treading so close on our actual fears it crosses the line where imagination becomes insanity, like that normal-seeming friend confiding in you all sorts of paranoid-sounding statements, like someone is breaking in at night to move boxes around in her closet (am I the only one with weird friends like these?). This is the kind of film wherein a roster of DSM IV-spiked beliefs start to dovetail with the Old Testament, making us wonder if the ultimate conspiracy theory paranoid schizophrenic manifesto might be the Bible. Is it so hard to believe that, once the blinders on our perceptions are opened through chanting, stress, sleepiness, magical potions, or prolonged trauma conditioning (PTC), the witchcraft can begin in earnest. Maybe we can only fly when no one who doesn't believe we can is watching. Maybe if we can let go of our bodies we don't need a broomstick; when no one is around to listen, the sound a tree falling in the woods makes is like music in the eye of a screaming demon.

Here lie some links to past conspiracy writing should you be a glutton for madness, or need more ideas for similar mind-benders afterwards:

The Goat of Menses and the Fox in the Atheist Hole: THE WITCH
(March 2nd, 2016)

"So see the movie and understand at last why patriarchal science and religion are both such hardheaded dicks about the unknown and supernatural, and why Christian zealotry has never not been on the rise and why women are always considered a zone outside of western rational objectivity. Only in one or two other films have we seen beautiful women materialize out of the darkness of the woods or the gleam of the bathtub, as irresistible as a warm slug of whiskey in an unfriendly wilderness, our willpower long gone, we lower our lips towards their hearth and then suddenly these figures grab onto us as if with clawed tentacles and thorny paws. They are not hot and young at all, but decomposing and very old. You've been tricked, son of Adam! The distance of time between that first kiss, the wedding bells, funeral chimes, cold ground worms boring through rotten pine box walls collapses into a single Donald Sutherland death rattle.

This powerful motif, the 'young-old predatory woman' reflects the tradition of the sidpa bardo in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the level of purgatory where you see and notice only undulating lovers like flames in an otherwise all-consuming darkness. If you let yourself be drawn too close to them you run the risk of finding yourself stuck like a fly in the frozen web of the woman's newly-fertilized embryo, like being sucked over a waterfall. Then devouring demon rock below shreds your current construct of self into a million pieces which sink or scatter in the rapid current below; only the core I AM remains trapped in that sticky embryonic web- and soon you've forgotten you were ever anywhere else-- the 'you' you believed yourself to be is shaved away like your hippie hair under the electric razor of a FULL METAL JACKET barber." (more)

The Illuminati, Hypnosis, Paranoia, Schizophrenia, Kubrick, and Tom Cruise 
(DP - May 2016)

As per Zizek via Lacan (or vice versa), the Big Other's whole purpose is to remove the 'constituent anxiety," to make sure there is no "traversing" the fantasy which would dislocate the subject from its void-circumscribing orbit. In EYES WIDE SHUT, Ziegler's positing Dr. Bill as an outsider who will never be a member of this exclusive shadow society, no matter what mask he dons, is doing him a massive favor, because this forbidden society exists solely in order to exclude him, and thus perpetuate constituted (rather than constituent) anxiety. It's a gift, son! This lack of a gift is the best gift he can give.

A similar effect occurs with UFO crash sightings wherein the military steps in, harasses and bullies witnesses into silence, and reports it was a weather balloon or crashed satellite, then hauls it away never to be seen again. In doing this they perpetuate the revolution around the desire. They fan the flames of the need to know, and so perpetuate the illusion that they have this thing well in hand. If they announced a spacecraft was found, the world press would swamp them and create panic, but by simultaneously threatening witnesses and lying to the press they create a subliminal consolation. Instead of worrying about aliens (which is terrifying - coming with a sense of total powerlessness and vulnerability) we're angry at the government for not telling us the truth. We always feel protected when denied knowledge. It brings us full circle back to the feeling of invulnerability we had as five year-olds bugging our mom about where babies come from, free from any worry she might actually find out, that she'd lie to protect us from the whole bloody-terrible besital truth. (full)

Genealogy of Flies: LORDS OF SALEM (2013), HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (2008) + My own Salem Witch Connections

(September 2013)

 I have to mention, as always when discussing Salem and genealogy (characters here are descendants of the hung witches and/or judges and executioners) that all these descendant movies are fascinating on a personal level for me because the one side of my family tree that kept immaculate records is from Salem, having arrived in Boston in 1631 (with fellow passenger Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island): This side of my tree includes nuggets like these (copied direct):

The family of John Perkins 1583-1654 - freeman 18th May 1631
Married Judith Gates, born Newent, Gloucestershire, England
Children: 

1. "Quartermaster" John - b. 1614 0 d. Dec, 14, 1686
2. "Deacon" Thomas 1616-1686 (not the witch hunter, he died before that)
3.  Elizabeth 1618-1700 / married William Sargent (5 children)
4. Mary 1620-1700 - "She was accused of witchcraft, sentenced, but the execution delayed and the citizens recovered from the delusion." (+5 more)

The Family of Elisha Perkins (born - 1656 - Topfield) died - 1741 in Methuen
Married Catherine Towne - 1680
--
Children:
(9 total), including: John (third son) born Aug. 12, 1685 - died June 22, 1750
married Mary Easty (whose mother Mary Easty and Aunt Rebecca Towne Nurse were hanged for witchcraft) --etc.

Age of Asherah: ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

(May 2014)

"In conveying Rosemary's gradual awakening from compliance ("you're gonna think I really flipped,") Polanski exploits our willingness to grant power to unseen forces, and thus allows us to see the link between paranoia and pregnancy, and how the patriarchal condescension in the big city can completely dominate even a free spirited young woman from Iowa whose determination to be hip is both her saving grace and undoing. Taken in total, her story has devils of both the psychoanalytical interpretation variety (paranoia brought on by hormonal surges due to pregnancy) and the physical arrival, up from the subconscious realm, of a devil ("Hail Satan!"), in other words, Rosemary's Baby is the opposite of a film like Inception - which is a story about people invading other people's dreams. Baby is about a dream incarnated into living tissue, the rip in time is the rip in Rosemary's womb from which out claws the Elder God.

When we sense something is being kept from us, whatever it is gains in power as our fears project onto it and projection is exactly how the coven operates: they chant together and use combined mind projection to astral travel along an associative nine-dimensional curve via an item belonging to the victim into that victim's nervous system (like following a DNA print through space the way a cell phone signal follows a chip). This is the same 'reality' that paranoid schizophrenics and remote viewing agents live in (tiny microphones in their teeth, men following them in brown town cars, etc); it's an ocean wherein all dreamers are linked together, are as fish, surfers, sailors, drowners, whales, or dolphins, in a matrix of nonlocal consciousness. The Satanist sails on the surface (hence Rosemary's dream of being on a boat and seduced by a Naval officer, like Nicole Kidman's fantasy in Eyes Wide Shut - see Make-Up Your Mind Control); the psychedelic shamans surf until they're wiped out or transcend the ocean altogether; unconscious dreamers bob in the waves; and the schizophrenics drown but do not die, just hover in that agitated drowning panic until medicated or the spell subsides. Rosemary's dream begins on the ship and winds up bobbing, then sinking, before clawing her way back to land (finding the secret passage between the apartments). In the end she joins with the cult because her maternal instinct is too strong to resist. (Besides, she wasn't even invited before - that's what stings, being left out, when she's the most important part, like not inviting the kid with the fake ID who bought the booze to your party. But now, no one even has to ask her to come now - it's really her party, whether they like it or not). "What have you done to its eyes?!" she asks, horrified. "He has his father's eyes," Castavet answers. And its the eyes of Guy's rival for his coveted part that are affected by the telepathic sabotage of the coven - the windows to the soul. No one has their own eyes anymore, the souls are long since funneled. (more)

The Satanic Blondes of '66: EYE OF THE DEVIL, INCUBUS

(October- 2013)

Cinema's pagan devil culture can't quite capture the ephemeral chain of cause-and-effect karma ouroboros-boomeranging to the point just watching a film creates bad luck, but it can generate a feeling of unease through depiction of the most sophisticated or banal of circumstances if it but tweaks them with little uncanny ripples of fatalistic coincidence that benefit or harm as befits 'the bargain.' With Satan there's usually a gruesome payoff after the subject sells his soul for a drink, where he learns he's "always been the caretaker," and so forth. Ask not whom is sacrificed on the ancient altar, because if no one told you else it's going to be, then it's you. You're doing both the killing and the being killed. Two ends of a scroll slowly rolling towards each other, when they meet, your text has disappeared.

So is there free will in a Satanic model of reality? Maybe the one who has 'always been the caretaker' can play Christian the way a closeted gay guy can play straight i.e. stunting his own potential and becoming far less than he was meant to be, or he can let go of the handrails and let Satan's vacuum suction pull him towards the full realization of his unholy destiny. If your Christian family would rather have you as a stunted straight than a fully blossomed gay person then they are the cursed, not you. Thus the devil exists only in advocate position --where there is hypocrisy he brings truth; where there is repression he brings exultation.

If we apply that logic to the actual making of these films, wife Sharon Tate is doomed the moment husband Roman Polanski helps her get the part in EYE; Polanski is doomed to exile the moment he shoots a scene wherein a woman is drugged and date raped by Satan. It all connects, from the devil's murky fatalistic machinations within the story--recreating itself through helping Guy get the part in that play (as, fittingly enough, a cripple)--to the reality of its makers (Castle's kidney stones, etc). The devil's happy to crib off your paper, so to speak, to make reality out of the image you made of him. It's as if film was little more than a halfway point, the equivalent of a pie cooling on the windowsill before its opened up and devoured, except the windowsill is a mirror, and the pie sliced open is a young and lovely actress -- an accident that becomes a rupture in the fabric of pop culture history. (More)

Make up your mind control: 33.3 Ways of Reading EYES WIDE SHUT

(October 2013)

CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG is on TCM in the background as I write about mind control, totally by chance. Onscreen: an audience of power elite have assembled to watch a demonstration. An automaton girl in German peasant attire is standing before a series of mirrors (which I've just learned they use in Monarch mind control programming mere minutes before this comes on), singing that she's under a spell and delivering an almost exact description of sexually subjugating mind control techniques (including having the demonstration occur before an assembled audience, which mirrors our standard dreams of being exposed naked at a school exam). Coincidence?

Maybe nyoets, for if there was a blueprint for mind control it would probably be geared to work towards reproducing--as close as possible--synchronicity, the iconography of normal subconscious dreaming, and the mechanics of sexual repression, allowing the programmers to tap into the unconscious' control state with maximum ease, 'speaking its language' so to speak. Programming their automaton women, the "standard pleasure model" ala BLADE RUNNER, DR. GOLDFOOT, etc. (see CinemArchetype #16 - the Automaton) to fall in love with whatever billionaire diplomat is breezing through town for a weekend, these girls wouldn't even know they had microphones in their teeth to record any business secrets that might get spilled in pillow talk, or which could be used for blackmail. They wouldn't even remember being there. Or suffocating him with a pillow and making it look like a heart attack.

I don't believe this was what CHITTY was trying to achieve (then again, Walt Disney was a 33-degree Mason) but it shows you that once you let this paranoid stuff into your mind, it mutates and transforms even dishwater dull children's movies into rabbit holes of horrifyingly vast circumference. (full)

Caretake Sparkle: ROOM 237
October 1, 2013

Call the critics in ROOM 237 paranoid, overreaching, seeing too deeply, perhaps mildly schizophrenic, but at least they know how to look deeply.... deeply... into the Kubrick's crystal ball. And as long as it’s well written I’ll read good crazy film deconstructive analysis over lifeless, if intellectually advanced, Bordwell style 'post-theory' any day. To the average academic, a crazy person is someone whose words must by definition have no meaning; to Acidemic, a crazy person is someone uniquely aware of how awfully close death and blood and pain is to the surface of our skin-thin reality at every given moment -- he goes crazy because he can’t shut it out of his mind; it doesn’t go away after eight hours like it does for the humble tripper, or fade with some deep breaths like it does for the anxiety attack sufferer. So if it makes him unusually aware of how everything is connected, to the point he even sees connections where there aren't any, well, maybe we're not digging deep enough. Maybe our teeth really do contain hidden microphones, but the dimension where that happens is far beyond ours. Somewhere advanced 8th dimensional beings are recording every human word and sigh for some massive Akashic library, using the teeth like crystal sets…. (full)

Daze of our Lies (or "As the Reichstag Burns"): SECRET HONOR, HITLER (1962), UFO HUNTERS, Lord Lhus!
(September '11)

If you surrender to Hall/Nixon's fever dream rant (and you may as well since there's nothing else going on in the film) you enter a pretty spooky world, a U.S. with the curtains ripped back to reveal giant white owls devouring a pile of gutted mice and money. Presidents like Nixon (and now Obama) are just straw dogs set up to take all the shit the manipulated American public cares to volley after being robbed and deluded by the previous office holders (who conveniently step down right before it hits the podium). Watergate was Nixon's way of reversing the straw dog parabolic mirror. Instead of the plan to throw Nixon to the wolves so his puppeteer overlords could sneak off to the inky darkness of the Bohemian Grove's towering redwoods, Dick snags up the strings by pretending to fall off the stage, derailing their entire evil plan... for now.

Meanwhile we see the paintings of Eisenhower, Lincoln, Jefferson on the oval office walls, and they all seem twisted and arcane, as if swirling reptilian pan-dimensional aliens were, even now, within the confines of a portrait on television on television, writhing and breathing and corrupting the deepest tissue of man's democracy with Martian spider eggs. (full)

CinemArchetype V: The Human Sacrifice

(Feb. 28, 2012)

In the movies the sacrificial subject creates a great unease because it hits so close to home; the death is intrinsically tied into the act of viewing itself. The tribe always gathers to watch the sacrifice, otherwise what's the point? Watching these sacrifices now (i.e. slasher film killings, etc.) stirs up deep archetypal responses from our past lives still seeing through the two-way crystal ball eye. If the film is clever about it, the whole process sneaks up on us and suddenly, too late to do back out, we feel the big black body bag suddenly close over our heads and the credits roll us right into the cremation furnace; to our horror, our friends regard our anguished pleas with the same ambivalent mix of compassion, gratitude (better us than them), and morbid curiosity, we felt looking at all the other victims. Sometimes we're led by the nose ring of desire, sometimes we're manacled unwillingly to the Satanic altar, either way it's like a spin the bottle game where sooner or later the bottle is going to point to us... and then when it does we're always hoping for that last minute rescue and when that last minute's up we try one last gambit: take my wife, please. If that doesn't work, we try to substitute our children, our friends, anyone! And all those members we would have so willingly held down had the bottle not pointed at us now hold us down. We can't even complain it's not fair, since we've already killed so many in just this same way to avoid being killed ourselves. Every cult member knows this truth - every innocent drop of blood spilled is just another interest payment on the massive carnivorous debt we owe that dark insatiable thing below.
  (full)

The Primal Scenesters: TWIN PEAKS
Nov. 2016

Consider the implication in a lot of these stories (THE INNOCENTS and THE HAUNTING in particular) that deep cover memory repression of dark events provides the current that activates the dark ghost 'residual energy' captured in the walls, so that traumatic moments in the past keep repeating. That energy stays there, up for grabs to anyone with the right wireless router to tap into. And who has that router? Free-floating demonic spirits--formless and powerless initially, like inactive ions or dried-up flies in the corners and basement doorways--the trauma recorded in the stone provides the energy jolt back into corporeal existence (on some higher or lower frequency from the spectrum of most human's perception). Be the energy coming from the trauma of past dark crimes or--in the case of poltergeists--boys or girls hitting puberty, the huge amount of psychic disturbance shocks the inert magnetic anomaly some choose to call Satan into our dimensional spectrum.

In other words, incest or similarly abominable crimes are like a wave generator that gets the boat of consciousness bobbing, allowing the usually unseen barnacles on the lower hull to rise above sea level. Thus the unseen barnacles whisper to sleeping seamen above them through the wood, bidding them to obscenely vile doings. (full)

Dentist Chair Don Juan: Love Radio and the Scaly Father
(C-Influence - March 21st, 2011)
...mystical visions can trick you... In September of 2006 I was meditating one afternoon after work, when I felt the sky and wall dilate open behind me an a giant electromagnetic hand touched my shoulder, enlightening me instantly in a profound holy 'beyond duality' glow. For two months I was completely egoless and in tune with love for my fellow man. But I got carried away, got cocky as  cult leader, and would up making a pass at this girl I was infatuated with, too soon, and who--rather expertly-- rejected me, depositing me in a vast swarm of subway commuters so that I couldn't get over her to try and kiss her goodbye--I saw her wry smile (though she was too deft to reject me directly to the point I might get violent or sullen-- a real pro!) and I felt that inner God voice I'd been following (and which had led me to all sorts of secret gifts prior to) sneering and laughing at me the whole subway ride home. I was so shaken and abashed I missed my stop and rode it to the end of the line. That laughter was heartless and terrifying. It was as if everything from the hand of God moment had been a way of conning me into risking my soul for this girl and getting shot down -  it was Trickster God 101 shit - and I'd fallen right into it (Hamlet's friends were, you may remember, worried the king's ghost was just such a trickster). Now that I was in such heartsick misery, I felt the god feeding off me, like I was a slot machine that he'd been rigging up and now was paying off big time - all that holy soul energy he'd cultivated he now stripped off me like he was expertly rolling a sleeping drunk.

Now maybe I was just 'imagining' all this - it was 'magical thinking' my shrink would say; but at the same time, so what? If she'd done any LSD she'd know it's all magical thinking, the whole damned show of 'perception' -- we have to go on what feels more than real, especially if we're writers and artists who want to depict more than the boring surface of the world. Whole months can go by these days that don't seem as real as that godly hand on my shoulder, or the glowing demon in the bookshelf. There's a certain assumption among left-brained scientists that hallucinations are somehow 'less' than reality, but it's the opposite: they're more. They spill through when our perceptions overheat and dilate, letting in more information than our egoic inhibitors would like - it's like we're five and our mom passed out drunk and left out her pornography stash all over the floor so as we wake up and go downstairs we see things we were never meant to, by her, that is, until we're much older. Our senses have built-in 'blinders' on them that filter out up to 90% or so of all the information coming at us. Our visible world is just a swath on a spectrum. Hallucinations and visions could be said to be moments when the blinders fail and dreams and reality leak into one another-- but isn't this in a way a much more 'real' situation? What about dreams, then? As we spend 1/3 of our life sleeping aren't we rather too quick to dismiss everything we experience with our eyes closed as just fluffy nothing? Are Van Gogh's electric color bands considered hallucinations since 'sane' normal people don't see them? Matter is just vibrating energy waves. The image of them as solid, permanent objects is what is the illusion. Meanwhile memory and reflection change even the most concrete experiences, shrouding and distorting the more we record, write, and relay them. (full)

Bad Acid's Greatest: 70s Paranoid Feminism Edition
(Oct. 2009)

Made at a time when psychedelic drugs had changed the face of American culture, LET'S SCARE .... DEATH (or LSD!) is nothing short of elegant in the way it blurs the line between subjective and the “real" to demonstrate how paranoia can bend the nature of reality itself, exposing even the most realistic objectivity as a paranoid conspiracy. Polanski set the bar high for this in ROSEMARY, by having Mia Farrow's paranoia be utilized to cast doubt on the reality of her situation, even though at the same time as we know the supernatural is behind it all. Rosemary and Jessica prove you can unsplit the difference between the real and the delusional, and that in fact, the difference is--as quantum physics proves--all in your head. (full)

Great and Wonderful Acid Cinema: WIZARD OF OZ 

(July 10, 2010)

Take it from me, the first time you run into 'The Lollipop Guild' (while astrally traveling the psychedeli-brick road) is enough to give even the gutsiest space cowboys the yips. They're like those little weird demon guys in the bottom corners of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band which scared me as a four year-old (back when first hearing the full alien weirdness of Harrison's sitar on side B, was terrifying beyond any palpable physical threat). When in college I began to read the work of the pioneering psychonaut Terence McKenna on 'the machine elves' -- common mushroom and DMT hallucinations-- small, elvin beings that exist in alternate dimensions but are nonetheless real, dancing in lockstep unison as they paint the plurality of worlds onto the time/space canvas like a curtain of slow motion paint bristle soft shoe that's hilarious yet terrifying, joyous yet disturbing. When I saw them during my own travels in college (and after), they were even wearing plaid, just like the Guild (which came first, is of course your immediate question - did I see them like that because of the movie or did the movie costume designers dress them based on patterns from their unconscious?!!) Mine had garden hoes instead of lollipops and lacked that terrible gold hair, but otherwise - yeesh. Good thing I'm a drinking man. Or was. I'd nah go down that road again unarmed. 

--

Thus as an LSD-quaffing college kid I found the living link wherein Eastern mysticism, indigenous shamanic vision quests, and Western schizo paranoia are all linked. When I learned that the Monarch 7 program used Oz imagery during their hypnotic programming, I wasn't a bit surprised. But in thinking about it, I also wonder where the line between hypnotic programming and mythic archetypal psychology intersect. Saying the iconography of Oz is used in a ritual that is itself possibly fiction, makes it the definition of myth (in my mind) come into focus as a narrative both true and untrue, a 'possible fiction' or a reflection of some truth so large normal reality cannot encompass it (full)

ALSO - OSLA -

Blue Testament: History Channel's Hot Hot Hell. 
(DV, 2011)

Occult Streams of the Amazon: 13 Prime Witchcraft-y Recommendations:
Blood-Orgy of the She-Devils (1973), Haxan (1922), Southbound (2015), Witchouse (1999), Satan's School for Girls (1973), The Church (1989), Burn, Witch, Burn (1962), Voodoo Man (1944), Chandu and Magic Island (1934), Little Witches (1999), Mark of the Witch (2014), The Eternal (1998), etc.
(Oct. 2016)

Guide to Cable's Paranormal / Ghost-Hunting TV Shows

(DP - August 2012)

Rite of Passage - the Archons begin their Feb 2013 chi/soul energy harvest

Occult Streams of the Amazon (Prime): 13 Witching Hour Picks

The welcome and most unholy arrival of this year's big new horror classic, THE WITCH, onto Amazon Prime last week signaled the month (my favorite) of all unholy magic has arrived. Time for great hauntings and macabre classics to come streaming like a running flow of witches o'er town and dale.  Lucky then that--as I wrote re: their Vampiredeliction last week--though Netflix has shied away from the ratty old rarities and sideshow bargain basement found objects, Amazon Prime has more than picked up the slack. Every micro-genre category of October horror now can now hold its own special list, were a man mad enough to make it. This here one, the Occult-themed film list, stretches from silent films from 1922 up until present day, linking Middle Ages gynocide to 70s ouija boards and forward to modern direct-to-DVD scrappy indie gems with surfeit of imagination and paucity of purse. So let the fall foliage crumble in lovely dark red and purples in the crispness of your knobby knuckle caress! We shall collect them for a recliner to plant before our tombstone screens. Wake thy imps from their velvet cloth slumber --the tape's unwound! So to speak.

PS  - as before, each film is rated both for film quality (factoring personal preferences) and image quality (as in the HD clarity, restored crispness/color, etc of Prime's streaming print --which is subject to change)

1. THE CHURCH

(1989) Dir. Michele Soavi

**1/2 (Image- B)

It's long (feels longer than it is), convoluted, and it tries to keep too many balls in the air, but this DEMONS variation makes great use of a vast ancient church set, and involves a treasure map mystery, Templar massacre, and Rube Goldberg-esque Freemason contraptions stirring to dusty life after half a millennia, opening the pit and releasing a horde of long-buried evil spirits and then springing ancient magical masonry traps that close every exit so no evil can escape --but neither can the assortment of tourists, archivists, restoration curators, priests and--as luck would have it--a school field trip and a fashion shoot--that all happened to be in the church at the time the gates and locks swung shut. Like so many horror films dealing with witchcraft, this has its cake (those Templar murderers were wrong to slaughter cute hippie chicks), eats it too (but they were/are real, and evil), and then brings it right back to the store complaining its stale and demanding a refund (so we have to kill them again). As with Soavi's other masterpieces, Stagefright: Aquarius and The Sect, there's a gorgeous olive green tinge to the darkness and a weird playful sense of metatextual humor if you know where to dig for it, as all sorts of little side plots set themselves up and then resolve themselves differently at the last minute from how your sixth horror film sense tells you it will. The model from the shoot (Antonella Vitale) is nearly suffocated in an expensive, beautiful white wedding dress after it's caught up in the gears locking the front gate (with the wardrobe mistress cutting each stitch with tiny scissors while Vitale complains and slowly strangles). There's a Rosemary-style devil copulation (a running theme in Soavi's late 80s-early 90s work), unsettling near-incest with Asia (as her character's working slob father is possessed), hallucinations, gory murders, and a relatively keen sense of who is where in the cavernous space at any given time, which is no easy feat of continuity in an Italian film with so many little bits of business.

Co-written with Lamberto Bava and Dario Argento, this stars Argento company regulars Barbara Cupisti, Asia Argento (when she was still a kid), and Thomas Arana. The music is credited to Phillip Glass and "The Goblins." There's occasionally some annoying prog courtesy Keith Emerson, but most of the time it's quiet enough you can pray to the blessed virgin sans distraction (yet still in vain). The image is a little fuzzy but I think it's always looked like that - on par with Soavi's other films - lots of gray and dust filtering the light. If the CHURCH isn't very good when held up against Soavi's STAGEFRIGHT, THE SECT, or CEMETERY MAN, it still holds up better than most everything else in its league, genre, and field.

2. BURN WITCH BURN

(1962) Directed by Sidney Hayers 

***1/2 / Image - A

What makes this film work is its moody black and white photography and AIP talent roster, including Corman Poe screenwriters Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, who always instill 'classic' material with an edge of modern wit that does nothing to dispel the unease and terror. It's directed by Sidney Hayers, a TV director who's worked on The Avengers, and Baywatch, among others, but hey - it's all about the script and the actors, and these are top flight, even if there's nary a familiar face in the bunch: Janet Blair is the wife, Peter Wyngarde the brooding Rod Taylor-ish lead, Margeret Johnson the limping rival; Judith Stott an amazing and odd face as the charmed co-ed.

I've been shy about this film since I was afraid half of the running time would be spent with the husband condescendingly lecturing and belittling his wife about her black magic habits. He does, but she fights back with scathing wit and makes her conversion to logic something that's a result of her own self-doubt, rather than his stern paternal berating. Part and parcel to this left brain belittling the right thing is the whole code-enforced demoting of women from sexy independent thinkers to smiling slave drone Stepford wives. I love women! I think they're great / they're a solace to a world in a terrible state. What a nightmare to have no women in the world (Lou Reed). Or as BWB shows, it's a nightmare either way, but beautiful (Bing Crosby). Filmed in black and white, BURN has the arty photography of the British countryside, rocky beaches, and cloudy English skies of the British new wave, and stands up against the cream of Hollywood's post-Lewton / Tourneur ambiguous shadowy whispering.

3. BLOOD ORGY OF THE SHE-DEVILS

(1973) Dir. Ted V. Mikels

 ** (Stream quality - B+)

For this alcoholic, a great simple throbbing synthesizer score goes a long long way towards paving over rough spots (what Carpenter called a 'carpet score' - i.e. it avoids micromanaging). Good old De Palma's preference for high-falutin' longhairs like Hermann and Rota can get a little overwrought, like one long music video for the orchestra, but here in Mikels country a nutcase named Carl Zittrer plays 'special electronic music' that's just one crude sustained repetitive drone that's occasionally broken in on by organ and drums. It works with the crude imagery, like some magic enchantment. Mikels directs the whole thing like he's ingested too much mandrake root and didn't pay his light bill. Lucky for us, this Amazon print/image has blacks so dark and deep they seem to creep down some dreamy dangerous and dusty cinematic alleyway between Kenneth Anger's ceremonial magick outsider art and a Sam Fuller primitivist pulp nightmare. You start to get that Temple Drake-style 'being really wasted at a party and suddenly you look around and everyone you know has left and the room is now filled with sketchy strangers giving you weird looks-style feeling. It's a feeling embodied the high strangeness of the lead witch Mara (Lila Zaborin), who stresses every word of her weird rhyming spells as if channeling Mickey Rooney's Puck in the 1935 Rienhardt film version of Midsummer Night's Dream.  Together with that Zittrer drone, Zaborin's intense, drawn-out, vaguely amphetamine-tinged hypnotic trance chanting can make even you--at home and half-asleep--a believer.

The scenes of her group of sexy acolytes dancing around prone male victims with spears, their hot midriffs and long legs driving innocent Christian viewers into the embraceable flames, connects it all in some vague way to Hammer's Prehistoric Women (1967), in a good way. What I mean is, I could have used more of these dancers, less of the weird bouncer guy with the fur hat (he looks like he could be Tom Savini's dad screen-testing for The Hills have Eyes) who just stands around looking inscrutable. Before and after these dances, various coven members stare into mirrors and hallucinate their past lives as witches being persecuted by intolerant sadistic townsfolk, priests, or knights. A scene of a girl forced to watch her child mercilessly flogged while she's burned alive is pretty vividly etched and quite painful to endure. There's also Native American dances, and a pope trying to exorcise a woman and then having her stoned to death by the locals when he fails. It's all very appalling and surprisingly well done, with decent crowd scenes. Since the bulk of the film looks all super cheap in dark and dingy rooms in Mara's mansion, these strong scenes offer a curious juxtaposition.

One tangent has Mara accepting a contract to rub out a crusading politician at a cocktail party via totem telepathy. It works, but the client tries to kill her rather than pay up! What kind of idiot doesn't honor a contract with a woman who can kill through telepathy and voodoo doll torture? A dead idiot, that's what kind. There's also a pretty weird seance, maybe the most amateur-creepy since Ed Wood's Night of the Ghouls. In other words, this is clearly a 'can't-miss' Halloween option, perfect for that coveted 4 AM slot. Interesting too that the film so covertly judges the 'good' guys: a normal hetero couple visit Mara's house for some cheap thrills, but then run for their lives when they realize it's legit. They tell a 'good; doctor, known for his ability to "psychometrize" objects ("Some people devote their entire lifetime to study of the mind!") Though we're never sure why this 'average' couple deem her such threat, the Christian doctor is determined to bring Mara down. "There's a sabbath going on in this house at this time" he notes from down on the street as her cool LA pad glows in the dark. Surrounding the house on all four sides with powerful 'good guy' warlocks, he shoots some painted-on lightning and kills everyone inside. After all, he had a right to! Their politics disagreed with his! Christendom is 'saved.' Not even a rubber bat shall be suffered to live.  

4. THE WITCH 

(2016) Dir. Robert Eggers

***1/2 / Amazon Image - A

Shrouded in portentous gloom and ominous droning electric cello, THE WITCH (2015) is the first great woodsy pre-Salem devil film in 300 years, a SHINING for the ANTICHRIST x BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW subdivision of the HAXAN community (with a dash of the recent HONEYMOON if you're keeping track). Set in 1630s New England on a small patch of farm and field, surrounded by deep (if leafless) woods, it's a character piece that delves into the same dark patch of the soul that many witch and devil movies make feints at but then run away from, i.e. the actual dark superstitions and folk tales, court records, and the twisted folk horror stories of zonked-out American mystics like Hawthorne, Poe and Ambrose Bierce. First time-writer/director Robert Eggers shows flair for the milieu and the genre both, making the narrative work by being straightforward with the paranoia and the reality. Not unlike ROSEMARY'S BABY it functions on both conscious and unconscious levels. It's an historical look at repressed female psychic energy in a patriarchy and the validation of that patriarchy's fear of the dark.

Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Thomasin (above, amidst deepdreamgenerator pareidolia), a naif to the menstrual age, who prays valiantly for deliverance from sinful thoughts but nonetheless falls prey to shady woodsy pagan strangeness, especially once the baby disappears on her watch. Kate Dickie, brilliantly unhinged, is the salt of the earth mom slowly dissolving into the dirt from the loss. The loving yet ineffectual dad (the nicely deep-voiced Ralph Ineson) can do nothing but try, fail, and then shy away from all blame. The son, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), is the sacrificial Barleycorn offering of a young lad starting--since there are no other options--to lust for his developing sister. Running rings around them all are moppet evil twins and a strapping horned goat named Black Phillip who is possibly the embodiment of Goat of Mendes i.e. Baphomet, or maybe just a buck in heat or in the early stages of rabies. Somehow, that goat steals the show and miraculously never seems CGI fake or badly cut-in to appear to not be doing naturally the eerie stuff he's up to. There's also a rabbit and a raven, filmed in such a thin grey light we feel the ominous ambivalence in their empty eyes. They might remind you, as the did me, of being a small child terrified by some strange small (but big to you) animal. That THE WITCH conjures such tremulous memories via just showing a frickin' hare just sittin' there in the deep dusky woods speaks to the film's unholy power. (more)

5. SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS

(1973) TVM (prod.by Aaron Spelling & Leonard Goldberg)

*** (Image - C)

A smooth occult TV movie prelude to both Charlie's Angels (1976) and Suspiria (1977), this Spelling/Goldberg joint stems from the halcyon days of relaxed morality, a time when free love and occult practice alike were mainstream-sanctified and girls' schools were allowed to have their male teachers host wine parties, and tell the students to "condemn nothing.... embrace everything... and hang loose" and it was all alright. Future Angels Cheryl Ladd and Kate Jackson are students at an all-girls college where there seems to be only two teachers: both groovy men--Dr. Delacroix (Lloyd Bochner)--who goes crazy imparting the secrets of mind control via a relentlessly-squeaking rat maze--and Dr. Clampett (Roy Thinnes), who teaches art and encourages the girls to embrace their own hallucinatory perceptions: "What we think we see is as real as what we actually see." Dude, that was like our mantra in my 4th-5th grade combined (artistic-minded) class! And maybe in the 70s in general. The less-cool Delacroix meanwhile talks about how terror makes rats and humans alike irrational and suggestive. Jaime Smith-Jackson (who'd just come off Go Ask Alice!) worries she may be next and drops to the hallway floor shrieking in terror between classes for no conceivable reason. Pamela Franklin (the girl-child in The Innocents who'd just come off shooting Legend of Hell House) is Elizabeth, secretly investigating the supposed suicide of her sister (Terry Lumley) whose ironed dirty blonde hair and red sweater / denim jacket ensemble kick things off perfectly in the paranoid opener. Jackson--wearing devilishly long straight black hair is the smart girl who helps Elizabeth with the mystery while espousing the wondrous powers of professor Clampett ("he can't help you if you fight him" she tells her). The all-of-a-piece low-key acting (only Jo Van Fleet's conflicted headmistress hams it up) and lengthy scenes of crackling thunder and blowing wind, girls walking around in their nightgowns in the dark, with a lantern illuminating their scared but determined young faces, all add up to laid-back 70s TV horror movie heaven, or... the other place... Satan, where do I sign?

The print on Amazon isn't great but it's the best we've got and at least the bulk of the artifacts are actual celluloid damage--green lines, cigarette burns, inconsistent color, blotches etc. with very faded color, but it's not blurry or obviously a VHS tape-transfer like some other TV movies floating around. It's over pretty fast and there's nary an uncool moment, so if I were you I'd join them.

----

6. VOODOO MAN

(1944) Dir. William "One Shot" Beaudine

** / Amazon Image: B

It might be hard to appreciate the beauty of Voodoo Man without the background of having being what Forrest Ackerman called "a monster kid" in 1960s-70s, when it was on local TV in Saturday afternoons a lot, introduced by various horror hosts or just flung onto screens with no warning. If you decided to stay inside and watch it, expecting Lugosi and company to make it worth your while, you'd be forced to admit you made a mistake. But to understand why that mistake was still worth making, and why we look back on this movie now so fondly now, first you must know the combined pain of artsy introversion, blase parents, clingy little brothers, and allergies. OR maybe, if it was in the theater, you needed to understand  the pain of losing sweethearts to Nazi or Japanese gunfire, the pain of soldiers heading overseas to face death at the hand of foreigners and hoping their young brides or sweethearts stay 'on ice' as it were. If you understand either audience, and the way strict censorship tried to wheedle every drop of horror out of horror movies, then maybe you will know the joy we all found in Bela Lugosi's insane megalomania as he broke through all restrictions to do whatever he wanted. Here he hypnotizes, and dresses young women in ceremonial robes and then uses them in weird soul energy transfer voodoo rites to bring his catatonic or dead wife back to life. Sound familiar? He did the same thing in Monogram's Corpse Vanishes a few years earlier, but that time he was truly evil -here he's sympathetic. The film itself isn't very clear about if it's supposed to be the victim's souls going into the wife's body, or vice versa, making it incoherent to a nine year-old Lugosi fan. Where's the monster, we wondered? Why is George Zucco wearing the funny hat with the feathers? Who does voodoo happen in a remote house instead of the jungle? Had the studio no potted fronds?

VOODOO MAN suffers from disrespect and the hostile derision not only of critics but itself (the writer hero disparages even his own past 'voodoo movie' scripts) but we monster kids were used to being told stuff we liked was crap. And we raged against boredom and against every bedtime and in this refusal to kowtow to life's petty rules we really found a kinsman in Lugosi. It didn't matter how bad everyone else was in front of and behind the camera in these dull murky dramas, Bela was the star and he 'got' our pain. He was how we imagined we'd be as adults, for we couldn't imagine life without our world-conquering mania. Bela never phoned it in. His banal surroundings made him glow that much brighter - not unlike ourselves trapped in the tedium of suburbia! 

And this has George Zucco.... in a headdress, acting up a solid 1/2 a shit storm of no tomorrow with mouthfuls of gobble di-gook probably made up on the spot. In these scenes lies the bliss kernel inside the bland screenwriter headed to a wedding shell. Not even John Carradine's painful hamming as an imbecile assistant (which I realize is for the censors--so he scans too childish to molest the zombie brides beyond petting their hair)--or the condescending attitude of the hero-- can dampen the glow, the passion, the moistening in Bela's eyes when he thinks he's finally waking up his sleeping beauty. Life.... to.. death! (more)

7. HAXAN: WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES

(1922) Dir. Benjamin Christensen

**** / Amazon Image - A

The definitive documentary / dramatization on the 'science' of the Middle Ages, this weird but essential tract on hysteria examines one surefire cure to the problems of overpopulation and unmarried old bitches in the days before women had rights --witchcraft accusations. We follow two different relatively minor incidents which balloon into wholesale slaughter and torture of the innocents. In the first, the father is dying of some unnamed malady; the wife suspects witchcraft; a passing old lady makes the mistake of dropping by to steal bread, and that's all it takes. Event follows event, and soon the entire household is rounded up and burnt at the stake. In the other: a horny young monk can't stop fantasizing about some local girl, so he renounces her as a witch.. Sooner or later all the women confess to lurid fantasias of midnight orgies in the middle of the woods, orgies vividly brought to life as Bosch-style horrors coupled to a Bruegel drunken peasant woodcut facial wrinkles. It might have been made in 1922 but the scenes of the monks laughing and drinking while torturing poor old women to death are pretty Eli Roth-style gut-wrenching. Luckily, there is also a scene of witches kissing the devil's filthy ass like it's a new bride at a wedding reception line; a devil feverishly churning his witch pole and flicking his tongue with enough lascivious obscenity to shame a Pazuzu-possessed Regan McNeil; flying witches on brooms; stop motion imps breaking through doors; flying gold pieces always just out of reach and banquet morsels that turn to squirming toads at first bite --all of it brilliantly-rendered, like some wild datura root nightmare come to life.

On Amazon Prime we have the (to me, superior) 1968 rerelease restored version --the one with a strange and wondrous free-form jazz score (crazy avant garde percussion and the violin of Jean Luc Ponty) with the intertitles replaced by narration from William S. Burroughs! He not only covers both the intolerance, hysteria and the fantasy but begs further thought, especially as regards modern Satanic panic / conspiracy theory / UFO abductions and so forth, as they survive to this day. Did the constant heart-wrenching torture these girls endured unlock past memories through the shattering of the mind and body? Supposedly this how the CIA creates split personalities in its sex slaves and assassins! I muse more on this all over on Divonorum Psychonauticus. 

For those of us familiar with the film through old shitty grey dupes, the Prime transfer is a whole other beast. See it and shudder at the fathomless depths of your own crazy species and all we do not know about where our narrow space-time dependent conception of reality ends and the timeless madness of the collective subconscious begins. 

8. SOUTHBOUND

(2015) Dir. by Roxanne Benjamin, Radio Silence,
David Bruckner, Patrick Horvath

*** (Amazon Print: A)

Immeasurably fueled by the Gifted's wildly retro-analog synth score, this scrappy anthology offers an array of southwestern Satanists, demons, strange voices on radios and cell phones, and world-weary bartenders, all aiding and abetting various characters driving down a stretch of American Southwestern highway someone calls the 'ass end of purgatory.'  Some characters are mere innocents on the wrong turn of their lives, some stuck on endless loops of karma and demonic pursuit, and do they even know which is which? It's as if the idea of watching a film obsessively over and over is more than just the strategy of neurotic film lovers striving to avoid their own existential mortality, it's what lies beyond as well. Some of the vignettes are scarier or funnier than others, but the cumulative effect is one of droll pleasure mixed with that anything-can-happen WTF dread we used to get from Tarantino and his spawn back in the 90s, back when our genre narrative expectations were first used against us with some regularity.

To be honest, those narrative expectations are why I've never been a huge fan of anthology horror films. Too often they rely on lazy scripts full of banal set-up and see-it-coming-a-mile-away twists, by which I mean all the stuff from Britain's Amicus or America's EC comics. Soutbound on the other hand, is more Sin City than either of those, albeit with a quietly remarkable absence of misogyny (there's even a girl director for one segment). Stories range from a Satan-worshipping 'normal' family recruiting most of an all-grrl rock band, to a very chilling and nightmarish trip to a deserted ER, a misguided 'rescue' by some old crazy brother for his long-missing biker tattoo-artist sister, and a murkily-motivated assault on a vacationing family that is almost--but never quite--explained. The patter of the local DJ (rockin' Larry Fessenden) ever-present on all the vehicular radios, unites the tales, not in theme or direction, but in Wolfman Jack-cum-Red Sovine highway philosophizing. But unlike the Crypt Keeper or Alfred Hitchcock, Fessenden's DJ doesn't add bad puns or plothole putty, just keeps the existential road homilies flowin' like a steamy asphalt ribbon down the line. Drive on, good buddy, whether you can't get off the highway and home before dawn, remember one thing: If yer an American, the endless highway already is home. Drive it and never look back, good buddy, because the Bickle freeze-frame rearview glance might be y'alls last, or already was.

9. LITTLE WITCHES 

(1996) Dir. Jane Simpson

*** (Image - B)

It's in full screen if you can believe that but damn, maybe it was never in anything else. I certainly don't remember it in theaters though I imagine it tried to ride the success of the very similar high school girl clique coven flick, The Craft. Much as I like that film and much as critics disparage this one online, I think Little Witches is better. The only advantage The Craft has over this is that career-defining badass performance by Fairuza Balk. Well, this one has a great evil witch performance too, from the lovely dark-haired Sheeri Rappaport. Rocking an insane midriff and baring her (thankfully un-augmented) breasts with diegetic abandon (but sans ickiness), Rappaport is quite a heart-stealer., and it doesn't have the yucky Skeet Ulrich either, adhering more to a Satan's School for Girls format, set an all-girls boarding school, this time Catholic, but with the same chosen coven of orphans and kids whose parents don't want them home for the Easter holiday, i.e. spring solstice!

Unlike SSFG, there is one boy toy character to deal with: a dumb hunk construction guy whose crew uncovers a walled-off room off the campus rectory, exposing a deep well/pit to caverns leading to the sea, and a gaggle of skeletons of missing girls from decades earlier. The (living) students--bored and under-chaperoned--find themselves returning to the uncovered room in the dead of night, again and again, driven to perform unholy rites for reasons that wouldn't make sense to the sober layman (dormant evil has the ability to make you think summoning it forth is your own idea, that is to say, some evil witch made you notice the Ouija board for sale and think it would be 'a lark' to try it --and that witch is the one who answers your attempt to contact those who've 'gone on').

Horror royalty Jennifer Rubin (Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Bad Dreams) is the cool nun in charge of the girls; Jack Nance is the priest; Poltergeists's Zelda ("this house.... is clean") Rubenstein is the requisite blind nun tasked with the holy Sentinel-style duty; one of the assembled girls is a very young Clea Duvall. Allow it.

Anyway, where we we, again? Oh yeah --the unholy powers are summoned. The Good Friday solstice convergence threatens reality as we know it and the Lovecraftian tentacles from beyond the door loom like a checkered flag.  Rather hostilely, Arrow in the Head notes that the film is too on the fence about what it wants to give us: "the sex is too soft (no lesbian scenes or sex scenes) to satisfy the [XXX] hounds and the horror too weak to thrill the genre fiends. I don’t even know if the film is supposed to be a comedy or not." But to some of us, Arrow in the Head, that's the very thing (or lack of) that makes it great! Once it's one or the the other, a comedy, a sex film, or a gore fest, it's boring. What Little Witches has that's unique is the in-between, the fluid genre-traversing. I also appreciate the hard-to-duplicate naturalistic Hawksian overlapping rapport between the girls, and the film's refreshing freedom from all the typical characterization shorthand we associate with the boarding school supernatural misadventure. There are no dumb pranks, gross gags; there's no slut-shaming, doofus boys leering through keyholes and snickering about scoring, or dullard parents loping in at the wrong moment. I like the sense of the supernatural arising slowly and naturally, almost like a joke at first but then, like the frog in the boiling water, too late to escape. I'd say anyone who hates on this film is a misogynist idiot whose fate is decreed by the unholy raiment of the Illuminati Sistren shish boom blah blah blah.

Probably, I'd be wrong.

Dig Rappaport's Linda Fiorentino-ish brunette feline fierceness

10. CHANDU ON THE MAGIC ISLAND

(1935) Starring: Bela Lugosi
**1/2 (Amazon stream Image -D+)

It's sometimes hard to figure why Bela Lugosi got such mean treatment from the studio system, but films like this may offer a clue: the unsteadiness of opiate dependence (so vividly, if compassionately, chronicled in Ed Wood). A lifelong drug addiction can be controlled, even harnessed, with an endless prescription from a connected quack with the ability to prevent the star from taking either too much (which would make him nod off and miss his cue) or too little (which would turn him into a twitching, sweaty, wild-eyed basket case). The 'too-little' part seems to be Bela's lot for Return of Chandu, the serial from which Magic Island was edited. Perhaps a simple "booster" from a studio doctor (if you were at a studio big enough to have one on call) could have knocked Bela into the outfield of calm, centered brilliance (as he demonstrated in The Black Cat the same year at Universal) but there was likely no studio doctor on a B-movie serial set like this one.

I generally warn you away from Amazon streams with the poor image quality--and this is one of the worst in this list-- but I've never seen a good version of  Magic Island's source material (my old two-tape set of the original serial looked just as bad) and, at any rate, the condensing of 12 dull chapters, keeps it lively; and the blurry pixelation gives weird accidental oomph tto all the shimmering spellcasting. Everyone has a glowing aura/halo and the crystal ball, stirred fountain effects, and fire pit all shimmer like some kind of yard sale surplus Max Reinhardt fairy dust.

Adding to the weirdness is that Bela plays Chandu instead of the villain (confusing those of us who loved him as the evil Roxor in Fox's Chandu the Magician from 1932) and even has a girlfriend in Princess Nadi (Maria Alba). Bela, with a girlfriend? He's more the dead wife type. Sweating, overwhelmed, wild-eyed and messy-haired, in ill-fitting white khakis, Bela can be hard to look at unless you do as I do, and pretend Bela's Chandu really is a junkie and that his (good) magic is the power of mightly Narc-Anon and the evil black magic is centered around opiates; the imprisoned white magician Tyba (Jospeh Swickard) is a friend Bela's Chandu makes in rehab; Chandu/s ancient guru is always reachable via crystal ball, i.e. like a sponsor available on speed dial; and scenes like where he's tied up and tortured with the crushing stone almost an exact mirror of the tortures of withdrawal. So even if --at times-- you'll want to bitch slap Lugosi's character for just standing around letting people get hurt rather than speaking up or launching a spell; and you'll wonder why he keeps toting a big ungainly diplomat family all over the Far East and subjecting them to danger nonstop while he just stands around sweaty and horrified and passive. I say, forgive him, as I have via your magical fourth step. Then keep this film on your Prime watchlist for emergencies.

 Sometimes just taking the edge off is paradise.

11. WITCHOUSE

(1999) Dir. David DeCoteau
*** (Amazon Image: B)

A simple story set in a very cool mansion about a solstice celebration, thrown by well-heeled Goth girl Margaret (Ashley McKinney) for a disparate bunch of Dunwich schoolmates, who come heedless of the fact they don't like her. Do they know their Puritan ancestors burnt her ancestor, Lilith (Arian Aulbright), as a witch 300 years earlier, and Lilith's been revived for the party? The pentagram is drawn. The lights are low. The mansion is gorgeous, and yet some don't give this DeCoteau-via-Charles Band joint a chance since it's shot on video and the witch make-up is kind of Sid and Marty Kroft rudimentary. Actually, Witchhouse looks fantastic once you give it a chance, thanks to patient Romanian craftsmen who use a stunning array of candles and oil lamps instead of unnatural electric light (Band had set up shop there, hiring talented local crews for cheap). There's all the requisite types for that film's totemic sacrifice: the stoner comic relief, the sex addict couple, the dumb jock and his hot blonde punk rock girlfriend, the bookworm hero and the hot-but-doesn't-know-it bespectacled girl. It might be the lamest party ever (pot and whiskey are nixed by buzzkill girlfriends) but the basement seance works like a charm and that natural lighting compensates one hell of a lot, as does woozy camera work (when magic is afoot the camera sways drunkenly) and there's a great sense that the whole mansion is lit up for running around in, rather than just in some static scenes - so the camera goes careening after the actors as they tear all over the place in this huge beautiful house and it's all in a very grand. I love that the uptight smug film major is the first to get zapped and he's the loudest at just saying no - preferring to stay all tense and bothersome--and clearly we're meant to cheer his demise --and we do! And I love that the stoner's girlfriend gets to knock out Lilith with one punch ("I coldcocked her," she flatly declares "and locked her in the other room"). Even the magic laser effects are well done.

L-R: ---Brooke Mueller (the rocker type); seance; Monica Serene Garnich (the cute nerdy type)

So, like Little Witches (above), what we have here is a lesser-known, underappreciated spookshow that's neither all the way sexy, funny or scary. That may bother some folks but I appreciate how unburdened by covertly-misogynistic it is. It may not be that great, story-wise, but so what? It's not trying for anything it can't achieve--it knows the spell we want to see it make, and it makes it. I dig the low-key acting of some of the characters, the engaged acting and clever writing--how innocuously yet lovingly the cinematographer keeps the candlelight in proper atmospheric balance (total termite). There's nothing to upset your babysitting charge's Puritan ancestors, with just enough aching "c'mon and kiss her already" tension that one five second kiss is all the affirmation they need to die for each other even though they just met. Ah kids.

Maybe I'm just partial to the ancestor-of-Salem vibe as I myself am the grand child of Dorothy Perkins, therefore a "direct" (?) descendent of several Salem community 'witches', including Mary Easty and Mary Edwards. Seeing films like this I wonder if I should enact some kind of unholy black magic revenge on their behalf? The simple fact is, 320 years is a long time to hold a grudge. Just to be safe, though, I bore witness against the thinness of Sherri Moon Zombie's lips in my review of Lords of Salem.

Lastly, it might help to have grown up reading/watching shit like The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew to really resent (as I do) the way gore and graphic sex and sexual assaults are so regularly rubbed in our faces, sex demeaned through pathetic dog-like rutting smash-cuts employed as a cheap shortcut to amping up the intensity. Then again, I'm very particular - the list of things I dislike in my go-to horror films gets longer every year, especially if there's any depressing imprisonment, puerile douchebag snickering, misogyny, or garlic. Witchhouse may not be as stealth great as The Eternal, but it's similar enough that I forgive it all trespasses. Plus the bond between Lilith and Margaret is cute -it's like she's the cool 320 year-old eccentric aunt who visits on the holidays once a year and the niece falls under her sway and gets into crystals and the tarot or something. You know the type? Neither turns on the other as a final bloody twist and the nerds win in the end, but who gets to rock out? Margaret and Lillith. Witches give snitches stitches and damn right they'll be back in another 320 years, whether anyone shows up to fuckin' ever drink that whiskey or not! Fuckin' lightweights

---

12. THE MARK OF THE WITCH 

(AKA "ANOTHER")
(2014) Dir. Jason Bognacki

**1/2 (IQ -A)

Proof you don't need a huge budget and a ton of scenes or even a sense of linear time in your film, you just need to have done enough drugs, meditation, therapy, or arguing with a manipulative mother to know how slippery identity and self perception really is. This film by newcomer Jason Bognacki shows us he may qualify.  His 2014 debut has q cute young pharmaceutical intern's 18th birthday shift interrupted by the sudden arrival of her absentee body-hopping immortal mother. Guess whose body she wants to inhabit? Lynchian para-sympathetic matriarchal ellipses and horror hallucinations and dreams-within-dreams, make it harder and harder for us to figure out what's real as our plucky intern tries to learns the truth about her coven heritage. For witches, it seems, blood is not only thicker than water, it's the sewer tunnel through which immortal spirits scurry like rats under the river of the centuries. If you have access to a pharmacy, so much the richer.

Newcomer Paulie Redding brings a marvelous range of expressions as the possessed intern: we can instantly tell who's possessing her at any given time. The Skelton Knaggs-nosed Maria Olsen--playing either her mother or herself or her ancient ancestor, makes a terrifying shadow/devouring mother archetype. We feel the futility of trying to fight one's genetic matriarchal heritage (even with rebel 'good witch' guardian Nancy Wolfe trying to help), the same way we feel it's futile trying to convince relatives their politics are wrong at Xmas dinner. Bognacki trusts his imagery to structure a story within the viewer's paranois, sparing him the duty of linear explanation (which seems counter to the workings of real druggie magic anyway). 

Clearly this was originally a short, being stretched to feature length by any means necessary (dig the way the director bides for time by slowing the end credit scroll to ten minutes!) but that's not to denigrate a very promising and unusual debut. Even possessed by Lymcjoam tropes, it remains quite itself.

13. THE ETERNAL 

(1998) Dir. Michael Almereyda

**** (IQ - B)

Like a few other films on this list, I'm shocked at the afforded hostility of the average critic over the loose drunkard druid revisionist  meditation on Irish horror novelist Bram Stoker's Jewel of the Seven Stars that is The Eternal. Have they even seen it? Blood from the Mummy's Tohand that winds up possessing a young Victorian daughter of a catatonic Egyptologist. The book is great, like Dracula, Stoker seems obsessed with a kind round the clock vigil over endangered hotties whose past lives either are these ancient demons or were in love with them. Either way, that ridiculous faux K-horror erotic video cover is terrible, the title is meaningless, and even the other title 'TRANCE' is bad. Michael! Call me I can help! You could have called it She-druid Drunks of the Iron Age - that's just off the top of m'head. And whatever you have against this film, film critics at large, admit that Allison Elliott is sublime in an array of roles, and the idea of a devouring matriarchal druid ancestor jibes very well with the other films on this list, so even though I've written about it a dozen times already (see: Inescapably Her Iron Age Druid Bog Mummy Telekinetic Alcoholic Hottie Self) I had to include it, do you understand? I didn't have a choice!! 

And for Almereyda heads out there, Prime has his first feature, favorite of everyone ever in the world who's seen it (all sixteen of us), 1989's TWISTER, (no relation to the 1996 Jan De Bont action movie), a strange family movie with Crispin Glover, Harry Dean Stanton, Dylan McDermott.... hell yeah.

Also: 

SUGAR SKULL GIRLS

(2016) Dir. Christian Grillo

*4/5 (Image - A)

If Phil Tucker (the 'genius' behind Cat Women of the Moon and Robot Monster) took a bet he could film an all-ages girl power spookshow with just his daughter and her slumber party friends, a few very odd guest stars (such as Michael Hills Have Eyes Berryman) over a single weekend, then this is proof he won that bet. For "adults" of all ages, this is perfect for parents who are trying to turn their ten year-old daughters away from the Neon Demon and the hentai watched by their peers and towards their own Labyrinth / Power Rangers past. It's a demonic Power Puff contingent for the freshly pierced, something the less mature children can show their younger siblings after trick-or-treating - to both laugh at and with, and even get the gist of what good Brechtian so-amateur-it's-genius is all about.

As Prospero says in Corman's Masque of the Red Death, the best swordsman in Europe wouldn't fear the second best, he would fear the worst.  SSG is proof that terrible pacing, clunky editing, amateur acting and muddled writing can be overcome through pure muttonheaded moxy.

I also will ascertain at this juncture I know no one in the cast or crew, have not been sent a copy or courted via emails to review this, I just found it floating in the Amazon stream, like all the rest. Let us give thanks this day, for in my childhood this kind of distribution was a foolhardy dream. The label putting this out is 'Potent media' and their symbol is an inverted pentagram. Something is amok, I mean amiss. Yet I found it - floating in the 'similar titles on Prime' and for a hot sec I felt once again like a single digit-aged Ed Wood fan finding a surreal K. Gordon Murray kiddie import on the 5 AM movie as I waited for ISIS... and SHAZAM.

The DEVIL'S HAND

(1962) Dir. William J. Hole

**

I have tried to see this all the way through a few times but it seems like little more than an Alfred Hitchcock Presents or Karloff 'Thriller' episode padded with a lengthy scene of coven members sprawled on divans watching a floor show of devilish beatnik jazz dancing and bongos. That said, mileage may yet vary if one day feathers prove the ploy. Bruno ve Sota lurks amidst the divans, the Satanic honey trap (above) has excellent posture and look fast for...nah I won't spoil it.

BAY COVE 
(AKA [Easy] BAY COVEN)

(1987) TVM - Dir. Carl Schenkel 

** (IQ - C)

The mid-to-late 1980s TV movie was mired in a lot of regretful fashion choices: pastels, shoulder-pads, Ray Bans; perms, sweatbands and spandex bouncing to aerobics videos, and Armani narcissists like Tom Cruise and Richard Gere who honestly thought that by playing narcissists who finally get their heads out of their own asses, they're somehow 'heroes', that any step forward out of their narcissistic materialism should be accompanied by a parade of gorgeous women's admiring tears. That said, by 1987 we were wising up to such tinny bombast, and we had the abortion affidavits to prove it.

What we needed was a fresh start. Really fresh. We needed to get out of the city, with its boardrooms and Venetian blind-and-cigarette diffused lighting, and get back to small upscale communities with sinful secrets, and farther back still, to harvest sacrifices and chanting covens.

So come thee, hetero DINC couples, to Bay Coven, or Cove as they call it (to throw the persecution-crazy Christians off the scent). Here in this isolated island community ("only" 45 minutes away from San Francisco!), an unholy pact has resulted in all the original members being still alive after 300 years. Their secret: sacrificing the descendants of their olde thyme persecutors. You know, business as usual.. in the '90s... the 1690s. But now they need new blood for the circle, so its time to recruit Timothy Hutton and and his sexy wife (Pamela Sue Martin!), and to welcome them to easy Bay Coven!

We're left with many unanswered questions. The main one: who the hell does the script think Woody Harrelson is? Did the citizens use their magic to kill Pamela's brother and why no mention Woody was her brother until after he's dead? Confused? I am.

Well, I know it's a lot to ask, but if you can handle Pamela Sue Martin's post-New Wave shoulder pads and unflattering Cherry Hill perm and don't mind the movie's stubborn refusal to try even one original plot point of its own instead of "borrowing" everything (right down to the dream sequences) from 70s touchstones like: Let's Scare Jessica to Death, Crowhaven Farm, The Stepford Wives and The Dark Secret of Harvest Home, (and of course, the one they all borrow from -- Rosemary's Baby) and if you're not dissuaded by its dated ersatz neo-noir look (the muted blue-and-grey shot-on-video colors) and you're doing something else at the same time, like laundry or homework, to keep yourself distracted, then you may like Bay Coven or Cove.... whichever.

Maybe that's the whole reason the whole family used to love these old TV movies in the 70s: they were never meant to be original or riveting - never meant to absorb our full attention, never meant to disturb us, or bum us out. They were designed solely to keep us watching through the next commercial, to keep us mildly absorbed but never fully enthralled. We'd joke about lame dialogue or inept special effects while sharing popcorn, guzzling Coke (for the kids) and highballs fort the parents and being able to follow the plot while eight other things were going on--Monopoly games, babysitter pony rides, general carrying on (see also: Satan's School for Girls), talking on the phone (and when a bit older, making out on the couch).

Now that we can watch entire seasons of disturbingly violent and vivid TV shows in one sitting--no commercials, no respite, no return from reality--all that social connection is fading.  The sheer number of options leaves our attention span too short to watch anything less than instantaneously riveting.

Maybe what we need is a fresh start. Really fresh. We needed to get off of TIVO with its brutal SVUs and back to the simple joys of 70s TV horror movies. That said, this is from 1980s.... hand me the sacrificial scythe.

SEASON OF THE WITCH
AKA "Hungry Wives"

(1972) Dir. George Romero

 ** / IQ - C

This doesn't get a lot of love due its hopelessly trite surrealism, depressing aesthetic (terrible greasy paleface make-up that everyone seems visibly sweating under, close-ups of middle-aged faces with yellowed long teeth), and dialogue way too close to how annoying friends of your mom actually used to talk. Sure it's directed by George Romero, sure it was made between Living Dead and The Crazies. Nonetheless, it's too dingy and too didactic to work as either horror or 'cracker factory' polemic. It's like hey, we get it: like so many women in the early days of "women's lib," housewife Joan (Jan White) is bored and sexually frustrated. Her bland husband barely seems to notice her (and vice versa) and she's got nothing to do all day--she thinks--but laze around dreaming in surreal shorthand. Even her witchiness is boring. Honey, we all have to suffer against the sucking tide of societal indifference towards our own inertia. Toying around with New Age accoutrements like it's not just another form of isolation consumerism is not 'doing' anything. And no offense to Romero, but do we really need another man telling a story about the troubles faced by women at man's hands? Instead of just laying around in bed all day dreaming of being led around on a leash by an uncaring bored (impotent) husband, why not get a job, or write your own damned movie? Go work as a dominatrix in the afternoons and you can lead the men around on the leash instead like Catherine Deneuve. Or at the very least, maybe volunteer at the animal shelter.

LATE ADDS:
Since this post more cool titles worth seeing have come out on Prime:
THE LOVE WITCH (review/essay here)

THE WITCHING starring Pamela Franklin!