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. 

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

Ah 1966, what an excellent year for an animal or human sacrifice, what with any worry about an EXORCIST still eight years away. Hell, even two years off from ROSEMARY'S BABY and the sudden hipster clout it engendered, '66's twin devil offerings, INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL are polar opposite heralds to Polanski's influential hit: one co-stars Polanski's then-wife (he helped get her the gig) and mirrors Rosemary's feeling of being a wife shut out of some grand conspiracy; the other is off on some crazy hipster dream in a language all its own (literally, since it's the only film ever made in that forgotten 'experimental' language, Esperanto, at least the only one that anyone's ever seen). Soon the fangs would be properly installed in the balls of horror cinema, but for now it was all just rumors and poetry and urban legend. There are those in insider circles who say it was Roman's getting wife Sharon Tate the EYE role that caused the devil to stir from his liquid slumber and languorously stretch through time to snatch her at the prime two-souls-in-one moment via his extra-dimensional Manson hook.

In case you are not up on your Hollywood Satanic conspiracy theories, some say the strange accidents and macabre coincidences during ROSEMARY's production originate in producer William Castle's imagination. Some say he took his gimmickry to a whole new level, way way past his usual chair buzzers and skeletons on strings, instead he went psychologically nefarious, going for the paranoia seed-planting that can spread like wildfire from a single cocktail party to infect the collective unconscious in ways deeper than any normal 'fiction' ever can. As Sutter Kane might say, when everyone believes the legend, the truth warps to accommodate. 

Reality is as susceptible to insanity as anyone. 

We know it's relatively unlikely a real skeleton is going to come flying through the screen during a revival showing of HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, that's why we love Emergo! so much. It's not really scary-scary, it's Boo! Ahahah scary. The devil doesn't need skeletons to be scary. An old lady neighbor who baked you cookies for some reason and keeps wanting to be invited in - that's genuinely scary.

Besides, maybe there's a reason superstitions began that does have scientific validity. Maybe not walking under a ladder prevents paint can concussion, and people made shitty ladders back when that superstition began, so they just told everyone not to walk underneath them (the guy making ladders was really mean so they didn't want to suggest he tighten the screws); maybe salt thrown over the shoulder absorbs negative ions; maybe Castle didn't mean to create a real curse by starting the rumor going, but rumors do tend to zero back in, like a curved sacrificial karmic arrow, on the one who started them, even if he himself didn't believe it.. at first. (1)

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 you don't know yet, I'm afraid it's going to be... 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. Only those who revere repression need fear him. And they're likely the ones bound to be caught up in a sex scandal sooner or later. Sexual repression is the devil's distillery. And its release in an evil act is the devil's drunk tank. He gets them going up and gets them going down.

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 (just how did he get it for her?); 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 (by blinding the EYEs of rival Tony Curtis)--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. And the devourer is always... Moloch.

On the other hand, even if for the moment we believe all this fateful 'nonsense,' it's mighty fuzzy logic. Impossible to confirm by any one set of truths, its also impossible to deny--and thus like all fiction that explores this realm, dangerous. The best way to approach it is as a true skeptic, which means you don't scoff at either side, because unlike the pragmatist, you know your own eyes and ears are easily fooled. Thus, a Satanist who believes in an actual physical devil is as rigidly dogmatic as the rationalist who denies the devil's existence, even as a metaphysical concept. When corporeal reality tries to limit itself to expression within either set of parameters, there's always nightmare overflow. Satan never singles out the open-minded for his mischief. It's always the sure and pious ones who draw him, their unsullied souls sticking out like bleached whites in a soiled soul sea, and the ones who are so sure he's a living being succeed in--as far as their own direct experience is concerned--making him one. Eventually every conception of good and evil comes 'literally' true. Especially if you do lots of drugs, are schizophrenic, or have a really bad fever.

I mention all this to eat up the time because when Sharon Tate's not onscreen, EYE OF THE DEVIL is a grand bore. And she's not on an awful lot. The tale of some grand ancient sacrificial rite that ensures good grape harvest at a sprawling South of France winery, it draws us in as outsiders through the eyes of a prim and overbearing wife played by Deborah Kerr. She spends the whole movie trying to get her half-asleep nonentity husband, the marquis (David Niven) of the area to come back to London so she can resume boring him to death with dreary classical music salons. Here in France he's being prepared for some even worse fate (she thinks); it's some some kind of diabolical ceremony and he's being prepared to participate somehow, but how? She must know, so she can stop it, like a nanny no one invited, still chasing after old charges, trying to make them go to bed at nine and drink their milk,long after they've grown up and filed restraining orders.

Tate and David Hemming are sublime, meanwhile, as a pair of magical blonde twins doing all sorts of macabre arcane prepwork, but they're barely in the film at all. Even Niven's angry flogging of a sexy black turtlenecked Tate makes it onto the poster and opens new chamber doors in our telltale hearts but it's just another joyless punitive measure. The film would rather focus in on Kerr's prim outrage over David Hemmings shooting down a white dove with his little bow and arrow. After she first spies him and his equally strange blonde sister, Odille (Tate) as they bring said dove on a pillow into a weird looking Satanic ceremony, Kerr orders them off the property. Like who put this dame in charge? Intentional or not, Kerr is as irritating a nosey parker as Dustin Hoffman in STRAW DOGS or Jessica Biel in the 2003 remake of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (see my op here). Inviting herself in to take charge of a situation she doesn't understand, she's a mutton-headed missionary enforcing a hypocritically "Christian" concept of law and order wherever she goes, never thinking to examine her own mess or to just go home and resume micro-managing her servants. As her colonialist animus-dominated sense of superiority clouds her awareness of what's actually going on, we begin to understand both Niven's passivity and his eagerness to complete the ceremony to come Every husband in the world stuck with a wife this much of a buzzkill would gladly cut off his own arm to escape her. Soon we're rooting for Niven to pursue the one avenue of escape she leaves open... the one avenue even she dares not follow.

I don't mean to slight Kerr - or this kind of weird set-up. As a kind of unwittingly dosed quasi-pedophile Mary Poppins in THE INNOCENTS (right), Kerr was amazing in a similar role. Destroying the lives of two children through wicked hallucinations of a groundskeeper animus, or else trying to save them from incestuous possession --either way she was invited, hired for the job; she was assigned the position and expected to take full charge. DEVIL is different; if those two weird kids in INNOCENTS grew up to be blonde Satanists, stalking their ample mansion grounds like Warhol superstars able to turn doves into lizards, then Kerr's meddling would just seem petty and aggravating but still it would be nowhere near as depressingy mundane as in EYE. In INNOCENTS, the three of them--or four with the maid--are so cut off from the rest of the world, we sympathize with how lack of connection to the social order can allow things to spin way way out of control.

The animus-incubus-like Peter Quint was the corrupting voluptuary shadow to Kerr's 'proud, white governess, driving her like a flaming hearse into the heart of their young charge's budding darkness. In EYE there can be no psychosexual kinks because all she wants to do is rescue her full-grown husband and bring him back to her tedious London social orbit. We just want to ride with the twins on their weird evil errands, but instead our camera follows Kerr everywhere, like a priest trying to score a fat donation: she lopes after Niven as he lurches hither and yon, as stricken by his impending doom as a bones-tossed Queequeg. She judges and condemns the wicked, wicked twins as they loiter in black turtlenecks; they drive poor Flora Robson to tears because... oh no, the nightmare--it's all happening again... Sign, Robson's always great, and if we can't run amok with the twins we'd be happy hanging around her for awhile, but noooo, on this endless bucolic French vacation we're stuck with the most boring character in a 60-km radius, and meanwhile all this cool stuff is going on behind our backs. She's like my mom used to be, forcing me to hide all my insidious soul-killing vices from her over the holidays because she doesn't understand why anyone would do anything bad for their health. And then wondering why I need to just sleep the day away and then stay up all night.. where she can't get me. 

Luckily, the weird devil 'becoming'-ness I mentioned earlier is all over EYE: the music played during the local festival sounds eerily similar to Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" --we'd think it a homage or even rip-off had it not come first--and after that just imagine the film as a vision of what ROSEMARY'S BABY 2 might be like if Rosemary had twins and 18 years later she's still in denial about who their father was, chasing after them with mittens and rubbers as they burn churches and slaughter priests.

All that said, if not for Tate's real life fate lending EYE even more of the eerie black magic ballyhoo synchronicity that plagued ROSEMARY and THE EXORCIST, it would be worthless. But in its eerie prescience it's Tate's equivalent to James Dean's Highway Safety promo film. She's the bizarro super sexy Satanic Virgin Mary that would beget Rosemary Woodhouse and Regan MacNeil, as they in turn would beget a period of widespread Ouija abuse. And that black outfit with the hypnotic pendant or whatever is damn sexy, especially with her bright blonde hair as contrast. It shows us just how far ahead of us England was at celebrating the eerie self-confidence of badass babes in black (Mrs. Peel, we're needed) rather than ever trying to shoehorn them into pretty dresses and tie their hair back in a cruel mirthless bun.

Working our way back out of the EYE, it should be clear now that the devil is alive and well in any representation of his evil influence. His name is a kind of interactive tarot deck wherein having the cards read is what kills you. Believing precedes seeing; the moment your focus settles on a shadow, that shadow begins to spring to life, the way William Castle's rumor mill ballyhoo about mysterious accidents on set could be said to have indirectly led to the Manson murders.

But... even then, man oh man -- there any more boring sacrificial murder weapon than a bow and arrow? Do British schoolchildren stay up at night listening to tales of the haunted archer? Nein! It's too impersonal. It lacks the fears we harbor for the knife. And another thing: if there's anything a drunk like me hates, it's a buzzkill. Everyone else wants whatever is going to happen to Niven to happen, including us. We didn't start watching a movie called EYE OF THE DEVIL so we could see Deborah Kerr scold us for our curiosity about such things. We're going to root for Sharon Tate, no matter what, evil or not, because she's gorgeous, young, and confident. And it doesn't take long before we're fully invested in whatever evil is going on, hoping the devil gets the job done before Kerr comes barging in like mom tromping down to the basement to complain about the noise you kids are making and what's that smell? Smoke? Let me see your eyes!

Mom, go back to bed!

If the devil's eye offends thee, Kerr, pluck it from its hottie roost!

It's hard to believe that EYE, this weird little Satan's Little Helper edition of BONJOUR TRISTESSE came out two years before the relatively old school DEVIL RIDE'S OUT (AKA BRIDE OF THE DEVIL), a rousing, full-blooded Hammer film that seems decades younger in spirit if not in form than the new wave-y EYE. There's no occult real life ballyhoo associated with RIDES, and it doesn't needy any, because it has at least two characters with ample wit and sparkle: Charles Gray as Mataxa and Christopher Lee as the Van Helsing / Quatermass / Sherlock Holmes- type Devil hunter. Dennis Wheatley's original novel was set in the South of France, too, I think -- another connection and proof the area's rife with possibility! Is it some secret knowledge that the south of France is devil cult country?).

RIDE understands--the way few devil movies do--that the trick to defeating pure evil is not to confront it with pure good, but with balance, and a sense of humor to help you roll with the absurdity of it all, but not to the point you kill the atmosphere. That would be truly uncharitable.

Onwards then to the other Satanic offering of 1966 -- INCUBUS.

INCUBUS.... the only film ever shot in Esperanto.... the language of the Satanic mass! Invented by the UN coven to bedevil the globe!

Put your feet up

Wondrously pretentious, like a beatnik open mic jazz dance performance if it was shot by Dennis Hopper as an ONIBABA-style psychosexual folk tale for Roger Corman over a single Big Sur weekend, INCBUS would make a good double bill with THE TERROR and/or THE SEVENTH SEAL (as it no doubt intends). The Esperanto angle adds just the right dash of weirdness to the already weird story of a succubus hanging around a healing spring, corrupting infirm male travelers and then hastening their deaths so big daddy Satan can devour their souls. She longs to corrupt a good pure soul instead of just offing the already stained, but her older sister advises against it. Sis is right (I tried it once and look at me - I lost the fight and now am pure as snow.) Then William Shatner shows up, and he's not there for the waters, baby, but to play a variation of Jack Nicholson's lost Napoleonic solider in THE TERROR: sick of war, wandering the Big Sur coast, so noble he can't be beat. Luckily the sisters have a back-up plan when things go south: unleash the Incubus (their brother) on the good soul's equally good (i.e. virginal) sister!

Second thought, scratch the other two, this would actually make a good double bill with the 1961 Liz-and-Dick semi-camp classic, THE SANDPIPER. Both concern a mythic 'impossible love' story between a paragon of virtue and a slutty mankiller who loves lolling in the Big Sur surf and spouting beatnik profundities. One is a studio-backed Vincente Minnelli opus, the other a low-budget concoction from Leslie "Ed Wood on a dime bag of Bergman" Stevens, but both love the Big Sur surf as much as we all do, if we've been there. And if we haven't been, what are we waiting for?

Sure, I know what your saying, man: INCUBUS sounds over-baked... but a succubus feeling sexually violated because Kirk brought her into a church to get out of the sun while she was asleep? Senpreza!  

In conclusion, INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL share a lot more than their date. They're burdened by similar faults: EYE is way too dry and disdainful of its subject; INCUBUS is way too singleminded and didactic. Yet, they share a strength, too: a unique ambiguity about which 'side' they're on, as films. There's an association of good with boring and safe in both. In ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE EXORCIST, the heroines--Chris (Ellen Burstyn) and Rosemary (Mia Farrow) are hip enough that we don't wince at their every word, and the evil spirits--Pazuzu, Guy--vile enough that we don't want to go party with them. But in both these 1966 films, the 'average' voice, the establishment figure, so to speak, is an unshakable bore. He or She is as a fruit tree ripe for shaking. Every second of screen time they are not being shaken to the core is nigh unbearable to us, the hip post-67 viewer. Maybe it was still dangerous in 1966 to feel ourselves rooting for Tate and Hemmings in EYE. That we feared for their plan to be interrupted because of Kerr's imperialist meddling must have felt transgressive in that more innocent, staid era; and in INCUBUS not to spoil the ending, but did we really need to see some old church / patriarchy win out for 665th time against the feminine darkness? No one goes to a devil movie to root for the very thing they went to the movies to escape from, mom! Satano, liberigu miajn malbonajn junajn knabinojn!

NOTES:
1. William Castle got painful kidney stones right as the film was released - didn't you hear?