Odin's Last Stand: WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN

A great experimental film premiered on TCM last week from Nicholas Ray, which he shot in the late 1960s-early 70s with his film class while teaching at an upstate NY school. Along the way Nick may not have made a real film per se, but he created a communal spirit. He pulled his entire class out of their other courses and into his decaying orbit--for better and worse--drank in excess, smoked "quantity," had affairs with coeds and generally--as was his wont since the beginning of his long tortured career--alternated between being a benevolent pied piper and a manipulative tyrant towards his crew and coterie. His younger wife sums it up eloquently in her accompanying documentary, and I paraphrase: Nick had passion and an obsessive focus on the project at hand. That focus that never wavered, even when the project was clearly not working--even if it was never going to work--even if it was an unsalvageable train wreck. And that's the difference between an artist and a non-artist (is the ultimate message here). Most of us just walk away from lost causes. For guys like Nick Ray, lost causes are the preferred kind. But is that Quixote-esque madness true courage or fear? Does he worry about the post-film depression experienced by so many filmmaker, the being forced to confront the empty page, the empty budget, the empty house, once more?

As time goes on, Nick and his class's ambiguously semi-finished collaborative collage WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN (1973-ish) becomes a self-reflexive right place / right time black hole. An old Hollywood outsider inspires and infuriates and exhausts an upstate New York crew of campus semi-radicals - and films same, and is in turn filmed by the class and his girlfriend, footage of which is swallowed back up into the thing itself (like mounting a serpent on the wall even as it's in the midst of swallowing you). There's smatterings of Ahab, Manson, Colonel Kurz, and Long John Silver in Nicholas Ray's inexorable creative drive as he charges boldly into the abyss of 'semi documentary' ala MEDIUM COOL, GIMME SHELTER, BILLY JACK, I AM CURIOUS YELLOW and so on. He's the kind of film teacher you both hope for and fear, since he has you convinced that if you fail to follow him over the lip of madness then you must not really want to be filmmaker. He'd be great if you needed an ennabler - someone who'll always be drunker and up later than you, and yet never is late to the cutting room (since he never leaves). Whether pretending to hang himself or coaxing tears and anguish from his actors he's always a little bit Norman Maine from A STAR IS BORN, ever a stone's throw from the long swim as he grooms the next generation with a love born of mortal desperation. Left to his own devices, he'd be editing and re-editing this film forever, it's a maze he created just to get lost in, and like therapy, you know you've graduated when you've worked up the nerve to leave him to it. You graduate when you learn to do the one thing he can't teach you, to fucking quit.

Maybe that's all art is, in the end, a moment in an ever-changing maze, where you either say hello or goodbye to the guide who'll either get you lost (if you're stagnant in your foundhood), or found if you're lost too long. Maybe it's because the insane need to always have an ending, a way out, open to them, at least in their imagination. And for Nick, the end is that of a rope or a gun, far less terrifying than the thought of not having a project to distract himself with. Left to his own devices he would be like Orson Welles, tinkering with the edits and sound on each and every film post-KANE until it's snatched from his hands by impatient producers and hacked back into some semblance of order by a sane, orderly film; or drunken De Kooning in his early years, painting over and over on a single canvas simply because he has neither the money nor sobriety required to judge it finished and/or the ability to replace it with a blank one. 

This kind of compulsive behavior when harnessed to genuine art is unstoppable. And it can't fail because it avoids judgment - it's the work in progress - the "previews" for plays, the test screenings for films that would die ignobly if opened up to critical judgment.

The unfinished work fills the void no amount of sex and possessions ever could. Nicholas Ray's film is a success because he worked on it long enough that he could distract his mania for over a year. It's a success because he was dead before he could finish it. It's a success because it's still not finished. It has no terms to be accepted by. It's simply a a con game, wherein a wily old visionary cheats the eater of souls, one last time.

Does the finished product of WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAN amount to anything? Compared to what? The only ideal way to see it would be at four in the morning at a small university projection room with the people who made it; a thick haze of pot and tobacco smoke revealed in the beam of the projector, and co-eds in thick beards and glasses sitting cross-legged in the aisles, passing jugs of wine, with Nick Ray sitting behind you, yelling at the projector or the screen, entering and exiting the room to compliment and juxtapose metatextually his entrances and exits in the film--sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose--and with actors onscreen showing up with beards one reel, then shaven the next, then you see the same actor in the audience, with a half-full beard. 

On TCM in your living room, on your modern day utopian sofa, the film's relevance will depend on where your own head is at: are you a filmmaker yourself, one who perhaps chooses self-reflexivity and post-modern metatextuality as your mise-en-scene, since it ensures the sets are always free, the actors always present? If you come for that, you may find what you're looking for. If you come for political insight, forget it.

I wish I had Ray's mania and am glad I don't. Something inside me keeps me from ever letting go of the rope as I descend into the abyss that Ray jumps into, always, headfirst, holding onto the rope only because he can use it to hang himself if things get too grim. WE CAN'T GO HOME practically dares the audience to dive in after him, right through the screen. He even left us a wide open hole, woven open by a patchwork ring of images of social unrest. Just stick your head through, and let his old Hollywood gravity snuff your scalding flame.

"Law no more!" - Kindergarten Consciousness in ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1933)

Thanks to Criterion's fancy restoration, the ships and shipping in the pre-code horror Island of Lost Souls (1932)-- a film too long absent from DVD--have extra foggy resonance. Finally. My dream request that Criterion release this title at last has been answered. I feel like the dream king of a remote Skull-shaped island, who can see deep into the shadows of the studio jungle and make out the grim black beast faces that before were just vague smudges on a home-recorded (in1981, SLP mode) VHS-tape. What a difference! This time Criterion's burned all the streakiness out of her!

Director Earle C. Kenton eschewed mere stock footage rear screen projections for this lurid lost soul island, Paramount spared no expense, and the enormity of the ships and their lines and cables strung in the fog really hits you on Blu-ray. You can practically smell the salt-sprayed animals and you feel bad for them and anyone aboard who has to smell the wet fur and excrement. There are lovely shots of bright spot light and pitch deep black now coming through chiaroscuro latticework. Pond reflections of potential lovers dissolving back into DNA sequences ripe for halving; the subtle changes of distressed expression on Leila Hyam's face as the windows facing her at dinner teem with lewd, grinning, probably jacking-off donkey men; the character of Oran ("Him.. tell me... spill blood!") now standing out more from the foliage as every feature of his black on dark Caliban face restored with the Criterion glow, and every obscene pustule on Moreau's hopelessly phallic giant jungle plants glistens in the moonlight.

One would feel better about it all if the old man had some opiates or Ketamine on hand to knock out his animals before all the painful glandular surgery, but that would undo the grisly satisfaction of the ending. Still, there's a lot of pain in this movie. So beware! But humor too, of the jet black evil variety. Due to Laughton's fey, portly sadistic, aesthete elan, his Moreau becomes something like the younger brother of his other two main early 30s sadists: Cap'n Bligh in MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (1935) and 'bullyin' Barrett in THE BARRETTS OF WIMPOLE STREET (1934). 

 Those mythic British connections are perhaps intended, as a satire of such types, the English sadist using (in this case science's) strict codes of conduct as tools for abuse (apparently England's brutal school system will teach you all about that). We learn from my old Scarlet Street editor David J. Skal in the extras that HG Welles meant the original version to be a kind of Swiftian meta-satire on the Victorian fad for social evolution and science and disregard for the suffering of lab animals, but my reading of the film this time harkened back way farther, as far back as ye can Goethe - to the Annunaki in the old tablets of the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia. Look at the picture below and tell me it doesn't look like this ancient god is inserting a pineal gland, our cosmic router, thus forever separating us from the rest of the animal kingdom. 

Him tell me... spill blood!

If you don't know your ancient alien theory: Lord Enki and other advanced race visitants came here and made humans from a mixture of their own  Annunaki genes and resident ape /animal DNA so that they could be taught to mine for gold which was then shipped off-world. Enki got soft on his critters and gave them some tips on the use of fire and language against strict orders. He even taught us to eat other things than meat, i.e. plants, which to eat and which to avoid and which to use for astral phone calls.

Maybe the end of most mad scientist movies-- when the monsters run amok and kill their maker-- are really a kind of very long-belated revenge against lord Enki for fucking us up - making us part god, part beast -a  hideous still-beating THING! We've been simmering all these eons in our ancestral memory, resentful of ever being dragged from our Edenic animal sleep and thrown into the cold logical light of reason, pain, spelling, kindergarten; being forced to walk on two legs instead of comfortable crawling, and all that other serpentine-mammalian hybrid consciousness duality - both herd animal and solo predator --all just to satisfy the morbid curiosity of a well-heeled reptilian alien madman who's angry at the world 'cuz he's too deep in the closet to have a sex life of his own.

Moreau could also be an early accidental ringer for J. Edgar Hoover (more on that to come)!

The big highlight in ISLAND is the climactic showdown between the two biggest hams of horror at that time: Bela Lugosi as the keeper of the law going against the whip-snapping Charles Laughton. Lugosi's ranting--after being beaten down, forced to endure untold hours of daily make-up application, brought to heel by bad deals from Universal and morphine addiction--brings several lifetimes worth of rage to bear; Laughton's hamming--no need for studio beat-downs when his homosexuality is beaten into the closet by the intolerant age itself--matches Lugoisi's floridity with a gradually eroding bed of fearlessness. 

It's a great moment in classic horror, worthy of any Karloff-Lugosi pairing. And perfectly cast. I can't see Karloff playing either Moreau or the teller of the law; he was never much of an ego-mad tantrum-raving screamer-- more like the creepy mellifluousness of his Satanist in THE BLACK CAT (1934)--and in the end this showdown is all about tantrums --the bratty older child reigning terror on the younger ones until they band together and wreak their vengeance. When we see the 'faithful dog' die to save his master, we're suddenly ashamed we've been dressing our pets up in little butler outfits all these years.

Another cool aspect of SOULS is its ahead-of-it's time approach to liberal empathy. Perhaps the fall from Eden wasn't the serpent's DNA-diddling after all but the sneering condemnation of a moral crusader like Richard Arlen. The outrage of his Mr. Parker towards the vivisection of these creatures makes him a kind of early representative for PETA. On learning Lota was once a panther, note Parker's choice of language: "These others I can maybe overlook, Moreau," he says, "but to make a woman, with a woman's suffering! That I can't forgive."

In other words, his empathetic response is manageable with the grunting, tough manly beasts, but a woman is, as Carol Clover noted, man's sensitive springboard, his mental frame for absorbing a more acute form of projected punishment via the masochistic gaze.

In other words, the gaze is a holy thing that must be guarded from trauma. It is itself feminine. Hence you can serve a bunch of pork, steak, and chicken at the craft services table during a film shoot, but if you kill a pig, chicken or cow onscreen you are 'cruel' and in violation of "the law" - What is the law? To protect the stomach of squeamish animal and woman lovers --are we not men? There's no way you can possibly kill a creature 'more' cruelly than at a freakin' stockyard or under a scientist's scalpel, so it's not the animal's suffering the laws protect but our own squeamish gaze. We want to be assured no suffering we see onscreen is ever real. If only Moreau had given vocal chords to the meat on the craft services table! Their ghostly yowls might haunt the entire world into veganism!  And what argument could Mr. Parker have then, that wouldn't make him sound like a hypocrite as he reaches for another plate of veal?

Of course while on his island--Moreau insists on it in his laws--everyone is a vegetarian, just like Hitler!
---

Final note: I generally don't groove on DVD menus, but the Criterion one sets a new awesome standard, expanding on the cover art, with overlaid medical drawings spliced together and music from the film playing over, cool and menacing.  Dig. I love it. DVD of the year.

Old Dark Capsules: THE GHOUL, CAT AND THE CANARY, THE MONSTER WALKS, THE OLD DARK HOUSE, THE BLACK RAVEN

Secret panels, stormy nights, dying heirs, hairy hands, Karloff, candles, lawyers; priceless mcguffins stolen from a dead man's watch pocket; maybe a coroner, woken up at this ungodly hour of the night; guys in ape suits for the medium shots, stock footage of a monkey for the close-ups; Bela Lugosi stuck playing a butler with barely any lines because the producers are worried about his morphine addiction; shrieking maids; bats; black cats; skulls on desks; conniving trophy wives everyone wants dead. What could be more Halloween-ish? It's the Old Dark House genre, basically forgotten today because there are no more old dark houses. Now they're either 'haunted' or long-since converted to apartments.

But if you've ever spent a weekend at a rich friend's mansion then you know how weird it can get: a late night trip to the bathroom after everyone else has gone to bed can be a terrifying, surreal nocturnal journey ala THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER river trip. The walls are so thick that if someone were screaming for help downstairs in the study you'd never even hear them, or be able to find them.

And no longer can eccentric millionaire uncles just caper down to Egypt and help themselves to whatever cursed, ancient artifacts they care to dig for. The colonialist yard sale is closed! But the films, thank Ra, remain open! Here's five I know like the back of m'hand, and the catacombs of m'mind: 

 THE GHOUL

(1933) Dir. T. Hayes Hunter
***

British studio Gaumont's attempt to make a 1930s Universal horror reveals just how great Universal horrors were by contrast, especially when made with Karl Freund and James Whale nearby. At any rate, GHOUL used to exist only in fuzzy dupes (in this country at least) so it's nice there are finally coherent transfers/prints around, for the film is lovely and foggy and cozy as a cup of Earl Grey at a midnight foggy moor picnic which, as a few of the other entries here make clear, is not as easy to pull off as it seems. The all-star cast includes Ralph Richardson as a noisy parson (there must be a running joke in English dog-and-pony circles about nosy local vicars cycling from house to house to mooch drinks). Karloff stars and gets almost no lines as an eccentric, dying Egyptologist who spends 75,000 pounds on an emerald he thinks will bring him back from the dead. He's soon entombed to the strains of Wagner's immortal "Sigfried's Funeral March" but naturally the gem winds up bounced around the rest of the skulking cast, starting with Ernest Thesiger (Dr. Pretorious!) as a worried Christian butler, and Cedrick Hardwicke as a grumpy Dickensian lawyer who employs rather elaborate strings of words like "I intend to grant myself the pleasure of calling on her this evening." They're all either looking for the emerald, stealing it from someone else, writing notes, stealing said notes in the fog, making peace with angry cousins, being strangled by Karloff (back from the dead and in search of his expensive emerald) or having sadomasochistic fantasies (how very British!)

The grand guignol moment is when Boris carves a bloody ankh symbol on his bony chest, cut from many prints, and skulks around nearly harming the ladies (he's really just after the gem and immortality) and the comic relief comes in the form of Katherine Harrison as the daft best friend of plucky heroine (Dorothy Hyson). Believe it or not, Anthony Bushell and Harold Huth steal the show as a bemused Arab and a square-jawed nephew, respectively, THE GHOUL would make a fine, weird double bill with the original MUMMY (1932), and possibly even stole its props. Alas, like so many British-Egyptian Museum horrors of the era all the supernatural elements must be conveniently explained away by film's end. One mustn't leave the queen's subjects thinking such things are true, you know... a gullible lot they are, I'm afraid, sir. That's not to say this jewel still isn't a little loose in its setting, sir! Pure 30s horror mood it is, with enough Worcester fog to carry it through if you lose track of who has the jewel, or where it's hid, or where everyone else is relative to everyone else on the grounds.

THE CAT AND THE CANARY

(1939) Dir. Elliot Nugent
 ****

My favorite Bob Hope movie! I've seen it 1,000 times! Dragging my canoe behind me! I taped it off 'Spotlight' in 1980 and, in some ways, I'm still watching it. It only came onto DVD recently, was never on VHS and hasn't been on TV ever, so if you don't remember it, there's a reason. The silent version is in public domain but who needs it when this one has Bob Hope in the perfect mix of romantic hero and scared goofball quipper as Wally Campbell. It was his first big role and his comedic timing is so sharp he actually heightens the suspense with his whistling in the dark style asides, double takes, and feints back and forth between courageous pose and truthful reveal of (understandable) fear; he puts all the other variations of this character to shame (and I mean you, Wallace Ford). He's also drawn a great leading lady in Paulette Godard, though it's clear that in the original she's a bit more frail and old-school kindness-of-strangers-dependent. Goddard seems way too modern to faint or drop a gun, and way too sane to believably be even remotely as out of her mind as her greedy relatives would like to believe. That's because the she's the sole heiress to her eccentric Uncle Cyrus Norman's bayou mansion, where an escaped maniac who calls himself 'The Cat' is prowling for victims, and where the disparate relatives are gathered for the midnight will reading, a cliche which really got its start with the play version of this, which underwrites not just this film but the entirety of the genre.

So much that could go so very wrong goes just as right instead in the hands of director Elliot Nugent. He keeps the shadows alive and makes sure a creepy wind sound accompanies the fine Enrst Toch score (which never gets cutesy, just creepy). The outdoors around the house is a big swampy fog-bound soundstage rather than drab outdoor footage, which earns it a high mark; the secret panel-to-the-small-garden-hut climax conjures the expressionist shadows of Cabinet of Caligari, replete with the maniac's dramatic posturing - very high mark. What a cast! George Zucco reads the will and is the first to get murdered; Gale Sondergaard is the Creole housekeeper in tune with the mysterious chimes and 'murmurs' of the old house; and nobody sings or titters like an imbecile, not even cousin Cecily and she has to hold her finger under her nose to keep from screaming. Top marks. It was such a perfect lightning bolt synergy of style, substance, and cast chemistry that Hope reunited with Sondergaard and Zucco when they played his Nazi pursuers three years later in My Favorite Blonde and he reunited one year later with Goddard in The Ghost Breakers which has more supernatural elements than Cat and is generally considered the better film, but man, I'll take them both. It's still early in his career enough that Hope doesn't know yet just how great he is, but Nugent does, and the atmosphere is electric. Dragging my canoe behind me!

THE MONSTER WALKS
(1932) Dir. Frank Strayer
 **

This creaky Frank Strayer riff seems recorded on the kind of early sound equipment that was outmoded by 1930. The air is thick with burbling hiss like everyone is underwater (which I like). It's got most of the boxes filled:  big old dark house with a rich dead patriarch? Check.  The will read and an absentee girl heir (the compact Vera Reynolds) breezes in to collect the millions? Check. Ape in a cage in the basement? Check. Willie Best as a frightened chauffeur? Check. But we also get Mischa Auer as the illegitimate son of the old creep in the wheelchair and the maid, angry he's denied any of the family fortune after all the hours he's slaved for that old man. Not even hairy hands coming out of the wall can remedy the social injustice and animal cruelty (the ape, named Yogi, is a real ape instead of a guy in gorilla suit) that lingers in the air while the typical Cat and Canary will-reading resentment simmers and the camera keeps its static distance.

I know the Leonard Maltin review by heart: "Willie bests Mischa for laughs, but it's a close race." Lenny, you're my wheelchair-bound true father who taught me to write like a subliminal weisenheimer. Despite the unpleasant angles, the unconvincing stormy night-rattling-sheet metal makes it nice to fall asleep to as the sun comes up on another frosty November 1st, your blood levels of alcohol, ecstasy, nicotine, and sugar now dwindled to an early morning frost on the window shudder no amount of hot coffee can allay. Take it from me. "I have a premonition something's going to happen! Something horrible!" Vera says while the painting behind her slowly turns crooked so someone can spy on her. Her dumb boyfriend doctor (Rex Lease) tells her she needs something for her nerves, but then just kisses her. Dude! You should have got the tranquilizer! Then the old creep in the wheelchair tells her she should take one, too. And then the doctor goes to get her one after the ape hand incident and she still won't take it ("perhaps I won't need it"). Ugh.

Still in a movie this slow and strange it's the little things. "Nobody's going to steal their money," snarls bitter Mischa after his mom tells him to bolt the doors and windows. "It's not here." Best gets the last laugh: when he's on the floor panicking because the mouth on the polar bear rug has caught his slipper (he thinks it's "Mr. Yogurt") he seems about as afraid and engaged as if he's reading the script to himself while falling asleep. Vera is such an idiot she won't believe who the killer is, even when he's openly trying to kill her.

THE OLD DARK HOUSE

(1932) Dir. James Whale
****

The great 'lost' Universal horror of 1932. I longed to see it ever since I was a kid reading about it in my Creature Features guide, but it was all but lost thanks to the habit of destroying older versions when remakes came out (not that the remake resembled the original in anything but name/s). Then Kino came to the rescue via a restored, lone surviving print (discovered through the perseverance of Curtis Harrington), and co-star Gloria Stuart even did an audio commentary for the laserdisc.

I never had a laserdisc player, but James Cameron did, loved the commentary, and that's how she came to narrate Titanic! True story!

Not an old dark house movie, Old Dark House is not even really a horror movie or a comedy, but a James Whale movie. As such, it's a combination of many atmospheric, very British elements that don't come together until numerous viewings over decades help the various medicines buried in its flavor tapestry kick in. Getting older, we come to understand the 'that's fine stuff' rant by Rebecca Femm (Eva Moore) to Gloria Stuart, and how it leads to her reflection like that of a skull in the mirror; or the resemblance Rebecca has to a photo of Queen Victoria by her mirror; the general nicety and British crust of Horace Femm (Ernest Thesiger) who "likes gin" (and would still be drinking it a few years later in Whale's Bride of Frankenstein), the way the alcohol passed around by the roaring hearth gives you a feel of being there and feeling the warmth of the cinematic image like that same fire; the honest romance between lost generation lad Melvyn Dougas and Bill's (Charles Laughton) traveling companion Perkins (Lillian Bond); their arrival like a daft breath of fresh working class air in the middle of a stiff dinner, lightening the rich yobbo dryness against which the merry Melvyn Douglas hurls himself like a kid fighting waves on the beach. Karloff as the mute butler portrays the end point of madness and the beginning point of savagery; Laughton becomes the backbone of Britain; the late inning introduction of Roderick Femm--played by the elderly real life old lady of the stage Elspeth Dudgeon --provides a welcome bit of contextualization, change of scene and foreshadowing. And then, in a rage Morgan releases Saul (Brember Willis- the hermit from Bride) who is hopelessly, violently insane... See it 30 times, 300, it's still not enough... my friend.

 THE BLACK RAVEN 

(1943) Dir. Sam Newfield
****

When I'm having a travel-induced panic attack, THE BLACK RAVEN is my go-to source of solace. I really respond to the cozy fireplaces, howling wind, torrential rain, muffled dialogue, and the sense of conspiratorial cool amongst the more criminal guests (they all sign the register as 'John Smith'). It all takes place--like the best old dark house films--over one 'dark and stormy' night, beginning as guests learn the bridge is washed out in their rain slashed cars and ending when the rain stops at dawn. Padding around the waterlogged cardboard sets in his robe and slippers, Zucco's great as the enigmatic retired criminal who now runs a small inn (named the Black Raven) just this side of the Canadian border. No actual ravens or border-crossings appear in this film--too rainy--but Glenn Strange is the idiot manservant and the wondrously dour Charles "Ming" Middleton is the clueless sheriff. A suitcase of embezzled cash results in murder; a corrupt politico tries to break up his daughter's newlywed marriage; and an escaped crook is out to settle an old score with Zucco. An eloping young couple try and stay out of the way. Make sure to get the best available edition as there's lots of crappy public domain editions wherein everything is too dark and muffled. (Roan Group's 'Black and Blue' set that includes Ulmer's Bluebeard and Bela's great, incoherent Black Dragons is the best so far, and highly recommended). Your mileage may vary, but for my dark and stormy night PRC 40s money, it's Black Raven all the way.

Special shout-out to Verdoux! - it seems to contain the same eerie alchemical magick as celluloid itself!

White as a Sheet: BLACK MOON (1934) and PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 (2010)

Voodoo and witchcraft-related horror films often simmer with a whole gris-gris bag of subtext: gender, race, and psychology all percolating under a boilerplate plot and how much of it we detect depending on our own cultural and educational situation. As our nation/world gets collectively more sensitized, not noticing the drip over spilling out of that pot seems hard. We can't not roll our eyes as yet again a white man lands on a voodoo island for gold or research or to investigate shipwreck and a cute young half-caste (or white, but made up in bronzer to look dimly ethnic) woman from the village betrays the gods to be with him; they escape in a boat as the island erupts in flames and all the black monsters die except the grinning ferryman who is innocent in his naivete, who spirits them away where they can breed and uphold the status quo and in later years, the now retired white dude can go "Voodoo? Harumph!" when the kids ask him about it.

As for the woman, it's tricky but with a recipe set in Hollywood stone: if she's actually white (usually her parents were missionaries or crashed in a plane) they're happy ever after (though maybe she still uses some voodoo in the kitchen, ala Burn Witch Burn). If she's not 100% white, she must die to save him, and thus appease the gods/censors). If she does live, you must imagine Carl Denham lecturing at a feminist studies group: "She was a queen in her jungle world, but she threw it all away to follow a handsome stranger home to to his own lands, and here she is, barefoot and pregnant, for your own amusement!"

In a very few films however, someone clearly takes a stand against these tired/true rules, such as in the consciously progressive, often forgotten voodoo film from Columbia, BLACK MOON (1934). With its mix of horror-action and white man's burden-coded proto-feminism it just may be the least racist and sexist of all 1930s racist-sexist zombie movies --a kind of pre-Lewton Lewton where women understand the supernatural realms instinctively while the half asleep men try to keep it all buried via tactics like condescension, humiliation, beatings, and threats --none of which work a damn-- until the status quo boundaries have shrunk to noose size.


Keeping with the subjugation motif, Fay Wray gets second billing in MOON but is the most recognized name, having tangled with Kong on Skull Island the year before. However, on this particular forgotten island the white power over the ebony denizens is long established, thanks to a racist French sugar cane plantation owner (Arnold Korff). His young niece (Dorothy Burgess) left the island years ago for New York City and now wants to come visit. He doesn't want her to, lest it excite the natives. Living there as a kid, she apparently did some serious mystic bonding with the locals and now the drums are calling her to return, return, with her own young daughter in tow.

The voodoo scenes turn out to be surprisingly respectful of the tradition - and the drumming and singing is awesome, with day-for-night shots of glistening black bodies drumming and dancing, old wizened faces staring off into the distance, and lots of white plantation garb that may be more true to the mileu but lacks the exoticism wer'e hoping for. There's no 'real' night in these scenes, no Anton Grot or William Menzies-type set design to bring it all into a rarefied realm. And it's slow going in spots, and very odd. It never seems sure where it wants to go, only where it doesn't. They even bring in the under-sung Clarence Muse (see my ode to him here) as the charter boat captain who takes old Jack Holt to the island (he wants to make sure his girl is all right). Muse is worried about his own girl, a local who's become much too mixed up with the voodoo scene. The form a kind of interesting bond of equals, not unlike Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier in Paris Blues, just two normal American guys wondering what's got into their women. There's no nonsense like there would be if their characters were played by Willie Best and Bob Hope, for example, though they werent' too bad in and of itself compared to other teams.

But while it's applaudable on these levels, and it is spooky right from the opening with servants in the voodoo lady's New York City apartment, shuddering at the sound of Dorothy Burgess teaching her infant daughter to play voodoo drums, it never lasts: a strange man who works for the colonialist uncle shows up with the message he doesn't want Burgess to go to the island--the natives are too agitated. She says buzz off, and then he's killed on his way to see the husband to try and get him to nail her fins to de floor, so to speak. What's cool is we want her to go to the island, so the native skulkers are killing the messenger for our benefit. Thus, the natives are clearly the good guys up to a point, as we bristle at the idea these scowling white dudes are going to decide where Dorothy Burgess can and can't go.

But in the end of course they are right.

Aren't they always?

Lacking any kind of central figure to care about, aside from Wray and Muse (both minor figures in the film) makes the film a little too reliant on atmosphere and expectation. The ominousness builds up for the big ceremony but it's so 'respectful' when it comes it's a bit of an anticlimax. The kid's maid is killed early on when she keeps objecting to the child being given things like knives and voodoo dolls to play with, but we don't see the murder or even the body. Why? This is a horror movie, after all. Wray wires for Holt to come and take them home but the wire operator is killed before he can send it. At least we get to see the explosion.

Even so, we side with the voodoo crowd because we're waiting for something genuinely 'bad' to happen. They keep talking it up, until it can't possibly match our expectation. But we do like Holt's relationship with his little daughter. They have a genuine bond and he's not a simpering sort like dads in films today, but a rough and ready 70s dad type and she loves him for it.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 shares a lot of BLACK MOON's deep subtextual feminism. Here the dad is a self-satisfied liberal authoritarian pretending to be fun, hip, gentle family man but he scoffs at the supernatural while his wife and maid know better, which only makes him resentful and furious, forbidding any mention of supernatural goings-on in his presence, even firing the maid for daring to light incense in the house. What a dick!

Like its forerunner, PA2 was a huge hit in theaters, and like BLACK MOON has a great, prolonged set-up with only mild yield: the initial ghost attack looks enough like an ordinary break-in that it compels dad to install security cameras and as our subjects sleep through the night these security cam images--a ghostly lit pool with the cleaner snake slithering around the surface; the crib room with the German shepherd guardian (the dog's not much for supernatural detection, surprisingly; the big petit bourgeois living room--take on a creepy life of their own as our eyes nervously scour the banality in search of some uncanny element or movement. Andre Bazin would surely approve!
 

One reason the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY films work as instant pop culture artifacts is their William Castle-ish utilitarianism - they are here to provide bonding moments of shock in the cinema on Saturday night, or to creep out couples on their couches, couples similar to the couples depicted. And that is all - they are obviously super cheap to make, and make far more than their more expensive competitors. But what they show is something new--the modern American family to itself as it really is, revealing the awful difference between how 'scary' we look on video vs. the pretty people we see in the mirror. The dad thinks he's a hilarious righteous sex machine but we see he's an asshole, etc. and then, watching himself on screen, so does he. These people are the American family that the sitcoms and TV want to portray, but don't have enough time. All the corpses the screenwriters can dredge up in the family garden pale in comparison to the unstoppable demonic ghost possession in the real time found footage usually edited out of TV shows. For eight hours or so every night most of us are in a sate of total unconsciousness. Who knows what's going on while we're asleep? It's creepy. That's what got us hooked in the first place with the first PA - a possessed sleeping girl standing motionless over her sleeping husband... hour after hour.

It's important in each example here that the endangered family be upper-middle class as success makes the dad 'dependent' on the prevailing reality and culture. He's got something to lose. He knows hungry young bucks are eyeing his spot. A white trash redneck sleeping in his pick-up truck has nothing to lose by embracing new paradigms and is thus way more likely to be down with the supernatural. But in the American upper middle class' unconscious, the uncanny is ghettoized so deep that when dad finally sees the tape and learns the truth he becomes a fractured, incoherent mess, worse than useless and ripe for possession. If such a possession was offered he'd snap at it, a chance to switch sides and affix his star to whatever's currently in charge, whatever overpowering force wants to supply the new paradigm, no matter, as long as he can still feel smug.

Just as BLACK MOON is not just about race oppression but gender oppression, each one a metaphor for the other, so too the PARANORMAL films are about superstition and rational thinking kicking each other into oblivion. When the rational left-brained know-it-all douche bag dad types are forced to confront the truth, forced to realize via the very rationalist tools of the skeptic-- security cameras-- that they can never completely protect their children, even in their own house--that their kids will always be exposed to danger, then not even the TV set can provide a respite, then dad is drained of all his false entitlement. And if he denies he ever even had any, his double negative shoots him in his own foot through his mouth.

Such a realization of complete powerlessness is the apocalypse of the American family and its one salvation. One thinks back to the "they're here" moment in POLTERGEIST, and if you compare the downward spiral from level-headedness to powerless tired mess of Craig T. Nelson as the dad in that film vs. the gone-to-pieces dad in PA2, all you can do is weep for the incredible dissolving father. The ghosts came through the TV static in that 1980 pre-cable film (when white noise static and station sign-offs still existed), but the PA films are made on and with digital --there is no more four AM shot of an American flag to signal the end of another broadcast day, no chance for static to sneak through and speak to us in its crackly 'popcorn' white noise languge. We have 900 channels of cable and it never, ever sleeps. It's not just ghosts we shut out, it's everything. All hail Shark Vacuum!