Tag Archives: psychological horror

Unsane

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Someday, soon, I will finish a book. I swear this to be true. But in the meantime, I have seen another podcast movie. Scare is psychological, style is “within the last ten years”, only from 2022 when the episode was recorded, but Unsane is also within ten years from today, so, double duty!

A career-minded young woman named Sawyer seems to have it all: the eye of her boss, distance from her mother, a firm grasp on what she wants from men and the ability to get it. Unfortunately, she also has initially unspecified trauma that almost immediately results in her being kidnapped by involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility. This is all more or less within 24 hours, to be clear.

The rest of the movie is a mix of thriller (“is she actually as crazy as we are initially led to believe, or is she just high strung but also something very bad is happening to her?”) and horror (“is the mental health system in America actually as bad as this movie wants us to believe, or-” “Let me stop you right there. Yes. At least this bad. Probably worse.”), with a dash of comedy. But mostly the horror part.

So here’s the interesting bit. This is a Steven Soderbergh movie, who you might remember from such films as Ocean’s Twelve. Or Thirteen. Or lots of other movies that I would have sworn I’ve seen more of them than I actually have. But, and this is the actually interesting bit, he made this one with an iPhone. No other shooting equipment. Just an iPhone. I’m assuming that in some cases microphones were used rather than the iPhone also doing all of the audio pickup, but even still, it’s a big job for a serious director and cinematographer to leave in the hands of a smartphone, y’know?

Often, you cannot tell, but whenever you’re consciously thinking about it, there’s weird fisheye perspective things happening. That said, this adds to the mental and physical claustrophobia of the unfolding events. All in all, the movie is a little bit more gimmick than it is sincere horror, but that’s also what I would expect from someone whose previous horror résumé is a remake of Solaris. I do not, per se, mean this as a diss. I just came up in a different style, is all.

The Addiction (1995)

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It’s been a while since I have been faced with categories this easy to remember. I have never heard of The Addiction, but boy howdy did it meet the intersection of vampires as scare and 1990s as style. You know how Clerks screams indie comedy, from the dawn of independent cinema? This is like that, but for thesis horror, here defined as “horror for people who would never admit that horror has value, so I made an art house flick instead.”

So what’s actually happening is Lili Taylor is an NYU philosophy student, grappling with important topics like who, at a generation’s remove from the events, was the actual bad guy in Vietnam? But between walking around town to the soothing strains of gangster rap, she gets introduced to heroin.[1] And then she takes the heroin to each of her friends and classmates and professors who she is also dating, and gets them addicted to heroin as well. At one point, a dude tries to tell her about Jesus, and he does not get addicted to heroin, but neither does she quit her addiction and move to the suburbs.

That’s it. That’s the whole movie.

Wait. You said this was a thesis horror movie dressed up as art house drama. That’s just purely arthouse drama. What gives?

Oh. Crap. Um. Let me do some quick rewrites here. Um, let’s see. Okay, what if she’s bitten by a vampire, and then wanders around doing soliloquies in dark sunglasses about who the bad guy really is, but also turning all of her classmates and friends and professors who she is also dating into vampires? And the vampirism is a metaphor for heroin, you see.

Ah. Yes, that would fix it.

Well there you go then!

[1] Or maybe meth, but I think it’s too early to have been movie meth, even in movie New York.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

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First, I didn’t watch Twin Peaks when it came out. Then I didn’t watch it for an additional 35(!) years. Then, the podcast people decided to[1] watch Fire Walk with Me, which meant I had to watch 32 episodes of TV to be ready for watching the movie. Which I have done, over the course of the past maybe not quite a month. And now I’m supposed to review the movie.

I was prepared for how weird the show would be. I was not prepared for how soap opera it would be. I can really see a direct throughline from this show to Passions. Which makes me sad I never went back and watched it before now, but at least it’s now. Another thing I can say is that it predicted modern television, insofar as 10 episodes for this kind of show is about perfect. The second season, at a traditional 22 episodes? It was a complete and total mess, and definitely needed to be shorter. If it had been two more seasons of 10 each, then a little shorter is still not nothing, but also the arcs would have been more tightly described I suspect.

What I loved the most is how seriously it took itself. When the FBI guy throws rocks at a bottle while the sheriff’s office reads the names of suspects, and the one that got read when he breaks the bottle becomes their prime suspect, and the sheriff’s reaction is awe at how good a detective he is? Actually, the thing I liked least about season two is when the sheriff complains that he put up with a lot of strange behavior from Cooper. Because part of what makes the show work is that nobody ridiculed him or took it as strange. It’s just how the FBI is!

Anyway. That brings me to the movie, a prequel in which some stuff happens a year ago and starring different FBI guys which had 5% bearing on the rest of the movie so far as I could tell, and then picks up during the last week of Laura Palmer’s life[2]. It’s a decent movie. As a character study of a girl who is slowly being destroyed by her family life (and her school life, but mostly her family life), and of the people around her who love her (her best friend) and who think they love her (her boyfriends, who do not know about each other, and also that family I mentioned), it’s definitely a David Lynchian character study, but that’s okay. As an explanation of how Bob and her killer interrelate, it… fell short. Massive spoilers for the show and at least partial spoilers for the movie follow, so see footnote [3].

But anyway. I cannot imagine watching this movie first, or especially as a standalone feature. It would never work. And I’m not really convinced it was entirely necessary, with a handful of exceptions. But was it good? Yeah. Mostly pretty good. And whatever else I might say about it, at least someone finally made me watch Twin Peaks.

[1] Well, random, whatever blah blah. The style was sequel plus, I remember that, but the scare? Man, it’s been weeks. I have no idea.
[2] If you do not immediately associate Twin Peaks with the phrase “Who killed Laura Palmer?” then you were not watching television in 1990. Not sure what else to tell you.

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Rökkur

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I’ve made it to December 2021. I think this means I’m still catching up? Who can say, really. The scare was (I’m pretty sure) psychological, and the style was queer, and thus I watched Rift, a movie out of Iceland about gay dudes breaking up but then talking about it for the rest of the movie while other things also happen.

The deal is Einar is posing as maybe suicidal and then a couple of days later… no, let me go back. They’re standing at a balcony, post-breakup, and Einar is wobbling his beer bottle on the railing, and says, “This bottle is me. If I fall, do you think you could save me?” And then the bottle falls to the pavement. And then a couple days later, Gunnar gets a 3am voicemail about how he’s out in the sticks and there’s maybe someone with him. So he leaves his new boyfriend and drives out into the sticks to check on Einar, and, well, things are immediately weird, and they stay that way.

It has a tiny cast. There’s Einar and Gunnar (who if it was not clear already initiated the breakup), there’s the new boyfriend but he’s only in the prologue, and then there’s a) the helpful neighbor keeping an eye on the place, b) the creepy old farmer down the road who is introduced as probably a sexual predator, c) the girl at the convenience store who says not to pick up hitchhikers, and d) the Icelandic countryside, full of wind and emptiness and dry December grass, and bends and folds from all the volcanoes off in the distance, and abandoned buildings in states of decay. Oh, and I forgot e) the creepy red car that keeps showing up everywhere.

So yeah. The movie is 100% atmosphere, which unfortunately leaves no percentage points for making a lick of sense. But still, it’s a creepy, immersive atmosphere, and that makes up for a lot of sins, you know?

Weapons (2025)

The guy who made Barbarian[1] just made another movie. In Weapons, a whole classroom of kids just up and run away from home, on the same night, at the same time. As you can imagine, everyone in town finds this event to have been very wtf. If you are anything like them, you are wondering: how did this happen? Why did this happen? If you are anything like humans in general, you are also wondering: who can we blame?

Anyway, that’s it. That’s the movie. If you want to know what happens next, or if you liked Barbarian, then you definitely want to watch this movie. Barbarian is a better horror movie, but Weapons is I think closer to mystery than pure horror in the first place, which makes a difference in comparing them. Either way, they are structured similarly, and I like to think they are set in the same universe of Zach Cregger’s mind, a universe in which I’m excited to see what comes next.

[1] I just saw that again, earlier in the weekend. Man, it is an all time baller.

Smile 2

Remember Smile? Demony thing stalks and/or possesses a hospital trauma therapist who has just witnessed a horrific act of self-harm, and the main symptoms of said possession, prior to gruesome death, are losing time and seeing people oversmile creepily at you everywhere you go?

Smile 2 is very much like that movie, only instead of a deep metaphorical dive into the personal costs of providing mental healthcare, it follows a Taylor Swift-level superstar who lost everything to drugs and alcohol and is staging her comeback. Only, she makes a single impulsive (and low-key bad) decision that puts her in the wrong place at the extremely wrong time, and now people are smiling creepily at her.

Where the first movie was deeply horrifying and also an unpredictable mindfuck, this one is… well, the mindfuck part is gone because we know for sure that it’s real even if the afflicted character doesn’t, and the horror is not precisely gone, but it just feels mean-spirited this time. Not like it could happen to anyone, but like it is happening to this character because she deserves it. (Wondering whether she actually does deserve it or not honestly misses the point.)

In conclusion, not every horror movie needs to be a franchise.

But, if you’re into body horror, there was some stuff with hair that was really making me squirm.

Smile (2022)

Based on the year of release[1], I wonder if this was a late in the game victim of Covid? I ask this question because the first time I learned there was a movie called Smile was when I saw the previews for Smile 2 in the theater earlier this year. Which is weird; I don’t often completely miss the existence of horror movies. (Of course, maybe I missed it because of how few previews I see anymore, too.)

Anyway, the setup for the movie is as follows. There’s this ER psychiatrist who is asked to handle a newly intaken woman who has had a really bad few days since she watched one of her professors beat himself to death with a hammer. Over the course of their conversation, the patient claims to be entirely sane but hunted, and describes the nature of the hunt. Then she suffers a really spectacularly dramatic seizure, after which she stands up, smiles widely, and slits her own throat. Then, the movie’s title card appears.

The remainder of the film follows our psychiatrist as she gradually begins to break down, while the viewer is left to wonder whether anything is actually happening beyond her own deteriorating mental health. I mean, other things happen too. But mostly trauma, and trauma response, and a shameful lack of empathy from the majority of the characters. As a psychological horror movie, it really is outstanding, and all the moreso horrific as you come to the dawning realization that, yep, this is what would happen. Way more adversaries than helpers in the world, you know? Alas.

[1] In fact, there is a second horror movie named Smile that came out in 2022. I cannot do much about this, except never watch it I suppose, because how then would I differentiate?