I’m tired. All of my friends are tired, too. Not just the kind of tired brought on by sleepless nights or working too much or chasing one thing or another too far and too fast. This is the New Tired. We’ve become accustomed to so many “News” this year: the New Normal, New Social Interactions, New Dining, New Schooling . . . New Realities, so to speak. This is the New Tired.
Upheaval of what collectively many of us have internalized, for better and worse, as “normal” has not so much been upended as set afire. So much of this has been, as Sam Cooke sang, a long time coming. The secondary effects of the coronavirus pandemic have brought to the surface so many social inequities and just damned plain structures of oppression and degradation at a critical intensity not seen in my lifetime . . . and I ain’t exactly a youngster.
That’s the good, and it’s damned important to recognize and seize the good amidst the social and cultural chaos, because all of this tinder was set ablaze by a viral pandemic that forced all of us out of our own comfort/noncomfort zones. Ignoring, turning a blind eye, and minimizing/rationalizing are no longer convenient defense mechanisms for anyone with even a modicum of conscience.
Here’s where horror comes in. To paraphrase Jack Halberstam, horror draws power from the tension between fear and desire, and the resulting vertiginous excess of meaning creates a screen upon which viewers can project their own anxieties in a meaningful way. With that in mind, here are some films I’ve revisited recently because they provide an antidote, of sorts, to the kind of existential exhaustion of which I’ve been speaking. Think of them as Rejuvenation Horror:
Liam Gavin’s A Dark Song is ultimately a film about resentment and how the all-consuming desire for revenge completely blocks the passage through grief to acceptance, threatening to consume the resenter in the process. Catherine Walker plays Sophia, a woman consumed by grief for her son, who has been murdered by supposed satanic cult members. She enlists an occultist, Joseph, to lead her through an arcane ritual supposedly to allow her to speak one final time to her dead son, but despite the occultist’s warnings, she hides a deeper motive.
Harboring an obsession for revenge, she really desires the eternal damnation and punishment of her son’s killers. This all-consuming thirst for revenge perverts the ritual as her own demands for vengeance push her grief and memories of her son to the background. The tortures she suffers in her quest, ranging from extreme physical and psychological suffering to sexual exploitation at the hands of Joseph, can best be summed up in the old saying that resentment is like one person taking poison and expecting the other to die.
But Gavin’s film ends with a transcendent move towards redemption, when she ultimately chooses the sufferings of forgiveness over the selfish desires of revenge. A Dark Song is a visually arresting, philosophical, and highly moral film with an ending that rings like a single, sonorant note from a brass bell.
Nesasa Hardimn’s first feature film benefitted from the pure serendipity of delving into themes that hit our collective unconscious in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Filmed long before the phrase Covid-19 became common parlance, Sea Fever tells the story of an introverted marine scientist who finds herself at the center of a very local controversy over infection control and the need for self-sacrifice for the good of others.
Connie Nielsen’s Siobhan is the most reluctant of heroes, and for that, she is all the more stellar. Withdrawn and socially-awkward, Siobhan secures a research position on an Irish fishing vessel, the symbolically-named Nianh Cinn Oir, to do field research. When the boat dredges up something Lovecraftian, things turn rapidly towards infection horror and the Lovecraftian fear of encountering unknown entities.
As the fear of contagion butts up against the economic realities of struggling to survive in a brutal economy, Siobhan becomes the lone voice of science and reason in a very real debate over the rights of the individual and the greater rights of humanity. Perhaps most impressive is that her rational, science-based arguments are framed within a larger framework of Kantian ethics as the film follows her trajectory from an alienated and socially distant woman to someone forced by a cosmic contagion to embrace humanity in a sacrificial moment of unity.
What is perhaps most striking about this film is the absence of stereotypes. The fishing crew have genuine concerns about their survival in an economic system rigged against them, while Siobhan represents the person with the thankless task of reminding them of what true sacrifice for the greater good means. Visually stunning and steeped in Irish folk mythology, Sea Fever is ultimately uplifting in that it celebrates someone who makes the hardest of choices for the better of all.
I have to admit, I was so pleasantly surprised by Travis Stevens’ Girl on the Third Floor. The initial promotion and fan hype surrounding the film made it seem like a Bruce Campbell/Evil Dead type horror film (which I also love), but I was stunningly impressed by how deeply the film delved into a devasting exposure of toxic masculinity and cyclical patterns of abuse.
CM Punk plays an alcoholic husband and expectant father who has taken on the task of renovating a house with a sordid local history as the new home for himself and his expectant wife. Punk plays “King Don” Koch, a man trying desperately to reconstruct his life after being targeted by the government for defrauding his clients out of their savings.
Don throws everything he has into building a new home for his sham of a family, but the house resists him at every turn. The house, a rambling Victorian home, was the former site of a notorious brothel with a Gothic history of sexual violence and exploitation. As Don tries to “remake” the home, every violent hammer thrust and act of demolition opens traumatic wounds that expose the culture of sexual violence long hidden by the town.
Stevens loads his film with allegorical meaning from the outset. “King Don” is the quintessential His Majesty the Baby of Freud’s essay on narcissism. As the ultimate “King Baby,” Don is locked into an infantile masculine narcissism that keeps him dependent on the service of others to meet his perceived needs.
And narcissism has its price to pay. Don literally hammers away at his new home while facetiming his wife Liz (Trieste Kelly Dunn) during the preparation stage . . . in between watching porn on his phone. He violates the house in the most graphic of manners, often thrusting his fingers into holes he has violently opened. A mysterious woman appears and seems to seduce Don. And the house fights back.
Other reviews of the film have already noted the repeated amounts of semen-like fluid leaking from the orifices of the house, and they are spot-on. This house represents the whole of a hypermasculine repository of semen and violence in the most visceral way. As one character in the town reflects, the house seems to draw upon the character of the people who live in it.
When Liz arrives at the house, the real horror of toxic masculinity hits its climax as the gender politics of the film reverse trajectory from negative critique to positive reclamation. Dunn represents a very different type of Final Girl, one we could use more of these days. This is a film to dissect in its minutia, as there is so much here to look at, but to go further would be to spoil it. Suffice it to say that the more of the surface you peel away, the deeper the critique will follow.
The existential vacuum manifest itself mainly in a state of boredom.
-Victor Frankl
Jeremy Gardner and Christian Stella’s After Midnight is a solid example of what highly-talented people can do with a tiny budget. This film is honest, heartfelt, and probing in its depiction of Hank (Gardner) and Amy (Brea Grant), a couple trapped in the restricting ideology of idealized love. Amy mysteriously leaves town without notice, leaving Hank with nothing but questions, recriminations, a lot of alcohol . . . and an unseen monster intent on breaking into his home each night.
More on the monster later, because this film is really about a couple negotiating a serious relational crisis amidst the relative anonymity of small-town life. Hank owns a bar, likes to hunt, and does little else. His quotidian life is as predictable and repetitive as can be. Hank has become comfortably uncomfortable in his life in the existential vacuum.
Amy, however, yearns to break out of the vacuum, no longer able to tolerate a life filled with regrets, unfulfilled hopes, and meaninglessness. Unlike Hank, she rebels against the repetitive emptiness of existence and tries to carve her own meaning as an antidote to the suffocating dread of life in the existential vacuum.
As you have probably picked up by now, Victor Frankl’s form of existential psychology is hugely influential on my approach to film criticism. Frankl introduced the concept of the existential vacuum in his 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning. This vacuum represents a dilemma brought about by the crumbling of traditions that once promised meaning in life in the fading wake of animal instincts. As Frankl wrote: “No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people tell him what to do (totalitarianism).”
The film stays largely with Hank as he spends his days running his bar and barricading his home against the nightly attacks of the monster. With a sole exception, his friends- who are more acquaintances than true friends- don’t believe in the monster and try to rationalize what they interpret as his breakdown following Amy’s exit from his life. Gardener is brilliant in his restrained performance as a man grappling with what seems to be an absurd situation while also subtly conveying the true trauma of the seeming end of his relationship with Amy.
When Amy suddenly reappears, the film presents one of the most emotionally honest scenes between a couple in recent memory. In a remarkable one-shot scene, Amy and Hank sit in chairs at the front door of their house, awaiting the monster’s arrival. Rather than a cheap payoff where the monster appears as they sit vigil, Amy and Hank have a real conversation about their relationship, about desires and insecurities and fears. It’s the most brutally real conversation about what it means to be ina relationship, not just individuals trying to havea relationship, I’ve ever seen in a horror film.
As for the monster, I don’t want to spoil things, so let me just say that I believe it represents the elephant in the room of their relationship, the representation of the monstrosity of an idealized representation of true love- a love abstracted from the realities of human needs, conflict, desires, compromise, and the general messiness of real relationships.
When the monster does shockingly appear . . . well, all I’ll say is that Hank makes the right choice and kills the part of him that kept him from accessing his full humanity.
After Midnight is the best, most honest love story I’ve ever seen in a horror film. Watch it, if for no other reason, than to say yes to life despite all the negativity that commands you to say no.
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