The Whip and the Body (1963) by Brian O’Connell

Why do we enjoy horror stories? There have been a million attempted answers to the question, and almost none of them are satisfying—or entirely satisfying, at any rate. A common view holds that exposing ourselves to our deepest fears in a safe and artificial environment helps us prepare ourselves for and cope with them when they arrive in the real world, but this seems to fall apart with even the merest scrutiny: watching Hereditary would not seem to ease the pain of losing a loved one, for example, nor am I likely to recommend Audition to someone with a fear of needles. Stephen King, who once proposed this view in his 1981 survey of the genre, Danse Macabre, has alternately contended that watching horror movies allows us to satiate our deepest, darkest instincts and thus to keep them at bay, but again, this suggestion fails to account for so much; when I walk out of an especially traumatic or upsetting picture, I don’t feel that anything has been “purged” from me, I feel worse. Ligotti perhaps strikes closer to the mark when he argues that horror is the best genre for reflecting the eternal agony and absurdity of the mortal human consciousness, but I don’t think we can assume this holds true for a huge portion of the audience for horror movies, either. In each case the proposed answer seems either too trite, beholden to fundamentally conservative notions of art as serving some redemptive social or psychological function, or too specific, expressing a highly individual philosophy of life and existence that doesn’t adequately account for the genre’s popular appeal.

Without hazarding a guess of my own, I’d like to examine another response to this perennial question, a response suggested by the great horror auteur Mario Bava in his 1963 Gothic chiller The Whip and the Body. Unlike the above proposed explanations, The Whip and the Body centers a very simple and uncomplicated experience at the locus of the horror genre: that of pleasure. A strange kind of pleasure, to be sure, that derives itself from immersion in negative emotions, from scenes of death and degradation, from abject misery and anguish—but pleasure all the same. In short, the pleasures of masochism, that curious disposition that finds gratification and fulfillment in the darkest of places.

Masochism is, indeed, what this suggestively titled picture has been most remembered for, owing to the numerous cuts demanded upon its release by various censorship boards in multiple nations. Its unsubtle allusions to “degenerations and anomalies of sexual life,” as a Roman court declared in 1963, occasioned the butchering of the 91 minute film into a nearly incomprehensible 77 minute international cut, released in the United States with the fittingly perplexing new title of What!. This furor was mostly due to an early scene in which the female protagonist Nevenka (Daliah Lavi) submits to an erotically charged lashing from her former paramour, the imperious Kurt Menliff (Christopher Lee). This brief sequence, in combination with its winking title, accounts for The Whip and the Body’s reputation as a playfully kinky, if otherwise fairly standard and by-the-numbers, Italian Gothic of the early sixties. It’s not received nearly as much discussion as the consensus-held masterpieces of Bava’s oeuvre (Black Sunday, Blood and Black Lace, Bay of Blood, and Black Sabbath among them), and when it does, the sexual current of the film is spoken of mostly as if it were a gimmick, teased at in a few superficially titillating scenes but overall subordinate to the director’s stylishly gloomy atmospherics.

It’s true that the slight scenes of masochism in The Whip and the Body are quite tame by today’s standards, hitting nowhere near the level of explicitness or perversity that would come to be regular fare in exploitation films only a few years later. Indeed, following that initial whipping scene, Nevenka’s sexual proclivities are hardly ever addressed—or at least directly represented—again, outside of a few scant moments and mentions. It’s presumably this reticence, or even potential disinterest, in probing the extremes of its implications that has led many critics to ignore or significantly downplay the sexual tensions of the film, instead preferring to situate it within Bava’s overall oeuvre by addressing its familiar motifs. But to do so is to fail to recognize that masochism is integral to the very texture of the film: that in truth it is the film’s principal subject, in ways far more fundamental and interesting than the mere surface play of its meager erotic scenes.

The narrative of The Whip and the Body is very simple. Kurt, the eldest son of the Count Menliff (Gustavo de Nardo), has been exiled for his entanglement with the servant girl Tania, a dismal affair that ended in the girl’s suicide. Kurt had been engaged to the beautiful Nevenka; in his absence, she marries his younger brother Christian (Tony Kendall) instead. One dark night Kurt returns, distressing the entire family, most especially the mother of the servant girl (Harriet Medin), who longs for Kurt’s death. He coldly offers his congratulations to Nevenka and Christian, but he obviously wishes to reassert his place in both the nobility and Nevenka’s heart. On a dusky beach, he reinstates their sadomasochistic entanglement, flogging her with a riding crop, reigniting in her a confused disorder of passions she had hoped to leave behind. But that very night, in a highly oblique and mysterious series of events, Kurt is murdered by an unknown culprit. Quite shortly after his death, his ghost begins to stalk the castle, leading Christian to investigate the mysterious circumstances of his murder and ultimately culminating in tragedy for Nevenka.

On the surface, this reads like a stock Gothic plot, with only the barest hint of sexual sleaze to differentiate it from any other number of lurid Italian productions of the day. And it’s true that the plot is probably the very least interesting thing about The Whip and the Body, the element that feels the most underdeveloped and unrealized. At times, when it focuses on Christian’s quest to determine the murderer, it can even feel laborious, merely a series of ponderously paced generic machinations to provide a flimsy canvas for Bava’s aesthetic sensibility. It’s hard to fault those who take issue with the somnambulant slowness of such predictable and well-worn genre clichés. The inventiveness and enthusiasm of the visual craft does not extend to the details of the screenplay.

But the film finds an emotional and thematic key in the personage of Daliah Lavi. Her performance as Nevenka is so completely absorbing that she even manages to upstage the great Christopher Lee, who by comparison comes off as stodgy and wooden. (In all fairness, the horrendous dubbing endemic to Italian films of the period can’t be helping.) In a production full of cardboard cut-out horror movie stereotypes, the psychological intensity and uneasy ambiguity of Lavi’s role emerges with startling force. It is in her that the film locates its dark core.

For even though it is only overtly addressed in the early scene on the beach, the performance makes it clear that Nevenka’s masochism permeates every aspect of her being. Her reaction to the haunting has a troubling ambivalence unfamiliar to the Gothic heroine of more conventional stories. Lavi intentionally acts in a manner that blurs the distinction between gasps of fright and moans of pleasure; when she shivers, it’s uncertain whether it’s out of fear or exhilaration. Terrified glances become indistinguishable from desirous ones. This is The Whip and the Body’s real surprise: not the shallow tease of skin, but the sense that the horror is not inimical to, and perhaps even willed by, the person who we assumed was its victim.

Consider the film’s most frightening scene, a nocturnal visitation from Menliff’s ghost to Lavi’s bedchamber. After an extended period of excruciating build-up, during which the doorknob gradually turns at the touch of an unseen hand and Menliff’s silhouette (bearing the same riding crop) looms before the window, we are treated to the terrifying image of his hand slowly extending toward her—toward us—out of the darkness. She screams, but instead of running away, she rolls onto her back, in an attitude of eager submission identical to that from the beach scene. The hand caresses her cruelly, commandingly, before tearing her nightgown open. These are the gestures of sadomasochistic theater as much as they are thrills in a horror set piece. The fact that this sequence acts as a double of the earlier erotic encounter on the beach points to the dissolution of boundaries between death and desire, pain and pleasure, horror and fascination that the film will affect even further in subsequent scenes.

The truth is that Nevenka does not seem to feel fear at all in response to Kurt’s return from the grave—or more accurately that her fear is indissoluble from, indeed synonymous with, her happiness. For her the haunting is not a curse or a nightmare, but a state of sexual fulfillment; the horror movie villain is not an antagonist, but the enforcer of her repressed desires. Over time, we come to see Kurt as servicing Nevenka rather than terrorizing her. Certainly, he seems to at least understand her more than the supposedly virtuous Christian, who Nevenka witnesses engaging in an adulterous rendezvous with another woman. Heartbroken as much by his hypocrisy as by his betrayal, she flees to a private room, where Menliff’s specter appears next to her in a mirror. She cowers and falls on the bed, where he whips her once more, more brutally than ever, but despite her theatrical protestations, she is quite discernibly and unequivocally moaning in sexual ecstasy, even smiling. “I’ve come for you,” Menliff tells her, in another telling double entendre. Quite contrary to the menacing threat we might typically interpret in such a statement, the implication is almost poignantly romantic. He has come for her, for her benefit, to serve her, because he knows this will make her happy, happier than she could ever be with the dull and proper Christian. For her, dread and pain are inseparable from joy and eroticism. Kurt’s aggressive resurrection, by which he can exert total terror and dominance over her, thus presents the most complete realization of the masochistic scenario possible. And it is my contention that this masochism implicitly doubles and illuminates the pleasure we as audiences often take in horror as a genre: we are drawn to these macabre scenes and ghastly experiences for themselves, not in spite of their negative emotions but because of them, because we find in them a pure and indefinable gratification loosely analogous to the sexual titillation the masochist takes in pain.

For clarity’s sake, it might be worth briefly contrasting this with a diametrically opposed but curiously complimentary philosophy explored in Michael Haneke’s infamous home invasion experiment Funny Games (1997). The young torturers in Funny Games have also come “for us,” the audience: the horrific violence they enact upon an unsuspecting bourgeois family is for our entertainment as viewers, an awareness rendered chillingly clear through a number of Brechtian fourth wall breaks. In this way Haneke aims to expose, explore, and critique what he understands as the audience’s sadistic voyeurism, evidently the underlying fantasy not only of many a horror film but of numerous forms of media consumption relating to images of violence. But what we find in The Whip and the Body seems to suggest that this claim is limited, at least when it comes to the horror genre. Bava instead proposes a masochistic understanding of spectatorship, predicated on identification with the victim rather than with the killer. We come not to terrorize, but to be terrorized; our pleasure is not derived from the thought of inflicting violence on others, but from experiencing the fear and agony of being subjected to violence at a physical remove. We do not align ourselves with the hollow coldness of the sadistic Menliff, who doesn’t even have enough personality to securely latch onto, but with Nevenka’s dark and heated passions, her inexplicable lust for pain. The terror she experiences is a crucial part of the thrill, the central and consensual term both of her unspoken contract with Menliff and our contract as viewers with a filmmaker: she wants this, and so do we.

Viewed through this lens, the whole of Bava’s filmic style takes on an almost subversive new meaning. The creaky trappings of old dark house pictures are reframed as the fetishistic signifiers of a totalized perverse fantasy: the fluttering curtains that bind and strangle Menliff before his death; the sinuous hanging branches that grope and choke the shadowy mise-en-scène of the ancestral vault; the darkened passageways, sliced by slats of icy light, that come to resemble the internal passageways of the human body. The more her madness progresses, the more Nevenka herself seems to merge with this environment, which comes to feel closer to a fearsome emanation of her ghastly desires than anything else. When Christian discovers her swooning in Menliff’s crypt late in the film, the panting sighs she emits as she languishes on the stone floor are more suggestive of necrophiliac euphoria than the shock of a kidnapping victim. The men are baffled, try to impose explanations, but she remains steadfast in her solitary quest. And Bava recognizes that, at least in art, this obscene pursuit has an inevitably suicidal terminus. The ending, which goes so far as to suggest that the ghost may have been a hallucinatory manifestation of Nevenka’s desires the entire time, finds her plunging a dagger into her breast, to Christian’s great horror. But this penetration is also a consummation, and she expires with the stamp of contentment on her face. “Let’s hope she’s free of him forever,” Christian mournfully remarks, but the final shot of hellish flames blazing over the smouldering remains of the riding crop suggests that her violent delights may not be extinguished even in death.

An exemplary early sequence, just as the haunting is beginning, shows Nevenka wandering the midnight corridors of the castle, drawn by an unusual sound to a heavy wooden door at the end of the hall. Bava intercuts between shots of the door and ever-intensifying close-ups of Lavi’s face as she approaches. Light and shadow play so delicately across her features that we’re unable to clearly identify her expression. We hear her quick, short pants of agitation, but it is impossible to tell if her mouth is curling in a grimace or a smile, if her widened eyes suggest building anxiety or yearning anticipation. By the time she is turning the handle the tension has reached an almost unbearable pitch, but, as any horror fan knows, the sickening frisson of suspense is also a source of ardent excitement. What lies beyond that door? Her worst nightmare? Or her darkest desire? The singular pleasure of The Whip and the Body is to suggest that there is no difference.

by Brian O’Connell

Brian O’Connell is a writer living in New York. He has been published by Plutonian Press, Muzzleland Press, and Planet X Publications. He regularly cohosts the podcast Celluloid Citizens with Sean M. Thompson.

October 6, 2021 by Silent Motorist Media

Cure (1997) by Brian O’Connell

The characters in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films seem dominated by their environments. They loom, awkward and ill-suited, in their drab, underfurnished apartments, dim and flatly lit; otherwise, they wander the dreary winding streets of the nameless cities where they live, labyrinthine mazes of concrete and glass that blur every face into anonymity. We seldom see them head on and close up but instead through doorways, smeared windows, down corridors or through narrow apertures. A predominance of icy wide shots emphasize the empty space in any given location, and the camera movement—generally scroll-like lateral shots that lend an oddly theatrical, distant atmosphere to these scenes—merely brings us up against the limits of whatever area we happen to find ourselves in. Even with multiple characters in a single scene and location, there are numerous fracturing devices that section the actors off from each other, stranding them, solitary, in the frame. Whatever the visual strategy, wherever the location, the message is clear: these people are alone.

Such is the bleak landscape traversed by the filmmaker in his 1997 international splash, Cure, a deeply unsettling detective procedural-cum-occult thriller that uses its vacant rooms to reflect equally abandoned souls and minds. Like Kairo, Kurosawa’s famous 2001 ghost story, Cure is an uncommonly nihilistic and despairing horror movie, using the generic tools of its established cinematic tradition to express deeper anxieties relating to loneliness, contagion, and the human condition. Where Kairo pivots, however, on the dual poles of both the eerily modern dread of Internet-augmented isolation and the elemental fear of death, Cure takes as its central subject an altogether more complex and possibly more human terror: the great abyss of meaning that lies beneath our daily lives.

Initially, the film takes place along something of a  dual-narrative track. On the one hand we have the story of Kenichi Takabe (played quite compellingly by Kōji Yakusho), a detective fruitlessly investigating a series of gruesome murders  committed over the preceding two months. The murders are carried out in a strikingly similar fashion—most notably, a gory X was carved into each of the victims’ faces—but have nothing in common otherwise, including a perpetrator. The different killers are easily caught and willingly confess, but can never provide Takabe with a motive, and have no clear connection to each other. The frustratingly futile progress of Takabe’s investigation is intercut with enigmatic scenes following the visits of an affectless young man we come to know as Mamiya (a chilling Masato Hagiwara) to several disparate individuals, each one of whom leaves a trail of death and destruction in their wake. Further complicating matters, we’re occasionally ushered away from the main action to observe puzzling vignettes of a woman with amnesia or some other psychological disorder either being treated in a hospital or wandering the streets of the city. We later come to learn that this woman is Takabe’s wife (the late Anna Nakagawa), and that their marriage is strained from her progressively worsening mental illness. Just what are we to make of this tangle?

Well, these threads eventually begin to coalesce, approaching a strange logic that never fully resolves, but Kurosawa keeps his hand hidden a long while. That first hour is a memorably opaque one. The audience is placed in the position of the detectives, blindly groping for some sort of structure or even a hint as to the nature of what is going on. The film steadfastly refuses consolations, preferring instead to immerse us in an icy atmosphere of slow, gnawing dread and uncertainty. Cure’s narrative itself becomes a crime scene, a fractured, incomprehensible set of incongruous misconfigurations and mystifying suggestions suffused with an air of impenetrable terror and melancholy. Only with time and close attention can the patterns become clear.

One thing is never in doubt: it is Mamiya who lies at the nexus of this mystery. His presence in the film is like that of a black hole, an absolute emptiness toward which the characters and the audience alike are drawn by inexorable degrees. We first see him wandering a lonely beach in Shirasato, encountering a seated stranger and asking him for their location. A few moments pass and he asks the same question again. Shortly later, he is wondering what the date is, then for the location again (for he has already forgotten), and finally, with a disquieting casualness, he asks the other man if he knows who he is.

Throughout the film, Mamiya is defined by such queries; indeed, most of his dialogue is nothing more than an endless stream of questions, exhibiting no interiority or even a clear sense of personhood. His strange interactions are characterized by an incessant questioning that inevitably assumes an almost aggressive, interrogatory quality; his words become an assault. His eternal refrain, “Tell me more about yourself,” comes to sound like the lure of a predator, and the hypnotic manner with which he draws these individuals’ words from their reluctant lips holds more than a hint of vampirism. When paired with the darkly evocative symbolism of the lighter he pulls from his pocket (it both illuminates and destroys), or the nightmarishly amplified dripping of a tap in the low, humming sound mix, things become more sinister still.

It comes as no surprise that Mamiya is the driving force behind the killings, nor is the reveal of the “device” being employed—a mystically-inflected version of mesmerism—a particularly shocking one, for the film gradually and delicately leads us to this conclusion after a long buildup of subtle indications. What is a surprise, at least in a film of this type, is Mamiya himself: his complete lack of personality, of motive, of any individually distinguishing features at all. What we might initially take for opacity or mystery on his part—a riddle concealing his hidden depths—ultimately reveals itself to be mere blankness, a total void. The revelations of his past and of the method in which he influences other human beings hardly tell us anything; they show us how he does things, but they don’t serve to explain why he does them, because, it finally seems, there is no explanation. Mamiya has nothing to hide, nothing of consequence at all, and it is this that shocks us more than anything else: more than the occult nature of his uncanny powers, more even than the murders themselves. The film slowly brings us closer and closer to the center of its crimes before revealing that there is no center at all—just an empty cavity.

Which, I’d wager, is precisely the point of the film. Cure is about the absence of meaning, our clumsy and incompetent attempts to process a world that constantly refutes and baffles us. It’s a sneaky trick of Kurosawa’s to encase such a nihilistic statement within the narrative structure of the detective film. After all, we expect tidy resolutions and satisfactory explanations in the detective genre more than anywhere else. But Cure mocks this anticipation on every level. Mamiya isn’t the psychopathic or opportunistic antagonist we might expect from a serial killer film, and he constantly frustrates any explanatory framework we might impose on him. The law, so ineffectual and helpless in the face of the killings, is also subject to ridicule. Mamiya doesn’t recognize the police as an authority; “Who?” is his only response when Takabe announces himself during his arrest. When Takabe, in a particularly intense and extended scene, explains the roots of his inability to express his emotions, Mamiya offers little more than sarcastic dismissals: “Oh, so society’s to blame.” Society as a whole seems something utterly alien to Mamiya’s understanding of the world. As he’s uselessly interrogated, he gets up and walks around his cell aimlessly, beating his fists on the walls of the room, as if confused by the spatial restrictions his fellow humans have placed on him.

Mamiya is simply someone who has found a way, through mesmerism, to dissolve his personality completely into the incoherent texture of the universe; his hollowness is a form of enlightenment. His victims temporarily experience the same thing, although they ultimately prove too weak to attain the powers Mamiya wields with such terrifying clarity. When they tell their life stories to him—pedestrian, inconsequential, drearily ordinary lives—it is as if they are rambling gibberish into a vast abyss. And it is the dawning awareness of this meaninglessness, as embodied by Mamiya, that overwhelms them more than his hypnotism. They’re like the caged monkeys we see outside of Mamiya’s apartment around the midpoint of the film, ignorant animals that have suddenly become aware of their limitations. And once their illusions are stripped away, all they can do is murder, completely without motive, entirely arbitrarily, for a pointless murder is the ultimate expression of purposelessness that can be enacted by human beings. An X is a symbol of absolute negation. The bleeding crosses carved into the victims’ skin stare us dumbly in the face like a rejection of every social institution, of psychology, of reason itself. The X serves as a cruel wall human endeavor inescapably comes up against.

Why Takabe should prove stronger of will than the other victims is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it is because he is more intimately aware of life’s haphazard disasters than the contented schoolteacher or the simple policeman or bored hospital nurse that commit the murders. He has, as he tells Mamiya, always repressed his emotions, and this problem has been aggravated by the exhausting condition of his wife, for whom he experiences mingled feelings of tenderness and resentment. He certainly loves her: that much is clear following an exceptionally harrowing hallucination he experiences after returning from Mamiya’s apartment, during which his face collapses into a haunting mask of grief. And yet the many years of caretaking, minor aggressions, and constant stress have obviously taken their toll. “We’ll take that trip,” he reassures her after one of her episodes, alluding to the vacation they’ve been meaning to take. “Definitely.” But he doesn’t sound convinced, and his composure only weakens from there. The tension between his duties as a social creature—a husband, a detective, an inhabitant of the world—and the nihilistic abandon represented by Mamiya begins to grow intolerable. In Mamiya he sees a freer, less constrained version of himself, as Mamiya himself points out on multiple occasions (note too how their hairstyles are subtly paralleled), and this vision both horrifies and enrages him. “Lunatics like you have it easy while citizens like me have to go through hell,” he wails at one point, revealing just how much of his contempt for Mamiya is rooted in an envy of his freedom from obligations, from even the burdens of selfhood. But his struggle is ultimately a short-lived one: he is too angry, too intelligent, and finally too hopeless to resist the tug of the void.

By the time the film reaches its climactic scene—not only anti-psychological, but almost anti-narrative—Takabe has had his wish granted. In a room dripping with water and cold morning light, he undergoes the metamorphosis that finally frees him from the shackles of meaning and human order. It is an unbearably horrific transformation, but also a liberating one. In becoming like Mamiya, “happy, empty,” he attains the grim enlightenment that will allow him to wander selfless and untroubled through the chaotic atrocities of the world. This is why the first murder in the film is set to such curiously jaunty music, and why there is the slightest hint of a strange smile on Takabe’s face in his powerfully chilling final appearance. Contentment, this remarkable film suggests, might be the most terrifying thing of all.

by Brian O’Connell

Brian O’Connell is a writer living in New York. He has been published by Plutonian Press, Muzzleland Press, and Planet X Publications. He regularly cohosts the podcast Celluloid Citizens with Sean M. Thompson.

May 24, 2021 by Silent Motorist Media

Chad Ferrin Talks The Deep Ones’ Lovecraftian Horror

Back in January, we broke the news that cult writer/director Chad Ferrin (Someone’s Knocking at the Door, Easter Bunny! Kill! Kill!) was producing an original horror flick inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft.

Three months later, the film has wrapped and post-production is underway on what can only be described as a very sticky, very bizarre and oft-amusing throwback genre entry that combines the Cthulhu mythos with what you might call that Chad Ferrin feeling.

In the wake of the flick’s gory execution I spoke to the veteran indie filmmaker about how the picture came together and what audiences can expect from the mind behind John and Wilma Hopper (Someone’s Knocking) and the murderous mole people of Parasites.

Bob Freville: The Deep Ones is very different from anything else you’ve made. What was the genesis of this project?

Chad Ferrin: Star/producer, Gina La Piana offered her beach house as a location, and said we should shoot some kind of airbnb horror film there. The moment she said Airbnb, my mind clicked and the script was done in two weeks. It fell into place faster than anything, from script to production that I had done before. Perhaps it was writing for specific actors, seaside locations, divine intervention or Lovecraft guiding my hand…whichever, it was a perfect formula.

Were you reading a particular Lovecraft work when you alighted on the idea?

Shadow over Innsmouth, Dagon and The Call of Cthulhu inspired me the most. And I must say, it’s truly a dream come true to make a Lovecraftian film.

How did the project come together and what did that look like from inception to pre-production to wrapping on the beach?

It all started with Robert Miano introducing me to Gina for another project and when that didn’t work out, this one fatefully slithered up. Once we had her and the locations, Robert found the first batch of investors Michael Schefano and Richard Pate, followed by Gerry Karr and Jerry Irons. Then producers Zebadiah DeVane and Jeff Olan came in with the rest of the budget. Gina recommended Johann Urb and Jackie Debatin who were FANTASTIC in the roles of Petri and Deb. We had Zeb’s excellent catering, perfect weather, I only almost died twice(fell asleep at wheel)…it was really a blessed production.

How much planning went into the creature FX? I imagine you had a hand in sketching out the design of the mythical beast.

Jim and I went back and fourth on few concepts for Dagon that fit within our budget. Elements of C.H.U.D. were the icing on the creature cake. Then Jim and his crew had a couple months prep and they really out did themselves.

How was this experience different from that of your previous films? What were some of benefits to this shoot and, by contrast, the struggles you came up against?

It was the smoothest from start to finish and by far the most rewarding for me artistically. In large part due to a really top notch cast and crew that gravitated to the material. The set had a family vibe that helped keep everyone in high spirits and the beautiful locations didn’t hurt.

I understand that Robert Miano co-produced this one with you. How did that come about and can you talk a bit about your collaborative process with someone like Rob?

We collaborate on everything from script to screen. I first worked with Robert’s wife Silvia Spross on Someone’s Knocking at the Door, and she introduced me to Robert. The three of us had an amazing collaboration on Parasites, and then continued with Robert Rhine on Exorcism at 60,000 Feet and now The Deep Ones.

Did you have any specific influences in mind when you were prepping The Deep Ones? I know we touched on some aesthetic similarities to Brian Yuzna’s Society and Peter Jackson’s Braindead when we were talking about a particular sequence from the script, but were there

other influences that you were consciously or, subconsciously drawing upon?

Yes, Society and Braindead, as well as Kubrick’s The Shining, Horror Express, Rosemary’s Baby, Halloween III, Dark Shadows, Possession, Humanoids from the Deep, Salem’s Lot and Prince of Darkness.

The Deep Ones has reunited you with some people that you have worked with frequently in the past. I believe this was your third time working with Robert, but you’ve also got Timothy Muskatell on board for the first time since…Someone’s Knocking? You’ve always had a bit of a repertory company of actors going. Do you have a dream team of sorts that you’d like to work with in the future?

Well when you find talented cast/crew you just want to keep that magic going from film to film. Worked for John Ford, right? I hope to add Gina, Johann, Jackie, Kelli, Nicolas and Jerry to the next one. It’s nice to work with talented people that you have a little history with. I worked James Ojala back in my Troma days. Rae Robison had done costume design on Unspeakable, so it was pretty awesome to reunite 20 years later. Jeff Billings worked on Parasites, really dug the script and went above and beyond. Steve Hitselberger, John Santos, David Defino have been on most of my films since The Ghouls. Richard Band and I had a such a great experience on Exorcism that just had to get him on board.

I have to say that this flick seems pretty epic in scale in terms of the practical creature effects and whatnot. Do you see yourself going in the opposite direction with your next picture? Could we ever see a two-person character study from Chad Ferrin? Maybe a claustrophobic single location thriller?

I have a sort of single location thriller sitting here as well as a few bigger budget things. I’m ready for anything.

 

What do you think audiences can look forward to experiencing when The Deep Ones is finally unleashed on them?

Wall to wall cosmic creepiness and a score that is phenomenal. A Lovecraftian Rosemary’s Baby that will leave you gasping.

Do you have any acquisition deals in place? Is there a global sales rep attached or anything of that nature?

There’s a lot of interest, but I’m waiting to do a festival run before locking anything.

Can you see yourself expanding on the Cthulhu mythos down the road?

Yes, working on a sort of sequel to The Deep Ones now. Very excited.

Are there any other existing IPs that you would be interested in tackling?

I have a western version of Kihachi Okamot’s The Sword of Doom ready to roll.

Keep your eyes peeled for updates regarding The Deep Ones as they come in…

April 15, 2020October 28, 2021 by Silent Motorist Media

Kaurismäki’s “Hamlet Goes Business” Takes the Bard Into Bizarro Territory

Aki Kaurismäki’s films were bizarro before bizarro became a thing. I can think of no other auteur who has done for the motion picture what authors like Kevin L. Donihe have done for alternative fiction—consummately married the mundane to the peculiar.

If there’s one thing that our readers will find appealing about Hamlet Goes Business, a film that could otherwise be summarized as a black-and-white arthouse melodrama, it’s the depths to which it goes to highlight the absurdity of ole Anonymous‘s play.

The high contrast black-and-white photography feels less like an homage to Shakespearean theater and more like a tip of the hat to Kafka fans who have relished cinema’s adaptations of the same (think Orson Welles’ production of The Trial). Indeed, the entire film feels less like a Shakespeare tragedy and more like an exercise in lampooning industrialism and Capitalism, and the people responsible for both.

Where the play starts out with two watchmen convincing Hamlet’s friend, Horatio, to stand watch with them so as to catch sight of the King’s ghost, Hamlet Goes Business opens on a tight shot of a puppy yapping, his cries falling on deaf ears.

Instead of the Prince’s friend becoming convinced that a specter spells bad things for the future of Denmark, Kaurismäki’s story finds Klaus (the Claudius character of the Shakespeare text) poisoning the King before sucking face with the widow Gertrude in a shot yanked straight out of Gone with the Wind.

In a first act reveal that would have likely drawn belly laughs from John Kennedy Toole, Prince Hamlet himself (played sublimely by Pirkka-Pekka Petelius) is shown to be a paunchy, greasy-haired brat.

The other men populating this adaptation are profoundly dense, their actions motivated by the basest of fears and desires. An early scene involving ham is laugh-out-loud funny but, also, symbolic of the flick’s central theme—man’s voracious appetite for amassing things. Wealth describes not only money but anything that can be horded and/or devoured.

As Polonius (Esko Nikkari) explains early on, the porky prince has the controlling shares of the family company with the rest belonging to the banks. Polonius takes for granted that Prince Hamlet will be too stupid to object to a modest allowance in lieu of a promotion. It’s his firm belief that the little bastard is so dumb that he won’t realize that the role of company president is his birthright.

At the King’s funeral, Klaus tells Hamlet that he has something he wants to show him. The next very abridged sequence is introduced by an intertitle reading, “Satan and Jesus on the Mountain.” It consists solely of Klaus showing the prince around the company’s factory as if introducing him to the nuts and bolts of Capitalism.

The intertitle seems to suggest that Klaus is the Devil, tempting the son with the fruits of other people’s labor. It’s a captivating metaphor, particularly in what is an otherwise pretty silly film. That Hamlet is then quite literally thrust upon Ofelia (Kaurismäki perennial Kati Outinen), the daughter of a “good family,” furthers this rather blunt metaphor.

The Finnish director behind this short and defiantly sloppy re-imagining is fond of calling his films dog shit, pointing out that they are failures when held up against the works which inspired them. In Kaurismäki’s eyes, even his masterworks—the Oscar-nominated ‘Man Without a Past‘ and his faithfully rendered film of La Vie de Boheme—are garbage compared to the Art of Bresson’s Mouchette or Ozu’s Tokyo Story.

Many would read the director’s comments as self-deprecation, but that’s only if you aren’t hip to the artist’s rather wicked sense of humor. This is the same guy who jarred David Lynch at Cannes by allegedly whispering, “Who are you?”

Silly and haphazard as much of Hamlet Goes Business is, it’s still a cinematic marvel and a well-crafted one at that. As a filmmaker notorious for his economy with dialogue, Kaurismäki never fails to deliver sparse lines that fester in one’s brain. Example:

[After rebutting Hamlet’s advances, Ofelia sits, slouched, on the bed, staring up at him timidly.]

Ofelia: You know I can’t. Not before marriage.

Hamlet: That’s blackmail, darling.

[Moments later, Hamlet advances towards her again, this time to the sort of melodramatic strings of a Douglas Sirk film.]

Ofelia: No, don’t. We’d both regret it afterwards.

Hamlet: That’s what you think.

Ofelia: What did you say?

Hamlet: Leave me now. I promised to dine with my mother.

[Ofelia gets up to leave as Hamlet exhales cigarette smoke and broods. As she leaves, Hamlet turns off the source of the melodramatic music—a reel-to-reel recorder—and turns to a vintage jukebox sitting against the wall of his bedroom.]

The mise-en-scène here is a key component of Kaurismäki’s signature brand of bizarro. On one level, it can be read as a meta-fictional detail bordering on parody, but on another it’s representative of the anachronisms that make his films so unique. I dare any viewer to name another artist working in motion pictures who better juxtaposes such incongruous elements.

After Ofelia leaves, Hamlet kicks the jukebox in anger, compelling it to skip to a 45” whose chorus commands, “Hush! Hush! You’re talkin’ too much.”

Unlike much of the 69-year old’s ouevre, Hamlet Goes Business was not well-received here in America. Of the few reviews that one can dig up on the Internet, nearly all of them agree that the flick is short, stilted and anything but representative of Kaurismäki at the height of his powers.

This strikes me as hilarious since the picture shares so much in common with an American film that suffered the same critical fate upon its release. There are aspects here that will call to mind The Hudsucker Proxy, a screwball comedy directed by the Coen Brothers and co-written by Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, A Simple Plan).

The most obvious similarities are the the ridiculously long dinner table and Polonius’s central hypothesis that Hamlet will be too stupid to succeed. It’s worth noting, however, that The Hudsucker Proxy didn’t come out until 1994, a full five years after ‘Hamlet‘ was released on our Shores.

Like the Coen Brothers, Kaurismäki has an affinity for the village idiot, a character that often propels his narratives forward (see: Leningrad Cowboys Go America). In ‘Hamlet,’ it is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who are the big, dumb goons while Kaurismäki’s favorite male lead, the late-Matti Pellonpää (Ariel, Night on Earth), fills the ancillary role of The Guard (a conglomeration of the three guardsmen from the Shakespeare text).

The Guard and his young ward are obviously simpletons of the sort that are often found in the periphery of a Coen Brothers flick. Think Steve Buscemi’s Donnie in The Big Lebowski or Ryan Hurst’s Lump Hudson from their 2004 remake of The Ladykillers.

This correlation drew itself in my mind when I was less than a quarter of the way into Hamlet Goes Business. And the more I dwelt upon it, the more it made sense. For all of the credit that we give the Coen Brothers for their signature style, it’s impossible not to see Kaurismäki’s work in almost everything of theirs.

The way that Hamlet gobbles a thick slice of ham over his father’s dead body reminds one of nothing so much as George Clooney’s Harry Pfarrer messily gobbling hors d’oeuvres in Burn After Reading. Just when this theory begins to feel far-fetched, ask yourself what made Fargo, the Coens’ 1996 original film, so “original.”

At the time, cosmopolitan American audiences were widely unfamiliar with that distinctly Scandinavian Midwest populated by pregnant police officer Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) and loser car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy). What’s more, the laconic deadpan humor typical of Scandinavian countries was foreign to their ears.

It was this deadpan comedy and the way that the Coens portrayed Minnesota as a bleak winter tundra that got American viewers’ attention. Here was something that was rather eccentric and undoubtedly one-of-a-kind…except it wasn’t.

One could easily picture the Coens’ silent, stone-faced killer, Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Storemare), meeting one of Pellonpää’s sad sack working class characters at a pub in Kaurismäki’s Loser Trilogy (Shadows in Paradise, Ariel, The Match Factory Girl). And that bleak winter tundra has been well-represented in the auteur’s canon, from Ariel all the way up to Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses.

This is not to slight the exceptionally talented Coens in any way, simply to state for posterity that the Finns did it first, Kaurismäki in particular. Here we are given one of the most indescribably odd adaptations of any classic volume. It’s equal parts Orson Welles drama and Three Stooges-style slapstick.

The incongruity I mentioned earlier pops up again when we arrive at one of the director’s perpetual live music sequences. Here it’s a raw punk rock performance of “Rich Little Bitch” by Melrose, one of Lapland’s greatest bands, whose rhythm section consists of a spiky-haired kid with a giant stand-up bass.

While most reviewers are probably right when they say that Hamlet Goes Business is an imperfect film, they neglect the fact that it is still head and shoulders above the hackneyed productions of Hamlet that are rolled out on the stages of International theaters on a near-constant basis. If there’s one thing going for it it’s the director’s obvious restlessness with the source material.

The resulting picture succeeds by virtue of its almost perverse refusal to acknowledge the play’s underlying concerns. The preternatural relationship between Prince Hamlet and his mother is reduced here to a throwaway line of dialogue that reduces the heir’s Oedipal complex to nothing more than the co-dependence of any sexless geek.

If it’s not a masterwork on the order of the director’s later port city stories (La Havre and The Other Side of Hope) then it’s definitely a worthy sizzle reel, demonstrating Kaurismaki’s knack for rendering the boring wildly compelling. If nothing else, it’s surely a worthy stocking stuffer for someone who loathes the Bard.

If you’re familiar with the Shakespeare play then you already know this one doesn’t end well, at least not historically. But in Hamlet Goes Business nothing goes according to plan. Don’t be surprised if the film’s ending finds you smiling. This is just part of what makes it so bizarre.

February 1, 2020 by Silent Motorist Media

Films That Fell Through the Cracks: “Aaltra” (2004)

“Aaltra”

(Film Movement Series; Delépine et K/Vern)

Some films have the ability to leave you in awe while others are in possession of something capable of driving you mad. Delépine and Kervern’s directorial debut, the nebulously titled Aaltra, is in full possession of both.

Described as a darkly comic road movie, this French-Belgium co-production came and went from European arthouses, collecting warm if largely pedestrian praise from native critics, ultimately landing on our shores only after New York City’s Film Movement launched their e-commerce distribution model in 2003.

The relative obscurity that it has existed in is unfortunate, first and foremost because discerning audiences deserve to see it but, furthermore, because American independent filmmakers could learn a lot from its style and structure.

Aaltra‘s plot seems tailor-made for the sort of broad bromantic comedies that Tinseltown loves to turn out like a cheap escort…at least on paper. To wit: After finding out that his neighbor’s lazy farmhand Gus (the hulking, disheveled de Kervern, credited here as K/Vern) has been screwing his wife, a nerdy motorbike enthusiast and failing company man (French funnyman Benoît Delépine) speeds out into the fields and instigates a haphazard fistfight.

As the two men wrestle, their bodies land in the gaping maw of Gus’s combine harvester. The machine swallows them up, leaving each of them paralyzed below the waist. After realizing that they are both F.U.B.A.R., they begrudgingly decide to team up to take on the corporate bigwigs at Aaltra, the manufacturer of the offending combine.

Naturally, a sort of stand-offish camaraderie develops between the two, one that would be easy to picture drowning in saccharine if placed within the wrong hands. Fortunately for us, Delépine and Kervern are not the wrong hands and Aaltra is not that sort of movie.

Eschewing the buddy comedy formula in favor of something at once more realistic and more surreal than anything most of us are used to, pic presents us with the kind of story that often plays out among modern men in the real world; emotions are stifled, feelings left unexpressed and base urges rule supreme.

Instead of the faux-meditative scene that would find Delépine’s Ben confiding in Gus about the disintegration of his marriage and the laughably awkward details of his sex life, Delépine and Kervern never speak of Gus’s covetous tryst or Ben’s wife at all.

This left quite the impression on me when first I saw it since it flies in the face of our collective understanding of narrative composition. And it’s this kind of ultra-realistic detail (or lack thereof) that gives Aaltra its charm. Of course Ben and Gus never engage in some contrived heart-to-heart about marriage, infidelity or divorce.

Why bother? No use squabbling about yesterday when tomorrow is gonna be lousy enough. After all, each is now half a man in their own eyes, but together they form one mean son of a bitch.

Those seeking an escape from the hypostatized universe of Hollywood cinema would do well to seek this one out. It provides viewers with a slightly askew realism that hasn’t been seen since Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessan or, at least, Kaurismäki’s Leningrad Cowboys Go America (fitting that Kaurismäki should cameo in Aaltra‘s denouement).

There is much of the Theater of Cruelty on display, almost all of it more comical than anything Alejandro Jodorowsky ever committed to celluloid (save, perhaps, for select bits of Fando y Lis). From the way the male nurse fucks with them once he’s confirmed that they cannot feel their legs to Ben’s surreptitious theft of a barfly’s drink when he’s not looking.

There is also something of American vintage here in the particular physical comedy that both men employ. Gus’s slow ascension while lying in an automatic hospital bed feels like it was engineered to be an homage to the age of Keaton and Chaplin. And that’s to say nothing of Ben’s Harold Lloyd-worthy pratfalls.

We know from early on that Aaltra‘s journey will have its end in Finland, so it is appropriate that our dyspeptic duo manage to illustrate that country’s aversion to arbitrary loquaciousness. When an old sod at a pub talks relentlessly at a laconic patron, going on and on about something as seemingly mundane as air conditioning in a tractor, we can feel the collective pain of the Finns.

Subtle touches of physical and visual humor soon give way to an extremity that’s every bit as amusing and confounding. The flick is especially effective at juxtaposing the average person’s veneer of samaritanism with the patina of short-tempered prejudice simmering under the surface.

This paradox is first displayed in a worker’s removal of Ben and Gus from a motocross track. “You guys can’t stay here,” he exclaims. “It kills the dream.”

Just when you might begin to feel pity for them, pic reminds us how wrong that sentiment would be. As it turns out, these two scabrous individuals work well together, effortlessly pulling grift after grift on the proud fools in their path. These are guys who think nothing of stealing popcorn from a little boy and threatening to slit his throat if he snitches.

Their primary victims: Every bourgeois idiot who dares to count themselves as well-meaning do-gooders when, in reality, they treat the handicapped as anything but equal. Their encounter with a British motocross star and grade A wank (Jason Flemyng) is almost as riotous as the psychological havoc they wreak on an uptight German couple (Brrring! Brrring!).

It’s the wealthy and entitled Brit who gets one of the flick’s most quotable lines: “It’s people like you that give fucking people in wheelchairs a bad fucking name!” This emerges as one of the only lines worth mentioning in a film whose economy with the verbal gives every line weight.

Like all of the best comedies, Aaltra is also a tragedy, one that opts to impress its poignancy through stark and random images and penetrating silences instead of overwrought pathos.

The beach sequence, featured prominently in the DVD release’s artwork, leaves an indelible impression not only for its blackly comic tableau but, also, the austere beauty of the same. No other director has ever made such effective use of the Lord’s prayer, certainly not in such a perfectly literate fashion.

One of the funniest scenes in the entire picture is also one of its most tense. A stocky Finn with a greasy pompadour sings a flamboyant rendition of Bobby Hebb’s R & B classic “Sunny” while our cripples sit back eating sausage and a room full of mean-looking skinheads seethe.

It’s in moments like this that Delépine and Kervern’s message comes through loud and clear: You need not fear for the well-being of these antagonistic protagonists, but you should worry about everyone else around them.

According to IMDB, Aaltra’s worldwide box office amounted to little more than $6,000 in sales. This may be discouraging if film fans equate financial success with artistic success. Personally, I choose not to.

Part of me believes that true art has no monetary value, only a kind of spiritual one. But as a gambling man, my money’s on this one finding the audience it deserves on streaming platforms.

As for its directors, they have gone on to make a number of unique projects including their Aaltra follow-up Avida. It’s my intention to check that one out sooner than later. I have it on good authority that it made at least seven gs.—Bob Freville

January 29, 2020 by Silent Motorist Media