First Scare: House (1977)

This Japanese cult classic is a psychedelic romp that doesn't so much scare as bewilder

I'm a haunted house aficionado. I love all the tropes—the happy family finding a deal despite a sordid past, the bad smells, the stopped clocks, the distant fathers who can't stop chopping wood. I love it all. If we're being completely honest, The Conjuring is my idea of a perfect scary movie. Spooks, vibes, demons—that's what I'm looking for in horror.

But at this point, finding a haunted house movie from a different culture and time period felt like a must-do. House had always been on my periphery, though I'm not very knowledgeable on Japanese horror (apart from crossover hits like Ringu). Needless to say, I was prepared for some very grim and dark storytelling.

I went in blind, of course, but no one told me that it's technically comedy horror. That's a horse of a different color! House is like someone mixed together a Luis Buñuel film, a Benny Hill short, and an after-school special from the 1970s— complete with schlocky rock soundtrack.

It's known as a beloved as a cult classic in Japan, and I can definitely see how that came to be. I, too, have my cheesy Halloween movie from the past that I adore: It's The Worst Witch, featuring Tim Curry and a young Fairuza Balk.

House was directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, who was approached by Toho studios in the '70s with the instructions to "make a movie like Jaws." It's unclear how he took that direction, exactly, but I will say that he definitely made something unlike anything I've ever seen.

The film follows a group of schoolgirls who travel to visit the reclusive aunt of one of them and spend the night in her huge house in the countryside. It's very clearly haunted, and over the course of the evening, girls disappear and die in mysterious ways—namely through traumatic deaths featuring household items such as:

• Mattresses
• A piano
• A grandfather clock
• Lamps

It's hard to explain just how very weird this movie is. The folks over at Criterion have published an in-depth analysis that goes into why it's a certified classic, but the entire time I watched it, I felt like I was on drugs. Kind of like if Rocky Horror Picture Show was directed by Dario Argento. It's very much a product of its time, I believe—there's some commentary on postwar Japanese life in there, along with growing up. Someone on Letterboxd was like, "this is exactly what a sleepover when you're 12 feels like." And that I totally agree with.

While it definitely won't scary anyone, I recommend that everyone checks out House, if only for the sheer surreal experience of it.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, new NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Film Review: Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched

A sprawling, exhaustive (and exhausting?) documentary about folk horror films

 

This three-plus hour documentary was not what I was expecting. I went into the 2021 documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror expecting something along the lines of a modern-day Haxan, the Danish/Swedish silent 1922 documentary/dramatization discussing the roots of local legends surrounding witches and witchcraft, dating back to the Middle Ages.

Instead, what I got was a survey of some nearly 200 films from (one of my favorites) Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973) all the way through contemporary films like Ari Aster's Midsommar (2019). How they managed to license clips from so many films, from so many countries, to visually tell the story of folk horror films in this documentary is a wonder. I say in all seriousness, hats off to the distributor's legal team. Without the absolute waterfall of clips included in this documentary, the proceedings would be extremely dry and I don't think the film would offer the viewer anything approaching the same level of engagement.  

Written and directed by Kier-La Janisse, the film begins with the "Big Three" of folk horror, Witchfinder General, Satan's Claw, and The Wicker Man. The film touches on the actual events that inspired the first two films -- a depraved religious zealot who exploited the societal breakdown of a civil war in England to amass power to himself and torture people he deemed "witches," and a true-crime case of a child who committed murder and was rumored to be involved in demonic cult, respectively. The popular conception of folk horror films begins with these, and in the minds of most casual viewers familiar with the subgenre, hews mostly to stories set in the British Isles, and usually involving some type of ancient pagan practice persisting unnoticed into the modern day.

But over the next three hours, Wilderness Dark and Days Bewitched then widens the lens beyond the British Isles, and I think this is the real mission of the documentary. It explores films either produced in or set in England, the United States broadly -- its previous colonial incarnation and various Native cultures, New England, and the American South -- Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Japan, the Philippines, and within Nazi Germany's occult fascination (while gesturing at by not including the Indiana Jones films explicitly). 

The central conversation of folk horror is one between the present and the past. One aspect is that change itself is frightening, both because of the unknown looming on the horizon, but also because of what has been forgotten from the past. There may be traps set, there may be poisons latent in the land itself, in the primordial soup from which modern culture evolved that lie in wait or, worse yet, bear us ill will. The horror comes from our inability to resist these things because we are ignorant of their possibility. This tension exists in every culture, it seems, and so the film makes a compelling argument that folk horror is a global phenomenon.

The film does stumble, however. In some ways, it falls beneath its own weight. Even at 3+ hours, it feels like it merely scratches the surface, and films are mentioned in a clause of a sentence and then gone before much can be done to link them to a larger thought. The documentary may have benefited from a closer look at fewer films in order to tell a more focused story. That lack of focus manifests in another quirk of the film, as well -- the writer/director is one of the interviewees featured throughout, and she is not identified onscreen as the filmmaker. I found myself wondering at the creative choices that led to the author being presented as one of many, rather than a guiding presence. I think the film may have benefited from a stronger authorial voice, rather than the presentation it ultimately went with. 

The breadth of films included also, I think, weakens the central argument of the movie. Here is a sampling of just some of the movies I've seen personally that were excerpted in this documentary: Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man, Burn Witch Burn, Night of the Demon, Dunwich Horror, Lair of the White Worm, Suspiria, The Witch, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Messiah of Evil, The Lottery, Deliverance, The Shining, Poltergeist, I Walked with a Zombie, Serpent and the Rainbow, Ganja & Hess, Candyman, Hour of the Wolf, Midsommar, Black Sabbath. At a certain point, it starts to feel like if everything is folk horror, nothing is folk horror.

The overall impression is of a film that is both too much and not enough, one that introduces compelling ideas but leaves them largely unexplored. Here is a nice YouTube examination of some of the specific areas in which it does that. That said, the steady stream of titles and concepts does propel the documentary, and I found myself not regretting, or even really noticing, the long running time, which I spread out over two evenings.

--

The Math

Highlights: If you like folk horror, or the even-more-specific category of daylight horror, this doc is a revelation of film recommendations; a specific focus on widening the lens to be more inclusive and thoughtful about traditions that are often excluded in film discussions

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Posted by Vance K—resident cult film reviewer and co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together

Review: Late Night With the Devil

An inventive take on found-footage horror with incredible '70s period detail that builds slowly into a wild and unforgettable climax

It's still 6 months out from spooky season, but getting the chance to head to the cinema to see a movie set on Halloween was a nice treat. As a caveat for this review, two things: Horror movies never, ever scare me and also, I won't delve into too many details because half the fun of scary movies are the twists. But let's dive in!

Late Night With the Devil is framed as a found-footage horror tale told in real time on Halloween night in 1977 on the set of Night Owls with Jack Delroy, a Tonight Show competitor. Slumping in ratings, his career on the verge of falling apart, Jack —played with charm, likeability, and a slow simmering of something dark just underneath the surface by David Dastmalchian— plans an extra-special Halloween episode, with guests including a mind reader, a skeptic, and a parapsychologist. Nothing too crazy, of course, but with live TV, you never know what may happen.

Things start to go wrong as the show progresses, but not enough to derail the show. When the psychic becomes physically ill on stage and starts spewing black vomit, everyone just says, "Oh weird!" But hey, that's showbiz, baby, and the show must go on. When the antsy producer starts to beg Jack to stop the show before something bad happens, the foreshadowing is so thick that you can almost feel the dread of everyone on set.

The tension and stress build and build as the movie progresses, and the possession centerpiece toward the middle of the film is inventive and unnerving. We watch as a young girl raised in a satanic cult has her arms strapped to a chair and becomes possessed by a demon named Abraxas. It's nothing compared to the full-scale assault of Linda Blair's ordeal in The Exorcist, but it's still convincing and creepy.

In the next scene, we witness a hypnotist convince a man he's got worms writhing and escaping his body. It's some of the best body horror I've seen in a long time, and one part in particular made my jaw drop.

What's interesting about these set pieces is that we're along for the ride just the same as the audience: everything unrolls chronologically and through the grainy and orange-and-brown hues of a 1970s talk show color palette.

This makes it work very differently than if it were just a movie set in the '70s and filmed as a drama, as the fear and doom feel so much more immediate because you're imagining watching it on live TV at home. Every few minutes, I'd think to myself, Holy shit, what if something crazy DID happen on television? I guess that's what the 7-second delays are for.

There are no jump scares throughout the movie, and the moments of horror come in small bursts backloaded in the last half. But the climax at the end —when the demon reveals himself and all hell breaks loose, literally— is 3 solid minutes of genuinely scary and very memorable supernatural violence.

The Math

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonuses: Slow-building tension that lasts the entire film; incredible performance by David Dastmalchian; some very very good body horror in the last bits.

Penalties: The film has come under fire for using generative AI for 3 of its interstitial art bumpers. I don't feel qualified to discuss all of the repercussions of that choice, but this article and this one have good explanations and takes on the matter.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, new NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Microreview [film]: The Love Witch

There’s a lot to love

 

 

The Love Witch is a movie shot in 2016 that looks like it was shot in 1972. Supposedly, it was *the last* film shot on 35mm film and edited on a negative without using a digital intermediate. As a big film nerd, this all makes me way happy, but what writer and director Anna Biller did with this film far outpaces a simple stylistic exercise.

The eponymous love witch is Elaine, who is attempting to recover after the end of a marriage, and has — as she puts it — been reborn as a witch practicing love magick. But her magic is maybe a little too effective, as the dudes she sets her sights on never really seem to be able to move on from her. This failure to move on takes several forms throughout the movie, and Elaine seems both a little confused by this effect, but also ambivalent. It’s not really her concern if a romantic plaything can’t move on.

This is where gender dynamics come into play. I’m not the best reviewer to discuss this, but let me say that the gender dynamics in the film are complex and nuanced. Elaine articulates the notion that women should be subservient to men, and give them sex all, all, all the time. She tries to convince other female characters in the film of this. But Elaine doesn't really practice what she preaches. Instead, she seeks out men for *her own* sexual and relational gratification. We hear the abusive voices of her father and her ex-/late husband demanding greater physical perfection from her, and we watch her sexually engage with men only to come away still wanting, while the men collapse in weepy heaps in her wake.

For me, this is where the aesthetic beauty of the film comes into play. And please understand, this is a BEAUTIFUL movie. Anna Biller not only wrote and directed it, but also designed the sets and costumes. She and cinematographer M. David Mullen purportedly worked out blocking and lighting schemes from 1970s giallo movies in order to better mimic the look of those films. It’s one thing to mimic the look of old film with a plug-in, or even to shoot on the same medium, but to fully mimic it down to the nuts and bolts...well, something else happens there.

By perfectly copying the aesthetic of a bygone generation of films and doing so in the context of a new work that handles gender, narrative, and thematic content differently, Biller is setting her film up explicitly in dialogue with those earlier films. Giallo and independent Technicolor horror movies brought us a number of female heroines, but when fifty years later it’s plausible that a woman might yet be attacked in a bar because someone calls her “witch,” the narrative takes on an additional layer of meaning.

That is maybe too esoteric. At brass tacks, we have the following: Samantha Robinson as Elaine is probably as beautiful as any human has ever been in a movie; the production design is sumptuous and layered; there are evocative references to films like The Seventh Seal that make my film-nerd heart happy; and the narrative leaves room for ambivalence and competing interpretations of Elaine, her goals, and her accomplishments.

In the end, this is kind of everything you want from an independent film — a strong narrative voice, bold visual choices, and a thoughtful re-examination of genre conventions.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for Samantha Robinson’s highly stylized performance; +1 for literally every single thing in front of the camera lens, because nothing is wasted

Penalties: -1 for a certain lack of narrative integrity that makes a couple of plot developments feel pretty mushy

Cult Film Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Vance K — Emmy Award-winning producer and director, cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together for lo these many years now.

LET'S FRIGHTEN CHILDREN! Bonus Conversation Edition

Welcome to a loverly punctuation mark at the end of the LET'S FRIGHTEN CHILDREN! series, in which I look at how to share horror with our offspring. Today's guest is Chloe N. Clark, an author and educator who has taught far more folks about horror than I have children. So let's talk scaring tiny people!

VK: Thanks for agreeing to chat about this!

CNC: Of course, I'm excited! Thank you for asking me!

VK: In your book recommendations for this series, you talked about how you got into horror at a very, very young age. I'm spending a lot of time thinking about how I roll this type of stuff out to my kids. But do you think, in the end, it matters? I mean, you seem to have turned out ok.

CNC: I honestly think it depends on a lot of factors: openness of the family in general and the kind of other media the child is consuming (as a child, I was also watching shows like Homicide: Life on the Street and talking about it with my parents, so there was certainly a level of my parents allowing me to be comfortable talking about adult matters); it also deeply depends on the child — I'm an immediate coward, I jump at jump scares like nobody's business but I also don't carry fears over. So as a child, I didn't get nightmares, for example. So I think a big thing is knowing that the child feels really safe in their surroundings. If they do, then I feel like horror is more manageable. There's also just the fact that a lot of children's entertainment is inherently scary — in Disney films and fairy tales, fucked up stuff happens, too.

VK: That's very true. I didn't realize how twisted even Snow White was until I re-watched it as I was getting into animation more generally as a late teenager. So much of that stuff just missed me as a small kid. Maybe it was because evil step-mothers and those fairy tale tropes felt so foreign. They didn't touch my life.

CNC: That's true, definitely — like they are based out of specifics that, in a way, are true to all genres of terror. There's a quote I love that I can't remember which Italian folklorist said, but is along the lines of "Don't believe fairy tales, they're true." Because at the time of their writings, they were the issues that people dealt with (where women died in childbirth way more frequently, etc), so there were stepmothers aplenty. Or where children did have to act as scullery maids (a la Cinderella)

VK: Right. For me, as someone who has always had very vivid dreams, as a kid the idea of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies was too much for me, and I steered clear of them for a very long time. It wasn't a burned-up guy with razor knives that did it, it was the idea of my dreams turning against me. When I talked specifically about Coraline and ParaNorman in this series, I discussed how it's given me an opportunity to talk with the kids about othering in very specific terms. It's easy for me, and my kids, to identify with Norman, or Coraline, as a kindred spirit with outsider interests. As those characters are othered and rejected by those around them, we've been able to have great talks about empathy, and how we don't want to make the mistakes of the crowd. Do you think that's a central part of the horror narrative overall?

CNC: Definitely, I can see that (fun side fact, Nightmare on Elm Street is how I realized I was a lucid dreamer as a child). And that's what horror does so well: it links into that idea of base primal fears (our own mind going against us, or the beach being dangerous, or whatever), but I almost think those are *good* lessons for kids to learn early. And yes, I think empathy is a key to horror. Obviously I think about othering and horror a lot — it's literally what I teach about. It is how we view monsters as others and how that shapes the narratives of fear told culturally. Horror is actively telling us to listen to those we might not listen to, and that's one of the biggest, most valuable lessons I think it can offer to us.

VK: This is one of the big reasons why I was looking forward to you participating in this series: Monster Theory! Can you talk in general terms about that?

CNC: So in general, Monster Theory is the critical lens of examining how monstrosity is used by different cultures in order to perceive of othering or social constructs, etc. I more specifically use it to talk about constructions of privilege and how horror is often a lens to examine that. This is something Get Out, for example, does exceptionally well. Making groups we fear into monsters has been a tactic since the beginning of storytelling. It's the most effective tactic for controlling a populace. And it's one, more and more, that we see horror narratives questioning in ways other genres are not.

VK: Right. Because there's an understandable, natural aversion to something that's different. But what separates humans from, say, my cats with new people in the house, is that we have an intellect and empathy and ways to synthesize those into an understanding of others. But routinely we see those impulses weaponized by leaders who want to divert someone's gaze away from where they should be looking. I feel like that's one of the most important lessons I can pass on to my kids, because it's a fundamental mechanic of the world. And you're right — I don't know other genres that consistently explore that theme.

CNC: Yeah, that exactly sums up why I teach horror in a rhetoric class. If there is one skill I want college students to have, it is to see the world with empathy and to understand the way fear is used to promote rhetorics of violence. Horror is the perfect genre to combat and explore that.

VK: Is the "what you thought was the monster isn't the real monster" (ie, Frankenstein, etc) a sub-genre in monster stories, or is it sort of the home key, do you think?

CNC: I think for the most part, it's the home key. I mean look at zombie movies — the whole premise is often, Oh shoot, wait! The humans are the ones we should be fearing after all!" The same goes for even things like Jaws — the shark is following its natural instinct, but it's the money-grabbing mayor who is actually the villain by not allowing the knowledge to spread/closing the beach. Like at their hearts, most horror stories operate on someone-did-something-awful-and-it's-created-a-monstrosity.

VK: That winds up getting perverted in the slasher genre, though, right? Because the "something awful" gets colored almost entirely by conformity/regressive morality. The promiscuous teens get chopped to bits, the virginal Final Girl lives on. I'm not showing the kids slasher movies. I mean, it's just something else that exists in the genre waters.

CNC: Definitely, Though I'd argue that in some ways those also have at least one, perhaps unintentionally, progressive bent — the premise is "listen to women." In almost all of them, the Final Girl susses out what's up and then absolutely no one takes her seriously. Which again becomes a people-in-power-not-doing-anything-to-help-stop-the-issue.

VK: Yeah — it's hard to imagine if Kevin McCarthy got pod-peopled in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Dana Wynter was the one who went to the next town over for help, that anyone would take her seriously.

CNC: Yes! That exactly! In the remake with Donald Sutherland, we even sort of see that a little bit with Veronica Cartwright versus Donald Sutherland's character.

VK: And it's so, so great.

CNC: It is one of my favorite films.

VK: We talked about the dangers of othering and how horror can provide a powerful (however bloody) window into that, so I guess we should talk about the other side of the same coin, which would be to keep a healthy skepticism of the uber-normal. I don't want to wander into the weeds of "Stranger Danger" or anything, but there's a consistent thread that connects The Stepford Wives and Body Snatchers, American Psycho, and even Get Out, I suppose, where the ultimate villain is someone who appears super normal on the surface.

CNC: Yeah, definitely. The veneer of normalcy needs to be interrogated in horror movies a lot of the time. Which I think is important — we idealize certain qualities, right? From "nuclear families" to "perfect marriages," etc, but we don't question enough what goes on beyond the surface of that. Horror helps us to push the idea of, "We can never know what secrets lurk beneath the surface." In horror, it's extreme, right? "Oh no! That successful businessman is a psychotic killer!" or, "Your neighbor is actually an alien!" But on a less extreme level, we do find that out all the time. The perfect husband is actually abusive, the business that seems so environmentally sound and respectable is actually using slave labor. Interrogation of ideals is a good skill to have.

VK: Yeah, and a perfect message for kids. Bruce Springsteen tells a story in his autobiography that he can't stand wind chimes to this day because when he was a kid, the husband in the next house was an abusive drunk, but the wife hung up these wind chimes to try to make the house appear peaceful and "normal" on the outside. You can see how that same lesson informs his entire career, and it's so easy (it's the norm, probably), for people to encourage their kids to be "like" somebody else. What's that really teaching them?

CNC: Yeah, it's teaching them this horrible lesson that if things aren't like everyone else then it's their fault. So many people don't report abuse because they don't want to be seen as being outside those cultural norms, too. Which is much more horrifying to me than a horror movie is.

VK: Agreed. Horror allows us a lens through which to process our own fears, and I'm thankful we've had so many generations of genre storytellers helping us all out.

CNC: Yes, that exactly! It also, I think, helps us to think about the ramifications of those fears. Like, we get the safety of asking "what would I do" before we ever have to actually face that question in real life. What would I do in a dangerous situation? Who would I be and who would I want to be?

VK: "Who would I want to be?" It's a perfect question, and one I think we should be encouraging our kids to ask (be they small, or in college).

CNC: Definitely. It's a lesson it's never too late to learn, but I wish we'd all learn earlier.

Posted by Vance K and Chloe N. Clark — in agreement about horror movies at nerds of a feather since at least 2016.

Fright vs. Fright: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Fright vs. Fright is a series of comparisons between classic horror films and the lesser-known works that inspired them, or subsequent remakes that stand on their own merits.

The Film: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

The Plot: Dr. Miles Bennell stumbles into a police station raving about not being insane, and needing people to listen to him. A psychiatrist arrives and agrees to hear Bennell's story. It goes like this: Miles returned from a medical conference to news that many of his patients had called and made appointments in a panic while he'd been gone, and then a day or so later, all called to cancel. When a friend says that she thinks her uncle isn't really her uncle, Miles is concerned for her. But then when a little boy comes in with his grandmother saying that his mother isn't really his mother, Miles begins to worry more generally. Stuff gets really weird when Miles gets called to his friend Jack Belicec's house because Jack's wife seems to have found a...body. It's a strange body. Sized and shaped like Jack, but without distinct facial features or fingerprints. Miles remembers his would-be girlfriend Becky saying she thought her dad was behaving strangely, and he darts to Becky's. In the dark basement, he believes he sees a doppelganger body of Becky in a locker down there, but afterward can't be sure. When he and Becky return to the Belicec place, though, the four of them discover giant alien pods in the greenhouse, each pod growing a copy of each of them. They've uncovered an alien plot to replace humans with unfeeling clones, and now they have to try to get away...and stay awake.

The Good, The Bad, The Indifferent: Invasion of the Body Snatchers is about as good as 1950s horror/sci-fi gets. There's not a lot of "guilty pleasure" here — this is lean, taut storytelling that is maybe not as visceral today as it would have been in 1956, but is no less thought-provoking. That this movie can be claimed as both a tacit endorsement of McCarthy-ite Red Scare paranoia and a rejection of that very same ideology speaks to how engaging it is. The filmmakers all went to their graves insisting that there was no political motivation or didactic intent behind the film, but there's no denying that it is a product of its zeitgeist. Can we be saved from the threat of secret Communist infiltration? Or, can we be saved from the reactionary forces in control that insist on homogeneity? This is in many ways the best of genre storytelling — a metaphorical treatment of existential forces that a society is wrestling with.

Fun bit of connective tissue: Carolyn Jones (later Morticia Addams), was in last week's installment, House of Wax, and also plays Teddy Belicec in this movie.

Remade As: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

How It Stacks Up: I'm not sure which of these two version is "better," so suffice to say that when it comes to the daunting task of remaking classic movies, this is about as good as they come. There are some elements that are a little dated — like the super-fake nosebleed on the pod-body of Jack Belicec (this time played by Jeff Goldblum) — but on the whole the practical effects hold up, and Philip Kaufman's film does a great job of painting on a broader canvas than the original film. Set in San Francisco, instead of a small town, the stakes begin much higher, and the barriers to stopping the alien pod-people from spreading are much more daunting. The ick-factor is ratcheted up in this version, and one additional characteristic added to the pod people in particular really heightens the creepiness. It's the shrieks. The shrieks of the pod people. It's unsettling and kind of chilling, and such a great reminder of how the well-chosen little things can be used to much better effect in horror than gore-for-gore's sake.

Worth a Watch? Absolutely. I think it's hard to go wrong with either of these two versions. There are more versions out there, but these two I can recommend without reservation.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012. Perennial watcher of dozens of horror movies each October. Not a pod person. As far as you know.