Review: "Midsommar"

 

ASTER, Ari (Dir.), “Midsommar”, A24/BR.F/Square Peg/Lionsgate, 2019.

Have you ever heard an instance of glossolalia? The so called “speaking in tongues” has quite a musical quality to it, with rising and falling intonations and cadences and mild interweaving musical themes. Some people find it strangely thrilling and soothing – either because of its mysterious origin (as an instance of supposedly divine inspiration and contact), or because its mere presence is interpreted as a manifestation of The Beyond. Personally, I find it quite grating to listen to. It wanders; it never seems to know where it’s headed; it’s endlessly reiterative and tentative-sounding – like someone trying half-heartedly to pick out a Philip Glass piece on a piano. It sounds as though each individual performer is not totally committing to it and is sure that, at any moment, the whole thing might suddenly stop and so they’re trying their damnedest to not be the last one left crooning when that happens.

I bring this up because most of the soundtrack in this movie resembles glossolalia, albeit it is mostly instrumental, not vocal. At various points there are fiddles and flutes making endless glissandi and arpeggios in the background and – while at times it’s quite lovely to hear – it eventually becomes fairly drone-like and annoying. I think this is intentional. The people in this story are, for the most part, quite mad, and this soundtrack is certainly emblematic of what must be passing through their heads.

Horror fare, especially in the UK, has taken a sharp turn toward the Folk Department of late and these kinds of narratives – of bloodthirsty rural traditions irrupting out into the modern sunshine – are definitely seeing a revival. Magazines such as “The Ghastling” and “Hellebore” are attempting to breathe new life into the concept that was crystallized by such movies as “The Wicker Man” and “Witch-Finder General”; Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery”; almost anything by Alan Garner; and 80s slasher flicks like “Children of the Corn”. The focus of this material is upon long-standing – supposedly, millennially-old – traditions linked to nature and the surrounding environment and the accompanying ritual behaviour designed to appease, or entice, natural forces, or to bring the community closer to some perceived natural, cyclical way of being. Sometimes, there is an actual supernatural entity in the background of all this activity; other times, it’s just crazy people who should know better.

Such it is with this present example. We meet Dani, a university-level psychology student who has just suffered the loss of her entire family at the hands of her schizophrenic sister, who gassed herself to death along with her parents. Dani’s grief and outrage is barely handled by her oxygen-thief boyfriend, Christian, who is meandering through an anthropology degree – mainly because of the opportunities for sex and drugs – along with his best buddies, Josh and Mark, a useless crowd who feel that Christian is being ‘pussy-whipped’ by his ‘frigid’ girlfriend and her ‘baggage’. A visiting student from Sweden named Pelle offers to take the guys away to his home country to see the high summer festivals of his home town: the guys decide that this is the moment that they can shake Christian free of Dani and have a sex-and-drug-filled holiday together; however, due to Christian’s mealy-mouthed attitude and general incompetence, Dani winds up learning of the plan and going to Sweden with them.

From here on in, we are introduced to the rural community from which Pelle originates and we see the outwardly friendly and welcoming attitude of the community’s denizens which throws into stark relief the bitchiness, shallowness and craven attitudes of entitlement displayed by Christian and his friends. This is a truly abhorrent bunch of people, driven by narrow impulses and expectations and firmly reliant on a belief that – being American – everyone will cut them some slack; even our heroine Dani has elements of this in her character. Well, the local villagers certainly cut them, I’ll give them that.

After showing up at the village, our crew is combined with an engaged British couple – Simon and Connie – brought to the festivities by Pelle’s brother Ingeborg. We don’t see much of them, but, on the whole, they are far better behaved and more perceptive than our Yanks, who fail repeatedly to see beyond themselves and their own desires. Consequently, these are the first two to ‘disappear’. After this, as the nine-days’ Summer festival rolls on its course, our group of visitors gets picked off one-by-one in an escalating series of horrific, brutal encounters, which our self-involved victims fail to see coming or deflect, so far up their own arses have they shoved their heads.

I was a bit conflicted about this. On the one hand, as a viewer of the movie, you can see the enfolding net of the villagers slowly enmeshing our party of adventurers, and it is truly calculated and chilling in its ramifications and effects. On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine it happening to a more deserving group of people. My sympathies were nowhere: I disliked Pelle and Ingeborg for being the mendacious procurers that they become rewarded for being; I disliked the Elders with their casual brutality and twisted rationales; but I was also furiously annoyed with Mark for his hide-bound cultural insensitivity, and also the petty pissing match that takes place between Josh – who came to the village specifically to study its traditions for his thesis – and Christian who decides after that fact that he wants to write about the place as well. No-one is likable in this film; there’s no-one really to relate to. Dani is given our sympathy due to her horrific family troubles and the fact that she’s roped to a thoroughly despicable partner, but she gets railroaded along with everyone else and even her ‘shocking’ decision at the end has very little sting. It’s like the world just made a little garbage can for a select group of nasty humans to go and die in. Go planet!

Like a lot of these types of narratives, it’s not so much what happens to our victims but how. The village in this film is entirely constructed as a map into which our story falls, once we’ve left America and the populated bits of Sweden behind. Much of the village’s architecture is covered with drawing and murals which give hints to the viewer (certainly, none of our victims ever pick up on these tidbits) as to what might be coming next. The gateway into the village is a huge circular representation of the Sun; standing directly opposite this at the other end of the settlement is a yellow triangular house which, we’re told, is “off limits”: our narrative winds its way inevitably from one to the other. The villagers deflect curiosity and nosiness, and set up the demises of our characters with studied ease; in fact with an ease that is immediately apparent to the viewer and which has them yelling at the screen (in my case, at least) for these useless boneheads to wake up and smell the goddam coffee. Subtle, it ain’t. The two Brits are the only ones who sense that something is definitely stinky in Denmark and who make efforts to escape: their captures and deaths are the only moments when the villagers have to take extreme steps to avoid complete exposure. Our Americans, on the other hand, are completely fooled and grab what’s offered with both hands and little regard. Irritating.

Given the architectural and cultural detailing on display in this film, it’s clear that the director wanted to capture as much of it as possible for posterity. The sets and costumes, the set dressing, the landscape – it’s all lush and wonderful and the camerawork is just amazing to see. That being said, Aster treats it all like it’s a doll’s house, tiny figures moving in a constructed world, and this might be a deliberate choice. What it does though, is it puts all the characters into the middle- or far distance in each scene. There are close-up moments – mainly of Dani, and certainly ‘hero shots’ of each village Elder as they take their evil moment to shine – but the cast is mainly viewed as diminutive players on a vast stage, to the point where they become unidentifiable. As a particular case, Simon is only ever seen close up after he’s been horribly killed; for most of the proceedings otherwise, he’s a distant brown figure and an accent. Even dead, he’s had his lungs ripped out through his back and his eyes masked by flowers, so it wasn’t even initially clear that this was him. The same with Connie: at the finale a grey corpse on a wheelbarrow turns out to be hers but it’s not immediately obvious that it is, and it has to be inferred from context. (You will suffer if you don’t pay attention with this, folks!)

Finally, there’s the violence. This is harsh. The R-rating here is for the gruesome detail of bodily injuries and the lingering camera shots that display them. If hyper-realistic trauma damage is something that you’re not capable of easily withstanding, you might want to look elsewhere. The brutality here is casual and grotesque: no-one gets whacked on the head with a mallet where two or three well-aimed thumps will make sure. It’s all in stark contrast to the pretty white blouses and sunny countryside, which definitely ramps up the impact and drives the ugliness of it home. For the keen-eyed however, there are warnings in the wall murals and embroidered decorations, so you’ll at least have a slight chance to anticipate the worst of it.

For Mythos devotees, especially those with a yen for Ramsey Campbell’s works in that regard, there’s a nice nod to The Revelations of Gla’aki – the holy book of the Village Elders is a stream of consciousness rambling by a deliberately-generated inbred savant, created to keep the volume going into the future. It’s one of very many moments of extreme ickiness in this movie.

In the final analysis, what’s to like? This is a very well made and put together movie; the photography, the casting, the locations – it’s all a treat. The characters are all vibrant and well-realised, and their interactions and individual arcs – while not surprising – are believable and well-portrayed. It’s a very attractive vehicle. It will hardly surprise the viewer, however; there are no challenges to expectation at all: we know, going in, what to expect, and all of those things happen. It’s murky too (despite all of the bright sunshine): everything is shot too far away from the screen and we never really get a visual sense of the characters as anything other than distant puppets, highlighted by variations in colour. No-one here is a sympathetic person and I wasn’t even left wondering what might happen to Dani afterwards. This is a very long film that leaves no firm impression, apart from its stark gore and idiosyncratic soundtrack.

If folk horror is your bag, there are lots of interesting things happening online and in the world of print media at the moment. I suspect that, as far as cinematic versions of the form go, what's been done already will stand up as well, or even better, against what might turn up in the next few years. If you've seen "The Wicker Man" (the 1973 version with Edward Woodward, Britt Ekland, Ingrid Pitt and Christopher Lee; not the 2006 dreck with Nicolas Cage), or "Blood on Satan's Claw", then you've seen this film; it's definitely a love-note to those movies. It doesn't really add much that's new to the genre though.

Three-and-a-Half Tentacled Horrors (with flowers in their hair) from me.

Player Handouts: Spawn of Azathoth, Part 1 – “A Ghostly Presence”

I was going to be concluding my series of module handouts from the CoC version 6 rulebook by doing the resources for “Dead Man’s Stomp”; however, they have proven to be fairly tricky and time-consuming, so I thought I would jump into the “Spawn of Azathoth” campaign in the interim. “Stomp” has handouts which are vastly more interpretive than the usual scenario – the information is left largely in the hands of the Keeper - whereas “Spawn” has information which is more-or-less cut and dried… although the sheer quantity is terrifying! This is a beast of an undertaking, but it has the virtue of being able to be broken down into bite-sized chunks, making my workload a little less Sisyphean. The clear parallels between these two projects is that they are both incredibly well-written – the first by Mark Morrison and the second by Keith Herber – and I don’t want to get them wrong.

*****

The introduction to “Spawn” is called “A Ghostly Presence” and embroils the party with questions surrounding the death of a former teacher and mentor, Dr. Philip A. Baxter. One party member receives a horrible visitation in the night prompting them to try and contact their old teacher: they are informed by the housekeeper that the Professor died just the day before. A death notice in the morning newspaper supports her statement, and provides details about the resulting funeral:

Azathoth Papers #1

Players attend the funeral and meet all of the NPCs pertinent to the ensuing saga. They respond with varying degrees of friendliness: Emmett Baxter, one of the professor’s two sons, is quite abrupt and offers the players only his marked business card and a request to “make an appointment”:

Azathoth Papers #3

After the funeral is over and everyone has gone their separate ways, the players arrive back at their base to find that a telegram has been delivered, inviting them to the reading of the Professor’s will, at the offices of Baxter’s lawyer, Judge Braddock:

Azathoth Papers #2

The will reading is a fraught session of grief, anger and recrimination – as is usual for these kinds of things – and many interesting nuggets of information can be found. During the proceedings, the party is given a manila envelope, prepared for them by Baxter. It is noteworthy that a second envelope is also present, for an un-named individual not able to be there.

Azathoth Papers #4A

Azathoth Papers #4B

In the original text, this dream journal is presented all as one document; however, for the purposes of adding colour and legibility, I have broken it up into several images. There is also a map:

Azathoth Papers #4C

*****

That’s all for the set-up – from here the players need to get to Providence in Rhode Island and start poking about in the dead Professor’s affairs. What they’ll discover might unnerve them completely… 

(All material presented here is copyright Chaosium Inc., Hayward CA., 1986, 2005.)

Review: “Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark”

 

ØVREDAL, André, “Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark”, CBS Films/Entertainment One, 2020.

The ongoing pandemic is clearly continuing to be a dumping-ground for film studios’ misbegotten creations which they seek to disavow. This horror is a prime example. This movie was released in the US in 2019 and got a fair reception; it’s obvious to me however, why it has been snuck into this country on DVD while everyone – it’s assumed – is looking the other way.

I wasn’t at all interested in this when I saw it at the supermarket; but I was buying something else and the deal of the day was “two for $20”, so I grabbed this to score the discount. The two things that clinched the deal for me were the picture of Dean Norris on the back of the packaging (I quite liked his work in “Breaking Bad”) and the fact that Guillermo del Toro was listed as the producer. Turns out, M. Norris is a trivial element of the tale and del Toro’s input was lacklustre at best… or farcical at worst.

As I started watching this, I had this weird sensation: something didn’t click. The further I got into it, the more I felt that I wasn’t working with all of the required information; that there was something going on I wasn’t privy to. This started to irk me but, before I could examine it, I got distracted by the scarecrow:

When I was a kid, I watched a Disney film about a guy called Dr. Syn who dressed up as a scarecrow and rode out into the night to do stuff. I wasn’t sure exactly what he was doing, or why – I was only eight or so, so the intricacies of the plot eluded me - but there was this cool dude, dressed as a scarecrow and frightening the living daylights out of the bad guys! I was hooked. Later on, I discovered that the film was called “The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh” and was based on a series of novels by British actor and writer Russell Thorndyke, written from 1915 to 1944. Patrick McGoohan was the actor who played him in the Disney film (which you can watch on YouTube). Ever since that time, scarecrows have always ranked high in the creepy-cool stakes for me, even making me a little leery about “The Wizard of Oz” and those broomsticks in “Fantasia”. Here though, there was a problem:

Is this how scarecrows are made? I’ll admit, I’ve made several of these things in my lifetime and I’ve even dressed up as one for Hallowe’en, and this one looked wrong. As the main villain in the first story of this portmanteau film, he had a chilling enough face (with extra beetles) and the huge hole in his midriff was also cool: it was just his stance that threw me off. Slumping forward from his supporting stick, his arms hang loosely at his sides and his legs are splayed out wide to either side like he’s trying to mark each side of the mouth of a football (ie. soccer) goal. Weird. I was thinking that it’s a good thing that the hole in his tummy was there, otherwise it would look as though that pole he was hanging from had been rammed determinedly up his jacksy. Where I come from, scarecrows are positioned much as you would a person about to be crucified; given the director’s country of origin - or del Toro’s for that matter – is the position of this guy typical of Norwegian, or Mexican, scarecrows? I’m just saying, wherever this pose originates from, it’s got to be a minority expectation, surely.

So, being thrown for a loop by the ludicrous positioning of the straw man, I began to tune in once more to the plot. As stated, this is a collection of separate stories tied together with some tenuous connective thread. That’s fine; I’ve seen “Creepshow” and its associated ilk since back in the 80s – I’m down with that. This time however, it was the clunkiest stitching together of unconnected narratives I think I’ve ever seen. Three of the stories are based upon a clumsy info-dump issued by the targeted characters shortly before the horrors manifest to claim them and, to add insult to injury, make no sense, or fracture the exact logic that they try to create. In “The Big Toe” – why would anyone, having just discovered a human toe in their backyard, put that item into a stew that they were intending to serve to their family as an evening meal? And who, having been served such a meal, would eat it? I was bewildered. Then, another character claims to have been experiencing a bizarre dream about meeting a pale woman in a red room. He does meet said woman immediately thereafter, but in a series of white corridors under flashing red lights. So, no red room; not so much. And the Latino lad hears a nonsensical string of verbiage (“me tie dough-ty walker”) and immediately remembers – at length - a campfire story about another horrific entity and neither he nor the ensuing “Jangly-Man” explain, at all, what this piece of doggerel means. Deeply unsatisfying…

So, I watched while the film ran to the end of its train-ride. Nothing was unexpected and nothing was explained and certainly nothing was particularly horrifying. I was thinking: has del Toro completely lost his touch? I mean, this is what he’s coming to, off of winning an Oscar for “The Shape of Water”? This is a low bar, possibly even lower than “Crimson Peak”: a complete non-event B-grade waste of film stock with a hyper-inflated special effects budget. In desperation I turned to the special features on the DVD and finally received enlightenment: this is based on a book! In fact, it’s based on a three-book series of collected horror stories that apparently were a bit of a cause célèbre in the US in the 90s:

Collected and re-told by Alvin Schwartz starting in 1981, the books were a young adult publishing sensation in America, since they gathered together all of the campfire yarns and urban legends prevalent in youth culture at the time, beefing them up with some lesser known Poe trifles and other odds-and-ends of folklore. Highlighting the creepy stories were a series of gruesome monochrome images by Stephen Gammell which became integral to the overall tone of the books (a reprint in 2011 with art by Brett Helquist met with strong opposition and forced a further re-issue with the original art restored). In 1984, another collection – More Scary Stories to tell in the Dark – was released, and a third compilation – Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones – was produced in 1991. Other titles have appeared, but these were not written by Schwartz who had died by that time. In the background of the censorious rumblings that led to “Parental Advisory” stickers being stamped onto popular music of the time, these books were denounced and burned, banned and then liberated from banning, in repeated waves of attempted libricide by the morally self-appointed religious bigots of the US, seeking to “protect the youth” of that country, a collective youth who, like Charlton Heston, would only see their beloved scary stories prised from their cold, dead hands. From what I can tell (not being au fait with the books), the stories reproduced in this film are the following:

“Harold”

“The Big Toe”

“The Red Spot”

“The Dream”

“Me Tie Dough-ty Walker”

“The Haunted House”

…with other stories hinted at during the run-time. All of these tales come from either the first book by Schwartz or the last: did del Toro not like the second book, one wonders? It’s clear that what he does like is Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which provides much of the framing device for these lacklustre re-tellings, along with the main character Stella. So, my reading experience was of some use after all...

This is what is missing from this film. For someone like me who, until I Googled all of this stuff, had no idea that any of these things had occurred, this film makes absolutely no sense. This is a love note to a treasured literary series that automatically alienates itself from everyone unfamiliar with its source material. I guess that CBS and Entertainment One were figuring on only distributing this film in the US and that everyone else could go jump up a rope. This is narrow thinking and piss-poor marketing, allowing lazy screen-writing and bad execution. Dumb.

As someone who never grew up with campfire tales (or the sort of camps at which they are a feature), I would have welcomed the opportunity to become familiar with the source code of this phenomenon; to be made aware of this cultural icon; to be welcomed into this fold of fandom. But no, I was simply told “if you don’t know, then screw you!” and fobbed of with this lazy, ill-conceived shit. Thanks for nothing; and you can take my $10 and add it to your Scrooge McDuck money bin.

As far as it goes (and it doesn’t strive to go that far, or with any effort) this will fill an empty night but will – for people in the same position as myself – be more annoying than satisfying. It relies on sloppy narrative tropes – because that’s what the books were highlighting: “have you checked the children?”; the killer’s hook hand is stuck to the car-door handle – and it doesn’t struggle very hard, or with any finesse, to work these into its narrative frame. The Hollywood Playbook ensures that all irritating characters get whacked so that only the attractive ones and the ones “in lerv!” survive, and it tries wa-a-a-a-ay too hard to convince us that it’s 1968 for no real reason whatsoever (seriously - what was the point?). And Dean "blink and you'll miss him" Norris is completely wasted.

My one heartfelt takeaway from this is that all the Americans who watch this will take one look at Harold the Scarecrow and go… WTF?

Two-and-a-Half Tentacled Horrors.

*****

Postscript: So here's a picture of "Harold" by Stephen Gammell from the book:

It seems that the makers of this flick were just being doggedly faithful to the source material. Still looks dumb. Maybe they should have just let it go...