At one point in "The Purge," a horror film in which Americans are legally allowed to commit crime one night per year, a character laments that "things will never be the same ever again." The line is cringe-worthy given that the character just watched people she loves hurt somebody without hesitation, yet you don't know anyone in the film well enough to care one way or another, and the camera jiggled so much during the violence that you only got teasing, migraine-inducing impressions of the act. Writer/director James DeMonaco, who previously scripted the surprisingly effective 2005 remake of John Carpenter's "Assault on Precinct 13," cuts creative corners this way throughout "The Purge." He often confuses economical story-telling with paint-by-numbers dialogue and vague characterizations. So instead of being a creepy B-movie about the necessity of suppressing one's animalistic urges, "The Purge" is just an uninspired film. The concept of Purge Night is novel enough: crime is not in fact cathartic, so while behaving badly once a year may keep the the nation's crime rate down, it also turns people into monsters. But the movie forgets to explore its own premise, and instead focuses on a "Straw Dogs"-like
scenario in which a home-owner resists a mob that wants to break into his house in pursuit of a fugitive they want to lynch. The year is 2022. It may not be dystopia yet, but it's getting there. Somewhere in the suburbs, James Sandin (Ethan Hawke), a top salesman at a security company, has made a lot of money by selling home protection systems that consist of elaborate surveillance systems and steel doors that seal doors and windows. James just wants to hunker down and avoid Purge Night in his home, which, once his own security system activates, transforms into a house-shaped bank vault. James's wares are put to the test when his sulking loner son Charlie (Max Burkholder) admits a never-identified stranger (Edwin Hodge) into the Sandins' home. Charlie's humanitarian motives don't require much explanation: the stranger is wounded and helpless. But the stranger is also being chased by a posse of machete-wielding yuppies. These killer rich kids are supposed to be as odd-looking as they are menacing, so their leader (Rhys Wakefield) proudly wears a blazer with a fraternity crest, and a mask with a leering grin and long blonde hair that makes him look faintly Crispin Glover-esque. He could be the nerd-hating, Aryan younger brother of Michael Meyers from "Halloween." Wakefield's character, only identified as "Polite Stranger" in the film's credits, gives James a choice: sacrifice the bleeding stranger and save his family, or perish for a noble lost cause. This scenario is promising enough, though DeMonaco hypocritically encourages viewers to applaud the spectacular deaths of some home invaders before eventually concluding that the best thing for people to be is repressed and non-violent. But James's dilemma is never as nerve-wracking as it should be, because it's never clear what he's fighting for or against. For one thing, the stranger is barely in the film: he's apparently missing most of the time, and is therefore more of an abstract concept than an identifiable person. And the Polite Stranger is a cartoon fascist with all the nuance of an Adam West-era Batman villain. (What to name him? Killer Preppy? The Jackbooted Collegiate?) After repeatedly calling the wounded stranger a "homeless filthy swine," the Polite Stranger warns James, "Either give us he, or that will be thee!" but only after he tentatively bids James farewell with a florid, "Toodle-oo." Unfortunately, Wakefield's hamminess isn't a patch on Burgess Meredith's Penguin or Frank Gorshin's Riddler, and the film's jittery hand-held photography obscures our view of pretty much everything. It's hard to be shocked when the camera operators' convulsions are more violent than whatever they're shooting. DeMonaco almost never slows down long enough to give us a singular image of James or his world. A moment in which James peeps out of his front door's steel barricade and stares blankly — but directly! — at the viewer is effectively unnerving. But James is usually not so vulnerable, and the bland circumstances of his macho crisis are only fitfully memorable. Like the previously mentioned character who unbelievably insists nothing can ever be the same after The Purge, James speaks fluent ClichÊnese. When he finally makes up his mind and tells Mary whether he
intends to fight back, his decision is expressed so generically — "This our house!" — that it's unclear what he really cares about, his family's respect or his homeowner's insurance premium. Violence may not be cleansing, but you might want to stifle unhealthy thoughts after watching "The Purge."
What Annabelle 3 Is Going To Be About The Conjuring Universe is riding high right now. The Nun debuted last weekend to easily the best opening in the franchise with $53.5 million, affirming that this horror series isn't going anywhere anytime soon. One of the next Conjuring Universe films on its way is Annabelle 3, to be written and directed by The Nun screenwriter Gary Dauberman. Annabelle: Creation, the second film in this spinoff series, was a prequel, but it seems that Annabelle 3 will be returning the franchise back to the future and a very familiar place, as Gary Dauberman explained: That's going to go before cameras mid-October so I'm deep in prep on that now. We're bringing the franchise back home after being so far away in Romania. It's set in the Warrens' house. It's what happens when Annabelle comes into the artifact room. Much like Swamp Thing, what happens when Annabelle comes into the artifact room and how she affects her environment. Between Annabelle and Annabelle: Creation, we basically got the full story of the titular doll's backstory, but Annabelle 3 will bring the story forward, showing what happens once the doll comes into the Warrens' possession. Once in the artifact room, Annabelle will have an effect on the other cursed objects there. We've also heard that Annabelle will terrorize the Warrens' daughter Judy and will bring things to life in a horrific, Night at the Museum-type situation. Apparently putting a bunch of cursed and evil objects all in one place can have unintended consequences. Who knew? This brings Annabelle full circle while also returning audiences to the home of the Warrens for more supernatural shenanigans, creating even greater connective tissue between the spinoff and the main series. As Gary Dauberman told Slashfilm, production on Annabelle 3 is set to begin this fall, which is fascinating because that should mean that we will get a third Annabelle film before the third film in The Conjuring series. Of course, given that the story of Annabelle 3 takes place within the Warren home, you'd have to think that the Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga will be back as Ed and Lorraine Warren. Gary Dauberman was coy on this point, but it would be hard to have the film set in their house without them there. That said, maybe it could take a Peanuts approach and just show everything from Judy's perspective or have it take place over a shortened period, like one night when the couple isn't home. Annabelle 3 isn't the only sequel in the works in this growing universe. The Conjuring 3 is happening, but it may be without James Wan. There is also the spinoff The Crooked Man happening at some point. And given the success of The Nun, it's probably safe to say that we have plenty of more sequels and spinoffs to look forward to in this universe in the future.
For your Conjuring Universe horror fix now, The Nun is now playing. Take a look at what CinemaBlend thought about the movie and let us know what you think. Check out our guide for all of the upcoming Conjuring Universe films, and for everything else, take a look at the release schedule. Former toy maker Sam Mullins and his wife, Esther, are happy to welcome a nun and six orphaned girls into their California farmhouse. Years earlier, the couple's 7-year-old daughter Annabelle died in a tragic car accident. Terror soon strikes when one child sneaks into a forbidden room and finds a seemingly innocent doll that appears to have a life of its own.
The Shining: the film that frightened me most It wasn’t so much the axe-wielding maniac, the twins or the corridor of blood that left Peter Kimpton sleepless, but that he began to doubt his own eyes on first view of Kubrick’s classic • More from The film that frightened me most Peter Kimpton @PeterKimpton Fri 24 Oct 2014 04.51 EDTLast modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 14.23 EST ● ● ●
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A rather anxious moment during the door scene from The Shining with Shelley Duvall. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
No matter how hard things might become, you can always trust your own perceptions. It’s the bottom line, the safety net, the final refuge. It’s sanity. Well, that’s what I’d always told myself. But when I first saw The Shining on TV as a teenager, I felt like I’d been hit by a bus. Or possibly a snow cat. And Jack Nicholson was probably waiting for me behind a door - with an axe.
Admittedly I was going through a bad patch. I’d just had an angry falling out with my best friend. And a girl I really liked was blowing hot and cold. It was really upsetting me. I was having rows with my family, and there were always fights, not only at home, but at school, and the night before I’d seen someone getting knifed outside a club in central Manchester. I can still picture the blood on the pavement. The whole world is going mad, I said to myself. But it’s still OK, I know what I see, and I know who I am. But then, in this very challenged state of teenage alienation, I was suddenly at home, alone, on Saturday night, and with the perfect storm in film experience, about to break. FacebookTwitterPinterest All at once I am flying across a Colorado lake and mountains, with a yellow VW Beetle down below, heading towards the vast, bleak, Overlook hotel. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is calmly agreeing to be caretaker with wife Wendy and son Danny over the winter period, but everybody else is heading in the other direction. He’s grinning, and says he hopes to get some writing done. In my experience that’s already a bad sign. And alongside the splendour of the setting, there’s a blandness about the packing away, the end-of-season closing down. It’s a normality, with aura of something not right. This, and the early part of the score, really gets under your skin. There’s a powerful sense of foreboding. The combination is dream-like, inexorable, and as Stanley Kubrick undoubtedly planned, makes you feel vulnerable.
Would you trust this man? He’s scary enough in this shot. Stanley Kubrick on the set of The Shining, 1980. Photograph: Everett Collection/REX
Advertisement There are many terrifying things in Kubrick’s horror masterpiece. There’s the rattling, stabbing, jagged violins at key moments using music from Krzysztof Penderecki’s Polymorphia. Then there’s little Danny’s imaginary friend, Tony, who lives in his finger, or mouth or wherever, and speaks in Exorcist-type robotic tones, climaxing in the REDRUM /MURDER mantra written on the bedroom door. There’s the horrible death of amiable head chef Mr Halloran, Danny’s psychic shine friend, chopped down when all he does is to drive through the snow to see if they’re alright. No! He killed Scatman Crothers, the voice of Hong Kong Fooey and occasionally on Scooby Doo. Then there’s the woman in room 237, who commits the mortal sin of turning old and rotting very quickly in the middle of a naked snog. Urrgh. Shiver! And then, after the brilliantly innovative floor-level Steadicam footage of Danny tricycling through the corridors, there’s the terrible twins. OK, Let’s play it. FacebookTwitterPinterest Yet the scariest thing about The Shining is how it always plays with your perceptions. The most shocking revelation comes in the typewriter scene, where Wendy, played by Shelley Duvall, who does frightened like nobody else and is film’s answer to Edvard Munch’s The Scream, discovers that her husband has typed, over and over, nothing but reams of the same phrase: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” As she glances through, the typing also contains fleeting glimpses of the phrase mutate into “dolt boy” to “adult boy”. But even before this catastrophic moment, Kubrick seems to have been playing subliminal games. I did not notice this until years later, but in a precursor scene in the same Colorado lounge, when Jack tells Wendy not to disturb him when he is writing, the typewriter changes from a small white model to a large grey one, and a chair in in the background disappears, reappears and disappears. The film is full of other object and hotel layout anomalies which subconsciously cause us disquiet. They simply cannot be continuity errors from a director so well known to be painstakingly meticulous. So, after Wendy’s discovery, a central scene unfurls in which Jack explains his “obligations”. FacebookTwitterPinterest Although there’s nothing friendly about a river of blood in a corridor, mental breakdown can be just as frightening as physical horror. Much has been said about the hidden messages in the film, that it plausibly refers to the killing of native Americans, or more obscurely the Holocaust, or perhaps even less likely, clues that Kubrick helped create false footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Much of this is discussed in the Rodney Ascher’s interesting 2012 documentary, Room 237. But the dialogue in the bat-swinging scene for me hits the heart of the horror, the centre of this maze of corridors, hedges and carpet patterns, and Jack’s so-called minotaur within it. Jack seems to turn on his family not because of visions or demons, but because
he cannot find a proper job, a role, an identity, and balance this with ordinary family life, and adulthood. He has driven himself mad from an obsession with his contractual obligation at the Overlook hotel. The feeling is shaped by his offbeat, surreal encounters in the dining room with the ghosts of barman Lloyd and caretaker Grady. He tells his wife “I gave my word’ - and that she doesn’t understand his “responsibilities”. Here is the banality of evil from everyday life, out of drudgery, and that is key to why it’s all so frightening. But that doesn’t deny me being absolutely terrified by such scenes as when Wendy glimpses a man dressed as a rabbit appearing to give another man a blowjob in the 1920s. The scariness, the first time, came because it happens quickly, the camera zooms as they look back at you, and because you’re not really sure what you’re seeing. I found myself doubting my own perceptions. FacebookTwitterPinterest Advertisement While it isn’t the actual plot climax to the film, the absolutely most chilling moment is also the funniest. I’m referring, of course, to the door-chopping scene, with Nicholson’s twisting nursery rhymes and where he improvised a phrase from the Johnny Carson show. Kubrick, living in the UK at the time, didn’t get the reference at first, and nearly cut it. It still makes me jump, even though I know what’s coming up. FacebookTwitterPinterest The film ended. And as Jack sat frozen in the maze, I sat frozen in a cold sweat to the sofa. I didn’t sleep at all that night. My parents came home and I locked my bedroom door, but that wouldn’t have stopped Jack. And when I eventually did sleep the next night, it was far from restful then, or for several weeks. Why? Not so much due to scenes of bloody horror, but more because I wasn’t really sure what I was seeing, and it several years for me to understand why. Is this a shared experience, or was I going slightly mad?
Gonjiam The media likes to repeat legends of mysterious deaths, mad doctors that were as crazy as the patients in the asylum, and other “fakelore� to hype the creepy factor of the place, but the hospital was closed and
abandoned for more mundane reasons than their tall tales would have you believe. Gonjiam was forced to close mainly due to economic downturns, unsanitary conditions and problems with the sewage disposal system, not due to insane doctors or murderous patients. As the sewage problem grew, the owner left the country and did not leave documentation behind about the land or the buildings on it. Eventually the hospital just closed its doors and it has been abandoned ever since, unless you count the numerous tourists, camera crews, and ghost hunters who come to stroll through the area, looking for evidence of paranormal activity or the proverbial skeletons in the closets of the asylum. The hospital is technically closed to the public and locals do not encourage tourists or give directions to the asylum willingly but roughly a thousand people break in and roam the grounds of Gonjiam Psychiatric hospital every year. The buildings stand complete with rusted out machines, hospital remnants, trash, and filthy mattresses, adding to its creepy and haunted reputation. Ugc. “Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital.� Atlas Obscura, Atlas Obscura, 27 Nov. 2013, www.atlasobscura.com/places/gonjiam-psychiatric-hospital.editmore horizontal