The Signal #1 - The Horror Of It All (Nov 14)

THE SIGNAL #1 THE HORROR OF IT ALL

THE BABADOOK / FRENCH ZOMBIES / JOHN CARPENTER / FOLK HORROR / THE STRAIN

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A Word From The Editor Welcome to the first issue of The Signal, a zine of entertainment and media criticism published in Belfast and a print cousin of BelfastFilm.net. The aim is to provide monthly high-quality, entertaining writing on popular culture and offer a space for local critics to develop their work and gain an audience. We begin with a seasonal horror special, but if there’s another theme for the month it’s that of persistence, from the postmortem lives of the undead in The Returned and The Strain, to the recurrence of folk and Carpenter tropes in contemporary productions like The Guest and True Detective. Indeed, the zine itself is a sort of act of persistence, a small gesture of faith that in the era of swipe able surfaces a homemade print publication may have some creative and commercial value (although, obviously, a digital version will also be available).

We’ll be experimenting with elements of production, design and content over the coming months, hopefully you’ll keep an eye on us.

Conor Smyth @conorjosmyth The Signal is edited by Conor Smyth and published by Fan Boy Publishing (a fancy name for Conor’s kitchen table and printer). Digital edition available at issuu.com/the_signal.

More more info and subscription services go to belfastfilm.net.

If you wish contribute to The Signal with writing, design or illustration work or place ads please email conorjosephsmyth@gmail.com.

Apres Le Mort Conor Smyth on modern Gallic zombie innovations A herd of freshly deceased octogenarians comes streaming out of the open cemetery gates, a sea of pastel colours and comfortable slacks. Numbered in the hundreds, possibly more, they shuffle into the streets of an unnamed French city, a docile invasion of the recently resurrected. Not so much zombie apocalypse as retirement centre day out. So opens 2004’s Les Revenants (released in English territories as They Came Back), an unconventional French zombie film written and directed by Robin Campillo. Later, the film served as inspiration for the critically-admired series Les Revenants, or The Returned, created

by Fabrice Gobert, which aired on Canal+ in France and Channel 4 in the UK in 2012/13 and is scheduled for a second season next year.

Both productions borrow from the zombie genre but blend their its features with social and psychological realism, family drama and the aesthetics of other horror sub-genres. The results are mixed but interesting: They Came Back is an unusual but inert experiment, while The Returned is one of the most entrancing television shows of recent memory.

An uncontroversial idea: pop culture reached peak zombie a long time ago. When I heard that a participant at a Comic-Con ‘zombie walk’ was hit by a car I couldn’t help but feel a faint pang of satisfaction (they’re fine). Is there any trend in modern horror more self-satisfied than the cottage industry around zombies and their punchline status (‘Keep Calm And Kill Zombies’)? Post-millennial practitioners of the re-animated have been forced to innovate

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within the genre, splicing in other beats like hyper-kinetic action (28 Weeks Later) or indie comedy (Life After Beth), or anchoring their stories in richer visual textures or character dynamics. One of the reasons the early seasons of The Walking Dead felt so stale (production troubles aside) was that it borrowed classic zombie tropes in an artistic marketplace that was busy re-evaluating and re-fashioning them.

They Came Back and The Returned ditch the standard zombie paraphernalia of flesh-hungry lunging, rotting gore and infected periphery cast in favour of highly antiseptic, decidedly European, productions. Both focus on one of the central experiences of the genre – the unsettling experience of having a loved one return in an unfamiliar form – and use it to tell stories about grief, marriage and familial disharmony. Both are highly parochial in structure, limited to small sets of characters in a specific location. In They Came Back, the return of the city’s dead (or at least those that have died in the past decade) is part of an unexplained global phenomenon while in The Returned it appears to be confined to its isolated mountain town. In neither are the returned a violent mass threat, but they excite other fears and anxieties.

In They Came Back, the questions the mass resurrection raises are primarily bureaucratic. The returned are mostly elderly and all are showing signs of cognitive impairment: they have stunted personalities and means of understanding (they are mass-diagnosed with the brain disorder aphasia, similar to Alzheimer’s or dementia). The mayor (whose wife returns) and city council debate the matters of housing, employing and electronically monitoring the returned. ‘Reintegration’ is mentioned a lot, a word which gets at the film’s main allegory: the returned as stand-ins for groups on the economic or social margins, like immigrants or, more obviously, the elderly. The dead are regarded by the living with a mix of suspicion, impatience and condescension. One returns to his managerial engineering job but is eventually shunted into more remedial and manual labour. The desperate mayor, sick of his wife wandering off and fearful of losing her again, takes to simply locking her in her bedroom like a caregiv-

many of those left behind have been enduring a kind of living death. Adele, Simon’s expectant pregnant bride, has found a new love but can’t shake the emotional muscle memory of the one she lost. After Her fiancé finds her lying in the bath with slashed wrists he installs secret cameras in their house (the returned are often shot through translucent surfaces like screens or windows, lending them an especially spectral quality). Serge’s brother, dogged by guilt at his fratricide, assumes the return is a form of punishment. Julie, who becomes a mother figure to Victor, is the most tragic figure. Years ago she only just survived one of Serge’s violent outbursts (he slicing up her abdomen… and tried to eat her liver). After years of nursing er at the end of his rope. The real menace her scars and internalising trauma, she of the returned is their economic unpro- reacts to the phenomenon with the suspicion that she is unknowingly one of them, ductivity, which is, within the capitalist a miscalculation by the cosmic bean morality, a monstrous sin. counters.

The Returned innovates by morphing As with other successful European telzombie imagery into a ghost story, expanding the role of mourning in the gen- evision shows, The Returned is set for a re. The eight episodes, written by Gobert, Stateside remake but the transition will Emmanuel Carrere and Fabian Adda and be challenging. It isn’t just slow. It’s posibeautifully shot by Patrick Blossier, offer tively glacial, using static shots, a light piano score and throwaway premonitions a streamlined, more tonally assure, version of its cinematic source, with heavier of doom (suicidal animals, plumbing and electricity problems) to build a creeping supernatural leanings. Five members of the deceased reappear in an out-of-the- sense of disaster. The story’s unrushed pace arguably breeds a level of complaway town, unaware of their lifeless stacency with the character development as tus: a good-looking, lovesick musician who killed himself on the eve of his wed- we get closer the finale’s resolutions or ding (Simon), a schoolgirl killed in a mass otherwise, but the muted dramatic engines contribute in their own way to the coach tragedy (Camille), a nearly-mute over-arching purgatorial vibe. Images of boy murdered by home intruders (‘Viccircles and curves gain prominence, and tor’), a serial killer buried alive by his the very finite location shooting aids the brother (Serge) and a sardonic woman who is tight-lipped about her death (Vivi- sense of constriction. So strongly articulated is the fag-end feeling of depletion ane). They have a large appetite and struggle sleeping, but otherwise it’s as if that it’s almost a disappointment to learn they never left. They must deal with the that there’s another season coming. I strangeness of their situation and the dif- guess zombie stories never die. ficulty of lives that have left them behind, They Came Back and The Returned Series while the living must bear the joy and 1 are both available on DVD. @conorjosstunning inexpicableness of the event. myth ‘What is happening to you is wonderful and awful’ imparts the head of a local Christian charity, who sees in the returned a sign of the biblically-prophesised end times.

In classic ghost story fashion, the primary themes are irresolution and repetition. Since the deaths of their loved ones,

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Dark Stars Rufus Mullan on the rise and fall (and rise?) of the cinematic anti-hero

As the credits of Dracula Untold began to unspool after an Iron Man-worthy teaser of an end scene, I felt the first moment of horror and fear that I had experienced in the previous 90 minutes; this is Good Guy Dracula. It seems that soon he’ll be joined by the Wonderful Wolfman, the Misunderstood Mummy and Fabulous Frankenstein to become the Nobody Asked-For-This-Shit Avengers.

Universal are giving their movie monster pantheon the Maleficent treatment.

Dracula Untold spent its duration morphing the cold, murderous Count into a pure-intentioned hero set on a dark path by forces outside his control. No horror or evil lurked within the soul of this man; if it had, the film might have been much more interesting to watch. Where was the torment? The dark desire? The admission to himself that killing, that being bad, felt so very good? It made me long for the age of the true anti-hero. The darkness of the 70s and 80s, when there was more freedom for your good guy to be a bad guy too. The age of John Carpenter.

Although often mentioned in the same breath as Spielberg, Cameron et al, Carpenter doesn’t enjoy their wide recognition, in spite of the fact that his influence on modern cinema is incalculable.

He gave us the first slasher movie with Halloween, revolutionised the siege movie with Assault on Precinct 13 and his partnership with Kurt Russell gave us the wonderful Big Trouble in Little China and The Thing, frequently cited as being one of the best ever made. Perhaps one of the biggest marks he has left on the industry is his catalogue of anti-heroes, from Precinct 13’s Napoleon Wilson to modern day anti-hero archetype Snake Plissken. When asked if he thought his characters were heroes or anti-heroes,

Carpenter simply replied ‘What’s the difference?’ In Gilles Boulanger’s book The Prince of Darkness he describes his idea of a hero as a character with a singleness of purpose: ‘he could be a killer or not a good role model, but it’s still a hero’.

The idea of the anti-hero in cinema arguably began with the characters of Carpenter’s favourite genre, the western.

These were stoic and manly men, whose blasé attitude was born of the politics of

an era where men were men and emotional masking was considered necessary and admirable. The likes of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood played characters that exhibited serious dark streaks and the young Carpenter ate it up. Although many of his protagonists paid homage to this type of character, in Carpenter’s hands they became something more, morphing into what remains as the standard for the modern anti-hero: characters who are cynical and self-interested, indifferent to the suffering of others until it affects them directly, but somehow just lovable enough and with enough of a shred of humanity that they don’t become completely unrelatable.

As well as being a reflection of Carpenter’s own identity and beliefs, his characters were also a product of their times. Anti-heroism was at its peak in the 70s and 80s, a time of cultural shift towards cynicism and hopelessness in the wake of the US military’s failure in Vietnam, race riots, assassinations and the rise of capitalist culture. It was an atmosphere in which Carpenter’s characters and those like them thrived. Audiences bought into the pessimism of these protagonists because they recognised these people as products of their environment. However as the twentieth century rolled on the Baby Boomer generation got older, they started families and working lives, and the cultural tide began to turn more towards ignorance of social injustice and distraction from activism, and with that the idea of the anti-hero began to die out. The audience still recognised a hopeless situation but began to want to believe in heroes that had the strength of character to save them instead of someone like themselves who had been stepped on but could try to fight back. People, Carpenter believes, surrendered themselves to leadership of one kind or another: ‘We didn’t stand by what we believed in. We bailed out. We got scared. We wanted our cars and our kids. And all I want to do is burn it all down and say, “We got to start again because this is horseshit!”’

Carpenter kept up his trend of darker films with twisted protagonists, but the audience was no longer there with him.

His films’ popularity began an ever-decreasing spiral. The 80s even turned the most famous anti-hero of them all, James Bond, into a character too dark for cinemagoers. Timothy Dalton’s Licence to Kill was criticised for its level of grim violence and put the brakes on the

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franchise for six years until Pierce Brosnan stepped in to bring back the camp.

There seemed to no longer be a place in cinema for the Dirty Harrys and Snake Plisskens (whose late-in-the-game sequels were ill-received), delivered as they were into a world that seemingly no longer cared to see protagonists who pushed the boundaries of right and wrong. In recent years, however, we have seen the beginnings of a new social revolution, one that claims to recognise the absolute control of governments and industry alongside the death of privacy and the idea of individual freedoms. In accordance there has been a synchronous uptick in the amount of emerging filmmakers who want to use their films to make a statement about the world.

For this generation, that means that many of these filmmakers grew up watching Carpenter’s films. As such, it seems that some of his ideas are reappearing on the big screen.

Carpenter himself constantly compares his own work with those of his idols Howard Hawks and John Ford, pioneers of the Western, a genre with more than its fair share of anti-heroes. Now it’s his turn to serve as the inspiration for the next crop of filmmakers, with directors such as The Raid’s Gareth Huw Evans and Mud’s Jeff Nichols explicitly stating that they have been directly influenced by Carpenter’s work, Evans describing him as ‘a genius’. A lot of modern movies that seem to pay homage to Carpenter do so mainly through their music: movies like Drive and this summer’s The Guest are part of a revival of the vibe of Carpenter’s trademark self-composed synth soundtracks. This is another aspect to the resurgence of the dark 80s feel that has been increasingly noticeable in recent years, as the generation who grew up in that era reach the age where they are becoming the creators, free to recycle their early influences.

Robert Rodriguez, as famed as Carpenter for his low-budget filmmaking, made Planet Terror in 2007, essentially a feature-length tribute to Carpenter in all aspects (and like much of Carpenter’s work, it was unsuccessful upon release).

But it’s not just the music or the surface

aesthetic anymore: the themes and characters are also reverting to those of Carpenter’s heyday. The Guest gave us the ultimate anti-hero character, a guy shrouded in ambiguity as the movie teaches us to like him, with a final reveal that forces the audience to admit that they’re rooting for a bad guy. The mood, tone, music – hell, even the title font – are all pure Carpenter. It’s as though a new generation of filmmakers are not just inspired by the works, but by the essence of the man.

He has described himself as being apolitical, a filmmaker more interested in pointing out the world’s problems than attempting to solve them and that, perhaps, is where his affinity for the anti-hero comes from. The anti-hero is not necessarily the opposite of a hero: it can simply be someone who sees a problem and chooses to ignore it as it doesn’t directly affect them or serve their interests, like Snake Plissken walking away from a woman being attacked in an alley in Escape from New York. Carpenter has said that ‘what a person does defines who he is [but] what a person does not do defines him totally’. In this way, he himself is an anti-hero filmmaker.

Carpenter takes pride in his work, almost to the point of egotism (his Twitter handle is the humble @TheHorrorMaster), but if you read enough interviews with him you’ll discover that he’s a pretty irritable guy, one who views filmmaking not as a majestic art form but as a grinding process that must be suffered to reach the end product. He doesn’t consider himself an artist with a style, he views his form as function: the style is a byproduct of a man just trying to do his job as simply as possible. He views ‘intellectual’ readings of his films with a certain level of disdain. His moreor-less retirement now seems less to do with disillusion or creative drought and more that he simply doesn’t want to go through the trouble it takes to get a movie made. Walking away from potentially doing something great, simply because he can’t be bothered. The essence of the anti-hero.

Movies of late have largely been risk-free, de-clawed and sanitised for en-

joyment by the largest consumer base possible. Universal are de-monstrifying their monsters, and blockbuster behemoth Marvel Studios turned Tony Stark from his comic book incarnation as a right-wing alcoholic into a charming and affable playboy who has some problems with his mood from trauma, maybe, or blood poisoning, or something that can be blamed on anything but a natural character flaw. Or his just being an asshole. With Carpenter moving on to other media – he has a comic book with his name on it, although he doesn’t actually write it, and was a ‘horror advisor’ on video game F.3.A.R., a horror shooter with an anti-hero protagonist – it would appear that the cinema no longer has a place for him or his antiheroes.

What it seems is happening, however, is that his influence could be slowly turning the multiplex back into the place it once was. With Marvel now seemingly prepared to take bigger risks, they actually represent the best hope we have for a new generation of blockbusting antiheroes. The summer’s biggest surprise came in the form of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, directed by James Gunn, a guy who has claimed that Carpenter is one of his biggest influences. They’re a gang with questionable morals and shady pasts led by Chris Pratt’s self-congratulating thief Star-Lord. They lie, cheat and steal their way across the universe, all whilst at each other’s throats. Some of them are murderers. These are the heroes of a multi-million dollar blockbuster.

After they eventually get the gang together, the question of what do next is asked: ‘Something good? Something bad? Bit of both?’ If James Gunn and others like him can lead more filmmakers to follow the path carved by John Carpenter, hopefully Hollywood could be looking at a bit of both.

Rufus Mullan is a writer and blogger who has contributed to several high-profile websites and publications. At least, that’s what he’d like you to believe. @rufusmullan.

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Morbid Symptoms Eamon Byers traces the history and enduring relevance of Folk Horror A month ago, I ventured into London to visit the British Library. Inside, turning left at the reception desk and then right at the gift shop, I followed a beckoning life-size illustration of a vampiric figure and entered this venerable establishment’s latest exhibition – Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination. After handing over my ticket and passing down a darkened passage, I was struck by two things. Firstly, the entire space was appropriately and luxuriously decked in blacked. Secondly, it was dominated by the incantatory, almost hallucinatory, repetition of sounds.

Amongst these sounds were Elsa Lanchester’s piercing scream from Universal’s legendary Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and some hushed dialogue and evocative street-noises from the BBC’s Bleak House (2005). Above all, however, were the sounds of the wonderful final scene from Robin Hardy’s classic The Wicker Man (1973). Almost at the centre of the exhibition, faintly visible throughout behind a fluttering black veil, a screen repeated ad infinitum Edward Woodward’s horrified invocations of 'Oh God! Oh Jesus Christ!', Christopher Lee’s chillingly calm invocations to an older religion and the singing of ‘Sumer is icumen in’ by the assembled inhabitants of Summerisle as their sacrifice burns.

In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Lucie Armitt describes The Wicker Man as demonstrating how 'Celtic and pagan superstition retain their cinematic as well as their literary appeal throughout the twentieth century' as well as reflecting 'the late 1960s/early 1970s concern over hippyism and the newly related attitudes towards drug use, religious belief and sexual permissiveness'. In this way, the exhibition seeks to argue, the film encompasses many of the defining themes of the Gothic. There is no denying the film’s position within this tradition. After all, it stars the Gothic icon Christopher Lee, a man who has met both M. R. James and Mervyn Peake and who

remains, arguably, the finest Dracula in cinema history. Yet as well as being a link in the chain of the Gothic tradition, The Wicker Man is the cornerstone of another, related, tradition – Folk Horror.

The term ‘Folk Horror’ first came into popular parlance in 2010 when the actor and writer Mark Gatiss discussed the genre in his BBC series A History of Horror.

However, the phrase itself probably predates this series, perhaps originating with the blurbs accompanying VHS releases of films such as The Wicker Man in the 1990s. Whatever its provenance, the term ‘Folk Horror’ did not invent the object of its reference, but, like any good neologism, filled a semantic void by providing the vocabulary to discuss something that had already, however hazily, been identified. In essence, Folk Horror might be defined as a genre that encompasses a variety of media, including film, television, literature, music and art, but with a unifying thematic focus on the propensity for traditional culture and its practitioners to be the object of unease and dread.

According to Gatiss, the three primary films of the Folk Horror tradition are Michael Reeve’s Witchfinder General (1968), Piers Haggard’s Blood On Satan’s Claw (1968) and, of course, The Wicker Man. Uniting these films, Gatiss argues, is 'a common obsession with the British landscape, its folklore and superstitions'.

In this respect, the genre betrays its indebtedness to earlier literary traditions, like the Gothic and Weird fiction produced by late nineteenth and early twentieth century writers such as M. R. James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood.

To these writers, folk culture represents a rural and ancient idyll nostalgically yearned for to allay the anxieties provoked by the encroachment of the urban modernity. Yet for their antiquarian protagonists, it is often the case that the past has been left behind for a reason, for by unearthing buried objects and beliefs

they invoke ancient and malevolent forces beyond the ken of modern sensibilities.

In seeking to understand the reasons why folk culture has been such a rich resource of horrific inspiration, a useful perspective is offered by the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci: 'Folklore can be understood only as a reflection of the conditions of cultural life of the people, although certain conceptions specific to folklore remain even after these conditions have been (or seem to be) modified or have given way to bizarre combinations'. In some respects, the idea that folklore affords 'surviving evidence' of earlier cultural moments is an antiquarian cliché. However, what is valuable in Gramsci’s interpretation is the notion that folklore preserves elements, 'adulterated and mutilated', of past social conditions that, in new contexts, produce 'bizarre combinations'. Often, these 'bizarre combinations' consist of customs and rituals developed in pre-Christian or pre-industrial ages persisting long after their original contexts had vanished. In many ways, it is this dynamic that underpins the genre of Folk Horror, the disquiet and terror evoked by the uncanny presence of archaic customs in modernity.

The first two films of the genre’s unholy trinity, Witchfinder General and Blood on Satan’s Claw, both explore the residual presence of antiquity in modernity in the form of witchcraft and Satanism.

Crucially, the action of these films is located in early modernity, on the very cusp between the supposed death of the Middle Ages and the birth of the modern age.

To quote Gramsci once again, when 'the old is dying and the new cannot be born […] a great variety of morbid symptoms appear'. It is the irruption of these 'morbid symptoms' that produces the horror of these films. The Wicker Man, meanwhile, is set firmly in the present day. It is impossible to overstate the film’s significance in crystallising the Folk Horror genre. Firstly, whereas many entries in the

features 7 canon concern the darker side of the pastoral or strange pagan rituals being enacted in the countryside, The Wicker Man is explicitly concerned with folk culture as an item of tradition and revival.

The inhabitants of Summerisle are not an uncanny vestige of an ancient British way of life but an enclosed community whose forebears developed an idiosyncratic folk culture of their own by drawing on customs and music from throughout the British and Irish Isles. Crucially, it is these customs, from the maypole to the eponymous sacrificial offering, that produce the horror of the film. They are not simply atmospheric accoutrements. Moreover, the film’s use of folk music is hugely significant. A patchwork of authentic English, Scottish and Irish songs and tunes mixed with Italian-American com-

sources nor the audience to produce horror films so quintessentially British in tone. When yoked together, the heyday of the British folk revival and the British horror industry produced films that, if they did not invent the genre of Folk Horror, solidified it.

In the 1970s, the cultural influence of Folk Horror expanded into numerous other films and, in particular, television programmes. Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape (1972) and Beasts (1976), John Bowen’s Robin Redbreast (1970), David Rudkin’s Penda’s Fen (1974), the Doctor Who serial The Dæmons (1971) and adaptations of the work of M. R. James and Alan Garner, such as Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968) and The Owl Service (1969-1970), respectively, all explored the uncanny presence of mythological

ment, the film pays homage to Gothic writers such as Horace Walpole, Thomas Chatterton and Mary Shelley, each of whom presented their writing as transcriptions and translations rather than original creations. Secondly, the ominous wooden sculptures that litter the forest throughout the film draw on the earthy imagery of Witchfinder General, Blood On Satan’s Claw and, especially, The Wicker Man. Moreover, by studiously and wisely refusing to reveal the evil that haunts its protagonists, the horror of the film relies solely on the atmospheric dread invoked by the legend of the Blair Witch and the terror it inspires in the youngsters who set off into the woods to explore the folktale. A film about student filmmakers, marketed as footage discovered by

poser Paul Giovanni’s stunning imitations such as ‘Gently Johnny’ and ‘Willow’s Song’, the score both enhances the erotic, ritualistic, comedic and horrific aspects of the film and sonically locates the action in a time and place where folk culture, both its good and its bad aspects, is thriving. Without its iconic music, The Wicker Man would be greatly diminished.

Indeed, it was in part the presence of a thriving folk revival that produced the cultural environment in which Folk Horror could come to the fore. Without the likes of Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and Pentangle popularising folk music by making it exciting and accessible to a younger audience, films so indebted to folk culture could not have been produced. Similarly, without the success of studios such as Hammer, there would neither have been the re-

and folkloric survivals and their unsettling influence on social, cultural and sexual hierarchies in a rapidly modernising Britain.

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, Folk Horror films and series could only be viewed late night on terrestrial television or on VHS copies procured by dedicated collectors, bootleggers or home recordists. While the genre may still have had its devotees, creatively it had become moribund, producing few if any new examples. Things began to change in 1999 with the release of Daniel Myrick’s and Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project. While noteworthy for kickstarting the continuing craze for ‘found footage horror’, this film also ties in with much older Folk Horror and Gothic traditions. Firstly, by masquerading as documentary footage discovered by students from the University of Maryland’s Anthropology Depart-

student filmmakers, produced in reality by student filmmakers, The Blair Witch Project is finely tuned to its cinematic heritage. Even the production company founded to produce the film, Haxan, was named in honour of one of the earliest films in the Folk Horror canon.

In the new millennium, it was in the New World that Folk Horror continued to flourish. After the success of The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000) and Signs (2002), the writer and director M. Night Shyamalan produced The Village (2004). Unlike the supernatural and science-fiction plots of his previous films, the action of The Village is rooted in reality, with the mysterious creatures that terrify the villagers revealed to be nothing more than costumed men. Indeed, in many ways these hooded beasts resemble such European folk costumes as those documented by the French

8 features photographer Charles Fréger in his wonderful book Wilder Mann (2010). Moreover, the much maligned plot twist of The Village illustrates the influence of The Wicker Man. Rather than being an early modern community of settlers as we are initially led to believe, the village of Covington is revealed to have been founded by a group of men and women scarred and frightened by the harsh realities of urban existence in 1970s America. Seeking to retreat into the apparent safety of an earlier rural existence, the inhabitants of Covington resemble those of Summerisle, who disdained the religion and society of 1970s Britain in favour of a folk culture and an agricultural society based on a magpie reconstruction of British and Irish folkways. Finally, just as it was the elder Lord Summerisle’s wealth that sustained his island experiment in The Wicker Man, in The Village it is the family fortune of Edward Walker that allows himself and his companions to purchase the site for their commune.

While Shyamalan’s intelligent homage to The Wicker Man has been the subject of much invective, Neil LaBute’s 2006 remake of the grandfather of folk horror films has been universally derided. In the place of the Victorian socialexperiment-meets-hippy-sex-commune of Hardy’s original, the gynocratic-survivalist-cult-meets-Lilith-Fair of LaBute’s remake resembles a bastardised mélange of the work of Margaret Attwood, Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson. In the place of Edward Woodward’s powerful performance as a policeman devoted equally to the law of the land and the law of the Lord, Nicolas Cage plumbs new depths of self-parody as a detective with a deadly allergy to bees who finds himself deployed to an island devoted to the production of honey. If intended as a comedy, LaBute should be lauded for producing one of the funniest films of all time. If intended as a horror, which is sadly more likely, LaBute should be roundly condemned for producing a film that fails on every level, both as a remake and as a work in its own right.

Perhaps as a result of this stillborn attempt to rejuvenate the genre, it would take another five year before Folk Horror could recover and reach its present level of popularity. When Hammer Films came back from the dead in 2007, one of the first features it began to

develop was Wake Wood. Set in contemporary rural Ireland, this film stars Aidan Gillen and Eva Birthistle as grieving parents who move to a village where a pagan ritual brings their daughter back to life so they may spend one last weekend together as a family. With its focus on arcane customs, the clash between the rural and the urban, and on the connections between human and agricultural fertility, Wake Wood is quintessential Folk Horror, illustrating a keen awareness of its cinematic forebears.

Originally scheduled for release in 2009, the film did not appear on British and Irish screens until 2011. In the interim, Gatiss’ series A History of Horror had introduced films such as Witchfinder General and Blood On Satan’s Claw to a wider audience than they had ever enjoyed and revived interest in the Folk Horror genre to such an extent that it began to develop a diverse and devoted community of online aficionados. Meanwhile, the English director Ben Wheatley breathed new life into the genre with his films Kill List (2011) and A Field in England (2013). In some respects, Kill List might be compared to The Village with its juxtaposition of Folk Horror elements and a modern setting through a final act twist. However, whereas Shyamalan aspires to an elaborate Hitchcockian effect, Wheatley produces a unique cinematic tone by appending a shocking Folk Horror climax to a narrative that is otherwise equal parts hitman thriller and kitchen sink drama. A Field in England, meanwhile, returns to the Civil War epoch of Witchfinder General for a powerfully psychedelic film that harks back to the aesthetics of the early 1970s.

On the small screen, meanwhile, there have been equally encouraging signs that Folk Horror is in rude health.

HBO’s True Detective, one of the most remarkable television series in years, is full of themes, shocks and folk customs that place it squarely in the genre. It even bears comparison to The Wicker Man, with the central conceit of detectives investigating the disappearance and murder of vulnerable young girls being used as a hook to explore male sexuality, faith and death, with a healthy dose of grisly folk customs thrown in for good measure. Similarly, E4’s series Glue bears some of the hallmarks of the genre, being a murder mystery set in a dark and

sexy vision of the modern English countryside with judiciously deployed snatches of folksong and mythological references. Producers Joel Wilson and Jamie Campbell, meanwhile, have written: “British drama often focuses on urban environments and the countryside tends to get neglected. The modern countryside is complex, exciting and rarely portrayed the way we’re going to show it. Glue should scare the shit out of anyone who thinks they might move there for a quiet life”.

Folk Horror came to the fore in the late 1960s and 1970s thanks to things such as the risk-taking attitude of BBC drama commissioners, the do it yourself attitude of the British film industry, the popular appetite for fantasy and occult that had been nurtured by children's literature and genre fiction for decades and revitalised by psychedelia, and a cultural ambition to resist censorship and explore dark and erotic themes. The recent resurgence of interest in the genre has emerged for many of the same reasons.

While it does not have the popular audience it once did, the folk revival is still thriving; while they do not encourage risktakers in the way they once did, the BBC and other broadcasters are trying to produce programming with a thoughtful and mature attitude towards adult themes in an attempt to emulate the success of American networks; a variety of cultural and technological developments have allowed independent filmmakers to produce ambitious work without the backing of big studios; there is once again a huge appetite for fantasy and the occult thanks to the creative industries being populated by people who grew up in earlier decades when such themes were all around. Thanks to all of these developments, and the peculiar anxieties of our age, there is still a cultural aspiration to explore dark and erotic themes.

Eamon Byers recently completed a doctorate in medievalism and folk music at Queen’s University Belfast. In September 2014 he co-organised A Fiend in the Furrows – Perspectives on ‘Folk Horror’ in Literature, Film and Music, the first academic conference addressing the genre.

He works as a schoolteacher and independent researcher in London. @folkoff

television 9

Vamp Viral Guillermo del Toro-produced The Strain lacks bite, reports Conor Smyth Vampire series The Strain, broadcast recently on cable channel FX in the States and currently on satellite channel Watch here, is fifteen per cent cool ideas, eightyfive per cent bolloxed execution. It doesn’t help that the pilot has what might be the year’s dumbest line of television dialogue. A routine commercial flight is disrupted by a monster hiding in the cargo hold and then, mysteriously, appears grounded on a runway in pitch black. A group of airport and Centre for Disease Control officials approach the quarantined plane when one overexcited character, a human adult who, keep in mind, works at an actual airport, exclaims: ‘it’s like a building, with wings!’

Considering the teleplay was written by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, the executive producers who wrote the novels the series is based on, it’s not a great omen.

Created by del Toro and Hogan, with showrunner Carlton Cuse (one of Lost’s producers) and a rotating set of writers and directors, the main problem with The Strain, one that feeds its various other assorted problems, is that none of the creative talent seems to have sat down and figured out in advance what kind of show it is and what kind of people its characters actually are. It begins as a mix of the procedural and supernatural, with a running motif of vampirism as a virus.

House of Cards’ Corey Stoll dons a dodgy wig as Dr. ‘Eph’ Goodweather, heading up a team of professional disease investigators that includes the bleeding-heart Argentinian Dr. Nora Martinez (Mia Maestro) and Sean Astin as a cowardly, curly-haired underling that’s in cahoots with the enemy.

Set in contemporary New York, vampirism is here a kind of physiological perversion transferred via worms in the patient’s blood, which induces a zombielike state, dries their blood and warps their throat organs into a spring-loaded

stinger. Probably the best isolated moment in the season is when Eph and his colleagues dissect the first vamp they’ve encountered, and he drags the stinger organ out through his mouth, the long, fleshy weapon seemingly going on forever, slapping heartily against the table and the floor. It’s a small flicker of the fun biological gore of The Thing or David Cronenberg and a rare moment of rooted physicality.

The show is a broad, often unthinking, recycle of vampire and zombie templates, some of which work better than others. The best storylines are the pulpiest. David Bradley’s agent deserves a round of drinks for convincing the esteemed actor to take on the part of Abraham Setrakian, an old-school vampire hunter, Holocaust survivor and pawn shop owner that keeps his dead wife’s vamp-heart in a jar and feeds it droplets of the red stuff (classic del Toro). Setrakian’s nemesis is Eichhorst (Richard Sammel), a right-hand acolyte of the ‘Master’ who has the double-barrelled evil of being a Nazi blood-sucker. Eichhorst is a deliciously camp picture of German elitism, a slightly pantomime and lower-salary version of Hannibal’s Mads Mikkelson.

When Setrakian teams up with Vasiliy Fet (Kevin Durand), a deadpan rat catcher and Ukrainian immigrant, the two make a fun duo of vamp exterminators.

Too often though the broadness results in dumb character and plot beats.

The worst offender is Gus (Miguel Gomez) a third-rate The Wire Latino who bleats stereotypical one-liners like one of those Mega Drive heroes loaded with a small set of audio beats. In lieu of identifiable motivations and tensions, the writers shackle the characters with arbitrary personal problems (so Eph is an alcoholic going through a divorce and Nora has a grandmother with Alzheimer’s). The Strain is also massively, frustratingly inefficient in how it allocates story and char-

acter time. Threads are raised and peter out, which means it’s difficult to build strong, consistent momentum. A vampire invasion of Manhattan screams for some wide-scream scene-setting, but for budget reasons The Strain is very cloistered in its locations, preferring to instead load the backing audio with random sound effects of looting and screaming.

There are pockets of nice monster imagery with the infected, like a little girl waiting for her father in the bathtub like a reptilian predator or a Marilyn Mansonstyle rocker’s junk falling off into a urinal.

But without a solid sense of what exactly its heroes are fighting, and fighting for, The Strain huffs and splutters along, relying on that old story engine of the hack horror script: human stupidity. Even in the vampire apocalypse, it’s hard to root for idiots.

The Strain is broadcast Wednesdays, 10pm on Watch. @conorjosmyth

10 film

Blood Read Conor Smyth grips the armrests for Jennifer Kent’s auteur frightener magic shows for photos of his dead father. Shattered by sadness and parenJennifer Kent, 93 min, 15 tal exhaustion, Amelia’s grief is calcifying into a depression, or a kind Pig-tailed dolls and ouija boards? Kids’ of nervous schizophrenia. She’s sick of stuff. This year’s real Halloween haunt- his wailing warnings about the Babadook - the word even sounds like gober is Mister Babadook, the monobledygook - but she’s starting to see chrome bat-fiend in a top hat who appears to a mother and her son in an and hear things too. A shadow figure with talon fingers and grinning gashers. unfamiliar pop-up storybook. After a Perhaps they are hallucinations, or year of terrorising the festival circuit, waking dreams. Even with all her nodAustralian-born Jennifer Kent’s low ding off, she’s exhausted all the time. frills feature debut The Babadook Maybe she’s going mad. opens in wide release, proving an enWith its emphasis on the terrors trancing alternative to the exhausted of maternal experience – its unforgivquietquietLOUD set-pieces of Hollying permanence, its failures and the wood horror. Expanded from Kent’s essential unknowability of both parties 2005 short The Monster, it is a work of – The Babadook obviously echoes Lian original and skilled filmmaker laced onel Shriver and Lynne Ramsay’s exiswith a rich and subliminal folklore spirtential skin-prickler We Need to Talk it.

About Kevin (2011), but its conceptual Even before the spooky stuff and visual directness gestures to a widstarts, domestic life for Amelia (Essie er field of genre veterans: early PolanDavis) and her young son Samuel ski, Craven, Kubrick and Nakata. After (Noah Wieseman) is something of a the slick but anaesthetising production horror story. Widowed since the day she gave birth, the stressed-out Amelia style of recent hits like The Conjuring or Insidious, it’s a dreadful delight to can barely keep her hyperactive child under control: he’s a screaming, grab- see such a finely-crafted and tonally coherent horror. The Babadook may by, feverishly imaginative source of permanent disruption. The two spend not be shot in the monochrome of their evenings together in the washed- Kent’s short, but she and Polish cineout house, slurping anaemic soup and matographer Radoslaw Ladczuk do reading bedtime stories. Their encoun- their best to maintain an austere palette, filling the frame with dour blacks ter with the blood-red, clothe-bound and blues. hardback – and its nursery-rhyme Powered by the primal terror of a promise that ‘if it’s in a word or it’s Grimm’s tale, and unwilling to indulge book, you can’t get rid of the Babaits audience, The Babadook progresses dook’ – invites the titular monster into with a simmering, hair-raising dread. their lives and tips their own shared The intensity is powered by the powerdysfunction into a living nightmare. ful double act, with Davis and WieseIn true fairytale fashion, the monman giving titanic, throat-ravaging sters are psychological as well as superformances. The Babadook’s tricks pernatural. Isolated from kids who and ambiguity, and its moral-fable condon’t like him and adults who don’t have the patience for him, Samuel has clusion, won’t be to everyone’s taste, retreated into a cloying, quasi-Freudian but it’s a novel experience which marks the emergence of a significant new dependence on his mother, clutching horror talent. her hair in his sleep and putting on

THE BABADOOK

****

film 11

The Fault In Our Stars Conor Smyth is impressed but unmoved by Nolan’s sci-fi blockbuster INTERSTELLAR Christopher Nolan, 166 min, 12A

*** Houston, we have a problem. Christopher Nolan may be a spectacularly skilled constructor of film, but he's no storyteller. After Inception’s giddy, multi-layered hacking of subconscious dreamworlds, he rockets off in the opposite direction, sling-shoting cosmonauts Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway into a fantastic voyage through wormholes, black holes and narrative rabbit holes. Interstellar is a gorgeous, meticulously staged, hyper-expensive celebration of human discovery and a thrilling rebuke to the timidity of the average studio blockbuster. It is also, in the fine tradition of Nolan's films, nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is. The elegance of its visual design is matched only by the inelegance of everything else.

Ambition is the keyword here, in both theme and form. In an elliptical, crisp opener, we're on near-future Earth, where cataclysmic crop failures and conflicts have clipped the excesses and hubris of the 20th Century. In America's dusty cornfields, former pilot and widowed father of two Cooper (McConaughey) pines for the lost days of the pioneer spirit, complaining to his father-in-law (John Lithgow) how 'we used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, and now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt', a worrying early example of characters speaking in the dialect of a poster tagline. When a mysterious force leads him to a classified NASA location, his former professor (Michael Caine) enlists him in a do-or-die mission to leave his family, dive into a distant wormhole and find a replacement for their dying planet.

Interstellar is both essential viewing for cinema fans and a not terribly great film.

Nolan's aesthete fussiness results in pock-

ets of transfixing imagery (all without green screen) as the crew's ship makes its lonely voyage across the hulking masses at the edge of our solar system. There are moments, when disaster strikes the vessel, and Cooper has to pull a hail Mary manoeuvre against a stunningly photographed backdrop, and that Hans Zimmer score is pounding, that the film approximates the inimitable cinematic experience Nolan has spent his career extolling (see it in IMAX if you can). But then characters start speaking again, explaining and re-explaining the plot, and a weightless inertia takes over.

Aside from an unconvincing time-loop finale, the film mostly avoids the structural sleights of hand of Nolan's earlier work and tells a fairly straightforward story of voyage and separation. Nolan is often labelled a soulless tech-dork, but Interstellar is his most nakedly emotional film yet, at least in theory, framing the space journey around a cosmic wanderer hung up on those he left behind. McConaughey's committed, essential performance is instrumental in selling the absent father story (unsurprisingly, the screenplay is a leftover from a Spielberg project Jonathan Nolan was working on). Interstellar shoots for high wonder, but the Nolans' pretentious, graceless dialogue has a gravitational pull of its own. Conversations morph into word clouds of hard-science jargon and embarrassing philosophising. At times it’s difficult to know who is human and who is robot.

With its inter-meshing of space-time trickery and hokey inter-personal drama, the film feels more akin to Contact or even Signs than Kubrick’s seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s too over-busy to be profound; innovative but old-fashioned; smart but dumb as hell. Interstellar is easy to admire, but impossible to love.

12 film

A Dog Walks Into A Bar Conor Smyth bids James Gandolfini a solid but unremarkable farewell THE DROP Michael R. Roskam, 106 min, 15

*** The Drop is a good example of how short stories and screenplays are different forms with different expectations and demands. Dennis Lehane, who writes the film, translates the material straightforwardly from his 2009 story 'Animal Rescue', producing a low-level Brooklyn crime drama which often feels both undernourished and padded. Director Michael R. Roskam impressed in 2011 with Bullhead, a Dutch-language feature about the animal hormone underworld in Belgium, and here he finds a similar, if less complex, story about dayto-day mob operations and the guarded, tense blue-collar men caught up in them.

Bob (Tom Hardy) and Marv (the late James Gandolfini) operate a modest neighbourhood dive named Cousin Marv's, which is sometimes used as a 'drop bar' for dirty cash to pass hands.

When they get robbed one night, the Chechens who actually own the place demand that they find the now-missing five thousands dollars. Meanwhile, Bob's taken an abandoned bulldog into his care and is bonding with local waitress Nadia (Noomi Repace) over the animal, attracting the attention of her dodgy ex. It's unremarkable, often cliched, material but it is helped enormously by the caliber of those involved, especially the lead performances. This is the last of Gandolfini's posthumous roles, and it's bittersweet. As always, he's a sturdy presence, but it's not as full a showcase for his talents as last year's Enough Said, a romantic comedy with Julia Louis-Dreyfus in which he got to be warmer, funnier and a fuller per-

son. His Marv is a tough guy who was never really that much of a tough guy, still bitter at losing ownership of the bar: he's basically Tony Soprano without the swagger. The meek Bob spends most of the film with a furrowed brow and mumbled dialogue, Hardy not quite matching the electric minimalism he brought to Steven Knight's Locke (2013).

There are small good elements here. When the men are sparring up against each other, or grumbling about prosaic things like the garbage men leaving their bins upturned, there is a nice bubbling, affectionate tension. Particularly good are the scenes with Nina's ex, Matthias Schoenaerts, a wiry ex-con with a reputation for flashes of violence who creeps into Bob's view with a competing canine claim (yes, one of the key plotlines is about ownership of a dog).

The film isn't without threat or menace, but it's all been crammed into the trailer and when you watch the full feature you realise there isn't much else going on besides those moments. The screenplay faffs around too much, bolting on character and story beats that don't contribute to the primary stakes and hold up momentum: the excellent Ann Dowd is wasted in a small role as Marv's sister, while the sniffing around of a suspicious detective (John Ortiz) doesn't come to much. Near the end, we learn new things about one of the central characters, and it's the sort of thing that needed a third act to flesh out and establish consequences. Movies demand bigger things.

film 13 ‘71

DRACULA UNTOLD

THE MAZE RUNNER

Yann Demange, 100 min, 15

Gary Shore, 95 min, 12A

Wes Ball, 113 min, 12A

***

**

**

After his superior officer divides the Belfast street map into handy colour demarcations (orange good, green bad) fresh-faced Private Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell, maintaining his local connection after shooting Starred Up in Northern Irish prisons) and the rest of his unit are carted off to republican West Belfast a year before Bloody Sunday. Their Captain assures the nervous youngsters that they remain within the safeguards of their native kingdom, but for both the bewildered Hook, facing the steely resentment of an occupied population, and contemporary audiences who came of age around the Good Friday Agreement, this Falls Road may as well be another country altogether. Writer Gregory Burke and director Yann Demange translate historical tensions into a tight and gripping chase-thriller, as Hook is marooned after a riot and must negotiate the hostile urban geography and the uncertain loyalties of those on both sides of the political divide.

The riot and chase sequence is an absolute firecracker, even if the rest of the film never quite lives up to it. Demange and cinematographer Tat Radcliffe maintain a pincer grip on the simmering tension ignited by the soldiers’ presence, which suddenly explodes into guerrilla violence. The outside perspective helps ’71 avoid any political correctness or piety, eschewing specific judgement for a cynical insistence upon the self-interested, untrustworthy motivations of all sides, whether it’s the feuding republican movement or the British security services and their collaboration with loyalist fighters. This thriller morality is its own cliche, but it arguably gets at one kind of truth about various forces at play during ‘the Troubles’. O’Connell does a sterling job as the soldier behind enemy lines, but the screenplay turns him into too passive a hero. Injured, lost and shuffling from one haunt to another, he lacks the fire to really take the survival into his own hands. But it’s still a brusque debut from Demange and a novel collision of local political history with genre film-making.

CS

To local youngsters seeking a bankable trade in these uncertain times, might I suggest a specialism in medieval prop design? HBO has had a good time of it transforming our castle-and-field vistas into a fantasy-realist Middle Ages, and the trend continues with Dracula Untold, feature debut of Dublin-born Gary Shore. Shot on location here, the film echoes much of Thrones‘ production aesthetic: set in 15th-century Transylvania, it’s all heaving bodices and clashing steel, telescoping Stoker’s novel with the real-life Vlad the Impaler (Luke Evans).

It is a very contemporary studio product, feeding on the vogue for origin stories and Universal’s plans for an Avengers-style cinematic universe for their dormant Monster properties. It’s super-Dracula versus digitally-rendered Turkish hordes, led by a surly and inexplicably cast Dominic Cooper.

The best scenes are those inside an ancient vampyre’s bone-riddled hiding hole, with Charles Dance’s world-weary gravitas providing a welcome counterweight to Vlad’s breathless self-seriousness. Dance’s character is the only one written and performed with a bit of personality, injecting a spark of Gothic camp seriously lacking elsewhere. Evans is a fine enough beefcake, but growls his lines with an affected gruffness, not helped by the dialogue’s clumsy Dark Knight metaphors of light and darkness. The Dracula myth is ripe for provocative interpretations, but the film sticks to the basic fantasy-action beats in its brisk ninety-minute run. There’s not much space to develop a sense of menace or establish (ahem) stakes. Most scenes are staged in a pretty rudimentary and slightly forced manner that reminded me of an episode of The Tudors, which probably speaks to the green fingers of the film-makers as much as anything else. But it’s competently put together and will probably serve as an adequate springboard for more ambitious, franchise-integrated adventures for the Count. More Dance next time, please. CS

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

It’s the near future, a possibly dystopic or autocratic scenario. Suddenly a pubescent special snowflake emerges, shakes things up and, along with a their merry band, must use his or her moxie to save the day. Call it Harry Hunger Games and the Giver’s Divergent. Another in a line of young-adult sci-fi movie treatments is The Maze Runner, the first in a trilogy of films based on James Dashner’s novels, written by Noah Oppenheim (who’s penning the next Divergent). It’s frontloaded and concept-heavy, setting up a grimly intriguing premise and then squandering it with an undercooked middle and a ludicrous finale.

There’s a nice industrial texture to some of the early sequences, in which our hero (Dylan O’Brien) is introduced to the colony living under the shadow of a giant concrete maze. The first act does a decent job of establishing the different personalities of the boys, sketching out the troubled history of the boarding school colony and raising questions for our plucky, handsome hero to answer.

Trouble is, when the answers arrive the film falls apart. Problem one: the maze itself is totally uninteresting. There are a couple of action-adventure platformer scenes with a good bit of jumping, fighting and climbing and but it’s not enough (I was expecting more, you know, running). The maze is supposed to be this oppressive, deadly, sprawling space that has been flummoxing these kids for years now, but its menace is never really demonstrated. There’s better peril in a basic Tomb Raider level. Problem two: the ‘reveal’ is an insultingly half-baked mishmash of dystopic clichés which makes no sense. Skimming through the synopses of the rest of the books, the whole thing reads like something dreamt up by a grease-palmed publisher eager to cash in on the Katniss-worshipping, Tumblr gif-ing masses. It’s like someone scribbled ‘lord of the flies’ and ‘maze’ on the back of a bar napkin and then just winged it. CS

14 film SERENA

THE JUDGE

THE BOOK OF LIFE

Susanne Bier, 110 min, U

David Dobkin, 141 min, 15

Jorge Gutierez, 95 min, U

*

**

***

Pity the poor logging baron. George Pemberton (Bradley Cooper) is making his timber fortune in the Depression-era forests of North Carolina and has met the love of his life, the beautiful but wounded Serena (Jennifer Lawrence), but he’s plagued by troubles. His longterm business partner (David Dencik) is getting itchy feet, he’s gotten the camp cook pregnant, he’s had to put up his Brazilian rainforest property as collateral for an extension on the bank loan and government officials are sniffing at his land for a potential addition to the new system of National Parks. His workers are losing their limbs and getting poisoned by hostile wildlife, but this guy’s got real problems! Adapted from Ron Rash’s novel by Christopher Kyle and Susanne Bier, Serena has been sitting on the shelves since 2012 in search of a distributor. Watching it, you can see why: it’s a turkey.

Cooper and Lawrence’s other collaborations, the award-courting Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, both had serious story-telling problems (the first a fake catharsis and the second a fake style) but at least you could tell the actors had some fun getting into the outrageousness of their characters. Serena, by contrast, saddles its performers with unremittingly flat material, a stodgy old-fashioned melodrama delivered in dodgy, fluctuating accents. It’s less a story than a collage of Danielle Steele cover jacket art. Or perhaps, given the heady brew of stock firstworld lust and danger, a Mills and Boon title. The Ripped Industrialist and The Beautiful Orphan perhaps? A film with a more reckless sense of imagination or style could have turned the material into a campy disaster, but it’s just long and tedious. Even a decent set of supporting players, including Toby Jones, Rhys Ifans and Sean Harris, can’t save it. A great depression indeed. CS

The trailers for family drama/legal thriller The Judge make it look like an afternoon melodrama but it’s not. It’s actually about four afternoon melodramas running simultaneously, all of which have managed to bag the over-qualified Robert Downey Jr. Downey Jr., best known as Tony Stark, a rich, hyper-articulate asshole superhero, plays Hank Palmer, a rich, hyper-articulate asshole lawyer.

When the Palmer matriarch passes away, Hank must leave his big-city pad and sterile marriage and return to his smalltown childhood home in Carlinville, Indiana, the kind of place where a ‘blueberry festival’ is a legitimate cultural event.

Things get complicated when his father, the titular magistrate, is accused of running down a man he sentenced years ago and, whaddayaknow, Hank has to reconcile old grievances and defend him in court. Downey Jr. and Duvall give solid performances, the latter displaying his knack for stoic, old-school masculinity, but they deserve better than this round of soggy awards-bait.

Nothing in The Judge is implied when it could be glaringly signposted. Nearly every story and character beat in the film is pitched at a least one level higher than it needs to be: Joseph isn’t just sick, he’s the kind of sick where he pukes in the toilet and shits on the bathroom floor.

When the film settles down, and has its two stars just hash it out, it’s a perfectly fine, if well-trod, drama about the complicated resentments and bruised affection of father-son relationships, but director David Dobkin (Wedding Crashers) is more interested in playing to the galleries. It’s a string of Dramatic Moments. Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque’s screenplay bounces from one secret revelation and unearned catharsis to the next, Thomas Newman’s score lays on the piano and strings and Janusz Kaminski shoots the courtroom scenes like it’s Christ himself on trial. Talk about leading the jury. CS

Jorge Gutierrez, who has previously channelled his love for Mexican folklore for Nickolodeon’s award-winning El Tigre, pairs up with screenwriter Doug Langdale for an imaginative story of childhood rivalry and feuding gods inspired by the Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’.

The Book of Life is a moderately ambitious but highly charming fantasy-animation with a fun multi-level narrative. In the dustbowl town of San Angel, the bullfighter-in-training Manolo (Diego Luna) and brash fighter Joaquin (Channing Tatum) fight over the affections of Maria (Zoe Saldana), an independently minded young woman who affectionately rolls her eyes at their courting. Observing are Orpheus and Eurydice stand-ins, La Muerte (Kate de Castillo), ruler of the vibrant Land of the Remembered, and Xibalba (Ron Perlman), who’s stuck with the much less fun Land of the Forgotten.

Xibalba, desperate to switch territories, proposes a wager on who Maria will marry, leading to a love story played out across the realms.

The film deserves credit for handling death in a way which isn’t maudlin or hysterical, even if the message is the fairly stock one of ‘you’re only ever dead when those you love forget about you’.

There are shades of darkness here, and flashes of Tim Burton, early Disney and Guillermo del Toro, who produces, but the film still moves in a light-footed pace.

It also looks beautiful: the blocky, marionette anatomy of the characters and the vaguely stop-motion storybook design has a lovely tactility and the Land of the Remembered is a flood of pulsating colour. It’s a busy film, cramming in multiple plot layers, goofy side-gags and original and chart-gleamed musical numbers. By the end, the restless activity does get in the way, denying the film the emotional staying power of some modern animation classics, and it falls into a conventional finale, but it is still a winning and thoroughly wholesome distraction. CS

film 15 TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

IDA

ANNABELLE

Pawel Pawlikowski, 90 min, 12A

John R. Leonetti, 98 min, 15

Jonathan Libesman, 110 min, 12A

****

**

*

Ida is a modest but beautiful Polish-lanTMNT combines two of the least appeal- guage buddy road movie from Pawel Pawlikowski, who returns to his homeing trends in current pop culture. The land for a gorgeously vintage story of hisfirst is an unearned nostalgia for televitories both personal and political. The sion cartoons that were already pretty ropey to begin with and the second is the sheltered and doe-faced Anne (Agata Trzebuchowska) is a novice nun in Sixties relentless grimification of pulpy comic Poland who is sent to meet her only livbook material for the PG-13/12A multiplex crowd. TMNT is an inexplicable and ing relative, the hard-drinking, cynical gormless film. It’s a Nickelodeon produc- Aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza).

Anne’s benign ignorance give way to a tion but I can only imagine children will complex personal narrative, as she learns be quickly bored by the unending huher real name (Ida Lebenstein), her surmourlessness and the focus on human prising religious heritage (‘a Jewish nun’ characters no child could ever care about. Meghan Fox is April O’Neil, a New sneers Wanda) and the ugly effects of Nazism on her family life. The two travel York television reporter investigating across the Polish countryside in search of ‘Foot Clan’ gang activity in the city, who the burial site of her parents, murdered stumbles upon the green-skinned fourduring the war, but for all the grimness some in the Manhattan sewers (as an earnest news reporter, Fox is less believ- it’s a distilled and surprisingly light eighty able than the talking rodent). The heroes minutes.

Shot in monochrome colour in a series in a half-shell have to go up against the of fixed frames, Pawlikowski and his phoancient Shredder, whose design logic echoes that of The Social Network‘s Sean tography partners Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Parker: the only thing cooler than a ninja Lenczewski offer a lesson in the strengths of austere film-making. It’s an robot with two knives is a ninja robot aesthetic that carries over from the natuwith twenty-two knives. rally ascetic spaces of Ida’s convent, with The film’s directed by Jonathan its rigid routines and stone interiors, Liebesman (Battle: Los Angeles), but it’s to the secular spaces of the external got the default metallic aesthetic of world. There’s a painterly, studied apMichael Bay (whose company, Platinum Dunes, produces). Without the charming proach to the construction of shots, with the natural light and angular geometry of slapdash prosthetics of the original film series, the green-screened anthropomor- windows, doorways and townscapes (credit must go to the English subtitlers phic heroes look weird and unsettling: bulbous, alpha-bro snot war- for their sensitive placement of text. Personalities are dwarfed by the riors with nun-chucks. Watching them frame, trapped and constricted by the hanging out in the sewers with a traumas of the past and the tedium of giant rat in a bathrobe is gross, not the present. The bored Wanda envies goofy. The tone stumbles from frat Ida’s pious self-assurance, even as she house one-liners to grim gun realism to scorns it. It’s a transfixing double act. In age-inappropriate leeriness. There’s the obligatory ass-shot of Fox and a run- some parallel universe, there’s a Hollywood version of this story, in ning joke that Michelangelo wants to which Wanda learns how to have faith, fuck her (hashtag turtle bants). One of and Ida learns how to enjoy jazz, sex and the many wasted ironies here is that TMNT began life as a one-issue lark the other material joys of civilian life. meant to parody the dull, self-serious vi- But Ida’s movement towards resolution (or something like it) is both more comolence of popular ’80s comics and now, in a full circle effect, it’s been swallowed plicated and more simple. Ida makes her choice, and the frame sprigs to life, and up by the modern equivalent. Shell it’s kind of a revelation. CS shockin’. CS

Probably no-one is more responsible for the look and feel of contemporary studio horror than James Wan and John R. Leonetti, who here spin off one of The Conjuring‘s creepy talismans, a pig-tailed doll the size of a small child, into her own origin story. The thematic motor of the film is that of Sixties suburban family life under threat. After a tense home-invasion opener, in which the soul of a cult-hippy gets trapped in invade their house, postcard perfect couple Mia and John move into a roomy apartment, but they just can’t shake that doll. Soon the stock strangeness begins: appliances run by themselves, the doll doesn’t stay where she’s left, and a creepy girl in a white sheet keeps appearing. By the third act it’s cliche-o rama, with a kindly local priest, as well as the film’s sole black supporting character, a ‘spiritual’ bookshop owner, enlisted in the fight against the demon.

When Annabelle stays small, building dread with silent, unbroken shots of the doll, or fashioning slick tension with the everyday noises of domestic life (like a sewing needle jamming into the flesh of a finger) it’s moderately successful but when it tries to go big in the finale it’s totally unconvincing.

In many ways Annabelle is a surface (mis-)reading of Rosemary’s Baby.

Like Polanski’s horror classic, it gets a lot of mileage out of compromised childhood icons and an escalating sense of overwhelmed maternal instincts. In Polanski, the threat to the child was famously internal, a malevolence hiding behind the mask of polite geentelity: in Annabelle‘s uncomplicated version it’s a demon with horns and hoofs who scrawls messages in ceilings in blood.

The demon defeated, John can go back to work and Mia can go back to her knitting, soaps and baby, the dangers of modernity defeated. It’s not so much that it’s politically conservative as it is really, really not that interesting. CS

16 film

GONE GIRL

THE EQUALIZER

NOBLE

David Fincher, 149 min, 15

Antoine Fuqua, 131 min, 18

Stephen Bradley, 100 min, 12A

****

**

**

Who knew extreme marital dysfunction could be such a riot? Adapted by Gillian Flynn from her best-selling thriller, Gone Girl is a lurid and sickly funny evisceration of modern marriage, centred a missing wife (Rosamund Pike) and her oblivious husband Nick (Ben Affleck).

Flynn efficiently translates her twisted psychologies, and Fincher, working with his regular photography team and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ downbeat score, anchors the violent camp in cold suburban surfaces. The film has the studied dread of Patricia Highsmith and the page-turning brio of a schlocky airport novel, and is a wicked satire on the ‘missing girl’ media phenomenon. The flashbacks and voiceover scramble our expectations, complicating the dynamics of victim and aggressor. Maybe the whole film is a trick.

The first act brings out the black comedy of the novel, with Nick as the hapless husband who turns out to not know a thing about his wife, enduring the flashbulb attention with the half-hearted exasperation of a man permanently recovering from a hangover. Selfish, unearnest and entitled: in another life, he could be one of the clueless beta males in Palahniuk/Fincher’s Fight Club. Pike is terrific as the Hitchcockian femme fatale, channelling her icy girl-next-door primness into something new and electric, playing Amy as a ferociously alert, doeeyed predator. The ideas on show about self-presentation, gender games and news culture are not the most complex, but Fincher isn’t betting on sophistication. The film is ruthless in finding audaciously trashy ways to render its ideas, presenting everyday relationship fears and troubles in extremis. After Social Network and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl rounds off a trilogy about the terrifying unknowability of other people, an anxiety complicated and intensified by our omniscient image machines. A ridiculous but righteous domestic horror show. CS

Robert McCall is a man with a very specific set of skills. Ex-black ops spook McCall (Denzel Washington) has traded in his life of blasting and bombing for a Joe Schmo existence, putting in honest hours at a hardware superstore. He’s out, but he’s pulled back in for - you guessed it one last job. Based on the American ‘80s television series of the same name, in which Edward Woodward’s middle-aged investigator dished out brute justice to the lowlifes of New York City, The Equalizer is scripted by Richard Wenk and directed by Antoine Fuqua, whose filmography has been in a rut ever since 2001’s Training Day (he helmed last year’s Olympus Has Fallen). It is strange and unfortunate that here is where Fuqua and Washington, who won an Oscar for his corrupt narcotics cop in Training Day, reunite. Basically, The Equalizer is Training Day without the tragedy, or the moral reckoning, or the politics, or the menace, or the restraint, or the irony.

The film has a nice low-key vibe in the opening act, when McCall is doing the civvie thing, but he quickly morphs into a mirthless, relentless kill-bot, a soft-spoken glum-puss with flashes of that handsome cheshire grin. We are asked to condemn one kind of gruesome violence while cheering for another, just because it’s done by our hero, who talks politely and has ‘movie OCD’. The crushing, ludicrous killing scenes are slavishly presented in close-ups and slow-motion, an irony-free aesthetic in which the alphamale avenger can, in all seriousness, set off an explosion and do the badass walk towards the camera. It’s an oblivious, often ugly addition to the ascending action subgenre of Old Dudes Still Got It, a trend which signals that Hollywood’s well-publicised ageism does not, at least, extend to the indiscriminate annihilation of foreign-tongued goons. The Equalizer is the kind of film where the lead makes small speeches about doing the right thing and respecting justice, and then jams an electric drill into some poor schmuck’s neck. CS

Noble, the biopic of Irish humanitarian Christina Noble with comedian Deidre O’Kane, feels a lot like a TV movie. It takes an intensely by-the-numbers approach it takes to Noble’s life story, as cribbed from memoirs like Bridge Across My Sorrows and Mama Tina. Noble’s childhood is one of storybook urban Irish misery. She has a sick mother, an alcoholic father (Liam Cunningham) and is constantly on the run from the local School Inspector, played with the pantomime smirk of a bad guy from Wacky Races. When her mother dies and she and her siblings are brought to court for truancy, they are handed over to the state and dragged kicking and screaming through what is basically a hell-mouth trapdoor in the middle of the courtroom.

Greene does a good job of projecting steely vulnerability, but the film zips through her seemingly endless catalogue of misfortune with little time for reaction or reflection.

O’Kane plays the elder Noble with a postcard Gaelic wit and brusqueness, but her husband Stephen Bradley, who writes and directs, provides her with a massively underworked role. She arrives in Ho Chi Minh City and almost immediately sets about taking the local street children under her wing. The film depicts horrible, desperate images and situations – Agent Orange babies, extreme child poverty, sexual tourism – but lacks the stomach to commit to them and disturb the light, ‘uplifting’ tone. The children, who have presumably been through remarkable trauma, are totally unsuspicious and uncomplex, having no role other than offering blank smiles and cheers for their benevolent ‘mama Tina’.

Christina steers through her campaigning troubles with a hagiographic grace. At the tail end of her young-adult journey she has a dream (a vision?) about Vietnam, and disappears from the story for years, before emerging as a fully-formed adult ready to take on her mission (like…

Jesus?). Noble has the well-meaning unreality of a fairytale, or perhaps a Sunday School parable. CS